 And welcome to the first ever Verge book club podcast. I'll be your host today, Josh Dupolsky. I'll be, I'm Josh Dupolsky all the time, but today I'm also going to be hosting the book club podcast. And with me is the beautiful, the delightful Laura June, who is an editor and also we're married I should tell you now for full disclosure. And a very special guest Lev Grossman, who is the Time book critic, a Time book critic, is the or a? The. The Time book critic. That is the article you're looking for. And author of the New York Times bestselling Magicians series of books. So thank you for joining us. It's my pleasure. And I assume, well, I know Philip K. Dick fan and Ubik lover. Yes. Both of those things. Right. Well, thank you for joining us. So just in case you don't know, if you just tuned into this and you don't know what's going on, we last month, September, we read Ubik, which is a Philip K. Dick novel in the Verge book club. And now we're discussing, we're discussing it. We're going to, we have some questions from, from book club members who read it and we're just going to talk about the book and what it means. Does that make sense? Yeah. So what I wanted to start with was one of the reasons that I asked Lev to do this was that he, that you included the book on the time list of the 100 best novels since I think it was in 1923, which is when Time started publishing. Not only did I do that just to break in, I just turned over my copy of Ubik to find my own name on the back. Which is so similar. I don't even want to look at the money in my pocket because it might possibly have my face on it too. It's just in this context, very disconcerting. So if you read the, if you read the, what edition is this? This is the Mariner. Lev is quoted quite prominently. I mean, before the description of the book even. Although they've got Adam Gopnik on the cover, which I, I don't know how that decision was made. That is a bit frustrating. Adam is always getting there before me. And, and you know, I'm personally a fan. I'm going to write to Mariner. She would, yeah. But I did not know that. It's interesting. Can I read the quote since we're talking about it? If you don't have the book. From the stuff of space opera, Dick spins a deeply unsettling existential horror story, a nightmare you'll never be sure you've woken up from. Lev Grossman, Time. Yeah. And one of our readers actually took a small bit of issue with it, which I do want to, with the quote, which I do want to get to later. But the first thing I want to talk about is, is Philip K. Dick as a thing. And I think that he was a person and he was, he was a really prolific writer, but he was not a very well respected writer for, for most of his career. And I think that that's changed pretty drastically in the last five to 10 years. And Ubik was not the first book of his that I read. I think it was the second or the third. What was the first book? I think it was Flow My Tears the Policeman Said. Or Scanner Darkly. No. Three Stigmata. No, I've never read that one. Three Stigmata is, is, oh no, that's the Transmaker. I was thinking of the Valis. I think you started reading Valis trilogy. I started. And then you didn't finish it. Yeah. You read it? I have. But not everybody comes out the other side of that. Yes, I did not. Well, it's interesting. Sorry, I don't mean to derail you. But to your quote, that quote, I think is very applicable in terms of the Valis trilogy, particularly the first book, which made me feel like I was going a little nuts while reading it. Yeah. Not that we're here to talk about that, but anyhow. I mean, I wanted to just briefly talk about, you know, I started reading his books five to seven years ago. And I came to it through you. You were a big fan. And you're obviously a big fan. And I think that, you know, I think that he's having like a moment. He's having an obvious resurgence. And my question is why? Do you want to take this? Well, that's a good question. I mean, he has been in the process of resurging for some time. How long would you say? Well, ever since Blade Runner, really. I guess so. Which is right after he died. But Blade Runner was a bomb. I mean, it was not a success. It was a slow burn. It was a slow burn. It took another, I remember it was re-released. They did a limited re-release 10 years later in 92. I feel like it started in the 90s really with kind of, not to jump in here, but Blade Runner, I feel like there was a big period post Blade Runner where just he wasn't relevant. And then something happened in the mid 90s where I think Blade Runner, people woke up to the idea that it was actually a really great, cool movie that didn't suck just because they didn't like it the first time around. It became like a cult thing. I think it stewed for a while. And once it was on video, I mean, did they even have VHS tapes in the 80s, mid 80s? Yes. Yes. I was alive then. Yeah, so was I. It's all a blurry memory. Well, I think the thing that I focus on really is the way that in Dick's books, technology is not the source of certainty. Technology does not give firm answers, if anything. It blurs the lines of reality. It's not about calculating values precisely. It's not about solving problems. And in fact, in the guise of solving problems, it in fact adds new ones, even more intractable ones. It destabilizes things in ways that it was never meant to. And that's something that Dick awoke to very early, and I think we're still just awakening to it. And the technology is also, I mean, speaking strictly about the things that are not the people in his books, it seems to be almost often a backdrop or just a kind of trigger for a much deeper psychological sort of trauma of the characters. I mean, in Ubik, for instance, the technology is, there's almost no technology really. I mean, there is this one, there is this technology of half-life, right? Which is, he doesn't really go into great detail about how it works exactly. But then there's lots of meddling minor technology that is there to like, there are many things that are barriers to the characters in this book. And one of the things that just keeps hanging around everywhere is this, the minor technological barrier every time Joe Chip wants to do something simple, like open a door, which is an odd, you know, it's an odd way to think of technology, not as an enabler, but it is exactly the opposite. Yeah, well, it's an enabler for the people who are getting the money. It's a way of establishing control and centralizing control among a small group of people of whom one is not a member. Right. I think what's interesting about half-life as if you look at it as a technology is almost instantly in the book, my favorite character, Runciter, is he very clearly, like when he is visiting his wife for the first time, it sort of sets up the entire prospect of this thing as a technological, you know, like a technological advance that society has made. He muses almost immediately that he like wish it hadn't happened or that it wasn't an option. He says, is this better than the old way, the direct road from full life to the grave? I still have, I still do have her with me. In a sense, he decided the alternative is nothing. So really early on, he's like philosophically sort of saying like, well, maybe it was better before. Yeah. And that actually, for me, pervades like the entire rest of the book. That's what the rest of the book is about for me. Really? Mm hmm. Let me ask this. I actually, we were talking about this on the way over. What is Ubik about? I mean, I have my ideas, but what do you think Ubik is supposed to be about? What was the point? I know that's a broad question, by the way, but I feel like it's a kind of a dumb question that I'd like to hear people's answers to because I think everybody, I think there's a lot of ways to interpret it. Yeah. Well, I don't think it's reducible to a single point. What do I imagine Dick experiencing as he wrote Ubik? I read it and I think of someone who is writing rapidly, as Dick, I think, did, and improvising. There's this incredible profusion