UBIK

UBIK.  The unusual title is foreshadowing to the kind of story this plays out to be.  Philip K. Dick starts off this story by recognizing two kinds of people, psionics and anti-psionics.  Both have their respective industries, the latter trying to stop the former from forcibly interrogating or invading the mind spaces of human kind.  They are both at a tug of war, or rather a checks and balances with each other to try to maintain the order in keep the system maintained.  Industries have been built to capitalize on this happenstance.   With this era, there is also a term called half-life in which people who have been injured/died can have their mind and body preserved in order to speak again to the living in order to give advice etc.  These play crucial roles in our story for Philip K. Dick, just like the Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch uses the idea of half-life and psionic capabilities to play mind games and produce the feeling of uneasiness as one's mind is forcibly going through an experience unlike what he/she has been before.
 With any drug trip, one confuses reality with fantasy and questions both using basic logic in order to come back to any sense of order within one's surroundings.  However, when the world around you feels so real, but completely wrong at the same time, there are too many possible factors that could hurt the credibility of one's choice.  Dick fully exploits this in this wonderfully intense story of mental exploration and deterioration .  As always, the book starts off slow in order to encapsulate the tedium of day to day life and the politics and technology of the time, but gathers an intense speed in order to describe what is happening.  Just with any mental novel, the climax did not occur with action happening, but with the main protagonist going through his though process to figure out what is happening.  For once, the idea of psionic abilities sounded necessary in order to bring out the plot of the book, but again could have been replaced with another industry etc.  The main focus is the idea of half-life and should be noted extensively as one reads through the novel.  The idea is impeccable, but brings so many more questions than it answers.

I completely recommend this book to any fans of sci-fi, and can't wait to start on my next novel Martian Time-Slip by Philip K. Dick.


HAPPY READINGS.