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Title: Ubik
Score:
Author: Philip K. Dick
Rating: Not available
Hits: 137

Review of Ubik

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Comments for Ubik

• Posted on 2009-10-19
  The writing is dated, but the plot is wonderfully convoluted
  
  You probably already know the basic plot, so I won't bore you with that.
  
  The plot is very convoluted and explores the nature of reality and consciousness and what we can know is real.
  
  The story itself starts slow and gains steam in the 2nd half of the book, which by the way at only 200 pages is just right.
  
  My only gripe is that the writing style is quite dated and - I don't know if he tried, but for a sci-fi writer, Dick sure didn't predict 1992 very well. Some of his ideas seem cliched by today's standards and others missed the mark.
  
  Overall, a quick, thought-provoking read.
  
  RECOMMENDATION: If you like these sorts of twisted stories, read Bad Monkeys by Matt Ruff - I liked it a lot more than this - although I know that is blasphemy to sci-fi zealots. Oh well.
  
  
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• Posted on 2009-09-28
  Not the best Dick
  
  I like PKD but I did not like Ukib. The writing seemed amateurish and because of this I assumed it must have been one of his first novels (it isn't). None of the characters have any depth and in fact many are so poorly developed that they are hard to tell apart. The science fiction ideas in Ubik aren't especially interesting. I recommend you don't bother with this until you've read Dick's other major works.
  
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• Posted on 2009-07-22
  The most amazing scifi book ever
  
  This is one of my favorite science fiction books ever. It was like the Twilight Zone written in a parallel universe, in which telepathy is real. It is not so far fetched that someday life might be preserved by letting people survive in a cryogenic state while their minds remain active.
  
  Ubik is a mysterious substance that the protagonists hope will restore the world to sanity. Remember, it's not US that are insane...it's THEM!
  
  Maybe I will come up with an air freshener called Ubik and market it. What do you think?
  
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• Posted on 2009-06-01
  Format for Kindle: A-
  
  This review is specific to this "printing": B000FC2O48 for Kindle and was read on a K2. Also to be clear my star rating is a reference to the story and not the formatting.
  
  Perhaps the only down-side to this Kindle edition is that the chapters cannot be navigated with the directional stick. The text is properly laid out and the chapters are given new pages. For whatever reason I always notice em dashes and this uses the correct format for them.
  
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• Posted on 2009-04-08
  Underdeveloped, But Still Very Good
  
  Overview:
  
  A well-thought-out tale, but not a complete one, Ubik is the story of the destruction of Runciter's anti-paranormal agency at the hands of its pro-paranormal counterpart, Hollis. The plot is reasonable, although not well-developed. The characters are a fairly typical Dick cast, as the Wikipedia article on this book points out. The conflict is interesting, and the resolution is nice (before the last two pages), although a lot more could have been done with this plot.
  
  The idea of people being in half-life cold-storage is underutilized, along with many other aspects of the book, suggesting that perhaps Philip Dick had something greater in mind when he wrote this, but that it lost favor in his eagerness to work on another project. Nevertheless, it was worth reading, despite ample room for improvement.
  
  A. Plot
  
  The plot of this twisted tale takes a bit to start but once it does, it is worthwhile. The first sixty pages or so merely outline the competition between Runciter's "prudence" organization of anti-psychics and Hollis's psychic spies. This would have been more meaningful and worthwhile if this was a part of a larger pantheon of stories set in the same alternate future, but, at least to the extent of my ability to tell, it is not. As such, it seems like a grinding waste of 40% of the book.
  
  Once the plot get moving along, all youknowwhat breaks loose quite fast, and then you are left wondering what just happened, because no where earlier does it suggest what a humanoid bomb is. Then, it gets crazier and weirder for a while, before all of it is nicely tied up in approximately five pages. Pretty common for a Dick novel, but that is part of the problem, no? The plot itself is interesting, I guess, but it feels more like a plot for a television show like Star Trek or the Outer Limits than it does a novel. At 160 pages, though, it is easy enough to see why.
  
