Ubik

The middle of the book resists the subtractive test. Once the bomb has gone off on the Moon, each stage of the regression is required: the stale cigarettes and the soured cream, the coins bearing Runciter’s profile, Wendy Wright found dried to a husk, the elevator that turns into an old cage, the drive in a LaSalle into Des Moines in 1939, the funeral, the stairs. Each turn of entropy tightens one question, who is dead, and each epigraph marks the cost of the remedy. The test bites in the first third. The tour of Runciter Associates, the testing of Pat Conley and the long gathering of the inertials run longer than the plot uses; Pat Conley’s power to alter the past, built with care, is dropped once Jory is named; and several inertials are names, not persons. Perhaps a fifth of the book is permitted rather than compelled.

Score: 7.9 / 10

The disclosure can be stated, and it holds. A world can decay while it goes on selling itself to you, and the remedy for decay will be offered in the same voice as the product: grace in an aerosol can, sold with the reassurances of the label. And the living and the dead may be unable to tell which they are, the reality each inhabits sustained by others, some of whom feed on it. Joe Chip, who cannot pay his own front door, makes the first finding plain: even the threshold of one’s home is metered, and the self is the last thing one is permitted to own. What keeps the axis from the gate is that much of the book’s power is the condition of paranoia itself, a mood brilliantly rendered; its theology is shown in a reversal at the end rather than articulated across the book, and the social finding is struck as satire and not developed.

Score: 8.2 / 10

Elevation comes as dread, and it comes more than once. A scrawl on a washroom wall, telling the survivors that one is alive and that they are all dead, turns the plot into terror in two lines. Wendy Wright found desiccated in a closet, dried out in a night, is a cold height. The summit is Joe Chip’s climb up the stairs of the hotel in Des Moines, freezing, ageing by the step, his body failing as he goes, rendered without relief until Ella Runciter’s help reaches him: one of the strongest passages of physical horror in American fiction of its decade. The last chapter’s epigraph reaches a different height, the voice of the Word. Against these, much of the book runs at the level of brisk pulp narration, and the comedy of the door, though sharp, does not rise. The heights are real, and intermittent.

Score: 8.1 / 10

Myth is built, and it bears weight. The structure is a descent into the underworld: the half-life of the cold-pac works as a Bardo, a passage between death and what follows. Jory is the devourer in the dark who eats the souls of the newly dead, a Kronos in a Zurich vault; Ella is the guide who intercedes, a Beatrice speaking from the next world; Ubik is the Word, the creative principle set against entropy, sold back to a fallen people as a spray can. The particular stays particular: Joe’s debts, Runciter’s grief for a wife he consults by the hour, the cheap economy of 1992. The final reversal, Runciter’s face on the coins becoming Joe Chip’s, turns the myth in on itself. What holds the axis at the gate and not above it is outline: some figures, Pat Conley as an Eve or temptress among them, are evoked and then left.

Score: 8.5 / 10

The inheritance is American magazine and paperback science fiction of the 1950s and 1960s: the psionic thriller, the plot of corporate espionage, the time-slip story, van Vogt’s games with identity. The turn is real and Dick’s own. He took the pulp caper, a team of anti-telepaths lured to the Moon and bombed, and made it a metaphysical novel in which the question is which world is real and who is alive to ask. He folded the advertising copy of his decade into the book as scripture, and let the comedy of a metered life stand beside a theology of grace. The stake was real: a writer paid by the word, in a market that wanted plots, building a book whose ending refuses the reader solid ground. What holds the axis a tenth below the gate is that the vehicle is still the caper, and the swerve is made inside it, not against a proven path.

Score: 8.4 / 10

The form carries knowledge in three ways. The narration sits with Joe Chip and knows no more than he does, so the reader shares the half-lifer’s condition: one reads a world in decay without knowing that one is dead, and the regression of objects is experienced before it is explained. The epigraphs are the second instrument. Each chapter opens on an advertisement for Ubik, a beer, an instant coffee, a salad dressing, a razor, a hair tonic, a bank, a stomach remedy, and the reader takes them as satire until the last, where the same name speaks as God; the form makes the commodity and the sacred one word and lets the reader discover it. The closing turn to Runciter’s point of view is the third, reversing the whole frame in a page. What holds the axis there is the plot’s machinery, the bomb and the corporate rivalry, a container the content could leave without great loss.

