What is life? What defines reality? What role does our perception play? Those are the questions Philip K. Dick asks in many of his books. While he was the master of predicting the future society, his books were always about individualism, and his belief that the reality is formed by our perceptions, and not the other way around. Nowhere is this theme stronger as in Dick’s finest book, Ubik.
Dick has approached his questions before, but in other ways. Sometimes, he used robots or androids to show that being alive meant simply being able to shape the world through one’s perception. Sometimes, he questioned this thesis by showing people who were able to predict the future, and thus change it. This time, he is brutal. He kills off his characters right at the beginning of the book and leaves them to deal with the problem.
Nowadays, Ubik is being largely known for the wrong reason: Dick’s portrayal of a future society, which is very scary because it rings so true. While in the Minority Report Dicks describes a society with personalized advertising everywhere, here he predicts another aspect of the modern living that is becoming reality – a fee-based society. The main character has to pay his home appliances a small fee to do any task, and it goes even as far as having to pay the door to open. While the method of payment is a little archaic, by throwing in coins, the devices are networked and semi-intelligent, and they know the person’s credit history.
However, this is only a backdrop to the real story. The society in the near future¹ is obsessed about two things: half-life and psi powers. Half-life is a method of freezing human bodies just before they die. They can live this way for several more years, and the relatives can visit them and talk to them once in a while. Psi powers are senses that some humans developed. They range from predicting the future and telepathy to complete opposites, people whose mere presence negates these powers. They are employed in secret wars that rage through large corporations.
Over time, two factions develop. The bad guys, led by a man named Hollis, are corporate spies. Their telepaths infiltrate companies and extract their secrets from their employees’ minds. On the other side of the spectrum are the security companies, which employ mainly people who can negate their powers, and who try to hunt the telepaths down. Enter one of such outlets, Runciter Associates, headed by Glenn Runciter and his right-hand man, Joe Chip.
A mysterious billionaire, something of a Bill Gates clone, hires Runciter to hunt down a band of telepaths who invaded his company. Due to the high profile job, Runciter takes his best men and women, including Joe Chip, his tester, and heads to the Moon, right into a trap that kills him, but leaves the rest of the team alive. Or so it seems…
On the way back, the team members start mysteriously dying, one by one, and Runciter appears in the most unlikely places, such as a TV commercial or a recent phone recording. The world starts reverting to a less modern place, until it falls all the way back to 1939. Joe, the main character of this story, begins to suspect that maybe Runciter isn’t dead after all; maybe it’s them who are dead, lying in half-life and Runciter is trying to reach them from the outside. As he tries to solve this mystery, all his team members die, and he only barely escapes death. In the process, he meets two mysterious entities, one that is killing off his team members, and another who tries to save him. His assumptions thus prove right; he got killed in the trap and is stuck in the half-life. However, in a final twist of the book we learn that there is no way to distinguish between real life and half-life, and thus we don’t know who’s actually dead.
Dick’s storytelling is superb. He manages to cloak a great philosophical question into a gripping story, which will leave you thinking for weeks. He manages to do this by making you care for his characters. They are all very well developed, and what’s more important, they behave the way they should in their world. While for us the idea of being frozen in half-life may sound scary, Joe Chip and his team members accept this as a fact of life, which they encountered numerous times before, and which sounds normal to them. They are still scared of dying, but they are aware that they could lead a full life once again, in this shadow world. Their perceptions form their new world, and they have the same sensory inputs as in real life, so in their minds they are very much alive.
While the story focuses on two characters, the bankrupt and phlegmatic Joe Chip and his boss, Runciter, other characters are also well fleshed out, and each has is own personality. There’s the jealous spoiled brat, the thoughtful sidekick, the always-suspicious woman and many more, all of which further give authenticity to Dick’s world. The story flows very fast, but is always careful around the twists, in order for the reader to keep up. The chapters always start with an advertisement for a mysterious Ubik, which later plays a role in the book, but not as big as you’d expect.
All in all, the book is pure fun to read. Due to the authentic setting, believable characters and free-flowing story, Ubik is engrossing from the beginning to the end. Dick’s genius is at play here again, asking the ultimate question, what is reality. Instead of answering, however, Dick will admit he doesn’t know. He does it in a fashion, though, which will make you realize this only a long time after you finish the book, when you think back on what you read. Once again, and better than ever before, the author managed to mess with my head in an entertaining way. If you like to think about what you read, this book is for you.
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¹Actually, the story is set in the 1990s, but I prefer to think of it as the near future. Dick wrote Ubik way before George Lucas established once and for all that all cool futuristic things happened a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away, so I can’t blame him for this small mistake.
Philip K. Dick s searing metaphysical comedy of death and salvation is a tour de force of panoramic menace and unfettered slapstick, in which the depa...More at Buy.com Marketplaces
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