Philip K. Dick is a sci-fi legend, but the boys have only ever seen the film adaptations of his work (Blade Runner, Minority Report, A Scanner Darkly).
Dick’s 1969 classic Ubik has us divided. Benny is mad that major premises are introduced and then abandoned, internal logic is sloppy, and the twist ending is lazy writing. Rich and Cam are charmed by the imperfections and think it heightens the sense of (un)reality.
Is Ubik a metaphor for God? What are the parallels to Gnosticism, and who is the demiurge behind the false reality of half-life? Do people who experience psychotic breaks even know that it’s happening? What does Plato have to do with all of this?
“He felt all at once like an ineffectual moth, fluttering at the windowpane of reality, dimly seeing it from outside.”
intro to the world of Ubik
Cam: You sound like you’re snorting some shit up — bending down.
Rich: Nah, it’s the opposite.
Benny: Speaking of enhancing creativity, let’s go. It’s very appropriate for a Philip K. Dick episode if we’re all hyped up on amphetamines.
Rich: Oh, we should do that! Hey, we should do novelty episodes where we do different substances. We should have done a microdose for this one, that would have been good actually — ‘cause we’d still be lucid.
Benny: Cam’s too straight edge for that, he couldn’t do it. Cam would have to be the sober one and then Rich and I would just be driven the fuck out.
Cam: I quit nicotine, eh? Speaking of drugs — I’m like four days in. I’m fucking nuts. Holy cow. I feel like I’m a dirt ship.
Rich: Why did you start vaping again?
Cam: Because I was stressed, bro. You know how stressed I was. I was calling you every fucking day.
Rich: Oh yeah, yeah, yeah. Actually that’s exactly what I do too. If I’m anxious or stressed I buy a packet of cigarettes and then feel terrible about it, and that makes you feel worse. I gotta start vaping, hmm. It’s cold enough that whenever you’re breathing outside you get those big dragon breaths — everything reminds me of her.
Benny: Damn, well this was not the episode to quit vaping, to be honest. You’re really disrespecting Dick with this one. But that’s okay, we’ll let it slide.
Rich: All right, should we get into it? Okay, so this week we’re doing Philip K. Dick, one of the all-time great science fiction writers. So you’ve seen Blade Runner, you’ve seen Minority Report, you’ve seen A Scanner Darkly. What else? Total Recall.
Cam: Total Recall — not the Colin Farrell version.
Benny: Is this a good time to admit I’ve never actually seen the original Blade Runner with Harrison Ford?
Rich: Me neither. I’ve only seen the reboot. So this is his most famous book that hasn’t been made into a movie, and therefore there’s no cheat way — we can’t actually watch it, we have to read it. So this is our first Philip K. Dick for everyone.
Cam: I read the screenplay.
Benny: I have the screen…
Rich: Yeah, so Benny, do you want to set the scene? What’s the introduction to this book? Where are we? What’s this world that we’re living in?
Benny: Yeah, so we should say it’s written in 1969, it’s set in the early 90s. So from the perspective of when it’s being written, it’s set in the future.
Benny: Fukuyama’s end of history or something — and gave up on everything.
Cam: It’s not that far in the future, eh, of when he wrote it. And he does some pretty radical shit.
Benny: Yeah, I mean I do think they were more optimistic about progress in like the 50s and 60s when they had seen more of a revolution in how they lived. You know, the first half of the 20th century was a huge revolution in how most people lived. And then…
Rich: Isn’t there something like what happened in 1971 or something, or it’s like the early 70s?
Benny: Oh, don’t get Cam started, dude. Cam will go off on the great stagnation.
Cam: No, that’s not me, that’s a you thing, man. You go there in your bookmarks.
Benny: Yeah, maybe that’s a me thing, I’m just projecting. Yeah, so there is a big upset across multiple industries starting in the early 1970s. 1973 is typically the date given for a big slowdown in everything but computers, basically. So the debate is, is that consequential, or is it fine that we’re just innovating with respect to computers now? Maybe that’s okay. The world of bits instead of atoms. Anyway, that’s a separate combo.
Benny: Okay, so this thing’s set in the early 90s and we’re in a world where telepathy — so there’s certain powers people have, and it’s unclear what percent of the population have these powers. Some subset of the population are psychics. And there are multiple varieties of psychic powers. The most prominent are telepathy and precognition. Precogs can basically see the future in certain ways. And then there are other psychic powers hinted at but never fleshed out in detail. And then there are other people called inertials that basically have the power to negate the abilities of the psychics. So if they’re in the vicinity of some telepath or a precog, they can negate their ability to do stuff.
Rich: Yeah, and we should say that we’re within an organization called Runciter Associates, which is a counter-psychic organization that basically hires inertials to block out the sabotage from rogue telepaths. So Runciter is waking up in the middle of the night and being told that another one of the psychics that they are tracking has mysteriously disappeared and evaded their grasp. So it sets up this big mystery about all these telepaths going missing — what are they doing, where are they going? This is the initial conceit of the book; it’s a kind of detective story.
Cam: The main guy is Glen Runciter, who owns this organization. He hires the inertials. And kind of his main guy is a guy called Joe Chip, who trains inertials. And then there are several inertials that are kind of minor characters. And there’s a new inertial called Pat — Patricia. She’s got a seemingly unique psychic ability, which is related to the precogs, where she can kind of look back in time or revert time. It’s a little bit ambiguous exactly how her ability works. And she’s recently joined up with Joe and Runciter.
Cam: One quick thought around the setting of Runciter Associates. I find it kind of funny — you got all these psychic abilities and the main thing is corporate espionage. That’s like the main use case. You got the bad psychics who try and make money and fuck up businesses, and then you got the good psychics who try and prevent them, also for a fee. They get paid for it. But that’s the only impact on society. It’s kind of funny.
Rich: You get this world-building on the first couple of pages and you think, oh, we’re going to explore all the ways in which the rules of society would look different if you had telepaths among you. And then it just proves to be completely inconsequential to the book. It’s not explored at all. He sets up this great conceit and then just totally ignores it for the entire rest of the book.
Benny: Yeah, there’s this organization that goes out to disempower psychics, but we don’t even know what sort of chaos the psychics are causing in society. Are they actually causing problems? Who knows. And then Glen Runciter is running this outfit that attempts to negate their influence, but they’re in this weird position where they can just go and tell anyone that they’re being messed with by a telepath. They hint at this at some part of the book — basically Runciter Associates could be hired to look into a situation and then just tell someone, “yeah, there are some telepaths listening in on you, you better hire us so we can negate them,” and no one has the ability to check. It’s absolutely bizarre.
Cam: It’s like the perfect job. It’s kind of like the chiropractor, right? It just says, “oh yeah,” takes a dodgy x-ray. “You gotta come on, it’s gonna need a hundred sessions, man, to fix this.”
Rich: I even thought there was a vague hint of mafioso tactics where you’re like, “Ah, mighty fine business you got here, wouldn’t want any telepaths snooping around.”
Cam: Just some innuendos.
Rich: I love that bit because it sets one of the recurrent themes throughout here, which is never being able to believe in any of your senses, and just not being aware of what’s real and what’s not, and who you can trust and who you can’t trust. Right down to the level of the core business practices of this firm, who are, to be clear, like our protagonists and our heroes. We don’t actually know to what extent they’re doing what they say they’re doing.
