Ubik

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The world of warring psychic agencies is a cut-throat one. Joe Chip realises just how savage it can get when his boss, Glen Runciter, is murdered in an explosion while on the biggest job of his career. Glen’s employees struggle in the aftermath, but their problems are only just beginning. Why are they receiving impossible cryptic messages from their dead boss? Why does reality appear to be collapsing around them? And does it have anything to do with their newest colleague, a girl with a psi talent unlike anything they’ve ever seen?

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. 

Many of Dick’s works have been adapted for the screen, ranging from cult hits to blockbusting vehicles for megastars – Ridley Scott’s seminal Blade Runner (1982) continues to shape our ideas about the future and what it should look like. More than 11 of Dick's titles have been made into films, suggesting that his work is particularly suited to the cinematic form, yet Ubik resists the treatment, perhaps proving too strange and malleable to be pinned down in a visual medium. Dick himself wrote a screenplay for a film version, and typically filled it with ideas on how the unique properties of cinema could be used to summon the vertiginous world of Ubik, but it remains unmade. For now, the best and only way to experience Dick’s masterpiece is to release your own grip on reality and dive into the novel – an experience you are unlikely to forget.

Kim Stanley Robinson is a New York Times bestselling author and winner of the Hugo, Nebula and Locus awards. He has written more than 20 books, including the bestselling Mars trilogy and the critically acclaimed Forty Signs of Rain, The Years of Rice and Salt and 2312. In 2008 he was named a ‘Hero of the Environment’ by Time magazine, and he works with the Sierra Nevada Research Institute. He lives in Davis, California.

La Boca is an independent design studio established in 2002 and specialising in illustration and image-making. They strive to create emotional connections through their work and value any part they can play in contributing to popular culture. They have worked with a wide spectrum of international clients on projects ranging from limited-edition record sleeves through to full-scale campaigns drawing on almost every type of media.