of ideas and plot lines and trying to manage them. And one of the wonderful things that happens in Ubik is the characters are basically trying to read the book they're in. They're trying to interpret the nature of the reality into which they've been inserted. And you feel Dick trying to figure it out as he goes along as well. He's improvising crazily. He's got all these plot lines, all these herrings, all of them are turning out to be red. And he's thinking, how am I gonna wrap all this up neatly? How am I gonna bring it in for a landing? And he starts to realize that the mess resembles his life more closely than anything like, a neatly tidily wrapped up thriller. He begins to realize that the state of permanent uncertainty is much more like real life than anything less than anything sort of less fantastical would be. There is this feeling and something that I found myself like kind of stopping and thinking about, stopping thinking about while I was reading this off the cuff feeling that he was writing rapidly and that there are moments that had they been more considered and by the way, I mean, I'm a fan of his, I'm happy he's rapidly written this, or we assume that he has. But things that just in I think in a from another writer, there would be situations that I think to me they were difficult to understand when reading, just difficult to accept for instance, towards the end of the book when Joe Chip is starting to be weakened by the entropic forces. He says, it's Pat, Pat is doing all of this and so immediately Pat becomes, she was like vaguely villainous throughout most of the book and then becomes completely becomes the villain at least at that point. And he's like, I'm gonna go to my room and lay down when and by the way, everybody at this point knows that going to your room to lay down is definitely the wrong, and Joe has even said, he said, don't let anybody go off alone because that'll be the end of them. And then Pat's like, I'll walk you to your room and I think had this book been maybe less rapidly written or a different author, Joe Chip would have said, no, thanks, you're the bad guy here. He's like, okay, fine, walk me to my room and they have this kind of weird conversation where she's taunting him as he's weakening and getting to his room. Magnificent sequence, I was just longing to see that on film. Her standing over him and him sort of basically crawling up the stairs. And this is something that it's interesting you mentioned that because Dick wrote a screenplay for you, Bic, which I have not read. I actually started reading a little bit of it and I was disappointed immediately with it and I because it kind of was different than my vision of the book, which actually was out of print for a long time. It's just come back into print. But have you read it? Have you read the screenplay? But this is one of his books that I saw so clearly the first time I read it, 10 years ago or when I was even longer and rereading it again, it just seems so filmic to me. The arc of it is so, it has such a propulsive arc. Do you do, I mean, was that something that has, I mean, you mentioned it as something you wanted to see on film. Is that something that you thought of as you were reading this? Oh, God, yes. I even thought, yeah, I know how to do this, man. They should just call me. They should. Because I could get this thing done in film because it's so propulsive and yet so just strangely ambiguous and shadowy at the same time. Everything is concrete and you can see the details very clearly, but the big picture is just nowhere. Yeah. I think that actually leads to one of the questions that sort of repeats over and over again and I think it's more about us as modern readers than it is about him and maybe it's more about the context he was writing in and the time he was writing in. When was this originally published? 60 something. It's like 60 something. Yeah. I don't know. I may have just embedded that number. It's late 60s. 65? 69. 69. Pretty close. So I think a question that's come up over and over again with our readers is, is this ending satisfying? And I think that oddly for a lot of them it's not and I think it's because the ending is you can interpret it almost however you want and it sort of forces you to, not however you want, but it forces you to recast everything that's gone before it but not in a neat sort of like sixth sense way. And I think... It doesn't answer every question. Right. I mean it... It's sort of beauty is in its lack of finality or its lack of answering everything up. Everything's not neatly, like you said, the sort of concrete details are sort of neatly wrapped up but the larger questions are like what's happened. And I think a lot of our readers are kind of not happy with that. Todd, this is my favorite kind of ending. I mean it's... Mine too. I would be less satisfied if it ended on a note where everything was neatly wrapped up and it didn't leave you asking questions at the end of it. Lev, I don't know what your take on it is. I love the ending. I adore it. And I feel as though all the space for ambiguity and ontological uncertainty that he spent the whole book creating for him to abolish it at the end with a pad ending would have been I think to me disappointing. I read a very... There's a famous Marxist interpretation of Ubik which has to do with it being an attack on all kinds of capitalist illusions and one of them being the satisfying ending. He wanted to blow up Ubik as a sort of satisfying commodity. You pay your 16.99 or whatever and you get your pat sense of certainty. He wanted to take that away and say this is not a commodity. This is something else, something more complex. That's an interesting interpretation. The idea that Dick would... And maybe I don't understand him enough as a writer but the idea that he would go into a book thinking I'm going to write a novel that blows up sort of capitalist concepts. There's certainly that the thread of I think a perspective of someone who is outside of sort of the capitalist thinking and has perhaps been beaten down by it. Joe Chip, I don't know, maybe I'm reading into this but I feel like the Joe Chip character is Philip K. Dick in this book. I mean I know that every character is the author in some way but I feel like there's something that's what I know of Philip K. Dick as a man. There is something that's kind of downtrodden, beaten by the system, extremely brilliant but unlucky guy. Well, you start looking for that stuff in the book and it's everywhere. These little refrains before each chapter written in actually really good impressions of sort of period advertising speak with this cubic commodity promising to solve all your problems, these household appliances that hassle you and negotiate with you and give you shit if you can't come up with a nickel. I mean he lives utterly embedded in this toxic capitalist matrix which has permeated every little part of his existence. I mean you can read it that way and it's very productive. I like the ubic is also. It's not just that it is a great impersonation of the kind of advertising copy of the 60s but ends to this day really but it's also highly dangerous. Whatever the product that is being advertised, it's not just that it is it will solve a lot of problems for you. It has to be used as directed otherwise. Do not taunt Happy Fun Ball. No, that's exactly. That was something that I thought of rereading it that I hadn't noticed either. I never made the connection but I don't know if everybody listening knows the Happy Fun Ball sketch from Saturday Night Live. It was about this, you know, this is just the kind of toy ball that would bounce but was highly volatile and you know could not be. There were just things you could not do like you take Happy Fun Ball out after midnight and you know it was like a gremlin basically. But it is all the ubic in these ads and they're not, they're kind of floating out there in the ether. I mean those ads are not, they're not seen on TV. They're not something that the characters in the book perceive and in fact it doesn't