Critique of PKD’s worldbuilding
Benny: Do you guys find the lack of detail here annoying? Do you wish he had done some more world-building, explored a world that actually takes psychic powers seriously a little more? I felt it was a little jarring to just be thrown into this world, have it not explained at all, and then have a lot of the details be completely — not erroneous, but…
Cam: I suppose some of the ideas in here are awesome. I like the book, and I’m definitely going to read more Philip K. Dick. I just feel like it could have been an absolute masterpiece if it had just worked more on characterization, was a bit longer, worked a bit more on the world-building. I mean, it’s already kind of considered a masterpiece to some people, and it’s on the Times list of 100.
Benny: I gotta say, that’s pretty bizarre to me. I’m pretty confused by that classification.
Cam: And maybe it doesn’t need that stuff. Yeah, it’s weird.
Benny: Yeah, I don’t think this even comes close. I don’t think it was that good of a book. I’ll just put my cards on the table.
Cam: I understand. I quite liked it.
Rich: I’m gonna argue against that later, but for now I just want to say that a bunch of things that seemed weird at the beginning of the book, I’m now more on board with. And I don’t know if he did this deliberately or not, but it works thematically.
Cam: Yeah, quickly on the mind-reading thing though, just to pick up your thread, because you’re right there.
Rich: Let’s do the world-building for him and then I think we’ll see why it’s kind of a good idea that he didn’t do it and just used it as a cool conceit and moved right on. So let’s think about it.
Cam: Yeah, so do you mean what would the world look like?
Rich: Yeah, yeah, what would the world look like if there were telepaths roaming around? Other than businesses would employ inertials to block them out, I mean there’d be mass cancellations. The stock market would be massively vulnerable to insider trading — it would pretty much have to get shut down, I guess. To the extent that inertials are doing an imperfect job, it would be so easy to depose anyone in power. Unless everyone in power had to have an inertial following them around, around the clock. Everyone would need a sort of psychic bodyguard.
Cam: Well, I wondered how it would affect power and thought crime and stuff like that. In one sense I thought, well, it’d be easy to punish people because you can see what they’re saying. But I think a stronger effect would be that it would be hard to establish propaganda, because a lot of that relies on this kind of fear of speaking out against the majority and this silent minority. Essentially it would be hard for the emperor to have new clothes, because you just suddenly see — everyone sees that the emperor is naked.
Cam: But that scenario where everyone’s got it, I think it would just be so different to current reality that it’d be so difficult to write a book. There’s no way you could predict it at all because so much of life is performative, so much of human nature. I’m thinking of the work of Erving Goffman and Eric Berne — Games People Play — which Robin Hanson kind of popularizes a little bit around signaling. So much of life is around trying to perform signals and not lose face, and suddenly if you just have this into people’s minds — you’d still be interpreting things, it’s not like you can suddenly download it, but it’d just be so different. It’s not really relevant to what Philip K. Dick wanted to talk about.
Benny: Yeah, I agree. I mean it’s vulnerable to all the sort of criticisms that you can levy against any sort of superpower-type stuff. At some point you have to become inconsistent and there are always loopholes when you start introducing magic, which is basically what this is. So I agree, but I feel like you still have to take the axioms of your novel a little bit more seriously than he did. It didn’t come across to me as if he was hiding the ball on purpose. It just felt like lazy writing, sort of. We were just jumping back and forth — he’d introduce random details that had nothing to do with the plot and wouldn’t come up later. I just felt like I was reading the book of a schizophrenic or something, a bit, with some cool ideas. It felt like a first draft, honestly. It felt like a draft that you give to your editor — “I think I have an interesting concept for a book, here’s 200 pages of writing about it.” And then they’d tell you, you have something here, you don’t have something here. At the end of the day he sort of had something, but this is not even close to being in the top 100 English-language novels of all time. Are you kidding me? It’s insane.
Cam: It’s about the ideas, baby. It’s about the ideas. I’m definitely not as down on it as you are, but yeah, it does kind of feel like an early draft for sure. I think that’s a good description.
Benny: I mean, he’s on speed and wrote this in a week.
Rich: Yeah, I can’t argue with that. Also, the telepath we’ve talked about is the least world-breaking power. Like precognition — being able to tell the future — that’s incredibly difficult to make work. And then Pat Conley’s specific power, where she actually goes back in time, is completely unwieldy and doesn’t really work at all.
Cam: Yeah, time travel always breaks worlds.
Rich: We don’t actually have to hold sci-fi books to the standard that they need to perfectly formulate a way in which they could be consistent with our understanding of the laws of physics. That’s way too high a bar for any good fantasy or sci-fi to cross. It doesn’t bother me. It’s that — let’s move on to the plot a little bit.
Rich: So the next thing that happens — Runciter is pondering this mystery of the missing telepaths.
Benny: Which we should say are organized by a gentleman called Ray Hollis, or at least that’s what we’re led to believe. So all the psychics — not just the telepaths, the telepaths and the precogs — seem to be working with this guy named Ray Hollis, who’s sort of like Glen Runciter’s arch nemesis. And all his top talent — Hollis’s top talent — keeps disappearing off the map. Runciter Associates are tracking these people digitally, and basically what happens at the beginning of the book is they lose the top telepath, the most dangerous telepath from Hollis’s group. And this is just one of many recently that they’ve lost. Anyway, keep going, sorry.
Rich: Yeah, so the next big beat is Runciter Associates get approached with a big juicy job offer from someone who they believe to be Stanton Mick, who is — I think he’s a trillionaire. He’s basically the Elon Musk of the Ubik universe. He’s an eccentric guy. He’s got a lunar colony, or at least a base on the moon, and he’s up to some kind of big project there. Apparently they’re having problems with psychics invading his project, so through an intermediary he hires Runciter Associates to come and send a big team of inertials to counteract the psychic espionage. So Runciter assigns Joe Chip to pick out a team and they end up with like 11 inertials. They go to the moon, they meet Stanton Mick, but he turns out to be a human bomb. He blows up — and I’m not even glossing that hard, this is like…
Benny: Yeah, this is basically word for word the book almost. This is how quickly the book progresses.
Rich: Yeah, sorry — he floats up to the top of the ceiling and turns into a bomb. Blows up Runciter.
Cam: And this is like the main turning point of the book — you can split the book into pre-bomb and post-bomb. Pre-bomb had this sort of world-building, the psychic stuff, and then since the bomb happened — that’s one way to demarcate the book.
Rich: Yeah, this is when we get the real mysteries, and we completely forget about the original mystery and never return to it.
Benny: And a lot of the characters — we just completely omit them from now on. We should also say something about Joe Chip. I don’t think we’ve really introduced him, but he’s really the main protagonist. I identify with him. He’s poor, in debt — he can’t even pay his own door to let him out. Seems approximately correct.
Rich: He doesn’t even have the excuse of being a PhD student. He’s presumably a well-remunerated company man.
Cam: He’s juggling different girls, doing drugs.
Benny: So at the beginning we take him for somewhat of a pathetic character, but he’s sort of Glen Runciter’s number two, and his main job at Runciter Associates is to scan incoming potential inertials to see how strong their powers are.
