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Ubik Review

"The worlds through which Philip Dick's characters move are subject to cancellation or revision without notice," sci-fi great Roger Zelazny once wrote, and it strikes me that Dick's "Ubik" is a perfect example of that statement. The author's 25th science fiction novel since 1955 (!), "Ubik" was originally released as a Doubleday hardcover, with a cover price of .50, in May 1969. It finds Dick giving his favorite theme--the mutability of reality--a thorough workout in a wonderfully well-written, at times humorous, increasingly bizarre story. Indeed, the book may be Dick's "spaciest" outing since 1964's "The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch," and had me wishing that I had originally read it back in my college days, while under the influence of some, uh, psychotropic substance!

In the book, the reader makes the acquaintance of the various members of Runciter Associates, run by Glen Runciter and his half-dead wife, who is able to give business advice although in cryogenic "cold pac" in a Swiss "moratorium." Runciter Associates is comprised of special individuals who almost come off like very unusual members of the X-Men, except that these individuals, rather than commanding superpowers, possess what must be called antipowers; that is, they can cancel out the fields put forth by telepaths, clairvoyants, telekineticists and so on. During a promisingly lucrative business venture on the moon, Runciter, his assistant Joe Chip, and 11 of the various antitalents are ambushed in an explosion, orchestrated by Glen's enemies. Runciter himself is gravely injured and put into cold-pac storage, while the other team members scramble to find out how this attack transpired. But wait...why does reality itself seem to be changing? And why are various objects reverting to earlier forms, such as a modern (1992) stereo in Joe's apartment suddenly morphing into a Victrola? And how is it that everyone suddenly seems to be living in the year 1939, while one by one the team members crumble to dust? And just what is up with Ubik, a miraculous spray can that seems to be their only ticket to salvation? Dick certainly had his imagination working on overtime when he plotted out this one, that's for sure, and the wonder of it all is that, ultimately, the story DOES hang together coherently and ingeniously. It is a bravura piece of work, and one that "Time" magazine chose for inclusion in its "Top 100 Novels of the 20th Century" article. No argument from me!

"Ubik" really is a consistent pleasure to read. The aforementioned humor pops up in many guises, from throwaway remarks (such as a reference to a Supreme Court ruling to the effect that a man can murder his wife if he can prove that she would never grant him a divorce; the five-times-married Dick giving vent to some pleasant daydreaming, perhaps?) to hilarious turns of phrase (a man is said to be wearing a dress "the color of a baboon's ass") and to the truly outlandish outfits that all the characters wear (the moratorium owner sports a "tweed toga, loafers, crimson sash and a purple airplane-propeller beanie"). As in so many of Dick's other novels, amphetamine and LSD use are spotlighted, and the author's empathy for the plight of his characters is strongly pronounced. Dick also gets to show off his knowledge of 1930s minutiae in this tale, whether from in-depth research or by dint of having been an 11-year-old himself in 1939 America. His details are not ALWAYS spot on, however; a 1939 issue of "Liberty" magazine is said to contain a famous story entitled "Lightning in the Night," although that story actually appeared in the August 1940 issue; the Ford tri-motor plane is said to have come into existence in 1928, whereas 1925 would be closer to the mark. Still, these are the merest quibbles. "Ubik" is basically an extraordinarily clever, mind-blowing entertainment. It may cause some to furrow their brow in bewilderment--"very confusing," Joe Chip thinks to himself at one point--but I can't imagine anyone not being bowled over by this amazing piece of work. It is, quite simply, Philip K. Dick at his best, and modern-day science fiction doesn't get too much better than that.

Ubik Feature

ISBN13: 9780679736646
Condition: New
Notes: BUY WITH CONFIDENCE, Over one million books sold! 98% Positive feedback. Compare our books, prices and service to the competition. 100% Satisfaction Guaranteed

Ubik Overview

Filled with paranoiac menace and unfettered slapstick, UBIK is a searing metaphysical comedy of death and salvation--salvation which comes in a convenient aerosol spray, to be used only as directed!

