April/May Book Club: Ubik by Philip K. Dick

I'm about halfway through, having just finished Chapter 8, so don't click on the spoiler if you haven't read that far.  

It's everywhere. Advertisements included! UBIK. Made in Cleveland.*




* Beginning Chapter 2.

Oh awesome! I was actually planning on posting my thoughts on it later on today (I finished it over a month ago, but I'm terrible about procrastinating).

So anyway, I finished this over a month ago, and I ended up thinking that the second half of the novel was a huge improvement over the first.  As reality begins to fall apart, the haphazardness of Dick's world-building ceases to matter as much, and the surreal unfolding of events is ultimately a lot more interesting than the 1992 that the reader is presented with at the beginning of the novel.  Some of the best, and (oddly) most prescient moments from the book come from Joe Chip's experiences in the past.  Take for instance his conversation with Mr. Bliss, that anti-Semitic guy and mouthpiece for America ca. 1939 who drives Joe to the Des Moines funeral home: "Those Communists are the real menace, not the Germans.  Take the treatment of the Jews.  You know who makes a lot out of that?  Jews in this country, a lot of them not citizens but refugees living on public welfare.  I think the Nazis certainly have been a little extreme in some of the things they've done to the Jews, but basically there's been the Jewish question for a long time, and something, although maybe not so vile as those concentration camps, had to be done about it.  We have a similar problem here in the United States, both with Jews and with the n*****s.  Eventually we're going to have to do something about both."  It's the sort of sentiment that today is rarely ascribed to Americans living in such close proximity to the second World War, but wasn't uncommon at the time, and it's the sort of sentiment that when used to describe specifically Nazi Germany, Jews, and black people today is seen as objectively bigoted, but which is basically the same sort of alarmist sentiment which is today used in reference to Muslim refugees, welfare recipients, and (still) black people (albeit in slightly more coded language).  Granted, I think it'd be ridiculous to say that Dick foresaw this very sociopolitical situation in the US in 2016, but I do think this passage points out that alarmist bigotry is universal to human nature, as there is always some group for people to level baseless fears against.  At one point in the novel, Dick explicitly invokes the idea of Platonic essentialism to explain the degradation of Joe Chip's reality in a retrograde succession of forms, in transportation, in communication, in the manifestation of a  hyper-consumerist culture, in the convictions of bigots.  And this in some ways works really well for the novel, where Joe is unable to escape Ubik, the product that in its timeless, all-purpose, immensely profitable, nature, is essentially the Platonic ideal of the consumer product itself.  No matter where Joe goes, Ubik will be there to help him survive half-life, and in so doing fulfill his purpose of serving his boss even from beyond the grave.  It's a chilling concept and truly cleverly conceived on Dick's part.

But this retrograde succession of forms constituting a devolution of forms towards ever more primitive origins didn't really work for me on anything other than a surface level, because that's not how evolution (even broadly conceived) works.  Platonic essentialism can be a neat idea to explore, especially if you're writing as surreal a novel as Ubik, but even as someone who isn't especially well-versed in philosophy, I'm aware that it's also a completely bullshit idea that fettered progress in various fields of human thought for centuries, especially evolution.  Evolution is anathema to Platonic essentialism, where any sort of deviation from an ideal form is nothing but a negligible aberration.  So this devolution of various forms of technology doesn't really make a lot of sense in Platonic terms.  Granted, one should be careful not to conflate biological evolution with the evolution of technology or human ideas, but I'm not entirely sure that Dick would even have made the distinction, and his engagement with the actual logic behind his fictional universe seems shallow enough that he probably never thought about the complete incompatibility of a "devolution" of this world with Platonic essentialism.  Which I suppose gets back to my earlier complaint that Dick was kind of lazy in constructing his fictional world.

And one more quibble:  I thought the ending with Runciter seeing Joe Chip's face on a coin was pretty trite and hackneyed, not quite on an "it was all a dream", or "the whole thing was happening inside of a snow globe" level, but almost that bad. 

Ultimately, though, I thought Ubik was quite good.  I'm not sure it deserves quite the reputation that its earned as a great work of literature, but it was ultimately entertaining, unsettling, and (most of the time) intellectually intriguing.