What's a Ubik?

Ubik by Philip K. Dick is, at least on the surface, a bit of a puzzling ordeal. Part futuristic hyper-capitalist dystopia, part rambling psychic fever dream. One of the most intriguing ideas amid Philip K. Dick’s usual torrent of inventiveness is how cryogenic freezing is used throughout the story. In the world of Ubik, man has cured death, sort of; actually it’s more of a treatment. By freezing a body immediately after “death” and placing it in a process known colloquially as Cold Pac one may stall the final symptoms of death for many years. Cold Pac preserves the body in a kind of half-life where the dead communicate with the living and retain a kind of artificial consciousness. Like life, half-life is also limited; every minute a person in half-life connects with the living world to communicate they edge closer to their final permanent death. This technology has some major implications both for the characters in the story and society as a whole.

Cold Pac, like everything in the coin-operated world of Ubik, including doors, and all manner of mundane household appliances, comes at a price. Cold Pac is not a technology that is available for everyone. Only the reasonably wealthy can afford to be preserved in half-life and even amongst the wealthy patrons there are multiple tiers of service. It is not a stretch to draw comparisons between Cold Pac and current life extending technologies. Despite their helpfulness most of these current technologies remain unavailable to the vast majority of the world’s population. If a cure for death did exist in the modern world Dick’s assumptions on the availability of that technology is probably not that far off.

While many implications of Cold Pac are potentially wonderful, or at the very least convenient, it’s worth questioning why anyone would want it at all. Cold Pac could be seen as a harmful invasion into the natural grieving process. After all the technique is only prolonging the inevitable, and the half-life recipients aren’t exactly living in bliss, as we witness later in the story. The process invites in a whole rabble of tricky philosophical implications. There is the basic question of whether science should be meddling with the balance of life and death in the first place (sure, why not?), or more specifically whether mortality should be left to the control of market forces (no, that’s probably bad). The practitioners of the practice perhaps started out as purely scientists, but necessity has transformed them to part pitchmen, part morticians, part theologians. All in all the half-lifers are getting a bit of a raw deal. The whole setup seems to benefit the living first and foremost (although one could say the same about all post-death arrangements including funerals).

But these ideas only begin to scratch the surface of Ubik’s weirdly compelling mix of concepts; the omnipresent advertising for Ubik products throughout the novel becomes a kind of metaphorical shape shifting God. Multiple semi-serious references are made to reincarnation at the end of Cold Pac by the half-lifers. Ubik is perhaps not one of Philip K. Dick’s most seminal works but it is awash in the kind of digressive, paranoid wisdom that cements his place as the philosopher king of modern science fiction.

Alfred Bester the Accidental Father of Cyberpunk

Between the foreboding depictions of new technology haplessly entangled with mankind and the omnipresence of sinister corporations Cyberpunk seems like a genre devised especially for the Internet age. The mere mention of the term conjures up visions of a foot chase through the neon rain slicked streets of future Los Angles, or the frantic Zen warrior Neo jamming an AC cable into his cerebellum. But what if I told you the birth of cyberpunk was happening at the same time... as the jitterbug? You might be skeptical, and so was I until I read The Stars My Destination by Alfred Bester.

(Some mild spoilers to follow)

Bester’s preposterously grizzled, lowlife anti-hero is about as Cyberpunk as it gets. We are introduced to Gulliver Foyle as the lone survivor of an interstellar shipwreck. After enduring six months in the wreck the lowly crewman’s only notable trait seems to be his penchant for self-preservation. When a passing ship ignores his obvious calls for help Gully vows revenge. The means by which he actuates his revenge cements him as one of the nastiest characters in science fiction. Foyle’s sick determination for revenge unleashes his brutal potential; his transformation from a simple brute to a brilliant cybernetic enhanced killing machine is surprisingly poignant. Bester’s unflinching depiction of multiple flavors of violence is intense, even by modern standards. It’s hard not to see the echoes of Gully Foyle in later archetypical cyberpunk heroes; he’s part Henry Dorsett, part Motoko Kusanagi, and a little bit Kwisatz Haderach.

Bester isn’t immune to the occasional bout of the anachronistic sniffles and his grasp of science is flaky at (most) times, however he delivers on the things that count, namely characters and world building. While reading The Stars My Destination I was consistently surprised at how contemporary the work felt. The world he creates is packed with prescient social commentary and technologies. From a rampant corporate oligarchy to a poor, technologically deprived underclass it’s hard not to see parallels to issues that could be ripped from today’s headlines.  All this and I haven’t even mentioned Jaunting, a central mechanic to the story whose social and technological ramifications are a topic worth discussing in and of itself. For the uninitiated, Jaunting is a form of personal teleportation that one may practice by willpower alone. The economic ramifications of the near complete removal of the need for personal transportation have resulted in a major restructuring of society on every level. Interestingly, this restructuring includes some unforeseen consequences including the fortification of woman of the upper classes in Jaunt Proof ™ rooms. Leading to a new Victorian age of culturally mandated sexual repression.

Bester’s also experiments with his writing in some radical ways. Psychedelic onomatopoeia abounds and the style of writing undergoes changes in parallel to our hero's accumulating intelligence. Bester uses language to viscerally immerse the reader in Foyle’s state of consciousness. Bester should be owed a great debt for taking the first strides on the fringe of a sub-genre that didn’t come into its own culturally, until after his death.  Whether or not Bester knew it at the time, the importance of his endeavor had far reaching effects. Many of the elements of Cyberpunk have been appropriated into the mainstream and are now inexorably linked to modern science fiction.  

