Ubik

Philip K. Dick

4 ideas

1. Joe Chip's world regresses after Luna

   After Glen Runciter's team of anti-psi agents is lured to the Moon and caught in a bomb blast, Runciter appears to die and Joe Chip and the survivors bring him back to Earth. Once there they find that cigarettes go stale, cream sours, coins turn into obsolete currency, and machines revert to 1939 models, while teammates wither and die one by one. Runciter's face shows up on coins and his messages appear in graffiti and TV ads, which suggests that the survivors are the ones in half-life and Runciter is the one outside, trying to reach them.

2. Half-life as a dim, drained consciousness

   In the novel's future, the recently dead are kept in cold-pac at moratoriums, where their minds persist in a weakening state that the living can consult for a fee. Each conversation draws down a finite store of remaining vitality, so a consultation is a real cost to the dead person. The dead also share one substrate and can bleed into each other's experience, which lets a stronger half-lifer such as the child Jory feed on and shape the others.

3. Entropy as reversion to earlier forms

   The novel shows decay as objects sliding back to earlier versions of themselves instead of falling into chaos: a TV becomes a radio, a jet becomes a biplane, and a modern elevator becomes a caged lift. From this angle, the present is a thin layer that has to be continually maintained, and when that upkeep fails, things fall back to their previous forms. The effect is to make obsolescence and death look like the same process.

4. Ubik, the reality-restoring aerosol product

   Ubik is sold in a spray can, and its epigraph ads describe it as a beer, a coffee, a salad dressing, and a medicine. What it actually does is reverse the regression and hold reality in place for a while. It works as a stand-in for commodity salvation, a consumer good that promises to fix the ontological damage the world keeps doing.

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