Ubik
Philip K. Dick

What can be said! This isn’t the PKD book that has had the biggest influence on me (that would be the Valis trilogy), but it sure packs a punch. The author who inspired Blade Runner and Total Recall tells it like it is. Of course, like it is to him. Which must be said, isn’t as it is to anybody else, but that’s what makes his writing so captivating and enriching - a perspective we all know we’d have, if we were him… Unlike any other sci-fi author, PKD’s mind-bending leaps of lateral creativity won’t simply expose a strange phenomenon and then work with that. Rather, the pace of change is so rapid and consistent that we are forced to re-examine the fundamental certainty we believe is the basis of existence - and find it lacking… And who or what is Ubik? “I am Ubik. Before the universe was, I am. I made the suns. I made the worlds. I created the lives and the places they inhabit; I move them here, I put them there. They go as I say, they do as I tell them. I am the word and my name is never spoken, the name which no-one knows. I am called Ubik, but that is not my name. I am. I shall always be.”