So it was all in Runciter's head, is that it? And was the real villain Jordy or Pam? And why is reincarnation mentioned so much? What's the point? Help me I'm dumb.
From what I remember, the protagonist is dead and in this world people can be kept in a stasis between life and death. That means that people from the outside can sort of contact them but not really. The protagonist is in this stasis world and it's being slowly corrupted by some fuckass boy that turns everything back in time. It turns out the boy is some form of entity and the protagonist used Ubik to fix things. If you read Androids dream of electric sheep, you'll find that he talks about kipple. At the end he throws a curveball insinuating that Runciter is also in this stasis chamber, but from what I read PKD rushed the ending.
It's been a while since I've read it, but the ending with Joe chip on the coin was pretty shit and was just a tacked on WHAT A TWEEST
>>24785222yeah it was pretty wack, but aside from that I do like this book a lot, reminds me of The Man Who Was Thursday
It’s been years but from what I remember. You know how in the beginning the wife kept getting interrupted by Jordy so he requested to move her some place more secure? It’s possible Runciter died too but his body went to the wife’s secure location instead of the others so jordy hasn’t affected him yet which could also explain how the wife is able to do all that near the end. The Joe chip could be after the story with Joe figuring out how half life works and now is trying to contact runciter and trying to tell him he’s dead too.
>>24785094Well it's a mishmash of half-baked ideas, Dick didn't need for it to make sense. All he had to do was leave some red herrings strewn around and let the reader do the work.
>>24785094>So it was all >And was the real villain You don't get it. >What's the point?Narratives, contexts, facts, meaning and rules not coming together is the point. Joe Chip no longer knows if he's a psychic technician, if he's married, if he's in a sci-fi futuristic world, if he's sane, if he's alive even. Hence the search for Ubik - the [something] that can give this fluid and murky reality some contours, ground the meaningless and ever-shifting noise in anything concrete and ceratin. The real point of the story is Ubik, the futuristic Swiss life-after-death psychic contract agency is just the scenic decoration. What made Ubik good is specifically how well PKD conveys the schizo unraveling of the narrative.
