Ubik

Work Title: Ubik
Medium: Novel
Episode Title:
Year: 1969
Writer(s): Philip K. D
"Original" Writer: Yes Own work?: Yes
Summary:

Set in a future where people have psychic powers. The main character, Joe Chip, works for a company which ensures privacy for its clients through anti-psychics who can block mindreaders. After a violent encounter with a competing company on the moon, Chip and others return to Earth and begin to notice that reality seems to be somehow different. New technologies are being mysteriously replaced with old technologies. Eventually, they find themselves back in 1939. At the climax of the novel, they realize that they were killed in the explosion on the moon and that they've been kept partially alive through a stasis technology. Everything that they experience beyond the explosion takes place in a simulated environment they all share at the facility their bodies are housed in that is being slowly corrupted by a dead psychic.

  • Self-Written?: 1
  • Source Name:
  • Source URL:
Era/Year of Portrayal: distant_future
Distinctive characteristics of the world in portrayal:

Some humans have psychic or anti-psychic powers

Technology

  • Name of portrayed presence-evoking technology: "Half-life" (or cryonic suspension)
  • Description of the technology: To the living, the technology resembles a crypt full of coffins. To the dead people inside of it, it resembles the physical world. The replication is so realistic that the characters who are placed within it don't realize they are dead until they are told so.
  • Nature of task or activity: Life-extension
  • Performance of the Technology: It begins to break down when a dead psychic discovers he can extend his own half-life by stealing the psychic energy that newcomers contribute to the simulated world.
  • Description of creator(s): None given
  • Major goal(s) of creator(s): To give the deceased an extended life, allowing them to remain in contact with the living until the last of their psychic energy is gone.
  • Description of users of technology: Generally, only the wealthy can afford half-life. The main characters are granted it by the company they were working for when they died.
  • Type(s) of presence experience in the portrayal: both
  • Description of presence experience: For the living, they can communicate with the dead through the half-life technology. For the dead, they can continue living in a simulated world.
  • User awareness of technology during experience: Most half-lifers are aware of their death before they are placed inside the system. However, Dick's various narrative twists suggest that people would be unaware that they exist in a simulated space unless they were told.
  • Valence of experience: The main characters are horrified to learn that they've been placed in a half-life facility but only because they are simultaneously learning of their deaths. It seems as if others are grateful for a chance to live beyond their deaths.
  • Specific responses: Unable to tell whether they are alive or being simulated. Twists which bring about this response occur frequently.
Long-term consequences:

Dick consistently portrays the half-life technology in a neutral fashion. He seems to have included it for the purposes of creating a complicated narrative structure rather than for commenting on the social or moral consequences of such a technology.

Other:

Coder name: Michael Black
Coder email: mike.black@temple.edu
Coder affiliation: Temple University