Ubik

"The worlds through which Philip Dick's characters move are subject to cancellation or revision without notice," sci-fi great Roger Zelazny once wrote, and it strikes me that Dick's "Ubik" is a perfect example of that statement. The author's 25th science fiction novel since 1955 (!), "Ubik" was originally released as a Doubleday hardcover, with a cover price of $4.50, in May 1969. It finds Dick giving his favorite theme--the mutability of reality--a thorough workout in a wonderfully well-written, at times humorous, increasingly bizarre story. Indeed, the book may be Dick's "spaciest" outing since 1964's "The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch," and had me wishing that I had originally read it back in my college days, while under the influence of some, uh, psychotropic substance!

In the book, the reader makes the acquaintance of the various members of Runciter Associates, run by Glen Runciter and his half-dead wife, who is able to give business advice although in cryogenic "cold pac" in a Swiss "moratorium." Runciter Associates is comprised of special individuals who almost come off like very unusual members of the X-Men, except that these individuals, rather than commanding superpowers, possess what must be called antipowers; that is, they can cancel out the fields put forth by telepaths, clairvoyants, telekineticists and so on. During a promisingly lucrative business venture on the moon, Runciter, his assistant Joe Chip, and 11 of the various antitalents are ambushed in an explosion, orchestrated by Glen's enemies. Runciter himself is gravely injured and put into cold-pac storage, while the other team members scramble to find out how this attack transpired. But wait...why does reality itself seem to be changing? And why are various objects reverting to earlier forms, such as a modern (1992) stereo in Joe's apartment suddenly morphing into a Victrola? And how is it that everyone suddenly seems to be living in the year 1939, while one by one the team members crumble to dust? And just what is up with Ubik, a miraculous spray can that seems to be their only ticket to salvation? Dick certainly had his imagination working on overtime when he plotted out this one, that's for sure, and the wonder of it all is that, ultimately, the story DOES hang together coherently and ingeniously. It is a bravura piece of work, and one that "Time" magazine chose for inclusion in its "Top 100 Novels of the 20th Century" article. No argument from me!

"Ubik" really is a consistent pleasure to read. The aforementioned humor pops up in many guises, from throwaway remarks (such as a reference to a Supreme Court ruling to the effect that a man can murder his wife if he can prove that she would never grant him a divorce; the five-times-married Dick giving vent to some pleasant daydreaming, perhaps?) to hilarious turns of phrase (a man is said to be wearing a dress "the color of a baboon's ass") and to the truly outlandish outfits that all the characters wear (the moratorium owner sports a "tweed toga, loafers, crimson sash and a purple airplane-propeller beanie"). As in so many of Dick's other novels, amphetamine and LSD use are spotlighted, and the author's empathy for the plight of his characters is strongly pronounced. Dick also gets to show off his knowledge of 1930s minutiae in this tale, whether from in-depth research or by dint of having been an 11-year-old himself in 1939 America. His details are not ALWAYS spot on, however; a 1939 issue of "Liberty" magazine is said to contain a famous story entitled "Lightning in the Night," although that story actually appeared in the August 1940 issue; the Ford tri-motor plane is said to have come into existence in 1928, whereas 1925 would be closer to the mark. Still, these are the merest quibbles. "Ubik" is basically an extraordinarily clever, mind-blowing entertainment. It may cause some to furrow their brow in bewilderment--"very confusing," Joe Chip thinks to himself at one point--but I can't imagine anyone not being bowled over by this amazing piece of work. It is, quite simply, Philip K. Dick at his best, and modern-day science fiction doesn't get too much better than that.

'Ubik' is one of the best places to introduce yourself to Philip K. Dick. The story contains a number of his trademarks, but it is also one of his more straightforward books and contains a number of elements that would be familiar to many sci-fi fans.

The story itself is multi-faceted. The set-up involves Glen Runciter and his organisation of "anti-talents", who are a sort of futuristic industrial counter-espionage. When a large-scale operation to the Moon goes badly wrong, Runciter is killed and his employees find reality beginning to disintegrate; time going backwards, Runctiner contacting them from beyond the grave, and themselves frighteningly wasting away. The bulk of the book deals with the efforts of the characters to figure out the cause of this degradation and how it can be stopped.

The book contains plenty of standard Philip K. Dick elements. Protagonist Joe Chip is the standard down-on-his-luck "everyman" hero, with Pat being the cooly mysterious female lead. The dynamic between Joe and Pat is fascinating, with her highly original anti-talent possibly being connected to the bizzare circumstances in which they find themselves. Likewise, the idea of a warped or illusional reality is a standard feature among many of Dick's books, and is utilised well here. In addition, I particularly enjoyed the concept of "anti-talent", which highlights Dick's influence on the Cyberpunk genre. In his world, telepathy and precognition are not always used for good, and Dick has some interesting ideas about how they may be employed in an offensive manner against rival organisations.

The story fits together well; all of the pieces seem to be nicely in place by the end, only to have the final chapter throw in a disquietening twist that leaves the ending open. This is reinforced by the ominous introduction to the final chapter, which is complete change from the cheesy advertisement parodies than introduce the earlier chapters ("Eat Ubik toasted flakes"/"Get soft and supple hair with Ubik conditioner"/"Borrow from Ubik Savings and Loan"!). A clever and well-executed touch.

One issue I have with this book (and several other of Dick's books) is what might diplomatically be called his "matter-of-fact" writing. His quite dry style makes it difficult to get emotionally involved with the circumstances or the characters. The characters themselves (apart from Joe, Pat and Glen) are somewhat poorly sketched, and often abruptly die or disappear "off camera". Also, his predictions for 1992 were way off. Keep in mind the book was published in 1969, so it wasn't as if he was looking a hundred years hence; even allowing for the fact that this might be a deliberately "ironic" or alternate-reality approach, his predictions of hovercars and lunar colonies seem very dated in retrospect.

It is a pity that Dick couldn't bring out a little more emotion in the book, and really give a detailed insight into what the characters go through in such a bizzare situation. This means that 'Ubik' succeeds brilliantly as an intellectual puzzle but falls a little short as a novel. But if you can forgive that, 'Ubik' is a clever and thought-provoking science fiction book, and is the best place to introduce yourself to the original but disturbing world of Philip K. Dick.

I've always been deeply in love with Philip Dick's paranoid worlds. I love his books, I love his short stories, I even love things like Our Friends From Frolix 8. There is something raw and razor-sharp, almost clinical in Dick's writing, something that transcends style, ideas and story. You can always tell that a part of him - and it might very well be a dominant part - not only believes in what he writes, but lives it.

I haven't read all of Dick's books. I haven't even read half of them. Still I've read most of those whose names everyone knows, and I have read enough to think that even a genius of his magnitude would be hard pressed to write anything quite as good as Ubik twice. If I had to point at a single one of Philip Dick's works as his magnum opus, that would undoubtedly be it.

As Michael Marshall Smith aptly puts it in the forward of my edition of the book, there is a mind-boggling number of SF ideas in Ubik: time-travel; psychic abilities and their corresponding anti-abilities; the dead being kept in a state of "half-life" where they could be reached by the living; alternate realities and reality revision; futuristic space-faring society; dystopian economic system. Many authors would spin a book around any ONE of those, but for Philip Dick it's always what's underneath the flesh that matters, so he casually presents them ALL in the first ten pages of his novel.

In Ubik's world technology has advanced to the state where colonization of the Moon and other worlds is possible. Psychic phenomena are common and many people employ psychics in their business ventures or shadier dealings. And since no law could control such powers, the so called "prudence organizations" have appeared. Those who work in them have the ability to negate one psychic power like telepathy or precognition. Meanwhile, people could be put in "cold-pac" after death - a half-life existence that slowly diminishes until the person dies again, this time - forever.

The main character, Joe Chip, is a technician for Glen Runciter's prudence organization. When a client hires twelve agents to negate telepathic spies in his lunar facilities, Runciter and Chip travel with them to the Moon. The assignment turns out to be a trap, possibly set by the company's nemesis Ray Hollis (who leads an organization of psychics), and Glen Runciter is killed in the ensuing explosion. The party quickly returns to Earth to put him in cold-pac.

But afterwords the twelve agents and Joe Chip begin to experience strange reality shifts. Food and drink deteriorate prematurely, and the world seems to regress into the past. What's more disturbing, they all receive messages from Glen Runciter, implying that it is actually he who is alive, and they who are in cold-pac. And above all is the ever-present Ubik, appearing in commercials on TV and radio. Nobody knows what it is, but it is everywhere. And it is important.

Then the deaths begin...

Ubik is a deeply unsettling book. The characters' hold on reality is at best loose, and the uncertainty they feel as to the nature of their very existence seeps into the reader's own mind, turning the novel into almost a horror story. When the action and the race (quite literally) against time begin, you are almost grateful for the opportunity to evade the disturbing questions concerning what's real, what's not, and which one is more dangerous. Dick's misleadingly simple language and the traditionally schematic relationships between his characters, only seem to accentuate the unnatural events he is painting.

Philip Dick is a master of multiple realities that intertwine and overlapp until the mind's ability to grasp it all simply fails, and madness begins. As Paul Di Filippo says in a review of the book, "No reality is priveliged". Nowhere is Dick's ability to test the limits of perception and self more strikingly demonstrated than in Ubik. And even if you take nothing from the book, but the amazing mystery and suspense filled story, it would still have been one of the most satisfying reading experiences you've ever had.

10/10

[....]

When a bomb explodes on Luna and kills Glen Runciter, head of an anti-psi prudence organization, the world begins reversing in time and his team of anti-telepaths dying off one after another, shriveling up and decaying into dregs. The new leader, Joe Chip, must keep Runciter in half-life, the mind continuing to work while the body suspended and decaying, find the cause even as he began to decay. Through his half-dead boss, Joe realizes only Ubik, a mysterious spray, could save his life, but an evil force seeks to prevent him from getting hold of the cure.

Philip K. Dick's futuristic tale of telepaths and precogs takes the reader into a surrealistic world of time reversal and pseudo-science. Like other successful sci-fi writers, he creates a compelling world where the readers are willing to suspend their beliefs and experience coin-slotted doors and refrigerators with attitudes. Joe Clip isn't likeable but the twists in plot lead the reader guessing on the causes of the changes and what Ubik is. A fun sci-fi read.

I love everything I've read by Phillip K. Dick, and this story is no exception. I love how the author blends the familiar and bizarre together in all his stories, and yet it always seems fresh and alive, even when I read them a second time. I recommend reading anything by this author.

Overview:

A well-thought-out tale, but not a complete one, Ubik is the story of the destruction of Runciter's anti-paranormal agency at the hands of its pro-paranormal counterpart, Hollis. The plot is reasonable, although not well-developed. The characters are a fairly typical Dick cast, as the Wikipedia article on this book points out. The conflict is interesting, and the resolution is nice (before the last two pages), although a lot more could have been done with this plot.

The idea of people being in half-life cold-storage is underutilized, along with many other aspects of the book, suggesting that perhaps Philip Dick had something greater in mind when he wrote this, but that it lost favor in his eagerness to work on another project. Nevertheless, it was worth reading, despite ample room for improvement.

A. Plot

The plot of this twisted tale takes a bit to start but once it does, it is worthwhile. The first sixty pages or so merely outline the competition between Runciter's "prudence" organization of anti-psychics and Hollis's psychic spies. This would have been more meaningful and worthwhile if this was a part of a larger pantheon of stories set in the same alternate future, but, at least to the extent of my ability to tell, it is not. As such, it seems like a grinding waste of 40% of the book.

Once the plot get moving along, all youknowwhat breaks loose quite fast, and then you are left wondering what just happened, because no where earlier does it suggest what a humanoid bomb is. Then, it gets crazier and weirder for a while, before all of it is nicely tied up in approximately five pages. Pretty common for a Dick novel, but that is part of the problem, no? The plot itself is interesting, I guess, but it feels more like a plot for a television show like Star Trek or the Outer Limits than it does a novel. At 160 pages, though, it is easy enough to see why.

The major identifiable conflict in the story is the regression into time. As a sort of man-against-superman or man-against-god conflict, it is pretty well realized, in parts. The regression of time results in serious problems for the main characters, as their cigarettes and food go bad very fast. This begins to stop being a real problem fairly fast, as they reach 1939, and the food curiously stabilizes, along with the time. This could have been handled better, for example, if the people spent more time in each time period, or if the degeneration of the characters proceeded at a slower, more periodic pace, allowing the horror to build.

This degeneration, and the subsequent loss of the survivors of the disaster, seems to owe something to Agatha Christie's classic, "And Then There Were None...". This, really, is what suggests that the loss of the characters should have proceeded more slowly, uniformly, and completely. It would have allowed the sense of horror to appropriately build, prior to the denoument.

I have to make a special note of the alternate ending (or whatever) that makes up the last two or three pages. Completely unravelling the other 150+ pages, it managed to make the whole thing seem tepid and meaningless. It was kind of unfortunate. But, I can see why some people would like it; it certainly has the feeling of the author's smirk stamped into it, laughing from beyond the grave.

B. Characters

The characters in this are more described than they are presented, which is a weak literary technique. Mr. Runciter, for example, seems one way to me as a reader of the third-person-God-voice and a separate way as described by his employees. This inconsistency, while not damning, is never explained or utilized. Perhaps this is because of the shortness of the story, but it feels wrong somehow to work in details like that and then to leave them be.

In addition, none of them ever grow, in any apparent fashion. Instead, they finish the story virtually the same as they start it. I found this rather unfortunate, and was one of the reasons that I thought that this novel could have been much better.

C. Setting

The setting plays an important role here, as it regresses from an alternate future 1992 to a past 1939. This regression, and the settings in the novel, were one of the most interesting aspects, as it is fun to imagine your reaction if you came around a corner and found a telegraph, rather than your email. This temporal discombobulation, and the philosophy that ensues, was the highlight of the book, even if, at times, it didn't really make sense.

D. Theme

The themes here are instability and confusion. The reasons for this are clear, as it is Philip Dick writing, after all. Taking ANYTHING for granted in a Philip Dick novel is a sure route to confusion. These themes are readily discovered, and are developed clearly, but they are not used in as artistic a fashion as they could be. In order to maximize this effect, there should be additional things that are taken as fact that are revealed as fantastical, such as the entire world that they lived in (as if they discovered at the end of the book that they didn't really ever exist in 1992 at all, and that it was all the creation of a sick mind, and that most of them were not real characters, as that sick mind degenerated itself, losing control both of time and cast). Just off the top of my head, that would be one way in which it could be improved.