Cam: Yeah, so is he an inertial himself? I think he’s not, eh? He just trains and scans them.
Benny: No, I don’t think he has any powers. He just trains and scans them and basically tells Runciter how much promise they hold. And so Pat comes to him early in the book, brought by someone else, and that’s where he learns that she holds these crazy powers to basically be able to go back in time, negate the precog’s ability of seeing the future. She doesn’t quite travel back in time, but somehow she just makes — she sort of travels back in time. It’s basically time travel, though.
Cam: Yeah, it’s kind of weird. I’m not going to argue with the science. Yeah, but she’s interesting. And she seduces him a little bit — well, she kind of seduces him right at the start.
Benny: Yeah, we should say she kind of proves her powers by making them married at one point. At some point he realizes they’ve been married.
Cam: Is your main character of Pat Conley just this total minx? I just view her as that kind of espionage-thriller, pretty sexy, kind of knows what she’s doing, toying with me.
Rich: She’s like a blonde girl, right? Like a femme fatale or something.
Benny: I think that’s what he says, right? Yeah.
Cam: Yeah, she’s a blonde girl, for sure.
Cold storage and half-life suspended animation
Rich: So this is the big turning point. They’re taking Runciter’s corpse, they’re rushing back to the spaceship because they want to put him in cold storage so that they can save what remains of his consciousness. So this is the other big important plot point in the book, which everything else hinges upon: in the Ubik universe, when you die, if you quickly transport the body into cold storage, then you can maintain some of the brain’s trace activity as it’s fading out of consciousness, and you can tap into it and communicate with the dead by way of basically a telephone. You wire them up and you find the frequency that they’re signaling on, and then you can have conversations with dead people. And they exist in this universe of their own which is called half-life, which is not like real life — but time continues for them. They’re not immortal. They have a certain amount of life energy or vital energy before the shadow of their minds fades away to nothing. So it’s sort of like a scarce resource.
Cam: Yeah, and it’s not like it just runs out after five years. It depends how often you interact with them — or at least that’s implied. So you can use it up. You could come and talk to them every few months for a few minutes, or you could talk to them constantly for a few months and that would use them up more quickly.
Benny: But I think we also learn later in the book that the process is also undergoing even if they’re not talking to anyone — not at the same rate, but they’re still slowly decaying.
Cam: So early on, Runciter used to visit his wife, who’d passed away quite a while ago, and he goes and talks to her around business troubles. Every few years he comes in, he’s got some business issue that he wants to talk about, but it’s usually pretty important and interesting because, you know, the mind readers are destroying the earth.
Rich: Yeah, his wife’s name is Ella. She’s 20 years old for some reason, whereas Runciter’s like an old man. So unclear if he had a child bride or if she died many decades ago — but presumably the latter.
Benny: And it seems as though they basically talk on the phone. It’s kind of implied early on that they can’t actually see each other, they can just talk via voice, right?
Rich: Yeah, that’s right. You’re just in a pod and you’re stored in a crematorium, which is kind of funny. You’re in a cool pod that’s maintained by some business person. In this case, this German guy or Swiss guy. And they just wheel out the pod of the person…
Cam: Herbert, with a long name.
Benny: Herbert von Nostrand.
Rich: …that you want to speak to, and they bring it to a viewing bay, kind of like if you’re in prison or whatever. Then you get the phone and you can talk to them, and you can see their face frozen in dry ice or whatever it is that they’re using to preserve them.
Benny: I guess later that changes, but whatever, we can get to that later.
Cam: After the bomb goes off on the lunar — Joe Chip and his team rush back to Earth because Runciter’s died and they want to preserve him in half-life. So they go back to that same moratorium and get the process going. And it’s a question of whether or not it’s going to work for Glen Runciter. But what’s happening is just these weird things start happening. So his coffee and cream start getting old and moldy. Cigarettes go stale. They’re all just wondering — there seems to be this decaying thing happening. And then the other big thing is, Runciter seems to be communicating to them somehow. They’re noticing it in advertisements and TV and phone calls. They’re just getting messages from Runciter.
Rich: Graffiti on the wall.
Cam: Yeah.
Rich: And to be clear, they can’t communicate with Runciter in half-life. They’re not able to establish a signal with him. So they think that he’s dead and then they’re mystified why his consciousness seems to be sort of exerting itself on their universe somehow by extremely spooky supernatural means. He’s appearing on coins.
Why is everything decaying? Entropy and platonic essences
Cam: Yeah, so those are the two big mysteries. They kind of realize they seem not related — one is, Runciter seems to be communicating with us; and the other one is, stuff is decaying. So actually, I want to say this now: they kind of split up the two supernatural effects — one with the communication and the other with decay. But you could split the decay stuff up into two subcategories that I think actually aren’t that related. There’s one impact where things seem to decay more quickly — your coffee’s going to go off, your bread’s going to go off much more quickly. But then there’s this other impact where it seems to be going back in time, which is actually qualitatively quite a different thing. Sometimes my coin will no longer be a 2000 or 1990 coin, it will be like a 1940s coin. Stuff starts going back in time, and eventually they kind of feel like they’re in the 1930s, but the lifts becoming older if anything. I was actually wondering — I was thinking about a theme of entropy. This decaying stuff is entropy, and philosophers talk about how entropy is one way of understanding time, because there’s a causal arrow — entropy just goes one way and so time just goes one way. But going back in time, entropy decaying is going forward in time — and going back in time is total. I wonder if Dick may have just got a bit confused that these are kind of related in terms of degrading. Things degrading is actually going forward in time.
Cam: Well, some of it is entropy. Like some things decay — his milk goes off, his coffee goes off.
Rich: No, but if you imagine it as if he is drinking milk that has come from a previous age, that’s why it’s soured, right? Normally there’s actually a phase transition where — he’ll be walking, he’ll be watching his TV, and then his TV will become a gramophone player or a radio. But in the case of the cream in the coffee, the cream has become just a different cream, just cream from a different age, which is not very…
Cam: It tastes a bit sour.
Rich: Yeah, I think it’s still consistent. But yeah, that’s a nice catch that entropy is a bad way of putting it. I was confused about this until we got to the point about the platonic forms, which I think gives us the best possible understanding of what Dick is trying to get at in this world. The quick refresher on Plato is that he thinks that abstractions are real, and that the material world that we live in is a shadow of the real abstract pure world of forms. Any objects that we have around us, things we have in our life, are sort of imitations of the perfect platonic objects that are floating out there in the platonic world. So in this process where things are decaying and it seems like entropy is happening, what’s really happening is things are reverting through a sequence of platonic forms. So the radio in some sense platonically leads to a TV which leads to a big flat screen, or whatever. They don’t degrade evenly — and that explains also why, I think Joe Chip actually raises this in the book, he’s saying, why doesn’t my big plastic and aluminum TV turn into a lump of aluminum and plastic, or turn into atoms or molecules? Why does it turn into an old AM radio, because it has totally different constituent parts? So entropy doesn’t make any sense. It’s essences.
