Curt's Read-Bag: Ubik

[curt_holman]

Title: Ubik
By: Philip K. Dick (Modern Library; originally published in 1969)
Concerning: A team of “inertials” hired to block the hostile powers of enemy psychics experience a terrifying phenomenon that causes time to run backwards and claims lives of the group one by one.
Quote: [A description of one of the company’s TV commercials] “It shows a

Comments

[ghost_light]

Ubik is one of my top 3 Dick books. Electric Sheep and Valis are the other 2. I think you would really like Valis, but you have to go into it knowing that it is from the period where be believed aliens were beaming information directly into his brain with pink light.

[max_ambiguity]

Dick can be hit or miss, but I love Electric Sheep and Ubik in particular.

[travellight]

I think if my name was Phil Dick I'd change it.

[travellight]

Sorry. I've spent the last two days cooped up in my office alone. Just needed a juvenile moment. Back to regularly scheduled adult conversation.

[ursulahitler]

I think Dick had brilliant ideas but a clunky prose style. It's like he's doing a sub-par translation of a truly amazing foreign author.

[chris_walsh]

I've been impressed with what little of Dick I've read, especially A Scanner Darkly. That book is one of his more personal stories; his drug experience and that of his friends deeply informed it. (The book ends with a note naming his friends who died or suffered permanent injury from their time in their drug-influenced little society.)

I'll add what Richard Linklater said when he was promoting his film version: the story is funnier than you would expect. But it's jarring the way it bounces from being funny to being brutal and horrible.

Recommended.

[chris_walsh]

I'll add that I haven't seen the film version of A Scanner Darkly, so I can offer no opinions on it.