There's also the 'half life' concept, which the novel opens with, where people are caught in a kind of limbo, not quite dead, but their consciousness slowly fading. The author would have been fascinated by the new concept of cryogenics, wondering whether frozen people dreamed. Is dreaming a sign of life? In Ubik, the half life people could think and communicate, but time moves differently for them. You're never really sure whether the characters are in half life or in reality.
In my current reading of VALIS (another book where Dick has truly gone off the deep end) - He plays on the death of the consciousness, or will being separate from the death of the husk.
Even now, as I explore these writings for the first time, I can identify and define the ramblings of a man who had a mind like an anvil, and a way with words that probably peaked in Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?.
He revisits the same themes again and again. Runciter is everywhere in his work. It's Ubik. Its in Valis. Runciter (and the various entities) are even referenced in the various short films that make up the Electric Dreams series.
It is going to be an absolutely wild ride going through his work over the next few little bits (will likely take me a year or so, I think) - but when I emerge from this phase of Dick, I think I'll be finally ready for LeGuin.
I promise that to you, now.
I only hope that it is a promise I can keep.
I absolutely adored the little bits at the start of each chapter about Ubik. They were at first confusing and out of place, a little meta-novel, but the way in which reality is described in the book, it... leaves me partly obssessed with Dick's brilliance throughout his writing career.
I'm not intimidated by his back catalog, I am seeing it as a summit to climb.
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I'm really excited about it to. I just wish someone would gift me the entire collection. I'll see if Mum has any on her sci fi shelf. I know she got rid of a heap of books over lar few years.
@holoz0r I'm not sure where I read this recently or maybe heard it but it's making em think that when we are dead we actually do totally cease to exist. Because there's only fragments of us left in people's memories that couldn't possibly reconstruct the entire.
My view is that we cease when all those who remember us do - we can't be reconstructed, unless time and space are more complicated than we think they are. Maybe they aren't and all is just a loop.
There are gaps in human memory. But there is a theory that human consciousness remembers all events down to the smallest detail and continues to function after brain death. For example, Nobel Prize-winning neurophysiologist John Eccles said that the brain is merely a receptor through which the soul perceives the physical world. The Soviet academician and neurophysiologist Natalia Bekhtereva spoke about the same thing. They performed thousands of brain surgeries and sometimes encountered the inexplicable.
The world isn't as simple as modern physics makes it out to be. I think the world is multidimensional, and the soul's energy exists somewhere out there.
I don't think modern physics says it is simple at all, to be fair. They are only theorizing until proven otherwise, and there is much to learn, always. Belief in souls is a whole other ball game. I'm okay with our consciousness ending at death, as wild as it is to even imagine nothingness.
I also don't care whether the soul exists after the body dies or not. I don't like it when people believe in something; I like to seek knowledge.