Cam: Yeah, so there’s this essence of something. Because it’s also like his car — you have like a Toyota Corolla, and then it turns into like a LaSalle, which is like a 1940s car, and then it turns into like a Ford Model T. It’s just a completely different thing. Eventually it turns into a horse and carriage or something.
Cam: I think it makes it cooler — if I was watching a movie or reading this book, it’s cool that your car turns into a horse and carriage. We kind of get what’s going on there, rather than, yeah, like a lump of aluminum.
Cam: It’s been tried to be made a few times but they never finally green light it. I think Philip K. Dick wrote the screenplay of it, and one of his ideas was he wanted the movie itself to decay and start to look older, and then eventually cut out and go to black, and the audience is kind of wondering…
Rich: Oh, that’s cool. Imagine it goes from like 16:9 ratio down to like 3:2. That would be crazy.
Cam: Yeah, yeah, it would be hard for that not just to take over. It turns to black and white, and then you kind of lose…
Rich: So at this point we should definitely say that the reason none of this is totally jarring is that we don’t need to worry too much about the platonic forms thing because that’s very likely not base physical material reality that they’re in. Some of the messages they’re getting from — what’s the urinal quote, do you guys remember that off the top of your head?
Cam: It rhymes, but essentially: I’m the one alive, you’re the ones that are dead.
Rich: Yeah, “stand and go in the urinal, stand on your head.” I am alive and you are dead. That combined with the fact that their world is regressing to 1939, and one of the characters shrivels up into a tiny little sack of bones and hair and skin, which is this incredibly grotesque example of the effects of this universe they’re in, suggests — okay, something fucky is going on. Maybe the bomb going off — maybe Runciter survived and we are all dead. So we do know this from fairly early on; that’s one strong hypothesis.
Cam: Yeah, and that’s the big mystery, right.
Rich: That becomes probably the central mystery: who is in the real universe? And then Joe Chip’s job is basically to stop him and his friends from dying off, because it seems as if every time they are alone, they start getting weaker and weaker and they eventually shrivel up into this horrible desiccated state.
Cam: Yeah, there’s one point when he kind of realizes that, and he’s like, “we don’t split up,” and then a moment later he’s like, “okay, two groups,” and they’re split up into two groups. I’m like, I’m not sure if I trust that, man.
Rich: They’re in the cars and they’re like, “wait, where’s Billy? Oh, come on, I just fucking said.” This is a funny book, by the way. It’s pretty silly.
Benny: We should say the other characters in the group are basically just there to die, because we just learned their names at one point at like 20 pages in when they assemble this group to go to the moon. Besides that, we have no information about them. Their powers are totally irrelevant. They’re just dying basically.
Cam: Sometimes they use them as a vessel of exposition or something.
Cam: So with all this fuckery happening, it seems kind of like, of course they must be in half-life or something. But one of the other hypotheses that comes — maybe Runciter did die, and maybe Pat Conley, who has this new ability that we don’t fully understand, maybe she’s driving a lot of this stuff. We know she kind of goes back in time. It’s very related to what’s happening. And she’s new and we don’t trust her, and she becomes seemingly more and more untrustworthy.
Benny: And we should say that going back in time gets taken extremely far. They end up in 1939, basically.
Cam: We may just stop there. Des Moines, Iowa. 1939.
Benny: That was the most Kiwi way to say Des Moines, Iowa. “Des Moines… and then Iowa.”
Cam: Oh, yeah. How is that? Des Moines. Iowa. How do you say the state?
Benny: Iowa.
Cam: Iowa. Yeah, I guess. Not from America.
Rich: It’s funny when Joe Chip is driving that nice car — he’s like, “I could get used to this, this is a good bit of machinery.” And then he’s talking to a cab driver and the cab driver’s like, “man, too bad about all of them n—” or whatever. And Joe Chip is like, oh, okay. Yeah, I forgot about all this stuff.
Benny: No, he’s talking about the Jews during the Second World War. Right? He’s like…
Cam: No, he definitely drops the M-bomb. And then Joe is — yeah, there’s a hard one. And then Joe is like, “ooh, yeah,” because Joe’s just kind of liking it. He’s like, “don’t mind the 30s.”
Benny: You’re totally right.
Cam: They’re in the Midwest. There’s guys that are very racist. Pros and cons. Swings and roundabouts.
Joe Chip’s search for Ubik + the battle between Jory and Ella
Rich: That’s as far back as they end up going. Joe Chip’s battle is basically trying to work with the benevolent forces who are trying to help him — which seems to be Runciter — to find the substance called Ubik. Should we talk about that now?
Benny: Yeah, let’s do it. Let’s plow ahead.
Rich: At the start of every chapter in this book there are these funny little radio-ad-style jingles for the substance called Ubik, and every single time it’s a different product, supposedly some kind of miracle product. So like, “pop tasty Ubik into your toaster. It’s made only from fresh fruit and healthful all-vegetable shortening. Ubik makes breakfast a feast. It puts zing in your thing. Safe when handled as directed.” So yeah, we have no idea what the fuck this stuff is. It looks good as hell. But in the world that they find themselves trapped in, they keep trying to get their hands on this Ubik substance because they believe that will stabilize them in time and make things stop decaying. The only problem is, every time Joe Chip gets a hold of some Ubik, the Ubik itself has also regressed. Instead of being a handy aerosol dispenser can, it’s regressed into some kind of pomade, or I don’t know, a…
Benny: Yeah, exactly.
Cam: Yeah, they said a balm or something.
Cam: I need some motherfucking Ubik for my Ubik. You just need constant Ubik to reinforce. Yeah, so the Ubik itself is degrading.
Rich: So his quest turns into: how do I get Ubik? That’s what he’s up to. And he’s being helped by this entity who he thinks is Runciter, but which ultimately turns out to be probably Ella Runciter. So now we might as well talk about the actual battle that’s being fought within half-life. At the start, when Glen Runciter is trying to talk to his wife, the signal sort of cuts out halfway through the conversation, and his wife’s body — or mind, I suppose — gets taken over by this kid called Jory, who interrupts the phone call. Glen Runciter is really mad about this. He’s like, “give me my wife back, why am I getting interference from one of the other minds within the moratorium?” The lines are crossed.
Benny: The wires are crossed.
Rich: So it seems fairly innocent at the time. It’s just some annoying kid.
Cam: That’s quite flippantly mentioned.
Rich: I forgot about Jory until he comes up again later. But as it turns out, Jory is this entity who’s in the moratorium with all of the other people in half-life, and he is extending his own life juice — half-life juice, whatever you want to call it — he’s clinging onto the mortal coil by harvesting it. He is responsible for whether things decay or stabilize and so on. And it turns out that Ella has been battling him for some long time along with some other half-lifers, to try and stop him from feeding on everyone and destroying everyone. And she’s the one who has invented Ubik to try as the only known means of making herself immune from his influence. Does that sound right? Is that roughly what you guys picked up on?
Benny: Yeah, that’s roughly right. I think it’s not quite right that he’s causing the decay though.
Cam: I think he speeds up the decay, which would happen anyway.
Rich: So there’s two things to disambiguate. One is the scenery itself, and one is the life force being sucked. Decay — I think they’re two very distinct things, right?