  The major identifiable conflict in the story is the regression into time. As a sort of man-against-superman or man-against-god conflict, it is pretty well realized, in parts. The regression of time results in serious problems for the main characters, as their cigarettes and food go bad very fast. This begins to stop being a real problem fairly fast, as they reach 1939, and the food curiously stabilizes, along with the time. This could have been handled better, for example, if the people spent more time in each time period, or if the degeneration of the characters proceeded at a slower, more periodic pace, allowing the horror to build.
  
  This degeneration, and the subsequent loss of the survivors of the disaster, seems to owe something to Agatha Christie's classic, "And Then There Were None...". This, really, is what suggests that the loss of the characters should have proceeded more slowly, uniformly, and completely. It would have allowed the sense of horror to appropriately build, prior to the denoument.
  
  I have to make a special note of the alternate ending (or whatever) that makes up the last two or three pages. Completely unravelling the other 150+ pages, it managed to make the whole thing seem tepid and meaningless. It was kind of unfortunate. But, I can see why some people would like it; it certainly has the feeling of the author's smirk stamped into it, laughing from beyond the grave.
  
  B. Characters
  
  The characters in this are more described than they are presented, which is a weak literary technique. Mr. Runciter, for example, seems one way to me as a reader of the third-person-God-voice and a separate way as described by his employees. This inconsistency, while not damning, is never explained or utilized. Perhaps this is because of the shortness of the story, but it feels wrong somehow to work in details like that and then to leave them be.
  
  In addition, none of them ever grow, in any apparent fashion. Instead, they finish the story virtually the same as they start it. I found this rather unfortunate, and was one of the reasons that I thought that this novel could have been much better.
  
  C. Setting
  
  The setting plays an important role here, as it regresses from an alternate future 1992 to a past 1939. This regression, and the settings in the novel, were one of the most interesting aspects, as it is fun to imagine your reaction if you came around a corner and found a telegraph, rather than your email. This temporal discombobulation, and the philosophy that ensues, was the highlight of the book, even if, at times, it didn't really make sense.
  
  D. Theme
  
  The themes here are instability and confusion. The reasons for this are clear, as it is Philip Dick writing, after all. Taking ANYTHING for granted in a Philip Dick novel is a sure route to confusion. These themes are readily discovered, and are developed clearly, but they are not used in as artistic a fashion as they could be. In order to maximize this effect, there should be additional things that are taken as fact that are revealed as fantastical, such as the entire world that they lived in (as if they discovered at the end of the book that they didn't really ever exist in 1992 at all, and that it was all the creation of a sick mind, and that most of them were not real characters, as that sick mind degenerated itself, losing control both of time and cast). Just off the top of my head, that would be one way in which it could be improved.
  
  E. Point of View
  
  The point of view here is third person, limited omniscence. It adds nothing and detracts little from the story. In all actuality, individual chapters from the point of view of the protagonists would have been more appropriate in this context, particularly since the setting was so important, and the regression in time was one of the major conflicts in the novel.
  
  F. Aesthetics
  
  The aesthetics were not a major detractor to the book, nor did they contribute much. The sentences and paragraphs were appropriate in length and tone. The descriptions of virtually everything were brief and utilitarian. Nothing special here.
  
  Conclusion:
  
  Not Dick's best effort, this book is marred by its brevity. While I personally think that much of Dick's literature reached its zenith in the short story form, this novel was too short for its own good. It is still worth reading, but it seems less like something by Philip Dick than it does an episode of the Outer Limits or Star Trek. The lack of character development, and the slow plot, suggest that one of two things should have happened. Either it should have been shortened by half and been a long short story, or it should have been twice as long, used under-utilized plot threads and characters, and had a more coherent plot, perhaps with some theories as to the malignant force responsible (more, I mean, than there was).
  
  It could have been better in a number of different ways, but it certainly wasn't awful. I would recommend it to science fiction or mystery fans who are looking for a quick read.
  
  B-
  
  Harkius
  
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