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Fiction. Science Fiction. HTML: Named one of Time's 100 Best Books, Ubik is a mind-bending, classic novel about the perception of reality from Philip K. Dick, the Hugo Award-winning author of The Man in the High Castle. "From the stuff of space opera, Dick spins a deeply unsettling existential horror story, a nightmare you'll never be sure you've woken up from."????Lev Grossman, Time Glen Runciter runs a lucrative business ???? deploying his teams of anti-psychics to corporate clients who want privacy and security from psychic spies. But when he and his top team are ambushed by a rival, he is gravely injured and placed in "half-life," a dreamlike state of suspended animation. Soon, though, the surviving members of the team begin experiencing some strange phenomena, such as Runciter's face appearing on coins and the world seeming to move backward in time. As consumables deteriorate and technology gets ever more primitive, the group needs to find out what is causing the shifts and what a mysterious product called Ubik has to do with it all. "More brilliant than similar experiments conducted by Pynchon or DeLillo."????Roberto Bolao.… (more)
User reviews
The characters are unusually clear, lacking the amorphousness that Dick's psychological approach often inflicts on his protagonists, and this feature may well have been a function of his onetime development of this story as a prospective film treatment. In my dream universe, David Cronenberg has already directed a production of Ubik!
I'll never think of PKD as a great prose stylist—his amphetamine-fueled ideas came too fast to be presented with clarity or grace—but he handles both humor and horror very well here. The tone is engaging and the plot is snappy. None of the characters are fleshed out enough to become emotionally engaged with, but it doesn't matter; this is a paranoid farce, not a novel of feeling. Your head is supposed to spin, and it will, pleasantly for the most part.
Dick wrote a screenplay for Ubit that I haven't read. But it would make a great miniseries.
In “Ubik” by Philip K. Dick
This would feel like a meaningless read indeed if it wasn't, in fact, a very FUNNY one, full of a dry humor. In Ubik the characters are taken in such a subjective maze of crumbling reality, unexpected time-travelling and personal doubts, that it becomes a materialization of the absurdity of the human condition, in the form of an exhilarating fiction. If you are not into the humor of Kafka and Borges, it makes perfectly sense that you are not sensible to Dick's one. What makes Ubik a wonderful read still today? Dick didn't nail everything too tightly to the plot. The result may seem a potpourri but his worlds live and breathe. If he were writing now this book would make him a rebel and, given what he was like, would give most editors / publishers gray-hairs. It also begs the question (of others in the genre): Can you really do that?
I think the current fascination with Dick seems tied to the fact that most of his most popular books have dystopian or control themes. The other worldliness, or just around the corner-ness, of his stories, make it seem fictional, therefore enjoyable, yet also real and possible. I had been seeing a resurgence in sales of his books a couple of decades ago. This is just a speculative thought, but I wonder: If we had really been reading him for a spooky window into the future, then that means that the "seeds of the future dystopia" already started back then. Nixon had been around in Dick's time, but Reagan and the Republican nasties was their second coming. AI was only just poking its nose into things. 2000 was around the corner. Was Dick one of our clues to the future?
If you're into SF, read the rest of this review on my blog.
Philip K Dick has a way of starting his novels off with both wild ideas of the future and bland characters and then after he shifts the reality a couple times the characters suddenly go from poster board cut-outs to characters you care about. At the beginning this novel, with its rich boss and bumbling ever-broke employee, Joe Chip, reminded me of George Jetson and Mr Spacely of The Jetsons. But as the ideas of the novel took hold and the concepts, the crazy possibilities sank in I became entranced and my views about this world and life and death were called into question. The future world (of 1992) that Dick creates is one part Jetsons, with its rocket travel to Zurich and the Moon, chutes that drop you from the roof of your building to your office chair and Mortuaries that keep loved ones in "half-life" or suspended cryonic animation for monthly one hour visits; and on the other hand the future is one part distopia with pre-cogs that can see the future and telepaths that can read your thoughts and the worse of all, everything in the future is coin-operated! Your coffee maker, your refrigerator, and even your front door.
