Talk:Ubik

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Further deception[edit]

I removed from the summary the mention that Joe Chip was against having Pat Conley in the group of agents, since the book states the opposite: "Runciter pondered moodily. "Joe thinks she's dangerous. I don't know why." "Did you ask him why?" Runciter said, "He mumbled, the way he always does. He never has reasons, just hunches. On the other hand, he wants to include her(Pat Conley) in the Mick operation"".

I think the summary needs to take into account the final pages, in which Runciter discovers his coins to be changing face (in an obvious parallel to what happened to Chip), in as much as this implies that Runciter is himself mistaken about being alive and not in a half-life, and possibly wired into the group as well. --maru (talk) contribs 03:12, 24 July 2006 (UTC)[reply]

My impression upon reading the novel was that "Ubik" represented God, or salvation through God. The final Ubik "ad copy" reinforces this idea by saying "I am everywhere". Am I wrong? --71.125.20.241 05:11, 13 August 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Yes you are wrong - the ubik is the ubik - it is a genuine artifact of PKD. If dick wanted to talk about the conventional conception of god he would have done it - the ubik "mythos" is something more elaborate than that. To Marudubshinki : I think that these pages are a literary mistake on the part of dick - they are awkward - not needed. I 'm pretty sure he regretted them himself - it is a cheap ending to an otherwise very original novel. Unlike the turnover in the middle of the book, when one figures out what is going on really, these pages have no force. Or maybe they have :-)

The Ubik 16:17, 15 September 2006 (UTC)[reply]

It's still one of my favourite books, but the can of Ubik doesn't make sense! It's a blahblah protophason amplifier, affecting the particles by which the telepathy between half-lifers work. Thing is, the half-lifers in their cold-pac caskets, and the telepathic field between them, are real things, in the real world. The can of Ubik only exists within the dream-world. So how can it affect the real world? Maybe Ella's explanation is *supposed* to be nonsense, but it's the only one you get. Quite annoyed me, that. The ending, the Joe Chip coin, just seems like a standard Twilight Zone perspective-zoomout. Going meta, with a pretty obvious twist. Kindof a cheap twist, really. I tend to ignore that last bit. It's only a book, you don't have to take it all seriously. 188.29.165.158 (talk) 02:28, 21 January 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Plot synopsis inadequate[edit]

The plot synopsis reads like a teaser from a book cover. It sounds like it is trying to avoid giving away what happens in the novel. This is an encyclopedia and it has to talk about what actually happens, including the ending and all surprising plot twists. I haven't read the book, so I can't do this myself. --24.86.252.26 17:09, 21 August 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Is This Worth Mentioning/Exploring?[edit]

I recall reading an interview with Bret Easton Ellis wherein he referred to the bizarre clothes worn by the characters in "American Psycho" as his own invention. If you haven't read the novel, "American Psycho" details the life of a serial killer (or imagined serial killer), Patrick Bateman. It seems to me the two books have a lot in common, and many of the ideas Ellis takes credit for appear in Ubik, which appeared at least twenty years earlier!

--210.240.107.30 08:34, 29 October 2007 (UTC)[reply]

You should see what they wear in "The Zap Gun"! Wierdo clothes are something PKD used to fill paragraphs, I think. They're irrelevant to the plot, often you get several characters in turn being described in what looks like an attempt by PKD to repeatedly outdo himself in thinking up ludicrous outfits. 188.29.165.158 (talk) 02:21, 21 January 2014 (UTC)[reply]

How about this - Similarity to Life On Mars / Ashes To Ashes[edit]

Ubik has a lot in common with the aforementioned UK TV serieses- compare the coma patient heroes for the "half-lifers" in "cold-pak", Martin Summers in Ashes for Jory Miller, and of course the worlds of 1974 and 1982 for the regressed 1939 of Dick's novel. Think I should mention this? —Preceding unsigned comment added by Badnewswade (talk • contribs) 17:30, 9 June 2009 (UTC)[reply]


Don't just delete stuff, it makes people not want to contribute again. What's the problem with mentioning Ashes To Ashes? --Badnewswade (talk) 00:12, 12 June 2009 (UTC)[reply]

