Philip Dick - Ubik

Joe said reflexively, “To say ‘negative ions’ is redundant. All ions are negative.”

Again the girl moved away. “Maybe I’ll see you again,” she said gently. “It was rewarding to bring you the spray can; maybe next time—”

“Maybe we can have dinner together,” Joe said.

“I’ll look forward to it.” She ebbed farther and farther away.

“Who invented Ubik?” Joe asked.

“A number of responsible half-lifers whom Jory threatened. But principally by Ella Runciter. It took her and them working together a long, long time. And there still isn’t very much of it available, as yet.” Ebbing from him in her trim, covert way, she continued to retreat and then, by degrees, was gone.

“At the Matador,” Joe called after her. “I understand Jory did a good job materializing it. Or regressing it just right, whatever it is he does.” He listened, but the girl did not answer.

Carefully carrying the spray can of Ubik, Joe Chip walked out to greet the evening traffic, searching for a cab.

Under a streetlight he held up the spray can of Ubik, read the printing on the label.

I THINK HER NAME IS MYRA LANEY, LOOK ON REVERSE SIDE OF CONTAINER FOR ADDRESS AND PHONE NUMBER.

“Thanks,” Joe said to the spray can. We are served by organic ghosts, he thought, who, speaking and writing, pass through this our new environment. Watching, wise, physical ghosts from the full-life world, elements of which have become for us invading but agreeable splinters of a substance that pulsates like a former heart. And of all of them, he thought, thanks to Glen Runciter. In particular. The writer of instructions, labels and notes. Valuable notes.

He raised his arm to slow to a grumpy halt a passing 1936 Graham cab.

Glen Runciter could not find the moratorium owner.

“Are you sure you don’t know where he is?” Runciter asked Miss Beason, the moratorium owner’s secretary. “It’s essential that I talk to Ella again.”

“I’ll have her brought out,” Miss Beason said. “You may use office 4-B; please wait there, Mr. Runciter; I will have your wife for you in a very short time. Try to make yourself comfortable.”

Locating office 4-B, Runciter paced about restlessly. At last a moratorium attendant appeared, wheeling in Ella’s casket on a handtruck. “Sorry to keep you waiting,” the attendant said; he began at once to set up the electronic communing mechanism, humming happily as he worked.

In short order the task was completed. The attendant checked the circuit one last time, nodded in satisfaction, then started to leave the office.

“This is for you,” Runciter said, and handed him several fifty-cent pieces which he had scrounged from his various pockets. “I appreciate the rapidity with which you accomplished the job.”

“Thank you, Mr. Runciter,” the attendant said. He glanced at the coins, then frowned. “What kind of money is this?” he said.

Runciter took a good long look at the fifty-cent pieces. He saw at once what the attendant meant; very definitely, the coins were not as they should be. Whose profile is this? he asked himself. Who’s this on all three coins? Not the right person at all. And yet he’s familiar. I know him.

And then he recognized the profile. I wonder what this means, he asked himself. Strangest thing I’ve ever seen. Most things in life eventually can be explained. But—Joe Chip on a fifty-cent piece?

It was the first Joe Chip money he had ever seen.

He had an intuition, chillingly, that if he searched his pockets, and his billfold, he would find more.

This was just the beginning.

Philip K. Dick was born in Chicago in 1928 and lived most of his life in California. He briefly attended the University of California, but dropped out before completing any classes. In 1952 he began writing professionally and proceeded to write thirty-six novels and five short story collections. He won the Hugo Award for best novel in 1962 for The Man in the High Castle and the John W. Campbell Memorial Award for best novel of the year in 1974 for Flow My Tears The Policeman Said . Died of heart failure following a stroke on March 2, 1982, in Santa Ana, California.

Philip K. Dick’s Ubik (1969) is, for this reader, one of the most important SF works of the 1960s, for it is both deconstruction and a hint at reconstruction: it lays bare the principal ways that SF is used for ideological ends, in terms of science and of fiction, while tentatively looking towards a future freed from the restraints it has exposed. In this novel Dick has exploded and transcended the SF genre and the “representational novel” of which it is a part.

Two general criteria are most commonly used to screen out the “trash” from those SF works which are deemed worthy of critical attention and may be included in the university curriculum. The first refers to a work’s scientific or philosophic intentions and content, by virtue of which it is described as fictionalized science (vulgarisation), or as a paradigm of the scientific method (extrapolation) which may be used to probe our contemporary problems—for instance, SF as Utopian Literature. A pedigree of academic worth may also be granted on the basis of formal criteria, involving the discovery of esthetic or literary qualities: attention to style, imagery and metaphor, and to the work’s striving towards the status of High Art. 1 These attempts to make SF respectable through its co-optation into some larger literary tradition effectively strip it of its specific or generic qualities. Thus, they also fulfill an important role in the preservation of the literary status quo and, in corollary fashion, of the society it is the university’s function to support. But such conformist critical recuperation cannot make sense of much that is best within SF, and in particular, of the writing of Philip K. Dick.

Dick’s writing is not easily included within traditional academic limits, for his novels are, in appearance, badly and carelessly written, with superficial characterization, confusing plots and similar deviations from “good writing.” This apparent inattention to writing, along with an overabundance of traditional SF details and conventions have earned him the neglect of the proponents both of high art and of the New Wave; while his sprawling, chaotic near futures and his total disregard for the traditional SF virtues of rationality and futurological plausibility have caused him to be overlooked by the proponents of the more traditional extrapolative SF. 2 However, this paper will attempt to set out, through the example of Ubik , how Dick’s SF presents a model of a more subversive form of writing which undermines rather than reconfirms the repressive system in which it has been produced, and acts as a critique of the ideological presuppositions of the SF genre and of the traditional novel in general.

AS WITH HIS OTHER FICTIONS, from Eye in the Sky (1957) and Man in the High Castle (1962) through The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch (1964) and Maze of Death (1970), Ubik is centered on the “reality problem”—on the efforts of a group of people to grasp an elusive, changing, sometimes hallucinatory and often hostile reality. The novel divides readily into two parts. The events which lead up to the explosion take place primarily on a single reality plane involving the business rivalry between Hollis Talents’ psi agents and Runciter Associates’ “inertials” (anti-psis). Then, following the explosion and death of Runciter, reality begins to lose its consistency and integrity. Although Joe Chip and the other inertials succeed in transporting Runciter to the Blessed Brethren Moratorium where the dead are preserved in “half-life”—a state between “full-life and the grave” (§2) in which the subject may be revived and communicated with as long as the waning “cephalic activity” is retained—attempts to revive Runciter fail and are superseded by the inertials’ own anxious efforts to understand what is happening to them. Faced with a disintegrating, hostile reality, they surmise that there are two opposing forces at work: a “process of deterioration” in which their reality ages and decays, and another force which counteracts the first and involves inexplicable manifestations of the dead Runciter.