Remembering…
Posted on September 10, 2003
Alok Mehta was a fraternity brother of mine at Colorado State University. He was 23 years old and working at Cantor Fitzgerald in the World Trade Center in New York on September 11, 2001. He is sorely missed.
Filed Under Journal | Comments Off
Ubik by Philip K. Dick
Posted on September 3, 2003
Ubik came into my hands by means of my brother (Thanks, bro) who recently was recently cleaning up his apartment and decided to get rid of some old books. Anyway, Philip K. Dick is one of the masters of science fiction, who is probably best known for Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep which was the basis for the movie Blade Runner. Previously, I had never reaaly had much inclination to read his novels. I had read …Electric Sheep because I thought the movie was excellent. However, I thought the book was sort of…bland, I guess. I’m not going to get into the movie vs. book stuff, but this is one instance where I thought the movie was better than the book. That said, I was kind of bored yesterday after work, so I picked up Ubik.
Its not a very large book. The trade paperback style I was given is a little over 200 pages. More of a novella, really. I started and finished it in one night, though I did find it compelling enough to stay up past my usual bedtime (a little bit, at least). The story, roughly is about a company that employs “inertials” to counteract telepaths and “precogs” employed by other companies. In other words, no one will be able to read your mind, while you have one of these people around. A side story of sorts, is that people can talk to their dead relatives, because their…spirit, I guess, isn’t completely gone when they die, but goes through a period of half-life decay, instead. The owner of the company, Glen Runciter, occasionally uses this method to talk to his wife, who has been dead for quite some time.
The company has a new employee, who no one is quite sure about, and they just landed a fat contract for a very rushed and very classified operation on the moon. A huge corporation is concerned that a telepath and a precog (someone who sees the future) have infiltrated their facility on the moon and are stealing secrets. They hired Runciter’s company to weed them out. Runciter sends 11 of his employees, including a young girl named Pat Coley, their new employee. When they get to the base, there is an explosion and Runciter is mortally wounded. They take his body to the same moritorium where his wife is kept, and hope that they can get in contact with him (despite his being dead). Shortly thereafter, the employees who survived start getting messages from their boos, who insists he is the one who is alive, while they are all dead.
Its an odd and intriguing little book. It’s hard to compare it to any one thing. For movies, it can be compared a bit to The Matrix, eXistenZ, and even a little bit of The Game for all of the twists and turns. For books, this seems like a cross between the stories of H.G. Wells and Dean Koontz. Overall, it isn’t a bad book, and it certainly raised my opinion of Philip K. Dick’s stories. If you can find it at a library or used book store, so much the better, because at only a little over 200 pages, I have a hard time giving up the suggested $12.00 (suggested retail price), despite the Philip K. Dick name on the cover. On that note, I may have to go check out some of his other books at the library this weekend.
