The three stigmata of Palmer Eldritch

What Hacker News says

1. __sAug 2026
   Was recently explaining to my father how the free AI people interact with is completely different than the AI products we're burning cash with. That instead of hitting some critical mass of transistors we hit a critical mass of parameters which we then loop into themselves for reasoning

   Other old sci-fi I've been thinking of is The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch. Where claude is chew-z with its alien intelligence & when you start interacting with some code or writing you start noticing that the writer has steel teeth & feel like "damnit, this is palmer eldritch blogging again"

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2. piltdownmanApr 2026
   If you want the druggy, high-concept, ersatz-reality version go with Philip K. Dick - namely The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch, A Scanner Darkly, VALIS.

   If you want the intellectual take go with A Canticle for Leibowitz (Miller), Oryx and Crake (Atwood) or Solaris (Lem).

   If you want the 60s hard-science rooted societal outlook from an ex-Naval Engineer with strong views on gender roles, it's all about Heinlein - Stranger in a Strange Land, The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, Starship Troopers etc..

   If you want something to share with the young adults in your life, or simply some of the finest writing in the contemporary British YA canon, then Philip Pulman's magnificent homage to 'Paradise Lost' - the 'His Dark Materials trilogy' - cannot come more highly recommended. Usually categorised as 'fantasy', and heavily indebted to Milton and Blake, this represents a master-class in parallel-universe world building with its own take on a Steampunk Oxford and a number of other science fiction tropes.

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3. mnky9800nJul 2025
   Gibson isn’t the only person writing cyberpunk although he definitely gets most of the credit in internet forums. Tbh I feel like he only really has one story to tell which is about some manic pixie cyberpunk dream girl who is more daria than Elizabethtown existing alongside dudes doing things. His contribution is more about how he crafts the visuals from words like

   >> In the non-space of the matrix, the interior of a given data construct possessed unlimited subjective dimension; a child’s toy calculator, accessed through Case’s Sendai, would have presented limitless gulfs of nothingness hung with a few basic commands. ~ neuromancer

   Or

   >> There are bits of the literal future right here, right now, if you know how to look for them. Although I can’t tell you how; it’s a non-rational process. ~ idoru

   I think that a lot of what Gibson did was expose a world that almost exists to a reader who couldn’t access it. Gibson says when he writes a book he often goes to Tokyo to sit in a cafe or whatever and people watch. This is not a possible action for most teenagers in 1993. Gibson also said that he isn’t really prescient because they don’t even have cellphones in neuromancer.

   I would rather recommend books like PKDs ubik or a scanner darkly or the three stigmata of palmer eldritch to read over Gibson. Not because Gibson is bad but pkd is much more timeless and his books are about deeper ideas. Gibson seems more focused on making the words beautiful.

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4. djaouenJan 2025
   It's funny, man. I was on 4chan and reading Dostoyevsky waaaay back in 2008. Really wish we had a /lit/ back then :(

   Edit: In case any newfriends are listening, I would also like to suggest the books of Philip K. Dick, including but not limited to A Scanner Darkly, Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch, Ubik, and the VALIS trilogy.

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5. throw4847285Feb 2024
   I don't buy that. People form fan communities around these podcasts where they talk with real people about how much they love listening to minor internet celebrities talk about nothing. Why would they do that if the podcasts served that purpose already?

   I think rather than replace real human contact, the internet has created an increased demand for it. People need every moment of their lives to be filled with human speech or images.

   If I were to take off my "reasonable point" hat and put on my "grandiose bullshit" hat I'd say that in the same way drugs can artificially stimulate various "feel good" parts of your brain, we have found a way to artificially stimulate the "social animal" instinct until we're numb.

   I think the real risk of this kind of AI is not that people live in a world of fake videos of their favorite celebrities talking to them, but that entire fake social media ecosystems are created for each individual filled with the content they want to see and fake people commenting on it so they can argue with them about it.

   Everybody needs to read The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch by Philip K Dick.

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6. TrasmattaMay 2023
   And if anyone wants to get into PKD, I highly recommend the following books:

   * Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?

   * Ubik

   * The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch

   * A Scanner Darkly

   * VALIS (but probably not until you've read some of his others, and also read a bit about his life, because it's pseudo-autobiographical)

   I just finished reading a biography of him called "Divine Invasions" (not to be confused with his book "The Divine Invasion", which is roughly a sequel to VALIS), which I recommend as well. PKD was an utterly brilliant, fascinating, and sadly broken man.

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