“‘Only Words’: ‘Half-Life’ in Philip K. Dick’s Ubik and the Dynamics of Online Role-Playing Environments.”
Paper Presented at the 28th ICFA
I. INTRODUCTION
“Instant Ubik has all the fresh flavor of just-brewed drip coffee. Your husband will say, Christ, Sally, I used to think your coffee was only so-so. But now, wow! Safe when taken as directed.”i
That is one of seventeen different epigraphs that begin each chapter of Philip K. Dick’s novel Ubik. Each of the first sixteen is a satirical comment on the nature of advertising in the consumerist economy, where the mysterious product called “Ubik” stands in for everything from coffee to women’s undergarments, household cleaner to salad dressing. Each one safe when used as directed, of course.
Eric S. Rabkin, in his article “Irrational Expectations; or, How Economics and the Post-Industrial World Failed Philip K. Dick,” makes a point to establish Philip K. Dick as one of the most important and influential authors, in general if not in speculative fiction in particular, working in a post-World War II attempt to examine the metaphysical connections between subjective realities and the so-called “objective reality” which may or may not even exist in Dick’s work.ii Ubik, published in 1969, is one such work which takes a close examination at the nature of subjective realities. It is a novel that describes a world, and a condition of being, that is prescient when you compare it to the alternate realities of massive multi-player online games, or “MMOGs” — a condition that involves a merging and confusion of identities — identities that are defined by, and devalued due to, the commodification of reality.
