UBIK: Spray this on you and don't question

Philip K Dick is sneaky. Perhaps more accurate terms would be subversive or insidious but I think sneaky works as well. A writer who had an agenda, a writer whose goal was to undermine your sense of reality and to shake you up, who did so while you thought you were reading something called "science fiction"

Case in point, his novel UBIK, published in 1969. This is a book I read, or read part of, a very long time ago, at a point in my life when I was ingesting two or three science fiction novels a week; as I started to read the book again I realized there was a lot of it, the details, that I had forgotten

I had forgotten how funny it was. There are scenes where characters argue with their vending machines; in this future world you have to pay to do or use just about anything. In an early scene, one of the main characters attempts to leave  his apartment:

The door refused to open. It said: "Five cents please"
.... "I'll pay you tomorrow," he told the door "What I pay you is... is in the nature of a gratuity; I don't have to pay you"
"I think otherwise" the door said"
.... From the drawer beside the sink Joe Chip got a stainless steel knife; with it he began to systematically unscrew the bolt assembly of his apt's money-gulping door.
"I'll sue you" said the door
"I've never been sued by a door. But I guess I'll live through it"

Then there are how characters on this future Earth dress.

G.G. stood there ... wearing his usual mohair poncho, apricot colored felt hat, argyle ski socks and carpet slippers ...

A young stringbean of a girl with glasses ... wearing a cowboy hat, black lace mantilla and Bermuda shorts ... A good looking older dark haired woman ... who wore a silk sari and nylon obi and bobby socks .... A wooly haired boy ... in a floral mumu and Spandex bloomers ...

It's funny stuff. And if fools you, it lures you into what appears to be a madcap adventure with a deep aura of zaniness. But of course there is much more going on here. Dick was a master of Pirandello, a theatrical conceit that essentially says "I'm about to fool you, I'm going to show you something that you know can't be real but as you watch it, you'll believe it is real" In Dick's case, if you are familiar with his work, you know that he is going to give you a story where reality is somehow altered. You know he's going to do it to you, you are watching the signs .. and as you watch the signs you realize that the whole conceit started about two chapters back

The world of UBIK is one where telepaths and precogs exist and companies are created to prevent these individuals from using their powers against you. Our nominal hero, Joe Chip, works for one of these companies and it is his job to prevent telepaths from using their abilities in a negative way. It is also a world where people never really die. When the body expires, the mind can be maintained, functioning in a half-life, able to communicate with people in the living world. Their world may or not be real at least to us and our world may or not be real to them ... yup, we are deep in the world view of Philip Dick

When reading this novel, or any Dick book, you are constantly questioning exactly what is real. In UBIK, as Joe is shown different levels of reality, he begins to sense that there are entities behind everything, controlling his world view, to purposes of their own. What are they: Gods, telepaths, people laying in coffins half alive ... Dick was never one to just show us different realities, he was one to make us question if anything was in control of those realities and why we are not. UBIK is a can of spray that when used, brings Joe back to his reality. But where did the can from and why do they want Joe to use it ..

There is something to the point that salvation, in this story, comes in the form of a spray can, a product. There is a focus on objects, on commercial objects, in this novel. Brand names become important. As does money, beyond the fact it costs you to get out of your own house. Commercialism may be the thing that binds the realities together, or it may be the thing that makes them all tenuous

Dick was an author who moved comfortably inside the conventions of the science fiction lexicon of the late 1960's. But he was also a writer very familiar with different cultures and their religions, their deities, their views of the afterlife. In this book, while describing how people dressed he also dipped into the Platonic concept of a base reality; in the story Joe is being pushed back in time and he realizes that there is always a space-time reality behind everything, a master time, upon which all other times are built

This is science fiction, I think, in the barest of terms. Yes the book takes place in the future and yes there is space travel. But Dick uses one sentence to describe a trip from Earth to the Moon; he devotes an entire chapter to describe Joe, under the influence of some malevolent reality, going up a flight of stairs. As he ascends Joe must try to figure out what is real, where he is, who is doing this to him and if there is actually something being done ... this is the kind of journey that occupies Dick at his bets.

And UBIK was one of his best.