Ubik
Science Fiction Book Club, 1969
Philip K. Dick's Ubik follows Joe Chip, a technician at a psychic agency who begins to experience strange breaks in reality that can only be countered by a mysterious consumer product called Ubik. The novel expands on characters and ideas first introduced in Dick’s earlier short story “What the Dead Men Say.” First published by Doubleday in 1969. This Science Fiction Book Club (SFBC) edition. matches the design of the first edition.
Hardcover. Science Fiction Book Club edition. Octavo, bound in gray paper boards with pink lettering on spine. No date on title page. Date code "28K" on lower left margin of unnumbered page 203. . Garden City, NY: Science Fiction Book Club (SFBC), 1969. Levack 42b. Wintz & Hyde SF33.2. #11042.
Near fine in near fine dust jacket.
Hardcover. Science Fiction Book Club edition. Octavo, bound in gray paper boards with pink lettering on spine. No date on title page. Date code "28K" on lower left margin of unnumbered page 203. . Garden City, NY: Science Fiction Book Club (SFBC), 1969. Levack 42b. Wintz & Hyde SF33.2. #11042.
Near fine in near fine dust jacket.
Additional Details
Ubik (1969) is set in 1992, in a near future where psychic abilities are a commercial fact. Telepaths and precognitive agents are hired by corporations for industrial espionage, and counter-agents called inertials are employed to neutralize them. Glen Runciter runs one of the leading anti-psi prudence organizations, consulting regularly with his late wife Ella, who exists in a state called half-life, a state in which the recently dead can be kept in cold-pac moratoriums, where their residual consciousness persists for years, available for brief conversations with the living. Joe Chip is Runciter's best technician, chronically broke, so cash-poor that he can barely afford the coins his apartment door requires to let him out.
Each chapter opens with an advertisement for a consumer product called Ubik. In the early chapters the ads are cheerful and mundane. Ubik as beer, as instant coffee, as shaving cream, as salad dressing. As the novel progresses and reality begins to deteriorate around the characters, the ads grow stranger and more urgent, until the final chapter, where Ubik identifies itself not as a product at all: "I am Ubik. Before the universe was, I am. I made the suns. I made the worlds." The epigraphs enact in miniature the novel's central movement, from the banal to the cosmological, from consumer culture to something that looks uncomfortably like theology.
The plot turns when a mission goes wrong. Runciter assembles a team of inertials for a job on the Moon, but the assignment is a trap. A bomb kills Runciter, and the surviving team returns to Earth to find the world beginning to unravel around them. Objects regress toward earlier forms. Cigarettes go stale, cars revert to older models, hotel rooms furnish themselves with fixtures from the 1930s. Runciter's face begins appearing on coins. His voice reaches them through televisions and bathroom mirrors. The team members cannot agree on whether Runciter is dead and they are alive, or whether the situation is the reverse, and the novel is careful not to resolve this neatly.
The mechanism of entropy is precise and physically rendered. Technology devolves in sequence, from rocket to jet to piston engine to horse cart. A tape recorder reverts to rubber-belt drive. Joe Chip watches the regression accelerate and wonders how much time he has left. The only thing that can stabilize reality is Ubik, available in a spray can, which holds entropy at bay temporarily. Its instructions always include some variation of the phrase "safe when used as directed," a consumer reassurance that, by the final chapters, has become a kind of prayer.
Dick draws on his earlier short story "What the Dead Men Say," published in Worlds of Tomorrow in 1964, for the half-life premise, but Ubik develops the concept far beyond its origins. The novel was dedicated to Tony Boucher, the editor and critic who had championed Dick's early work. Time magazine selected it as one of the 100 best novels published since 1923, describing it as "a deeply unsettling existential horror story, a nightmare you'll never be sure you've woken up from." Originally published in hardcover by Doubleday in 1969.
Each chapter opens with an advertisement for a consumer product called Ubik. In the early chapters the ads are cheerful and mundane. Ubik as beer, as instant coffee, as shaving cream, as salad dressing. As the novel progresses and reality begins to deteriorate around the characters, the ads grow stranger and more urgent, until the final chapter, where Ubik identifies itself not as a product at all: "I am Ubik. Before the universe was, I am. I made the suns. I made the worlds." The epigraphs enact in miniature the novel's central movement, from the banal to the cosmological, from consumer culture to something that looks uncomfortably like theology.
The plot turns when a mission goes wrong. Runciter assembles a team of inertials for a job on the Moon, but the assignment is a trap. A bomb kills Runciter, and the surviving team returns to Earth to find the world beginning to unravel around them. Objects regress toward earlier forms. Cigarettes go stale, cars revert to older models, hotel rooms furnish themselves with fixtures from the 1930s. Runciter's face begins appearing on coins. His voice reaches them through televisions and bathroom mirrors. The team members cannot agree on whether Runciter is dead and they are alive, or whether the situation is the reverse, and the novel is careful not to resolve this neatly.
The mechanism of entropy is precise and physically rendered. Technology devolves in sequence, from rocket to jet to piston engine to horse cart. A tape recorder reverts to rubber-belt drive. Joe Chip watches the regression accelerate and wonders how much time he has left. The only thing that can stabilize reality is Ubik, available in a spray can, which holds entropy at bay temporarily. Its instructions always include some variation of the phrase "safe when used as directed," a consumer reassurance that, by the final chapters, has become a kind of prayer.
Dick draws on his earlier short story "What the Dead Men Say," published in Worlds of Tomorrow in 1964, for the half-life premise, but Ubik develops the concept far beyond its origins. The novel was dedicated to Tony Boucher, the editor and critic who had championed Dick's early work. Time magazine selected it as one of the 100 best novels published since 1923, describing it as "a deeply unsettling existential horror story, a nightmare you'll never be sure you've woken up from." Originally published in hardcover by Doubleday in 1969.
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