Ubik: the Screenplay

Dust jacket by Dave McKean

Foreword by Tim Powers

Afterword by Tad Williams

Subterranean Press is proud to make Philip K. Dick’s screenplay adaptation of one of his signature novels available for the first time in more than twenty years. Copies of the first edition of Ubik: the Screenplay now fetch more than $100 on the collector’s market, when you can find them. In addition, the screenplay features an ending that differs markedly from that of the novel.

“Dick included far more parenthetical description and interpretation than can be standard for screenplays, and so we have here his considered, after-the-fact portraits of Glen Runciter, Ella Runciter, Joe Chip, Pat Conley, and Ubik itself. And too, with a facility that’s scarce among novelists, he smoothly adapts his story to the wider, deeper ranges of the film medium. The Ubik ‘ads’ are much more effective as actual intrusions than as chapter headings, the soundtrack becomes a central element (and makes us wonder what music Dick would have chosen to complement some of his other novels), and he presents the dysfunctions in time and perception even more effectively when he imagines them enacted on a movie screen. In some ways, in fact, it almost seems as though we’re getting a purer version of UBIK—something closer to the original conception than the text of the novel.”
-- Tim Powers, from his foreword

Trade: 1500 copy cloth bound hardcover edition
Lettered: 26 copies, bound in leather, signed by the authors of the introduction and afterword, housed in a custom made traycase

From Green Man Review:
“The chance to watch a master trim down his work to what he considers the essentials for translation to another medium is not one to be dismissed lightly. By bringing the script back into publication after a more than twenty year hiatus, Subterranean is giving readers a rare and fascinating treasure.”

From SFSite:
“Ubik was one of the finest novels Philip K. Dick wrote, his distrust of reality put at the service of one of the most complex but fully realised plot structures he would ever devise. Yet if anything the screenplay, its alterations subtle but significant, is even better. So the reappearance of the screenplay, after more than 20 years, is welcome indeed.”