Ubik Specifications

Nobody but Philip K. Dick could so successfully combine SF comedy with the unease of reality gone wrong, shifting underfoot like quicksand. Besides grisly ideas like funeral parlors where you swap gossip for the advice of the frozen dead, Ubik (1969) offers such deadpan farce as a moneyless character's attack on the robot apartment door that demands a five-cent toll:

"I'll sue you," the door said as the first screw fell out.
Joe Chip said, "I've never been sued by a door. But I guess I can live through it."

Chip works for Glen Runciter's anti-psi security agency, which hires out its talents to block telepathic snooping and paranormal dirty tricks. When its special team tackles a big job on the Moon, something goes terribly wrong. Runciter is killed, it seems--but messages from him now appear on toilet walls, traffic tickets, or product labels. Meanwhile, fragments of reality are timeslipping into past versions: Joe Chip's beloved stereo system reverts to a hand-cranked 78 player with bamboo needles. Why does Runciter's face appear on U.S. coins? Why the repeated ads for a hard-to-find universal panacea called Ubik ("safe when taken as directed")?

The true, chilling state of affairs slowly becomes clear, though the villain isn't who Joe Chip thinks. And this is Dick country, where final truths are never quite final and--with the help of Ubik--the reality/illusion balance can still be tilted the other way. --David Langford, Amazon.co.uk

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Customer Reviews

Ubik - Roland -
I've always been deeply in love with Philip Dick's paranoid worlds. I love his books, I love his short stories, I even love things like Our Friends From Frolix 8. There is something raw and razor-sharp, almost clinical in Dick's writing, something that transcends style, ideas and story. You can always tell that a part of him - and it might very well be a dominant part - not only believes in what he writes, but lives it.

I haven't read all of Dick's books. I haven't even read half of them. Still I've read most of those whose names everyone knows, and I have read enough to think that even a genius of his magnitude would be hard pressed to write anything quite as good as Ubik twice. If I had to point at a single one of Philip Dick's works as his magnum opus, that would undoubtedly be it.

As Michael Marshall Smith aptly puts it in the forward of my edition of the book, there is a mind-boggling number of SF ideas in Ubik: time-travel; psychic abilities and their corresponding anti-abilities; the dead being kept in a state of "half-life" where they could be reached by the living; alternate realities and reality revision; futuristic space-faring society; dystopian economic system. Many authors would spin a book around any ONE of those, but for Philip Dick it's always what's underneath the flesh that matters, so he casually presents them ALL in the first ten pages of his novel.

In Ubik's world technology has advanced to the state where colonization of the Moon and other worlds is possible. Psychic phenomena are common and many people employ psychics in their business ventures or shadier dealings. And since no law could control such powers, the so called "prudence organizations" have appeared. Those who work in them have the ability to negate one psychic power like telepathy or precognition. Meanwhile, people could be put in "cold-pac" after death - a half-life existence that slowly diminishes until the person dies again, this time - forever.

The main character, Joe Chip, is a technician for Glen Runciter's prudence organization. When a client hires twelve agents to negate telepathic spies in his lunar facilities, Runciter and Chip travel with them to the Moon. The assignment turns out to be a trap, possibly set by the company's nemesis Ray Hollis (who leads an organization of psychics), and Glen Runciter is killed in the ensuing explosion. The party quickly returns to Earth to put him in cold-pac.

But afterwords the twelve agents and Joe Chip begin to experience strange reality shifts. Food and drink deteriorate prematurely, and the world seems to regress into the past. What's more disturbing, they all receive messages from Glen Runciter, implying that it is actually he who is alive, and they who are in cold-pac. And above all is the ever-present Ubik, appearing in commercials on TV and radio. Nobody knows what it is, but it is everywhere. And it is important.

Then the deaths begin...