Benny: Yeah, exactly. So he’s definitely causing the life force decay — he’s causing them to feel cold and he wants to eat them at the end of the day. I think by eating them he means physically eating them. There’s this horrific scene where he’s talking to Joe — he’s already killed some of his friends — and he’s like, “if I open my mouth you can probably hear your friends inside me because they’re the most recent ones I’ve eaten.”
Rich: That goes so hard.
Benny: So Jory is basically trying to power himself. He needs to power himself in half-life, and so he does this by eating people. He’s got this deal with people on the outside who actually pay the moratorium to keep people close enough to Jory in half-life such that he can take them over and use them for energy.
Cam: I’m not sure how explicit that is exactly, but there is this line of saying, why doesn’t the owner of the moratorium get rid of Jory? And his parents are paying the owner lots to keep him there. So he just kind of covers it up.
Benny: They know what’s going on. But then there’s the question of why are they stuck in 1939, and why does everything around them keep decaying. My read on that was that Ella remembers the world as it was in 1939, because that’s when she died. And Jory says at one point, it takes me a lot of mental energy to keep you all here. There’s a group of 11 of them, and he’s trying to keep them corralled to be close enough to him, and that takes a lot of energy. So he can’t keep the world as it was for him in half-life because that requires too much energy. So things are degrading because it’s this battle between him and Ella. Ella views the world as 1939, he views the world as it was in modernity, in the 80s or early 90s, and it’s regressing because as he tries to use all his powers to shape the world such that these 11 people in half-life are basically forced to come to him so he can take them over, he doesn’t have enough power to keep the world from regressing. So it’s the influence of Ella that’s actually making things regress back in time. That was my read on it.
Cam: Yeah, maybe. I also interpreted it just as half-life itself has this kind of impact — that’s a part of half-life — and Jory potentially speeds that up. Which I thought was an interesting point because it’s kind of like, well, is Jory the sole representation of evil enacting on the world, or is Jory just a way to further enable that and speed it up?
Rich: But if it was part of the pattern, why would it ever ground out? Does the timeline work out with Ella’s age? Because I quite like that — I hadn’t thought of that. So we think that maybe Ella died young and was born in the 30s? Yeah, that’s true. He could be well over 100, right? He could be any age.
Cam: I definitely could do, because Runciter has had a bunch of work done and potentially is like 100. Doesn’t look a day over 35.
Benny: Maybe the last thing to say is that she has this goal where she’s going to be reborn into the world. So she’s trying to get Joe Chip to basically take over her job in half-life. She views her job as battling Jory for all of eternity. She’s in this eternal battle with Jory, which — as we’ll probably talk about — is maybe representative of this eternal battle between good versus evil. She’s trying to get Joe to take over her position, and she’s going to be reborn in the world. But she’s worried that if she leaves without a replacement, then something bad is going to happen to Glen, I guess. I’m a little bit confused about her motivation, to be honest. But basically she views herself as battling Jory and she needs someone to take over.
Christian parallels and PKD’s gnostic epiphany
Rich: Yeah, I agree with that. I’ve got a big spiel to do about Gnosticism, which I think is a very good lens to understand what Dick is interested in and what he’s talking about here. But before I do that, do you guys want to talk about any religious interpretations?
Cam: I mean, yeah, obviously a major theme of this book is this kind of battle between light and dark, or evil and good, that’s potentially eternal. And then I was just wondering how Christian that is versus Gnostic or Manichean. They’re obviously kind of related as well, with the spell of good and evil. I think the main difference is that in Christianity, you kind of have one eternal God that created the world.
Rich: Questions.
Cam: And then you kind of have Satan or the devil that’s trying to subvert or battle you. But in Manichaeism, there’s kind of two co-eternal forces, like from the start, and one’s light and one’s dark and they fight each other.
Cam: You kind of see all these religious slash Christian themes, and then you’re realizing, okay, maybe Ubik is kind of God. Ubiquitous. Okay, very clever. And then right near the end it’s become explicit. Normally we get a little advertising jingle and then suddenly the Ubik epigraph is — I have it: “I am Ubik. Before the universe was, I am. I made the suns. I made the worlds. I created the lives and places they inhabit. I moved them here.” So it’s coming pretty clear that Ubik is kind of one God.
Rich: “I am called Ubik, but that is not my name. I am. I shall always be.”
Cam: And that kind of feels a bit more Christian to me. You can add some thoughts on Gnosticism…
Rich: Yeah. So I know that Philip K. Dick was interested in Gnosticism. Just to sort of set the stage for people who haven’t heard of it, it’s basically a series of Christian sects, heretical sects, who believe that the only way you can achieve salvation is through direct spiritual experience, which they call gnosis. And this is sort of a continuation of the Platonic ideas — that the material physical reality is a lie, and the true spiritual realm lies behind it. Everything you see and touch and experience is fake. So you can see how Dick got so paranoid and got so crazy with all this stuff about not knowing what’s real.
Rich: So within Gnosticism, you have this idea of a demiurge, which is a false god. You have the real god who you want to commune with, but you can only do it through achieving this direct spiritual gnosis. And then you have the fake god, and the fake god is the one who creates material reality. So in the case of half-life, that’s Jory. Jory is the one who sustains the illusion. He’s the demiurge and he is evil. And then you also have the good God, who we don’t get to see — and I think that would also be in keeping with Gnosticism, that it doesn’t make sense for you to see God directly. But the Ubik connection is, I think, the achieving of that direct spiritual knowledge. You spray the can in your face and that’s when you’re able to commune directly with God, and that’s how you get saved from the fake corrupted material realm. And then within the world you have people who are fighting against the demiurge and who are trying to help people, guide people, so that they can achieve gnosis and find this secret spiritual knowledge. So that’s Ella Runciter for sure — literally the inventor of Ubik and the one who’s trying to get Ubik into the hands of more people. And then I like the idea that she’s recruiting Joe to be her successor to fight this spiritual battle in this realm, while she is able to ascend to the next realm because she has completed the required transition.
Benny: What do we make of the detail that Ella created Ubik? One, do we believe her? And two, if we do, what does that say about the religious connections? Because it seems to break down. Ubik, according to the book’s own lights, is supposed to be this thing that has always existed, always will exist, exists in and of itself. It shouldn’t have to be created by anyone. But two, also just by the Gnostic reading — communing with God — it shouldn’t be a God that’s human-created. So that was one detail that kind of bugged me, and I thought was odd.
Rich: That’s why Ubik is not God. That’s why Ubik is gnosis. Ubik is the symbol of the knowledge that is required to interface with God, but Ubik is not literally God, I think. Because, yeah, all the reasons you just mentioned — it wouldn’t really make sense to.
Cam: Or it is, right? It is kind of literally God. I agree that Jory and Ella’s fight for eternity is a bit more than Christian, but there are a lot of similarities between Gnosticism and Christianity. I think you could have a Christian reading of this book as well, and maybe it doesn’t fit slightly as well, but…
Rich: Gnosticism is — it’s not distinct from Christianity, just to be clear. It’s kind of like a sect of Christianity.
Benny: It’s just Christian heretics, right?
Rich: Yeah.