There's lots of media over the years used the "coma-patient dream" / "OR IS IT!?!?" idea. A recent not-very-good TV show's no more notable than any of them. Unless there's evidence it was actually inspired by Ubik, merely having some similar ideas isn't interesting or relevant.
Particularly the regression in Ubik is nothing to do with time travel, it's to do with Plato's (?) "Forms", and the general sucking of life out of the world of Joe Chip and the rest. The only real similarity is the coma thing, and nobody in Ubik is actually in a coma, the whole idea of "half-life" is unique and has meaning that threads through the book. A TV show having 1 or 2 factors vaguely in common, but actually not that much in common, is not worth mentioning to people who want to know about PKD's book.
188.29.165.158 (talk) 02:18, 21 January 2014 (UTC)[reply]
Good point about Plato's "forms". There's nothing in a modern car's molecules or "DNA" that was inherited from a Model T or horse carriage (or nowadays from an MP3 file vs a record); their commonality is that we use them for the same purpose. So they can't physically revert into older technologies (how can a transistor turn itself into a vacuum tube?), they can only semantically revert via science-fiction means. Sluggoster (talk) 21:19, 29 October 2016 (UTC)[reply]

B?[edit]

Hardly B without any referencing to the article. :: Kevinalewis : (Talk Page)/(Desk) 09:45, 5 November 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Overwikification[edit]

There are many useless links in the article to milk, fact and such. I am going to remove them, because they are a distraction. --CyHawk (talk) 18:57, 23 January 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Interpretation is too simple[edit]

I've added another interpretation of the book, becaue I think that te other was good, but a little simple.

A part of this, i have somthing to say to all, is that when at te beggining one woman of the Runciter's moon group dream about Bill and Matt, and at the end of the book Joe says to the bad guy:What's your name? and the guy says: Sometimes people call me Bill, sometimes Mat, but my name is... I think that this is one of most important details of the book, like the joe's coin in Runciter's bag.

Can someone correct the text that I've added at the interpretation? I'm not an English expert. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 62.43.21.36 (talk) 13:08, 10 June 2010 (UTC)[reply]

I removed your text completely, it appeared to be a little bit of original research. WikiuserNI (talk) 15:39, 10 June 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Lem's interpretations[edit]

"Thus it is possible to rationalize the story in the above manner—on which, however, I would not insist too seriously, and that for two reasons at once. The first reason is that to make the plot fully consistent along the lines sketched above is impossible. If all Runciter's people perished on the Moon, then who transported them to the moratorium? Another thing which does not yield to any rationalization is the talent of the girl who by mental effort alone was able to alter the present by transposing causal nodes in a past already over and done with. (This takes place before the occurrence on the Moon, when there are no grounds for regarding the represented world as the purely subjective one of any "half-life" character.) Similar misgivings are inspired by Ubik itself, "the Absolute in a spray can," to which we will devote attention a little later on. If we approach the fictional world pedantically, no case can be made for it, for it is full of contradictions. But if we shelve such objections and inquire rather after the overall meaning of the work, we will discover that it is close to the meanings of other books by Dick, for all that they seem to differ from one another. Essentially it is always one and the same world which figures in them—a world of elementally unleashed entropy, of decay which not only, as in our reality, attacks the harmonious arrangement of matter, but which even consumes the order of elapsing time. Dick has thus amplified, rendered monumental and at the same time monstrous certain fundamental properties of the actual world, giving them dramatic acceleration and impetus. All the technological innovations, the magnificent inventions and the newly mastered human capabilities (such as telepathy, which our author has provided with an uncommonly rich articulation into "specialties") ultimately come to nothing in the struggle against the inexorably rising floodwaters of Chaos. Dick's province is thus a "world of preestablished disharmony," which is hidden at first and does not manifest itself in the opening scenes of the novel; these are presented unhurriedly and with calm matter-of-factness, just in order that the intrusion of the destructive factor should be all the more effective.


...Another critic (George Turner) has denied all value in Ubik, declaring that the novel is a pack of conflicting absurdities—which can be demonstrated with pencil and paper. I think, however, that the critic should not be the prosecutor of a book but its defender, though one not allowed to lie: he may only present the work in the most favorable light. And because a book full of meaningless contradictions is as worthless as one that holds forth about vampires and other monstrous revenants, since neither of them touches on problems worthy of serious consideration, I prefer my account of Ubik to all the rest. The theme of catastrophe had been so much worked over in SF that it seemed to be played out until Dick's books became a proof that this had been a matter of frivolous mystification. For science-fictional endings of the world were brought about either by man himself, e.g. by unrestrained warfare, or by some cataclysm as extrinsic as it was accidental, which thus might equally well not have happened at all."

Stanislaw Lem, "Philip K. Dick: A Visionary Among the Charlatans" --Gwern (contribs) 21:58 21 August 2011 (GMT)

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