Ubik by Philip K. Dick
My rating: 4 of 5 stars "So it goes." Published in 1969, Philip K. Dick’s Ubik is set in 1992, when the moon has been colonized and a ruthless corporate war is being waged between psi and anti-psi companies. Hollis Talents, run by Ray Hollis, hires “psis,” people with various types of psychic abilities, especially telepaths and precogs, while Runciter Associates, run by Glen Runciter, hires “inertials,” people who can negate psi powers. Thus, companies like Runciter’s (called “prudence organizations”) advertise that they are safeguarding privacy, while companies like Hollis’ say the prudence organizations are trying to block progress. Leave it to Dick to monetize psychic powers via American capitalism! Dick imagines many more brave new consumer world innovations for 1992, like conapts (glorified apartments) equipped with snarky homeopathic (semi-sentient) machines that require payment each time you open your door or fridge or take a shower or make a cup of coffee, etc.; artificial organs enabling you to live way past a hundred; and a system of “cold-pac” cryonic suspension maintaining the deceased in a “half-life” so that their loved ones may talk with them, though each time a half-lifer is woken, a little more of their remaining vitality leaks away, bringing closer their inevitable full death and or migration to Somewhere Else, like to rebirth ala the Tibetan Book of the Dead. An early remark from a character reverberates through the novel: “Is this worth it?” One other aspect of “future” 1992 life deserves comment: fashion. The characters wear a panoply of outré outfits, a hybrid hodgepodge of colors, cultures, eras, materials, styles, and gender markers. A woman in “a silk sari and nylon obi and bobby socks,” a man in “a polyester dirndl, his long hair in a snood, cowboy chaps with simulated silver stars. And sandals.” And so on. Is Dick mocking fashion or using it to assert individuality in a consumerist future? Anyway, the plot begins when Glen Runciter, faced with the sudden vanishing from the earth of powerful Hollis psis (which is hurting business by reducing the need for inertials to counter psis), visits the Beloved Brethren Moratorium in Zurich to consult his half-life wife Ella. Alas, Ella can only tell him to increase the company’s advertising when Jory, a lonely and vigorous 15-year old half-lifer in the cold-pac unit by hers, usurps her communication line. Enter Dickian “hero” Joe Chip, Runciter’s field tester for the psychic fields that Joe, as a “Norm,” cannot himself emit. He is so absurdly in debt that he can’t use his conapt’s appliances and alternates between defeatism and confidence—only partly due to the downers and uppers he takes (when he can pay for them). Poor Joe, “doomed in the classical sense,” quickly falls under the sway of a beautiful, wise beyond her years Dickian femme fatale, Pat Conley, who barely looks 17 and is possessed of a unique psychic ability to change the past so as to change the present/future. She is unnerving and unflappable, untethered to truth or empathy, armed with a “CAVEAT EMPTOR” tattoo. And then Runciter gets a commission for a big job from magnate Stanton Mick, who wants his Luna colony psi-free but won’t let Runciter et al do any preliminary tests to see what psis have infiltrated. Runciter takes the lucrative job anyway, assembling a crack team of eleven crackpot inertials to go to Luna. Soon Joe and company are in way over their heads, having to confront existential crises of the most reality compromising sort. Are they dreaming? Hallucinating? Half-lifing? Time traveling? What’s happening and who’s behind it? It is often a funny book. “Real” 50-cent coins feature the faces of Walt Disney and Fidel Castro. The name of Runciter’s spaceship is The Pratfall II. Then there are Joe’s trials and tribulations trying to use machines. And humorous dialogue, as when a colleague says, “I think it’s fine for Joe to have a mistress who pays his front door,” or Glen Runciter tells his sleepy half-lifer wife about the disappearance of a top telepath, and Ella says, “I wouldn’t forget an S. Dole Melinpone. Is it a hobbit?” And the absurd fashions (a man in “a tweed toga, loafers, crimson sash and a purple airplane-propeller beanie”!) Dick saves his novel from silliness via metaphysical nightmare. Kipple--a hyper entropy force in Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?--makes an appearance here, with suddenly aging phonebooks, cigarettes, coins, coffee, machines, and people: planned obsolescence speeded up and universally applied. A smoky, creepy red light may signal a bad rebirth womb. Is a malignant divine being behind everything? Aren’t we all half-lifers already, anyway? Can Joe get his hands on a spray can of Ubik before everything around him (and he himself) ages beyond the point of salvation? Ah, Ubik! We are told that it is related to ubiquity but doesn’t appear in dictionaries. Cheesy ads for a panoply of Ubik products begin each chapter, from coffee, cereal, and beer to plastic wrap, deodorant, and bras, all of which will surely improve your life—if used as directed: “Can’t make the frug contest, Helen; stomach’s upset. I’ll fix you Ubik! Ubik drops you back in the thick of things fast. Taken as directed, Ubik speeds relief to head and stomach. Remember: Ubik is only seconds away. Avoid prolonged use.” All this casts an unsavory light on Ubik, and yet instead of aiding entropy (which is ubiquitous), Ubik apparently supports the counterforce to entropy in the novel. Just what is Ubik and who made it? Audiobook reader Luke Daniels is entertaining but maybe tries too hard at times. Just cause someone says “Calm down Joe” doesn’t mean Joe is screaming, especially if there are no exclamation marks in the text. Fans of books whose mysteries are clearly solved and whose heroes fully triumph may be disturbed by this one. And it would bore you if you require page turning super-power X-men-esque fights, as Dick’s “action” scenes depict things like a decaying man climbing a flight of stairs or people making futile plans of action. But if you like reading lines like, “He felt like an ineffectual moth, fluttering at the windowpane of reality, dimly seeing it from the outside,” buy a can of Ubik. View all my reviews
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