I know from the other thread I made, on Dick's DADOES, that others here (well, most) have the view that Dick is not a good writer. And as I said there, it's not like I view him as a great writer, but he isn't absolute garbage either
So maybe making this thread isn't useless. At any rate I am finishing off the scifi part of my literary seminar, so it helps me to keep track (less than 2K words to write now, so it's over really)I read Ubiq a few months ago. It has the usual problems Dick's literature has, namely that Dick had no writing style at all and a great part of the story is forgettable. But compared to DADOES I felt that a lot less could be identified as filler or easy to take out without ruining the rest. Although this may be due to how vague what is going on in this novel is, compared to DADOES.
In Ubiq it isn't at all certain that anything we read has actually happened. Up to the very last chapter - which only numbers a couple of pages... - there could be one way to read this, but the last chapter ruins that, leaving the impression that probably everything is in flux. Much like the supposed psychotropic ubiquitous "Ubiq" drug in the novel, we can't say whether any object was really in the physical/real world or in the hallucinatory half-life world of the machine we read about in the first chapter.
That machine is supposed to preserve some degree of brain function, in an otherwise clinically dead person, allowing them to continue existing for some time (how much exactly can vary), so people in the real world can communicate with them for a few minutes at a time.
Now, up to the final chapter, the idea seemed to be that most of the people in the story thought their boss had died, but likely they were the ones who died and were transplanted to machines which gave them a half-life. The ending presents also their boss as suffering the first signs of being in half-life. Dick does refer - certainly not in a very elegant way - to Platonic Archetypes, and in the supposed half-life hallucinatory world the "objects" tend to revert to previous forms. Eg coins revert to older versions of coins, cars to older cars, modern planes to biplanes etc, all tied to the
But ultimately my view of the story's core is that it was about the chasm between being in a world where you can examine something of importance, and being willing to actually examine it. Since the owner of the machine-run half-life clinic is very interested in what happens in half-life, but doesn't have an experience of it (you need to be clinically dead to have one...), while the novel's protagonists are of the view they are in half-life but have no interest in examining it, because it is by now pointless.
At least this is the point of focus for myself. Maybe it is so cause I needed to cling onto something of note?
If you read the story - or even if not - you can post your own views...
Last edited:
