While I'd agree that Ubik is a great introduction to the PKD universe, I would also classify it as his best book. I also love many of his other books, but to me none of them are as strong or consistently good as Ubik. Some of them have great parts, though, so I definitely wouldn't stop at Ubik, but I've yet to read a better book by him, or even one that was just as good.

I was excited to read it after seeing a humorous excerpt of the protagonist arguing with his front door, trying to convince it to open.

As you said, the book is bizarre. The central premise is more fantasy than sci-fi (meaning, an adventure involving magic and monsters instead of starting from a premise and exploring it somewhat realistically using logic and science). Most of the book is written (deliberately) like a dream diary, with bits of reality shifting and changing.

I found the characters bizarre, and as you said, impossible to relate to. I'd describe them even worse than that: they're badly written characters that lack personality and consistency. Characters behave in seemingly random ways that leave you scratching your head. For example, Pat (a character) decides to strip naked and move in with the messy and penniless protagonist just minutes after meeting him for the first time for a job interview. This happens over a couple pages with little explanation.

Many people enjoyed the book, so you can take my opinion with a grain of salt.

> Pat (a character) decides to strip naked and move in with the messy and penniless protagonist just minutes after meeting him for the first time for a job interview. This happens over a couple pages with little explanation.

You find out a bit later in the book that Pat has the ability to change the past, and that she can remember the unaltered past but nobody else can. It's also strongly implied that there is some kind of deep, unstated connection between the protagonist and Wendy. The unspoken implication here is that the protagonist and Wendy were married in the "original reality" (or at least an earlier one); Pat wanted the protagonist so she changed history to take them out of each others' lives.

Ubik is a real trip, and a lot of it makes sense only in retrospect.

Also, the Andrew File System makes a whole lot more sense to me now, after reading the novel: https://openafs-workshop.org/assets/2019/slides/2019-06-20-0...

Either way, Pat (described as "obviously no more than seventeen") strips naked and announces she's moving in with the very messy and penniless Joe just minutes after meeting him for a job interview. That much happens in the present. All this theory adds is that Joe was also married and Pat just decided to undo his marriage. It's one extra obstacle. It doesn't explain why she's interested in Joe. There's no character development. And Pat gets blown up a few chapters later.

I'm not saying it's impossible for someone to do that. It's just one example of a character acting weird for seemingly no reason. But the characters remain weird throughout the book.

I talked about in another comment how Pat's power seems way too powerful to use in a logical plot.

The book is bizarre, illogical, confusing, and I was often trying to get a grasp of what I am supposed to make of what’s happening, if that makes sense. With that, I don’t think I seriously contemplated the scene that you describe as much as you did, since if I recall correctly, by the time it happened the book already had lost its grip on rationality. (Or was it when I still thought the story could make perfect sense, and only retroactively realized it was already going off the rails much earlier?)

Wasn’t there a “human bomb” that was essentially a weird caricature of a balloonish clown person floating into the air or something?

But I agree, it would be hard for me to say that I “liked” the book, I think it was one of the books where I was happy when it was over. Even though I’d have missed a rather complex experience that I still think about, had I not read it.

I certainly won't fault you for being glad to have read the book. It's definitely an unusual book.

Like take the exchange with the front door that you mentioned, where the protagonist basically had a human argument with it to be let out (and with his fridge). It indeed seems humorous at first, but once you realize that the book isn't a Douglas Adams'esque comedy, it seems downright bonkers!

Ubik is meant to be a colourful and out there. Take the descriptions of characters' outfits, for example. One is wearing "a cowboy hat, black lace mantilla and Bermuda shorts", and that's a female character. Ubik was beloved by French critics who compared him to Alfred Jarry, the surrealist. The argument with the door is meant to be ridiculous, but also predicts hostile technology. Today, I just had to argue with a chat bot in order to cancel my NY Times subscription (they also allow you to do it over the phone; but you can't just cancel), which is the kind of "banal dystopia" that PKD loved to conjure up.

Adams was also influenced by Vonnegut. In The Sirens of Titan, the entire plot — involving time travel and an attack on Earth by Mars — is orchestrated by an extraterrestial being simply because he needs a spare part for his spaceship. You find that kind of cosmic irony in Adams a lot.

To enjoy soft scifi and fantasy, you have to be able to be able to suspend disbelief.

Your complaint about the protagonist arguing with his door reminds me of people who read Tolkien and then complain that elves and balrogs don't exist. No, they don't, and you have to be able to get past that to enjoy the books.

Also, it's uncanny how many of Dick's "bonkers" ideas have wound up being close to where we are now or soon will be.

Even with something as outrageous as arguing with a door, we're pretty close to arguing with our phones. Voice recognition and voice synthesis has already allowed us to talk to our phones, and while phones aren't arguing back yet (afaik), it's not inconceivable that they will if corporate dominance proceeds apace. With the development of the Internet of Things, more and more appliances are likely to have that capability. I'm not sure about doors, but fridges are already part of the IOT. So Dick's world, even in this respect, may not be that far off.

Much harder for me to swallow are things like Ubik itself (whatever it is) and the various entities that seem to rule that world. But their improbability does not detract from my enjoyment of the book in the least, because I am able to suspend disbelief.

Also, as I said in another reply in this thread, I think PKD's books are much more comprehensible and relatable if you've had some bad trips on psychedelics. It's quite common for people in such states to experience inanimate objects as menacing and/or alive, for the world to seem inhabited by powerful spirits, to experience one's death, afterlife, and rebirth, etc..

So to someone experienced with psychedelics, reading PKD might not necessarily elicit a reaction of just "that's weird," but "I know what that's like. I've been there."

Whether by drug-induced accident or design, PKD was modelling how the 50s corporate world feels. People are subject to powerful forces far beyond their control, and they can be rewarded or punished for reasons that seem to have no relationship to their actions.

It's a kind of Capitalist Dreamtime, a 50s suburban corporate reworking of Kafka. With more drugs and mysticism and miraculous but also threatening technology.

She was too powerful for a good plot, in my opinion. The novel doesn't elaborate on the exact extents and limits of her power, but it leaves me wondering why she's working in corporate espionage and not, I don't know, ruling the world or something. Why does she have an interest in lowly Joe? Why is she killed off (or half-killed) so quickly and easily?

I agree with you. I'd rather the plot have seen one plotline through instead of abruptly shifting tracks and rendering the earlier plotline irrelevant.

On the spot, I can only come up with a rather stupid analogy, but if stories are carefully mixed and balanced cocktails, then a character that can arbitrarily turn back time for themselves and change things, is like taking that cocktail and pouring in a full bottle of everclear.

I'll try again (and might still fail): If I look at the 70s, e.g. watch a movie or a TV show that takes place in the 70s, or is even from the 70s, it feels like... the modern world for me. Yeah, fashion is whacky, technology was primitive, but overall it's actually "the modern world with whacky fashion and primitive technology".

When I read Ubik and the various decades before the 60s were described, it felt like different ages. The point about the pharmacy is not just the wood and brass and the medicine in jars, it's that the wood and the brass was made into intricate decor, including ornaments and statues, and that the pharmacist looked extraordinarily official.