Philip K. Dick is now widely regarded as one of the most important SF writers of all time and Ubik is one of his most entertaining masterpieces, a metaphysical comedy of death and salvation, a tour de force of paranoia and slapstick.
"An accident has occurred. Joe Chip and his colleagues-all but one of them-have narrowly escaped an explosion at a moon base. Or is it the other way round? Did Joe and the others die, and did the one fatality, Glen Runciter, actually survive? . . . From the stuff of space opera, Dick spins a deeply unsettling existential horror story, a nightmare you'll never be sure you've woken up from."-Lev Grossman, Time
In 1974, Philip K. Dick was commissioned to write a screenplay based on his novel Ubik. The film was eventually scrapped, but the screenplay was saved and later published in 1985. Featuring scenes that are not in the book and a surreal playfulness-the style of the writing goes back in time just like the technology in the book's dreamworld-this screenplay is the only one Dick wrote and features his signature mix of paranoia, humor, and big-idea philosophy.
'One of the most original practitioners writing any kind of fiction' The Sunday Times
'An exceptional novel' Brian W. Aldiss
Author
About Philip K Dick
Philip K. Dick (1928-1982) was born in Chicago but lived in California for most of his life. His edgy, dark future visions are even more relevant now. His novels have inspired many other writers and been used as the basis for films such as the classic Blade Runner the blockbuster Minority Report and the indie 'cartoon' A Scanner Darkly.
Since his untimely death at age 53, there has been an extraordinary growth of interest in his writings, which during his lifetime were largely ignored by serious mainstream critics and readers. Such is no longer the case, and the novels of Philip K. Dick frequently appear on university curricula devoted to modern American literature.
From age fifteen to his early twenties, Dick was employed in two Berkeley shops, University Radio and Art Music, owned by Herb Hollis, a salt-of-the-earth American small businessman who became a kind of father-figure for Dick and served as an inspiration for a number of his later fictional characters, most notably Leo Bulero in The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch. In the early 1950s, with the helpful mentorship of SF editor and Berkeley resident Anthony Boucher, Dick began to publish stories in the SF pulps of the era at an astonishing rate - seven of his stories appeared in June 1953 alone. He soon gave up his employment in the Hollis shops to pursue the economically insecure career of an SF writer.
