"Ubik" by Philip K. Dick

An amazing short novel by the SciFi Great, and just like many of his other novels, you really have no idea what is going on or who's who for the first 30 pages.  The next 20 pages you learn the names and personalities of the main characters and then the real ride begins.  It is a surreal ride and more so, because for so many pages you don't realize it and it seems like yet another 60s sci-fi novel.  But Philip K. Dick would not be one o the greatest science fiction writers ever if he left it at that level.  No, the twists come one after another with rapid velocity after you realize that for most of the novel all the main characters are dead and their corpses are kept on ice in a 'moratorium' which is a kind of artificial life extension institution that takes people at the time of their deaths and keeps their brains alive for many decades in a half-dream state called 'half-life.'

From another Philip K. Dick novel "Minority Report" we have 'pre-cogs' in Ubik as well, but here they don't deal with pre-crime, but are more common and can be hired for just about anything.  However, what's interesting in Ubik is that there are 'anti-talents' that is people with psyonic powers which are of the opposite charge of the regular psyionics like telepathy or pre-cog.  When 'anti-talents' are near 'talents' their psyonic fields cancel each other, thus making 'anti-talents' very useful for corporations to hire to protect themselves against industrial espionage that uses 'talents.'  Another interesting branch is there are people who are 'testers' like the main protagonist Joe Chip.  Joe's psyonic power can only be used to measure and 'feel' other psyonics, whether talents or anti-talents, but cannot do anything else. 

The novel goes into existentialist issues and is written interspersed with advertisements for Ubik in a manner of TV advertisements interrupting a movie.  Philip K. Dick published Ubik in 1969 when TV was just taking off as a commercial medium and he wanted to explore that direction, which points to the fact that he was a quite experimentalist writer for his period.  That would be like today's science ficiton novels being written with intermezzos consisting of twitter messages, or Tumblr, or other social network and their projection 23 years in the future, having in mind the book happens in 1992, the past for us, but the future for 1969. 

The author was a bit too enthusiastic about technological progress (which was common in the 1960s) and imagined that in 1992 we would have robots that clean our apartments, hover cars, fully robotized restaurants and coffee shops, bases on the Moon and Mars and building our first inter-stellar space ship drive.  Yes, folks, that was supposed to happen 21 years ago, according to Philip K. Dick, and realistically we'd be lucky if we get 10% of that 21 years from now (2013).  The book has many dark moments, thus some reviewers have called it "existentialist horror novel," but I think that is exaggeration.  The novel is not horror, just intense, in the dark Philip K. Dickian way.  And it is a pleasure to read.  You can't put it down.  Go, read it.