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Philip K. Dick (was UBIK group read thread)
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Today at 9:53pm
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yay! i just started chapter 3 so haven't got very far. do both of you have the copy with the introduction by michael marshall smith? i read it and kind of got excited. i like what he says about david bowie.
i've never been much on sci-fi. i've read a little of bradbury back in high school (the illustrated man and i still remember that short story about the astronauts falling to earth and a little kid seeing the falling star). and read the douglas adams stuff. and dune. that's about all i can think of except for rogue moon which ben passed to me a while back.
so starting this book required me to shift my thinking, especially since i've been reading toer's historical fiction of indonesia in 1899 and then cain's stark crime fiction. but i think i've got the mindset fine tuned.
Mod
Today at 10:10pm
hello hello!
i will start by saying i do not have the copy with the intro talking about david bowie. i will also say that pkd is not really like asimov, or herbert, or heinlein. i'm not much for traditional sci-fi myself. from what i've read so far, dick is employing the precog concept here, as he does in other books. usually i just feel like pkd stories are about people i can relate to but there is some fantastic concept or wrapping around it, that feels natural (at least to me) and not contrived. i don't wonder why he introduces far out concepts and ideas because there's a reason for them. as i write this, i'm thinking of lethem's gun, with occasional music which i thought was a good detective story forced into a sci fi milieu.
the book has 17 chapters, so why don't we meet up at the end of chapter 4 and discuss? dan, when do you think you can get there? i am a ridiculously fast reader, and i'm familiar with dick's world so it shouldn't take me too long to get there (in my edition that's 46 pages).
brian, would you mind summarizing the intro for us if dan doesn't have it?
m
Mod
Today at 10:26pm
Holy shit, how have I missed this many messages?
I am not a Sci-fi-guy myself. In fact I dislike Star Wars, Star trek, star gates, that one sci fi show that everyone likes currently. I do love both futurama and the 5th element.
Aside from the standard dystopian classics, Atwood's (sorry Mo!) Oryx and Crake about ten or so Vonneguts and Electric Sheep I am a rookie.
I really enjoyed electric sheep and ben has assured me that it was by no means his best so I am really looking forward to this one. My copy is also void of introduction. 46 pages won't take long. I could get it done sometime tomorrow, I will be fighting sleep soon reading it tonight so I probably won't get too far.
It seems someone slipped the cover artist a copy of photoshop and a few tabs of acid. Here is a link to my ugly ass copy:
http://www.amazon.com/Ubik-Philip-K-D...
Mod
Today at 10:44pm
did you notice the name melipone, mo? possibly from Μελπομένη (melpomene) the greek muse of tragedy?
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Today at 10:54pm
pkd loves greek -- i think you are absolutely right, and that it was intentional. where it will go, if anywhere will be another thing. one of the characters in my favourite (and possibly his most twisted) VALIS, is called horselover fat. i didn't realize that if you make that first name greek and the second german, it's really:................
a riddle for you two to figure out!
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am i over thinking this? it's clear i need a job, isn't it, with the gusto in which i am testing this page, and reading this book. :)
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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.
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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
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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?
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pat is fishy -- but then having the kind of power she has would make her automatically a very unsavoury, untrustworthy person to have around. after all, how would you ever know which of your actions she had decided was inappropriate and wished to negate? she signifies huge amounts of power with no controls. my favourite again! time travel! i'm surprised they don't immediately lock her up and throw away the key, despite how potentially useful she could be to the runciter organization.
runciter: i can't decide if i like him. he seems like a blustery old man, and yet he seems to feel very responsible to the world, that his company is providing a service that truly protects the people it serves, rather than supplying a false demand.
recap of chap 1-4: so we have a man who is worried about his business going to see his wife in half-life, which seems to be a kind of limbo between life and death, or at least rebirth. we meet his employee, joe chip, who we are to understand is worth more than his squalid surroundings, and the mysterious pat, and a mysterious mission to an off-world location, which runciter suspects may be the key to his business concerns. how will the image shift?