E. Point of View

The point of view here is third person, limited omniscence. It adds nothing and detracts little from the story. In all actuality, individual chapters from the point of view of the protagonists would have been more appropriate in this context, particularly since the setting was so important, and the regression in time was one of the major conflicts in the novel.

F. Aesthetics

The aesthetics were not a major detractor to the book, nor did they contribute much. The sentences and paragraphs were appropriate in length and tone. The descriptions of virtually everything were brief and utilitarian. Nothing special here.

Conclusion:

Not Dick's best effort, this book is marred by its brevity. While I personally think that much of Dick's literature reached its zenith in the short story form, this novel was too short for its own good. It is still worth reading, but it seems less like something by Philip Dick than it does an episode of the Outer Limits or Star Trek. The lack of character development, and the slow plot, suggest that one of two things should have happened. Either it should have been shortened by half and been a long short story, or it should have been twice as long, used under-utilized plot threads and characters, and had a more coherent plot, perhaps with some theories as to the malignant force responsible (more, I mean, than there was).

It could have been better in a number of different ways, but it certainly wasn't awful. I would recommend it to science fiction or mystery fans who are looking for a quick read.

B-

Harkius

Having been a fan of PKD for several years, this novel was a breath of fresh-air. The noir-feel and philosophical premise was very well-done and executed. There were points in the book, especially in the first two chapters where it felt very cinematic in a good way. For example, Dick's description of the setting where Runciter visits his wife, Ella in the cryonic suspension clinic was very impressive. Character-wise, all of the team members, especially Joe Chip, the protagonist and Pat Conley (a femme fetale), were very compelling. Plot-wise, the pacing was steady and the overall narrative simple and suspenseful. The plot twists at the end of the novel was amazing. In summary, this is probably the best science fiction novel I've read so far.

Dick is my favorite science fiction writer. This was the first novel I read of Dick's aside from the short story Minority Report and I'm planning on reading more of his novels in the future.

As a general rule, I read very little science fiction. And, when I do, I like for it to be short and not too intricately detailed about the science aspects. That's me.

Since this was so highly rated by Time Magazine, I gave it a try. I was amazed to discover that this book complies with both of my requests of science fiction. Additionally, it merges Asimov with Raymond Chandler. "Ubik" is a whodunit, with concepts of psi powers and lunar travel and videophones. . . . to solve a murder (or are there murders?). The key science fiction element is the "half life" - a state where the deceased somehow are hooked to machines which allow them to communicate with the living while their bodies lay dormant in a conservatory. Sound a bit like "Matrix" or how about "Minority Report?"

We work in and out of this half life concept, and the same becomes confoundedly confusing when it appears that one of the paranormal's psi powers can control the world about the half life by changing time and all around us. Mind over matter. All that matters is in the mind. If you love the volley between mind and reality, also reach for Murakami's "Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World: A Novel."

"Ubik" should be made into a film, especially as author Dick complied by finalizing a screenplay before his early death. But, alas his manuscript is not on celluloid. But, his ideas are - as reflected by the movies recited above - and some accuse the "13th Floor" to be a ripoff of Dick's "half life" concept which arouses your imagination in "Ubik".

Finally, like so much literature of the 1960's, the ending is a great twist. It throws you off balance. It truly is an ending which Rod Serling would have loved.

Ubik presents an interesting twist on psychics in the future. They not only exist, but they are highly organized and aggressive. At the same time, there are individuals known as inertials who have the ability to counteract both telepaths and precogs. The intertials are also organized and most work for "prudence organizations" that hire out to counteract spy work that the psychics undertake and the conflicts can escalate to lethal levels. The story hits a major turning point when the largest prudence organization takes on a job that sends 12 people into a trap that literally explodes in their faces. In the aftermath, reality starts to unravel and the group of inertials races against time to put things right before it's too late.

This book sets up an interesting scenario of espionage and counter-espionage with various types of psychic phenomena as the tools of the trade. Some aspects of the world are set up with a very clear logic that largely stays consistent throughout the story. Other elements aren't defined as well, and some seem to shift a bit depending on where we are in the story.

Characterization is also a bit of a mixed bag. The owner of the company seems larger than life, and one of his aides is pretty well fleshed out in an interesting way. Unfortunately, the remaining cast is pretty sketchy and doesn't get much attention. This lack of depth includes a prime suspect for the cause of their troubles, which was a lost opportunity.

Overall, I liked Ubik and found it interesting, but couldn't help feeling that it could have been even stronger still. I would have liked another 50 pages or so to flesh out the characters and add more personal drama. As others have pointed out, there are also plot developments that appear to contradict what has already happened in the story and a better job could have been done to edit these out or explain them. Ubik is still worth reading, but feels more like a missed opportunity than a treasured classic.

Better than average SF but nowhere near the top of my list. Some original ideas that perhaps served as inspiration for _The Matrix_ and "Overdrawn at the Memory Bank", but the novel doesn't hang together very well - it feels like Dick had various ideas that he threw in but didn't really develop. At this point I would only really recommend to Dick fans or folks like me who have read through most of the "great" SF works of the 20th century, and are starting on the second tier.

When most people try to describe a Philip K Dick book, this is probably as close as they come to the "typical" kind. Set in a near-future society where things are much the same with some odd concepts tossed out with frightening casualness, events occur that slowly cause the protagonists to question the nature of reality. If things go terribly awry, eventually reality starts to question them. Dick didn't hit the ball out of the park every single time and at his worst the mindbending explorations into reality left us behind and lapsed into what seemed like incoherency. That's not the case here, in "Ubik" not only does everything work perfectly, but with an assured ease that lesser writers treading these waters would not have been able to accomplish. Set in the aforementioned near future, Dick concocts a world with elements that are fantastic yet fit plausibly into the scenario. It's a world where people actually have psychic powers (yet they're not overt and rarely glimpsed, making any potential use of them somewhat creepy) and other people have anti-psychic powers. Its also a world where cold storage crypts exist to extend the "half-life" of a near-deceased, so that relatives can still interact with them, at least until a final death takes hold. Any of these concepts could be the center of a book but Dick merely places them as part of a wider society. Glen Runciter runs a company of the anti-psys and when they're dispatched on an assignment that turns out to be a trap set by a competitor, that's when things start to get seriously weird. Runciter is the only one killed in the explosion but soon enough the other members of the team start to receive messages from him and time starts to run backwards, with the advanced technology of today turning into record players and biplanes. Are the layers of reality being pulled backwards slowly, or is something else entirely going on? And what does it have to do with the elusive product Ubik, which while hard to find may truly cure everything that ails you? Dick manages to be one of the few authors who can successfully pull off paranoia in a narrative alone, with the shifting nature of reality freaking out the characters enough that it starts to seep into the reader as well. But there's never any notion that Dick is being strange for the sake of being strange, he's got a story to tell and a viewpoint to get across, and no matter how offkilter things get, he never forgets that he's telling a story. Indeed the revelation of what is going on makes perfect sense within the context of the story itself, even as Dick yanks the rug out a little bit from under us at the end, and leaves just the tiniest seed of doubt to linger on when it's all over. Probably the best showcase for him at the height of his powers, it touches upon his usual themes while still remainining concise and coherent, and may be the best place for a new reader to start.

The first comparison that came to mind when I started reading "Ubik" was Don DeLilo's "White Noise (Penguin Great Books of the 20th Century)." Not due to any special thematic comparison, but because of the advertisements for great new products named Ubik at the beginning of each paragraph in the story; this reminded me of the constant low-level onslaught of information that came at you while reading "White Noise."

As far as the story itself - what can one say without spoiling it? The main character is Joe Chip, a tester for the Runciter Group, which is a group of "Anti-psis" - basically, they null out psionic power to help protect people's privacy. I was by stages amused and appalled by the vision of 1992 painted in this novel - apparently we were supposed to have made our way to Mars and the Moon by now, with colonies on each, and we're supposed to be dressing even more outlandishly than we do now. However, it seems odd to me, as I have been reading through the omnibus in which this story resides (Counterfeit Unrealities (contains Ubik, A Scanner Darkly, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep [aka Blade Runner], The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch)) to note the things that are kept in the 50s and 60s. Women are either young and in the service industry or they are matrons and stay at home. If they are other than that, then they are shown as . . . strange, even dangerous, such as Pat Conroy in this story. It is this that makes her such an appropriate foil for Joe Chip, as he stumbles through his attempts to keep the group together after a major fiasco occurs when the Glen Runciter - the owner of the company - takes a group of his most highly skilled workers to the Lunar colony for a job and is there attacked.

The rest of the story shakes down while the surviving characters notice a strange combination of entropy and growth - recession and coming into being. The world seems to be regressing to an older era, but at the same time, they keep getting messages from "beyond" instructing them on what to do. Then the question arises - who is really dead? Who is really alive? What is reality? Who is creating it?

Not for a light evening's read, that's for sure! But well worth the slodge if you have the time. Most intriguing and something to keep the ol' cerebellum stretched. Give it a try.

[This review is based on the novel as it is published in the Library of America edition, containing 3 other novels by Dick.]

Ubik is a fascinating novel. If you're into virtual realities - Matrix-like - and such, then you would appreciate Ubik. The novel begins like any other Dick novel I read: it's full of obscure terms such as "precog" and other cryptical things, which are meant to be, and which you will soon enough understand clearly. That's not unusual of sci-fi novels.

So what you have in this novel is a world in which psychic people are used to spy on people, and to counter this, anti-psychic people are used to neutralise the threat. That's the background, but it's far from being very telling about the novel. In this futuristic world, when people die, they're not entirely dead. Indeed, they are kept alive, or half-alive, via cold-pacs. These are the two elements that structure the story.

Then the real plot gets started, and I won't tell you much about it because it is reality-destroying, mind-tearing, and everything. I'll only tell you that at some point, reality regresses. Cars turn into older cars, elevators devolve, milk goes stale, cigarettes become dry and break under the touch, etc. Time is turning back!

And then there is even more interesting material. The novel gets better and better, and even the ending is excellent, which is not something I often found with Dick.

Of the four novels I read from this author, Ubik stands out as having that superior crafting, or something, and it makes a difference. Little things like the fact that every chapter begins with a quote that's in fact a piece of advertising for Ubik, the product, added some goodness to the novel. And yes, you will come to know what Ubik really is. All you have to do is keep reading.

Every time I read a book by Phil Dick, I'm surprised. How did he come up with this stuff? You get repetitive themes: alternate realities, psychic phenomenon, alienation, a constant questioning of the nature of reality, and so on. But he managed to make it fresh and exciting nearly every time. And if the uniqueness of his prose and plotting isn't enough, he off-handedly peppered all his writing, especially his best, with interesting thoughts, bits of philosophy, and keen insight. Granted, the man's no philosopher, but he'll still get you thinking.
Ubik as a particular manifestation of Dick's psyche is no different. From a few chapters onward, Dick continuously keeps us guessing, trying to figure out what the heck is going on, what Ubik is, and why reality keeps slipping out from under our feet. With almost disgusting ease, Dick manufactures worlds, situations, people, and technology that, though slightly dated faced by today's hyper-aware (of itself, science, theory, fad psychology, what-have-you) sci-fi, nonetheless flawlessly convey something true about man and his relationship to a rapidly changing (some, including Dick, might say disintegrating) world.
What is Ubik? How safe is it? Is Glen Runciter really dead? Why do all the objects in the book keep morphing into earlier technologies (so that what is a state-of-the-art stereo one day is an old phonograph the next)? This book will keep you guessing until the very last page, building up new theories of what's 'really' going on only to dash them to pieces a few pages later.
If you like PKD and haven't read Ubik, get it now. It's one of his best. If you haven't read any PKD, Ubik is a good place to start. Though it's a little disorienting at first, especially if you aren't familiar with his fascination with psychic phenomena, the story quickly grips you, and will also introduce you to most of his major themes. Great, great stuff.

Original. Close to mind-blowing. Concept traps and builds from the get go. Science fiction plus mystery. Well-written (of course as Philip dick is author). Transcendent. Interesting as heck. Just wow. I also read a compilation of this author's short stories and those were quite good. I read SDK (think that's the name) by Dick. It read like The Matrix so I threw it at the garbage can. Yay! Two points.

In this futuristic sci-fi tale of life and death and cold-sleep, Glen Runciter (with the counsel of his quick-frozen wife Ella) runs a company that supplies `inertials', people whose proximity suppresses the psychic powers of others, ensuring their clients' right to privacy in a world where telepaths and pre-cognitives can too easily violate it. After Runciter is murdered, Joe Chip (the best tester in the business) and his counter-psionic companions struggle to survive in a world where time seems to have drifted backwards and death is striking out of nowhere. Is their dreaded nemesis the telepath Hollis trying to destroy them? Or is Joe's beautiful and dangerous wife Pat behind it all? Or could there be some still darker force at work? Their only hope lies with the fragmentary messages they receive from the absent Runciter, and the promise of the all-pervasive but ever-elusive product known as `Ubik'.

As the above summary may suggest, this is not your usual sci-fi adventure, even granting that it's from the inventive mind of Philip K. Dick. Not atypically, this book is crazy, dark, explosive, suspenseful, and yet still manages to be very funny. After the frantic pace of the first few dozen pages, the second half of this novel may seem to drag a bit, but the book is short enough that most readers will simply race through Dick's unpretentious prose until they get to the stunning conclusion, which, as always, will not please everyone. But then, life doesn't always come doled out in neat little (spray-can) packages.

This book is an extremely compelling and entertaining novel. Written in a fast-paced style, it is replete with interesting characters, an enticing mystery, foreshadowing elements, and well-placed humour. I was so enthralled with the novel that I could not put it down and finished it in one night.

If you are well-read in sci-fi and watch a lot of sci-fi movies, you will be familiar with the universe and themes here. The novel takes places in a future where pre-cogs and others with telepathic abilities are commonplace, exactly as was portrayed in Minority Report (the PKD novel made into the movie). There is also an overarching theme of living in a virtual world that just isn't right and having to find one's way out (c.f. The Matrix, The Thirteenth Floor, and many Star Trek episodes such as Spectre of the Gun and The Royale).

