Ubik
Named one of Time's 100 Best Books, Ubik is a mind-bending, classic novel about the perception of reality from Philip K. Dick, the Hugo Award-winning author of The Man in the High Castle. “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 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. “More brilliant than similar experiments conducted by Pynchon or DeLillo.”—Roberto Bolaño
Also by Philip K. Dick
What you might want to know about Ubik
The questions readers send us most often, answered without spoilers.
In 1992 New York, Joe Chip is a broke technician at Glen Runciter's anti-psi corporation when Runciter takes an eleven-person team to a Lunar resort and gets killed in a bomb blast.
Yes. Reality slips and rewrites itself constantly, and the rules of what is happening shift through the book. Most readers describe it as deliberately disorienting.
A film adaptation has been in development for years, with Michel Gondry attached at one point. As of now no version has reached production.
The ending is famously ambiguous. Dick layered multiple possible interpretations, and academic essays still argue about which character's reality is the outermost layer.
Ubik was written by Philip K. Dick, published in 1969 by Ulverscroft Ltd.
Ubik is 224 pages in standard print editions, though page counts vary slightly between hardcover, paperback, and large-print formats.
At an average reading pace of about 250 words per minute, Ubik takes most readers 3 to 5 hours to finish.
Ubik is a standalone novel by Philip K. Dick, not part of a series.
Ubik is available in hardcover, paperback, ebook, and audiobook formats from Amazon, Bookshop.org, ThriftBooks, and most major bookstores.
