Ubik

"He felt all at once like an ineffectual moth, fluttering at the windowpane of reality, dimly seeing it from outside."

Philip K. Dick's Ubik is a rollercoaster ride into metaphysics, dualism, and his creative science fiction world where precogs, half-lifers, telepathy, and other psionic activity coexist. Like other Dick novels, reality is not what it seems, a wondrous substance, like the fictional drugs of other novels, affect "reality," and Platonic notions of dualism (forms versus ideas) influence the potentially upsetting depiction of the real world and the world of the dead half-lifers, who can communicate with the 'living' at special moratoriums through advanced technology. Depending on how one reads this unwieldly novel in which most of the characters are "dead," Ella (to be replaced by Joe Chip) and Jory could be the eternal conflict of Ahriman and Ahura Mazda, for those familiar with the ancient Persian religion. I have no idea how to interpret this story...I am apt to suspect all the characters are in half-life, especially based on the novel's final paragraph, but in consideration of Dick's usual themes, I do not think we are to have a definitive answer about the nation of being or reality.