This book is simply outstanding. From the opening chapter where the morbid idea of preserving a dying person in "cold-pac" is presented, I was intrigued by the mix of dystopian future and mystery throughout.

The only negative about this book is that whoever wrote the synopsis on the back cover of this Vintage edition was an idiot, giving away way too much information. The information there references a key point that doesn't occur until half way through the novel, and even then that info gives away the whole nature of the remaining story.

This is the usual Philip K Dick in that there are several realities and you are not sure which one you are in at any given time. But its a bit more potent in that it has a lot to say about the human condition and where its going, and its very funny. Ubik is a mysterious product that is all things at different times. Each chapter begins with an add for Ubik. For instance:

Pop tasty Ubik into your toaster, made only from fresh fruit and healthful all-vegetable shortening. Ubik makes breakfast a feast, puts zing into your thing! Safe when handled as directed.

Dick, Philip K. (2012-04-17). Ubik (p. 167). Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. Kindle Edition.

The key is "safe when handled as directed.

If you're new to Philip K. Dick, then I can't recommend UBIK as a place to get to know him. Start with one of his inventive SciFi operas (Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? or The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch), his psychological conundrums (Confessions of a Crap Artist or A SCANNER DARKLY), his cold-war farces (The Zap Gun or The Simulacrum), or any of his fun short story collections.

If you're familiar with Dick, you'll find that UBIK displays all of his hallmarks. 1) A what-if concept that is too simple for any other author to invent: in this case a corp of anti-psi characters who are in high demand because their ultra-mundane presence blocks psychic interference. 2) Hapless male protagonists controlled by feminine mystique. 3) Thurber-style humor, such as talking coin-op household appliances. And 4) exploration of the borderline personality. In this case, the borderline personality takes over the book as each character fades to a figment of another's imagination and reality itself is revealed to be the product of a spray can.

Brilliant idiots way with layers upon layers of metaphor; simultaneously about death and the inevitable decay of the mind, and a cracking good murder detective mystery where the herrings are red and the mirrored-walls ubiquitous. Someone told me that after they read this reality wasn’t the same for several weeks.

Use as directed.

First: the bad. PKD had a tendency to write highly allegorical characters based on archetypes, which is good for a parable but bad for a serious story. Stylistically, his work doesn't know whether it wants to be an allegory after some medieval idiom or a compelling 20th century story and it's certainly enough to put many people off. In particular his female characters are annoying and stereotyped.

Some people may find the plain-spoken prose and quick pacing not to their liking but that's strictly YMMV.

All that being said, I would say that whenever I meet someone who's not too interested in reading the whole body of Dick's work, I recommend this one as a sampler of his "classic" pre-1974 style. It's fairly accessible, not as bizarre or steeped in Gnosticism as "Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch" but it still gives the full scope of what he was capable of in his better work.

Also, this book will quite often leave the reader with an uneasy feeling that maybe the admonition "I am alive and you are dead" is addressed to them. I certainly had that effect after reading it and others I've spoken to have shared that experience. On the one hand bleak and eerie and on the other hand, a story where hope burns but is not extinguished.

As a writer, this book taught me more than a few pointers on both what to do and what not to do in my own work. It has become a major influence for me, more so than VALIS which was the first of PKD's books I read.

Interesting book and style; futuristic feel with a security company that tracks mind readers, etc. Trouble is, it gets irritating trying to decipher all the futuristic slang and confusing upon the present date being 1992. Who's dead, alive and what does it all mean? I couldn't really get comfortable, but that's probably the point.

I've been reading the works of Philip K. Dick for several years now, and have read most of his more well-known works, thought I still have a lot to go. I have read a lot of books from many different genres, including the classics and technical writings, and the books of Philip K. Dick are, in many ways, the most complex of them all. Ubik was not his most original or creative work, as the author himself admitted, but is a great blending of many of the elements that make up the PhiDickian universe. Here we find Dick toying with many of his favorite themes: paranoia, isolation, alienation, paranormal phenomenon, and, of course, the slippery nature of reality. Ubik works on several levels, as do all of Dick's books; one is a quasi-detective story, which will interest the average reader with its suspense and intrigue, and another is as a dark metaphysical comedy. Much of the book is funny, in its way, wavering from black humor to near-slapstick. All the time, we are drawn further and further into the world of the book as weirdness piles upon weirdness and the mystery of the book thickens. Like all PKD, it is superbly and complexly plotted -- almost unimaginably so. His works never cease to amaze me. How did he come up with this stuff? It is almost incredible that he did -- and so easily and quickly at that. Dick spits out immensely imaginative subplots and asides that lesser authors could build an entire career on. His plots are the most complex I have ever encountered in literature, surpassing even the convuluted multiplexity of other science fiction works. Dick had a truly incredible imagination. That said, Ubik, as with all PKD, is very tightly written and extremely focused; though all of his books contain enough material for years of pondering, most all of them are around the 200 page range. Not a word is wasted. Aside from the ideas -- Dick peppers all of his books with philosophical asides, caustically witty remarks, and laugh-out-loud funny dialogues -- Dick is always worth reading for his superb writing and masterful technique. Ubik is quite a disorienting read at first: it drops right into the middle of the story, and it will take the reader a little bit to come to grips with what is going on (as another reviewer pointed out, another author would've spend many pages setting this part of the story up.) As with the best PKD, just when it all starts to come together in one's mind, the book takes a completely different turn, and everything that one has thought up to that point is eradicated. And then it makes another twist, destroying again everything that had come before. And then another. And then, finally, the ending offsets everything that has come before and puts the entire book in a different light. Only Philip K. Dick could make this work. This is a rich, rewarding, and immensely engrossing work that is complex, funny, and highly entertaining. I finished it several days ago, and have been pondering it -- but I'm still not sure I understand the ending. Or the book at all. I almost always have this feeling after reading Dick. Is there something more? What did I miss? One always wants to read the book all over again. That is the true mark of a great author.

would be for this one.

This is a PKD masterpiece. A strong convoluted story that, unlike many PKD novels, does not trail off but stays strong and sustained to the very end.

All the familiar pieces, played as well as he ever did. Paranoia funny and paranoia very dark. The besieged ordinary people of the future who have apartments (conapts, sorry) that know your credit history, doors that won't let you out unless you pay up in cash. Who work for battling corporate giants selling the services of precogs or telepaths versus the services of 'inertials', those who can block the intrusive powers of the first. A new element is that you can find yourself in 'cold-pak', at least if the cold-pak company gets to you soon enough after you die. A twilight state of consciousness between life and death, in which your relatives can still visit you and talk to you through a speaker and headphones. The problem as it turns out is that it's hard to know, when you're in cold pak, if you're alive or not.

Ubik evokes the feel of the 1960's sci-fi genre. An intergalactic who-did-or-didn't-dun-it with conspiracy theories, telepathic espionage, reality vs. dreams, warped time flow, the living dead, insolent robots, pushy Ubik ads, slapstick and deadpan humor. Here's a glimpse of the human condition in another dimension and mankind is just as lost as ever. Classic retro sci-fi!

"Ubik" is one of Dick's best books, but I should qualify how I'm defining best. By best I mean that it's one that I can read time and time again without ever feeling as though I've 'got' it. This is no comfy sweater book - you're not going to slip between its pages for a mind numbing reaffirmation of the beauty of life. Instead you're going to enter his black humor masterpiece that opens itself up to various interpretations - a satire of late capitalism, a metaphysical quandry, a who-done-it - all with a healthy dose of ontological angst. Add in a postmodern (or at least quasi-pomo) narrative further problematized by the ending, and you've got a book that will make you think. Therefore, for some, 'Ubik' may not be the best Dick book to start with ('Time out of Joint' provides an early entry into his canon), but it's a great one to return to repeatedly.

Many of the ideas presented in this novel are some of Dick's best. A prolonged period of artificial half-life maintained after death proves both a comfort to living loved ones and a lucrative business venture. Psi powers can be effectively blocked by anti-psis - as long as you can afford to pay them for the service. You may own your conapt, but you'll still have to pay your door every time you want to open it, or else it can sue you. And how can your dead boss appear on money, matchbook ads, and TV?

Dick turns almost all of the Golden Age of sf conventions on their heads: there are no heroes triumphing majestically - just normal, little people; technology hasn't solved all of our problems - instead it just lets advertisers hound us more thoroughly; his near futures are weirdly dystopic. In fact, for Dick we can not even take for granted that we know what reality is or what it means to be human. If this sounds normal for what you watch and read now (he's had a huge impact on sf and mainstream fiction, from 'The Matrix' and 'The Truman Show' to Gibson and Pynchon), just remember he started doing this in the 50s! No one book can capture all of what Dick has to offer, so try a few before making a final judgment as to whether his work appeals to you.

I think I have to say that the only people who can truly read a P.K.D. book from start to finish without becoming disheartened are people who enjoy and take pleasure out of intellectual activities and exercising the brain that his books always present. This means, I think, that only certain people will truly enjoy his books. It's just like how someone who does not take pleasure out of reading sports novels or detective fiction will simply not be able to read those kinds of books. The characters are usually pretty flat in his books, although I would definitely have to say that sometimes I wish they were better. Then again, adding 10-20 pages of character development in the beginning of his books might simply confuse the reader and bore the intellectuals who love reading his books. All told, I think he executes his style perfectly.
Ubik is a perfect example of a classic P.K.D. book. Having read some of his other books, I found some of the characters and plotlines to be similar but nonetheless still a love to read.
If you like reading because of the exercise it gives your brain or like good ideas or brilliant prose you'll certainly find Ubik very fun to read.

Anyone who watches modern capitalism can see just how much we are on track with PKD's distopic vision of the future: Coffeemakers, refigerators and other appliances that extort money for services rendered, 'flies' that are really just small advertising automata that fly into your car, land on your ear, and pester you with whining imprecations to buy things. In all of it's witty facets, the Dick universe is a belly laugh at capitalism run amok, eating its own tail.
On top of that is one of Dick's other great themes: the plasticity, and unreliability of 'reality' - i.e. that what we call reality is a cruel illusion at best.
Tack on 'homeopapes' (print-to-order newspapers that only contain user-specified content) and several other prescient inventions and you have the totality of the PKD experience:
A febrile, paranoid, witty mind seeing the future with chilling clarity and expressing it with a lethal black wit. Of course the writing contain's PKD's trademark sloppiness but it also contains his trademark multi-character-viewpoint plots and a billion fascinating ideas. Who cares that he was sloppy; he was in too much of a hurry creating to be a perfectionist, and I, for one, am thankful.

From about the mid-60's to mid-70's PKD was really in his element, delivering his greatest novels of bizarre mind-expanding futures. While some of his earlier and later works are bogged down by preachiness or a lack of focus, *Ubik* is one of PKD's sure classics, along with *A Scanner Darkly* and others from around the same time. Here we have a world in which psychic and anti-psychic people battle for supremacy in a cutthroat corporate environment, and this battle extends to the world of death as well. Characters try to determine if they're alive or dead while time collapses around them. Holding everything together in its own weird way is a strange product called Ubik, which is clearly PKD's commentary on brand name products and saturation marketing. The uncommon term "entropic fiction" applies to this novel and a few other of its ilk by a variety of writers, in which time and society degenerate into disorder - but not necessarily chaos, just a different state of reality. Like the best of PKD's mindbending works, just read this and then spend some time removing the entropy from your thoughts.

This book is fantastic! I have to admit that Ubik was the first Philip K. Dick book I read and I was thrilled by his concepts. I loved this book from the very first page on because it is...abnormal. In the meantime I have also read a couple of other Philip K. Dick books but Ubik is the one which is above all them.

The kind of ideas he throws at you are just stunning. Objects are morphing back into earlier technologies (a fancy high speed elevator transforms into an old cable operated thing), a talking door threatens to prosecute one of the main characters, messages from a dead guy, the picture of the same dead guy turns up on money coins, and last but not least the all important question: are we dead or is everybody else dead?

The book has only 200 pages and not a single word is wasted. The story is superbly, and plotted in a complex way which takes countless unexpected turns. Every single time when you start to believe what this is all about, it just changes in such a drastic way that you have to put your thoughts together from scratch.

Philip K. Dick is a master in his own genre and I don't think anybody else dares to enter his realm. The only sad thing which is currently happening to his brilliant stories is the way Hollywood turns them into cheap blockbusters, such as Pay check. I can understand that the complexity of his stories can not be easily turned into movies but using 10% of his genius ideas and 90% action crap is not good
Enough!

In Ubik, first published in 1969, we find the first distinct appearance of the transcendental element in Dick's work. In his earlier novels, he had been content to demonstrate that there is no "objective" reality irrespective of consciousness: the mind essentially constructs its own world. In Ubik, the protagonist Joe Chip, condemned to a perpetual "half-life" of suspended animation after a fatal accident, finds his world inexorably deteriorating around him. The only thing standing between Joe and complete extinction is a product called Ubik, which comes in spray cans, and, when sprayed on, instantly counteracts the forces of destruction. Among other things, Ubik appears as a razor blade, a deodorant, a bra, a breakfast cereal, a pill for stomach relief, plastic wrap, a salad dressing, a used car, and a savings and loan. As its name implies, it is ubiquitous. Though a symbol of the divine, it is not a mere magical aid but a gift that can only be summoned by the person who needs it through an exercise of will and intelligence. The ending of Ubik has a twist that calls into question the substantiality of the "real world." This is my favorite PKD novel, the one that combines the most dazzling metaphysics with the most involving story and characters. After reading it, one can only start scanning one's own environment for hopeful signs of the redeeming Ubik!

Published in 1969, Ubik describes a world of pre-cogs who can divine your intent and telepaths who can listen in on your most private thoughts. These are countered by "inertials" who have anti- talents corresponding to the various psychic talents. The inertials are available through "prudence agencies." The psychic and prudence agencies are bitter rivals, often killing each others' agents. You can have exactly as much privacy as you can afford.

Meanwhile, the world runs on micro-payments. It costs a nickel to operate the door to your apartment. All your appliances from toasters to ovens to refrigerators are coin operated, as are the elevators, television, and entertainment systems. You can't even invite a date home if you lack funds to operate the basics your own apartment so in a way even relationships are coin operated. The entire population has been monetized in every aspect of their lives.