Cam: Modern Christians would definitely disagree with it, but I think we’re saying the same thing. They’re very related and in some sense kind of the same thing, but they have important differences. Like what salvation is — in Christianity it’s more like faith, and in Gnosticism it’s more like what you were talking about. I suppose what I’m saying is, I think you can just interpret Ubik as God, and just have these divine interventions from God. I think Philip K. Dick’s wife talked about this — like it’s not that it is sprays; it’s that that’s the vessel that it’s easiest for people to interpret it. When you interpret that in a normal Christian sense, there are maybe other things now where we see God — you see him when you’re walking in nature or something like that. But it’s not confined to that. That is a vessel that we find it easier to interact with God, but it’s literally everything.
Benny: One thing that does fit in with the Christian reading I think is that near the end of the book, Ella has basically told Joe, “you need to keep a bunch of Ubik handy to be able to continually fight Jory. This is what you do — you just continue to have Ubik and you go around spraying yourself and things, and that’s how you fight Jory.” And then he starts running out, and then he basically thinks about it really hard. He basically just prays for Ubik. And then this woman shows up who is a manufacturer of it or something and hands it to him. She kind of comes out of nowhere.
Rich: Yes, to sort of pray for it, I suppose. Is that the analogy you’re drawing?
Benny: Yeah, in the sense that you have to be responsible for your own connection with God is a very, at least Protestant, sort of idea, right? Where you have to put in this effort. God is always there, but then you have to make this effort to contact him. If your mind is closed off to God, then he’s never going to reach out to you. That’s sort of the religious playbook, right — if you’re ever doubtful of the experience, well, you just haven’t opened up your mind enough to God. It is funny that this woman tries to explain very technically what Ubik is, and she just basically gives this list of pseudoscientific nonsense about electrons and all these particles, and tries to explain…
Cam: Yeah, I wasn’t sure if that was Dick trying to explain it or trying to satirize and criticize scientism.
Benny: I think it was clearly some sort of satire.
Rich: Yeah, it fell in line with all the other advertising-style descriptions of Ubik, which are clearly satirical or poking fun at the idea that people want to have some cool scientific explanation for something that stands directly in opposition to the very concept of having an explanation like that.
Cam: It definitely subverts sci-fi in this way, which we’ve talked about in the past, where a lot of sci-fi can feel sterile and soulless. This has elements of that, sure, in terms of characterization. But this big religious element — yeah, the fact that to try to explain any of this stuff is missing the point — I think adds quite a lot to it, and I like that aspect of the book, that it’s quite a religious book.
Rich: I think it’s worth talking about what Philip K. Dick actually believed in, right?
Benny: I don’t know — I didn’t look it up, so I don’t know.
Rich: Well, do you think it’s not relevant?
Cam: No, no, for sure, that’s interesting.
Rich: He thought that he had acquired gnosis, right? So the timeline — I’m not entirely clear on whether he… Yeah, this is interesting. He was having dental surgery and I think he was getting his wisdom teeth extracted. He had impacted wisdom teeth. And then a light shone in his eye and he saw a pink light, and a woman visited his home shortly afterwards wearing one of those Pisces Christian necklaces.
Benny: The drugs, bro.
Rich: And yeah, that was the trigger for him to acquire gnosis. And he wrote a 7,000-page book about the experience, which I did not have time to read for this episode, unfortunately. But here’s a very brief summary I saw someone say online: “It’s a man who thinks he met God trying to work out whether he is psychotic, if he was poisoned by Russians or the FBI, if he had an alien encounter, or if in fact the God of the Bible stopped by his house one morning on the necklace of a woman delivering pain meds from the pharmacy after he had dental surgery.” So that’s a little glimpse into the mind of Philip K. Dick.
Cam: That’s a major theme of this book, and probably why Ubik itself summarizes six worldviews or something.
Benny: Did that happen before or after he wrote this book?
Rich: I’m not clear. I know that he was a neo-Platonist before he wrote this book because he literally talks about Plato within the book. I’m not clear whether he had — scare quotes — achieved gnosis before or after this book, but it’s certainly in there.
Cam: I think he and others came to view this book as more important as time went on. He kind of wrote it and he thought it was all right, and then he just realized — and maybe a few of his friends — how important this was. Which is interesting as well: if he wrote this book before he had crystallized his worldview in himself as this kind of divine inspiration, this holds his most important worldview, but kind of before he had come to it.
Rich: Yeah, yeah. It’s like the Freudian stuff or whatever, right? It’s like, these things exist out in the world and I was merely a vessel that channeled them onto the page.
Cam: One quick thing I want to say before I forget — it’s kind of not on the religious stuff, but the idea that Joe Chip needed more Ubik to fight. One thing I’m still thinking about is that there’s a reliance on a substance. It’s so important that the only way you can survive is that you rely on Ubik. And I was just like, this kind of feels like — I don’t know, you need drugs to write your book.
Rich: Half the book is him trying to get his fix, right?
Cam: It’s like trying to get your fix, even away from drugs. You know, “I need my podcast to sleep, or to run.” In one sense you’re much more enlightened — you can do this shit without Ubik. But what happens if Ubik runs out?
Rich: This is the thing I find hard to believe about the more conventional religious interpretation. Joe Chip — you know, JC, Jesus Christ.
Cam: Jesse.
Rich: Yeah, but he’s not a very Christ-like figure. Even when he does the willing-the-Ubik-into-existence test-of-faith thing, it’s not really because he’s achieved any insight or he’s suddenly welcomed into the bosom of God. He’s just like, “I really fucking need some Ubik.”
Benny: Yeah, “I really need this.”
Rich: He’s just like, “please, come on.” So it’s not a great pattern match onto religious themes of piety or leaps of faith or anything like that.
Cam: But he definitely is a stand-in for PKD himself. You know — being poor, the drug addict, questioning reality.
Cam: I couldn’t tell if it was pro-advertising or anti-advertising. I couldn’t tell.
Benny: I mean, we should say there is an advertising theme throughout the book, or maybe a capitalist theme more generally. All the appliances require money to work. You need to give your door money for it to open. You need to pay your shower in order to take a shower. All this stuff. So it’s a very commercialized world in some sense. It’s written sort of dystopian. As the reader, I think you’re supposed to not enjoy that part of it. Half of it’s for comedic effects, I think.
Cam: He wouldn’t get his coffee right. The robot saying — they’ve been really annoying. You have to give them your card.
Benny: The robots are sarcastic as well. They don’t just deny you service, but they make fun of you and tell you that you’re a worthless human being.
Rich: They judge you. That was a really fun element.
Rich: The commodification of everything as well, I think, is prescient. It’s not manifested in this exact way, but this is the classic Marxist complaint of the cash nexus and everything becoming financialized.
Benny: Sure, but on the other hand, you basically — Ubik’s vessel is buy all these advertising products, so that’s sort of a counter-theme. But also Glen Runciter is the boss of this organization. He’s a businessman, he’s a moneymaker. But he also is the hero, basically. He ends up being this badass boss who’s trying to save all his employees, who’s going to the ends of the earth trying to figure out what’s going on and save them — depending, I guess, on how you read that very last chapter. Maybe we should bring up now. If you take it as that they were actually in half-life the whole time and Runciter was alive, then he was doing it as much as he could to save them and he doesn’t come out looking bad at all.
