Customer Reviews
Highly Readable 
2008-08-01
There seems to be a consensus among PKD fans that Ubik is the best place to start if you are new to the author's work. Its quick pace, wit, and spectacular imagery make for a highly entertaining read. Also, it touches on some of the major themes that recur in Dick's novels. This was the first PKD book I ever read and it got me off to a great start.
Time magazine called Ubik "one of the 100 best English-language novels from 1923 to the present." And Dick's website reported in May that Celluloid Dreams has optioned the film rights to this masterpiece. Did you love Blade Runner? That was originally a PKD book. Minority Report? Another outstanding work by PKD. Ubik is slated to be the next in line to make it to the big screen. Be sure to read the book before you see the movie.
Crazy, dark, explosive, suspenseful, and still very funny 2008-07-07
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.
Interesting take on psychic warfare 
2008-06-23
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.
reality in a can 2008-05-01
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.
Safe if taken as directed..... 
2008-04-03
Not my usual reading fare, thus I was a bit lost for the first few chapters.
Then the pace changed and the novel morphed and emerged with humor, wit, and surprises that were quite brilliant.
Sci-Fi aficionados will be highly entertained!
Take only as directed....
Susanne
Claustrophobic Nightmare 2008-03-18
Philip K. Dick's searing metaphysical comedy of death and salvation is a tour de force of panoramic menace and unfettered slapstick, in which the departed give business advice, shop for their next incarnation, and run the continual risk of dying yet again.
You've got the history right under reality's skin 2008-01-13
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.
Enjoyable 2008-01-08
Where PKD falters in prose style (and there are some "ouches" in this book) he makes up for in strong plot, imagination, pacing, and overall brio. There is a lovely gratuitous scene in which a women removes her shirt. No reason. Hence one is transported, in a cool way, to the Sixties, and the exigencies of publishing at that time. Call it a meta-appreciation. But that great plot idea!
Ubiquitous? 2007-09-19
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.
One of the best from the author of "Blade Runner" 2007-09-11
Ubik is one the better books written by Sci-Fi author Philip K. Dick. Dick mostly wrote in the 1960's and most of his books have the same theme - what is reality? Dick developed a following as much for his lifestyle as for his books. To appreciate and judge Ubik you really need to understand the author more than the author of a typical sci-fi space opera. So here goes.
First of all Dick was nuts. Certifiably. In and out of asylum kind of nuts. His whole life. He was also into every drug you can imagine. His personal life was a shambles. His books never really sold well - as a matter of fact he was on welfare or bummed off of friends most of his life. No one knows whether anything Dick said was true or not. Many of his claims are clearly false. Some are not. He apparently was monitored by the FBI at some time, but then so were most malcontents of that period. But the prime suspect in a break-in of Dick's house was - Dick himself - as Dick himself admitted.
Dick liked to go to sci-fi conventions and use drugs. The 1968 Bay area sci-fi convention was known as "Drugcon" (Drug Convention) due to the prevalence of various mind-altering chemicals. This is important because one of Dick's novels main problems is that Dick's novels and stories often don't make sense.
Dick's main theme of "Are you sure exactly what reality is?" is used in multiple books. Dick won the Hugo award for an early book "The Man in the High Castle" in 1963. Ubik was written in 1969 and is much better, in my opinion, although it won no awards.
Dick's novels suffered from a sameness once the originality of alternate and unknown realities wore off. His greatest failing was his characterization. Most of his characters are one-dimensional and unlikeable. Ubik, however, has the best characterization and several characters are fleshed out rather well. Another Dick characteristic was to look at relations between men and women as purely mechanical sex and almost no romance. He also didn't do extensive re-writes or revisions, leaving finished works that were self-contradictory and senseless in some aspects. Many people judge Dick on the movies made from his writings - particularly "Blade Runner" with Harrison Ford and "Total Recall" with Arnold Schwarzenegger. These scripts were written by others, cleaned up, changed and forced to make sense, so they are really not Dick's work at all.
In Ubik, as in his other writings, much of the plot doesn't make sense or contradicts earlier occurrences. In part, Dick was trying to make reality fuzzy, but mostly Dick himself didn't know or care whether each plot occurrence made sense and agreed with what was already written. Some claim this is what makes them good, but I personally think these people are on mind-altering chemicals themselves.
At any rate, Ubik is compulsively readable. In most of Dick's other books there are stretches that are simply boring. But Ubik has a relentless pace and a mind-twisting ending that makes pretty good sense - at least I think it does - kind of - well maybe not - but I still liked it.
The plot of the book should probably not be known before you read the book, so if you haven't read it skip this next part. Briefly, in a future where the dead are frozen in a kind of half-life, a tragedy between a good and evil group of characters immerses them in this same mind-bending half-life.
I enjoyed this book in spite of its weaknesses. You can either buy it singly or as part of the new Library of America anthology containing Hugo award-winning "The Man in the High Castle", "The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch", "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep" (the source of "Blade Runner") and Ubik. Either way, it is an interesting and influential book.
