Sunday, November 29, 2020

Back to the Classics Challenge 2020: Ubik


PKD was a weird guy. That’s my summation after having now read only two of his novels.  I chose Ubik for the Back to the Classics Challenge 2020 – “Read a genre classic”.

In reading this book, it became very clear right away that PKD had a lot of fun imagining what one would wear in his projected future. It is all pretty outlandish, such as:

 “A young stringbean of a girl with glasses and straight lemon-yellow hair, wearing a cowboy hat, black lace mantilla and Bermuda shorts…” 

or this

 “a beetle like individual wearing a Continental outfit: tweed toga, loafers, crimson sash and a purple airplane-propeller beanie”. 

Dick imagines a (colorfully dressed) world where telepathy and pre-cognition are commonplace. There are organizations created to harness these powers and other organizations that exist to curb them. Glen Runciter is the CEO of Runciter Associates, a company that uses telepaths and pre-cogs to counteract the nefarious actions of companies, like the Hollis Agency, that use these abilities to steal business secrets from corporations. When Runciter ends up killed in a job gone bad and his team desperately try to get him to a mortuary in Switzerland before his brain activity goes cold, where he may live on as a non-corporeal entity. Only nothing goes as planned and fabric of time and space seems to be disintegrating. 

Similarly to the other Dick novel I’ve read The Man in the High Castle, when I got to the end of Ubik, I was left wondering what had I just read? What does it all mean or is it just the rambling of a fertile imagination? Is Dick having the reader on or is there some deeper meaning to the text that I am missing?

It is interesting to note that Dick may have been a visionary in his prediction of a corporatized world of tomorrow in this book (everything has a cost – everything is commoditized), but like Asimov in the Foundation Series, he could not envision a smoke-free future. Even when I had a two-pack-a-day habit, I assumed (probably influenced by Star Trek) the future would not include tobacco smoking. It does make you appreciate it when a writer does get at least bits and pieces of the future (that we now live in) “right”. Not that we currently live in a smoke-free environment, but in Ubik, there’s more lighting up that in an average episode of "Mad Men". 😀

I enjoyed reading Ubik, but I have to admit that the book didn’t quite work for me as science fiction due to its farcical, over-the-top tone. It’s all pretty madcap but never very convincing. And the ending is either mind-blowing or just plain confusing. It’s almost like a koan, one could meditate upon it for eternity. 

14 comments:

  1. It's been forever since I read this one, but I remember liking it. His books are very strange. I do wonder, though, if in describing those outfits he wasn't just looking out his window in California in 1969...

    Funny about the smoking, but that is a bit of the future I'll bet nobody saw back then.

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    1. Thanks for the comment reese! It was a fun book to read. I guess I just expect more gravitas from science fiction? Ha ha that the fashions weren't so far off the mark for the late 60s....I will google "tweed toga" and see if any designer has snapped it up. :D

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  2. I keep meaning to read more by PKD. I've read a few of his books, but I haven't read this one. I'm not sure I'd put it high on my To Read list, but I do appreciate Dick's writing and the way he imagined the future.

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    1. Thanks for the comment Lark! I will continue to read PKD because his premises are always enticing even if he sometimes loses me in the execution! But for sure there are other seminal science fiction works I need to get to first, like I seriously need to finish Octavia Butler's Xenogenesis series!

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  3. Hi Ruthiella, I have never read PKD but I know he is a major science fiction writer. I guess I shy away from science fiction because I tend to gravitate to novels that are more straightforward in terms of characters and plot. Its why I like Ray Bradbury as opposed to the more hard science science fiction writers. But I know I am missing out and should challenge myself more with this genre.

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    1. Thanks for the comment Kathy! There is a lot of breadth in Sci-Fi among authors and styles for sure. I would recommend Octavia Butler for straightforward science fiction. Another, more recent favorite is the Wayfayer series by Becky Chambers. I've read some Ray Bradbury but I don't click with his writing style (at least not so far).

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  4. I thought the fashion descriptions were pretty to close to some of the outlandish catwalks I've watched!

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    1. Thanks for the comment jenclair! LOL, as I stated in my reply to reese above, I will have to google a few of PKD's creations and see if any have actually be put into action. You are probably correct that they aren't any wackier than what has actually hit the catwalks. :D

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  5. I've been meaning to read The Man In The High Castle so it was very interesting to read your review as I haven't read Dick yet.

    Star Trek's envisionment of the future always made me laugh. Very Utopian, but not very realistic given the nature of man. We can always hope though.

    Hope you're doing well!

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    1. Thanks for the comment Cleo! Yes, perhaps my visions of the future have been unduly tinged with optimism due to Star Trek. Battlestar Galactica (the reboot) is probably a closer vision.

      Dick is an interesting, if sometimes opaque, writer. I will probably read more from him in future. :D

      Hope you are doing well too!

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  6. I had the same reaction when I finished 'We' by Zamatin a couple of years ago! I hope you had a great Christmas & that all is well in your part of the world. Happy reading in 2021. :)

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    1. Thanks for the comment Carol. I read We a few years ago too and was also occasionally perplexed. :D Thank you for your good wishes. I hope the same to you and a Happy New Year!

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  7. Hi Ruthiella! Hope all is going well with you & yours. I'm following your blog but I'm not getting notified when you post, for some reason, so I have to remember to check and the old memory is, well, old! So I missed this post back in November.
    I totally know what you mean about PKD, as my reaction is actually pretty similar to yours, i.e., he's an interesting read, has some provocative ideas but, at the end, I always have a lingering question about "what was it I just read?" Although I can tolerate a certain ambiguity in fiction, I always found myself wanting a bit more certainty about meaning and/or plot than Dick provides.
    To be fair, I haven't read a lot of his work: Man in the High Castle; Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep and (a lesser known work) The Simulacra (I remember looking "simulacra" up in the dictionary wondering what the hell he was talking about!). These were all mass market paperbacks belonging to my dad, so I read them when I was pretty young. In some respects, I'm not sure it would have made much of a difference reading them now, however. I read somewhere that Dick was a pretty heavy substance abuser and I'm cynical enough to think that, perhaps, he was just throwing ideas out there and leaving it up to his readers to supply any meaning they wanted or to make sense of his future. Or, maybe, that IS the point -- there really isn't any underlying sense to it, kind of like dadaist art! Anyway, I've always sort of intended to read PKD's work, or at least some of the major novels, in a serious way. There's a lot of competition for reading time, however, and I can't say this project is high on my list.
    I notice that I have another unread post of yours to look forward to, this one about the classics challenge. A treat for tonight! I did terribly with the challenge this year -- I read a fair number of the books but never got around to reviewing them. What can I say, except --- c'est la vie?

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    1. Hi Janakay! All is fine here. Thanks for asking. Yeah, I am will you on PKD. But he certainly generated great ideas that have inspired not only his own books but quite a few films. So kudos for that. I normally am OK with ambiguity in novels because it does allow me fill in my own blanks which I like thinking about. And certainly in The Man in the High Castle there is a suggestion of parallel universes which I love to imagine (ever since that Star Trek Episode with evil Mr. Spock wearing a goatee).

      The best book I have ever read on simulacra is White Noise by Don Delillo. I was afraid to read it for a long time thinking it would be too difficult for my little gray cells but it was surprisingly accessible and clever and funny. I keep meaning to read more from him, but as you write, there is a lot of competition for our limited amount of reading time!

      Reading challenges are fun but honestly, no one minds if we fail at them. They are not compulsory. The real fun, aside from reading the books, is making the LISTS! I love making lists of books to read. :D

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