Philip K. Dick was born in Chicago on December 16, 1928, and grew up in the San Francisco Bay Area. He began publishing short stories in 1952, mostly finding homes in popular science fiction magazines, but he had little commercial success until he published The Man in the High Castle in 1962. He followed with novels such as Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, Ubik, and Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said, establishing him as a writer of science fiction. Following years of drug abuse and a series of mystical experiences in 1974, Dick's work dealt more explicitly with issues of theology, metaphysics, and the nature of reality. He died in 1982 in Santa Ana, California, at the age of 53, due to complications from a stroke.

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. “rom 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 Bolaño