Funny thing when you read a forty- or fifty-year-old science-fiction story: it feels like it plagiarizes dozens of more recent books or movies. It’s hard to appreciate it fully under those circumstances.

Beyond that, though, it looks like Dick’s science-fiction is not exactly the geeky kind, but more of the poetic, dreamy variety that doesn’t really care about… well, the science part. In Ubik’s case, Dick writes a character who essentially has all the powers of a god, and he never addresses that, and it evidently doesn’t bother him a bit — but it bothers me a lot, and just keeps me out of the story.

And then, there are the long chapters about 1900s-technology that Dick remembers a little too fondly, which is pretty unhealthy for a scifi author.