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Ubik
Philip K. Dick
Internet Top 100

Ready to stretch your imagination? Break out of old habitual patterns and experience something new? How about looking at your life from a completely different point of view? If "yes" to any of these questions, do something really nice for yourself and read Ubik.

This book further confirms my opinion of Philip K. Dick as one of the most creative authors in all of English literature. It has just about everything that defines a great book - excitement, believable characters, engaging and suspenseful plot, challenging intellectual situations. All this plus deep originality bubbling out of almost every page. It's easy to imagine how someone like Tim Powers could have taken a line or paragraph and used it as the inspiration for books like Expiration Date.

Though the events and people lie far beyond anything we might commonly experience, the underlying theme feels close to home. The main character, Joe, expresses it clearly in a short conversation with a coffee vending machine: "One of these days people like me will rise up and overthrow you, and the end of tyranny by the homeostatic machine will arrive. The day of human values and compassion and simple warmth will return...".

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