seem to be a reflection of what ubic is really. Well ubic doesn't enter the book as like a thing until maybe the second half, right? Oh, I think it's later. Maybe even later. It's very, very late. It's really like towards. But it's sort of these introductions, these ads and I think that our readers definitely picked up on it. I don't think they were thinking of Marxist interpretations but our readers definitely picked up on the weird like consumerism of the book. And I think that these little blurbs at the beginning of every chapter are there because I mean there's a couple of ways to use like blurby introductions to chapters and he uses them in one of the sort of classically interesting ones which is like he throws it out there and then it has nothing to do with the text. Right. Well it's one of the, as Lev said, there are a lot of red herrings. This is actually one that's not exactly a red herring but it feels that way up until about the last, in the final quarter of the book. I think it directs your attention in a particular way and I think that that's why even before Ubik comes in as a character, you are already sort of aware of like the sort of weird consumerism I think is the best word for what's going on in the beginning of the book. It certainly makes you want to know what Ubik is since it has so many uses. But I don't think there's any particular, any one sort of conceptual framework that kind of exhausts the power of the book. I mean obviously this is a powerful thing having to do with women. This is very sort of Madonna-whore thing where you have sort of the band sort of sexual woman in the form of Pat and the angelic savior in the form of Ella. Yeah. Well and there's also, Wendy is sort of presented as a more angelic, more sort of soft character who immediately shrivels up and dies at the, supposedly at that point thanks to Pat. I had this genius moment when I was reading it and I'm thinking, picturing the movie of it, they'd get a hold of the surveillance tapes of the hotel and they'd see her sort of creeping down the hallway. Struggling. In her desiccated state. It's really the most terrifying part of the book. It's interesting that I just realized this as you mentioned that it's hotels. Hotels are also prominently figured in the deaths of characters. I just realized that at the end, they could have been anywhere. They could have been at the funeral home. They could have been at somebody's house. They end up at another hotel. Which again, I keep coming back to the Marxist thing. I mean everything about this world which Joe inhabits, somehow it's impermanent, right? If you leave it alone for too long, if you stop pumping money into it, it starts to regress and rot and fall apart and collapse under you. Which is just like hotels. It's not like a house that you own that you live in. The minute you stop pumping money into it, you get triffed out. Everything is rented. Everything is, it is like Renaissance world. You're paying monthly for or daily or moment by moment to use it. Just the basic things in your house, your coffee maker. And it does seem that it is a very transitional kind of state, all these characters. And they are literally in a transitional state or so we are led to believe. But then in a more sort of permanent way in that world, it's a transitional world where everything is kind of and transactional. You know, that's interesting to think about because it kind of makes, when you think about, it paints this, everything is up for grabs. Everything seems to be a question. Everything seems to be like a debate or a barter. And there really is a lot of bartering towards the end of the book about Joe's condition. He almost barters in some way with Pat about it. But do we have reader questions? I'd like to get to some of the... Well, I mean, we are sort of actually moving through them. Are we going through them? Yeah. I don't want to, I mean, I think that we can riff on this. I think this sort of leads to the next question that a lot of readers had, which is, is Philip K. Dick a bad writer? And I think... No. He's the greatest writer ever. Very early on in the book. So I've been discussing the book in our forums for over a month with the readers. And so I went through chapter by chapter and very early on someone brought this up. And I think it was Jesse Hicks, who also is a big Philip K. Dick fan, sort of said, well, you know, in the sort of Philip K. Dick fan community, you know, there are a couple of schools of thought, but one of them is that he's this brilliant person whose ideas are often better than his prose. And I do agree that that can be true of him. And I don't, but I don't believe it's, that's what's going on in this book. I think I actually rereading it, this is the second time I've read it. I actually find this book to be fairly sort of beautifully thought out and beautifully written. He's known for making things up as he goes along. I don't know if he's doing that all the way here because it's so beautifully put together. So he's either even more of a genius than I previously thought he was, or meaning he can make stuff up as he goes along and it turns out just like fantastic. Or you know, he's sort of a, and I think that this actually goes back to my original point and maybe the reason that he wasn't thought of as a great writer for a really long time is because a lot of people still read his stuff and say he's not really that great of a writer. Well, I think, you know, we, I don't think he's that interested in sentences. I don't think he's that interested in words, in terms of phrase, in lyrical language. He does not write like Virginia Woolf. There aren't a lot of layers, you know, to the way he chooses words and puts them together. Some of them are very clumsy. But, you know, one of the reasons I think he's become more well thought of recently is that we're kind of getting out from under this modernist idea that books are about beautiful language and we're paying more attention, I think, to narrative. And a book that is more closely worked and finally constructed on a narrative level, I would be at a loss to name than you, Vic. If you think of writers being, you know, Woolf is probably more interested in language than narrative. You can throw the slider totally the other way. You got someone like Dick who's not a stylist at all. But on the level of plot, he's virtuoso. I mean, nobody constructs things the way he does. There's also, I think there's also a kind of, I think he has, I think there are some very beautiful writing in this book and in many of his books that does not hit the classic, I don't think it is in the classic confines of beautiful prose. I think it is something that is very modern. I think it is something that is very, I think, and maybe this is why, you know, in the last 25 years or so or whatever the timeframe is, 20 years, 10 years, that Dick has become not just more palatable, but extremely popular. Because I think there's something very modern in the way that he writes. And there are, he describes situations of extreme distress in a way that I think is fantastically beautiful. And I think that, you know, since his books are filled with paranoia and filled with dread and filled with the sense that the world is not what it seems and that the things that you've been told are lies and maybe you're not who you think you are. I mean, and that's really, you know, every book of his, I mean, there's threads of that. I think that as our kind of condition, our modern condition has come up, I think we're catching up to Dick. I think we're catching up to the idea that, you know, the world's, you know, we're in the midst of a big conspiracy theory in some ways, not quite as extreme as what Dick, you know, we're not living in, you know, what Roman era with a, you know, mask of reality pulled down in front of us, but, or whatever the valous premise is. But there is, I think this kind of beautiful paranoid prose in the book, particularly when describing situations that are, I mean, when he's describing the decay that, when Joe chipped