Ubik – Philip K. Dick

Rating: 4 stars

To begin this review, I want to say that I’ll be including a number of spoilers. It’s a nearly 50-year-old book, and you should have read it by now (or before reading such a review). You have your warning.

To start, I will list off the negatives, because I love Philip K. Dick. A friend once shared an anecdote that Dick was always so desperate for money that he never wrote second drafts. Everything he got published was a first draft. I don’t know how true that is, but it certainly reads like that. As Stephen King is the author who writes interesting stories with bad conclusions, Dick is the author who writes fantastic stories with awful everything. It’s the ideas that count.

Okay, now to the positives. The contents of the book is intriguing. The premise is that there’s a way to temporarily preserve consciousnesses after death. So the metaphysical is already the topic of the day. The characters openly introduce the Tibetan Book of the Dead and talk about a red light, rebirth and all that jazz. I don’t know too much about buddhism other than the basics, but I’m not sure Dick knows that much, either. I believe that it was a very common phenomenon of that period (the late 1960s) to feign knowledge of the alternate philosophies, especially eastern or the like. This is somewhat mirrored in Joe Chip, the protagonist, and his disdain for modern technology and its greed.

I believe it’s supposed to be played for laughs: the door that won’t open on its own, the space-plane that requires payment after landing, Chip’s rant about how homeostatic machines are keeping the man down, his troubles with money, all that stuff. But then there’s the more intriguing aspects of time regression once they revert into what may or not be half-life (as its termed in the book, the post-death experience of being on ice). Chip still has his money problems, but he seems to get along much better in certain aspects when the world reverts to 1939. I believe that it’s a bit of Dick complaining about his problems in real life.

Let’s move on to the meat of the story and the part that the author wants forefront: the cosmological confrontation of Eastern, Western and Middle theology. I say middle because there’s a strong hint of Zoroastrianism and Gnosticism in his approach. The whole deal with psychics/precogs/anti-whatever/Pat and her weird talent doesn’t seem to last very long. After the first act is complete, all of those shenanigans are dropped except for a brief mention near the end, but it doesn’t warrant much attention in my opinion. Psychic/supernatural phenomena seems to be mortal or mundane reflections of godliness or perhaps the over-bearing 1960s philosophy how technology would unite wordiness with God (or god), much like the proliferation and machine-dispensed drugs. See also the Lathe of Heaven for how much old Science Fiction writers liked drugs being common. We’re still holding out for that to happen.

So we have Chip, Glen Runciter, Ella Runciter, Pat Connor and Jory as the four forces in the book. Chip is normal, so he’s there to represent humanity, the author and you, the reader. It’s pretty simple, and it’s kinda obvious with him being the protagonist.

Glen Runciter is the lamb of God. He goes up to the moon with 11 disciples and is blown up by a bomb, seemingly a Judas. I didn’t really pay too much attention to the various side characters because they were only briefly characterized at all. They do feature more sexual diversity than the actual apostles, however, so that’s nice. Then he shows up obliquely for the vast majority of the story, as hints or ‘manifestations.’ In what felt like the most obvious part of the allegory, Glen is dead three days before he shows up again.

At the end he comes again and helps, but he doesn’t have all the answers. Chip even corrects him on some things and informs him (and us) of developments, so we can see that this isn’t the traditional Christian morality tale.

Ella Runciter is the father of the trio. She only shows up at the beginning (maybe at the conception) and towards the end with a solution to the antagonist, Ubik. According to wikipedia and Dick’s ex-wife, Ubik is the old testament God. That makes sense in some ways because Ella is human, dead and moving onto a new reincarnation (no longer in the realm of Christianity, or so it seems). And it does make sense that Ubik acts in mysterious ways, often hung out as the solution, and Chip only achieves his connection with it towards the end.

However, going against that is that Ella reveals towards the end that it was invented by her and other residents of half-life. To me, it sounds a lot like heaven or enlightenment, an instrument of Buddha/God.

Then let’s get on to Pat and Jory. Now, because I’m much more aware of Christian and Jewish dogma, my knowledge fails me. These two characters are the antagonists, and they both seem to somewhat occupy the space of the devil. Pat is a temptress (a big fault of Dick is always having a woman of the same characteristics being a part of or the enemy), and she (not very subtly) has a tattoo of “caveat emptor.” I believe she is the aspect of the devil that buys souls and such, being financially endowed and all-powerful in her somewhat mysterious way.

However, the real antagonist of the book turns out to be Jory. He’s a much more corporeal and understandable evil. He is stuck in half-life with everyone (beside Glen, kinda, more on that later), but he kills others to prolong his life. Ella says that, even if Jory himself were to be killed, there are a million like him. So that gives the idea that he’s a human who has become all-consuming. So humans are the real evil, I guess? Or he could be the evil god of Zoroastrianism. I have no idea. His motives are definitely way more relatable than Pat, who seems to be a mystery the whole time.

As far as characters and their meaning, I have no idea going on with them. I think Dick didn’t really know what was going on either. I remember a quote somewhere from some author about how if they had all the answers, they wouldn’t be writing books. I like that because I don’t have any idea in my own books either.

So, as an addendum, I want to talk briefly about the levels of existence. There is the real world and half-life. I believe the real world to be heaven or the afterlife and the half-life to be the real world. It’s where the action of the book predominantly happens, for starters. Glen exists on the outside, too, has limited ways of interacting with half-life, and there is one other important character there, the owner of the moratorium. He seems to be like a Charon or something. Or maybe it’s another Zoroastrianism thing.

The big twist comes in the last chapter, about a page long. Glen, on the outside, starts to receive the same hallucinations that Chip had as an indication of him being in half-life. I don’t know, and I’m not going to worry about it too much. Off the top of my head, I could cite a few things: a reversal indicating that the real world actually is that, an indication that no one (not even Jesus) is immune to the pressures of the world, the coming of the end of the world, that the layman is salvation, etc. Whatever!

As with many of Dick’s works, don’t go in expecting to find answers because no single explanation will give you the answers you want. But it’ll get you thinking, and that’s why I read them.