Academic Scientific JournalsPhilip Kindred Dick’s "The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch": The will to power as the axiological source of hallucinogenic and technological dystopia
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.26881/bp.2021.2.07Keywords:
dystopia, the will to power, hallucinogens, technology, axiology, transhumanism, Philip DickAbstract
The paper investigates the ways in which hallucinations induced by hallucinogenic drugs with the help of technological devices distort the human perception of reality within the fictional world of Philip K. Dick’s novel, The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch. It also examines how the axiological order of this fictional world is negatively affected by power games played by the main protagonists and how these games refer to Friedrich Nietzsche’s philosophical notion of the will to power. By underlining the novel’s narrative intersections between technology and axiology, this paper shows that within The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch the continuity of civilisational development proves to be dystopian in its essence.
Downloads
References
Baudrillard, Jean (1994). Simulation and Simulacra. Trans. Sheila Faria Glaser. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.
Blaim, Artur (2013). Gazing in Useless Wonder: English Utopian Fictions, 1516-1800. Oxford: Peter Lang.
Bostrom, Nick (n.d.). Letter from Utopia. Available at . Accessed 16.01.2021.
Dick, Philip Kindred (1991). The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch. New York: First Vintage Books.
Dick, Philip Kindred (2011). Valis. Boston: Mariner Books. “Does time stop when you travel at the speed of light?” Sten Odenwald in: Gravity Probe B. Available at . Accessed 19.01.2021.
Halberstadt, Adam L., Franz X. Vollenweider, David E. Nichols (2018). Behavioral Neurobiology of Psychedelic Drugs. Berlin-Heidelberg: Springer-Verlag.
Heidegger, Martin (1991). Nietzsche. Trans. David Farrell Krell. San Francisco: Harper Collins.
Heisenberg, Werner (2000). Physics and Philosophy: The Revolution in Modern Science. Edited and translated by Ruth Nanda Anshen. London: Penguin Classics.
More, Max (n.d.). Technological Self-Transformation: Expanding Personal Extropy. Available at.
Roberts, Adam (2006). The History of Science Fiction. Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan.
Sargent, Lyman Tower (1994). The Three Faces of Utopianism Revisited, Utopian Studies 5/1: 1-37.
Stockwell, Peter (2000). The Poetics of Science Fiction. New York: Routledge.
Terentowicz-Fotyga, Urszula (2018). “Defining the dystopian chronotope: Space, time and genre in George Orwell’s Nineteen EightyFour”. Beyond Philology 15/3: 9–39.