that scene, you know, where he's working his way up the steps and he's describing what's happening to him and the forces that are working upon him. Yeah. There's an oceanic pull on him. Yeah. Which I thought, God, yeah. It's extremely dramatic and it's, I think really beautiful. And I think that he's at his best, you know, I think of Martian Time Slip. Have you read Martian Time Slip? Which covers, well, covers, you know, similar. There's the main character of the book is essentially pulls people into this decaying worldview. And when he's describing the decay and the kind of the crushing entropy of this world, it's really beautiful. And so I think that he can be very matter of fact in the kind of moment to moment action of the story. But then there are moments, there are other moments, particularly the darkest moments that I think he's really a beautiful writer. And I think it mirrors the paranoia that the more modern paranoia. And I think maybe that's why it started to appeal to a broader. And then again, I think maybe people just didn't know that Dick existed up until 20 years ago. Yeah. That's my impression. I can't, I guess I was, I guess I started reading Phil K. Dick because of Blade Runner because I knew it was based on a book and I went and read it. That was the first, I think that was the first book I read of his. It's kind of a challenging book actually for him. Yeah. I think like Ubik is a very readable book, you know, with a great, very clear narrative. I feel like DuVernay's Dream of Electric Sheep is a much harder book to get through. Maybe I'm crazy. By the way, the first time I read Ubik, I had been living in a cabin in Maine all by myself for a month at that point. And I was running out of money to keep the cabin heated. It was getting colder and colder every day. And at some point in that span of time, I thought, I've got this Ubik book. I better pick it up. Don't ever do that. I nearly lost my, I think I spent, you know, I read the last page just like huddled over my stuff, kind of rocking to myself. Oh my God. Because I felt as though, you know. And you can't just put it down once it hits a certain point towards the end of this book. It's one of the, I mean, it really is a page turner in the sense that you just need to know like what is happening, right? Because you feel like everything is up, becomes questionable at the end and you just so desperately want to know. Go on. Oh, I just, do you guys have a take on the ending? Do you have a read on what's happening in this final? Yeah, that's actually what I was just going to ask. Because I think that's the, do you want to, do you have a take? I do. I mean, I think in terms of what's actually happening, I mean, maybe this is just the kind of reader I am. It was never, I mean, if you take everything that Ella says at face value, which is we can get to that, which I don't know if you should, but if you do, then I think it's fairly clear like technically what is happening, which is that they've all been in half-life the entire time. Including Runciter? Including Runciter. I don't think that that actually answers. Is that your interpretation? My interpretation is that. I would be interested to hear what better interpretation there is. I'm curious, what is your take? Well, I mean, the setup for you, because it's totally fascinating and almost unique in that, you know, a normal writer would have chosen one premise. You would either have a world where there are psychics and there is one particular anomalous psychic named Pat, and she has the ability to regress time, to go back in time and change decisions to swap time streams. That would be enough. He adds a, this is two novels crushed into one. And then he has a second premise, which has to do with Cold Pack. You can live in the state of Cold Pack. Are you dead? Are you not? Nobody quite knows. So there's that too. So there's two destabilizing forces, which when they interact and interfere with one another, create this incredible complexity, which I think nobody he could manage. Especially on the final page, you know, I oscillate between two readings. One, which is that everyone's in Cold Pack. Runciter's in Cold Pack too. And there's some kind of dynamic equilibrium whereby the more orderly Joe's world gets, the more Runciter's world starts to fall apart and he starts to see Joe chip money. And you know that things are going to hell for him. And the other one is that Runciter is in fact the only one who's dead. And he has been hallucinating everything that's going on, including the whole narrative that happened to Chip. And in fact, Chip is alive and is trying to reach him from outside. Because none of this takes into account Jory or Pat. And that's because I'm not as smart as Philip K. Dake. There's also, I think there's also, I mean, I think this is the more out there concept, but that everything is, there's a point where we're supposed to think something has happened and now everyone is dead. The explosion. Or some of these people are dead. I think that given the final moment, the final beat, right, it's possible that there is a version with Pat. There's a version where Pat actually is just as important as she seems like she's going to be. Right? There's a version where the explosion is not the event. Maybe there's something earlier or there's that, there's that moment with Pat where, where she kind of transports Runciter. You know, he's like, what am I doing? He's like in New York city office. Yeah. You know, and then he comes back to the office and they have to figure out like how Pat and there's, you know, people were asking, I think at the book club, how, how do they have their records of Pat if she was never hired by Runciter or if she was hired under it? It's some thing where there's like this kind of, but it's like, Hey, you know what, Phil K. Dick might've left a couple of hanging chats. It's possible that not every single thing was in order. But I do think there's that interpretation, the kind of this, the bigger, if you really zoom out that, that all of it is the hallucination of Runciter or another character. But I do think, I do think you cannot end the book when you, when you, when he looks at the Joe Chip money and think that something, something has happened to Runciter. I mean, how else would he be looking at Joe Chip money unless, unless Runciter's experience is a hallucination of Joe Chip or, you know what I mean? Like the, the, that his character is not doing any of what seems to be it, you know, he seems to be doing, and that's, you know, I don't know, Dick shows him as a separate entity. I think the book essentially requires you to accept that what it is doing is offering you an analogy to the uninterpretability of reality, the reality around you. You can never quite assemble it into a whole. There's actually a term, which I've forgotten, that's used by people who study conspiracy theories, has to do with the impossibility of assembling evidence into a coherent whole. There is always space for conspiracies. It seems to be a fact accepted within the realm of psychology and information science. You actually can't come up with a whole system where there is no ambiguity. And I feel like we sort of have to accept about Ubik that, that it is written that way in a way that emulates reality. It is not, it's not reducible to a single coherent explanation, which is, does not make it unique by any means. It's a famous fact about The Big Sleep, one of my favorite novels by Raymond Chandler, who killed the chauffeur. No one knows who kills the chauffeur. It happens early on. Everyone's forgotten about it by the end of the book. But in fact, if you go back, there's just no way to know who killed him or why. I thought you were going to hit us with a theory. No, I got nothing. I don't think Chandler knew. I think it was just one of those balls of yarn that you can't ravel up completely. I think actually that's one of my favorite things about certain types of literature and this fits there. And I think it, but I also think it's the rub. I think it's the reason that