Self-Determination and Philip K. Dick’s “Ubik”

“The ultimate message it proffers—Ubik the substance, Ubik the book—is one of self-determination despite humanity’s manifest lack of control and certainty.”

“This battle goes on wherever you have half-lifers; it’s a verity, a rule, of our kind of existence”

— Ella Runciter

In Philip K. Dick’s work of temporal and perspectival manipulation, Ubik, selfhood becomes an uncertainty threatened by a greater context.

Published in 1969, Ubik could be analyzed as having been written in the context of the broader political conflicts of the day. (And perhaps it was. We still wonder to what extent it is possible to avoid the seeping in of the political vagaries of one’s own time into one’s writing.) However, eschewing that, one may come to understand the novel’s message in terms of the individual mind and self-determination. Tormented in life by the guillotinic preeminence of death, it is all any human can do to learn to accept the limitations of that condition with the tools at his or her disposal. This outlook, of course, has political implications as well; however, prior to the organization of individuals comes the individuals who choose—based on their compatible way(s) of viewing the human situation—to agree on a manner of organizing their society.

So arrives Ubik. At the story’s outset, we meet Joe Chip, a monetarily indebted talent evaluator for Glen Runciter’s successful company of “inertials,” whose job it is to counteract the activities of Ray Hollis’ psionic telepaths and precogs, who in this futurescape possess the ability to read peoples’ thoughts and predict or determine their futures. We learn that some of Runciter’s inertials have been disappearing while on missions, and that there likely exists an ominous force that causes these disappearances. An acquaintance of Chip’s brings Pat Conley, a woman with a unique talent—the ability not to determine the future, but to redetermine the past and in doing so undo events which have since occurred—to Chip’s apartment, where he measures her anti-psionic ability for potential hiring with Runciter and marks her as dangerous, based on her stated skills, her demonstration of them, and her demeanor. “Watch this person,” the two underlined crosses Chip draws on her evaluation indicate. “She is a hazard to the firm. She is dangerous.” Although he tells Pat that the two crosses mean “Hire her at whatever required cost.” Nevertheless, Pat is taken to Runciter and hired to the anti-psi team, a position likely gained by means of her skills with retroactivity.