Ubik

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Ubik is a science fiction novel by Philip K. Dick written in 1966 and published in 1969 . As is often the case with Dick, several levels of reality are nested in one another in Ubik and the reader is ultimately left in the dark as to which of these realities is the real one.

content

Ubik is set in a future world in 1992, where psi phenomena actually exist. The main characters of the novel are the employees of the Glen Runciter agency. "Runciter Associates" offers the services of "anti-talents" who can telepathically track down and neutralize "talented" people or people equipped with other psi skills. These talents, on the other hand, can be hired from another agency (Ray Hollis's), mainly to spy on and infiltrate economic ventures.

“Runciter Associates” is under pressure, a number of Hollis' talents have disappeared without a trace and you have no idea where to go.

Joe Chip is the central character in the novel. His job is to recruit new anti-talent for Runciter. He recruits Pat Conley, who appears to have the ability to change past events. Chip thinks Pat is very dangerous.

Runciter is given the task of protecting an industrial project on the moon. Hollis' talents are suspected there. He travels there with a lot of staff. But the job turns out to be a trap: a bomb explodes on the moon, killing Glen Runciter. The group manages to escape from the moon and take Runciter's body with them.

On the return flight to earth, a “degeneration process” begins: although the ship is brand new, the telephone directory on board is out of date. Once on earth, coffee machines dispense cold coffee and spoiled milk. Coins that were in order before departure are no longer valid. Things age faster; in addition, objects develop back into their (historically speaking) earlier form. Where, for example, there was a modern elevator, there is an ancient model with a wrought-iron lattice door. This does not happen synchronously, so that different parts of reality no longer fit together.

Runciter is placed in a so-called moratorium. There it is possible to maintain brain activity in a person frozen immediately after death. This allows relatives to communicate with the deceased for a limited period of time. Before his death, Runciter spoke to his late wife Ella whenever important decisions had to be made. It is not possible to put Runciter into this "half-life" state.

However, the group receives messages from Runciter in the strangest ways, a note in a randomly selected cigarette packet in a randomly selected supermarket; an advertisement on a matchbook, a graffito on a toilet:

"Lean over the bowl
and then take a dive
all of you are dead. i am alive " 		"Bend over the sink
and go diving.
You are all dead, I am alive"

The degeneration is (almost) only perceived by the members of the group and takes on more and more dangerous forms, after all the first of them crumble to dust within minutes. One remedy for this is Ubik spray, Runciter tells them. Ubik itself is a product that comes in various forms. (Each chapter of the book also begins with a short promotional text for a product called Ubik , each with the note that it is “absolutely safe” if it is “used according to the instructions”, and each time it is something different: a type of beer , Razor blades, a deodorant spray or a pawnshop). But Ubik has also changed back.

Joe Chip goes in search of explanations for the decay and the messages. Did Runciter really survive and the others are dead? Is the degeneration due to the fading brain activity of Joe Chip and his colleagues who are frozen in the moratorium? And is Runciter's messages his attempts to contact them there? Or is Pat Conley an agent of Hollis, does she use her talent to neutralize the group, to keep them trapped in a "time or reality bubble"?

Dick throws all these interpretations overboard in the last paragraph and makes the event appear even stranger. The last section is also no longer introduced with an advertising text, but with a self-description by Ubik :

“I am Ubik . I was before the universe was. I made the suns and the worlds. I created life and land for life. I direct it this way, I direct it there It moves at my will, it does what I say. I am the word and my name is never pronounced, the name no one knows. I'm called Ubik , but that's not my name. I am. I will always be. "

filming

As early as 1974 the filmmaker Jean-Pierre Gorin commissioned Dick to write a screenplay for a film. Dick even finished it within a month, but Gorin never made it into a film. The script was then published in 1985 and again in 2008 under the name Ubik: The Screenplay . Dick's former wife, Tessa, claimed that the script had been changed by other people over time and was no longer suitable for use as a film. In truth, there are several scenes in the script that don't appear in the book, and the rest of the script is slightly different. In the foreword of the published script (by Tim Powers ) it is even pointed out that Dick intentionally designed the script differently.

In 2006, Tommy Pallotta , who had already produced Dick's A Scanner Darkly , said in an interview that he could imagine a film adaptation of Ubik . In 2008 the film rights for Ubik were bought by the company Celluloid Dreams . The film was to be produced by Hengameh Panahi and Dick's daughter Isa Dick Hackett from spring 2009.

software

Cryo Interactive Entertainment published a game based on the novel in 1998 with the simple title Ubik . But he was only met with moderate success.

German-language editions

  • Ubik (=  Fantastic Library . Volume 15 ). Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt a. M. 1977, ISBN 3-518-06940-3 (With an afterword by Stanisław Lem ).
  • Ubik . Heyne, Munich 2003, ISBN 3-453-87336-X (A script also written by Dick in the appendix, which was never implemented).

literature

  • Leo Truchler: Philip K. Dick: Ubik. In: Hartmut Heuermann (Ed.): The science fiction novel in Anglo-American literature. Interpretations. Bagel, Düsseldorf 1986, pp. 315-330. ISBN 3-590-07454-X

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Paul Williams, Introduction, Ubik: The Screenplay by Philip K. Dick, 1985
  2. ^ Tessa Dick, It's a Philip K. Dick World, September 8, 2008
  3. ^ Tim Powers, Foreword, Ubik: The Screenplay by Philip K. Dick, 1985
  4. ^ Marlow, Jonathan: Tommy Pallotta: Substance PKD . In http://www.greencine.com/ ( Memento of the original from June 7, 2011 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. . February 13, 2011 @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.greencine.com
  5. ↑ NN: PKD's Ubik Is Optioned . In http://www.scifi.com/ ( Memento from May 22, 2008 in the Internet Archive ). February 13, 2011