Ubik

UBIK IS NOT ONLY A DECONSTRUCTION of the metaphysical ideologies and the metaphysical formal implications of the classical bourgeois novel, but also of what (in Solaris) Lem has described as the anthropomorphic presuppositions of science and of SF. Science is expressly demystified, first of all, through the disregard for scientific plausibility and through the single “scientific” description of a technological device in the novel:

A spray can of Ubik is a portable negative ionizer, with a self-contained, high-voltage, low-amp unit powered by a peak-gain helium battery of 25kv. The negative ions are given a counterclockwise spin by a radically biased acceleration chamber, which creates a centripetal tendency to them so that they cohere rather than dissipate. A negative ion field diminishes the velocity of anti-protophasons normally present in the atmosphere; as soon as their velocity falls they cease to be anti-protophasons and, under the principle of parity, no longer can unite with protophasons radiated from persons frozen in cold-pac; that is, those in half-life. The end result is that the proportion of protophasons not canceled by anti-protophasons increases, which means—for a specific time, anyhow—an increment in the net put-forth field of protophasonic activity… which the affected half-lifer experiences as greater vitality plus a lowering of the experience of low cold-pac temperatures. (§16)

This passage parodies scientific jargon which is often used to conceal ignorance rather then to convey information or knowledge (try reading a textbook description of cancer, for instance, a “disease” which science can “describe” without understanding it).

More importantly, Ubik is a critique of the a priori modes of perception which inform scientific thinking and which science often claims as objective empirical principles.6 Dick undertakes this critique of scientific imperialism and tu

Dick’s writing has often been labeled schizophrenic, but it is time to recognize that this is not necessarily a criticism, that schizophrenia may be, in R.D. Laing’s words from The Politics of Experience, a “breakthrough” rather than a “breakdown.” Philip K. Dick’s writing is an example of such a breakthrough, not only in the sense of a deconstruction of the SF novel, but also of a breaking through the psychological and perceptual confines imposed on us by capitalism.

For the repression of the individual under capitalism goes beyond the obvious economic and military machinery of imperialism or the internal police control which Dick has frequently denounced in his public letters and speeches. It also functions in a more subtle and dangerous way through the control and direction of our forms of perception and thought, making a radically different reality either unthinkable or horribly monstrous. The well-known SF film, The Forbidden Planet (1956), for instance, is a classic presentation of the theme of the “monsters of the id,” those libidinal energies which (from the notion of “original sin” to the contemporary theories of man’s i

The SF of Philip K. Dick concentrates less on the actual unbinding of these forces (Dick’s use of parallel worlds, his exteriorisation of internal reality) or on the “real” shape they might take than on attacking the forms of control which I have discussed—the presuppositions of the novel form and of science. Although the metaphysical solution is rejected, although there seems to be no final answer then to the question of what reality is, and although for Dick there can be no single, final reality, there is little pessimism in the endings of Dick’s novels when compared to the facile pessimism of the currently fashionable literature of despair. Although Ubik does mark the end of some of our illusions, it is hopeful in its refusal to close the conflicts by a pat happy or unhappy ending in much the same way as another important SF novel of the 1960s, Delany’s The Einstein Intersection. In Delany’s post-cataclysmic world, strange mutated beings roam the Earth and speak of a different and unknowable future, but one towards which they move deliberately, with hope and longing. Ubik, through the figure of Ella Runciter, also holds out the promise of a different, unknowable future. Ella is leaving half-life for a “new womb” to be “reborn.” This rebirth begins with the dissolution of the personality, as can be seen in Ella’s description of the intermingling and “growing together” of different personalities in half-life. But this rebirth is not described as reincarnation; it does not involve becoming something specific, something which has been designed or programmed: rather it is an opening towards new forms and new collective possibilities.

1The most recent such study is David Ketterer’s New Worlds for Old (1974), which argues SF’s pedigree by attributing it to a “form of accepted literature” which Ketterer identifies as “apocalyptic” (p. ix): “If more teachers of literature are to be convinced that science fiction is a viable area of study, it must be demonstrated to them that a novel such as The Martian Chronicles can open up to intense critical scrutiny just as Moby Dick can” (p. x). And to accomplish this accreditation he will employ a “critical strategy [which] involves the comparative, hopefully mutually illuminating consideration of science-fictional and non-science-fictional or ‘classic’ manifestations of the apocalyptic imagination” (p. x).

2See the counterblast of S. Lem, “Philip K. Dick, czyli fantomatyka mimo woli” in his Fantastyka i Futurologia (Krakow 1973), 1:174-92. A modified version of this study appears in SF Commentary ##35-36-37 (Sept 1973) as “Science Fiction: A Hopeless Case—With Exceptions.” The exception is Dick, of whom Lem writes (pp. 22–23): “The surface of his books seem quite coarse and raw to me, co