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.