thanks brian for posting the forward. i wanted to read it once i finished, and now that i have, will enjoy it. :)
as for preferring his characters to be selling used cars, i don't know. for me, i love how dick imagined the future. a lot of his ideas seemed crazy to people then, and now but i think he was pretty damn visionary. this especially struck me about his short stories, which i guess are more firmly ensconced in the world of spaceships and interstellar travel. the characters are always believable, familiar, understandable but the how they deal with the outlandish schemes he comes up for them transplanting them out of our day-to-day reality? genius. to me that would be a tremendous loss. i bought voices from the street because you liked humpty dumpty so much but i'm not sure that i'm prepared to read it yet. :)
maybe i will scan a short story for you guys to read after UBIK to give you an idea of what i'm trying to get at. this talent for putting ordinary men in extraordinary circumstances, and have it be believable. i trust philip k. dick as a narrator even as i have learned to mistrust his characters, to not necessarily take them at face value.
Mod
I finished the first four chapters at about this time yesterday. I should have responded earlier but my life and way of doing things of late is incredibly stupid.
I once heard that PKD wrote his books in bursts. Quickly and intensely. Maybe I am thinking of someone else. Regardless, I feel that Dick forces you to read the books in the same manner. I have noticed it with Do Androids Dream... and now with the first 4 chapters. They were over before they started and so much profundity happened in so little time. It really is amazing how mind bending some of this stuff truly is. A state between life and death?! Half life. I recently read and article on Ray Kurzweil in Rolling Stone (which is unavailable online, though I will scan it if anyone wants to read it) in which Kurzweil talks of bringing the dead (particularly his father) back to life via genetic data and memories. A sort of half life here in the real world in the not too distant future.
I will echo Brian's thoughts about the Scifi terminology and stuff sometimes getting in the way of the characters. I attribute this to my newness to both PKD and the world of Scifi. I find myself trying to remember what all the terms are and what the mean and not knowing when to just let these bits flow through me as the rest of the plot and characters do.
I think that the distrust you feel from Pat is completely warranted and also a sign of PKDs amazing ability to make you, the reader, a bit paranoid. In the first four chapters I would say Chip is the only one I don't feel nervous about as a character. Everyone else has different agendas whereas Chip is just a normal guy a bit down on his luck (a can relate there!), at least so far.
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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
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i didn't get a chance to read much yesterday but i am looking to make up for it today. i'll be back!
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i think i am going to take a break from reading and go for a nice long walk.
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maybe you could just say spoilers, dan? we're going to talk about the rest of the book?
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i'll keep it vague but i'm sure you'll understand what i'm asking. i understood the concepts all the way through to the one before last chapter of the book. at least i think i understood. and then... the last chapter. the money, the picture on it... wtf? am i where i think i am? do i need a can of ubik?
***END SPOILER ALERT***
Mod
you'll totally recall (;P) that i was the one who suggested we break it out into 4 chapters of 4. i knew that when i suggested it there was a chapter 17, but it was short. and that made me think there might be a twist to it. it's not like this is his m.o. -- i just had a hunch based on length. when i got there, i had finally finished contorting my mind into understanding all the permutations of reality he was asking me to contend with, and explanations for it -- the last girl's is particularly obtuse.
i think our first clue is the ubik advertisement that begins chapter 17 is very different than the ones that have gone before. i read it and i hear "i am the alpha and the omega, the beginning and the end" in my head. i'm sure you hear something similar. ubik is god as i know it. of course, this makes me wonder if this is actually god -- then who is dr. sondenberg who is mentioned throughout as the inventor of ubik, and who we never meet. ella seems to work for his company so maybe there is a zoroastrian filter on this one. with more than one creative urge in the universe, opposing the destructive force. dick read theology extensively, and was always toying with Plato's forms, so it could be that too. ultimately, i think this novel is turned shows you the obverse of the coin as it were, at the end. had he stopped where he did in chapter 16, it would have been a satisfying conclusion to a roller coaster ride of shifting reality. with the last chapter he wants you to leave him doing exactly what you did all through the book, which is question what reality you are in.
