Ubik

"Yes, in 1969 he published Ubik. It starts out with the main character, a guy named Joe Chip, and his profession is to search out mutants – people with paranormal powers. There’s a battle going on between two major competitors, fighting it out on the level of paranormal activity. There are people who can move things through telekinesis, or read minds, or other strange paranormal type things. Joe Chip’s job is to search out people who can counteract these telepaths in these paranormal wars: somebody who can cancel out telekinesis, somebody who can cancel out telepathy, or whatever. It starts at Joe’s apartment, and he’s getting ready to go out the door. He tries the handle of his door, and the doorknob says, “That’ll be five cents please.” Joe Chip says, “I don’t have five cents, and I don’t have to pay you” – and the door argues no, it’s in your lease. He says, “I’ll pay you later” – but no, it needs its money now. He says, “I’ll get a screwdriver” – and now the door is going to sue him. He finally manages to get out of his apartment, and he goes to work, and he’s going about his normal business… Support Five Books Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount . But when he lights up a cigarette, it turns stale and dry in his hand. He gets in a in a modern car, and the car turns into a Model T – it’s devolved into some antique version of itself. He gets on an aeroplane, flying to Iowa where a lot of the action takes place, and it devolves to a Curtiss Jenny biplane. So there’s all this devolution going on, and nobody knows what’s happening. Meanwhile, his boss is getting advice from his ex-wife who is in deep freeze, using what they call cold-pac. She’s passed on, but she’s living on subliminally for a little while longer in this sort of afterlife, where she exists just enough that he can talk to her and she can give him answers. And now she’s phasing out. There’s another character phasing in , somebody less dead than his wife… Somebody’s invading the cold-pac state. I’ll have to leave it there, because this novel must be read before being discussed. But this story, Ubik … it’s not even a roller coaster, it’s a rocket ride of a story. It’s funny, it’s direct… Phil knew right where he was going with this one, and he went straight to it. It’s an arrow to the heart of reality, and a really great novel. Many people find it to be their favourite. There’s always a level of doubt at the end of Phil’s stories. It’s like quantum mechanics, there’s always a little uncertainty; you can never really be sure, and certainly not in Ubik . It doesn’t necessarily resolve the plot: it’s maybe this happened, but maybe this happened… There’s history to the Philip K. Dick festivals… They had a big one in England in 1994, and Paul Williams was there, who was a friend of Phil’s and the executor of his estate – but also a person of note in his own way. He was with John Lennon and Yoko Ono in Scandinavia when they sang ‘All You Need is Love’; he flew in with the Grateful Dead to Woodstock; he founded the rock magazine Crawdaddy , he was the founder of rock journalism. And he’d founded the Philip K. Dick Society, too. So, when I read Eye in The Sky , I wrote away and joined the society, and we’d get a newsletter every so often. This was from 1982 to 1992, with Paul Williams out in California publishing the newsletter, and it was a thing for us fans scattered around the world which brought us all together. Then in 1992, after 10 years of publishing it, Paul Williams retired the newsletter. At that time I was publishing a political zine over here myself, so I wrote to Paul and said, “We’ll do it – we’ll take it over.” There were two newsletters – Radio Free PKD by this fan in California named Greg Lee, and the zine put out by me (but not just me!) called For Dickheads Only , or FDO. It was just a little paper zine, stapled together in the corner, and I mailed it out all over the place. So I did that for a few years; and then I heard in probably 1997 or ’98 that Paul Williams had a bicycle accident in San Francisco, he’d been hit by car and left with brain damage. I’ve been wondering all this time, why don’t we all get together, why not have a festival or something? They had a real big science fiction festival in France in 1977, Philip Dick when to Metz and was the guest of honour – he was feted and gave a great speech and really confused everybody. Why aren’t we doing something like that, I thought? What’s Paul doing? And then I heard that he just couldn’t do it. I was up in Black Hawk, which is a casino town west of Denver, up in the mountains; me and my wife were there, and we got snowed in. So we went down to the casino and I was playing the slot machines – and right there and then it just popped into my brain: I have to do a Philip K. Dick Festival in 2010. We found a friendly motorcycle bar up on the highway near Black Hawk, and we did a little festival up there. We had about thirty people come in from all over the place – Japan, mostly California, all around here in Colorado. We had a little festival and a band, and we had scholars and we sat around in the Last Shot bar talking over the racket of the Harley Davidson engines… After that I thought, well, Phil was buried in Fort Morgan, down on the prairie. So I went to Fort Morgan, and the first place I went to was the library – I always figure the library’s the heart of the town, where culture’s going on. I talked to a librarian, and the curator of the museum, and they were all for it. It took me a few years to get in with these guys – I’m not making any money off this! – and we did another festival in 2017 there in Fort Morgan. It was a success! And then we did another one in 2019 and were going to do one in 2022. But it was the tail end of Covid, so I cancelled it. 2022 would have been the 40th anniversary of Phil’s passing. So last year, 2023, the big Comic Con in San Diego – humungous, thousands of fans showing up – they decide to have a Philip K. Dick panel. They wanted me to do it, but I couldn’t make it out there; but I thought it was a good opportunity to get a word out to all these Comic Con fans. So I said, we’ll put a festival on in 2024, so we can announce it at the Comic Con. So we’ve set the date, 13–16 June, 2024 , and preparations are moving along. We have scholars coming in from everywhere, artists, musicians, writers – there are a lot of young writers who are heavily influenced by Phil, who have their own way of looking at things you know. It’s a whole new world out there. So that’s how come we did the festivals. It’s just that we like to talk amongst ourselves, Philip K. Dick fans! And Fort Morgan’s a nice little town, very quiet, out on the prairie. I always think that town was one of the most competent places I’ve ever been; you get this sense of durability in this little town on the prairie, which has weathered storms and blizzards – they can handle anything, and the friendliest people you’ve ever seen. Well, it takes a slightly different emphasis. For instance, let’s take artificial intelligence . Philip K. Dick wrote a lot about artificial intelligence in his own way… There’s one short story where the governing computer for the society has decided that it wants to drop an atomic bomb on this one particular guy living out somewhere in California, it wants to destroy this dude. Well, why is that? Because AI, the computer, has made the decision that this guy selling gumball machines is somehow an alien invader or something. He’s just a man selling gumball machines! So there’s a cautionary tale about artificial intelligence. And there’s a film out called Screamers , which is based on Phil’s novelette called Second Variety : that’s about a future war where the artificial intelligence, the machines, have started building their own machines and improving them, but all of the machines that they build are designed to kill human beings. They’re war machines, they want to destroy humanity. So, they get better and better and better at it, and come up with this one killing machine that looks like a poor little boy holding a teddy bear; and they let him into communities where people live, and he turns into a killer and wipes them out. So, Phil wasn’t very friendly towards artificial intelligence! New writers like Cliff Jones, Jr. and David Agranoff, both big Dickheads, are doing interesting stories. They will both be at the June PKD Festival. So much more is known now about PKD’s life and work that these writers are taking in and writing their own weird stories. Jonathan Lethem, of course, is the glittering star that came out of the early PKD world, him and Rudy Rucker. Yes, Wide Books, in collaboration with Henri Wintz. We are about to publish a 4-volume unified edition of our PKD bibliographies, all matching, in hardcover and softcover: Precious Artifacts 1 : USA and UK novels (1955 – 2024); Precious Artifacts 2 : The Short Stories (1952-2014); Precious Artifacts 3: The French Editions (1959 – 2018) and Precious Artifacts 4 : The Italian Editions (1958 – 2024). We’re excited!"