The Library of America (that authoritative guide to all things Classic in American Letters) has a three volume set of Philip Dick, the science fiction author from the 1960s and 70s. I just finished UBIK, the fourth novel in the first volume of that set. And now four novels in, I must confess to a certain wonder why Dick deserves this All-Star treatment.
Don’t get me wrong. I
enjoyed UBIK. Reading it was a pleasant diversion from
reading economics books. Dick writes in
a style which is not particularly great, but makes it easy to just go along for
the ride. But, where is this ride
going? That is surely a question worth asking
before elevating a book to Great Book status, and it is here that Dick trades
in cheap tricks as a substitute for substantive ideas.
UBIK offers up a
bewildering array of science fiction tropes, but as it turns out most of them
are the literary equivalent of the magician’s trick of waving a hand to divert attention
from where the real action is happening.
There is an entire story of people with psychic powers and an
organization set up to stop people with psychic powers from using those
powers. There is a plot of a woman with the
ability to change the past, generating a new present—though how she knows what
she has done in the new present is totally unexplained and likely internally
incoherent. But neither the woman nor
the whole psychic power thing matters in the end. The real story is about half-life—a state which
people enter after death in which there conscious self still lives on in a
bizarre dream world. Living people have
some odd ability to talk with those in half-life, but only at some sort of company
which specializes in enabling contact between the living and those whom Billy
Crystal would call the Almost Dead.
Those Half-life people move along in some sort of odd time which seems
to be shorted as they spend more time talking to the living, susceptible to interaction
with other Half-life people whose bodies (corpses) are physically close, but sometimes
the physically close corpse can take over half-life person’s world or even that
person’s channel of communication with the living and if this is making any sense at all, then I
am providing clarity where there really isn’t any in the book. And, all this is totally irrelevant to the
real story too.
The real story. Our
hero may be alive or he may be in half-life and he doesn’t know and we don’t know
which either. Indeed, neither our hero
nor we have any idea what is going on--until the penultimate scenes in which we
discover that our hero is, in fact, in half-life and while there he has to fight
against nefarious evil plans of another half-lifer. Why the plans of an evil half-lifer to do evil
things to dead people matters is a bit unclear.
And then we get the final scene in which—ready for mind-blowing conclusion?—we
find out that the person who was revealed to still be among the living may be
in half-life after all, so maybe that previous conclusion isn't right after
all. The most coherent conclusion would be
that everyone is in odd parallel half-lives, but that conclusion isn’t really
coherent. Indeed, I suspect there is no
coherent storyline in this book.
So, where does that leave us? A pleasant, but totally incoherent
story. If that was the aim, it would be
one thing. But, I suspect the author has
delusions of grandeur here. This book
seems designed to make us question the nature of Reality. Are we too living in some sort of half-life
state, just imagining we are still among living? It’s the old “How do you know you aren’t a
brain in a vat somewhere imagining that all of this is real?” A trippy, unanswerable question? Or, like Samuel Johnson, when faced with an older
incarnation of the idea, kicked a rock and said, “I refute it thus”?
So, UBIK takes an
old philosophical question and converts it into an incoherent science fiction
novel. Fine. But the Library of America treatment? I have two more volumes of Dick to go; perhaps
the answer lies there.
In the meantime, I’ll wonder if this is real or not.
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