Philip K Dick

Ubik, by Philip K. Dick

an aerosol spray can labeled Ubik with a pink spray coming out of it

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.

A Scanner Darkly (Philip K. Dick, 1977/Richard Linklater, 2006)

a film reel

In the promotional trailers for Constantine, I saw one for the movie A Scanner Darkly which was directed by Richard Linklater. It was animated and visually fascinating because it was made via rotoscoping. In other words, the artists who made the film started with regular footage and transformed it into animation by redrawing each frame. The style of the film was striking and its trailer made me want to see it. According to material on the DVD, each character had a detailed style sheet for their animated design. The transformation was a time-consuming process.

After watching the film, I wanted to read the book. I was surprised that, although I needed to get the film via Interlibrary Loan, the book was in my local library. Philip K. Dick wrote several other stories that became movies including Blade Runner and Minority Report. I’ve seen both of those and they also have striking ideas of strange futures. The film begins, “7 years from now”, putting it into the context of something that could happen at any time.

Keanu Reeves was the protagonist Fred/Robert Arctor and Robert Downey Jr. played the character James Barris. Woody Harrelson, Winona Ryder and Rory Cochrane also appeared as important characters in the film.

I liked Barris’s performance. He had a paranoid, muttering voice that recalled a drugged-out character who was trying to be impressive while not having much important to say. Fred was a police officer and simultaneously the friend of Barris, Robert Arctor.

The story centers around a powerful drug, Substance D. The police are trying to find the source of the synthetic. The drug is also known colloquially as death and wavering between life and death is a theme. As Fred, his police employers monitor its effects on him. The medical officers tell him that it is causing interference between the hemispheres of his brain. As the story progresses, he becomes more and more confused until he goes to a drug treatment facility that specializes in Substance D.

The book and movie follow each other pretty closely. Although the film presents the Los Angeles of the story as a surveillance state with the police monitoring public spaces, the novel has surveillance of a much smaller scale, of just several targeted houses.

One science fiction element in the story is the scramble suit. The officer wearing it continually changes their appearance to disguise who they are. The goal is to protect the identity of the officer when appearing for public presentations or with other officers. When Reeves’ character is with Barris and the others, he is not wearing the suit; at work, the full body suit makes him almost invisible.

In a sense, the book and film are weak because transition between the majority of the story and their conclusion is abrupt and the story could be summarized with just a couple of sentences, spoiling the events of the rest of the them before they reach their sudden resolution. It is a forward pointing story making you imagine what happens next.

I read the book after seeing the movie. I noticed that I didn’t visualize the characters in the book as the actors and I didn’t hear their voices as they spoke in the book. Perhaps the animation style of the story made the actors’ personal appearance less attached to the story.

The book and movie had a strong emotional ending. A coda follows with an author’s note memorializing friends of the author who had died or suffered severe consequences of drug use.