ben and i were talking about the idea that the dream world is reality, and this life but a construct, and there have been times when this seemed right and proper to me. i suspect you don't need a can of ubik -- you just need to wake up. :)
at least that's what i think. we'll hear what the others have to say. lord knows i enjoyed this book but it doesn't beat my favourite, VALIS, but then again VALIS really affected my mental state. and i'm not as freaked out by it. i do think the sense of humour was clanging out at me throughout. but we'll talk more about the whole thing once dan lets us know he's finished. :)
Mod
Ok, I am finished, sorry I had a day without much reading happen. In any case this book may have made me a little bit insane. I wasn't even sure I could handle it after chapter nine and the introduction of the possibility of Runciter being alive. I was surprised by how the plot or perhaps the realities seemed to start making sense. My surpris-ed-ness was abated with chapter 17.
Mo I found this statement you made pretty interesting:
i read it and i hear "i am the alpha and the omega, the beginning and the end" in my head. i'm sure you hear something similar. ubik is god as i know it. of course, this makes me wonder if this is actually god -- then who is dr. sondenberg who is mentioned throughout as the inventor of ubik, and who we never meet.
So if ubik is god as we know it and Dr Sondenberg created Ubik isn't it possible that the Dr. is a representation of man? I mean in all likelyhood (at least from my standpoint) god is an manifestation of man anyway but even if this isn't true god as we know it can only be know through our man-ness (or woman-ness). Regardless I am not sure what me saying all this has to do with the story itself.
The Philosopher George Berkley said that only two things exist in this world, Minds and Ideas. Everything else is a construct. But at the same time how is it that we exist in any other form than as an idea?
Well regardless of all my twaddle Ubik has certainly made me think of some crazy things.
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the name sonderberg just made me think of sunshine and wonderful. but that's just me.
yeah, the last chapter just seems like twilight zoney tacked-on. oooooh! it's everywhere! which, sure, makes sense with the tibetan book of the dead swirling around and people being on the lookout for the red wombs and all... coming into and out of "reality," everything just moving in a constant circle, karma going both ways and etc. so, i understand it, but it does move us past the emotional closing of the story into what is basically an authorial statement on the nature of the universe.
whatever. man, that book really had me questioning my sanity. which i don't find very helpful right now. i still can't believe i used to think it was so funny.
I personally thought it was a proverbial zen master's kick in the reader's ass. As far as I remember, from what I read of PKD anyway, UBIK is the only novel he does this in such a blatant way. Normally, though they are mindblowing in themselves, his books have pretty standard closures. Meaning you reach the end, and although the book made you go "damn this guy is crazy" or "damn I wish i was half as crazy as this guy" numerous times, you have this perfect little smoky sphere floating in your head, with the book's essence comfortably inside. But here he went and burst that bubble in the last chapter, probably for himself as much as for us.
Mod
i'm going to come back with some more thoughts on this book in a bit -- i still have it on my mind. for example: even though environment and reality seem fluid in this book, i feel the characters stay consistent, and intentionally. i think this is how he grounds the reader: you may not trust runciter but his attitudes and loyalties don't change. neither do joe chip's. thanks heavens for that, or we'd all be way more messed up right now. :)
Mod
okay, well, i'm back but it's been a full week since i last wrote about this book and it feels like it's been a century. reading over our discussion above i find it sad for pat that she was set up as such a red herring. what a horrible thing to face when she began to succumb to the dry-out herself, despite the fact that she was happy enough when she thought she was doing it to the others.
and jory! jory is a terrible thing, an undead leech, and the idea that there are many jorys, in every moratorium, is a depressing one. joe chip takes on the battle against jory but i am still not sure why: revenge? survival? want of anything better to do with his half-life?
about dr. sonderberg: i looked up sonder in a german to english dictionary and it's an adjective meaning "extra" or "special". i think dan and ben both have something here: he could be a construct with the half-lifers behind it, almost like the wizard of oz.
