Sunday, August 14, 2011

Ubik

Ubik - my latest book circle read.

It took me several chapters to get into Ubik, (written in 1969) so my first complaint is that the initial characters who meet up in order to carry out some sort of project, in a 1992 of the future, are barely defined at all. The main character Joe, is absolutely fine. I liked him and got to know him. He is hard up, and constantly scrounging money, so a very human anti-hero. The others in the team, however, make hardly any impact. To me, therefore, they were just a list of names. I couldn’t work out who was who, and wasn’t terribly interested in doing so. Nor did I really understand the project and the competing team, with yet another set of names. I did, however, enjoy the humour of the doors that had to be paid before they would open, and similar futuristic jokes.

After several chapters, the story began to interest me. What was going to happen to Joe’s team, a group of people who were being struck down by an invisible force? Joe and the team are pulled back into another era – 1939 – there is a villainous woman who is working on destroying them, or so it seems, and their old boss, Runciter, apparently dead, is sending messages, trying to help them.

Things get very pear-shaped, however, for by the end of the book, we don’t know who was alive and who was dead, who was awake and who was dreaming. I got lost a little around here, but on the whole, I’d enjoyed the middle and latter end of the book.

I realised that Philip K Dick was being philosophical here. He was expressing his feelings about death – do we just go into another state and imagine we are alive? Do we dream, and do our dreams feel just like life? When Runciter tries to help Joe with the all-powerful Ubik, it seems he is talking about God, manifestations of God and perhaps faith or religion. Is Runciter God? is Joe God? Or is Ubik God? What is the difference between life and death? What is reality – and is everyone’s reality the same reality? These I think were the questions, though I don’t think Philip K Dick gave us all the answers.

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