Ubik

Hm.

Well, I didn't really like it. I unexpectedly liked PKD's Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? a few months ago, but this one - nah.

Stuff I liked:
- I like PKD's satirizing of American consumerism, i.e. the Ubik commercials i.e. the old Dan Aykroyd SNL commercials.
- Umm.
- Some weirdness. And my 2018 reading resolution is “MORE WEIRD”.

Stuff I didn't like:
- All the female characters were lame. They're objectified, they're all either wives/girlfriends or, ahem, “shrews”.
- The dated stereotypes of every character other than the white dude protagonist and his elder white dude boss. Actually, even the protagonist was a stereotype: the crusty, grimy private eye of PKD's cyberpunk visions. Deckard etc etc.
- Not weird enough.

I mean. The plot is the same as Ursula Le Guin's The Lathe of Heaven, which was also super dated, but was much more airtight from a plot/pacing perspective, and had the same psychedelic shifting reality thing going but WITHOUT the tiresome social stuff.