as for ben's comment re: "lonely and i'd like a girlfriend" -- this is the part of philip k dick i don't like. i have purposely tried to obliterate from my mind one of my favourite author's attitude and relationships to the women in his life. he is lonely even with a girlfriend, and then he gets a newer (generally younger) and then the cycle begins again, because the thing is one woman never ever satisfied. i am happy to have read the two biographies i did because they helped me understand a lot of other things about him, but this part of him just made me sad. the biographers made much of his relationship with his mother, and the loss of his twin jane, but as much as i tried to believe that, it rang falsely with me.
Mod
On December 28, 1974, he wrote to an acquaintance:
Thank you in particular for what you said about UBIK. Just the other day I looked up the Greek philosopher Empedocles and I was amazed to see that UBIK in many ways expresses his world-view. It is a view generally discarded these days. In May of this year a guy from France doing his doctoral thesis on UBIK flew here and asked me, "You know Empedocles?" to which I had to admit, no, I didn't even know the name. The French guy got very angry, as if he believed I was lying, and walked out. Now I can see why. It is impossible to believe that anyone could write UBIK without having gotten the concepts from Empedocles. By the way -- Empedocles, I read, believed that he would be reincarnated and return some day. I'm not kidding. He expected to come back... But I bet he didn't anticipate finding himself in Fullerton. I guess the part where they're all dead is because ol' E. has been dead these many centuries and knows a lot about how it feels (I wish I was kidding when I say all this, but I'm not; I mean, I really sort of believe this).
TSR 216
Within a system which must generate an enormous amount of veiling, it would be vain-glorious to expostulate on what actuality is, when my premise declares that were we to penetrate to it for any reason this strange veil-like dream would reinstate itself retroactively, in terms of our perceptions and in terms of our memories. The mutual dreaming would resume as before, because, I think, we are like the characters in my novel UBIK; we are in a state of half-life. We are neither dead nor alive, but preserved in cold storage, waiting to be thawed out. Expressed in the perhaps startingly familiar terms of the procession of the seasons, this is winter of which I speak; it is winter for our race, and it is winter in UBIK for those in half-life. Ice and snow cover them; ice and snow cover our world in layers of accretions, which we call dokos or Maya. What melts away the rind or layer of frozen ice over the world each year is of course the reappearance of the sun. What melts the ice and snow covering the characters in UBIK, and which halts the cooling-off of their lives, the entropy which they feel, is the voice of Mr. Runciter, their former employer, calling to them. The voice of Mr. Runciter is none other than the same voice which each bulb and seed and root in the ground, our ground, in our winter-time, hears. It hears: "Wake up! Sleepers awake!" Now I have told you who Runciter is, and I have told you our condition and what UBIK is really about. What I have said, too, is that time is actually as Dr. Kozyrev in the Soviet Union supposes it to be, and in UBIK time has been nullified and no longer moves forward in the lineal fashion which we experience. As this has happened, due to the deaths of the characters, we the readers and they the personæ see the world as it is without the veil of Maya, without the obscuring mists of lineal time. It is that very energy, Time, postulated by Dr. Kozyrev as binding together all phenomena and maintaining all life, which by its activity hides the ontological reality beneath its flow.
The orthogonal time axis may have been represented in my novel UBIK without my understanding what I was depicting; i.e. the form regression of objects along an entirely different line from that out of which they, in lineal time, were built. This reversion is that of the Platonic Ideas or archetypes; a rocket-ship reverts to a Boeing 747, then back to a World War I "Jenny" biplane. While I may indeed have expressed a dramatic view of orthogonal time, it is less certain that this is orthogonal time undergoing an unnatural reversion; i.e. moving backwards. What the characters in UBIK see may be orthogonal time moving along its normal axis; if we ourselves somehow see the universe reversed the the "reversions" of form which objects in UBIK undergo may be momentum towards perfection. This would imply that our world as extensive in time (rather than extensive in space) is like an onion, an almost infinite number of successive layers. If lineal time seems to add layers, then perhaps orthogonal time peels these off, exposing layers of progressively greater Being. One is reminded here of Plotinus's view of the universe as consisting of concentric rings of emanation, each one possessing more Being -- or reality -- than the next.