Cam: Yeah, so you get to the point where you think, okay, yep, they’re definitely all in half-life. Jory’s kind of running the show, Ella’s trying to fight him, and they have to fight him with Ubik, and Glen survived. And then the final chapter is like a half-page. We’re back in the real world. Glen checks his pocket to pay for something and his coins have faces of Joe Chip on them. And then it just kind of ends. And he feels like this is a bit weird, and he assumes the rest of them do. And then suddenly you go, oh, well, this is the same effect that Joe had. How do we know if Glen Runciter is reality? You get this recursive element where you never know whether you’re in reality or not. And that’s what Philip K. Dick was struggling with, right — how do you know?
Arguing whether the twist ending is lazy writing
Rich: Yeah. Did you guys like the twist ending?
Cam: Yeah, yeah, for sure. I mean, it reminded me a little bit of the ending of Inception.
Rich: Yeah, I was going to bring that up. It was surely a pin to that, or inspired by it.
Cam: Which is probably influenced by — yeah.
Cam: My interpretation of the ending of Inception at the time, just to remind people, is the spinning top. So here’s this mechanism where he spins the top, and if it falls down he’s in reality; if he keeps going, he’s been finally happy with his family. It doesn’t matter where he’s in reality or not. You can never know for 100% — you can never be infallible about whether we’re in reality right now. But it doesn’t really matter, and that’s kind of my attitude to the simulation hypothesis.
Rich: Whether or not Runciter is dead and in cold pack as well, or whether he’s in base reality — I think that’s, I doubt very much that Philip K. Dick has any particular answer in mind. Not only that, I think it cuts directly against the theme that he’s trying to establish, which is the unknowableness of what is real and what is not real. So I don’t think there is, or there’s ever going to be, a canonical answer to the question.
Cam: Yeah, although there is one little fun plot hole — I feel like in the interpretation that they’re all in half-life, like, they all die on the moon. How do they fucking get them back? How did Glen Runciter get his team of 12 back to the moratorium? I suppose we don’t know. Maybe he just did it, but this seems a bit hard to do after the explosion. I think it’s potentially a plot hole, not thought out — or I’m overrating it, but it doesn’t really matter.
Rich: Yeah, I kind of think it doesn’t matter. I would normally go the other direction and want to ascertain exactly what’s more plausible, but yeah, in this instance I think it doesn’t matter. There’s not something to discover there, is my belief. And it sort of ties together with what I was gonna say at the start — about all these premises being set up and not delivered upon, all these Chekhov’s guns not firing. Like, who is Hollis? Where did Melipone go? What’s Pat’s deal? None of them matter in the end. And I don’t find that annoying, because it adds a nice element of realism, and again just really hammers home what I think his central idea is: whatever you think is true, it may not be true. Whatever ideas you’ve seized upon, they may be false — not maliciously so, but just like red herrings or errors or mistakes. Life is not like a story where every clue points you in the direction of some underlying truth. Life contains lots of false leads and red herrings that will straightforwardly lead you astray and make you think the wrong thing and waste your time. So yeah, that’s why I ended up not being mad about all of that stuff. Maybe it’s bad writing, I don’t know — but maybe it’s not. I’m not actually entirely sure.
Benny: But then you can just make that argument with any poorly written book. That’s why I don’t like it. I don’t like the ending because it’s lazy. He didn’t do it. There’s no — it just strikes me as lazy writing. One source I read claims that it was just on a whim that he added that ending in, which bugs me even more. But even if he had planned it out — really, you planned out that ending? It’s a fucking cringe ending, man, come on. So there is something to be said about a book that is constantly making you question reality, which is, I guess, your guys’ steelman case on the best reading of this book. You’re never quite sure as the reader what’s going on, and in that way you’re sort of mirrored in the characters. They also don’t know what’s going on. They’re constantly questioning things. I guess I just think if he was trying to write that book, he just failed. The writing was not good enough. There was not enough substance. You can’t just write a confusing book with lots of plot holes where the next sentence doesn’t really make sense with respect to the previous sentence, and the internal logic is constantly being broken, and people’s motivations seem confused and unclear. If that was the landmark he was going for, he just failed, for me. I think he just wasn’t a compelling enough read. So I agree in principle you could write an interesting book that had that sort of theme of really making you question reality, and you wouldn’t have to tie everything together. I mean, in some sense Infinite Jest doesn’t quite have that theme, but Infinite Jest didn’t bug me that not everything was clear by the end of the book, right? It was a deep enough book and obviously enough thought went into it that you could have many conversations after, talking about the coherence of certain characters and what may have happened, what should have happened, what could have happened. That’s what made it worthwhile, because there was some sort of internal logic. Here there was just no internal logic. Things seem to be introduced haphazardly. I don’t think he took himself or the reader very seriously. I think it was basically a vehicle — he had a few interesting late-night ideas and it was a vehicle to just express some of those ideas. And then he wrapped it up, like, “oh yeah, we never know what’s going on, you can never tell what’s real or not.” It was basically the child writing of “and he woke up and it was all a dream.” That’s what the ending of the book struck me as. It’s just so lazy, man.
Cam: The ending did have that “it was a dream” feel about it. I don’t — I quite like the ending that it just made it explicit, this question of reality. Reality, there’s no difference, always it’s going to be recursive. But in terms of the bad writing and stuff — in terms of the plot structure, Rich’s arguments are kind of right, but in terms of the lack of character development, I just think yeah, it could have been better. I think your description that it’s a draft is quite apt, but in some sense I like that about it. I kind of imagine — imagine you’re going through this demolished house or something, you see these draft like — you see this odd, kind of like an old VHS, and you put it in and you watch something weird. You find this old draft, and it’s kind of scattershot but it has these cool ideas and these themes around it, and you’re like, this is actually quite good.
Rich: Another way of putting it is that if this was Infinite Jest length, I would be just as mad as you, if not madder. Because you’d be investing so much in characters and storylines that ultimately go nowhere, and you’d feel annoyed if it felt like they were afterthoughts or they’d been written in the middle of some amphetamine-fueled binge. But in this context — this short, sweet, fun, easy-to-read book — I’m not mad about it. The criticism of “oh, what if it was all a dream, any book could do it” — I don’t think that’s quite right, because this works because this is the point of this book. It wouldn’t work in literally any book. It’s only cool because he’s exploring these ideas, and putting it in context historically, he’s exploring these ideas in a way that everyone else now seems derivative — maybe. But this is cool, this is new and fun. I’m sure that the Matrix must be massively inspired by this, right? Like the idea of, we live in a simulation and this is not the real world — I think the Matrix is the best ever instantiation of that idea that I’ve ever come across, and it’s hard to beat that. But it was heavily, I’m guessing, heavily inspired by Philip K. Dick, probably directly, or if not him then some other derivation. And there’s even, like, what might be homages in the Matrix to some elements in this story, with the breaking bars and stuff.
Cam: Oh yeah, for sure.
Is PKD under or overrated?
Benny: Yeah, it’s possible that I am underrating it because I’m forgetting it was written in ‘69, and a lot of the ideas that are now in the water weren’t in the water at that point. With respect to the length, it’s not even that — I think you could write a better book and not have it be that much longer. I just think the motivations — I feel like you should be able to investigate a single character and have them make sense. For instance, trying to investigate the psychology of Pat Conley in this book comes up totally flat. I have no idea what she wanted, what her game was, was she evil, was she good. I feel like you could argue it either way.