Ubik is a deeply unsettling book. The characters' hold on reality is at best loose, and the uncertainty they feel as to the nature of their very existence seeps into the reader's own mind, turning the novel into almost a horror story. When the action and the race (quite literally) against time begin, you are almost grateful for the opportunity to evade the disturbing questions concerning what's real, what's not, and which one is more dangerous. Dick's misleadingly simple language and the traditionally schematic relationships between his characters, only seem to accentuate the unnatural events he is painting.

Philip Dick is a master of multiple realities that intertwine and overlapp until the mind's ability to grasp it all simply fails, and madness begins. As Paul Di Filippo says in a review of the book, "No reality is priveliged". Nowhere is Dick's ability to test the limits of perception and self more strikingly demonstrated than in Ubik. And even if you take nothing from the book, but the amazing mystery and suspense filled story, it would still have been one of the most satisfying reading experiences you've ever had.

10/10

[....]

One of PKD's best - Clearsky311 - Melbourne, Australia
To be read by anyone who has questioned there own reality and seen it as being unreal as a dream. Death scenes in the book bring reminders of the Tibetan Bardo Teachings. Recommended Reading for all!!

Best place to introduce yourself to Philip K. Dick - H. Jin - Melbourne, Australia
'Ubik' is one of the best places to introduce yourself to Philip K. Dick. The story contains a number of his trademarks, but it is also one of his more straightforward books and contains a number of elements that would be familiar to many sci-fi fans.

The story itself is multi-faceted. The set-up involves Glen Runciter and his organisation of "anti-talents", who are a sort of futuristic industrial counter-espionage. When a large-scale operation to the Moon goes badly wrong, Runciter is killed and his employees find reality beginning to disintegrate; time going backwards, Runctiner contacting them from beyond the grave, and themselves frighteningly wasting away. The bulk of the book deals with the efforts of the characters to figure out the cause of this degradation and how it can be stopped.

The book contains plenty of standard Philip K. Dick elements. Protagonist Joe Chip is the standard down-on-his-luck "everyman" hero, with Pat being the cooly mysterious female lead. The dynamic between Joe and Pat is fascinating, with her highly original anti-talent possibly being connected to the bizzare circumstances in which they find themselves. Likewise, the idea of a warped or illusional reality is a standard feature among many of Dick's books, and is utilised well here. In addition, I particularly enjoyed the concept of "anti-talent", which highlights Dick's influence on the Cyberpunk genre. In his world, telepathy and precognition are not always used for good, and Dick has some interesting ideas about how they may be employed in an offensive manner against rival organisations.

The story fits together well; all of the pieces seem to be nicely in place by the end, only to have the final chapter throw in a disquietening twist that leaves the ending open. This is reinforced by the ominous introduction to the final chapter, which is complete change from the cheesy advertisement parodies than introduce the earlier chapters ("Eat Ubik toasted flakes"/"Get soft and supple hair with Ubik conditioner"/"Borrow from Ubik Savings and Loan"!). A clever and well-executed touch.

One issue I have with this book (and several other of Dick's books) is what might diplomatically be called his "matter-of-fact" writing. His quite dry style makes it difficult to get emotionally involved with the circumstances or the characters. The characters themselves (apart from Joe, Pat and Glen) are somewhat poorly sketched, and often abruptly die or disappear "off camera". Also, his predictions for 1992 were way off. Keep in mind the book was published in 1969, so it wasn't as if he was looking a hundred years hence; even allowing for the fact that this might be a deliberately "ironic" or alternate-reality approach, his predictions of hovercars and lunar colonies seem very dated in retrospect.

It is a pity that Dick couldn't bring out a little more emotion in the book, and really give a detailed insight into what the characters go through in such a bizzare situation. This means that 'Ubik' succeeds brilliantly as an intellectual puzzle but falls a little short as a novel. But if you can forgive that, 'Ubik' is a clever and thought-provoking science fiction book, and is the best place to introduce yourself to the original but disturbing world of Philip K. Dick.

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Sunday, October 3, 2010