[Book review]: Ubik by Philip K. Dick

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Genre: Science Fiction

Published: 1969 (first edition)

Blurb

  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.

My review 

This is the third work of Philip K Dick I’ve read so far, and to me…not his best one.

With the plot set in an extremely commercialised world of 1992, the story follows Glen Runciter and his employees, the individuals with the extraordinary telepathic abilities.

When Mr. Runciter dies in the explosion, orchestrated by his business rivals in one of the remote Earth’s colonies, his assistant and deputy, Joe Chip, tries to save his boss by putting him in the moratorium, a place where so called half-lifers can prolong their existence, laying in cold packs and communicating with the outside world. Despite all the efforts, at first, it seems like Joe has failed.

The plot thickens when the employees, including Joe, start to receive encrypted messages from their dead boss, and the world around them starts to regress and decay, turning into ashes.

Finding themselves drawn back to 1939 by an unknown, powerful force, Joe and his peers need to fight the regression to stay sane, but the main thing, to survive.I must admit, P. K. Dick is a master of creation of the weird, surrealistic, lonely multiple words within the worlds. His matryoshka-like realities make readers wonder where’s the border between the real life, half-life, and death. Is death possible at all? Or, like Ella Runciter, Glen’s wife who experiences the half-life, we’ll be reborn again one day? Or maybe a spray of Ubik can help to stop it?

Ubik is not an easy, straight forward read. It made me think the plot over and over again. Are they all dead, after all?

I found it extremely difficult to get through the first few chapters of the story, as the author introduces readers to too many characters at once. I struggled to follow Joe’s discoveries and theories about what really has happened to him and his colleagues as well. Jumping from one conclusion to another, the book doesn’t explain much in the end.

I love cliffhanger and yet… Ubik could’ve had some more clarity for the tastes not as philosophical as its author’s ones.