The novel “Ubik” by Philip K. Dick was published for the first time in 1969.
Glen Runciter is the owner of an agency that offers the services of inertials, people who can neutralize psi powers and thus prevent them from gaining access to business secrets. His wife Ella helps him even though she’s been dead for a long time because she’s kept in half-life in a so-called moratorium. Unfortunately, her conscience was attacked by the one from a boy in half-life whose mental signals are very strong.
Joe Chip, a technician employed by Glen Runciter, meets Pat Conley, who has the power to change the past. The agency receives a request for inertials from a company based on the Moon and Runciter decides to include Pat as well in the intervention team. The job on the Moon turns out to be a trap but it’s only the beginning of a series of strange events.
“Ubik” is set in 1992, what at the time when Philip K. Dick wrote his novel was seen as a future in which humanity expanded to the Moon and there are people with mental powers such as precognition, telepathy, and telekinesis. Those powers can be negated by the mental powers of the so-called inertials. Certain powers are useful for industrial espionage, so there are so-called prudential agencies that employ inertials to avoid such access to their clients’ secrets.
Another frontier explored in that future concerns death: a special form of cryostasis allows the dead to be kept in half-life, a state in which they have mental activity and can communicate thanks to special equipment.
These are the foundations for a story that is like a roller coaster, with brief moments in which the situation seems calm alternating with others in which things are totally changed that can affect whatever exists around the characters. Reality literally changes under the eyes of the characters and in particular of Joe Chip, who on the Moon finds himself in a decidedly unexpected situation. That represents only the beginning of a story that takes away any point of reference from the protagonists and readers.
Throughout the story, a constant presence is Ubik, which in the introduction to each chapter is advertised as a product that is different every time and at some point becomes an integral part of the plot. In the introduction to the final chapter, Ubik becomes something quite different.
All these elements offer a series of insights connected to postmodern literature, psychology, and religion. Philip K. Dick built his own complex cosmogony based on religious elements inspired above all by Gnosticism. In this novel, psychological elements get mixed with Joe Chip’s time regression, as he goes back to a time before the machines he always quarrels with, a satirical element against advertising and the media, which were already powerful manipulators at the time.
The result is a set of conflicting entities and forces that, at least in part, Philip K. Dick himself claimed to know from direct experience. The importance of the novel also from that point of view is also shown by the fact that the author spoke of it extensively in his Exegesis.
For all these reasons, “Ubik” is a novel that had a significant influence that goes far beyond the science fiction genre. Later works, not only literary ones, have been more or less inspired by this one, and the development of virtual reality made this author a very important source of inspiration. There are different opinions on which is Dick’s most important masterpiece and certainly “Ubik” is a must-read for anyone who wants to get to know this author and his influence.
