'Repent, Harlequin!' Said the Ticktockman
Hugo and Nebula winner, and one of the most reprinted SF stories ever written — the genre's definitive fable of civil disobedience.
Book Entry · Science Fiction
What is Ubik about?
After a bomb on the Moon kills — possibly — anti-telepath executive Glen Runciter, his team find reality decaying around them: cigarettes stale, coins obsolete, 1992 sliding relentlessly back towards 1939, colleagues dying of sudden accelerated entropy. Salvation comes, maybe, in a spray can: Ubik, advertised in chirpy epigraphs before every chapter, safe when taken as directed. Half the cast may be dead in cryonic half-life; the question is which half, and Dick keeps reversing the answer to the final sentence. Funny, terrifying and completely uninterested in reassuring you.
Why it matters
Widely considered Dick's masterpiece; Time magazine listed it among the hundred best English-language novels. The entire reality-glitch genre, The Matrix included, descends from here.
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