Gods with Mustaches, Myth in the Contemporary World

In Neil Gaiman’s Anansi Boys a painfully normal man Charles accidental discovers that his father is the West African God of mischief, Anansi and he has a brother who is also a God. Charlie is a permanently embarrassed wreck and his brother is a blithe, womanizing sociopath. Friction builds as Charlie attempts to reconcile his ordinary life against the powerful forces of ancient myth that make his brother such a pain in the ass.

According to Gaiman's lore the first stories to exist were the stories by the God Tiger, now long forgotten. Tiger’s stories were distinguished by their brutality and revelry in predatory violence for survival. The trickster Anansi cunningly took the stories from Tiger and transfigured them with wisdom and guile into something else entirely. All stories now are said to be Anansi stories. As the Anansi mythology tumbles into the present it is scrutinized under modern precepts where its relevance to the contemporary world is tested.

If the Anansi stories are the progenitors of myth they are also the parents of modern narrative. But Myths are not just stories. They are the very essence of what makes us human. It would not be an stretch to say that modern civilization would not exist without myth. Myths were the very first form of figurative invention, a first attempt to quantify our situation as sentient beings in a universe. Mythmaking is the kind of activity that separates us from other animals. While the natural world was busy clawing its eyes out, myth allowed us to tiptoe up the evolutionary ladder behind. In Anansi Boys we witness the literal combat between Anansi stories and Tiger stories. This is really the primeval forces of nature pitted against the edified worldview born of myth.

 As cultures developed ancestral stories helped give meaning to life. They created a framework that reassured people that they fit in some overarching narrative, the grand tapestry of culture. This has developed into a much broader form in the contemporary world. We use myths to define our culture through expansive archetypes, for example the stories and ideas that inform the so-called American worldview (personal freedoms, pursuit of happiness, manifest destiny etc.). Myths that help define a culture also help define us personally. We form our own identities by the way we make associations with those larger cultural constructs.

We are often not aware of the influence of myth in our contemporary world. But the Anansi stories are hiding in plane sight, they are so much a part of the fabric of modern experience that they don’t even register as novel. Whatever cultural narratives you subscribe to, whether there are Gods or mystical worlds, whether those Gods have mustaches, the details are irrelevant. Those potentially mustachioed figures of myth are just whiskery vessels to transport ideas through time. Myth is the fundamental ingredient to human culture, the lifeblood of imagination and the driving force behind our interminable progression into more enlightened creatures.  

Pratchett v. Tolkien and the Epic Arms Race for Epic Fantasy

I was glad to finally get the chance to read The Color of Magic, the first book in Terry Pratchett’s long-running Disc World series. As a longtime Tolkien fan reading Pratchett’s work for the first time was a particularly rewarding experience. Pratchett borrows just enough from the epitomes father of modern fantasy to make the corkscrews in his narrative particularly effective.

Much of modern fantasy writing seems to be lurking in Tolkien’s shadow. The Stilted writing is rich in archetypical trappings but lacking in real substantive storytelling. What has emerged is a kind of epic fantasy arms race; too many characters, convoluted lore, and tomes upon tomes of plot. Pratchett was well aware of the state of his genre when he started writing fantasy. His Disc World series was a great first push off a cliff into the gulch of relative respectability that the genre enjoys today. He draws on a vast array of stale formulas and puts them in blender adding a generous helping of his own dry wit and rage. What emerges is something truly unique, by any measure a satirical feat.  

What sets Pratchett apart from many of his contemporaries is his approach to world building. Right up front he takes on the often-ridiculous conceits of fantasy worlds and gives them a colossal turtle-sized redecoration. The key to Pratchett’s success is the mundanity that he allows to infuse the most fantastical elements of his world. By contrast the settings in Tolkien’s works are separated from our world by a kind of gauzy mythological curtain. Despite all the war and tragedy and heartbreak Middle Earth couldn’t be further off from the messy grey morality present in our world. Even the evil places are perfectly, unremittingly evil. The sense of meticulously constructed antiquity is almost oppressive in it’s grandioseness. Pratchett by contrast revels in deconstructing the mythology of places and the creatures that inhabit them. Nothing is as it seems and chances are it’s a lot less remarkable than you think.

Tolkien doesn’t create characters so much as he creates archetypes. Even the Hobbits that function as the audience’s proxies are pulled from an idealized vision of middle class English society. While the characters are occasionally depicted as hungry or tired they are primarily motivated by honor, vengeance or pure evil (and definitely not sex). Tolkien’s warriors, wizards and elves seem to exist on a higher moral plane then contemporary man. 

Pratchett takes an opposing approach. His characterizations, for all their zaniness and sinister whimsy feel grubby and lived in. Like real people they are more likely to act in their own self-interests unless sufficiently persuaded otherwise. Heroes aren’t honor bound so much as they are driven by insatiable blood lust that may or may not occasionally coincide with honorable deeds. We often see the actions of so called heroes measured in collateral damage rather than purity of heart. In essence the divide between Pratchett and Tolkien is a basic philosophical one. Tolkien’s worlds are meticulously crafted binary systems, Good vs. Evil. He believes that absolutes can exist and that with effort we too can move towards absolute good (and maybe triumph over evil while we’re at it). This is a decidedly Christian point of view, and a fairly commendable one at that, after all his generation killed Hitler and invented zippers. Whether this kind of morality is still applicable in our brave new world of soy lattes and terrorism is a deeply philosophical question far above my pay grade, however the massive trans-media success of the Tolkien Empire would make a strong case that it is. Pratchett takes a different approach. One might be tempted to call it pessimistic but I prefer to think of it as a viewpoint that celebrates the quirks of human nature. Instead of using fantasy as a means of projecting what we should be, Pratchett projects reality onto fantasy to show us how we truly are in sarcastic high definition.