When PKD wrote the book its deep emotional impact derived largely from the contrast between the complete acceptance by the characters in the story to this state of affairs versus the aversion the reader is intended to feel at the way value is harvested from the human population with the mechanical precision and efficiency of a factory farm. The reader cannot empathize with the protagonist without also imagining themselves in the coin-operated Panopticon in which the story is set, where the most mundane of daily tasks are monetary transactions and not even private thoughts are private.

I suspect that there was a period in the 80s and 90s Ubik was "merely" a dark and unsettling sci-fi romp. That was before we implemented the society Dick describes. Swap out pre-cogs for surveillance marketing, psychics for our FBI, NSA and the like. Prudence agencies become ad blockers and cryptoware. Instead of paying with coins, we pay for much of our daily experience with our attention but it's still a transactional micropayment, extracting compensation at the point of consumption with the mechanical precision and efficiency of a factory farm just as Dick describes. Not that we lack coin operation to the degree it exists in the book. We just pay monthly instead of per-use, for example everything from Spotify, to Netflix, to smart lights, to smart door locks, to smart thermostats. Protagonist Joe Chip pays his landlord to operate his door, we pay Schlage. Same difference.

Though we haven't implemented every element of PKD's vision, when we do we often surpass his wildest dreams. For example, our surveillance isn't nearly as invasive as his telepaths and pre-cogs. But his is imagined in the world of atoms where the scope of surveillance was limited by the laws of physics. The telepaths paranormal powers were not grounded in Newtonian physics but the supply of telepaths was finite and they required proximity to the target. It was impossible in Dick's world to surveil all the people all the time and you mostly could rest easy in privacy through mundane anonymity. If you weren't interesting you enjoyed your privacy. Of course, in that case you were also among those least in need of it.

Our surveillance is based on bits instead of atoms which means we can surveil all of the people all of the time, whether they are interesting or not. This started with web browsing, spread to location tracking in our phones, and eventually we began to put surveillance into every personal device and repurposed the word "smart" as a euphemism for "data mining device." We have "smart" forks and toothbrushes, footballs and basketballs, jewelry and watches, entertainment and game devices, appliances and outlets, cars and bikes, security systems, "smart" sex toys, and anything else you can think of. All of these devices phone home with data about their owner.

Not only that but we retain the surveillance data indefinitely and if some person becomes interesting at a future date, we can retroactively surveil them in minute detail. Over time as the surveillance data accumulates and as our analysis algorithms improve we are relentlessly narrowing the capabilities gap between digital surveillance and that of telepaths and precogs. We aren't yet as accurate and invasive as telepaths and precogs but have no illusion that value is not already being extracted from you with the mechanical precision and efficiency of a factory farm.

Modern readers know they are supposed to react emotionally to the surveillance and micropayment economy Dick paints as the background for the story. The plot is premised in part on this reaction and that is reflected in plot devices, exposition, and character development. He practically clubs the reader over the head so it would be hard not to know we are supposed to be revulsed by it. But that emotional impact relies on the delta between the world Dick describes and the one in which the reader lives. the more different these are, the greater the emoptional impact of the story. When Ubik was first published it required the reader to imagine themselves in a micro-payment panoptical society. Today's reader is required to imagine they are not. That's more than a little terrifying.

OK, yeah, the writing is sloppy; PKD could be an exquisite prose stylist (try THE TRANSMIGRATION OF TIMOTHY ARCHER), but you'd never know it from reading this. On the other hand . . .
This *might* be the most unpredicatbly plotted, insanely entertaining novel ever written. You know how some books have plot twists and turns and ups and downs that make them into veritable roller coaster rides? Well, UBIK is the Space Mountain of literature. You're in the dark the whole way, and, boy, the ride is wild!
But wait, there's more! This seems like an outrageous claim to make of a book that's so much fun, but UBIK is also one of the most profound, thought-provoking explorations of the nature of reality ever written. And the profundity doesn't get in the way of the story one bit! How *does* he do that?
UBIK has been shown to be an effective reality-decay preventing dentifrice when used in a conscientiously applied program of metaphysical hygiene and regular mental-health professional care.

This is my PKD festival time, as I am buying all the PKD novels and reading them straight one aft the other. I read UBIK after VALIS. There is a vast difference in the material and the plot. UBIK, is core sci-fi. It describes a society where, Psi, telepathic and precog ability is a norm and is considered a menace against society. Pre-cogs are people who have the native ability to predict events before they happen. You'll recognize the universe in this novel, if you have seen the movie. "Minority report" which is based on the short story by PKD of the same name.

The universe in this novel: In this PKD universe, People don't completely die, when they die so to speak. There is a continuous "half-life" which follows the death in full life. Here, People don't get buried when they die, but are kept in "Cold-Pac", that is they are kept in freezer like temperatures, connected to certain high-tech apparatus, due to which they can commune with the living for half hour periods a month till the half-life energy exist. This storage happens in moratoriums, where a relative could come, present the id no of the deceased after which the deceased will be pulled out to the consultation room and will be revived for real world communication with the visitor. The person continuous to be awake in half-life, that is the person continuous to live in his own mind, but communicating with the external world, requires the use of photo-phasons and the strength of photophasons keeps diminishing with more communication with the outside world. There are photo-phason amplifiers which try to keep the half-lifer going as much as possible, but a time will come when the half-lifer will even consume this and then even half-life ends and actual brain-death also takes place. This is complete death, death in full and half-life, after which half-lifers take birth in other wombs to start a new life. In this way all energy in the universe is conserved. Anti-psi, anti precog and anti telepath are the people who can be hired, for keeping the Psi's, precogs and telepaths out. The Psi, Precogs and telepaths are not desirable elements as they are an affront to human privacy and hope as they can feel your thoughts and predict your future.

The story: Runciter Associates, a firm providing anti-force services, is run by Mr. Runciter who is alive and Ella Runciter, his wife (in half-life). In matters of business, Mr. Runciter trusts the sharp business acumen of his wife even in half-life, but Ella is slowly dying, but despite this Runciter must revive her now and them for matters of business. The plot gets darker when the firm gets retained for very lucrative deal, the site of work being Luna. The other main character is Joe Chip who is the right hand man of Runciter. He is the group tester upon whom falls the responsibility of testing out the recruits when new talent is brought in by the bounty and to see if they are worthy enough to be recruited as part of the firm. Things don't go as planned on Luna and we are in for a very unnerving experience as PKD decides to confuse us as to what is real and what is an illusion. I won't spill out too much cause that would be an insult to PKD. The kernel ideas in this book are so central to the surprise element in the story that saying much may diminish the enjoyment impact of the book.

In a basic sense, PKD as in all his novels tries to make sense of what is real and what is unreal. Are we alive and if so what makes us think we are alive, what if actually we are all dead and someone else is alive and what we see and perceive as the real world is just an imaginary illusion. What if we are in the MATRIX, so to speak. What is actually that what we call real time, should it always move forward ?. What if real time is actually spiral time, time flowing backwards and what if this is the way it is actually and that we when alive perceive it as the real real time in reverse chronology, which for us, then falsely implies forward going time. The ideas and concepts are skillfully brought to the fore in this dynamite of a novel. At 200 pages odd, it's explosive and inventive shrapnel. You'll get hit by it, before you know what happened. So you want to know what is UBIK...obviously, it's the title and of the novel and you want to know what it means, rite...well,... What If I told you, UBIK is nothing and at the same time everything. That it is present everywhere and at the same time nowhere...doesn't make sense, does it? . Read the book, you will not regret it. THIS BOOK ROCKS !!!!

Lately I am doing a lot of PKD reading. By the time you are probably reading this, I would have reviewed a good many PKD books.I have stocked up on 7 novels of his, which I will be reviewing as I finish with them. I have come to the conclusion that the matrix movie has got to be a PKD idea, as I found out PKD talks about the MATRIX- programmer-reprogrammer and parallel multiple universe concepts in his speech "If you find this world bad, you should see some of the others". This speech is present in the compilation "The Shifting Realities of Philip K. Dick : Selected Literary and Philosophical Writings": edited by Lawrence Sutin. I highly recommend this to any die-hard PKD fan, although casual readers will also find many of his speeches on relality and perception very interesting indeed. I would have reviewed this too by the time you are reading this. You can find these reviews by clicking on "see all my reviews". I wish I have the best half-life yet !!!....or am I in half-life already...beats me !!!...but if I am in half-life, I hope I am getting into the best wombs to start with :) or do I say to start over with..:). As PKD says in his speech "This may not the best of all universes, but it's not the worst either"

Vikram

Here's the thing about Phillip K. Dick.

He was the guy that everyone else was ripping off for their stuff to seem original. But for whatever reason he was never mainstream. But he made sci-fi craziness so that he could be mediated through hacks and made safe.

So, when reading Ubik, don't think of the bad predecessors that had more money and recognition than Dick. Ignore all the matrices that exist.

Buy the ticket, take the ride.

I hate to admit this but after finishing Ubik I have no idea what point Philip K. Dick was making with the conclusion of this story. (Though I've since then learned that he himself considered it one of his most important works.)
Ubik contains many very interesting developments and some tangents you know no one but Philip K. Dick would explore. My favorites include the idea that death can be defeated entirely and society may someday spin the pay-per-view mentality ridiculously out of control. Written in 1969, Ubik is just another example of Mr. Dick's advanced insight.
There is suspense right up until the end, and the hope of finally understanding "what's really going on" is tantalizing; if only I understood the ending this would be one of my favorites.
As always, reading any Philip K. Dick novel is truly an eye-opening and unique experience. If you like them hilarious and bizarre, you'll enjoy reading Ubik much more than once.

I had never read Philip K. Dick prior to picking up Ubik and primarily read it because it was one of the books on the Time 100 Best Novels list. Most of the other books on the list have been overwhelming disappointments but Ubik was a breath of fresh air. Although I certainly wouldn't agree that it is one of the best books of all time, I feel that the story was an exciting, unique story that kept me wanting more.

I am generally not a huge fan of Science Fiction, but in this case, I was able to gain an appreciation for it and may venture in this realm a bit more in the future. Ubik was a great, easy read and I'm fairly certain that just about anyone would enjoy it. Unlike a lot of SF, I wasn't confused with the plot or setting. Overall it was very enjoyable.

Ubik (1969) is generally considered one of Phillip K. Dick’s best novels. I’ll say this much for it. Unlike many of his previous works (I’m reading him in chronological order), the story hangs together and resists flying off in a multiplicity of directions better than most of the others.

The plot follows a squad of anti-psychics, people with the power to block the psychic powers of precogs (those with the ability to see into the future) and psychics (those who can read others’ minds). They are employed by a “prudence” firm, which markets security services against the privacy invasions of precogs and psychics to individuals and businesses. When a particularly daunting mission goes very wrong, the group is left hanging in what may be a rapidly time-receding reality or they may actually be dead (which in the novel’s universe doesn’t necessarily mean total cutoff from the living world).

Dick tosses in his usual imaginative touches. For example, in this world (1992, which was about two dozen years in the future when the book was written), just about everything (including the door to your apartment) is coin-operated and overseen by a rather obnoxious automated collection system. So, no quarter and you can’t leave (or get in) your own home. Same with the fridge and the radio.

A weakness of the novel is that the characters of most of the anti-psychic squad at the heart of the story are left undeveloped, eroding the reader’s identification with them and their plight. Also, there is a point at which the mystery stops being intriguing and becomes merely confusing.

I went back and forth, thinking at some points that this is a fascinatingly constructed mystery and at others that Dick is just making it up as he goes along. By the end I was dangerously leaning toward the latter.

That said, if you want to know why Dick has such a huge reputation in science fiction circles, Ubik is one of the essentials.

Sometimes Philip K. Dick gets himself into a more metaphysical, quasi-religious, psychedelic place. UBIK isn't exactly a pure example of any one of those things (all of which Dick played with in his career), but the overtones are there. You can see how books like The Divine Invasion and The Unteleported Man (aka Lies, Inc.) would arrive later. In UBIK, PKD deals with his most repeated theme, the whole "What is reality?" thing he so often dabbles with, but here we also mix in the afterlife, psychic ability and minor hints of theology. It is, like his best works, a mindfark.

And I wouldn't have it any other way.

UBIK is widely considered one of the better novels by Philip K. Dick, and for good reason: It throws into the mix most of the key elements that make a PKD novel. Highly worthwhile with one of his truly interesting twists, UBIK will keep you guessing and keep you thinking.

Ubik has probably got the best ideas within of all PKD's books, and, after a lame beginning that deals with the typical large corporate empires and pre-cogs telepaths etc, the book really gets going when they go to the Moon and Runciter gets blown up. At this stage, the book begins, and the next sections, while hastily written, are some of the best chapters in the PKD canon. I assert that PKD was much better at dealing the past or present(in this case, USA 1939) than he was at sketching the future. He has had many prophetic inventions (like the homeopape, which is soon to be reality) but he had a genuine interest in the past, see what type of books he read, his interest in classical music and classical cultures. PKD's 1939 is brilliant, and the story matches. The concept of Ubik, in its varying incarnations, is excellent, as is the uncertainty with half-life etc, and those little rhyming verses... very good. There are a couple of brilliant metaphors that have stayed with me, one where something is compared to a primitive creature using its own skin as a sail, and the other I have forgotten. No matter. The beginning of the book means that Ubik, while likely to be a favourite on the first read, is not quite up to the standard of Three Stigmata, which I believe is the best PKD, but still...

I have just withdrawn my earlier review for this novel because the store does not like the same item to be reviewed by one reviewer more than once. But I have just reread this novel and the light of my life experience has exposed so much more in it. Philip Dick is my absolute favourite writer - ahead of such others as Ivan Turgenev, Joseph Conrad, WH Hudson, Anna Kavan, Mary Shelley.... Not only is it his mind-bending plot lines, his dead pan humour, his gruelling descriptions of disaster (almost minimalist but enormously effective) but also his research - philosophy, theology, psychology. When I read 'Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep' he taught me all about empathy.

