Named one of Time's 100 Best Books, Ubik is a mind-bending, classic novel about the perception of reality from Philip K. Dick, the Hugo Award-winning author of The Man in the High Castle. “From the stuff of space opera, Dick spins a deeply unsettling existential horror story, a nightmare you'll never be sure you've woken up from.”--Lev Grossman, Time Glen Runciter runs a lucrative business -- deploying his teams of anti-psychics to corporate clients who want privacy and security from psychic spies. But when he and his top team are ambushed by a rival, he is gravely injured and placed in “half-life,” a dreamlike state of suspended animation. Soon, though, the surviving members of the team begin experiencing some strange phenomena, such as Runciter's face appearing on coins and the world seeming to move backward in time. As consumables deteriorate and technology gets ever more primitive, the group needs to find out what is causing the shifts and what a mysterious product called Ubik has to do with it all. “More brilliant than similar experiments conducted by Pynchon or DeLillo.”--Roberto Bola o
Welcome to Sold, Viewed, Playful, New, where we spotlight popular/fascinating/favorite items in four distinct categories. Sold, for used books. Viewed, for DVDs or Blu-rays. Playful, for board, card, or video games. And New, for new books. Author Erik Davis coined the term High Weirdness in his book of the same name to refer to a genre of Sci-Fi and philosophical writing that charted "the emergence of a new psychedelic worldview out of the American counterculture of the seventies." While Davis focused primarily on authors from America’s west coast, I'm going to expand the category to include a bit more with this month's recommendations.