Score: 8.3 / 10

The evidence of return over fifty-seven years is wide. The book has been reread as Gnostic theology, as a satire of consumer capitalism, as an allegory of the writer’s own precarious economy, as a study of entropy and grace, and as an early fiction of the simulated world, and the French reception, carried on through Emmanuel Carrère’s life of Dick, has kept returning to it. Within the book the questions stay open: whether anyone is alive at the end; whether Runciter is in half-life too; what Ubik is, and why it can be sold. The final page makes every reading provisional, and that is not a trick that exhausts on a second reading, for the evidence of the text is genuinely balanced. What holds the axis there is the surface: much of the incidental texture is taken on a first reading, and the inertials do not repay return.

Score: 8.5 / 10

The field is American fiction of the 1960s, with its science fiction as the field the book entered first. The force: the book showed that the genre’s furniture could carry an ontological fiction of the first seriousness, in which the reality of the world, and not its future, is the subject, and with The Man in the High Castle and the books around it, it moved the genre’s centre of gravity from the extrapolation of technology to the instability of the real. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: Stanislaw Lem’s essay on Dick set him against the genre he wrote in, and a line of films of unreality, from The Matrix to Abre los ojos and Inception, turns on its premise of a sustained false world in which the dead do not know their state. What holds the axis below the gate is that much of that reach runs through Dick’s whole body and not through this book alone.

Score: 8.4 / 10

The highest of the twelve. Fifty-seven years are weighed as fifty-seven years. The text survives whole, as published, and has been continuously in print in English and widely translated. Its presence is wide and not confined to the genre: it is read and taught as literature, and its reputation has risen, not faded, since Dick’s death. A survival of that length with that presence stands in its step, and the axis sits at the foot of it for the charge the axis names: a surface fixed to a moment, a 1992 imagined from 1966, with coin-operated doors, vidphones and a colony on the Moon, and some of its idiom of its decade. The charge is lightened because the satire has outlived its occasion and is read as forecast: the metered household now looks prescient.

Score: 8.8 / 10

Among the lowest of the twelve, level with The Inner Law and The Encompassed. The command is of construction more than of the sentence. The plot is engineered with real skill: the regression is paced chapter by chapter, the coins are planted early and paid in the last line, the epigraphs are timed so that their meaning turns only at the end, and the Des Moines sequence is sustained. Joe Chip’s quarrel with his door, which will not open without a coin and threatens to sue him, is exact comic writing. Three charges hold the axis near the floor of its range. The prose is functional and often flat, with stock description and an invented slang that now reads as period; the dialogue is frequently expository, persons explaining the plot to one another at length; and the inertials are drawn with a name and a trait apiece. The book was written fast, and it shows in the joins.

Score: 7.6 / 10

Among the lowest of the twelve, level with The Made and The Encompassed. One law governs most of the book: entropy against grace, the world running down and the remedy that must be bought to arrest it. Take the two most distant elements, the corporate comedy of Runciter Associates in New York in 1992 and the funeral home in Des Moines in 1939 where Runciter’s body lies. Both obey the law of decay and the commodity, and the comic economy of the opening is the economy that sells Ubik at the end. What holds the axis there is structural. The rules of the half-life world are not kept: Runciter’s messages and Jory’s power are given terms the plot then overrides as it needs; Pat Conley’s talent, built as the key, is laid aside; and the last reversal unsettles the frame without the book having prepared a law that holds it. The book is coherent in its mood and less so in its mechanics.

Score: 7.6 / 10

Among the lowest of the twelve, level with The Made and The Inner Law, and judged on what one short novel holds. Consciousness, in Joe’s dread and his failing body. Death and what may lie past it, in the half-life and the Moratorium. Labour and money, in Runciter’s firm, Joe’s debts and a world of metered things. Marriage, in Runciter’s hours with his dead wife. Commerce as the medium of life, in the epigraphs. The sacred, in Ubik and in Ella’s intercession. Time and history, in the regression to 1939. One figure joins them, the commodity that is also grace. What holds the axis there is the field: the state, the family beyond the Runciters, love beyond a sketch, the natural world and any society larger than a firm are thin, and the persons are few and lightly drawn.

Score: 7.6 / 10