Ubik

Philip K. Dick's novel about a world where reality keeps decaying in ways the characters cannot quite identify — and Ubik, a commercial spray-on product that seems to restore it. Dick's register is unusual: paranoid science fiction that turns into metaphysics, commercial absurdity that turns into genuine philosophy. For product direction the book is useful as literature; reading Dick trains a suspicion about appearances that is hard to acquire any other way, and product work is largely about noticing when the story you have been told about the problem is stable enough to act on. Short, strange, and one of the few genuine novels in this library.