Ubik

By: Philip K. Dick

Narrated by: Luke Daniels

Length: 7 hrs and 56 mins

Publisher's summary

A mind-bending, classic Philip K. Dick novel about the perception of reality.

Named as one of Time's 100 best books.

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.

©1969 Philip K. Dick (P)2014 Brilliance Audio, all rights reserved.

Critic reviews

"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)

"More brilliant than similar experiments conducted by Pynchon or DeLillo." (Roberto Bolaño)

Wierd

Joe Chip dauntless in his pursuit of Ubik. He encounters some devious people and half lifers.

I Couldn't Quite Get Its Promise

Any additional comments?

I wanted to like this one more than I did. Philip K. Dick’s work seems intriguing at a distance. I gather he had a sense of some of what it would feel like to live in virtual reality before virtual reality existed, and I gather he had a critical eye toward it. Who would we be in a future where we could invent so much of the world we experienced?

And this book really is a virtual reality experience. I don’t want to give away too much, but most of it takes place within a construct that one of the characters discovers himself inside. There is an inside and an outside to the experience, and it’s tantalizingly confusing to tell one from the other. And the very end suggests a wrinkle that serves as a potentially fascinating coda to the whole.

Knowing all that, I’d have been psyched to read this. I like what it’s asking, and I like the way it refuses to take the easy path and explain everything we go through. Much weaker authors could turn this material into something three times as long, and they’d weaken the strangeness at its core.

That said, though, this just didn’t quite grab me. Too many of the rules of the universe get demonstrated and then undermined. Details that matter early end up not mattering at all. There is a showdown in place, but it’s not the one we’ve been led to believe for most of the book. Dick shows his cleverness throughout this, and that cleverness acts as an antidote to the antiseptic sci-fi concepts that undergird it, but I found myself playing catch-up so often that I never quite caught the joy of it.

I think the narrator was likely ill-suited to the material. There’s an air of cynicism here; if it isn’t quite a noir experience, it certainly isn’t the bright, suburban-toned reader I had.

So, I’ll look for another PKD one of these years, holding out hope that Do Androids Dream of Electric Sleep or some other of his best-known work will get through to me. For now, though, I don’t quite get the program, and I’m willing to accept that it may be more my shortcomings than Dick himself.

Head trip

Hour 1- what the heck is happening, what is a precog, iced women? Half lives, what? Slow down, PKD

Hour 3- Narrator is really great, why isn't this a movie already?

Hour 4- drink the elixir fool, are you nuts? You can power a rocket but can't work a stick shift?

Hour 5- this just got insanely good. What the HECK?!?

Hour 6- this would be the most impossible book to turn into a movie. I love this.

Hour 7- SPRAY EVERYWHERE.

great performance, messy story

Great audio performance.
This is not the most interesting PKD novel - too many plots and themes are intermingled to make it truly captivating.

Distracted by narration

I found the story alright, but the narrator was over the top with his voices. I got used to his narration in the second half, but just wanted to finish the book and move on.

Great but confusing

Loved the story, but I haven't figured everything out, not even almost all. I had to listen to it again before I figured out mst of it. Not Philip K. Dicks best story, but you never know what to expect with him.

Fantastic Narrator and Story

This is a classic and arguably best PHK novel questioning reality around you and fighting to stay alive. The narrator provides engaging character voices that make the experience come alive. In some ways, Luke Daniels made it feel like I am watching a television show or reading a graphic novel.

I am going to seek other Luke Daniels performances.

Hand down the best Sci Fi Book I have EVER read

This book is an amazing introduction to Philip K Dick - perhaps the greatest sci fi author ever lived.
The whole book read and feels like you are dreaming through time and give you a creeping feeling of existential crisis.

The performance of the audio book was amazing. The voices and impression was on point. Overall I cannot recommend this enough.

Not a Fan

I have now read numerous reviews that express opinions similar to mine. The performance was a bit cartoonish. (Please forgive me when I misspell character names). I also cringed when Russeter spoke. I followed the story and was not surprised at the revelation la at the end. I just didn’t find the journey a good one and I truly didn’t care about the characters. As far as the last couple of minutes of the book, I don’t believe PK Dick was indicating that the real world was being influenced by those in half-life, but rather that in the end we still don’t really know who is in half-life stasis and who is alive.

strange book

as with other books by the author, this one took a while to get in to. but once I understood what he was talking about, it got interesting, though hard to follow.