Ubik

This is explored early in the novel, and is discussed directly by the moratorium owner, Herbert Von Vogelsang. In the novel, telepaths and psychics work for large corporations, trying to steal people’s and business’s secrets. People worry about privacy so much that they hire Runciter’s anti-psis to prevent spying and the stealing of secrets and personal information. Privacy is big business in Ubik.

This notion of privacy as a business resonates strongly in the Information Age of the 21st Century. A reader may even view Ubik as a metaphor predicting the current state of computer security. In this formulation, electronic criminals—colloquially known as “hackers”—represent the telepaths, armed with skills that allow them to steal corporate, government, or personal secrets off of computer networks. Cyber-security specialists, meanwhile, who protect corporations, governments, and individuals from cyber-criminals represent the inertials. Moreover, the costs and aptitudes associated with fighting cyber-crime create inequities between those who can afford electronic security and those who cannot, equities to which Ubik alludes.

It is perhaps a stretch to say that Dick fully intended this metaphor, given that in 1969 networked computers were a nascent industry. Yet it is worth pointing out that the invention of the Internet came largely as a result of the same Cold War pressures to which Dick was enormously sensitive throughout his career. Given the extent to which Dick’s novels seek to predict the course of digital technology over the coming decades, it may not be far-fetched to argue that his story of inertials battling telepaths is a conscious prediction of 21st Century cyber-security conflicts.

Like much science-fiction writers of the 20th century, Dick laments the technological progression of society as a movement away from genuine human contact and feeling. While he recognizes that society advances in positive ways, Dick creates a world in which his characters pay money to an unknown, mechanized entity to do even the simplest task, such as opening a door. When a problem arises with the interaction, the machines are cold and judgmental, sticking only to their economic rules. This lack of leeway or warmth sometimes prevents people in the novel from connecting in genuine ways.

This theme is perhaps reflected most strongly in the half-life machines. As much as humans seek to forestall it as long as possible, death is a natural and necessary part of the cycle of life. The half-life machines are therefore a perversion of the natural order and a gateway for individuals to invade that most personal of human faculties: consciousness itself. Characters like Runciter debate whether this risk of losing one’s consciousness—whether by invasion or simply as a natural consequence of the vicissitudes of the technology—make half-life machines worth it. This concern also calls into question the use of certain medical technologies which, though they may prolong life, also drastically reduce the quality of said life. 

Based on the Jungian concept of the “collective unconscious,” the idea in the novel that objects, places, and people maintain within themselves traces or memories of their past iterations was very popular at the time Dick wrote Ubik. Dick even references Jung by naming an airport after him in the novel. This idea both helps and hinders the characters in the novel: the Ubik bottle, for example, reverts to an unusable state at times, but the town also opens up to the characters in the past. This exploration of nostalgia and reverting to an earlier time is particularly problematic when Joe laments the casual racism of his 1930s-era driver, Mr. Bliss. In Ubik, “progress” takes many forms, and while many of the technological advancements are troubling to the characters, they acknowledge that social progress has accompanied it. The costs of reverting back to an earlier time are most stark when they concern the bomb victims’ tendency to rapidly age. Object-memory and nostalgia is thus a double-edged sword in Ubik. From this perspective, the Ubik substance represents an antidote that relieves the characters of their nostalgic haze, which may be little more than a harmful mass delusion.