Time Magazine Top 100 Novels

Book 94: Ubik by Philip K. Dick (1969)

This is a series of reflections reading through Time Magazine’s top 100 novels as selected by Lev Grossman and Richard Lacayo published since 1923 (when Time magazine was founded). For me this is an attempt to broaden my exposure to authors I may not encounter otherwise, especially as a person who was not a liberal arts major in college. Time’s list is alphabetical, so I decided to read through in a random order, and I plan to write a short reflection on each novel.

Ubik is a strange novel which combines a science fiction future (as projected in the late 1960s) with a noir aesthetic in a world which combines time travel, space travel, a heavily commercialized future, psionic powers, and half-life (a way of preserving mental life by putting the person into a cryogenic state). The primary protagonist, Joe Chip, is a down on his luck tester of psionic abilities for the powerful Runciter corporation and a friend of the company’s owner Glen Runciter when a mysterious woman, Pat Conley, is brought to his residence by a talent recruiter to be tested. Joe quickly discovers that Pat Conley’s powers, her ability to manipulate time, would be an incredible asset for the Runciter corporation but would also pose an extreme threat to them as well. When presenting Pat Conley to Glen Runciter for potential employment the company is offered a job to deal with a psionic threat to a corporation at a moon base and Glen Runciter, Joe Chip, Pat Conley and nine ‘inertials’ (individuals with powers that can thwart the psionic powers of companies that the Runciter organization provides protection against). The mission leads to a disaster for all involved as the present and reality seem to unravel and the team begins to individually age rapidly while their world regresses to the late 1930s.

Reading science fiction from an earlier time period is a little disorienting, especially when the projected future is now thirty years in the past. The world of Ubik is a strange imagining of what the 1990s would be by a person in the 1960s complete with all manner of talking appliances and doors that are coin operated. The reality of rapid space travel, cryogenic half-life, psionic powers, and radically different geopolitics never occurred as the novel projected, but the reality twisting plot of the second half of the novel is interesting. The book gets its name from a substance called Ubik which is advertised at the beginning of each chapter and becomes a key need for the protagonists as they try to navigate a reality which is being pulled by opposing forces of degradation and preservation. It is a strange but imaginative plot with a mysterious ending.