Born of a time of extraordinary change
Award-winning author Kim Stanley Robinson, best known for his celebrated Mars trilogy, wrote his doctoral thesis on the novels of Philip K. Dick. In his exclusive introduction to this edition, he discusses Ubik as the culmination of Dick’s key obsessions: false identity, the fight against entropy, the breakdown of reality. The book, Robinson writes, is itself a reflection of Dick’s own exhausted experience of the tumultuous 1960s: the real world seemed impossible, maddening, and Ubik’s satire of a universe falling into pieces makes it one of Dick’s most sophisticated works.