Books › Ubik
Ubik
First published 1969 · 464 pages
A paranoid, reality-crumbling descent into a hyper-capitalist nightmare where even the afterlife is monetized and nothing is as it seems.
What it feels like
Reading this novel feels like waking up from a dream only to realize you are still asleep, and the room around you is slowly rotting. It begins as a quirky, deadpan satire of a hyper-capitalist future where you have to pay your own door to leave your apartment, but it quickly accelerates into a propulsive, dread-soaked nightmare of entropy. The prose is deceptively pulpy, masking profound existential terror beneath layers of bizarre commercial jargon and retro-futuristic absurdity. You are constantly kept off-balance, sharing the characters' creeping paranoia as the fabric of their world literally regresses and decays. It is a perfect, mind-bending trip for readers who love philosophical sci-fi that dismantles the very concept of objective reality and leaves a lingering, uncanny chill long after the final page.
- Mood
- disorienting
- surreal
- dread-soaked
- uncanny
- Tone
- satirical
- paranoid
- deadpan
- absurd
- Pace
- propulsive
- Themes
- the illusion of reality · entropy and decay · hyper-capitalism · mortality and consciousness · existential uncertainty
- The writing
- Deceptively pulpy and utilitarian, laced with bizarre commercial jargon and sudden, disorienting philosophical depths.
- The arc
- Moves from bewildered amusement at an absurd, monetized future to a creeping, profound existential dread as reality itself begins to rot.
- Who it's for
- Fans of mind-bending, philosophical science fiction who enjoy having their perception of reality aggressively dismantled.
Content notes
- existential dread
- death and dying
- body horror
About the book
Named one of Time's 100 Best Books, Ubik is a mind-bending, classic novel about the perception of reality from Philip K. Dick, the Hugo Award-winning author of The Man in the High Castle. “From the stuff of space opera, Dick spins a deeply unsettling existential horror story, a nightmare you’ll never be sure you’ve woken up from.”—Lev Grossman, Time Glen Runciter runs a lucrative business — deploying his teams of anti-psychics to corporate clients who want privacy and security from psychic spies. But when he and his top team are ambushed by a rival, he is gravely injured and placed in “half-life,” a dreamlike state of suspended animation. Soon, though, the surviving members of the team begin experiencing some strange phenomena, such as Runciter’s face appearing on coins and the world seeming to move backward in time. As consumables deteriorate and technology gets ever more primitive, the group needs to find out what is causing the shifts and what a mysterious product called Ubik has to do with it all. “More brilliant than similar experiments conducted by Pynchon or DeLillo.”—Roberto Bolaño
Description from Open Library.
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