“He felt all at once like an ineffectual moth, fluttering at the windowpane of reality, dimly seeing it from outside.”
In the world of Ubik, the grave no longer separates the living from the dead. Swimming with ideas, from commodified psionic abilities to corporate espionage, lunar colonies, time travel, rampant drug use, artificial organs, Plato’s theory of forms, and The Tibetan Book of the Dead, Philip K. Dick’s snappy existential odyssey ultimately gets at the author’s favorite conceit: what is real?
It does so by quickly introducing the concept of cold-pac, a cryogenic procedure that freezes the recently deceased in a state of suspended animation, linking groups of half-lifers together in order to ward off loneliness. (Note that the first human to undergo cryogenic preservation was frozen only a couple years before Dick’s novel was published.) Then it tosses sad sack technician Mr. Joe Chip into an unstable world in which he struggles to ascertain the state of things. To Joe, the very fabric of reality is fraying around him. Storefronts, products, appliances, money—all of them appear to be regressing to earlier forms, even as other things rapidly age, including people. His memory, too, suddenly recalls slang from eras in which he’s never lived. “I think these processes are going in opposite directions,” one of Joe’s colleagues says. “One is a going-away, so to speak. A going-out-of-existence. That’s process one. The second process in a coming-into-existence.” His disorientation is compounded by manifestations of his boss, Glen Runciter, who had been killed in a lunar explosion arranged by his rival.
But then there’s Ubik, a mystical, mass-produced product that seemingly solves all of life’s problems, if the cheeky commercials that begin each chapter are taken at face value. Commonly sold in an aerosol can—though frequently found in various reverted forms such as a balm or an elixir—the miracle spray can be used to make food taste better or style hair, or to temporarily solidify reality by repelling whatever psychic force is warping the structure of time and space and causing Joe’s psychological disintegration. But where does it come from, and why is it so hard to procure? And why is Joe so cold all of a sudden?
In this way, Dick skeptically approaches the notion of cryonics, questioning what “life” would be like for a preserved individual. In turn, this allows him to interrogate our own understanding of what is real. Is Ubik consciousness? Drugs? God? Maybe we’re all just brains in a vat experiencing a consensus hallucination.
Where many PKD novels’ primary appeal lies in their transfixing ideas and philosophical musings, Ubik couples those elements with an unusually strong plot. Even so, it does seem like Dick didn’t start taking his story seriously until about a third of the way through. In fact, it almost feels as if the author was cranking out another autopilot romp and suddenly became inspired by his pile of pulpy detritus. From the point of the explosion onward, the plot is intricately constructed to prevent the reader from ever settling down, masterfully prodding them along with surreal breadcrumbs and perspective-shifting developments.
And even as it dips into esoteric cogitation on time travel, consciousness, afterlife, free will, and so forth, it mixes those heady themes with a comical approach to its drama and worldbuilding. There’s no reason for Dick to lock a man in his own home because he doesn’t have a nickel to pay the door, nor for the door to threaten to sue him when he begins dismantling it screw by screw. Or for him to describe one minor character as “looking like some amiable bug wound up in a cocoon not spun by itself,” or another as “technically” having the “intelligence of a raccoon.” Or to throw in a line as bleak as, “You know that recent Supreme Court ruling where a husband can legally murder his wife if he can prove she wouldn’t under any circumstances give him a divorce?” But he adds amusing little touches like that all over his cosmic, mind-bending game of tug of war between growth and decay, good and evil, life and death, giving Ubik a tremendous amount of personality. I’m not sure that any of the author’s novels marry his playful and contemplative sides quite so well as this exhilarating brain tickler, which is seductively profound and impossible to grasp in its fullness.