There are plenty of very funny throw away moments as we move through this world, not the least of which is how people dress. When we meet Stanton Mick, he is wearing "fuchsia pedal-pushers, pink yakfur slippers, a snakeskin sleeveless blouse, and a ribbon in his waist-length dyed white hair." Later von Vogelsang greets them wearing "tweed toga, loafers, crimson sash and a purple airplane-propeller beanie."
Despite these moments of humor, this is not a comedy. Chip and his colleagues spend most of the book racing against the clock to fight a deterioration of reality that threatens to suck the very life out of them and leave nothing but a desiccated shell of bones and skin. And it is not until the very end that the various layers of illusion on penetrated to the point that we can understand what is really happening.
This is my favorite Dick book to date.
The action opens on June 5, 1992, in a moment of crisis for Runciter Associates. The top psychics have been disappearing, and business is beginning to slow. As Runciter confers with his dead wife at her moratorium in Switzerland, Joe Chip is introduced to Pat Conley, who has the hitherto unknown power of causing history to change. Runciter and his top inertials, as the counter-talents are called, along with Joe Chip and Pat, are lured to an underground base on Luna. There, a bomb detonates, apparently killing Runciter. The survivors rush him back to Ella’s moratorium, but they are unable establish contact with him in half-life. Soon strange phenomena occur (stale cigarettes, outmoded machinery, outdated telephone books, and coins bearing the profile of Glen Runciter) that lead Joe Chip and the survivors to conclude that Runciter survived the explosion, and that they are the ones who are in half-life. The regression of objects occurs as units, not by their constituent parts. Thus, a refrigerator regresses as a refrigerator as a whole. The Platonic solid refrigerator remains constant, even though it is moving backward in time.
This regression moves from inanimate objects to the survivors’ temporal environment as a whole. The survivors head to Des Moines to attend Runciter’s funeral as their surroundings take on more and more antiquated characteristics, regressing to 1939. As this is happening, the survivors begin to die, turning into desiccated masses of hair, skin, and faded fabric. Eventually, Joe Chip discovers that Rory Miller, the fifteen-year-old half-lifer is consuming them. He had made the world, so he believes, for his own entertainment and interacts with and observes the other half-lifers before he consumes them. The only defense against Jory is Ubik, an aerosol product developed by Ella and others. Jory, however, is able to regress and make Ubik useless by his power, as it also exists in the half-life world. At the climax of the novel, Joe Chip exerts his will on a bottle of regressed Ubik salve. While it does not change the substance back into its usable aerosol form, it grants Joe Chip a lifetime supply of aerosol delivered fresh from the factory. The novel ends with Runciter discovering Joe Chip’s profile on a coin.
Joe Chip begins the novel trapped in his apartment, unable to afford the coins to open his front door, his shower, or even his refrigerator. Although he is Runciter’s top employee, his credit is terrible and the automated systems that run his apartment rebel against him. From a Gnostic standpoint, his name indicates the average soul represents the soul, frozen in material existence, having forgotten its origin as a divine spark. The tyranny of the inanimate objects in his apartment underscore how low he has fallen. Pat Conley personifies this forgetfulness within the material realm. When she is first introduced, she is in her work clothes, caked with authentic mud. She has a suntan, showing that she actual labors outside. These descriptions suggest the world of Assiah. More tellingly, her unique power is forgetfulness itself. She can change the past and reroute it along a different reality. In that sense, it is more than forgetfulness, it is erasure. When Joe Chip first tests her, he gives her examination sheet the special code “Ø,” which to Runciter means “do not hire,” but to the Gnostic suggests Ain Soph Aur. After she demonstrates her power to reroute the past, Joe Chip changes the code to “+ +,” as a warning of the danger she poses to Runciter Associates. Symbolically, the code is the cross of physical manifestation emphasized by doubling and underscoring.
