Ubik by Philip K. Dick (1969)

His revulsion became, all at once, a weird nebulous panic. (p.88)

Ubik is set in the same year as Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, 1992, although it is a different 1992 (itself making a point about ramifying realities and fissiparous futures). Instead of androids, this future is plagued by telepaths, telepaths who can read your mind and some which can predict the future.

The telepaths – known collectively as psis – have become such a menace that companies have grown up which offer the services of anti-telepaths, human mutants who also have psionic mind powers, but of a purely negative kind, to counteract them. The businesses are known as anti-psi prudence organisations; the anti-telepaths are known as ‘inertials’.

Types of telepaths include: teeps, kineticists, precogs, resurrectors and animists (p.22).

One of these prudence organisations is Runciter Associates, run by ageing Glen Runciter. His people irritate him by ringing him early one morning to tell him they’ve lost track of ‘the top telepath in the Sol system’, S. Dole Melipone. He is the only known telepath who can generate ‘68.2 blr units of telepathic aura’. Melipone is employed by Ray Hollis, who runs an organisation for psis and is by way of being the book’s baddy.

Runciter immediately flies to Zürich to consult his dead wife, Ella, who is kept in a state of suspended animation – in ‘cold-pac’ – at the Beloved Brethren Moratorium run by Herbert Schoenheit von Vogelsang. Family members who have passed away can be kept in cryogenic storage and you can ‘wake’ them and communicate with their brain patterns via special headphones, the ‘electronic communing equipment’ (p.223).

In the event, Ella’s thoughts are hijacked by a dead person being kept in a casket next to hers, Jory Miller. Because he’s younger, Jory’s cerebronic patterns are stronger than hers. Runciter is outraged and demands his wife be moved to a secure unit.

These half-deads are, the reader reflects, yet another kind of altered consciousness, Dick’s main theme – as are, of course, the florid range of telepaths and inertials we meet throughout the book. Other kinds of minds.

Runciter Associates had sent one of their own telepaths, G.G. Ashwood to the hotel where Melipone was last seen. Now Ashwood turns up at the flat of the chronically impoverished Runciter Associates employee, Joe Chip.

Ashwood has brought a new find, a girl of about 17 who has a spectacular new power. She seems to be able to rearrange the past in order to suit the needs of the present. I.e. if she sees something she or someone else wants to change she has the power, not to travel in person, but to send her mind back into the past to alter the course of events in order to change the present to suit. She proves this by showing Joe the initial evaluation of her which he carried out and which was very unfavourable. In the narrative we just read she had slowly stripped off to get ready for a shower, which swayed Joe towards giving her a more favourable valuation. This – the stripping version – is version two of events. She went back and changed everything that happened from the moment she came into his apartment.

Joe doesn’t believe it. To prove it Pat gets out of her blouse the valuation he wrote for her in the first course of events. It’s his writing, alright. It appears to be true that she can go back in time and alter the course of events. Wow.


All this has happens in the first 40 or so pages of this 230-page-long novel. As usual Dick has plunged us not only into a story, but into a densely imagined world of wonders where weird elements are not just everyday but so taken for granted that they’re given typically American nicknames.

The futureness of it all is created and reinforced by a raft of gadgets and gizmos in the brave new world of 1992.

  • Runciter obviously travels to Switzerland and back super-fast, maybe via rocket. The existence of rockets is confirmed when Runciter takes his team of inertials to Luna (the moon) by the company rocket, Pratfall II.
  • Runciter’s hovertaxi drops him on the roof of his company building, from where he takes a ‘descent chute’ down to the fifth floor.
  • People don’t have newspapers, they have ‘pape machines on whose screen they scan through today’s headlines and, if an article takes their fancy, ask the ‘pape machine to print it off so it can be read. (Reading this in 2019 you wonder why Dick didn’t make the logical connection and just have people read the whole article off the screen? Why bother with cumbersome printing? I guess the culture-wide tradition of reading from paper was too all-encompassing for even Dick to see beyond.)
  • People talk via vidphone (as they also do in Android).
  • Money has stopped being in dollars and is now counted in poscreds.
  • For weaponry people carry laser tubes (as they do in Android).

The plot

The main plot concerns a client, Stanton Mick, a billionaire who is developing a new hyperspace drive on the moon. He suspects his operation has been infiltrated by psis from Hollis’s organisation. The fear is that they will carry out industrial espionage, getting into his scientists’ minds, stealing all the secrets, possibly sabotaging the project.

So he sends a secretary, Miss Wirt, to ask Runciter Associates to send up a team of their best inertials to counter the psis.

