Philip K Dick Month: Ubik

For this month's meeting of the Science Fiction Book Club, namely Philip K Dick month, I have chosen Ubik, because 1) it is a Dick classic and 2) there is no movie of it. In Ubik, telepathy is commonplace and the privacy of the common man is threatened, so there has arisen a breed of men, called inertials, who can cancel the psionic talents of telepaths. The second feature of this future is half-life, a state of preservation in which the deceased (or, rather, the nearly-deceased) slowly fades away. The third thread of this novel is the ubiquitous "Ubik," a product of a thousand uses, which hardly ever seems to be used the same way twice. The plot follows Joe Chip, the ace but broke tester of Runciter's company, which supplies inertials to privacy-seekers, in a Dickian examination of reality, perception, and decay. Dick's telepathic dystopias seem to have less external freakishness than Bester's, and fewer circus geeks, but there is a greater emphasis on alternate realities and pharmaceutical abuse.