Two general criteria are most commonly used to screen out the “trash” from those SF works which are deemed worthy of critical attention and may be included in the university curriculum. The first refers to a work’s scientific or philosophic intentions and content, by virtue of which it is described as fictionalized science (vulgarisation), or as a paradigm of the scientific method (extrapolation) which may be used to probe our contemporary problems—for instance, SF as Utopian Literature. A pedigree of academic worth may also be granted on the basis of formal criteria, involving the discovery of esthetic or literary qualities: attention to style, imagery and metaphor, and to the work’s striving towards the status of High Art.1 These attempts to make SF respectable through its co-optation into some larger literary tradition effectively strip it of its specific or generic qualities. Thus, they also fulfill an important role in the preservation of the literary status quo and, in corollary fashion, of the society it is the university’s function to support. But such conformist critical recuperation cannot make sense of much that is best within SF, and in particular, of the writing of Philip K. Dick.
Dick’s writing is not easily included within traditional academic limits, for his novels are, in appearance, badly and carelessly written, with superficial characterization, confusing plots and similar deviations from “good writing.” This apparent inattention to writing, along with an overabundance of traditional SF details and conventions have earned him the neglect of the proponents both of high art and of the New Wave; while his sprawling, chaotic near futures and his total disregard for the traditional SF virtues of rationality and futurological plausibility have caused him to be overlooked by the proponents of the more traditional extrapolative SF.2 However, this paper will attempt to set out, through the example of Ubik, how Dick’s SF presents a model of a more subversive form of writing which undermines rather than reconfirms the repressive system in which it has been produced, and acts as a critique of the ideological presuppositions of the SF genre and of the traditional novel in general.
AS WITH HIS OTHER FICTIONS, from Eye in the Sky (1957) and Man in the High Castle (1962) through The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch (1964) and Maze of Death (1970), Ubik is centered on the “reality problem”—on the efforts of a group of people to grasp an elusive, changing, sometimes hallucinatory and often hostile reality. The novel divides readily into two parts. The events which lead up to the explosion take place primarily on a single reality plane involving the business rivalry between Hollis Talents’ psi agents and Runciter Associates’ “inertials” (anti-psis). Then, following the explosion and death of Runciter, reality begins to lose its consistency and integrity. Although Joe Chip and the other inertials succeed in transporting Runciter to the Blessed Brethren Moratorium where the dead are preserved in “half-life”—a state between “full-life and the grave” (§2) in which the subject may be revived and communicated with as long as the waning “cephalic activity” is retained—attempts to revive Runciter fail and are superseded by the inertials’ own anxious efforts to understand what is happening to them. Faced with a disintegrating, hostile reality, they surmise that there are two opposing forces at work: a “process of deterioration” in which their reality ages and decays, and another force which counteracts the first and involves inexplicable manifestations of the dead Runciter.
Their attempts at comprehension can be seen in the different hypotheses which they develop and which occupy much of the noveclass="underline" they think that Runciter has pre-recorded messages to them before his death; that Runciter is alive trying to contact them in half-life; or that Pat (Joe Chip’s wife) is an agent of Hollis and has succeeded in trapping them in a mental illusion. But as Joe Chip concedes, they can’t make it all add up; finally, he “meets” Runciter who assures him that they—not he—were killed in the explosion and are now linked together in half-life where he has been trying to communicate with them. And the inertials’ shared awareness of Des Moines in 1939 is the mental construct of the boy Jory who maintains his own half-life by feeding on the vitality of other half-lifers. Yet this final explanation is first modified, when Chip inadvertently summons into this illusion a living person from the future who replenishes his supply of Ubik, the “reality support” which protects him from Jory; and then destroyed when Runciter, upon leaving the Moratorium, discovers that all his coins and bills bear the likeness of Joe Chip.
From the first mention of half-life—a phenomenon which, according to Runciter, has “made theologians out of them all” (§2)—to the inertials’ quest for the meaning of their existence and their awareness of the forces of life and death, the narrative of Ubik continuously plays with a metaphysical dimension. Half-life is not presented as a realistic future possibility (that is to say, the novel does not explain how half-life might be possible, nor does it explore the possible moral, ethical or scientific problems raised). Thus the reader might begin by envisaging half-life as the fictional transposition of the world of ghosts and spirits into an SF novel, where the explanation is provided by pseudo-scientific assertions rather than by reference to the supernatural. Within this context both the quest for meaning and the never ending struggle between the forces of life and death have traditionally a metaphysical significance. The quest would usually rouse the reader to expect not only that there is some discernible meaning in reality, but that this meaning lies beyond or behind observable reality (teleology) and that man sometimes receives messages from the beyond about the meaning of reality (divine revelation). Jory, the negative force of illusion and death, is the devil in this Manichean allegory, while the Runciters are the agents of Ubik, the life-preserving force which is clearly analogous to God: by its name (from the Latin ubique, the root of ubiquity, one of the attributes of the Christian God), by its functions and, most explicitly, by the epigraph to the last chapter which recalls John’s “In the beginning was the Word…”:
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. (§17)
Although the reality problem is thus posed in metaphysical terms, such expectations by the reader are ultimately frustrated, and metaphysics is rejected. The characters are unable to discover any final, comprehensive meaning, and Joe Chip realizes, when he meets Jory, that there is nothing behind that reality: “Well, he thought, that’s one of the two agencies who’re at work; Jory is the one who’s destroying us—has destroyed us, except for me. Behind Jory there is nothing: he is the end” (§15). And again, when he meets Ella, he exclaims “You’re the other one, Jory destroying us, you trying to help us. Behind you there’s no one. I’ve reached the last entities involved” (§16).
Yet Joe Chip’s discovery of the “last entities involved” is not that of a final or first cause. Jory and Ubik, although they may be seen as allegorical representations of God and the Devil, are limited, nonetheless, in several crucial ways which weaken this allegory; or rather, which suggests a criticism of such idealistic concepts as “God” or “the Devil.” In fact, Jory only “speeds up” the “normal cooling off” and death of things which is the “destiny of the universe” (§13). Nor does Jory think of himself as eviclass="underline" his own half-life, he tells Chip, depends on his ability to prey on weaker half-lifers (§15) a dependance which is very similar to Joe Chip’s “ecological” argument in defence of Runciter Associates and the anti-Psis “neutralising” of Psis: “[anti-Psis] are life forms preying on the Psis, and the Psis are life forms that prey on the Norms… Balance, the full circle, predator and prey. It appears to be an eternal system; and frankly I don’t see how it could be improved” (§3).