Brian’s Comments (group member since Mar 02, 2009)

Brian’s comments from the fiction files redux group.

hey... hope you feel better.

i'm always astounded when a book effects my being... astounded and sometimes a bit scared. this book be doing that to me. how will i ever get back into the historic realities of the buru quartet?

on another note... the little ads at the top of each chapter reminded me of the old burma-shave ads. do any of you know about the burma-shave ads?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burma-Shave

and it works pretty damn good from my mobile phone which is usually my best link to the web given i hate staying in the office where my computer stays.

ok folks... i'm done with the first 4 chapters as i'm sure you are too. and like you, again i'm sure, you couldn't stop and are probably plowing ahead into chapters 5, 6... and beyond.

i understand they're making a movie out of this book (not sure who 'they' are) and am curious how that will translate. one thing i would like to see are the costumes. what is with the crazy clothes these people wear? pkd goes through no small effort to describe these wild and wooly coverings. kind of reminds me of pee wee's wardrobe.

i don't trust this pat girl, not because she wears what appears to be 'normal' clothes, but because her power is just too damn powerful (wait til chapter 5 if you haven't read it already). and i like how chip notices what appears to be 'actual' mud on her boots... real mud!

i really like the characters and as i read this i can't help but compare it to pkd's non-fiction humpty dumpty in oakland, the only other pkd i've read. ben's right. there is no difference except in the trades. instead of selling used cars they're selling anti-psi services. humans are humans regardless of the setting or gadgets and i really do like pkd's humans.

and this coin operated society just cracks me up. i love the door and the refrigerator. isn't this kind of what the airlines are doing now?

Dick went bonkers in the end, of course, or so they say: but you tell me whose reality is the most skewed. The majority of the world’s computers are forced to speak the same flawed language, for which you pay a tithe to the planet’s richest man - our very own Stanton Mick (without the charisma)? One of the most popular television shows takes nobodies from the populace and locks them in a house in the hope one of them goes mad - Bedlam with advertising breaks? You couldn’t make this stuff up. But Dick could have. He understood very well the breaking relationship between the signifier and signified, the oncoming death of reality, the apotheosis of simulation - making inroads into Jean Baudrillard’s philosophical territories, and at exactly the same time: Mass Media Culture was published in 1970, and Simulacra & Simulation not until 1981 - the same year as Valis.

For in the end this is what Ubik is really about: time, and the nature of reality, its chimerical unreliability. No one has ever played with this subject as skillfully or with such hair-raising confidence. People have been playing catch-up with his Gnostic manipulations ever since, and you only have to watch The Matrix a second time to realize how intellectually plodding these efforts have been. It is Philip K. Dick that I’m most thinking of when I get annoyed with the general public for happily watching science fiction on the big or small screens, but being wary of contamination from the actual books. There are celebrated literary lions who’ve won Pulitzers and Booker prizes for ideas that Dick would toss aside in an early chapter, but… oh, what’s the use. You evidently already now the score, because you’re reading this.

Either that, or you’re about to find out.

If this is your first PKD, prepare yourself for having to find another foot or so of book shelving space. Ubik would be extraordinary if it was a one-off, a solitary super-charged flight of fancy in a long career of stodge. It isn’t. When choosing the best Philip K. Dick novel, you might equally well consider Valis and The Man In the High Castle or A Scanner Darkly and The Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch not to mention Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? or Flow My Tears, The Policeman Said (surely tow of the greatest titles in science or any other fiction) or Counter-Clock World or The Transmigration of Timothy Archer or The World That Jones Made…

There are lots of great Dick novels, and may superb short stories too. It’s all good, it’s all weird, and yet it all still makes sense. You can’t get this anywhere else. Don’t even try. Ubik is your ticket to strange territories, and Philip K. Dick was , to use the vernacular of his time, on some whole different trip.

Climb aboard, and strap on tight.

Michael Marshall Smith
London, January 2006

Here's the introduction found in the UK version (in 2 parts due to character count limitations)

Introduction
By Michael Marshall Smith

Everything is destined to reappear a simulation. Landscapes as photography, woman as the sexual scenario, thoughts as writing, terrorism as fashion and the media, events as television. Things seem only to exist by virtue of this strange destiny. You wonder whether the world itself isn’t just here to serve as advertising copy in some other world.’
Jean Baudrillard, America

There’s a characteristic shared by most successful action thrillers. They hit the ground running. The conventional wisdom of the make-your-fortune script gurus is you start a movie with an establishing ten minutes, to lay out the real world and let the audience settle in their seats, before you turn things on their head. The edge-of-the-seat action movies tend to ignore this. They say: ‘Yeah, screw that. We’re going straight in with the big guns, and then we’ll wheel in bigger guns. Plus you should see the guns we’ve got saved for the end.’ The hero is introduced in mid-crisis and the audience has to scurry to catch up, to leap aboard the chopper before it leaves the LZ bound precariously for who knows where. This generates an immediate feeling of breathless involvement, a momentum that never lets up. There will be light and shade, naturally - no great movie keeps shouting all the time - but basically the intention is clear right from the get-go. Thrills. Spills. Action. And lots of it.