The course of the novel transpires in two worlds. The initial reality of the narrative and the reality of half-life, through which the majority of the plot runs. Communication between these two worlds exists, on the one side, by hooking up sensors to corpses stored in cold-pac, and on the other side, by paying attention to the idiosyncratic signs and wonders that appear in the fabric of perceived reality. The reality of 1992 that Dick presents, that of the prudential organizations, psychics and inertials, and coin-operated apartments, is not a projected timeline from when the novel was written in 1969. By reckoning temporal hints within the narrative, it becomes clear that this is an alternate reality. For example, Runciter is eighty years old. Herbert Shoenheit von Vogelsang, the director of the moratorium in which Ella is housed, imagines that he has several artificial replacement parts. This could perhaps be feasible in a 1992 projected from 1969, however Runciter’s secretary is around 120, and depicted as such, existing without the benefit of artificial rejuvenation. Moreover, Joe Chip and another survivor, both of whom could be anywhere from their twenties to their fifties or beyond (their ages are never specified) reminisce about dentists, a tale Joe Chip’s father told him about when teeth were subject to decay. Half-life reality is also tracking an alternate line. Although the details of 1939 Des Moines seem accurate, the newspaper false reports that the Polish army has stopped the German advance despite fresh troops being sent to the front. The reality of half-life, however, bears a greater reality than that of 1992 reality. When Joe Chip drove in Des Moines, for example, he noted, “the transportation of his own time lacked this palpable touch of sturdy realism.”
That Joe Chip could suddenly drive a 1930’s era vehicle, albeit with difficulty, demonstrates that the dichotomy of the two worlds is also displayed within Joe Chip himself. In 1992 reality, he sees CAVEAT EMPTOR tattooed on Pat’s arm and wonders whether it is Hebrew. In half-life reality, however, he knows that ubique means “everywhere.” He also recognizes the Verdi Requiem and knows that Toscanini was sometimes recorded as he sang while conducting. This suggests a subtle change within Joe Chip as he moves from a frozen spark to someone more in tune with universal knowledge.
Within the reality of half-life, Jory Miller serves as the demiurge. When he first intruded into Runciter’s consultation with Ella, he is described as vital yet clumsy, lacking Ella’s “deft subtlety.” At first Joe Chip mistakes Jory’s influence as some “sadistic cat-and-mouse game” on the part of Runciter, goading them toward some unknown goal. He senses later, as he is beginning to drain of his life force, being pulling into the same smoky red haze that Ella described to Runciter before Jory’s intrusion, that the true actor is “a polymorphic, perverse agency which likes to watch. An infantile, retarded entity which enjoys what’s happening.” Soon Jory reveals himself and explains himself to Joe Chip.
At the climax of the novel, the dualistic struggle between the forces of persistence (Ella and Ubik), and entropy (Jory and the nature of half-life) becomes overt. Joe Chip seeks aerosol cans of Ubik to counteract the decay of half-life, and Jory seeks to regress all samples found to a useless state so that he can devour Joe Chip. This culminates in a eucharistic scene in a Des Moines pharmacy in 1939. Joe Chip has obtained Ubik, but Jory, as the pharmacist, has regressed it to a jar of salve:
You are a spray can,” Joe said to the pasteboard container which he held in his hand. “This is 1992,” he said, and tried to exert everything; he put the entirety of himself into the effort.
* * *
“What I hold here,” Joe said, “is a spray can.”
“No,” the pharmacist said. “I’m sorry, Mr. Chip. I really am. But it’s not.”
Although the salve is not transformed by the exertion of Joe Chip’s will, it still leads to his salvation. Outside the pharmacy, a representative of the factory where Ubik is manufactured in the future greets him. He has won a lifetime supply of the aerosol.
Interestingly, it is unclear whether the representative has originated from the half-life world or the world Runciter occupies. In a sense, Joe Chip has established a link between the two, and he now affects the “real” world as Runciter, Ella, and Jory were affecting the half-life world. This new power is depicted by the appearance of a coin with Joe Chip’s profile in Runciter’s world, as Runciter’s profile had earlier appeared on a coin in half-life. On a Gnostic level, this could symbolize the redintegration of Joe Chip’s soul. Through his exertion in the pharmacy, he pierced and united his two realities and is now in the position of ה or, more appropriately, י.
Philip K. Dick wrote one of my favorite novels: The Man in the High Castle. Ever since then I’ve been
"Prior forms, he reflected, must carry on an invisible, residual life in every object. The past is latent, is submerged, but still there, capable of rising to the surface once the later imprinting unfortunately—and against ordinary experience—vanished. The man contains—not the boy—but earlier men, he thought. History began a long time ago."