some modern readers, maybe non-modern readers, maybe all readers, maybe it's a personality type, that that is what bothers them is that there's not an answer for every single thing. I think the idea, like you said, that maybe Raymond Chandler didn't know who killed the chauffeur, which implies that maybe it's not important. The whole point is that there's something you don't know. Right. Or it's not important to that particular story. It's just a detail. It's important that it's there and it's important that there's something you don't know. Right. But it's not important. He wrote the story that if he wrote it without an answer, that means that there isn't an answer and that there can't be one. But I think what's most impressive about Ubik and many of Dick's books is that he doesn't just not answer a question. He answers a question in one way and he doesn't just say, well, it's open to interpretation, but he gives you an avenue through which you can see or by which you can see the answer. That you kind of sense that if you don't know the answer, it's because you haven't studied it enough or haven't figured it out, but not because there isn't an answer. I think one of the things that is most upsetting to me in fiction is when somebody is presented and it's either a red herring or unanswerable and there is no essential backstory for that thing. I think in this book in particular, if what you think at the end is, if you believe that it's true that Runciter is also dead, there's an explanation for what's happened. Your mind can put together the explanation. I would find it very unsatisfying if it just ended with a kind of weird red herring ending and there wasn't a backstory. But Dick actually gives a really good solid, he at least gives, puts this element into the world, which is cold pack and half-life that allows that ending to work, whether you accept it or not. I think the most amazing thing about the book is exactly what you said, which is that it's kind of two books smashed together. And I think you can identify that through either the events or the sort of like technological existence of what's going on or through the characters. And the reason is like in the very beginning of the book, he presents a character and a technological thing. He presents Ella and he presents a half-life and they're very quickly like not important at all. All of a sudden what's really important are the sort of precogs, the psychics, all of the people with special powers and the fact that they need to go on this journey to, and you sort of forget about half-life and you sort of forget about Ella. And then at the end, it turns out that that's probably like the most important, if you accept what he presents to you, which is that they're likely, what Joe comes to believe, which is that they're likely all in half-life. Then again, it's like he's sort of set up these couple of issues in the beginning, then they're sort of like, oh, that's not important now. This is what's actually going on. Then you sort of jam on that for 150 pages. And then at the end you're like, oh no. Well, do you think that was, is that, I wonder if, did he just get to a point where he was like, I got to resolve this? I mean, was this, I mean, did Dick do outlines? Was this thing, I mean, my impression and maybe you know better than I do Lev, because I haven't read a lot about his process of writing. I've read a lot of his writing, but not his process. My impression, because I know that at some point he was kind of a speed junkie. I mean, I know that he was doing a lot of drugs while writing. Did I just make that up? I didn't just make that up. Did I? I don't think so. My impression is that he would kind of sit down, maybe not this book, but some books, would sit down and just write until it was done without any, without, you know, like I said, I don't know his process, but that's the way it feels where he just kind of starts with this idea and goes until the idea has resolved in some way that he feels satisfied with or that matched, you know, his deadline for, you know, whatever, for whatever he was doing. Is that, do you know if that was? I don't know. I don't even think it's necessarily that fruitful to try to reconstruct his process. The effect that the book has is of, I mean, if you've ever tried to write a novel, this is a masterpiece of misdirection. It's he does what magicians do, you know, he makes you look over here when he's, you know, when he's palming the coin over there. So you're spending a lot of time looking at, you know, Des Moines in 1939, you've forgotten about Ella and Jory, but he's, he's got them right there. And you know, when he needs them, then they appear and he waits just long enough. So there's no possible chance you could, you could come back to it. You could have come back to it on your own. You still remember it somewhere in the back of your head. And then he produces it like that out of, out of nowhere. Just like technically as a matter of craft, it's astounding when you read it. It's also incredibly relieving. I mean, the book gets so dark. He goes so dark and it's so hopeless, you know? And you have, you have completely forgotten that there's any chance of hope at that point. You kind of, it's almost like even the thing that he's presented as the hope, Ubik, as sorry Jory can manipulate it in such a way that there's no hope for anybody to even get to it. Yeah. You know, it's like he puts the one thing you need just out of reach. And it just, and it becomes so kind of dark and confusing towards the end where he's, you know, he's going to dinner. It's so odd. This is the thing that I think is so odd about Dick, you know, Joe Chipp picks up a girl on the street and he wants to take her to dinner and there's this whole kind of muddy sequence where that's going on. But it just feels like this thing. It's like a person who's given up. Yeah. And then, and then, and then he reintroduces these characters that you did completely forget about and were so important, seemed so important right at the beginning of the book. And here's, okay, so I have a question on that point. Do you want to say something? I did, but I don't want to get in the way of your question. Well, no, go ahead. I'll remember my question. The only thing I'll say is that one of the things that I find so beautiful about this book is not just the way he manipulates certain narrative lines, but also the way that he invites in certain interpretive methodologies. He's almost playing with you on that level. He's like, he keeps telling you, oh, this is about advertising. This is about money. So think about that. Right. And then just when you think, okay, I've sorted this out. This is a Marxist allegory and we're going to work it out on the level. He brings in sex and you think, oh, right. Okay, no, sorry. This is a psychoanalytical, psychosexual kind of drama. So we need to think about it in that terms and it's all about filth and shame. And then he brings in another, he triggers another sort of reading technique for you. Oh, it's a mystery. It's a whodunit. Let's read it in those terms. He's constantly forcing you to shift the way you read the book. And just when you start to feel as though you're comfortable, he brings in something else. So, you know, Joe Chip jumps out of the car and starts hitting on this girl and suddenly you think, right, oh, sex. Right. I forgot about that. Yeah. He just doesn't allow you to become comfortable. Yeah. And even up to the final moment, you're still not comfortable. And that's what I like about, I mean, this to me is, you know, it's a very David Lynch, you know, it's a very Lynchian sort of unsettled feeling that it doesn't, it ends in like many dick books in a way that it's, you know, it's not satisfying, like everything's wrapped up and they went and got married and had babies or whatever, whoever the characters may be. It is that feeling of, it seems like it worked out, but maybe, but really it kind of didn't. You know, really. What was your question? My question was, this is a, and I know that we have, you