Novel
Ubik
Philip K. Dick · 1969
Synopsis
1992. Companies protect themselves from telepaths by hiring the services of agencies whose agents, the inertials, neutralise their powers. Glen Runciter, head of one of them, goes to the Moon with his technician Joe Chip and eleven inertials on behalf of a financier; a bomb goes off there and kills Runciter. His employees bring his body back to Zurich, to the moratorium where his wife Ella is kept in half-life, a state in which the dead retain a remnant of consciousness. Then their world begins to regress: cigarettes crumble to dust, cream turns sour, currency goes out of date.
Context
Its author drew from it in 1974 a screenplay, commissioned by Jean-Pierre Gorin, which was never filmed and was published in 1985. Later projects, among them Michel Gondry's, announced in 2011 and abandoned in 2014, came to nothing either; only a video game was made from it, in 1998. Each chapter opens with an advertisement for Ubik, presented each time as a different product. Written in 1966, the book appeared from Doubleday three years later.
Who it is for
A novel of about two hundred pages, with a twisting construction. Nothing in it is stable and the reader deliberately loses his footing. Translated by Hélène Collon in 2022, after Alain Dorémieux.
Prizes and reception
Placed in 2005 by Time on its list of the hundred major novels written in English since the founding of the weekly.
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