This novel lived up to its reputation as one of Dick’s classics.
Its theme of personal realities and the imposition of one’s own reality on others echoes Dick’s Eye in the Sky and his A Maze of Death. The intimation of personal death in the bathroom
The malevolent presence of Jory infiltrating the minds of those in cryonic suspension was a bit like the gnostic god of A Maze of Death. The omnipresent Ubik messages are a classic example of divine messages (though, of course, Runciter is not god, but he is, in some sense, more real given that he is mobile and moves about in the “real world” and not the delusional world of those in the moratorium) found in trash and advertising, the divine penetrating the mundane world.
The style of this novel got me to thinking about the virtues and faults of Dick’s often rapid and ramshackle speed of composition. (I have no idea how quickly this novel was conceived and written.) I found the jarring nomenclature odd and interesting. Specifically, there is the clever “ubik” for “ubiquitous”, but we also get the decidedly staid Latin of “moratorium”. On the one hand, I sense Dick was writing in a hurry and (perhaps like the use of “demesne” in his The Penultimate Truth) simply used a rather improbable and long Latin word when a real future would have invented a slang word or corruption (like "ubik"). On the other hand, it's a great use of the word's literal meaning -- "to delay".
But as a sidenote, there's one scene where a large group of new characters is introduced, and Philip K. Dick describes each one briefly but so evocatively that I actually remembered who was who throughout the rest of the book. Maybe my memory is just awful (of course it is), or maybe I read too many books where hair color is a person's defining feature and everyone is young and attractive. Either way I was impressed.
Dick seems to be an ideas man, characters and tight plotting aren’t the point. In fact main character’s stupidity to get the plot started set my teeth on edge. Do you think this could be an ambush guys? Do you? Sigh. It also doesn't help that Ubik is a bit light on the idea front and full of humour that I don't find funny. It's not a horrible read by any means, the regression of technologies and the eras they evoke is a lot of fun. The mystery of who is the bad guy and they how to get out of it is enjoyable even if the ending is bit too signposted for a modern reader.
I picked Ubik at random after a bad experience trying to read [Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?] when I was a teenager so maybe there is no hope for me but I think he deserves one more try.
Not recommending this one, has to be a better Dick out there
I liked the tone and voice of the novel. It moves at a fast pace, and there is always either action or intrigue taking place. On the other hand, the novel was often confusing, especially about mid-way through. As I mentioned, his predictions of the future weren't very accurate. In his future, machines can talk and have personalities. It also requires coins to operate them, even simple things like opening a door. He has the foresight to come up with these machines, but then they use nickels and dimes to operate them, so he completely ignored the concept of inflation. There is also never a resolution to the plot line where Runciter's people are ambushed. That was more or less ignored about half way through. As I mentioned, there is some good and some bad, but by and large this was an entertaining novel.
Carl Alves - author of Reconquest: Mother Earth
This book is crying out to be a film, if only for the costumes:
"Over by the window G. G. Ashwood, wearing his customary natty birch-bark pantaloons, hemp-rope belt, peekaboo see-through top and train-engineer's tall hat, shrugged indifferently."
The story: a group of paranormals working for Runciter Associates are are on a job on the moon when they are killed, or injured, time starts to move backward for them, but not smoothly, objects regress, and the past is different (Walt Disney appearing on coinage for example). The groups of possibly half-dead people are being picked off (or possibly revived) one by one, and possibly being talked to by Glen Runciter, whilst they are in a half-dead state, or possibly not, I lost track.
It's another mystery story, and like Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said the mystery is once again "why isn't reality behaving itself?" The story doesn't flow
Of course, being PKD, he has to ruin a perfectly good story by ending the last chapter of the book with "oh yeah, and all of this might not have really happened." This seems to be a recurring theme with the author, and discourages me from reading his work more actively.
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Omslaget viser et kranie med øjne i øjenhulerne og et lysende atomsymbol i en glasbeholder ovenpå
Indskannet omslag - N650U - 150 dpi
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813.54 |