Unbalancing Thriller That Makes You Question
Science fiction at its best: taking advantage of temporal-spatial qualities to take advantage of our intuitions.
My Rating: 
I really think science fiction, the genre as a whole, is under appreciated. There is some really good writing out there, and just because the settings might be geeky, futuristic, or entail allusions to higher level math, it gets disregarded. The format allows authors to explore things that just wouldn’t otherwise be possible; when you don’t have to worry about what is plausible, you are free to explore the human condition unabated without typical restraints.
Where this can go awry is that things can get too zany when authors get drunk off the power of not having to tell a tightly-knit story. This can be a delicate thing to balance, using the unconstrained conventions of the genre but still having to tell a coherent narrative that can be appreciated.
Fortunately, Ubik does both of these well and gets the most out of both sides.
Continue reading “Top 100 Book Review: Ubik – Philip K. Dick (1969)”