This novel is about a psychopath - hidden until the very end, but impacting everywhere. There is a remedy for the disastrous personal collapses the psychopath triggers and how I wish I had just such a remedy for a colleague of mine! Not for me, but for her and all those who work and live around her. I suffered a recent bout of bullying in the workplace which alerted me to the fact that this bully might be something much worse and his impact in our community of workers may be much wider than just against me.

By chance a television program alerted me to a book, just published, called 'Working with Monster' by John Clarke and published by Random House Australia. Reading Clarke's book - not only about the workplace psychopath but also about his or her victims - has shown me how well Philip Dick plotted these characteristics into his novel. There was, for me, another inexplicable link between my workplace candidate psychopath (I cannot diagnose it - I am not a professional in these matters) and 'Ubik' - so spooky as to suggest to me that there are messages for me in this - but from where?

'Ubik'is a great novel, and its foundations are very sound. Read it and laugh at Joe Chip's fight with the autonomous doors and other devices, be fascinated at the wonderful pen picture of Wendy Wright, be horrified at Joe Chip's stagger up the stairs under the unsympathetic eyes of Pat Conley, follow the speculations of the characters in this thriller that takes you back from the future of 1990 (as it was imagined by Philip Dick in 1969) all the way back to 1939.

My heading to this review is the question posed by so many psychopath's victims - and it is a quote from 'Ubik'.

What did I write in the earlier review?

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After scanning some reviews of 'Ubik' I was appalled. There are people who believe Philip K Dick couldn't write, couldn't plot a story!!!! Now I don't claim to be a technical purist in these matters but I can certainly tell great writing when I read it. Here are two things to look out for in 'Ubik'. Firstly there is a character description of Wendy Wright that starts 'As always, when the opportunity arose, Joe took a long astute look at the girl whom, if he could have managed it, he would have had as his mistress, or even better, his wife.' and ends with '...... She had too much control over herself and outside reality for that.' And then there is the chilling collapse of Joe Chip at the start of Chapter 13, watched by an apparently unsympathetic Pat Conley.
I recommend those who have not yet experienced 'Ubik' to read it with an open mind and a preparedness to let the plot take you for a ride - whatever you do, don't try to make your 'solution' to the twists and turns as they unfold THE only possible resolution. Philip Dick will almost certainly take you another direction.

******************************

other recommended reading:
John Clarke - Working with Monsters
Philip Dick - A Maze of Death
Philip Dick - A Scanner Darkly
Philip Dick - Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?

I recently read this actual copy,and I can see that Philip Dick sure knew his stuff when it came to writing SF. The story,while it was suspenseful,and at times frightening with a sense of background dread,I found it to be a very enjoyable read. I also read that there were plans to make it into a movie a long time ago,but for a variety of setbacks it has yet to ever be made.

Personally,I hope they in Hollywood get it together and make an adaption of this sci fi classic.
Time will tell. Either way,UBIK imo is a FTW of a read!

After reading "Flow My Tears, The Policeman Said" and being blown away by it, I decided to give Philip K. Dick another try. Could he have written another novel as impressive, I wondered?
In short, yes. "Ubik" is thoroughly engaging, and even though it shares an underlying theme with "Flow My Tears" (i.e. shifting reality), the author manages to explore that theme in a totally different way. Granted, I did not find the characters to be as deep or compelling, and there was a brief slow spot in the middle of the story, but for the most part I was glued to this book as firmly as I was to "Tears". In addition, the tone of this story was somewhat lighter, with a lead character who has trouble managing his finances in a world where everything is coin operated, and this may appeal to some more than the dark and gritty style of "Tears".
I would definitely recommend this - it's a great read!

Ubik, what is it? That you will not know until near the end of this book... kind of a surprise. "Ubik" is a world of precogs, anti-precogs, telepaths, anti-telepaths, and other "6th sense" individuals, and how they are used as a business. In this world of the supernatural, the dead can be reached in "half-life," allowing them to help run companies from beyond the grave.

The plot: Runciter Associates, which specializes in anti-precogs and anti-telepaths, is summoned for the "job of a lifetime" to Luna. Unknown to them, this job turns into an assasination attempt by a rival firm. Following the attack, with Runciter apparently dead and unreachable in half-life, things in the world are changing rapidly... but why? "Ubik" leads the rest of the firm through a deadly ordeal, one in which most will not survive. Who will live, who will die, and who is behind the radical changes being made to the world?

"Ubik" is a good read for pure entertainment. Part of the middle of the book was drawn out, hence only 4 stars. Recommended for anyone with some spare time who wants to read a novel.

You probably already know the basic plot, so I won't bore you with that.

The plot is very convoluted and explores the nature of reality and consciousness and what we can know is real.

The story itself starts slow and gains steam in the 2nd half of the book, which by the way at only 200 pages is just right.

My only gripe is that the writing style is quite dated and - I don't know if he tried, but for a sci-fi writer, Dick sure didn't predict 1992 very well. Some of his ideas seem cliched by today's standards and others missed the mark.

Overall, a quick, thought-provoking read.

RECOMMENDATION: If you like these sorts of twisted stories, read Bad Monkeys by Matt Ruff - I liked it a lot more than this - although I know that is blasphemy to sci-fi zealots. Oh well.

I'm not usually a fan of science fiction (fantasy is more my thing), but I'm taking a course in it this year, and one of the novels we were assigned was _Ubik_. I picked it up this evening with a sense of reluctant duty... and put it down about four hours later, finished and wondering, "What *was* that?"

I mean this in a positive sense!

_Ubik_ reminded me, in some ways, of a very good mystery novel: something is fishy in Denmark, and you're constantly tantalized with hints of just what it is and who is at fault. This kept me entirely hooked into the book, and I was left dazzled by the possible meanings of the ending. Sure, the prose might not be flawless, but who really notices when the plot keeps you turning the pages like mad? I don't know a thing about the rest of PKD's work, but I'd certainly recommend _Ubik_, even for those who aren't enamored of the genre.

Like most of Philip K. Dick (PKD) books, Ubik is very hard to describe let alone categorize. But here goes!
Ubik is a futuristic story of time travel, space travel, big business and a slap at American consumerism. It's best not to be obsessed with the science fiction elements, which are a bit far-fetched, but rather to relish in PKD's brutal view consumerism and capitalism. American readers over 40 will find the many little commercial sound-bites on 'Ubik' (..a spray with remarkable restorative properties) to be a delightful (and sinister) throw back to the cheesy TV commercials of the 1960s.
...but please remember that as with most PKD novels Ubik is rather hard to understand fully, and is more than a little bizarre. But PKD's satire rings through - it's the best of several PKD novels I've read.
Bottom line: weird, wonderful and very original. Don't think too much while reading it; just flow with it.

Great Phillip Dick writing as expected. This one will throw you for a bit of a loop. But also includes the expected strange ending that's so common with Dick's works (he loved those, given how often he uses them). Read it.

There is little value in reading a story you don't understand. To Dick, most people lived their lives in a programmed, mechanical style. The world he saw around him was one where reality was out of joint. In this story, UBIC, "reality has receded; it's lost its underlying support and it's ebbed back to previous forms." This story demonstrated Dick's uncanny ability to write outside the box we all call everyday life. His characters here were forced to act in a state of frozen, half-life. His half lifers had died but their life force could be somewhat sustained in deep freeze. To Dick these half lifers represented the programmed, mechanized people who surrounded him and his writing. They ate him up. They sucked him dry. Half lifers are us. From this notion came his slogan, "I'm alive and you are dead."

Just as a can of Ubik, spraying out a negative ion field, was the antidote to complete deadness for Joe Chip, so Dick's imagination was the antidote to the deadness in those who surrounded him in his life. This story represents his crispest use of metaphor. As Joe Chip had to solve an elaborate puzzle just to discover he was a half lifer, so the reader must solve a word puzzle to glean the deep meaning of this tale. Deadness to Dick was an unimaginative life, one lived without passion.

I read Ubik in one sitting during a 10 hour transatlantic flight. It certainly provided a unique atmosphere to the plane journey! As is common in Dick's books, Ubik takes the reader through one of PKD's many nightmarish distopian worlds. I was pretty disorientated by the time I got off the plane, which is one of the things which makes his writing so special. I think an element of truth lies in the statement that structure-wise, much of Dick's work can be sloppy and disjointed, but I think those statements only really apply to the 'structure' of his novels. His stories are so rich with ideas and themes, and the reader is never left to feel 'secure', constantly being flung from one nightmarish pseudo-reality to another. I dislike strategically-structured novels, which can often appear stale and too thought-out. Dicks stuff is fast-paced and at times overwhelming which is why its so wonderful. I dare the reader to read something like Ubik in a single sitting and then try and find their way around Chicago airport ;)

I was hesitant to leave a review for this book, since 36 people have already done so before me. But I had to! It's probably my favorite novel.
Although the first 50 pages or so might make you think of this as a science fiction adventure about telepaths and terrorists, the story subsequently becomes rather ... um, weird. It's a chilling study of reality. People who have seen the film The Matrix will doubtless see how much that film borrows from Dick's sensibility, particularly in terms of this novel.
The book is somewhere between horror and science fiction. Dick's interest in Gnosticism, the Kaballah, and Jungian psychology all factor into this nightmare-like story. Other Dick novels with a flavor similar to UBIK's include THREE STIGMATA OF PALMER ELDRITCH, MAZE OF DEATH, and VALIS. That's probably an overly short list, however, since most of his books deal with reality and metaphysics in some sense or another.
Five stars for sure, but for God's sake use only as directed.

This is the craziest PKD book I've read yet. Reality crumbles, re-configures and reverts into itself, dead people live on in some kind of technologically extended, shared limbo. Psychics and counter psychics engage in broad, corporate warfare. Dick sort of unwinds and re-spools the basic fabric of existence around his characters, as they grope blindly trying to come to grips with reality(s) which they can't quite guess at, even if they know something is amiss. And like his other works, it's grounded by all of these extremely mundane, material details which makes it all the more unsettling

Anti-precogs have just upped and vanished from the face of the Earth and the corporation they work for, Runciter's Associates - a psychic security firm - does not know where they have gone. Glen Runciter, the boss who is losing workers, consults his dead wife in cryo-stasis at the Swiss Beloved Brethren Moratorium to see if she can use her telepathic abilities to help them. Runciter suspects that precogs have infiltrated their world by the hand of a competitive corporate business and so assembles a group of anti-precogs for a lunar trip to scan a commercial enterprise for a possible enemy, only for Runciter to end up violently murdered. On their way back to Earth to put Runciter into cryo-stasis Anti-precog Joe Chip, who has now taken charge of the group, notices that their reality may have shifted during the murder as new food appears spoiled and other items have aged. One by one the assembly of anti-precogs must discover what is happening to them, why they are digressing in time and yet aging, why some of them are disappearing, why Runciter is trying to contact them from beyond the grave, which of the anti-precogs may be a competitor trying to control their fate, and what is this "meaning of life in can" called UBIK all about? Chip starts to receive data voice messages from the past and the future that belong to his dead boss prompting him to penetrate the mystery further as the team members vanish or are murdered. Is it possible that Joe Chip may be dead? Are they are in half-life suspended animation? Is this a big dream or a computer controlled virtual reality?

Ubik is one of Dick's more upbeat books, reading more like a high paced action movie than some of his deeper more psychological stories. Instead of creating too many internal questions there is lots of dialogue and a quickly changing environment from apartment rooms, to office blocks, the moon and the virtual world. At the start of every chapter Dick has an interesting anecdote that does not make sense until we are introduced to what this mysterious Ubik actually is. It is also interesting to note that the science term `half-life' is used here to express a virtual world that become an exceptional computer game in our own reality.

Written as a satirical metaphysical comedy Philip K. Dick's delivers on a highly heady tale of anti-precogs in alternative realities predicting the future by manipulating the past in a suspenseful light hearted detective mystery tale that is the perfect intoxicating mind stimulation that the reader seeking original creative science-fiction writing needs. UBIK is the UBIK we search for in our lives, tales that keep us going, beautifully crafted - a theory of life within a theory of life - the endless possibilities of UBIK make it an instant science-fiction classic by the master of science-fiction. A superb follow-up the year after his other masterpiece "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep" (Blade Runner) was released.

Read more of Philip K. Dick by starting with "Do Androids Dream" then try his early Hugo awaring winning book "The Man in the High Castle" and then this one. The man has some 50 works, each superb novels worthy of any collection.

Ubik is the ball in a ping-pong game played by six(or, maybe, seven) extra-terrestrials, each vying for attention. In a P.K.D. novel, reality is a hot-potato passed around. You think you know who is the main character? Wait a few chapters. Finally one emerges. You think he is real? Or that his reality is real? Guess again. The fun and the pain of the (....) trip is to dive into Poe's maelstorm, grab on to whatever floats, and try to survive..or even die..it doesn't matter cause Death itself is transitory, here. But when one wants to delve into the mysteries, not of Joe Chip, but of you, your most ubiquitous soul..(yeah, let's face it...we yearn for the immortality shown us in red lighted psychotic Dickian visions)we become hooked. Ubik, in my opinion is not as good as TSEP, which may be the Best or Martian Time-Slip, which may be the Best, or A Scanner Darkly, which may be the Best, but it is so perfect that it just may be the Best. Give me half-life or give me death...A very satisfying hoodonit.

"Ubik" is from PKD's most fertile period -- "Do Androids Dream Of Electric Sheep" aka "Blade Runner" is from the same era. But to me, Ubik is a far greater work, rivaled only by "A Maze Of Death". It's an extraordinary, hallucinatory fugue on the meaning of life and death, and completely unforgettable.
One suspects that PKD was experimenting with LSD or other drugs, and feeling the first signs of his own mortality. I've read it about twenty times. It works as straight s-f, as a tribute to Dante's 'Inferno,' as social satire, and as a parable on the nature of entropy.
If any idiot tells you that sc-fi is not a valid literary genre, thrust this book in their hand. You'll never hear that nonsense from them again.
This book is profound, yet extraordinarily funny. Reading it is a truly Zen experience, one the years will never dim for me. PKD Lives!!

Typical Phillip K. Dick, this book is very funny but at the same time disturbing. It's hard to be sure of anything that's happening. A unique experience that raises questions about the nature of reality.