know, I don't want to keep you too long. We want to try to keep this. There's one more thing I want to get to. Yeah, we will. I want to make sure we're within time, but my question was very, kind of very nerdy, I think me being like just a nerd about this. If Ubik is real, if Ubik is real, I guess this is something that I thought about a lot, which is what is the mechanism by which Ubik was created? What is the, what is the, there seems to be a in half life. If we take Ubik at face value, there's a thing that it was created, there's a very scientific, there's just a moment, there's a passage or two where they describe this very scientific process in Cold Pack, in Half-Life where Ubik was created, led by a team, essentially, I think a team that Ella was in charge of, of scientists or inventors or something. What are we supposed to think about that? That's something that I thought a lot about. I mean, do we, so are we supposed to accept that in Half-Life? There's a completely orderly society of the people that are in Half-Life where they are creating products? I mean, cause that's my impression. They started it, that Ella started a company in Half-Life that produces Ubik and gives it to people who are experiencing trouble with Half-Life. Like it's a product they've, speaking of capitalism, that in Half-Life they've created essentially like some kind of capitalistic entity. Well, it's one of the moments, right, where you feel as though you've hit a stable floor when you're saying, well, Ella's sort of, she's laying it out for you, you know, she's saying, well, this is actually what's going on. There's a war going off, going on in Cold Life, in Half-Life, in Cold Pack between the Jories and everybody else. We're fighting it. We've got an underground, you know, we've come up with this process to make Ubik. So now you're in it. This is the rest of your life. Right. As it were. Right. Like, like, like you've got a disease and we have a vaccine for it or we have a, you know, medication you can take that will, that will let you live on and not continue to get sick. But I'm saying, when you think about what mechanically, what would have to happen, I mean, how is it happening? What is happening in Half-Life? Are they able to synthesize something, which is a chemical or are there, I mean, to me, she's talking about going towards a floating light at the beginning of the book, you know, even when, you know, she says she was dreaming, but it seems like, you know, when she speaks to Rancid or at the beginning that she was dreaming of a light, but it's unclear that her dream is not just her in Cold Pack when she's not being communicated with, that Cold Pack is a kind of constant dream. And in fact, the way Jory operates in Cold Pack, it seems to indicate that he can move into other people's minds and into their, into their sphere of thought in a very dreamlike way. So I'm just trying to understand that the, and maybe again, this is a very nerdy, you're trying to understand like the nature of the reality of Half-Life, very pedantic kind of question, but do they have a lab? Is there a building? Well, do they drive cars? I mean, presumably what happens in Cold Pack has no actual physical reality, right? So whatever it is, has to be some sort of psychological analog to some physical process because they can't move around in Cold Pack. Nothing's physically happening. Right. I mean, I think what he's, what he's presenting to us is what does, what does Half-Life look like to Rensiter and his wife? What does it look like to, to speak with the Half-Life, whatever remains of your dead spouse? It looks kind of depressing. It looks like something that maybe would make you wish you weren't experiencing it because they seem, she seems like she's on drugs basically. Yeah, she seems out of it. That's right. But what, what Joe Chip experiences of Ella is extremely well thought out. She's, she's acting, she's, she's waging a war against this sort of really terrifying guy who goes around telling people he's eating them. Not just, and there's not just one, do we think there's not just one jury that there are many? She implies that there are many, one at least in each moratorium or whatever they call them. Yeah. What, what to me, what to me, what he's doing, and it's not going to answer your question, to me, what he's doing is sort of like, what does it feel like to have a dream versus what does it sound like to describe one? That's what it sounds like and feels like to me. He's presenting to like being inside of a dream feels- Because your dreams are very detailed with lots of- And real. Specific. And you have a purpose. Right. But, but, but this, but this is what I'm saying. A dream happens for a short period of time and then it ends. I'm just, again, it's a very, it's, you can't answer this question, but it's something that like I've been thinking about, like how, like what is, how did she, how did she get these people together? What are they using? You know, I just don't think- No, I know. There's a lot of, there, there. I mean, for this, if I were to, the way that I experienced this book above, above all other ways and there's lots of ways, to me, it's actually a book about depression. To me, it's a book about the way that depending on how much energy you have to put into, to put into investing the reality around you with meaning, it becomes functioning. But when you have to, when you, when you, when you become depressed, had some experience with depression, things seem to fall apart. They seem to stop meaning anything. And all you want to do is start crawling back to your bed and it feels as though there's no energy left in the world. And it's like the reality changes around you. And it comes back, things, things comes back to life. They seem important again. They seem to have meaning. They seem to have a narrative coherence. And then the depression comes back and it all starts to fall apart. That above all is what I read this book as being about, but I don't, you know, put that out as a definitive reading. It's just how I experience it. No, I think that's, I think that's, there's a lot of, that makes a lot of sense. I think it's also interesting to note that his depressed, that, well, let's say the Joe Chipps depression, you know, which is a very palpable physical kind of depression is triggered by female characters one way or the other in the book. It's either Pat has brought him, has crushed him or Ella has revived him. Yeah. And the Pat points are powerfully associated with shame and filth. It seems to be related to his feelings, his problematic feelings about his sexuality. I just realized we didn't, we haven't, I know we have to wrap up in a minute. We've not talked about the clothing at all. And we also haven't made a joke about Philip K. Dick's name. I just, it doesn't, it's not going to feel complete until, well, I'm all ears. I just, sometimes when I, you know, I just don't find Dick fully satisfying. That's just, that's, you've been waiting all day. You've been thinking, I'm going to come in here and make that. Several years actually, I've been holding that in reserve. Well, you know, sometimes you have to have multiple experiences with Dick before you're fully satisfied. Okay. Now that we've done that, I feel that we can move on. The clothing. Can you read the G.G. Ashwood description? This is the one that I go back to. The first half of the book, maybe not half, but very, very early on, it's a wash in ridiculous clothing descriptions. I'd love to see it. By the way, if anybody could, who's listening, if they could do a rendering, a drawing of the- I'm just going to be doing some cosplay. Yeah. If there's any cosplay out there. I would love to do a Ubik cosplay where everybody dresses like a character from the, that's a good Halloween idea. Sure. Okay. All right. Let's hear some of these descriptions. This is Pat G.G. Ashwood said his arm with ostentatious familiarity around the girl's waist. Nevermind her last name. Square and puffy like an overweight brick wearing his usual mohair poncho, apricot colored