Ubik

A 1969 novel set in a 1992 where psychic talent is a corporate-espionage input and the recently dead are held in cryonic half-life. After a sabotaged job, the technician Joe Chip and his colleagues find reality regressing around them, briefly reversible with a consumer product called Ubik that arrives advertised in a different form in every chapter heading.

Context: Dick’s most formally inventive novel and the one that makes his central preoccupation explicit — the world as a rendering that can degrade, with a spray can as the patch. On an infrastructure reading list it earns its place as a book about a substrate failing underneath the people living on top of it.

Connections

• a16z Infra Reading List — the list this came from.
• a16z — the firm whose infrastructure team curates it.
• Philip K. Dick — the author.
• The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch — the earlier novel with the same product-as-reality structure.
• The Man in the High Castle — the other Dick novel here where the real world is one of several on offer.
• Historical Futurism — the research lens.