Book One (Estarion 1)

The war between the Golden Empire and the Empire of the Sun is over; the empires merged into one, and there is one emperor over them all: Estarion.
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He says it was actually Chip who almost died in the explosion on the moon:.

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So, it's actually Runciter who lived and is trying to communicate with Joe? Lem goes on and on:. I'm sorry for the length of that quote — but it's a fantastic summary of how events work in the book. Or at least, it would be, if it actually worked. As Lem himself points out, there's a major flaw in this explanation, too. If everyone died, who put them all in cold storage and brought them back from the moon?


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I also realise that I've expended 1, words without even mentioning Ubik, the substance that, true to its derivation from the Latin "ubique", is found everywhere in the book. Ubik appears most often in the form of an aerosol spray; it seems to counter time-regression and save the lives of those to whom it is applied.

It could be taken as a divine symbol. It could be a more straightforward phallic symbol, as theorbys points out. It could be what enables Runciter to manifest in Joe's world. It could also be some kind of anti-psychedelic, the thing that will bring Joe back to sobriety and reality. I especially like that last idea.


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Remember how we learned early on that Joe had spent the night getting "pizzled on papapot"? Could it be that the entire novel is Joe's exhausted, paranoid, drugged-up delusion? Maybe he never got out of his apartment after his argument with the door. Maybe all the confusion is just inside his head? The appeal of that last theory is that you could use it, like Ubik, to clear up nearly all the incidents in the book. It's just a shame that this house of cards is blown apart by that wonderful final chapter, which is told from Runciter's perspective, and notes his alarm when Chip's face starts appearing on his money ….

At which point, I give up. If anyone has a coherent summary that wraps up all the conflict in the novel, I'd love to hear it, but I suspect the task is impossible. Not, I should stress, through any fault on the author's part. This is a book that gives real meaning to the cliche "defies explanation".

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Like reality — what we see as reality, anyway — Ubik doesn't make much coherent sense. The unease, the difficulty, the contradictions are partly the point. It's all about the realisation that things aren't as they seem — that everything you thought you knew is wrong. As reading group contributor Mexican2 puts it:. For want of a better word, I'd say "squishy" is ideal.

You can't get a firm grip on Ubik. Try and squeeze it, and it moves. The more you look at it, the more it changes shape. I'm amazed Philip K Dick managed to keep it still long enough to get it on the page at all.

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He blows up … At which point, I can hand the narrative baton over to Runciter himself. Late on in the book, he states boldly: We got lured to Luna. We let Pat Conley come with us, a woman we didn't know, a talent we didn't understand — which possibly even Hollis didn't understand. An ability somehow connected with time reversion; not strictly speaking, the ability to travel through time … for instance, she can't go into the past either; what she does, as near as I can comprehend it, is start a counter-process that uncovers the prior stages inherent in configurations of matter.

He says it was actually Chip who almost died in the explosion on the moon: According to Ubik, people who, like Runciter's wife, have spent years in cold sleep are well aware of the fact. It is another matter with those who, like Joe Chip, have come close to meeting with a violent end and have regained consciousness imagining that they have escaped death, whereas in fact they are resting in a moratorium. In the book, it must be admitted, this is an unclear point, which is however masked by another dilemma: So if someone communicates with the frozen one, as Runciter does with Chip, this contact is accompanied in Chip's experiences by uncanny and startling phenomena.

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Lem goes on and on: But, to go a step further, is not contact also possible between two frozen individuals? What follows is a complex, multi-stranded narrative spanning pages that reads like a superior collaboration between Dan Brown and Michael Crichton. In short, expertly interleaved chapters, Riddle describes how the protagonists come together in a bid not only to staunch the spread of the global pandemic but to work out who started it. Pandemic is the first novel in the Extinction Files series. Daniel Godfrey follows his popular time-travel novels New Pompeii and Empire of Time with an action-packed crime thriller set in a future London dominated and monitored by state-of-the-art artificial intelligence.

When former air crash investigator Anna Glover gains employment with a company developing synapse sequencing, she finds herself utilising memory-immersion technology to investigate the violent attack on a young man and the involvement of the anti-AI Workers League, with far-reaching consequences for herself and society. Godfrey seamlessly integrates futuristic hi-tech into a fast-moving narrative and paints a convincing portrait of a woman haunted by past misdemeanours. When the inaugural express train pulls in to the station, celebration turns to horror as the doors slide open to reveal not happy passengers but carriages slick with gore.

What the novel lacks in psychological insight, it more than makes up for in pace and action: Topics Science fiction books Science fiction roundup.

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