UBIK- PHILIP. K. DICK
One of Philip K Dick’s weirdest novels ”Ubik”, shorthand for ubiquitous is a mysterious , ungraspable novel. Theology, cosmogony, technology, time travel , regression , existentialism are all interwoven brilliantly in this elliptical novel. The basic plot involves Glen Runciter and his team of precogs, who can telepathically penetrate other minds , on a project to Luna, a hoax project where Runciter and his team are bombed and his set of eleven precogs , including Pat Conley, an undercover enemy agent , inhabit forthwith half life, the interim between lifelessness and extinction of consciousness , embalmed in a mortuary where their flickering and steadily eroding consciousness communes with Glen Runciter , who is wont to visit the mortuary to seek advice from his wife Ella.
Joe Chip , the legatee to Runciter’s business and the eleven precogs enter a regressing, shrinking time warp wherein deterioration and physical decay are inescapable. And it is in these regressions, back to 1939 and the thirties that Philip K Dick brings in his theological concerns. The centripetal and centrifugal propulsion and repulsion of life enhancing and life sapping forces can only be obviated or circumvented by Ubik, the life giving product, perhaps metaphor for god, whose initial glimpses are as consumerist contraptions meant to usher in progression and advancement. Yet Ubik, a spray, which changes form and recedes indistinctly the moment it is grasped is also a metaphor for the elusiveness of ultimate reality from which Joe Chip and his colleagues, inhabiting the phantasmagoric regressive logic of time past , alternately recoil from yet seek . Ubik is also that impalpable, nameless quantity, the life force , which in its counterbalancing of good and bad, is the imperishable force that keeps Joe going, that steers his meandering bewildered regression befogged consciousness to unwaveringly focus on staying on the path of continuing awareness. Ubik , thus, as metaphor , is many things and ultimately amorphous .
”Ubik” plays with time brilliantly. Pat Conley, who can revisit the past and rearrange it is seeking to alter time past to impact time future, the precog team, including Joe Chip, move back in time and revisit a past that predates them and possesses a richness and substantiality, a concreteness that, despite WW2 hovering as an undertow, counterpoints the technological present they had hitherto lived with, where facilities and accoutrements possess, for all the materiality they promise, a certain unconnected, disjointed quality, almost as if human endeavour, in superseding its limits is circumscribed by the fastness of the multiplicating realities it brings forth. And then there is the half life phenomenon, in the shadow land between wakeful consciousness and lapsing consciousness, punctuated, ironically, in its very unreality, of a greater apprehending of the illusoriness of what constitutes reality. And even in this spectral half life is Jory, the masterminding consciousness, who voraciously feeds off other supine bodies to nourish himself .
Who is ubik ? It isn’t Glen Runciter , who , at the novel’s end, finds himself confronting a topsy turvy materialization of the ubiquity he assumed was inalienably his , merely by being alive. It isn’t Pat Conley , who, though capable of transmogrifying the past by re weaving its constituents , is but another appendage in this grand conspiracy and also is obliterated. Neither are the opponents and business rivals of Runciter Ubik who, though engineering chaos and machinations of regression, are outwitted by the incursion of a greater reality that supplants their superimposed reality. Jory, the imposer of the collective regressed unconscious amid these half life precogs is also outflanked by Ubik itself . If Jory represents evil, and Ella good, then Ubik is both and more than the sum of their parts. Good and bad are not natural limits beyond which a void beckons. Good and bad are simply coordinates, templates of the unconscious mind, densely intertwined, to be extricated painstakingly but never entirely successfully , beyond which is the greater abyss , which human consciousness can intuit only fitfully, incompletely .
”Ubik” too, as a novel, exists beyond interpretation though irradiated by interpretation. It is a sci fi novel utilizing the motifs of science fiction but it is also a metaphysical novel, concerned with frontiers of consciousness. It is also a moral novel, concerned with the struggle between life’s contending, multifarious forces. But the pathway to indeterminacy the novel concludes with involves a hallucinatory, existential peregrination through space and time, inner and outer, past, present and future and human limits and resilience. Philip k dick wrote with an intense, visceral, psychotic energy but always compressed into very thoughtful novels , written under the pressures of impecuniousness . He produced serious work and seriously good work. Ubik is also a metaphor for the technological reality we, in the 21st century find ourselves immured in. If a drug induced state elongates the antechambers of the mind to inchoate multiplicity , then the internet , technology is no less bewildering. Suddenly the vastness of the world rushes in, too much information, pooling in from myriad sources , too much happening. It is vertiginous to sift and sieve this simply because even human global reality is measureless beyond a point. But as Ubik tantalizingly suggests we operate in the presence of an intelligent mechanism whose potentiality outreaches human cognition. And no human overreaching can ever fully comprehend it.