Philip K. Dick is an influential science fiction writer. Many of his stories have become films including Blade Runner (1982), Total Recall (1990) and (2012), Minority Report (2002), and A Scanner Darkly (2006).

Each chapter of the novel begins with a promotional paragraph for Ubik. Those paragraphs act as a mood-set for the chapter. Ubik seems like some surreal perfecting substance. Later, Ubik appears to be an antique, useless, patent medicine but eventually Ubik becomes something modern and real.

In the imagined world of 1992, everything is a vending machine. It takes coins to wash your dishes, to take a shower or even to leave one’s home. Joe is skilled at rating the level of candidate’s parapsychological powers but not at managing his money. He has the talent of being able to test psychic powers and evaluate candidate’s usefulness to Runciter’s corporation. These employees can help prevent and detect industrial espionage by other psychics. There is cutthroat competition between different protection firms.

During a catastrophic trip to a moon base, Runciter is killed. The survivors prepare his body to return to earth and transport him to a half-life center (where deceased people can be kept, protected from full death, so that they can continue to communicate.)

The broad structure of the book is as a murder mystery. Once half-life is described, it seems that it would make murders easy to decipher by putting the murder victim in half-life and asking them to confirm the killer. However, half-life is not always possible or may not last, so finding evidence is a race against time. The story is a phantasm where time is fluid and the boundary between life and death is faded.

Things begin to dissociate for Joe when Runciter’s face shows on coins and money that Joe has. That money gets rejected by the vending machines. The bizarre occurrences can’t be explained but it doesn’t register with Joe. Once a video at Runciter’s headquarters is directly speaking to Joe as if it were somehow recorded just for him, Joe decides to travel to Runciter’s funeral to meet with the other people who were on the moon trip. Before he can leave, some of his coworkers die strangely. Joe heads to the funeral to confer with his coworkers and learn what is actually happening.

As he travels, time appears to rewind to a pre-technological era. What was a modern elevator transform into an antique lift with an attendant and a lattice door. Cigarettes become antiques, modes of transportation devolve and the equipment in Joe’s house transforms into logically-equivalent items from the past. For example, a console radio replaces a TV. One antique variant of Ubik is made with gold flecks which helps him rent a biplane on his journey. (Without explaining what Ubik does/)

I think the book is worth reading because it has some thought provoking puzzles. As you get more and more accurate information about the story, the level of tension keeps ramping up. The transfer of information between half-life and the real world does not follow obvious rules. It starts as just an intercom connecting the almost-dead with the living. As the interaction styles develop more power, the mystery seems solved until everything is turned upside down for a new beginning.