Tell Me What is You don't Like About Yourself?

This is the opening line of Nip/Tuck, where two attractive male plastic surgeons stare at a patient and state each episode: "Tell me what is it that you don't like about yourself?" Each beautiful or not so beautiful person comes in and finds something wrong with their body. Some external nip, some external tuck to be removed. The physical blemishes are merely metaphors for spiritual flaws the characters can't quite remove. And beauty it turns out may or may not be only skin deep. In a society that is increasingly obsessed with how we look, what material possessions we own, and seeks validation through others eyes - this show hits all marks.

This line could just as easily sum up Philip K. Dick's amazingly trippy and wryly entertaining satire : The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch. Actually let's extend that line a bit, "what is it you don't like about your life right now that you want to change or you feel is missing?" "Tell me what is about your life you don't like - so you have to escape?" Much truer to the mark. Don't worry, Dick isn't preachy or didactic. You have to read a little between the lines to get any of this.

I owe dherblay from the ATPO board for the discovery of this gem. A book he keeps suggesting people read and they keep ignoring him. Now that I am reading it, I am absurdly amused no one has selected it for a melee or book club. OF all the books online discussion boards or fan-related boards pick? This baby should *really* be at the top of the list. Why? Would involve giving far too much of the book away.

The book in a nutshell takes place in the distant future, an overly sunny/hot utopia, where people escape their mundane existence by chewing an illegal drug called Can-D. What Can-D does is literally translate their spirtual essence or at least appear to translate it into a male and female doll on a fantasy layout - created from a popular tv show or movie several years back. Into this world of consumer products and designer drugs and desire to evolve into something better, comes the distant traveler Palmer Eldritch who has brought back with him an even trippier substance called Chew-Z. This substance promises a bit more than mere escapism - it promises eternal life, or better yet a means of finding enlightenment with a price.

Dick unnervingly satirizes our modern obsessions with technology, escapism, evolving, spiritual enlightenment, and consumerism. Yes, like most Dick books, he's not that great with the female characters - it's heavily male centric, but it does play around with some very interesting concepts as well as a few frightening ones. By no means a perfect book, there are a few flaws here and there. But to me at least, a thought-provoking, humorous, and oddly frightening one. Why frightening? Is it horror? No not really. What scares me, is that I can see humanity going down the hellish road Dick paves in his novel. Heck, some of us are doing it already. Of course this view could have a little something to do with the fact that the Republican National Convention is still going strong nearby. And my fear that Kerry won't defeat Bush in the Fall.