It all has a broadly comic tone. The inertials Runciter assembles are a strikingly random ill-matched bunch of freaks wearing deliberately kooky outfits – the red triangular glasses, the fashionable elastic bands which push a woman’s breasts together – who even their employer, Runciter, finds it hard to take seriously.

They fly to the moon (in one hour) and are ushered by Stanton Mick’s people into the underground rooms of the lunar base. The bizarre figure of Micks, with waist-length white hair, appears, but they’ve barely begun discussing arrangements before Mick inexplicably floats up to the ceiling and explodes.

Many of the inertials are injured, Runciter fatally. Joe takes charge and carries Runciter’s body with another anti-psi, along with the rest of them they escape in a lift up to the surface, make it to the spaceship, and blast off, leaving Joe wondering: if the entire ‘job’ was a set-up by Hollis, why did he let them get away?


The novel is surprisingly funny. Or obviously funny at unexpected moments. One humorous element is Dick’s fondness for improbable-verging-on-grotesque businesses. I noted it in the Van Ness Animal repair shop in Androids and here it surfaces in the Beloved Brethren Moratorium and its unctuous Teutonic owner.

The rundown of the eleven inertials who go to the moon is a parade of grotesques in outlandish costumes, done for broadly comic effect.

There’s another thread of broad comedy running through the text in that, in the future, many basic household functions and implements – such as a door, a shower, a bath – require cash payments up front before functioning. You have to slip a nickel or a dime or twenty cents into the slot before they’ll work. This need dogs Joe Chip wherever he goes because Joe, a shambles of a man, is permanently hard-up, with the result that doors won’t open for him, coffee dispensers won’t serve him, showers don’t operate, and so on, so that he is continually begging everyone around him for spare nickels and dimes, which becomes a kind of catchphrase or repeated failing.


The plot so far led me to expect that there would be all kinds of cat and mouse, psi-chasing shenanigans between inertials and psis on the moon base. But this turns out tobe a complete red herring. From this point onwards the novel is about something completely different.

Immediately after the fake Stanton Mick bomb explodes, Runciter’s team all hurry back to the rocket and blast off back for earth.

And begin to notice what turns out to be The Big Theme of the second half of the book. Everything starts ageing and retrogressing. The cigarettes crumble in their hands. Coins seem out of date. The ship’s computer rejects information from the yellow pages when they try and phone the moratorium number.

They fly direct to the Beloved Brethren Moratorium in order to get Runciter’s body into a cold-pac as soon as possible, to preserve whatever is left of his consciousness and there is fuss and comic business with the funereal Herbert Schoenheit von Vogelsang, who insists on playing heavy classical music (Beethoven, Verdi) till they yell at him to turn it off.

But things are retrogressing. Joe stays the night at the moratorium hotel and in the morning is horrified to discover one his fellow inertials, Wendy Wright, turned into a dried-out mummy. She had obviously come to see him in the night but maybe be stricken by some sort of physical degeneration and crawled to the closet where she curled up and atrophied.

Joe flies back to New York where he finds a meeting of the inertials being led by Al Hammond. They have all noticed that their cigarettes are always too old to smoke. They get their money out and lay it on the table only to discover that Runciter’s head has replaced Washington on all the coins and notes. One of the inertials has a box of matches they bought weeks ago which carries an advertisement featuring Runciter’s face and telling them he is selling a product from a corporate HQ in Des Moines.

Joe takes Al from the meeting to his office where the remains of Wendy are in a plastic bag. They confer feverishly about the situation then decide to pick a city at random. Baltimore. They fly to Baltimore and visit a store at random. The woman in front of them at the checkout complains that everything she’s bought from the store is either dying or dead. Al and Joe check out the packs of cigarettes; all of them crumble in their fingers. Something is ageing the world. Something that aged Wendy to death.

They pick a carton totally at random from a huge pile of cigarette cartons and, when they open it, there’s a message from Runciter inside, telling them the situation is critical, he must get in touch with them, apologising about Wendy. What the hell is going on? There seem to be two forces, one in which everything is ageing, another in which Runciter is taking over the world, or revealing aspects of it (money, vidphone, products).

Joe takes a punt and buys a brand new tape recorder from the store. They fly back to New York. By the time they hand the tape recorder over to Runciter Associates’ chief technician the recorder has morphed into an old tape-driven version, at least 40 years old. Al looks at the instruction booklet and it claims the machine was ‘Made by Runciter of Zürich’ which has a North American office in Des Moines, Iowa. It’s as if lots of bits of Runciterness are leaking into this world. How? Why?