I'm having a lot of trouble figuring out my take on "Ubik". I enjoyed the speculation it offers, where the futures of the afterlife, corporate culture, and advertising are imagined in a very believable (and simply explained) way. I also enjoyed the suspense and mystery elements it offers. Someone has sabotaged Runciter Associates, the world's leading "prudence organization" (telepathic defenders against precognitive corporate raiders; don't trust my explanation, just know that Dick's is much more clear), and now they're slowly dying off. But how, and why? It is an interesting setup and the answer comes slowly and assuredly (except for the ending, which felt like an unnecessary tweaking of the tension, and logically made little sense). These disparate elements were handled well.
The problem is that the elements don't add up to a cohesive whole. Or rather, a cohesive whole that transcends the genre. Science fiction, to me, should speak about grand issues on a grand scale. The issues here were focussed on a very small group of people, and did not really speak to a larger community. I don't feel threatened by a half-life menace, such as the one that stalks Joe Chip and his crew. Although the idea of inertials, precogs, telepaths, etc. does hit close to home, the dystopian future Dick creates just didn't scare me enough. And besides, the characters he creates are quite slight, nothing more than two-dimensional devices around which paranoia swirls.
Another problem is more a result of wasted opportunity, based on personal biases. I truly enjoy works that explore the possibilities and perils of time travel (the second "Back to the Future" movie is my favourite of that series, and a fine example of the fun a warped space-time continuum can provide in a narrative context). When the Runciter gang goes back in time (in a way), Dick only tangentially explores this phenomenon (e.g. Joe Chip discussing the outcome of WWII with a xenophobic pilot), and to me that's not enough. Like I said, it's an opportunity wasted.
Dick does his best work here within the epigraphs that begin each chapter. Set up as advertisements for the mysterious title-product, each is a parody of omnipotent cure-all consumer products. But Dick also throws in a menacing warning line that the unfocused consumer wouldn't pick up on. They provided the lion's share of laughs in the novel.

I first read this novel in 1965 when I was an undergraduate majoring in English. I was put off by the sometimes amateurish use of the Language Dick demonstrated. But when I had finished reading the book I realized my dislike of the prose was based more on the snobbery of an undergraduate English major than on anything substantive, and that the ideas stay with you forever. I just finished reading the book again, and it is as mind-bending in the twenty-first century as it was in the mid twentieth century.
Dick writes about the tentative nature of reality, the persistence of the human spirit and the ambiguity of Life itself. He does it with good humor on the one hand, and frighteningly accurate logic on the other. I look at _Ubik_ as Dick's search for God through Joe Chip, his _everyman_ protagonist. Whether Joe Chip finds God, or simply creates his own God is a question that may or may not be answered for the reader, but the beautiful audacity of the asking might be enough.

Is it a good book or a great book? Some say that "Ubik", published a few years after Philip K. Dick's classic period, is a genuine and final return to form, a true last burst of lunatic genius before the drugs and disappointments ate it up for good. Others call "Ubik" the desperate attempt of a rapidly fading talent to cash in one last time by cynically copying the inspiration that had already deserted it. Let's see if we can take a fresh look at it, unencumbered by the past.

It's going to be a tangled project. At some point in this book itself, the very characters find themselves firmly entangled in the past, so what hope do we have? What's more, parts of this book show that PKD was indeed seeking to repeat his former glories, with limited success.

For example, in his previous work he was very good at throwing in bizarre details for no particular reason; apteryx-shaped buildings, wood-burning automobiles. The oddities in "Ubik," however, feel forced. Take the outfits the characters wear in this story. Outrageous styles of clothing can be a cheap way for sf authors to say "Hey, look! We're in the future!" So PKD does them one better; this stuff makes no sense at all. One minor character strolls into the scene wearing "fuchsia pedal-pushers, pink yakfur slippers, a snakeskin sleeveless blouse, and a ribbon in his waist-length dyed white hair." Everyone in this story wears something equally chaotic. Gets kind of old after a while.

Which is ironic; for about two-thirds of its length, "Ubik" gives us characters who find themselves and the entire world growing older at an astonishingly rapid pace. A fresh cup of coffee turns cold and moldy, new cigarettes crumble at the merest touch, and worst of all, people die and immediately mummify like they've been underground for decades. That's not even the weirdest thing; objects revert, too. Hi-tech entertainment centers turn into cabinet-style radios, automatic elevators turn into wrought-iron cages with human operators, and eventually everyone finds themselves in 1939 Des Moines, Iowa.

How does this happen? Well, I'm not about to give the whole game away, but it might help to know who these characters are. They're called inertials, and they render mental powers ineffective. With them around, telepaths can't read minds, precognitives can't foretell the future, and so on. They are all employees of a man named Glen Runciter, and they all get caught in a bomb blast that kills their employer. Now, who do you suppose would want to destroy a bunch of people who suppress mental powers? Figure that's the party responsible? Well, yes and no - this is PKD, remember.

Then, despite his death, messages from Runciter to his employees start popping up in the oddest places - in bathroom wall graffiti, on traffic tickets, even in skywriting. Many of these messages advise the Runciter people to find something called Ubik. Why? For the moment, suffice to say that "ubik" is short for "ubiquity", Latin for "the state of being everywhere".

In short, this is a puzzle novel - one of those stories in which the characters have something to figure out, and when they do the story is over. A darned good example of the species, too. When you can make your reader feel how terrifying it is for these characters to find themselves thrust into something utterly strange, especially when they start to disappear one by one, it's an amazing accomplishment. PKD pulled that off beautifully at times. With "Ubik", not quite.

It's a good story, and sometimes a great one, partly because by the time he wrote it, PKD had found a way to make us care about the people he invented. Take Joe Chip, Runciter's second in command. He's a loser. In a world where you have to insert a coin to take a shower or open your front door, Joe can't even get out of his apartment. In a crisis, though, he steps up and works his tail off to save his friends. When it looks like he won't be able to, you can really feel his despair. That's the sort of excellence that some critics used to claim could not be found in low-class pulp forms like sf.

PKD also handled the setting with aplomb. Let me remind you that this is an sf novel set largely in 1939, a revolutionary notion for the day. What's more, PKD doesn't even wink at you while writing about that time and place. The details ring true, and are all the more threatening for that.

The problem, I think, is that this time PKD couldn't seem to let well enough alone. It's sufficiently wrenching that these people find themselves in an alien yet human environment that kills them by degrees, one by one. Then the author had to reach for the strangest explanation he could come up with. It's so weird, it's actually kind of a yawn.

May I suggest in my arrogance that "Ubik" would have been a lot more powerful if PKD had revealed the big secret about halfway through, say, instead of at the end. Then he could have shown us how these people contend with their true environment, instead of how they try to figure it out. PKD was no Nabokov - he loved his characters far too much to make them jump through hoops like this.

The details, the setting, the characters and the plot are quite involving enough to make "Ubik" an excellent read. And I do not in the least agree that his career after this was just a way for him to mark time until his death. "Ubik" takes its place at the low end of his best work - better was to come.

Benshlomo says, Knock off the comparisons and just read the darn thing.

If Phillip K. Dick were to rise from his grave today, he would probably peruse the current state of `alternative entertainment' with a knowing smirk. The dominant themes Dick mined in his thirty-year career - including alien invasions, time/reality distortion, psychoactive illness, drug abuse, paranoia, metaphysical yearning - have been used and reused so much in the last decade that `alternative entertainment' now has a solid niche in the mainstream. Note the recent success (in theater or video) of Momento, The Matrix, Mulholland Drive, Fight Club, etc. Dick's own work has been drafted for the mainstream buck from time to time, as well, though usually in clipped or totally reworked format, _Total Recall_ being a good example of the former, _Blade Runner_ of the latter.
I state the above because it helps to read some of Dick's sci-fi with strong hindsight; to realize that when Dick was writing it, there was nothing else like it. Such is the case with _Ubik_. For though this book suffers from some typical Dick sloppiness (two dimensional characters, lazy grammar, a meandering plot that almost made me throw the book down in disgust - ) the core ideas Dick introduces and uses were undoubtedly radical for its time, far beyond cliché or contrived conflict.
The specifics: Glen Runciter is the owner of an `anti-psi' organization, which roots out errant telepaths and protects the `unevolved' layman from mental sabotage. After Runciter is slain by a business competitor, his gifted employees scramble to keep the company afloat...then scramble to stay alive, for reality itself seems to be disintegrating before their very eyes. Stranger still, Runciter's face appears on money; he (or his ghost, perhaps?) leaves surreal messages on the walls of bathroom stalls. Is Runciter dead? Or is everyone else? And how does the universal panacea Ubik figure into all of this?
_Ubik_ is not one of Dick's better novels. The characters are dull; many interesting ideas are quickly introduced and just as quickly discarded; the whole middle section of the book is a bit of a slog. But the ending redeems the effort spent, as everything falls into place - almost.
All in all, a good mind-bender for a summer afternoon. Four stars.

PKD's brilliance is evident from the first sentence to the last in this wonderful novel. Once I got to around page 50, I just wanted the world to go away so I could finish this book without putting it down. There is so much to learn from this book if you're a writer -- from character description, to plot pacing, to dialogue. You could probably devote an entire college semester to this novel and still not probe all the issues it brings to the table.

I would highly recommend this for any reader who wants something more than corny vampire love stories ... something more substantive than two cardboard characters playing boring S&M games.... Pick it up. You won't regret it. [Safe, if read as directed.]

Although "Ubik" wasn't the first Philip K. Dick novel I read (having read just about all of them now, it's hard to remember which was first, but I think it was "Martian Time-Slip"), I would recommend it as the best starting point for someone trying to decide if PKD is your cup of tea. "Ubik" has all of the major elements of the typical PKD novel (to the extent there is any typicality): (1) questioning of the meaning of reality; (2) an almost pathetic sense of humor in the face of the unraveling of reality; (3) an everyman protagonist; and (4) extreme readability despite a somewhat pedestrian writing style.
The plot can be summed up like this: some humans have psychic powers, but rather than being seen as heroes (as is the case in most sci-fi), they're possible sources of invasions of your privacy. Never fear, however, because some humans have developed anti-psychic powers -- they block the powers of the others. A bunch of anti-psychics go on a mission, but something goes wrong and they barely get away with their lives. Almost immediately, they notice that something is not right. Phone directories are out of date, coffee is disgustingly stale, and so on. Time, it seems, is flowing backwards!
For readers who aren't aware, PKD was one of the most influential sci-fi writers, with his reality-warping stories. His interest in this topic can be traced, no doubt, to his youthful experimentation with narcotics -- an experience recounted largely in "A Scanner Darkly."
PKD was an incredibly prolific writer; he wrote something like 16 novels in a five year stretch in the late-1960s, including "Ubik." Many of his best novels were written during that stretch. If you like "Ubik," I would suggest in no particular order: "The Gameplayers of Titan," "The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch," "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?" (made into the movie "Bladerunner"), "Dr. Bloodmoney," and "The Man in the High Castle." By the 1970's, PKD stopped writing as many novels, and they became more thematically complex, with increasing emphasis on religious spirituality.

A short and peculiar and pleasantly wild tale that had me curious through the end. Frankly the ending left me more curious than the beginning, but such is the way with Ubik.

If you would enjoy a tale that will resolve in its own accord and not at your whim as a reader, choose Ubik. (Use only as directed)

With UBIK, Dick wrote a book which is, in the same time, extremely pleasant to read and extremely confusing - quite a feat...
UBIK is a "best of" Dick's obsessions: it contains obvious reminiscences of The Eye in the Sky (the collective nightmare), The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch (the greedy, almighty, elusive son of a b...), Counter-clock world (time running backwards), The World Jones Made (precognition), Time Out of Joint (the fake world), to name a few. In a way, it is also reminiscent of VALIS (the Godlike entity which communicates with the hero by mystical means), which was written 12 years after UBIK!
How could so many themes be exploited so intelligently in such a short novel? The answer is: thanks to Dick's straightforward style. In UBIK, every word counts. The hero, Joe Chip, races with Death: each passing minute lowers his chances to find a UBIK vaporizer and to save his skin. Through Dick's sparing use of words, the reader understands this message: if Joe Chip rests, he will die. Some of Dick's despisers criticize his so-called "hasty" style: can't they see that, thanks to this style, he could describe the undescribable? When you get rid of the superfluous, you get a chance to grab the true essence of horror. At least, that's what Dick thought; I personnally think he was right and that he should be remebered of today not only for his hallucinatory visions but also for his style.
The style allows Dick to exploit the above themes "intelligently", ie in depth and by intertwinig them. But it will probably not allow the reader to fully understand the book after the first reading, unless he's VERY familiar with Dick's tricks, mainly the different levels of reality. One of my friends, who is an experienced sci-fi reader (but not a Dick's reader), still can't understand the last few lines of UBIK, where Runciter finds a Joe Chip coin in his pocket. She asked me, and I said: "I think you should re-read the book entirely." I all the less recommend UBIK to people who don't usually read sci-fi: insofar as the style is pleasant, and the basic cat-and-mouse story catching, they may 1) have a superficial reading of it, ie think that it works only on one level (as an "adventure" novel, like, for instance, Solar Lottery); 2) thus, read 90 per cent of it and think they have understood it all; 3) be completely bewildered by the last 10 per cent and make the conclusion that all the book is a piece of nonsense.
At the end of his life, Dick said in an interview that he was not very satisfied with UBIK: he felt that with this novel, he started to repeat himself. That is absolutely true. There is nothing new in UBIK - Dick only picked up the best of his previous books, confronted for the first time his obsessions one with another, and tried to examine whether the whole could be superior to the sum of its parts. It was like playing poker, canasta, baccara and gin rummy with the same deck of cards. The result is convincing.

I'm currently reading my 23rd Philip K. Dick novel. Ubik is likely my second favorite PKD novel, right behind The Divine Invasion. Like many Philip K. Dick novels, it leaves you questioning what is real and what is not real, and questions the concepts of death, perception and reality. It is one of the those books that leave you saying "wow" when you read those final pages. If you don't like Ubik, you likely don't like PKD's works.

I hope this isn't Dick's best novels because while I thought it was really good, it was imperfect. More others should write science fition that is unconventional and even for the particular genre, wholly strange. Most sci fi is too interested in developing the details of the tchnology in use (this sci-fi can be great too) than developing whatever it is that Dick does develop. The characters in this book could use some work though, and the book is not entirely focused. In fact, I wish he would have stuck with the question of how a person from the future could live in the past and it's current ideas knowing the major events to occur. Also, WHY DIDN'T JOE USE THE UBIK SPRAY TO UNREGRESS THE UBIK BALM? Oh well, just a minor detail.

