Ryan started the discussion with mixed lunch, meat and cheese and reading multiple physical descriptions. The book seemed to handle the fragmentation of the '60s and '70s versus the last solid feeling time of 1939 and interesting comparison to Wendell Berry feeling the same way about 1939. Discussion ranged from consciousness to technology to identifying a problem you see in living living and deciding how to handle it. See additional comments below. Please add to or edit anything I write...
Harley was unable to make it but provided it excellent series of observations listed here
Ubik was an enjoyable novel. I expect if you haven't read PKD's books before, then this might be a jarring read. Having read many PKD books before, this is probably a good introductory book to his style.
Ubik touches, as every PKD book I've read had, on the nature of reality and your perception of it. The beginning of the book was a little disjointed. I don't think PKD knew the ending of the book before he got there. The introduction of characters and the switching between them was interesting, but maybe not his finest writing in conveying a story.
Each time he introduced a new character, and his focus switched, it kept me thinking that maybe this new character was the main character. But there never was a main character. Maybe you could consider Glen Runciter or Joe Chip the main story drivers, with Al, Pat, Jory, and Elle as secondary carriers.
I was left wishing the book had delved more into the psychic battles that evidently occur outside the main storyline. We only get a taste of what these powers are with some mind reading, future event prediction, and time line shifting (by Pat).
The concept of being dead but with remaining mental capacity, then frozen in a half-life is interesting. The eventual introduction of the death of the party and entering into half-life wasn't well told. Why can they remember their whole lives, but not remember their own deaths? How is Glen Runciter entering into their reality? At the beginning of the book, he can only communicate with Elle by voice. By the end of the book, he has a full avatar in the half-life realm and can manipulate some objects there (with the help of Elle we surmise, but it's not well explained).
Ubik, the spray, was not well considered. It is explained in terms of realish physics, but they aren't in the physical world. The line here is blurred between alive and dead, the real world and half-life, and I don't think it was done well. I guess in a way, the half-life realm is still in the real world. It's a world within a world.
The regression of time within the half-life realm was an interesting concept. It linked objects from the half-life realm (ostensibly brought into existence by an unknown mechanism by Jory), with those of the real realm.
PKD keeps the reader on his toes, with guessing who the bad guy is until the very end. It seemed like it was going to be Pat, but in death she was just as powerless as the rest of the party.
The blurring between realities and characters doubting the veracity of their own existence is a common theme in PKD books. In Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, the protagonist is left wondering if he is human or android. In A Scanner Darkly, the protagonist is in a haze of drug induced psychosis that bends his perception of reality permanently. Other books touch on time travel, or expanding human consciousness through drugs.
The ending was a bit of a let down. I'm left wondering how the blur between realms is advancing. I would have preferred a little more explanation on that point.