They take a lift back to the meeting room where they left the others, but on the way Al has visions of the lift itself reverting to a 1910s metal frame elevator complete with elevator guy. He is phasing back and forth between the present and a degenerated past. As they walk the corridor towards the meeting room Al fades. He asks to go into the men’s room where they find a graffito:


The lights go out. Joe hears Al’s voice fading. He’s going the way of Wendy and begs Joe to leave. There is a terrifying page which takes us inside Al’s head to experience the sense of the entire present world turning to a barren desert of rocks and ice.

The conference room is empty. The other inertials have split. The big TV screen broadcasts a news announcement of the death of Runciter and a big funeral to be held at the Simple Shepherd Mortuary in his home town of des Moines. This cuts to a message for a product named Ubik, followed by a message from Runciter himself, saying that he knew he was going to be assassinated on the moon, thanks to some company preconfigs. He knew this deterioration would set in (though he doesn’t explain why) and says he posted an aerosol of Ubik which Joe can use to spray around him and stave off the decay.

Joe, the reader notices, is taking all this very calmly. Dick’s characters generally do. When they have nervous breakdowns it’s not because of the weird stuff that happens in the stories. Anyway, Joe ponders: the graffiti in the men’s room implied that Runciter is alive and that somehow all the other inertials are dead. Maybe the bomb on the moon killed all of them save Runciter and he somehow managed to get them all into cold-pacs. Maybe this is what being half-dead feels like, like the world carries on but rots and regresses until eventually it’s just the bleak desert which Al saw.

But that theory is contradicted by this TV newscast which, along with the text of the matchbox ads, appears to show that Runciter genuinely is dead. Only answer is to get to des Moines for this supposed funeral.

Joe takes a hovertaxi back to his apartment building. Here there is an extended passage where Joe discovers that every single element in his apartment has regressed – the fridge, phone, TV, everything have ceased to be their shiny plastic 1992 editions and gone back to the 50s, 40s and 30s.

When he exits the apartment (held up, as usual by the front door demanding its nickel) he is scared of taking the lift in case the same thing happens to him as happened to Al, so he walks down the stairs. By the time he gets to the front door it has an old fashioned electric buzzer. There’s a package in his post cubby hole but it doesn’t contain the Ubik spray Runciter promised, but Ubik Liver and Kidney Balm, some old-fashioned snake oil.

The substance designed to reverse the regressive change process has itself regressed. (p.145)

His car has reverted back into a petrol and combustion engine car. He’s never driven one before. A key ring is in his pocket with the ignition key in it so he starts it up and hesitantly drives towards the nearest airport.

By the time Joe gets to the airfield it is lined with old hangars and all the planes have propellers. In the time it takes to be directed towards some flyers who might be prepared to take him to Des Moines these have degenerated further to biplanes. the quaintly dressed pilots a) look at his outlandish (futuristic) clothes b) reject his unknown (to them) money and c) agree to fly him in exchange for his 1939 LaSalle motor. But when Joe takes them to see it it has regressed further to a black 1920 Model-A Ford (p.149).

The pilot isn’t interested in the car but notices the bottle of Ubik on the passenger seat. It has regressed since Joe left it to an apparently rare ointment – Elixir of Ubik – in a vintage bottle. Looking at it closely Joe sees the label has changed and there’s another message from Runciter:

Don’t do it Joe. There’s another way.
Keep trying. You’ll find it. Lots of luck.

The pilot says he’ll fly Joe to Des Moines in exchange. Weird though all this regressing has been, it has in a sense been easy enough to grasp – the world is moving backwards in time relative to one privileged character who remains the same and observes it rationally.

Next day he arrives at Des Moines airfield more or less in one piece, struggles (as always; it is his signature schtick) to find a nickel to use in the payphone, rings the Simple Shepherd Mortuary to be told that the service for Runciter has started, to be followed by a lying in state.

Joe finds all the other inertials who had been to the moon and were involved in the blast attending the funeral. They all crowd round him and it’s immediately obvious that they too have experienced the regression. They all see the same ‘reality’ as him, namely – from a newspaper he saw – that it is 13 September 1939 i.e. the Second World War has just broken out.

They confer and agree that they need to keep together. But one of them, Edie, had returned to her hotel in town feeling ‘tired’. they jump into the two available cars to get to the hotel and help her. On the way Joe is pulled over by a motorbike cop who writes out a citation. When he reads it, Joe sees it is in Runciter’s handwriting, warning him that Pat is… and then stops. At the bottom is an ad for a druggist, Archer’s Drug Store.

