Ubik

Ubik is a 1969 science fiction novel by the American writer Philip K. Dick. The story is set in a future 1992 in which psychic powers are used in corporate espionage and cryonic technology allows the recently dead to be maintained in a lengthy state of hibernation.

The novel follows Joe Chip, a technician at a psychic agency, who begins to experience strange alterations in reality that can be temporarily reversed by a store-bought substance called Ubik. As the story proceeds, consumables deteriorate and technology becomes more primitive, so the world around the characters is visibly reverting, which is the device that sustains the book's uncertainty. The agency's business is psychic counter-espionage, and the people who work there are employed to neutralise talent rather than to use it.

The work expands on characters and concepts first introduced in an earlier vignette, What the Dead Men Say. Ubik is one of Dick's most acclaimed novels and was named one of Time's hundred best books. The substance of the title is a spray that can briefly restore the world to what it was, which is why it works as both a joke and a defence.