Will I love Ubik?

This is a sci-fi book from famous sci-fi author Phillip K. Dick. Besides suggesting some big, scary questions, it didn't exactly stick to what I usually go for in a sci-fi book.

For a while, it involved this product, Ubik, which has so many uses that it's everywhere. But the story drew me in with a relatively everyman-type guy on a team of psionic corporate spies—and then things get weird. It's the kind of weird like when I was struggling to remember this amazing horror movie I had seen, only to realize the media in question had actually been this… show more.

Finally got around to reading this, and baby, it blew my mind. A crazily original mash-up of science fiction and edge-of-the-seat thriller, with a heavy dose of complete mindfuck. Nothing else like it.

I loved this book for the new concepts it brought to me about psychic abilities, specifically telepaths that could block other’s psychic abilities.

After this, I was drawn to the book for the way it blurred the lines of reality, making me question alongside the main character if anything they were experiencing was real. I also thought the idea of the UBIK drug that kept people in a 'half-life' was fascinating and a different way to show addiction and its consequences.

Lastly, the ending was quite thrilling and kept me reading into the wee hours of the morning, even though… show more.

Back when psychics were all the rage in science fiction, this novel takes it to the next level with a mystery that kept me guessing until the last reveal.

This novel takes the typical detective tropes and adds world-bending twists that so many science fiction stories have copied. One of my favorites and a great entry into Philip K. Dick’s work.

Ubik is everything I love in a science fiction book – a metaphysical comedy full of alternate realities, dystopian futures, paranoia, time, death, salvation, and madness.

A psi-powers suspense mystery thriller which only my favorite author could create which has greatly influenced so many writers and movie makers ever since it was first published. If a Ubik movie was ever made, I think viewers would complain they’ve seen its plot too many times before, but they wouldn’t realize that is because so many other writers have copied and duplicated it.

In a time when cryo-technology allows the recently deceased to maintain brain activity for years in cold storage, successful businessman Glen Runciter consults with his late wife, Ella, who has been dead for over two decades.

Glen and Ella manage a company that employs a team of anti-telepaths with a unique ability to seek out and neutralize telepaths who pose a danger to society. One of Runciter’s senior recruiters, Joe Chip, introduces a new prospect with a unique ability to telepathically travel into the past and alter history. 

As someone who enjoys both science fiction and the paranormal, I was… show more.

Ubik is one of the first Sci-Fi novels I read and has stuck with me the most. Moreso than Dune and any of the others I read during my first heady introduction to the genre where I was devouring any and everything my library had in that area. Dick created such a trippy but believable world I questioned my own reality for weeks after reading this book. Set in the future (for him since he was writing in the first half of the 20th century) in a world where we have colonized the moon and psychic powers are common,… show more.

Reality always seems to be something of a moving target in Philip K. Dick’s books. No other writer gives me the same kind of thrilling vertigo as I get when I enter into his worlds because no other writer treats the idea of reality so skeptically. Everything in Dick’s fictional world is open to doubt, corruption, or complete overthrow – there’s really no safe place for his characters, or us, to stand. I think Ubik is the book where he takes this to the extreme, pushing those feelings of anxiety and dislocation until it’s very close to being a horror… show more.

PKD is the master of stripping away the veils of the so-called real world and uncovering the wonders of the Reality that lies beneath—and Ubik is my favorite of his novels. Reading PKD is like ingesting a mind-expanding drug. You’ll want to touch the wall after consuming Ubik, just to make sure the room you’re in is solid and actually there. Questioning the nature of what we assume to be real, as PKD does so well, can lead us to truly transcendent levels of Reality.