Book: Ubik
Author: Philip K Dick
Read: Seattle 21 May 2006
It's been a long time since I read PKD, maybe 20 years. I realized that the books I read, I had almost entirely forgotten. I read most of them in my friend John's game room in between music sessions or role playing games. Everything of Dick's was pretty much lost in a maze of other images. So I've decided to read one of his books a month until I work my way through all 39 of them.
Philip K. Dick is the perennial trade paperback science fiction writer. Books of his like Ubik, have interesting, yet thin, storylines that introduce a set of concepts and play out an often Twilght Zone scenario around them.
Ubik is a tail-chasing book where the reader is never sure whether the main character or the ancillary characters are trapped and where. Ubik explores our reality and how determined we might be to hold onto it both when livng and after death. It's a fast read, excellent for a plane ride or a idle day.
It's currently fashionable, it seems, to make movies out of PKD books - so you're likely to see a good half dozen of them in the future. Dick's books also come as a set, exploring human freedom and perception. A 39 book set is ... a bit of a set, I know. See me in three years when I finish them up.
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