felt hat, argyle ski socks and carpet slippers. He advanced toward Joe Chip. So G.G. is coming in from outside. He's wearing what are carpet slippers? Do you know what carpet? I assume that they're like slippers for the home. Yeah. I imagine them as being the kind of slippers that a dog would fetch for you if you were sort of a 1950s, you know, guy. Yeah. Right. With a pipe. But he's also wearing- And a mohair poncho. Mohair poncho. His usual mohair poncho. What is mohair? That is a type of wool? It's a type of wool. So some weird wool drug rug and a what kind of hat? Felt. Felt hat. Apricot colored. Apricot felt hat. With ski socks. Mm hmm. In other words, he's got it going on, this guy. So his legs are as close. But this is not uncommon. Not wearing pants. What's it? Is there another- But this is actually, this is the reason I like this one. It's very short. But it's a description of Joe who seems to not really be in, like he's not a dandy, you know? But everybody's a dandy. He just throws something on and what he throws on is a Sporty Maroon rapper, twinkle toes turned up shoes and a felt cap with a tassel. He also has a felt cap. What, like a fez or? It feels like it's like a fez. So if you were to turn up shoes. If this is Tam O'Shanter, it's hard to just reconstruct it. Almost none of them are wearing pants. I mean, I don't think any of them. That's right. And no, and at one point, I think Runciter is wearing a miniskirt. Pat wears jeans. Somebody's wearing, a man is wearing a miniskirt in one of these scenes. I can't remember who it is. But actually, upon rereading and really taking note of the outfits, it kind of ruins some of that. Oh, here it is. Here it is. Who is it? Go on. It's Runciter. It is Runciter. That's what I thought. It's either Runciter or Tarnish. He's wearing an electric yellow cummerbund, pedal skirt, knee-hugging hose, and military-style visored cap. That's either a male or female character. It's a male. Oh, it is a male character. Yeah, because they're both male. It ruins the, if you were to, you know, and by the way, I understand Michelle Gondry might be doing a film version of this. Which makes me very depressed, because I think that he'll focus on things like their outfits, which I feel like Dick wrote kind of off the cuff, maybe in a speed haze. At least that's what I hope. I mean, that's kind of what I think. Because the story is very serious. It's a very serious story. And their outfits are the exact opposite of serious. They are like completely comical, cartoonish, flamboyant. And I guess maybe he was thinking, this is how people will dress in the future. In 1990, what year is it? Like, 91 in the book? 92, I think. 92. 92. Which was a bad year for fashion in reality. I mean, I think there may be parallels. There may be actual parallels in fashion in 92. It was prescient. Prescient. That's what he describes. Certainly men in skirts, that was, I think, in the 90s thing. I mean, this is a good question for you. Do you think, knowing that he wrote at least faster than most people did, do you think he's writing the way that he assumes people will read? Do you think it's possible he's just throwing that in there thinking? Because the way that I read, I very often don't. I kind of gloss over the words where they describe the clothing. Yes. That's what happened to me. That's why I was so shocked when I reread this. Yeah. I don't think that it's in there. But I don't think it's heavily signifying. I think the bones of the font is what he's expecting people to really focus on. I don't really see the clothing as a load-bearing part of the narrative. It's not a structural. No, no. No, but it's definitely, it kind of makes me feel like he has a sense of humor. Oh, Dick definitely had a sense of humor. I mean, I find his writing to be, maybe I'm alone. But I think that there are, I mean, not in this book, but I think there are other books where there are actual laugh-out-loud moments. I think if you stop and really take a look at that, I mean, I think the clothing choices are funny. Maybe he wasn't trying to be funny, but they certainly are humorous. Before we wrap up, there's one other thing or quality of the book that I wanted to ask you guys whether you had this experience. The problem that when I have reading you a book is that it tends to bleed into my real life. I don't know if you guys had that experience, but I start to, it starts to creep out of the pages. I was reading it last night, and I've had this kind of infected sort of hangnail on my thumb. And when Dory bites Joe in the thumb, I suddenly thought, oh my, oh my god, he got to me as well. I also was having trouble finding my phone last night. It turned out I left it in the car. I found it this morning, but I felt like, Jesus Christ, this is just the beginning. Things are starting to disappear. The tires will be flat on the car when you go out there. Well, I definitely found, I found in much of what Dick writes, and this book is no exception, here we go. It's starting to begin. It's happening. The walls are collapsing in this building. It is something very insidious about his writing, and something very, maybe it's because the characters aren't, these aren't extreme. I mean, the characters are extreme, but they're not described, I mean, they seem to have extreme qualities, but they're not described in extreme ways. And I can relate to many of his protagonists. Joe Chip is certainly a character that I relate to on many levels. But there is something in his writing, and there's something I think it really begins with breaking down the concept, our safe concept of reality. I think his first job, Philip K. Dick's first job seems to be he just wants to tear down your concept of reality as a safe and knowable thing, and present the real reality, which is something far less knowable and far scarier. And as soon as that happens, as soon as that wedge gets in, his books do have a very strong effect on your experience, and your kind of waking, thinking, rumination on what's going on around you. And that was what I was saying about Valus. Valus was to me, he had, not to go off on a tangent, but he had these characters where Philip K. Dick was a character, and then another version of Philip K. Dick that was questioning, where one was questioning the other. And all of these things that he throws up, and in this book it happens as well, about are you really experiencing this, or is this a product of your mind? And you can hear, it's almost as if that explosion on Luna kind of echoes through the culture, because you find it in Paul Auster, then you find it in The Matrix, you find it in Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, you find it in Inception. I mean, once that explosion took place on Luna, somehow it's like nothing was ever quite the same again. This is the thing about Dick, is that his fundamental question always seemed to be, what is the nature of reality? I know that's kind of like a philosophy 101, but the way he presents it is in a very real, that's the thing, when I was saying it's explainable, that there's an answer. He presents this kind of setup of there is an answer. Even when he's completely off the deep end in a book like Valus, he has an answer. He says, there's a technical reason why this is happening, and I can explain the whole thing. And what makes it really scary is that when somebody, it's one thing to say, well, reality isn't what you think it is. It's another thing to say, reality isn't what you think it is, and here's why. And I think that he does a lot of that, and I think that that is, and maybe this matches our kind of, and I'm rambling now, but maybe this matches our paranoid, the paranoid state that we live in that is just, I think that we live in an increasing state of panic and paranoia about the world around us, that we don't know what's going to happen next. And I think that that is, his idea is that we're very raw and weird and new in the 60s. And I think that are probably born out of drug use in many ways and the political climate at the time. I think