UBIK | |||||||||
Philip K. Dick | |||||||||
Orion Millennium, 224 pages | |||||||||
|
A review by A.L. Sirois
Or does it? Before long, Runciter employees, including his right-hand man, Joe Chip, are receiving voice
and data messages from the supposedly deceased boss. And their world is warping and changing around them. Is
their own time running out? And who is behind it? Joe tails the disturbances past death itself, into the shadowy
world where suspended people like Runciter's wife exist. Is Joe able to communicate with her -- and Runciter,
or the person posing as Runciter -- because he has been killed, too? Is he himself held in the half-life of
suspended animation, where only UBIK, the universal product, can save him? Meanwhile, Joe's co-workers are
turning up dead, one by one.
As ever with one of Philip K. Dick's books, the plot -- crenellated though it is -- is less interesting here
than the characters, the theme, and the virtuosity of the writing. Dick's explications of his fractal reality look
easy to accomplish, but they really aren't. He seems to have taken A.E. van Vogt's self-referential writing a step
or two further into territory that even van Vogt, with his own odd grasp on reality, wasn't equipped to explore. Only
someone with a very firm grasp on and understanding of their own shifting grip on sanity could map out the less solid
nearby terra incognita as successfully as Phil Dick did.
Dick was the first SF writer to really get into playing with the heads of his readers, and getting them to
think about the nature of reality and their perceptions. For this reason, his books never really grow stale -- you
can come back to them years after the first reading and find new signposts directing you into previously obscure
pathways of your own personality. A.E. van Vogt tried to do the same, but from the inside rather than the
outside -- he was perhaps too much the product of the pulp era to really be able to focus the glass of his thematic
concerns on himself. Whereas that's all Dick could do, after a point.
Dick's better books are less novels than they are explorations of the relationship between reader, writer
and story. His explorations became even more pointed after he suffered a mental breakdown in 1981. Whether his
breakdown had anything to do with his experiments with drugs remains unclear, but subsequently it became harder
to separate Dick from his work. It seems pretty clear that's what he had in mind, or, at least, it's a side
effect that he would have found perfectly appropriate.
As a result, reading his stuff is at once a venture into the mind of a highly creative man, and a fictional
roller coaster ride -- because Dick's work took on a slightly hysterical apocalyptic tinge as it grew
darker. It may be that reading Phil Dick is as close as one can get to the world of the paranoid schizophrenic, without going too far.
It's tempting to point at Dick's work and say, "This is the key to the 21st century," but we ought to resist
the temptation, at least for another ten or fifteen years. It may well be that key, but perhaps it doesn't behoove
us to examine it too closely for fear of what we might find.
Which is probably what Philip K. Dick wanted.
(By the way, let me add a brief note about the cover art. I can't tell if it's a reprint from an older
SF magazine -- it rather looks that way -- but the feral-faced and somewhat sallow woman pressed against what
seems to be a grimy spaceport wall in the rain really suits UBIK nicely, although the artwork has nothing at all
to do with the books contents.)
A.L. Sirois walks the walk, too. He's a longtime member of SFWA and currently serves the organization as webmaster for the SFWA BULLETIN. His personal site is at http://www.w3pg.com/jazzpolice. |
![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() |
If you find any errors, typos or other stuff worth mentioning,
please send it to editor@sfsite.com.
Copyright © 1996-2014 SF Site All Rights Reserved Worldwide