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Dick’s former wife Tessa remarked that “Ubik is a metaphor for God. Ubik is all-powerful and all-knowing, and Ubik is everywhere. The spray can is only a form that Ubik takes to make it easy for people to understand it and use it. It is not the substance inside the can that helps them, but rather their faith in the promise that it will help them.”[2] She also interpreted the ending by writing, “Many readers have puzzled over the ending of Ubik, when Glen Runciter finds a Joe Chip coin in his pocket. What does it mean? Is Runciter dead? Are Joe Chip and the others alive? Actually, this is meant to tell you that we can’t be sure of anything in the world that we call ‘reality.’ It is possible that they are all dead and in cold pac or that the half-life world can affect the full-life world. It is also possible that they are all alive and dreaming.”[2] It is altogether possible to take Glen Runciter’s convictions that he himself is alive and that the others are in half-life at face value, given Joe Chip’s ruminations on the organic values of his own world’s pseudo-reality at the end of the penultimate chapter. The reinforcement of this limbo state’s ‘reality’ by repeated use of Ubik, as well as its prolongment via widespread half-life, could allow it to cross over into true reality by being set up as its parallel: just as Glen Runciter was able to impose his presence on half-life by repeated contact with Joe. Part of the confusion of interpretation is down to the mystery concerning the means of survival and escape of Glen Runciter following the explosion on the moon. | WIKIPEDIA |

“Later, when my personal life became complicated and full of unfortunate convolutions, worries about crab grass got lost somewhere. I became educated to the fact that the greatest pain does not come zooming down from a distant planet, but up from the depths of the heart. Of course both could happen; your wife and child could leave you, and you could be sitting alone in your empty house with nothing to live for, and in addition the Martians could bore through the roof and get you.” (Philip K. Dick)

“There will come a time when it isn’t ‘They’re spying on me through my phone’ anymore. Eventually, it will be ‘My phone is spying on me’.” ― Philip K. Dick

“I mean, after all, you have to consider we’re only made out of dust. That’s admittedly not much to go on and we shouldn’t forget that. But even considering , I mean it’s a sort of bad beginning, we’re not doing too bad. So I personally have faith that even in this lousy situation we’re faced with we can make it. You got me? (Philip K Dick, “The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch”)

“But-let me tell you my cat joke. It’s very short and simple. A hostess is giving a dinner party and she’s got a lovely five-pound T-bone steak sitting on the sideboard in the kitchen waiting to be cooked while she chats with the guests in the living room-has a few drinks and whatnot. But then she excuses herself to go into the kitchen to cook the steak-and it’s gone. And there’s the family cat, in the corner, sedately washing it’s face.” “The cat got the steak,” Barney said. “Did it? The guests are called in; they argue about it. The steak is gone, all five pounds of it; there sits the cat, looking well-fed and cheerful. “Weigh the cat,” someone says. They’ve had a few drinks; it looks like a good idea. So they go into the bathroom and weigh the cat on the scales. It reads exactly five pounds. They all perceive this reading and a guest says, “okay, that’s it. There’s the steak.” They’re satisfied that they know what happened, now; they’ve got empirical proof. Then a qualm comes to one of them and he says, puzzled, “But where’s the cat?” (Philip K. Dick, The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch)

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“Later, when ny personal life became complicated and full of unfortunate convolutions, worries about crab grass got lost somewhere. I became educated to the fact that the greatest pain does not come zooming down from a distant planet, but up from the the depths of the heart. Of course both could happen; your wife and child could leave you, and you could be sitting alone in your empty house with nothing to live for, and in addition the Martians could bore through the roof and get you.” (Philip K. Dick)

Omnibusudgave med romanerne The Man Who Japed, Dr. Futurity, Vulcan’s Hammer.

Jeg har allerede The Man Who Japed i to forskellige Ace-udgaver og i en omnibusudgave så … manuskriptet til den planlagte men aldrig realiserede filmatisering af Ubik, har jeg derimod aldrig ejet før og det samme gælder det første manuskript fra forfatterens hånd. Jeg har forsøgt mig med at åbne bogen tilfældigt nogle steder og læst derfra for at se om der var noget der fængede og det var der så ikke i første omgang. Men man er vel samler, ikke? Vulcan’s Hammer er i øvrigt udkommet i den samme serie og den mangler jeg også i stor paperbackudgave. Det er i øvrigt et eksempel på en bogserie hvor ryggene er mere vellykkede end forsiderne.

“Don’t try to solve serious matters in the middle of the night.” (Philip K. Dick)

Dick was a schizophrenic. Dick was a paranoiac. Dick is one of the ten best American writers of the 20th century, which is saying a lot. Dick was a kind of Kafka steeped in LSD and rage. Dick talks to us, in The Man in the High Castle, in what would become his trademark way, about how mutable reality can be and therefore how mutable history can be. Dick is Thoreau plus the death of the American dream. Dick writes, at times, like a prisoner, because ethically and aesthetically he really is a prisoner. Dick is the one who, in Ubik, comes closest to capturing the human consciousness or fragments of consciousness in the context of their setting; the correspondence between what he tells and the structure of what’s told is more brilliant than similar experiments conducted by Pynchon or DeLillo. (Roberto Bolaño)