Alex's Reviews > Ubik

"Our own homegrown Borges" is how Ursula Le Guin describes Philip K. Dick, because they both use writing to question the nature of reality. Both writers assume that everything is up for debate: the story, the page it's written on, the author writing it.

Dick is my favorite of the pack of mid-century science fiction writers. (The "Big Three" of Heinlein, Asimov and Clarke, plus Bradbury, Le Guin and him.) He's best known as a short story writer; of his 44 novels, The Man in the High Castle is his most famous but it's pretty flawed, so when Lev Grossman wants him represented on Time Magazine's top 100 novels of an arbitrary period, Ubik is up.

But who are the characters? What is the setting? Does anyone exist? What time is it? In 2016 I'm reading a book written in 1969, set in 1992, decaying to 1939. Here's a chart.


Here's what happens: (view spoiler)[Joe Chip, his femme fatale Pat Conley, and their whole anti-psionic team are assassinated via bomb by the psi organization Hollis. They are all stashed in cryo sleep, where they can be somewhat communicated with by (among others) their employer and sole surviver Runciter. There they're ambushed by a powerful cryo sleeper named Jory, who manipulates their near-death dreams in order to swallow their souls. (hide spoiler)] Every chapter is basically a twist ending to the chapter before it - this book is like a series of trapdoors - and in the final twist, (view spoiler)[Runciter realizes that he too is dead. They have perhaps all been invading each other's dreams. (hide spoiler)]

Ubik - pronounced like "ubiquitous" - is slippery. Nostalgia is death, literally, and Ubik (in its MacGuffin form, as an aerosol spray) is the new, which might save you - at least temporarily. But why the cynical ads for Ubik products at the top of each chapter? That implies that it's rotten itself. It doesn't seem to work very well, anyway.



This is anticlimactic if you try too hard to explain it. The answer isn't the answer; the question is the answer. (Whee!) It's fun to wrestle all this out, but there's no explanation that totally satisfies. Like Kafka, Dick isn't trying to write something that makes sense. He's trying to point out that nothing makes sense. Reality is subjective and you will never be sure that the one you experience is "real."

So far so Borgesian, but there's a difference: Borges knows he's playing. For Dick the questions are more serious. His major influence is noir, and his books are dark, and when he questions reality he's seriously questioning reality. He doesn't really have a guess. He was beset by hallucinations throughout his life. He believed for a while that he was the reincarnated prophet Elijah. He may have been schizophrenic. He was certainly a heavy drug user. There's anguish at the bottom of his writing. Borges thinks it's neat to wonder what's real. Dick thinks it's terrifying.