Gross distortions of what we consider the real universe were common in the work of Philip K. DICK
even before he began emerging as a major novelist.
In Eye in the Sky (1957) a group of individuals find
themselves in successive realities where one or another of their group has managed to superimpose
distorted versions of natural law on their environment. The concept that the universe is not perceived identically from one individual to another,
and that these perceptions are all valid, would
recur in different guises, such as Clans of the Alphane Moon (1964), in which only the inmates of
an insane asylum survive and prosper, resulting in
differing tribes with different manias. But paradoxically, it is this very inability to look at the world in
the same way that allows them to resist conquest
by an outside power.
In Ubik, there is growing conflict between
those with psi talents and those who are alarmed
by these extrasensory powers. Joe Chip, the protagonist, lives in a world almost unrecognizable to the
reader. People are now able to transcend death,
after a fashion, by preserving their consciousness in
a state known as half life. Much of the surface conflict originates in the rivalry between two businesses, but the story changes dramatically with the
passing of one major player into half life, from
which he makes occasional appearances as the
forces of deterioration and of renewal contend
with the nature of the universe itself. The Ubik of
the title is a form of compressed reality stored in
aerosol containers that can actually cause objects
to regress functionally—that is, an application to
an automobile could change it into a horse and
buggy. Images of decay often show up in Dick’s fiction, but rarely so explicitly. The novel ends on a
note of ambiguity, which annoyed some readers,
who wanted to know which reality was the correct
one, missing the point that there is no objective
universe, just the one that we perceive and shape
as the sum of our individual perceptions.