In article
<c886d76c-7471-4855-9ace-c045d17676da@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
>,
<daijoudaijin@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> wrote:
>It took me way too long, but I finally picked up and
>finished PKD's Ubik. It was every bit as great as I was
>expecting. What is everyone's take on the last couple of
>paragraphs though?
>
>When I first finished it last night, I assumed it meant
>that Runciter had died as well (or was dead all along), and
>was now about to go through the same process that the rest
>of them had.
My take on it was extremely negative. Alas, it was a
borrowed copy, so I was unable to give it the treatment I
felt it so richly deserved: Fling it on the floor, and then
jump up and down on it over and over and over and over, then
drop-kick it into the toilet.
Basically, the whole book is setting up some kind of
mystery, and you spend the whole book trying to figure out
the mystery as it gets weirder and weirder, then in the last
paragraph, PKD goes "Nyah nyah, neener neener, everybody
died in that explosion in Chapter 1, and this has all been
the dying hallucinations of the only one who wasn't killed
instantly as his brain slowly deteriorates on life sup****t.
I bet you thought it was supposed to make sense! Ha ha,
fooled you!"
Some people really like that sort of thing. I am not one of
them.
This was my first PKD story, and it would have been my last,
except I got talked into reading "The Man in the High Castle."
My reaction to that was that it was OK, but nothing special.
I gather PKD stories tend to be more like "UBIK" and less like
TMitHC, so I'm not inclined to give him a third chance.
--
Mike Van Pelt | Wikipedia. The roulette wheel of knowledge.
mvp at calweb.com | --Blair P. Houghton
KE6BVH
|
