Ubik
UBIK (Philip K. Dick) - Three Stars
I was expecting the Dick to be more... substantial.
Pardon my pompous comedy—I've already been accused once of being a sci-fi hating elitist—but I still have yet to read a fantasy writer that can actually WRITE. Write, like a Rushdie or an Irving (Kage Baker and Mary Doria Russell have come closest). When I saw Ubik on Time's list of the 100 greatest English language novels of the past 100 years, I was expecting a brilliantly executed novel. Instead, I found a moderately intriguing, well-conceived, but poorly-executed book that was much like any other sci-fi novel I've ever read, only with a bit more ingenuity and fatalism.
Ubik is almost a murder mystery: Dick does a good job of making reality diaphanous and confusing the reader. Who died in the explosion on Luna? Who was behind it? And what's going on with time? The book did keep my interest, trying to unravel just what the fuck was going on here. The creativity of the plot carried me through the sections of sub-standard prose.
In the end, the book was kept from greatness for me by a few issues. Dick has too many throw-away sections that don't serve the main purpose of the story. The protagonist is really a whiny jerk for much of the novel. Dick shows a bit of a misogynistic bent towards his female characters. The left-turn at the end was "shocking" (though I figured it out a few pages before it was revealed), but what purpose did it serve? All of the plot-twists were fairly haphazard, nothing was wrapped up: sure, it's great to throw in a bunch of twists and turns that confuse the reader, but it's even better if all those twists and turns share a unifying greater theme.
*** SPOILER ALERT ***
(Sure, the ending's not a cheat per se, but it basically says "Haha, everything that happened in this book was bullshit and everyone's fucked." Okay, great, why'd I read this again?)
So, yeah: Dick was very clever and quite ingenious, but he was a pretty average writer and this is a good, not great book.
I was expecting the Dick to be more... substantial.
Pardon my pompous comedy—I've already been accused once of being a sci-fi hating elitist—but I still have yet to read a fantasy writer that can actually WRITE. Write, like a Rushdie or an Irving (Kage Baker and Mary Doria Russell have come closest). When I saw Ubik on Time's list of the 100 greatest English language novels of the past 100 years, I was expecting a brilliantly executed novel. Instead, I found a moderately intriguing, well-conceived, but poorly-executed book that was much like any other sci-fi novel I've ever read, only with a bit more ingenuity and fatalism.
Ubik is almost a murder mystery: Dick does a good job of making reality diaphanous and confusing the reader. Who died in the explosion on Luna? Who was behind it? And what's going on with time? The book did keep my interest, trying to unravel just what the fuck was going on here. The creativity of the plot carried me through the sections of sub-standard prose.
In the end, the book was kept from greatness for me by a few issues. Dick has too many throw-away sections that don't serve the main purpose of the story. The protagonist is really a whiny jerk for much of the novel. Dick shows a bit of a misogynistic bent towards his female characters. The left-turn at the end was "shocking" (though I figured it out a few pages before it was revealed), but what purpose did it serve? All of the plot-twists were fairly haphazard, nothing was wrapped up: sure, it's great to throw in a bunch of twists and turns that confuse the reader, but it's even better if all those twists and turns share a unifying greater theme.
*** SPOILER ALERT ***
(Sure, the ending's not a cheat per se, but it basically says "Haha, everything that happened in this book was bullshit and everyone's fucked." Okay, great, why'd I read this again?)
So, yeah: Dick was very clever and quite ingenious, but he was a pretty average writer and this is a good, not great book.
posted by Kevin at 11:16 PM
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