Ubik
1969
- fiction
- death
- businessmen
- explosions
- science fiction
- fiction, science fiction, general
- iowa, fiction
- fiction, humorous
- fiction / science fiction / general
- fiction / literary
The story
Named one of Time's 100 Best Books, Ubik is a mind-bending, classic novel about the perception of reality from Philip K. Dick, the Hugo Award-winning author of The Man in the High Castle. “From the stuff of space opera, Dick spins a deeply unsettling existential horror story, a nightmare you’ll never be sure you’ve woken up from.”—Lev Grossman, Time Glen Runciter runs a lucrative business — deploying his teams of anti-psychics to corporate clients who want privacy and security from psychic spies. But when he and his top team are ambushed by a rival, he is gravely injured and placed in “half-life,” a dreamlike state of suspended animation. Soon, though, the surviving members of the team begin experiencing some strange phenomena, such as Runciter’s face appearing on coins and the world seeming to move backward in time. As consumables deteriorate and technology gets ever more primitive, the group needs to find out what is causing the shifts and what a mysterious product called Ubik has to do with it all. “More brilliant than similar experiments conducted by Pynchon or DeLillo.”—Roberto Bolaño
What it’s like
Dry, bureaucratic 1960s America bent slightly out of true: the prose is brisk and matter-of-fact, full of cheap consumer goods, cigarette-scented offices, sedans and shabby apartments, and the sensory world keeps decaying on the page as products age, coins warp and technology slides backward into crude, dimming versions of itself. The mood is paranoid and wry at once, a sun-bleached unease that turns almost comic in its absurdity and then curdles into dread, the sort of book that feels like a stifling summer afternoon with the air-conditioning failing. Its rhythm is quick and cliffhanger-driven, with short chapters, abrupt shifts of scene and jolts of violence that land sharply but briefly, including explosions, an ambush, and a few grim deaths, with no gore for its own sake. Its emotional register is cool and ironic, and its central figures are ordinary, faintly weary men and women who are gradually stripped of certainty, slowly learning they cannot trust what they see. It suits a late-night read alone, a long train journey, or anyone who wants a witty, unsettling science fiction puzzle with a melancholy undertow, written for readers who enjoy existential paranoia, mordant humour and the unease of a world that will not hold still.
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