Some PKD books are failures and some are not. This is not.
The use of technologies and backgrounds keep you wide awake (interested) to read the first bit of the book. There is one major twist from there. After that particular explosive twist (you'll know when) you're hooked.
The first thing some of you may know is that "Ubik" is short for the latin word that means "everything". You will encounter some major twists and turns in the book that captivate you rather than confuse you. The uses of the beginnings of each chapter are unique and innovative and Joe Chip (from the major explosive twist onwards) is always hanging on the edge, guaranteeing that you'll swallow it in one 4-hour gulp.
The use of words make you want to read it again and again.
The elements just mentioned here make it the best SF ever made.

I finished reading Ubik and I couldn't even start any other books for a week because I had to sit and think about everything that had just happened. I've read several other books by Mr. Dick and, while they are all excellent, this is the best. So far. It has everything that I have come to expect from him. You never quite know where reality is. Then you figure it out only to find that you are wrong. Then another twist comes. It has excellent pacing, a good bit of humour, and - of course - loads of wild ideas about life, death, the future, consumerism, dreams, drugs, psychic abilities, and the human condition.
The first few pages set up the stage for the story in a way that an average author would have required 100 pages of descriptions and explanations. And it all made sense. This is a good book if you have never been introduced to PKD's work, since it is very accessible and well written. It is required reading for any PKD fans who have not yet gotten around to it.
Just remember- it is safe when taken as directed.

UBIK is one of my favorite of PKD's "alternative reality" novels. It is, in part, a metaphysical and epistemological mystery: why is reality breaking down? How can the characters know if what they perceive is really real? What is the ultimate nature of reality, anyway?
Until the very last page, where PKD plays a last joke on the reader, one cannot be certain which level of "reality" is the correct one. Meanwhile, there is the usual profusion of humor, odd characters, and psychological and philosophical insights.
We love you, PKD, wherever you are!

For someone, like myself, that values originality and mental stimulation above almost all else, Ubik is a damn near perfect novel.

Get yourself a copy of Ubik today. It will freshen your mind, whiten your teeth, and, when read under doctors supervision, remove stubborn toilet bowl stains.

I'm going to have to re-read this. Pretty mind-bending stuff. I got a Matrix meets Inception meets What Dreams May Come vibe. No spoilers but the last chapter was the perfect ending.

POTENTIAL SPOILER ALERT: Question: is Pat the greatest red herring in literary history? LOL! I ask because I'm so confused that I don't whether or not to believe anything PKD wrote in this story, LOL!

Robots may dream of electric sheep, but does anybody care if an entire novel is a giant red herring, of which you care none the faintest how it ends up??? For how bad A Scanner Darkly was, I wanted to give PKD another chance. While PKD has a strong grasp of the written language, the story is both extremely boring and pointless. The whole psychic/anti- story has no meaning. None of the characters have meaning. Doors that charge $0.05 to open??? Meaningless and completely retarded idea if not a "ohhh the creativity" fanbois). NONE of 95% of the book matters... and what does... WHO CARES?!?! The ending.... WHO CARES?!?!

If you like this book enjoy your Pabst beer and open mic poetry readings. No wonder they never tried to make a movie of it.

As in any PKD book (but in this one espescialy ) I had while reading a drugged feeling. He's making me feel as if the world around me becomes fluid , moving gently , colors all mixed-up.
PKD is just able to take apart with a few words your grasp of reality , you ca'nt tell if the protagonist is awake , asleep , or drugged-almost-to-death. combined with his extrodinary gripping writing style - It's a lethal dosage of excellent literature - almost poetry.
My English is not good enough for me to write fully what I think of this particular masterpiece. very recommended.

As usual, Dick tests the boundaries between reality, and . . . something else. One reason I was really interested in this book is a research paper I was working on. The data came from my psychological interviews, using the ZMET method. In this type of consumer behavior study, we find that what people say and what they actually do are often very different. People even make up elaborate descriptions and explanations to justify their imaginary behaviors. Ubik really fits this context well, because here Dick references a consumer product called Ubik, that is everywhere. Everyone wants Ubik, but no one seems actually to obtain it.

The task of imagining the future has been taken by many writers from past generations. "Ubik" is one example of such diligence achieved in a way that nothing seems dull to us, members of an era much closer to the one the author imagined.

Surely, flying vessels and spaceships are all there. It's hard to escape those. But everything appears in a way we can easily reconcile while letting our minds wonder around familiar Orwellian landscapes. "Ubik" is a fun adventure and a great read.

Ubik is defiantly not for the novice, especially those who use liner narrative as a railway for thought and opinion.

Do we define what is real based on what we experience? How do we know we are not in a dream or simply a character in someone else fantasy. Given the paranoid nature of PKD's writings, Ubik taps in to that subtle feeling we all have that something is not quite right with the world.

PKD, himself having suffered from Schizophrenia, has remarkable insight into paranoia. One can't help but experience a broad range of confusion as the protagonist of Ubik struggles to find a meaningful explanation for why things are not what they seem.

As in the mind of PKD, things are not quite right with the world in Ubik. At points Ubik will provoke your own anxiety and pull you into a world where someone's life essence can be used up in an a sudden cascade of utter exhaustion. A world where latest Ubik models are available in a variety of colors. A world in which people can hear each others thoughts, see the future, and use such talent for corporate espionage.

Ubik explores or rather questions the nature of existence, the soul, and what is life. As our culture advances technologically, our brave new consumer world challenges our notions of life and what we know. PKD's stories seem less like a distant future and more like someplace else in America we haven't been yet.

In recent years, PKD's work has found a broader audience then the fans of Science Fiction. His works have become the feature films Blade runner, Total Recall, Imposter, The Truman Show, Minority Report, Paycheck, and most recently a Scanner Darkly.

The influence of Ubik (or at least similar themes) are evident from the Outer Limits to the Matrix. In particular in Dark City, eXistenZ, Thirteen Floor, and unmistakably in the Spanish Film Abre Los Ojos (open your eyes) along with its flashy American remake, Vanilla Sky.

Just aside, Vanilla Sky trades the gripping introspective qualities of Ubik found in Abre Los Ojos for some creative references to pop culture and multiple camera angles of Tom Curse striking various versions of the same pose.

Ubik is one of my favorite PKD novels with themes that persist in provoking thought long after the work has been read, but only if used as directed. So use your Ubik. Take the red pill and see how deep the rabbit hole goes.

This may well be Philip K Dick's best. When one of his competitors top telepaths disappears off the face of the Earth, Glen Runciter, who runs an anti PSI firm, goes to consult with his deceased wife. Recently deceased Loved Ones can be placed in a moratorium, where they enter into half life. There they can be resurrected briefly for communing only. Runciter and eleven of his staff are commisioned to travel to Luna for a secret project. It turns out to be a trap, and Runciter is killed. Joe Chip, a top techie of the firm takes charge. At this point reality becomes obscured and it is difficult to know whether Runciter is dead, alive, or in half life, the same goes for his eleven member team. UBIK is a miracle product, a force for good. Then there's Pat, one of the eleven, who can change the future by altering the past. Lastly there's Jory a half lifer with terrible powers over other half lifers.

Ubik is a rare work of literature. Without being overly preachy, verbose or incomprehensible [which most philosophy accomplishes to be all at once], Philip K. Dick has created a completely "real" reality, and then let it fall apart as he observed. This begs the question - was it real at all, and is it real now that it's gone? In spite of these philosophical meanderings, Ubik is a ripping good read, and will scare you half out of your brains when you finally read the last two pages. I can remember not wanting to fall asleep, worrying that I'd find Glen on all my dollar bills.

I noticed a previous review at this site, bemoaning the "anti-climactic" final page of this novel. the reviewer then proceeded to sing the praises of Isaac Asimov. Perhaps he should have proceeded directly to an Asimov page and stayed where he seemed happiest. Enough on that. What the final page of this book does effectively do is deny the reader any sense of finality. there is no comfort in finishing this tale, as the tale has no definite end. The reader - especially one new to the work of PKD - should prepare for one of the most original and testing meditations on tangibility. The book's conclusion is not, I feel, the intended climax. The book is more than a linear narrative. Linearity in fact is deliberately confused. The intention of writers such as PKD - and this work is perhaps his best example of this intention - was to use science fiction as a philosophical instrument, to challenge what we think we know - actually, what we are led to believe - about ourselves and our place in the universe. For the discerning sci-fi reader who wishes to engage some weighty philosphy, Ubik is essential. By the way, did anyone think that The Matrix was something revolutionary?

Just and incredible piece of science fiction, let me rephrase that, incredible fiction, period. PKD's writing is light years above nearly all the science fiction writers before or since him. A very psychologically complex story and highly original. Hollywood owes this guy millions, nearly every GOOD science fiction movie produced over the years has directly used PKD's books or stolen parts from them.

There's a lot going on in this novel beyond the main storyline, some of it good, some of it not so good. Written in 1969, this novel was written in the future (1992), which is now our past. Dick got virtually none of his future predictions right in this novel, which casts it in a bit of a negative light. The main plot is that Glen Runciter runs an anti-psi agency to counter the use of agencies that are using telepathy and other paranormal means to gain an advantage in the business world. Joe Chip is his right hand man who tests anti-psy abilities for the agencies. Things change when they encounter a woman who has a talent they have never seen before, which is to change the past. Chip recognizes that she is very dangerous, which proves to be true. The other main aspect of the plot is that people don't die. They go into cold stasis where they are still sort of alive and people can communicate with them, something that figures very prominently in the novel and becomes the main plot line after being a secondary one.

I liked the tone and voice of the novel. It moves at a fast pace, and there is always either action or intrigue taking place. On the other hand, the novel was often confusing, especially about mid-way through. As I mentioned, his predictions of the future weren't very accurate. In his future, machines can talk and have personalities. It also requires coins to operate them, even simple things like opening a door. He has the foresight to come up with these machines, but then they use nickels and dimes to operate them, so he completely ignored the concept of inflation. There is also never a resolution to the plot line where Runciter's people are ambushed. That was more or less ignored about half way through. As I mentioned, there is some good and some bad, but by and large this was an entertaining novel.

Carl Alves - author of Reconquest: Mother Earth

This is frequently listed as among Dick's best, but I prefer the other three of his I've read (Do Androids Dream, Flow my Tears, and Three Stigmata). Like Ubik, those three books question the nature of reality, but they also go beyond that to provide insights into the human condition. Ubik is more focused on the philosophical question as to the extent to which our reality is simply a construct.

Of course, it is a cool idea for a book, and the book is quite interesting. This book also has a bit of humor mixed in.

On the whole, good but not great.

Ubik is a well-written and entertainingly comic read. Ubik explores the borderline between life and death and purgatory and redemption. However, after reading the book's conclusion, I'm not sure how meaningful the story is compared to some other PKD works that take a relatively more serious tone. This one will leave readers thinking that something is a bit lacking. Nevertheless, Ubik doesn't take itself too seriously, and is a good change from all the excessively serious science fiction that seems to be written today. I just think that some of Dick's other works balanced seriousness with humor better.

The main source of excitement in Phil's novels, is a constant disorientation, and our minds' attempt to make sense of what we are experiencing. Within that mindframe possibilities flow out in many directions from even a subtle event. It is what one experiences while on LSD. In my opinion - Stigmata, Scanner Darkly and Ubik are particluarly good at this. I think "Maze of Death" is his most impactful work: to wander so aimlessly and darkly through the entire novel- until the final chapter when your breath is taken away- is catharctic and religious indeed.

After reading UBIK, I have become totally hooked on PKD.
I am a big traditional sci-fi fan and although PKD is anything but traditional, I think he embodies everything that's great about SF. Only this genre allows people like PKD complete freedom to twist their literary reality into anything they desire. Needless to say, Philip K. Dick is an absolute master of that!
The only other SF writer whose style seems a little similar is Alfred Bester.

Philip K. Dick was a true visionary, mad towards the end like many other visionaries. His books are pigeon-holed as 'Science Ficition', but I agree with the alternative genre description of 'Psy-Fi', for, like the author Morton Bain, his books explore consciousness more than interplanetary realms. Read this and all his other novels!

UBIK is one of the most fascinating books I've come across, a book that hardly seems to be the product of one mans imagination as much as a glimpse into an alternate reality that could be entirely real and happening right now.

Horrifying, funny, delirious, evocative and ingenious.

Possibly Dick's best work.

I am making a conscious effort to go back and start reading Phillips books again. Knowing his style and thought process brings a whole new level of understanding. If you are new to his work this is a great book to start with. Think about the movie vanilla sky, and try to figure out when everything changed.

I can see for 1969 how ahead of it's time this was...BUT, it was not a page turner or even a lazy, easy read. So just three stars. I could see many, and I mean many, sci-fi tropes to come later in other books and movies in this novel. Listing them would just be spoilers. I have read other PKD works over the years and found them also rather dated in specifics, writing style, and especially the slang, yet still way ahead of their times as to the big ideas, new for their time. Still, generally not page turners as well.

This was the first PKD I ever read, so it's got some sentimental value...as it is, it's stood the test of time to remain one of my all time favorite PKD novels.
Supposedly one of the major influences on The Matrix (along with The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch), Ubik is about the subjectivity of physical reality, death, advertising, consumerism...
In the first few pages PKD introduces more ideas than most sci-fi (I cringe to pigeonhole him so, but it's the closest comparison) authors are capable of their entire careers.
You can't take this book on face value, it engages the reader so completely with it's energy, style and fiercely challenging ideas. Not to mention the plot twists, which will keep you guessing to the final page (without sounding too horribly cliched I hope).
For PKD vets it's comforting to revisit the world he established in his most blatantly sci-fi phase, with all the standbys like precogs, conapts, talking kitchen appliances, etc.
For PKD newbies Ubik is a perfect choice to start in on the incredible feast that are the novels of PKD - trust me.

This is as good as any Dick novel. Reality loss at it's finest. There are telepathic people and precogs and organizations that help block them. "The concept of the anti-telepath. trying to talk to his dead wife Glen Runciter gets "Jori". The anto precog has the ability to make all future seem equally real to the precog. Also the ad's are funny.

