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Announcing the 4th meeting for a science fiction study group I'm doing this season with ADDS DONNA gallery.

Next reading: Ubik, by Philip K. Dick, 1969, 212 pages

If you watch movies, you have probably seen an adaptation of Philip K. Dick's work: Blade Runner, Total Recall, A Scanner Darkly, Minority Report, Paycheck, Next, Screamers, The Adjustment Bureau, etc.

Exactly 8 years before Blade Runner's release & Dick's death, a french filmmaker made the first attempt to produce a Ubik film. Dick himself wrote the screenplay. After almost 40 years of failed production attempts, the rights to Ubik are once again in the hands of a french filmmaker, Michel Gondry — Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. So, we've decided to read this soon-to-be-adapted book, without the distractions of Harrison Ford's voice over, or Keanu Reeves rotoscoped acting.

Named by Time magazine as one of the 100 greatest English-language novels of our time, Ubik is a unique story that wipes out the boundry between life & death. It is 1992, it is the future, and something has happened -- an explosion. People reach into their pockets and pull out money with different faces, each reflecting different realities. Dick often problematizes the relations between the world & the individual who perceives it. Many science fiction stories raise this issue because science is about knowing. Get past the first few inept* chapters, and you will be rewarded with a comic, horrific tale that examines the uncertainty that arises from living in a technosphere.

A PDF version can be easily found online, like this example:

http://www.arthursbookshelf.com/sci-fi/dick/philip%20k.%20dick%20-%20ubik.pdf

Message me if you would like a copy of the audiobook.

Hope you can join us; all are welcome.----------

* "This multidextrous work is elegant, surprising, and witty, spilling out disconcerting artifacts, scarecrow people, exiles, street-wise teenage girls, Faberge animals, robots with ill consciences and bizarre but friendly aliens. Dick published ninteen novels during the sixties, many for paperback, and as a result some are hastily written. Such prodigy demands an understanding editor; the inept start to Ubik all but cripples an exceptional novel."

Brian Aldiss on Philip K. Dick, p. 329 of Trillion Year Spree