Chip works for Glen Runciter’s anti-psi security agency, which hires out its talents to block telepathic snooping and paranormal dirty tricks. When its special team tackles a big job on the Moon, something goes badly wrong. Runciter is killed, it seems–but messages from him now appear on toilet walls, traffic tickets or product labels. Meanwhile fragments of reality are time-slipping into past versions: Joe Chip’s beloved stereo system reverts to a hand-cranked 78 player with bamboo needles. Why does Runciter’s face appear on US coins? Why the repeated ads for a hard-to-find universal panacea called Ubik (“safe when taken as directed”)?
Ubik is a 1969 science fiction novel by American writer Philip K. Dick. In 2005, Time magazine named it one of the 100 greatest English-language novels published since 1923; critic Lev Grossman described it as “a deeply unsettling existential horror story, a nightmare you’ll never be sure you’ve woken up from.”
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