His language and dialog are crisp and the scenes move along with the touch of the master. As to the story itself, well, you are entering a future where lives can be prolonged in a kind of permanent bardo, and there's a power struggle between soul snatchers and their detectors. Oh, yes, and we've colonized the moon by the 90's. The cosmology is preposterous but consistent, all unfurling in a lovely whodunit container.

I can only add my own voice to the resounding chorus of praise that I see in these reviews. This is a masterpeice and amongst the greatest works of speculative fiction ever written. Its easy to see the germs of cyberpunk and virtual reality based sci-fi in this book, and years before these genres even existed! You can see the direct influence of Ubik if you read anything by Neal Stephenson or William Gibson. But PKD thought of this stuff first and in my opinion he far surpasses anything that has or will emerge in the SF genre.

An amazing book, dealing with issues of life, death, rebirth, and entropy. It delves deeply into the subjects, exploring the hopelessness and despair associated with death, but also the hope for rebirth and, of coruse, salvation. Joe Chip is an endearing character, who grows from being baffled and confused to accepting his reality and dealing with it. Highly recommended.

Death? Reality? Salvation? I can't describe exactly what is so compelling about this novel. I read it twice, and the second time I was shocked at the strangeness of the whole thing. The tone is somewhat humorous and sad, and the style is not exactly breathtaking. Yet UBIK has the essential feel of greatness that any masterpiece does. It is simply indescribable. I have given one of my old paperback copies to a friend for his perusal, and I would highly recommend this novel to anyone--not just PKD or science fiction fans--but anyone who wants to read something so uniquely different that they will be able to say, "What the hell was that! "

This is one of my favorite science fiction books ever. It was like the Twilight Zone written in a parallel universe, in which telepathy is real. It is not so far fetched that someday life might be preserved by letting people survive in a cryogenic state while their minds remain active.

Ubik is a mysterious substance that the protagonists hope will restore the world to sanity. Remember, it's not US that are insane...it's THEM!

Maybe I will come up with an air freshener called Ubik and market it. What do you think?

This is a science-fiction masterpiece that does a great job to explore the boundaries between life and death. When reading through the book, it becomes clear that films like Inception have drawn a lot of inspiration from it. Starting with a rather dense prose, and at times bordering comedy and absurd, it evolves into a very engaging and thought-provoking story towards its middle, and a gripping one towards the last few chapters. Highly recommended.

Ubik is a tremendous read. Dick is capable of terrifying the reader in one moment and producing laughter in the next. I have read this book over ten times, never failing to react to the characters, never failing to enjoy it. Of the many utterly brilliant books that Dick had produced this is both brilliant, moving and exciting. It sits easily among his best.

PKD is such a great writer, so it's always a pleasure to dive into his worlds. It's bizarre to read his vision of the 1992 "future", written before the Internet or even CDs. Beyond those small details, this is an intriguing exploration of time and psychology. Not my favorite, but I'm glad I went on this little journey.

I wonder if the book I read is the same the book the other reviewers read. Same story, it seems, and same characters... But mine was not as good as theirs. Sure, the ideas in this book are great. PKD manages to create a kafkian feeling of being trapped in a world that continues to shift as soon as you turn your eyes. But there is not discipline in the execution of the story. It seems as PKD changed his mind many times while he was writing the story, and never bothered going back and make things consistent (since when Joe Chip loves Wendy?). Maybe what disturbed me was the total lack of attachment that PKD shows towards his characters. Other reviewers refer to this as "characters are not developed enough", but my impression is rather that PKD loved more the plot ideas than any of the characters in this book. Except maybe for Runciter...

Ubik is the best sci fi book I've ever read. I've read Sci Fi all my life, but usually stick with the short stories. I get bogged down in the first chapter or two of novels, boring, but not this one. But I just finished reading this book for the second time. The first time I read it was ten years ago, I remember well, Cause it was about 100 degrees out here in Texas & I was laying in the sun... This story gave me chills & goosebumps! So many twists & turns, truely soul shocking! This evening I found it again, and as I started reading again, I had the same experiece, I couldn't put the book down. It's now 6 am.
Well, to me that's a great Friday night!

I really love the way some books leave you sitting there and marveling at the abillity of the author to catch your attention like that. This books does this and more. What a finale, what a build up! I love it!

If you like your sci-fi bizarre,then this is for you. As usual,with Phillip K. Dick,it's a highly creative story and fully entertaining. He does have imagination. This consists of psychic abilities,communications with the dead and time regression. That's all I'll say,cause I don't want to spoil it for others. A very entertaining read.

To be read by anyone who has questioned there own reality and seen it as being unreal as a dream. Death scenes in the book bring reminders of the Tibetan Bardo Teachings. Recommended Reading for all!!

Aclaimed electronic composer/electric guitarist Richard Pinhas has pieces entitled Ubik and The Joe Chip Song that probably date from 1983. The Joe Chip Song is in four parts spread throughtout this album D.W.W. Each part's main instrumental source is a string quartet electronically treated in a successively altering, deteriorating fashion. Ubik is a very driving track. Both convey emotional overtones that resonate with this book. On the Cuneiform Records label.
Very recent!!!!! : A new Art Zoyd album with extravagant instrumentation and composition. I haven't heard it yet but this group is so amazing. The new album entitled: u.B.I.Q.U.e. is based entirely on the book. An in French description and conception of this work is available at the Art Zoyd home page. Art Zoyd's own label on Wayside Distribution.
I appreciate all the Vintage pressings of PKD's books. The layout and font choices are good.

It pains me sometimes to read the works of Phillip K. Dick. His ideas are always innovative and mind-bending, but his prose is somewhat lacking. This book is a fun read, and a great idea, it just isn't very well-crafted. I recommend for first time Phillip K. Dick readers the novel A SCANNER DARKLY, one of the few novels where Dick has both a great idea and a distinct literary voice.

This book take you on an extraordinary inner journey. There were times that I was completely lost, but then some more information was revealed. I feel that the writer was toying with me, my perceptions. Just when the inner world started to gain solidity, perceptions changed and I was lost again. To separate myself from the characters was nearly impossible. What an extraordinary journey.

The author of the novel that inspired Blade Runner has got to be a genius, and Ubik cannot be representative. If you are new to Philip K. Dick, as I was, don't begin with this book.

There is only so much that can be said, if one is to avoid spoilers. But Ubik has two plots: one about telepaths and their opponents, telepathy-blockers, a number of them working for the agency run by the novel's main protagonist, and another about cold-pack, meaning not-quite-dead people in suspended animation, still dreaming and communicating with the outside world. The first plot is pursued for about one third of the novel, then to all intents and purposes abandoned as the second one kicks in. Ubik is clunky and awkward, with hasty portrayal and often corny dialogue, perhaps reflecting the lack of direction. It is too full of red herrings and loose ends, in particular concerning Pat, the girl on the cover of this edition. I won't give up on Philip K. Dick. But this novel seems to me for established fans.

This book is both entertaining and awesome. It will have you on the edge of your seat guessing and wondering right up to the end. A true master piece by one of the greatest sci fi writers of all time!!!!

YOU WONT REGRET BUYING THIS MASTERPIECE.

GUARANTEED

I am sorry if this upsets the author but I found Ubik to be a very confusing and jumbled book that makes me wonder why in the world I even bothered to read it all the way through. A real imagination went into making it, however.

i am ubik. before the universe was,I am. I made the suns. I made the worlds. I created the lives and places they inhabit, I move them here, i put them there. They go as I say, they do as I tell them, I am the world and my name is never spoken, The name which no one knows. I am called Ubik, but that is not my name. I am. I shall always be.

The story is really good and the ideas will make your head spin for a while, but for me the sometimes cheesy, detective fiction style was a minus, a one star minus. Excellent book and well-worth the read.

Utterly brilliant. After an initially slow start and potentially confusing first few chapters, Ubik quickly turned into one of the best pieces of science fiction I've ever read. Why did I wait so long to start reading this genius body of work?

If you want to prepare yourself for or just know what the "bardo's" or afterlife is like then read this. The definitive sci-fi "book of the dead." The companion to "The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldridge" - both are the best examples of PKD's reality shifting talent.

Dick once more plays with his favourite theme, i.e. whether reality is for real. But in Ubik he does so in a heavy way, far from the subtelty one can see in The Man in the High Castle for example. There are literally hundreds if not thousands of books dealing with Reality that are more subtle and smarter than this one. It's not that Dick was uninspired when he wrote it - it's full of energy, has humour as usual. But it just did not work out well that time.
Age cannot have been the problem because he was just 7 years older (41) when he wrote Ubik, than when he wrote TMITHC.
I am a big fan of Philip K Dick, but Ubik is simply one of his weaker books - most if not all writers have them.

I guess I just don't get it. The book strikes me as meaningless and incoherent. I looked at my book collection and remembered "The Philip K Dick Reader." I liked many of the stories in there, and I thought "Androids Dream" was okay, so it's just some of Dick that I don't get. I had a similar baffled reaction to "The Man in the High Castle."

"Ubik" started out promising. It was an interesting premise for a story that I found intriguing. Unfortunately, after reading several chapters, I became disinterested. I basically didn't care about what happened to any of the characters involved (even though I found the plot mildly clever).

If you are a person who wants to identify with, and feel an emotional connection to the main characters' lives, I wouldn't recommend this book to you. But, if you are a person who prefers twists and turns in a plot instead, you'll probably enjoy this story.

Ubik is a good book, very dynamic, you begin reading it and it surrounds you in a craving for read it all. At the beging I though it was the typical Sci Fi book but the history tack unthinkable paths. A book to recommend for sure.

I ran into the same problem with this sci-fi novel as I do with all of PKD's works...the idea is great, the actual process of reading his writing is torture.

I find his sentence structure, word choice, point-of-view, and actually every else to be so clunky. His style is like being hit over the head with a sopping wet blanket.

Yes, his ideas are great. But in the end, his novels are not worth my time.

When I looked below at "people who bought this also bought " I saw Neuromancer by the ultimate poseur and ponce William Gibson.

Billy Boy you are not and never will be Philip Dick.

Sure you can write, but then so can my 5 year old son.

Phil had something to say, something worth listening to.

Billy Boy writes shopping novels like he's channelling Jackie Collins.

Please read Philip Dick, please, please ignore pathetic William Gibson.

I'm a bit of a Sci-Fi buff, but found this book disappointing. The characters and background were not well explained and I found the final page that other reviewers praise as being so groundbreaking a bit of an anticlimax - nothing special. I'd recomend Asimov instead any day - something like the foundation series by Asimov (the fourth book in the series is perhaps the best Sci-Fi I've read - pure quality)

This book was random and disconnected with a painfully plodding plot, ridiculously 2 dimensional characters, and horrible writing. It was so dang boring that it became a chore to read... I couldn't finish it and put it aside with a feeling of relief. This book is truly a three star stinker. I would have given it just two stars if not for a couple of interesting scenes. As it is I am being very generous.

Phil Dick is my favorite writer, but of the 15 books I've read by him, this is my least favorite. The plot is confused and the characters, never a strong point in PKD's books, are one-dimensional at best. The title of the book, which seems to be related to entropy, reality, and the notion of saving grace, is given very little treatment. These notions could have made for a great novel, but the ideas are not even half-fleshed out.

I like PKD but I did not like Ukib. The writing seemed amateurish and because of this I assumed it must have been one of his first novels (it isn't). None of the characters have any depth and in fact many are so poorly developed that they are hard to tell apart. The science fiction ideas in Ubik aren't especially interesting. I recommend you don't bother with this until you've read Dick's other major works.

My god... this book was bad!!! The premise was alright (as far as SF goes) and had this novel been written as a short-story, it might have worked in some way, but the truth is that the results shown here are completely forgettable. Basically, "Ubik" is a story about a group of people (some of them gifted with special abilities) who are set upon the task of counteracting a plot of industrial espionage (or something like that, I couldn't care less, anyway). The story is crammed with a lot of characters, but unfortunately all of them are quite unsympathetic and lack any real depth. Except by their different names, you couldn't tell one of these "zombies" from the other. I didn't care at all about any of them, no matter whether they were disintegrated and scattered to the four winds, mummified and kept in formol or being "preserved" by means of a quaint hairspray. The storyline develops awfully and there's such a lack of intensity and narrative ability in some of the most crucial events (the bomb explosion, for example) that you really have to re-read some passages in order to understand if what the author describes is really coincident with the supposed gravity of the situation. I also found some details in the story quite dated (tobacco use, for instance) or just plain unconvincing (coin-operated home appliances, uh?). Also, the special abilities of some of the characters were preposterous, more typical of semi-divine entities taken out of a `Marvel' or a `DC' comic, than of regular human beings (whatever "gifted" they might be). The open-ended conclusion was also quite cheap. In general, everything in the book is too far-fetched and lightweight even for the standards of SF, 'popular fiction' or whatever you may want to call it. At the end, the reader finds himself snoring and nodding too much for the novel's good and wondering how the hell a book with an interesting premise like this can end up being such a dreadful yawn fest.

In some ways, PKD is a horrible writer and "Ubik" really does its share in confirming the cliché by which he is largely known: that of an author with great ideas but poor literary skills to develop them satisfactorily on paper. A pity, yes, but that's how the thing goes... If you are not a Dick "fanatic" of the very first degree, you'd better stick to SOME of his best short stories; they will certainly give you "more" for "less"...

As to me, I think I shall be definitely avoiding Dick's novels in the future like the plague, as this is not precisely my first disappointment with this author as "long prose works" go.

I've been reading Science Fiction (I hate the name) for the better part of the last 40 years, so I guess you can say I know a little about the genre.

Ubik is one of those books that I've been using to keep doors ajar, to level tables. I finally burned it in a camp fire. It was a pleasure to see the book be slowly consumed by the fire, finally serving some noble purpose, namely, warming me and my family in a cold autumn night...

Like most of Dick's work, Ubik is pretentious, high-nosed, the type or literary garbage that is admired by pseudo-intellectuals.And, as it is always the case, there is some evil corporation involved in the plot. No wonder so many of his books have been adapted to films. To make things worse, it is extremely boring tedious, uninteresting.

I hated it with all my guts!