Wake up to a hearty, lip-smacking bowlful of nutritious, nourishing Ubik toasted flakes, the adult cereal that’s more crunchy, more tasty, more ummmish. Ubik breakfast cereal, the whole-bowl taste treat! Do not exceed recommended portion at any one meal.
Every chapter of the novel commences with a commercial for Ubik. This is the opening to Chapter 16. The opening to Chapter 15, by contrast, situates Ubik as the cure for bad breath. Chapter 7 starts with a commercialized endorsement of Ubik as a household cleaner. The titular Ubik is, after all, a product of astonishing power, though notably distinctly regressive in its ability to transform one thing into another of similarity. Dick was an author famously ahead of his time when it came to recognizing the all-encompassing power of the product and marketing to desires. Ubik is the ultimate expression of that in some ways.
The door refused to open. It said, “Five cents, please.”
He searched his pockets. No more coins; nothing. “I’ll pay you tomorrow,” he told the door. Again he tried the knob. Again it remained locked tight. “What I pay you,” he informed it, “is in the nature of a gratuity; I don’t have to pay you.”
“I think otherwise,” the door said. “Look in the purchase contract you signed when you bought this conapt.”
Over the course of a just a few pages, Joe Chip hears the phrase “five cents please” from a refrigerator door, the entry door to a coffee shop and this bathroom door. It is a stroke of genius that the one time he really has a conflict is with the bathroom door because—as some younger readers may not know—at one time it actually did cause money to open the door to a stall in a public restroom. So while the idea of a talking door asking for money for doing its job may seem entirely absurd, the reality is that, well, it’s not so much, really. Of course, the key point here is that Joe and the door have two conflicting perspectives on the subject of tips. The entire point of the book is that what we reality is actually a construct of billions of different perspectives working in unison.
“One of these days people like me will rise up and overthrow you, and the end of tyranny by the homeostatic machine will have arrived. The day of human values and compassion and simple warmth will return, and when that happens someone like myself who has gone through an ordeal and who genuinely needs hot coffee to pick him up and keep him functioning when he has to function will get the hot coffee whether he happens to have a poscred readily available or not.”
Ultimately, Ubik becomes what at least a good forty-five percent of all science fiction novels become: a rage against the machine. The name of the titular item derives from the idea of ubiquity: it is everywhere at once fulfilling every possible function at once to attend to every single different need at once. And what happens when that monopoly is attained in the marketplace? Fortunately, since the breaking apart of ATT into several different smaller companies, we’ve never had to find out.
But keep in mind that those seven different and distinct companies that ATT was forcibly split into (alongside the still existing ATT) in 1982 are today almost all right back where they started from as a part of ATT. Monopolies are bad, even when a single product is capable of doing everything that anyone might actually require. And the response from some is always rebellion. But it is worth keeping in mind that by the end, Ubik is still everywhere while the fate of Joe Chip remains forever ambiguous.
