Philip K. Dick's paranoid classic Ubik: Fluttering at the windowpane of reality

Philip K. Dick is a sci-fi legend, but the boys have only ever seen the film adaptations of his work (Blade Runner, Minority Report, A Scanner Darkly).

Dick's 1969 classic Ubik has us divided. Benny is mad that major premises are introduced and then abandoned, internal logic is sloppy, and the twist ending is lazy writing. Rich and Cam are charmed by the imperfections and think it heightens the sense of (un)reality. 

Is Ubik a metaphor for God? What are the parallels to Gnosticism, and who is the demiurge behind the false reality of half-life? Do people who experience psychotic breaks even know that it's happening? What does Plato have to do with all of this?

“He felt all at once like an ineffectual moth, fluttering at the windowpane of reality, dimly seeing it from outside.”

 

CHAPTERS

• (00:00:00) intro to the world of Ubik
• (00:08:35) critique of PKD’s worldbuilding
• (00:20:10) Cold storage and half-life suspended animation
• 00:25:00) Why is everything decaying? entropy and platonic essences
• (00:34:43) Joe Chip’s search for Ubik + the battle between Jory and Ella
• (00:43:10) Christian parallels and PKD’s gnostic epiphany
• (00:58:35) Arguing whether the twist ending is lazy writing
• (01:06:28) Is PKD under or overrated?
• (01:09:54) Psychosis, psychedelics, and paranoia

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NEXT ON THE READING LIST:

The Fall - Camus

Hamlet - Shakespeare

Piranesi - Susanna Clarke