SEMIOPUNK (31)

By: Joshua Glenn
March 1, 2025

An irregular, ongoing series of posts dedicated to surfacing examples (and predecessors) of the sf subgenre that HILOBROW was the first to name “semiopunk.”

UBIK

Philip K. Dick’s Ubik (1969) takes place in 1992 — by which near-future point psychic powers will have become common. So common, in fact, that unscrupulous telepaths and “precogs” will have become a nuisance — meddling in business and government operations. (The novel expands upon characters and concepts previously introduced in the 1964 novella “What the Dead Men Say.”) Within this far-out context, it makes perfect sense that an outfit like Runciter Associates — a “prudence organization” that employs “inertials,” which is to say, psychics with the power to neutralize the abilities of telepaths and precogs — might become a thriving concern.

Our protagonist, Joe Chip, is a Runciter Associates technician. He’s one of Dick’s “minor men,” unable to manage his own life; in fact, he’s in debt to his own conapt’s front door. Joe is charged by his employers — Glen Runciter, that is; but also Glen’s deceased wife Ella, who is maintained in a state of “half-life,” a form of cryonic suspension that allows the deceased limited consciousness and ability to communicate — with joining a team sent to Earth’s colony on Luna (the Moon) to secure the colony against criminal psychics. The team includes Runciter himself and also Pat Conley, a psychic who can change the past in such a way that people don’t realize it (by starting “a counter-process that uncovers the prior stages inherent in configurations of matter”). Joe has a crush on her.

The mission turns out to be a trap set by criminal telepaths; a bomb explodes, and Runciter is killed. Joe and the team barely survive. They return safely to Earth… but there they begin to experience strange alterations in reality. When Joe orders coffee, the cream is sour; a cigarette crumbles to dust between his fingers. Joe and his teammates find themselves slowly moving into the past, eventually anchoring in 1939. Objects fade into prior “versions” of themselves: an audio system reverts to a gramophone and a TV becomes an AM radio.

At the same time, they find themselves surrounded by “manifestations” of the deceased Runciter; for example, his face appears on their money. As the story progresses, members of the group begin to feel tired and cold, then suddenly die.

What’s going on?

Here’s where Ubik becomes a work of semiopunk. Joe Chip finds himself immersed in an alien semiosphere, if you will: This altered reality in which he and his teammates are moving back in time, in which things keep crumbling and dissolving, and in which Runciter keeps manifesting in unexpected ways. So Joe does what semioticians do: He analyzes the semiosphere’s norms and forms, seeking patterns that might reveal insights about what’s going on… and how what’s going on is going on.

The strangest thing going on has to do with a mysterious commercial product called Ubik. It often appears as an aerosol spray — the ultimate commercial product of Dick’s era — but Ubik can take other forms as well. According to the commercials that Joe and his fellows keep encountering, Ubik can be used to temporarily reverse the deterioration they’re experiencing. Each chapter of the book is introduced by a cheesy midcentury-style commercial advertising Ubik — in its various formats.

Not only must Joe act as a semiotician, then… he must specifically act as a commercial semiotician. Amazing.

Are they really moving backwards in time? Or might they have been transported to some other reality? Are they caught up in a cosmic battle between the forces of light and the forces of darkness — and if so, what is the ultimate source of these forces? Does it all have something to do with Pat’s powers? How can Runciter, who died — and who wasn’t placed into “half life” — keep appearing? How do Runciter’s messages appear in TV ads, on billboards, and inside cigarette packages on store shelves? What is Ubik; how can salvation possibly be bottled? Every interpretation that Joe and his teammates posit is frustrated.

It’s an apophenic adventure!

The last chapter of the book is prefaced by a quote from Ubik itself, speaking in the first person. It has created and directed the universe, it claims; its real name is unknown and unspoken. We then learn something that makes us question everything we’ve come to comprehend about Joe Chip’s situation.

I don’t want to give anything away. Let’s just say that, as with all of Dick’s books, even the “right” answer to this conundrum isn’t necessarily validated — or validate-able.

HILOBROW friends Jonathan Lethem and Benjamen Walker show off their UBIK tattoos…

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SEMIOPUNK (31)

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