Joe enters the nearest shop and asks where the druggist is. The owner points across the road. Joe realises the building is pulsing in and out of time. For moments he can see it as an automated shop from 1992. Then it reverts to an era even before 1939. In one of its old moments he enters and asks the shop assistant for a jar of Ubik. On the label is yet another message from Runciter, warning that Pat is lying, Pat the time changer may be behind all of this.

Joe goes onto the hotel foyer and confronts Pat with the part of the message on the traffic violation at which moment his world explodes. It is dark, darkness which slowly resolves to grey streaks, and he can hear voices concerned for him. Basically he is dying and disintegrating just like Wendy and Al did. Pat accompanies him as he slowly, agonisingly makes his way up the stairs to the room he’s been allotted, taunting him all the way. Joe realises she is really evil. She was sent by Hollis to infiltrate Runciter Associates and kill them all, but this is a horrible way to do it.

The chapter describing this is really horrible, with an acute description of what feels like a heart attack only much worse – the sheer agony of trying to lift his feet and move one step further is nightmarish to read – and made ten times worse by Pat’s cold, heartless, taunting of him at, literally, every effortful gasping step of the way.

But when he finally, just about makes it into the room, and collapses to the floor, prepared to shrivel into a bag of dusty bones… Runciter is there and sprays him with wonder-working Ubik, at which he is almost immediately restored to normal life and function!

Runciter explains his view of the situation. Ashwood, Melipone, Mick and Hollis have been conspiring for months, maybe longer to lure them to Luna and blow them up. Now they are using Pat to transport them back in time. Why stop at 1939? Because that’s as far back as Pat’s powers extend.

Joe doesn’t believe him. In a complex dialogue Joe forces Runciter to admit that all the inertials were killed in the bomb explosion. They were quickly stored in cold-pacs. Pat herself was mortally wounded and is in a cold-pac. Runciter admits that he is sitting in the lobby of the Beloved Brethren Moratorium while Joe is in a cold-pac. Reluctantly, Runciter admits that the sense of atrophy and decline, things ageing and falling to pieces – they’re all common features of what all ‘half-lives’ experience, a mournful sense of decay.

And the regression in time? Initially Runciter tells him that is the work of Pat’s half-life mind taking them as far back as she can go. But, Joe asks, who is sometimes killing them, sometimes making it worse? Joe doesn’t believe it’s Hollis and his gang. It’s too arbitrary, too malicious for that. An almost childish delight in breaking and fixing, like a kids pulling wings off a fly. He nags Runciter into admitting that he, Runciter, doesn’t know what’s going on. He’s left all these useful messages and yet… he can’t actually save or improve the situation.

Runciter breaks off contact and the text cuts to him sitting in the lobby taking off the apparatus which lets you talk to the half-lives. And back to Joe in the fake 1939. There’s a knock at the door and one of the gang of inertias, Don Denny is there with an old-time doctor. Joe tells the doc he doesn’t need his help, but the doc inspects him anyway, while Joe tells Denny what he’s learned and what Runciter told him.

Denny tells him they’re all going to die. Even Pat. He just came from Pat expiring on the stairs. She seemed surprised. Yes, says Joe, she thinks she’s doing this, but she isn’t. She’s in the cold-pacs like all of them. Joe persuades Denny to use up what’s left of the Ubik spray, might do him some good. Denny sprays himself and when the nimbus of aerosol disappears, it isn’t Denny at all. there stands some gawky, misshapen teenage kids. He tells them his name is Jory, Jory Miller.

He is the gawky crude teenager who was in the cold-pac next to Runciter’s wife who invaded her thought patterns near the start of the book. Now he’s doing it to all of them.

There now follows an elaborate game as Jory gets rid of the doctor and explains that everything, everything he sees about him, was created by he, Jory. He eats the other half-lives, he consumes them, he has eaten all Joe’s colleagues. Joe attacks Jory but Jory sinks his teeth into his hand and tells him he is invulnerable. Joe turns and tries to escape out the hotel room, down the stairs, hails a cab in the street. Asks the cab to cruise around town and then out of town.

Joe knows that creating this world and keeping it stable costs Jory a lot of effort. He wants to make it hard. Cruising round they come across a pretty young woman. Joe kerb crawls her and says he’d like to take her to dinner. He is beginning to feel tired again, and cold, signs that the Ubik is wearing off. The young lady is kind and courteous and compassionate whenhe begins to fade and look rough. And then she announces that she is Ella Runciter, Ralph’s wife. She has been fighting a long war against Jory ever since he arrived in the moratorium.

She gives him a certificate for a lifetime supply of Ubik which he can get at any of two pharmacies in town. She says she is soon to be reborn (reborn? there’s a whole new angle) and wants him, Joe, to take over as Ralph’s sleeping partner, the person he comes to consult. They stop the cab. She gets out and bids adieu.