TSR 224
UBIK was primarily a dream, or series of dreams. In my opinion it contains strong themes of pre-Socratic philosophical views of the world, unfamiliar to me when I wrote it (to name just one, the views of Empedocles)
TSR 243
In my novel UBIK I present a motion along a retrograde entropic axis, in terms of Platonic forms rather than any decay or reversion we normally conceive. Perhaps the normal forward motion along this axis, away from entropy, accruing rather than divesting, is identical with the axis line that I characterize as lateral, which is to say, in orthogonal rather than linear time. If this is so, the novel UBIK inadvertantly contains what could be called a scientific rather than a philosophical idea. But here I am only guessing. Still, the fiction writer may have written more than he consciously knew.
SL: 285
Dear Sandra,
{...}{...}
Thank you for the review. I'm sorry the characterization in UBIK is so minimal, but I had this problem: I had to move rapidly from the opening status quo (the psi company against the anti-psi company) and into the retreating 'thirties world. Bear in mind that all the material at the beginning of the novel is for all intents and purposes dumped once the bomb goes off. Readers may well ask, "What ever became of S. Melipone Dole?" {sic} and they would be right to do so.
{...}
Take care,
{Sandra Meisal, Sep 8, 1970}
{...}
(Interviewer:) Of all the novels you've written, I guess my own particular favorites are The Man in the High Castle, of course, and Ubik.
(Dick:) You-bick?
(Interviewer:) You-bick.
(Dick:) You-bick. The French call it Ooh-bick. Deek's Ooh-bick. It's called Ubick, Mia Signore in Italian. I guess that means Ubick, My Dear Sir or something like that. Well, it does--I looked it up.
IPOV 63:
In UBIK the forward moving force of time (or timeforce expressed as an ergic field) has ceased. All changes result from that. Forms regress. The substrate is revealed. Cooling (entropy) is allowed to set in unimpeded. Equilibrium is affected by the vanishing of the forward-moving time force-field. The bare bones, so to speak, of the world, our world, are revealed. We see the Logos addressing the many living entities.. Assisting and advising them. We are now aware of the Atman everywhere. The press of time on everything, having been abolished, reveals many elements underlying our phenomena
If time stops, this is what takes place, these changes.
Not frozen-ness but revelation.
There are still the retrograde forces remaining, at work. And also underlying positive forces other than time. The disappearance of the force-field we call time reveals both good and bad things; which is to say, coaching entities (Runciter who is the Logos), the Atman, Ella; it isn't a static world, but it begins to cool. What is missing is a form of heat; the Aten. The Logos (Runciter) can tell you what to do, but you lack the energy -- heat, force -- to do it. (i.e.time)
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I really like that Joe Chip is stuck without quarters and always asking to borrow coins despite being in charge of Mr. Runciter's firm.
I do not think it would make a good movie becaue like Brian said, it is mostly book of ideas of the future, however I have not really grasped the meaning of this book and how it related to society except in term of dem evil ads men poisoning our minds.
I guess I will have to finish this book to get more out of it.
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** spoiler alert ** It’s been a few weeks since I finished Ubik -- and while I thoroughly enjoyed it, I’m probably going to echo a few comments already made. I agree with Brian’s comment on how wonderfully PKD’s books are like a screwdriver poking around in the circuitry of your brain.
I learned after finishing it that PKD had expanded it from a short story/novella into a full blown novel and in some ways that explains some of my frustration with the novel. By about Chapter 12, the ever spinning top of possibilities was becoming a bit dizzying. At first I wondered if it might be my own impatience with wanting to get to the resolution – but the built in chase scene complete with bi-plane and antique cars was visually intriguing. To a point.
