(1969/2000) Philip K. Dick, Millennium, £6.99, trd pbk, 224pp, ISBN 1-85798-853-1
(1969/2012) Gollancz, pbk, £7.99, ISBN 978-1-780-22037-6.
One of Dick’s more brain-damaging (that’s a compliment!) novels in which Joe Chip and a team of anti-psi’s are taken to the Moon by their employer, Glen Runciter, to protect the work of a client who fears psi infiltration of his company. While there, a bomb goes off seemingly killing Runciter. Joe and the anti-psi’s, back on earth, must work out what has gone so disasterously wrong, and this mission becomes ever more urgent as each of them begins to die. Who is behind the plot against the anti-psi’s? Could it be that the only person who really knows is Ella, Runciter’s wife, now living in ‘half-life’ following her death? And what is Ubik, and why should Joe Chip need it? This is a lovely book, with a great last chapter, and quite accessible to the new Dick reader. This edition is part of the Millennium SF Masterworks series, which has already reprinted Dick’s A Scanner Darkly (1977), along with many other excellent SF novels of the past.
Tony Chester
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