Hugely relieved, Joe gets the cab to drive to the first pharmacist. But almost as soon as he’s inside he realises the pharmacist is a version of Jory, who quietly gloats that he has ‘reverted’ all the Ubik in the store back to its 1930s version, pure snake oil, useless for healing. He hands him a jar of the useless stuff. Joe bends all his heart and soul and spirit on trying to force the thing to regenerate back to 1992, to be the proper Ubik, bending every nerve to make it so.

He fails. He gives up. He walks out the store. He is now feeling weak again. Oh no he’s going to have to go through the appalling weakness and cold he experienced back in the hotel when Pat was taunting him. He lies down on the bench at a bus shelter.

And a pretty woman bends over him and offers him a can of up to date, effective Ubik. She sprays it on him and she comes back to life. She is a representative of the manufacturer. She gives him a plausible sounding explanation of how it is a biochemical agent which retards the inevitable fading effects of being in a cold-pac on half life. ‘Hey, you want to go to dinner?’ he asks her. ‘Next time,’ she promises and fades away.


Throughout the book every chapter has started with a spoof little advert text selling Ubik as a wonder product, a brand of beer or coffee, a type of brassiere which pushes up and shapes those boobs, Ubik hair conditioner, Ubik sleeping pills.

On one level these read to me like the kind of satirical spoof ads you get in late 1960s comedy movies, Woody Allen films and suchlike, the knockabout spirit of the original M*A*S*H movie (1970), taking the mickey out of grotesque American consumer culture.

But quite obviously, on another level, Ubik is portrayed as some kind of magic force all the way through the novel. The entirely biochemical explanation the young lady gives at the end is not quite enough to explain the imaginative force it has had in the text. So it comes as no surprise when the epigraph to the short final chapter reads.

I am Ubik. Before the universe was, I am. I made the suns. I made the worlds. I created the lives and the places they inhabit; I move them here, I put them there. They go as I say, they do as I tell them. I am the word and my name is never spoken, the name which no one knows. I am called Ubik, but that is not my name. I am. I shall always be. (p.223)

So is Ubik just a chemical compound created by Ella Runciter within the world of the cold-pacs (and it’s pretty hard to see how that would be physically possible seeing as their bodies are completely static)? Or is it meant to be some shape-shifting force which stands – within the half-life world – for God?

To be honest, by this stage of the novel, on the penultimate page, I was too exhausted by the continually shifting realities of the previous 221 pages to care. That kind of point blank interpretation seems to me to be dead and stultifying.

What makes the novel live is the extraordinary and apparently endless succession of surprises it pulls on you. It is the narrative dynamic which appeals and works. Stopping to think about the logic of the plot or the symbolism for very long tends, in my experience, to make the whole house of cards collapse.

Futures and pasts

Both Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? and Ubik are set in 1992, a giddy 24 years from when they were written. Dick predicted that by then we’d have hovercars, colonies on the moon and Mars, lasertubes, androids and telepaths.

In the real world 1992 was notable for the UK General Election which was won by John Major who went on to govern Britain for five years and is most remembered for setting up a traffic cones hotline.

Thus the difference between the dazzling techno-worlds of science fiction – and between Philip K. Dick’s deliriously proliferating alternative worlds – and the big grey underpants of reality.

Related links

Philip K. Dick reviews

  • Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (1968) In 1992 androids are almost indistinguishable from humans except by trained bounty hunters like Rick Deckard who is paid to track down and ‘retire’ escaped andys
  • Ubik (1969) In 1992 the world is threatened by mutants with psionic powers who are combated by ‘inertials’ but the novel focuses on the weird alternative world experienced by a group of inertials after a catastrophe on the moon
  • Flow My Tears, The Policeman Said (1974)

Other science fiction reviews


1898 The War of the Worlds – the Martians invade earth

1904 The Food of the Gods and How It Came to Earth by H.G. Wells – scientists invent a compound which makes plants, animals and humans grow to giant size, leading the human giants to rebel against the ‘little people’
1906 In the Days of the Comet by H.G. Wells – a comet trails gasses through earth’s atmosphere which bring about ‘the Great Change’, inaugurating an era of wisdom and fairness, as told by narrator Willie Leadford






1961 A Fall of Moondust by Arthur C. Clarke – a pleasure tourbus on the moon is sucked down into a sink of quicksand-like moondust, sparking a race against time to rescue the trapped crew and passengers
1968 2001: A Space Odyssey by Arthur C. Clarke – panoramic narrative which starts with aliens stimulating evolution among the first ape-men and ends with a spaceman transformed into galactic consciousness



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