Ubik by Philip K. Dick – Update Your Antivirus
Ubik by Philip K.Dick is a science fiction story, published in 1969, now considered a classic. It appears on Times Magazine’s list of best novels since 1923.
The book imagines a version of 1993 where people with telepathic powers use their skills to gain access to valuable information. They are like psychological computer hackers. Individuals with ability to block these hackers form themselves into what you might call antivirus companies, known as prudence organisations. For a fee they will block the telepaths. There is a constant tension between these two sides, which reaches a crisis point when the anti telepaths are lured to a base on the moon, where, apparently, their leader Glen Runciter is assassinated. Then, under pressure from competing mind-bending powers, time seems to slip backwards as the anti telepaths fight for survival. Our threatened group is helped by a mysterious substance called Ubik, which appears in all sorts of guises, ranging from hair products to medicines – a kind of all-inclusive useful stuff, whose name derives from the word ubiquitous, meaning everywhere.
Alright. Let’s take a moment. A tricky, complicated story. What to make of it? There’s a kind of amorphous quality that invites theories, which many readers have duly provided.
For me, I suppose I made sense of it in the virus/antivirus comparison. Antivirus companies wouldn’t be necessary if people didn’t make viruses. And most of the time you have no idea if a virus is threatening your system, requiring the protection you are paying for. There is an element of unreality about the whole situation, cooked up between two opposing sides, who after much expensive trouble, end up back where they started when there was no virus. Everyone expends a lot of energy to get precisely nowhere. And the medicine to make it all better is ambivalent to say the least, coming in many forms, with warnings of side effects if not used as directed. After all, the one thing that an antivirus company needs to keep it going is a good supply of viruses to protect against. You might imagine an antivirus company, short of things to do, cooking up its own threats, the medicine becoming the poison. Ubik, the book and the substance, is a bit like that.
‘Could the prudence organizations be, in fact, rackets? Claiming a need for their services when sometimes no need actually exists?’
This is not the most straight-forward of reads, jumping around in viewpoint and setting, with a kind of spare writing style that leaves much of the work of imagining scenes to the reader. But there are interesting ideas that save a potentially chaotic project. You have this fascinating struggle, deriving from ancient dualities of good and evil, presented in a modern story about data theft. For me, Ubik was a book that seemed better in retrospect, thinking abut it afterwards. It kind of took me on a bizarre and confusing journey only to bring me back to where I started. This could have felt like a waste of time and effort to get nowhere in particular. Instead it was more like a crazy trip before the relief of home-coming.
