Ubik is a charming novel. Philip K Dick is so good at building worlds, and the metamorphosis that the world in Ubik undergoes as you turn through it pages, enthralled, is a complex delight. With a cast of characters that feels almost too big, (but really only having a few that really matter) - and amusing, mysterious quips about Ubik at the start of each chapter, it has pacing and narrative depth that fools you into thinking it will be a much lighter read than it ends up being.
The protagonist of Ubik is probably Joe Chip, who has a strange job. He is a talent scout for Runciter Associates. Talent scout doesn't mean HR, and this is far from a human relations periodical. He hunts down people who have psionic abilities, tests them to see what their powers are, then refers them into the organisation for work. They could be telepathic individuals, they could be pre-cogs, able to see the future, or they could be something more.
The book swings between the real world, where deep conversations and observations made by characters progress the plot, to the Half-Life, where dead people are in a sort of suspended animation, and exist as entities that can be spoken to, extending the life span of organisations and dynasties to potentially hundreds of years - and then into vivid and wild descriptions of the mere act of observing the mundane, as the world undergoes strange and unexpected phenomena.
The other thing that this book is - astonishingly, (for someone who I thought was always a constantly serious author) genuinely funny. Be it the strange fashion choices of the characters (for example, a beanie with a propeller on the top?! I WANT one!) or a Tweed Toga; the eclectic sense of fashion and style permeates not only the visual descriptors, but also the haphazardness of the world and the larger than life personalities that inhabit the story.
It is a time when every appliance is coin operated, and they all speaks to their customers, who, in particular, Joe Chip, never has enough money. The machine intelligence torments its users with wit and sass that would make modern linguists beam with joy at the way in which the English language is used. (Something they would certainly not do reading this review).
Furthermore, this gains more contemporary relevance owing to the fact that I am reading this book in 2025, and with everything wanting to be a subscription or a service model, the idea of having a coin operated coffee pot in your own home is not unlikely, what with the proliferation pod machines and mislabelled devices carrying the moniker of "AI". But the idea of a fridge that bills you every time you open it to peek inside? I'm glad people in marketing and product design can't read because Ubik could also be a preview of a future dystopia.
If it is, I want a job insulting those who can't afford to put the right currency in their machines.
So - what do we have so far? Psionic abilities, a massive organisation known as Runciter Associates, and a technologically advanced, capitalist landscape. And then, as the blurb of the book tells us. Glen Runciter is Dead. Or is he?
Only, that spoiler doesn't happen for many chapters - and it is right there on the blurb. This isn't a whodunnit sort of mystery, but it reads more like Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency, the excellent novel by Douglas Adams. Only, Ubik was published a few decades prior, so it is probably better to say that this book inspired Douglas Adams somewhat in his later writing. And that's a great thing.
Because, this is a great book, filled with page turning intrigue, mystery about the world, and something that asks, rather indirectly, and somehow softly - big philosophical questions like What is time? What is observation? What is reality? While it doesn't answer all of these questions in a satisfying and conclusive manner, the fact that it asks them at all, makes this tale linger in my mind.
This is simply one man's view on a book that should be read by anyone who enjoys speculative fiction, and ... now I fear, I really must go dive much deeper into Philip K Dick's works, because I think I might just enjoy all of them. Only, there are so many. Valis is likely up next.