Ubik, in common with most of Philip K. Dick’s work, is almost exactly unlike this - which is one of the reasons that adapting his work for the cinema is very tough. Piling on visceral action sequences was never high on Dick’s list of priorities. The first three scenes in Ubik are basically conversations, for example, and not short on exposition. But if you substitute ‘action’ with ‘ideas’, suddenly you realize that there’s a strong similarity after all, and understand how he generates so much emotional excitement with so few pyrotechnics.

Never mind action. Dick was writing conceptual thrillers.

The first chapter of Ubik kicks in with telepaths and precogs and a problem in the lives of those whose job is to stymie them. Through what is deftly unsaid Dick conjures a world in which all this is already known, accepted, business as usual. You’re barely coming up to speed with this before Glen Runciter is communing with his increasingly semi-dead wife Ella at the Beloved Brethren Moritorium in Zurich, a sequence of melancholy bravura most writers would save for a big reveal later in the book. Then you’re with the down-at-heel Joe Chip, sharing his hung-over frustration at a door that won’t open unless it receives its mandatory five cent ‘tip’ - and confronted with a sassy young woman who, it appears, might be able to counter-attack precogs through altering the future, by… yes, going back in time. And never mind the fact that, through the epigrams at the head of each chapter, you already sense there’s some kind of meta-narrative of satire building too…

And at this stage we’re only about thirty pages in. This is the intellectual equivalent of taking the car chases and explosions and monsters from the first acts of Lethal Weapon, Aliens and all three Diehard movies and saying ‘Oh hell, let’s just have it all happening at once!’ Dick has barely warmed up yet: in Ubik, he has access to conceptual guns of near infinite size. There’s a lot more to come, moments both head-spinning (as when Pat first vertiginously demonstrates her powers in Runciter’s office, a trademark Dick sidestep) and stealthy - as when a phone book is discovered to be out of date, or the eerie, sad specificity of ‘All the cigarettes in this world are stale’.

This fecund extravagance with ideas is one of the reasons Dick remains supremely relevant today. One of the key challenges facing any work of futuristic fiction is that of lasting. It’s not the only important thing, of course, but if you hang out your shingle on the premise of saying what things are going to be like, and it turns out they aren’t, it cannot help but distance the reader. This is the tension inherent in all science fiction, and the bottom line is that novelists have little skill in predicting technological advances: otherwise they’d ditch the hard slog of writing and play the stock market instead. There’s also the matter of getting the resonance right. Even if someone does manage to predict people running around with portable ‘communicators’ or some such far-speaking device, they probably won’t also imagine the market in downloadable ring tones or soft porn wallpapers, or realize how much time will be spent using said communicators to bellow ‘The shuttle’s just getting into spaceport now, should be back at the livePod in 0.5 Earth hours,’ to people who already know what time you’re expected home, and don’t in fact really care.

Dick understood this. He doesn’t just hold up the prospect of the dead living half-lives, for example, but presents you with a situation in which it’s already going wrong. Again, a lesser writer would have saved this, frugally held back dysfunction to spice up the second act. Dick understood the human condition all too well and committed to putting it at the heart of his fiction. He didn’t just know there would be personal computers. He knew they would crash, that the people who came to fix them would charge heavily by the hour, and be annoying, and no good, and in the end would just ell you to buy a new amore expensive machine - doubtless powered by the Ubik2020 processor, use only as directed, and never in the shower. In a genre that is often structured almost exclusively around ideas, this lends a dense and sparkly richness that is hard to find anywhere else.

But Dick sidesteps prediction, mere prose precog - and thus anticipates cyberpunk by many years - by focusing on the emotional and cultural currents of future times, on the human impact of change. It doesn’t matter that he still has people writing cheques and using coins in the future - rather than swiping cards or befitting off skin implants - because the real point is that people will still be underpaid, or need to borrow money. This grounding in the emotionally reall also means that it doesn’t matter if the occasional verbal coinage sounds a bit clunky, because we recognize the notions themselves have modern currency. Dick’s speculated future vernacular also sounds less awkward than most, because it’s wrapped in a light touch. Humour was not unknown in science fiction before Douglas Adams, of course - Alfred Bester and Cordwainer Smith had it in spades, Asimov and Clarke their droll moments, and even Heinlein waxes hearty once in a while - but it’s very rare to find it combined with ideas of such profundity. So much genre writing (and fiction in general) is careful and po-faced and stick-to-my-niche. Most science-fiction novelists still write hard or soft, near or far, funny or deadly earnest. Hot or Cold, if you like. Dick had access to some strange third tap, and in this respect his imagination is reminiscent of the early work of that most futuristic and otherworldly of songwriters, David Bowie: producing vignettes of such quality, and standing so far to the side of the prevailing progression of creative evolution, that they transcend time. Listen again to Hunky Dory (1971) or Ziggy Stardust (1972) and tell me it isn’t so. Then read Ubik (1969), and do the same. I’m not a rabid Bowie fan, but the fact remains that David Bowie is fundamentally cool. He always will be. If at some point he becomes uncool, it will be the world that is at fault. The same is true of Philip K. Dick’s imagination. He put that stuff out there: it’s the universe’s responsibility to keep up.