those two things mashing together had a profound effect on the way we think of reality. But I think that stuff has become very much pop culture now. Now we expect there to be a problem with reality or a problem with what we're told. And the response to it, this compulsive need to explain, to fill in vacuums and gaps in reality with just profusions of explanation, whether they're conspiracy theories or respectable kinds of theories that just can't be proven one way or the other. We can't leave it alone. We just keep picking at these little edges. See, now that you say that, I'm starting to feel that at this moment, something is unraveling. I want to sort of finish up with one question, which is a reader had a specific question for you, which isn't really about Ubik, but I think it is related in that we were all, it was interesting to watch this book club occur because it's interesting to watch people who've never read a book read it and also try to sort of make sense of it every step of the way. And I think that this book really lends itself to that because you watch the attention shift from things like Pat and Cold Pack to the sort of things that become more important in the second half of the book. But all three of us were rereading it. And I think that the experience of rereading this book, unlike a lot of books that I've read, I reread books that are my favorite books. This one has a really different character or did for me the second time around. And the reader who wrote the question asked, since you included it on your list, he asked basically if you reread the book before you put it in the list and if you reread a lot of your other books before you sort of contributed to the time list. And I think for me, what's interesting about it is the character of rereading a book. I think the experience is interesting. Right. Well, to answer the second part first, I did reread everything I put on the list. I didn't do the whole list. There was another guy who did a lot more of the list. The bad selections. Yeah, yeah, all the crap. The Man Who Loved Children, I just could never get through that book. That was not mine. But I put Are You There, God? It's Me, Margaret on the list. And I went back to it to make sure it seemed as rich and important as it had when I read it as a kid. And it did. And that wasn't true of everything. And I reread Ubik. And the funny thing about rereading Ubik, rereading Ubik, unlike any other book that I've reread, it's a lot like reading Ubik for the first time. You read a book. You know what's going to happen. Everything gets sorted out. Then you go back and reread it. Maybe you can pay attention to the characterization or stuff like that. Ubik, you get to the end and it's not explained for you. So you go back and you're still in that state of uncertainty. It's just like reading it for the first time. You never really finish this book. Yeah. I agree. I mean, I was shocked to reread it. Just utterly confused. There was whole passages that I didn't recall at all or remembered them differently. And maybe that's my own brain working badly, decaying. The drugs. The drugs. The drugs, the decay, the constant request for nickels for my toaster. But my mohair, all of my mohair products are at the cleaner right now. No, it is weird. There is something weird about it. I loved the book. I mean, I think I read it twice before this time. And I loved it. This is the great. I said this is my favorite Philip K. Dick book. And yet when I reread it, there were things I just did not remember at all. You'd think like your favorite book, you're going to remember every part of it. And I think it is, I mean, part of it is the red herrings. And part of it is just that I think it's a. For a really short book. A lot of information. There's a lot there. It's very dense. And I did remember, I see it in this reader question, the Man in the High Castle was the first Philip K. Dick book that I read. Which is really. You saw that in a reader question? It's odd. He mentions it. How does he know? No, he doesn't. No, he mentioned the book unrelated. Wait, that's the first book you read? That's the first one I read. We had talked about that earlier. And I couldn't remember who it was. No, right. You said you thought it was Float My Tears the Policeman said. What was the first Dick book you read? Same, Man in the High Castle. Man in the High Castle. Yeah. That's a great book. That's another one. I read in the comments somewhere, someone who had read a bunch of his stuff said, oh, the Man in the High Castle is great, but it's really atypical for his work. I actually think that all of his work is atypical for his work, like they're all very different. Like, there's not, like, Ubik and the Man in the High Castle and Float My Tears the Policeman said are all three. They're radically different in their approach. And Man in the High Castle, as foundational in its way as Ubik in terms of the whole alternate history genre, I mean, so much has been produced in imitation of that book, building on it. It's amazing. It's amazing what he did. Yeah. I mean, it's, and then we should end. But I just want to say, I mean, it's always interesting to speak to somebody else who I don't know who is a Dick fan, who loves Dick. Sorry, you started this. I just want you to know that. But to hear the passion, I don't think people get passionate about a lot of authors like this. I think people love, I think there are great books. I think there are great authors. I think people love the works and the writers. But I think there's something about Dick that just engenders. And we went to the Phil K. Dick Festival. And we have a great video, which you should watch, where we interview a few different Dick scholars. And damn, now everything sounds like a joke. We interview Dickheads. And they talk about this thing. One of them talks about this thing where you first read a Phil K. Dick book, and then you get a bunch of others, and you read them all rapidly because you can't get enough of it. And that was my experience. I don't know if it was yours. But I think there is something about his writing. And I don't know what it is, something magical that just makes you love him and love his ideas and want to just kind of get deeper into the murky depths of his brain. And changing speed, October's book is Foucault's Pendulum by Umberto Eco. Good transition. That's great. Well, I'd like to talk about that book for a moment. But I've never read it. You want to talk about Foucault's Pendulum? Very difficult to read from what I understand that you've started reading. I've started reading it several times. I've never given it a full effort. Lev, I assume you've read it? Never finished it. I found it very hard. Well, you can join us if you wish. This does not bode well for the future of the book club. We're shutting down the book club, it turns out, after one month. Interestingly, our readers chose that. We had a poll. We gave them four options. Is this some kind of advanced trolling? Is it possible that they're like, let's pick a book that no one can finish? Even the most well-read scholarly of all the book authors. Well, in September, they complained that the book was too short and that they read it too fast. And I don't think we'll hear that this month. No. No. No. Well, Lev, thank you very much for joining us for this. It's an incredible pleasure to have you. I'm glad you could take time out. And I would love to have you back for future book club. I had a great time. Conversations. So that is, I think, any final thoughts? You're very interested in anything that you'd like to say? I'm good. You're good? I think we solved it. I think we sorted everything out. I think we got it. Turns out Runciter was just dreaming the whole time. And he woke up, probably. That's our podcast. And I hope you enjoyed it. You can check our forums in the book club forum for the latest book, which, as Laura said, is Umberto Eco's Foucault's Pendulum, which is very difficult to read. And good luck to all of you. And we'll be back next month. Thanks. Bye. Thank you. Ok.