Cam: She’s a sexy femme fatale.
Benny: I want a book where it can be confusing at first read and I can finish the book and not know what’s going on, but then there should be enough substance in the book and enough internal coherence that I can start piecing things together and making interesting cases. Pale Fire was like that. The first time you read it, you’re like, what on earth just happened? That made no sense. But then there are real arguments to be summoned about what actually happened, what didn’t happen. There were clues here and there. Here, it just feels like, besides the general theme of no one knows what’s going on — are we in half-life, are we not in half-life — you could make arguments almost all day about what actually happened, because there’s enough random stuff that happens throughout the book that any thesis you come up with about some reading of it can be supported by some amount of evidence. So I don’t know — pick your favorite reading of it, I think we can come up with a semi-compelling case that that’s what he was trying to do.
Cam: At its core it has some substance, or some something, which is really important — and maybe the first instance of it.
Psychosis, psychedelics, and paranoia
Rich: I think there are glimpses of good writing in here too. There are some really nice lines occasionally. I love this line: “He felt all at once like an ineffectual moth, fluttering at the windowpane of reality, dimly seeing it from outside.” Whether or not you agree with the actual religious interpretations of what he’s trying to get at, I think this is a really deep truth about reality — about all observations a theory later, and the problem of relying on sensory perception, and the paradoxes that you get into where you’re having a psychotic break, or you’re schizophrenic, and you literally don’t know what’s real and what’s not. It’s a very interesting state of mind to explore, for me. I was going to ask if you guys have ever had experiences like this, where you felt untethered from reality. Have you ever had a psychotic break, or psychedelics and lost control or whatever? Because it is interesting to inhabit that paranoid mind.
Cam: And it’s lasting as well. I’ve had two — one where I was traveling and just didn’t sleep well for like days. And the other one was when I was 17 or 18, I did — it was a kind of legal drug at the time, like salvia or something. It sounds like — yeah, salvia, synthetic weed. Holy shit, that threw me. Kids, man, don’t do that shit. I’ve talked to quite a few people that have had pretty heavy trips on that.
Rich: No, that’s awesome, because you just tripped for like 15 seconds or something, right?
Benny: It’s like 15 minutes, right? Okay.
Cam: I think the problem was you didn’t necessarily know what you’re — “oh, this is just weird.” But there is this thing — yeah, where it can be like…
Rich: Then you’re melting through the couch and falling into a black hole.
Cam: These bad trips, anger trips, can be lasting — like for your whole life, or at least for months or years. And it does kind of bleed into reality. There’s this idea that I think Philip K. Dick was paranoid about: how do you know when a trip ends? And then like, is it even — it doesn’t exist. And the crazy people who kind of see their…
Rich: But it’s also related to the gnosis idea, right? That you can unlock direct spiritual experience through this thing. And this is my experience as well: basically, I don’t like psychedelics, because this is something that intrigues me because I’m so bad at doing it and I find it so terrifying. All I want to do is pin down the territory as closely as I can and make a good model of it. And it’s absolutely terrifying to not be certain about what’s what and where I am and who I am. So the thing that I miss out on by virtue of not liking to lose control is that when you do have experiences like this, I feel like you come back and you have these insights. And I honestly think they are true in some sense, and they’re incredibly banal — when you say them out loud, you sound like a fucking idiot. You’ll be tripping balls and you’ll be like, “yeah, yeah, it’s all love.”
Cam: It’s like a trope of a weed-induced — right?
Benny: “It’s all love, it all comes down to love.” Yeah.
Rich: When I did mushrooms for the first time, I had the insight that, oh my god, everyone was right about the idea that love is the answer or whatever. And even now saying it just sounds so fucking stupid. But it’s a very moving, compelling insight in the moment. And you could make an argument that there is some kind of truth to that, and that you are attaining some kind of spiritual knowledge. So it’s a double-edged sword, right — if you’re willing to make these leaps, then it’s not entirely cuckoo to think that you can grasp some things that would have been hard for you to grasp otherwise, or maybe break through some barriers which really were distorting your normal sober version of reality. As in the case of psychedelic therapy for breaking down stuck trapped priors that you had in your brain and things like that.
Benny: Yeah, I’ve done some psychedelics and stuff but I don’t think I’ve ever had the experience of actually like ego dissolution or losing sense of self or not knowing where I was. Which I feel like I would like to have those experiences. I’ll be in Amsterdam this summer, so that’s it. Here we go.
Cam: That’s a good example of the way people talk about it, where that is a way you’re actually seeing reality more truly than our normal state. Okay, so because we’re kind of talking about how you never know if you’re in reality or not — but we actually ultimately reject that. Well, at least I do. I reject solipsism or idealism. I think an external reality exists and we’re in it. I think David Deutsch provides a very nice argument for that. In short, it’s the best explanation for things. Sure, like Bertrand Russell’s celestial teapot that’s invisible could exist, but that would be a bad explanation, and to require it would have all these extra stipulations that don’t add anything to the explanation, so we reject it. But the other point is: in Ubik, in the book, reality is becoming fragmented. There’s this effect happening, right? That’s quick, and that would question reality. But in our reality that’s not happening — unless you do drugs or go meditate in a cave or something. But then you’re having hallucinations. Maybe I’m being circular and the whole point is, how do you know the hallucinations are not real? But based on this argument that they’re not good explanations — like, a giant rabbit is talking to me right now telling me to kill my family, that’s not a good explanation of something that actually exists. The better explanation, as Hume says, that would be a fucking miracle, or maybe I’m being deluded.
Benny: I mean, I think honestly — not just being facetious with respect to my earlier argument — I think you actually could try and make an argument for this book that it’s not real life the whole time. The writing is weird, the names are weird, the clothing’s weird. Things are a bit discombobulated, scenes jump.
Rich: You’re not wearing electric yellow cumberbunds and wizard robes.
Benny: It’s my usual attire for Sunday-night book club.
Cam: I mean, it’s set in the future, though.
Rich: For those who can’t see Benny on video.
Benny: But you know, scenes are jumping from one to the next, from one sentence to the other, in this weird dreamlike sort of way. And mostly you’re just a little bit confused and on edge and jarred as the reader. But you could also just make the argument that they’re in a dreamlike state the whole time, none of this is real, etc. So I don’t think Cam’s reading of this is actually too much of a stretch.
Rich: Yeah, it’s definitely dreamlike or even nightmarish in parts, I agree with that. I just don’t really have a problem with that. I kind of enjoyed it.
Benny: I will say it’s made me curious to read more Dick in the future. For some reason, even though I didn’t like it that much, I am curious about what his other novels are like. Now I’m dead curious. I’ve never been more Dick-curious in my life. I want to be very well versed in Dick by the end of this year.
Cam: That’s a real uncertainty that no one’s ever sure about.
Benny: Yeah, how much Dick is too much Dick — you never know.
Rich: Do you guys have like a déjà vu during this meeting that we’ve talked about this in some other timeline?
Benny: We’re in the best of all possible timelines, but that Dick did a worse job. Thank god we’re in this timeline.
