Spurious
Ubik
Questioned signature, Book Club edition, 1969
Ubik (1969) is one of Philip K. Dick's most important novels, a hallucinatory thriller in which a group of psychic operatives return from a botched mission to find reality itself regressing around them, held at bay only by a mysterious consumer product. Science Fiction Book Club edition, issued the same year as the Doubleday first edition and matching its design.
Probably Not Signed. This copy is purportedly signed by Dick on the front free endpaper with the inscription: "why did you spend good money on this book? / Philip K. Dick." The sentiment is appealing. It sounds like something Dick might genuinely have written, and the self-deprecating humor is consistent with his character. However, several factors raise doubt. The inscription has no recipient, which is unusual for a personal inscription of this kind. There are signs of hesitation in the letterforms, and the flow of the signature feels a bit labored rather than natural. The copy has no provenance, purchased online from a source in Idaho who claimed the copy and other signed copies came from the estate of a science fiction fan but declined to disclose the identity when asked.
More tellingly, a second inscribed copy from the same source had previously been listed and sold. We tracked down that listing, and it was a copy of The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch, inscribed in the same hand: "this is a remaindered copy, I made no profit on it at all. / Philip K. Dick." Again no recipient. Again a wry, self-deprecating sentiment that sounds plausibly like Dick. Again a book club edition with no provenance. Book club editions are a known target for forgers precisely because they can be acquired cheaply, and the potential return on a convincing signed copy can be significant. As one dealer put it: "It's savage out there, man." Unfortunately for collectors, PKD is targeted more than most.
This copy was acquired relatively inexpensively and with eyes open, less as a collectible than as a representation of the problem itself, a reminder that the market for PKD signatures rewards skepticism. We once bought a pair of confirmed Vonnegut fakes for similar reasons and ultimately destroyed those copies so they could not pass to another buyer. This one we have kept, documented, and flagged. If the person who originally owned this copy can share convincing provenance, we are genuinely eager to learn our assessment is wrong. But for now, the scanner sees darkly about the authenticity of this one. As much as we would prefer otherwise.
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. #11406.
Near fine in price clipped dust jacket.
Probably Not Signed. This copy is purportedly signed by Dick on the front free endpaper with the inscription: "why did you spend good money on this book? / Philip K. Dick." The sentiment is appealing. It sounds like something Dick might genuinely have written, and the self-deprecating humor is consistent with his character. However, several factors raise doubt. The inscription has no recipient, which is unusual for a personal inscription of this kind. There are signs of hesitation in the letterforms, and the flow of the signature feels a bit labored rather than natural. The copy has no provenance, purchased online from a source in Idaho who claimed the copy and other signed copies came from the estate of a science fiction fan but declined to disclose the identity when asked.
More tellingly, a second inscribed copy from the same source had previously been listed and sold. We tracked down that listing, and it was a copy of The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch, inscribed in the same hand: "this is a remaindered copy, I made no profit on it at all. / Philip K. Dick." Again no recipient. Again a wry, self-deprecating sentiment that sounds plausibly like Dick. Again a book club edition with no provenance. Book club editions are a known target for forgers precisely because they can be acquired cheaply, and the potential return on a convincing signed copy can be significant. As one dealer put it: "It's savage out there, man." Unfortunately for collectors, PKD is targeted more than most.
This copy was acquired relatively inexpensively and with eyes open, less as a collectible than as a representation of the problem itself, a reminder that the market for PKD signatures rewards skepticism. We once bought a pair of confirmed Vonnegut fakes for similar reasons and ultimately destroyed those copies so they could not pass to another buyer. This one we have kept, documented, and flagged. If the person who originally owned this copy can share convincing provenance, we are genuinely eager to learn our assessment is wrong. But for now, the scanner sees darkly about the authenticity of this one. As much as we would prefer otherwise.
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. #11406.
Near fine in price clipped 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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