Given how tightly wound that first chapter was, things seemed to get dragged out. But to Ben’s point, I’m willing to admit that even PKD at his slowest is a more accomplished storyteller than many.
Did anyone else wish that we had spent more time with Pat Conley? She is relegated to such a second banana role to Joe Chip that I kept wanting her to play a more significant role (and while she does have a significant role of “sorts”, it’s ultimately not HER we’re dealing with.)
One of the things that astonishes me about his work, each time I read something new is how currently relevant it is with issues of ennui and the struggle of human beings to hang onto what it means to be human in the face of a technology that is never quite under control – whether they’re finding themselves still sentient beings encased in a cryogenic freezer or struggling with the idea they might be androids.
Another theme that is replayed in his work is the notion of corporations stepping in in place of governments – addressing a human need (or in this case, fear of PK’s) but becoming feudal lords in the process. PKD humanizes Runciter but there is also a sense of something unknown and evil about him too.
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SL: 285
Dear Sandra,
{...}{...}
Thank you for the review. I'm sorry the characterization in UBIK is so minimal, but I had this problem: I had to move rapidly from the opening status quo (the psi company against the anti-psi company) and into the retreating 'thirties world. Bear in mind that all the material at the beginning of the novel is for all intents and purposes dumped once the bomb goes off. Readers may well ask, "What ever became of S. Melipone Dole?" {sic} and they would be right to do so.
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Leaving for Ukraine tomorrow morning, so I'll be finishing Voices on the plane. See you all in a couple of weeks.
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Go well Pavel. Have a safe trip.
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http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/30/boo...
I love Lethem's quotes. Sounds crazy fun.
Dan wrote: "PKD's Exegesis is to be published. Two 350 page volumes are to be released from a reported 8,000 pages. I have no idea how it could be edited down to 700 pages. http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/30/..."
I'm guessing at least a few thousand pages were just covered with the same sentence over & over: "All work and no play makes Phil a dull boy."
I wonder if his obsession with Linda Ronstadt will make an appearance.
A shrewd publisher will include some cat photos. Cats can sell a book!
Philip K. Dick & cat companion whose name I've forgotten
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The other day I picked up What If Our World Is Their Heaven? which is a series of interviews with him about his work that starts with Androids and runs through works of his right up until 2 months before his death. It was a random find at a used bookstore. And I've decided I love interviews with writers since subscribing to The Paris Review.
Anyhoo, everyone's respect here has permeated my membranes to the point where I knew I had to have that book and that I needed to start reading this guy immediately.
The reason at first was the storytelling. Just before spotting this book I was checking out the stack of library-edition Nancy Drews this store had, the bright blue covers and old, campy pictures on the front, and I was thinking, I've lost my sense of story. Now those books had story. They kept you turning pages; I read every single one, more than once. And my aunt says of me that I can't read a book without a colon or semicolon in the title because it's all serious literature and that, I think, began to take its toll on my sense of story. I am noticing with Androids that we have interaction, then a fair amount of exposition that doesn't feel like exposition because it's so revealing, or maybe it's the tone or the humor, but it's so... concrete compared to other stuff I usually read.
I think that in sci fi literature you have to be careful with story. I mean, clearly there's ideology here about empathy and what it means to remain human in a decaying world that our own species destroyed, but to do that he has to weave not just a narrative that we can relate to, but he has to do it in a world we don't know. That is where the fascination is held for me in science fiction movies and TV - but the literature is where, I think, the true point lies. I can discern the point of an episode of Star Trek but I'm not going to pick up the gravity of it, not really, unless I'm immersed in a character's point of view.
OK, I'll stop rambling now about what is probably obvious.
fiction files redux
Books mentioned in this topic
What If Our World is Their Heaven?: The Final Conversations (other topics)Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (other topics)
Voices From the Street (other topics)
VALIS (other topics)
so here i am, copying the emails from facebook into this so we can see where it goes. i notice there's a character limit, which may chafe me. :P