Ubik was still the most wild story I’ve read from Phillip K. Dick, more than his usual reality-bending stuff like Scanner or Three Stigmata.
It turns out I forgot I read A Terran Oddessy...
But I also believe that isn't what it was at all, but cannot bring to mind what it really did.
Like but not like Iain M. Banks' Lazy Guns [0]. When you pulled their triggers, literally anything could happen to the target, ranging IIRC from a cartoon anvil dropping on their head to a devastating volcanic eruption. Again IIRC, they weighed more when held upside down.
It is similar to the reasoning about unstable existence of any time machine that can send you back to before it was made.
That said what I recall was that the main character was a weapons designer for coalition of western countries that had some name to signify they were an amalgamation of the US and Western Europe.
Weapons were designed but never used, they were designed to be destroyed thereby keeping the peace. There was also a similar designer for the communist bloc of countries, old USSR China amalgamation.
It turns out there is a comic book writer / artist in some African country that has been producing comics with their designs before even done. This threatens to collapse the whole clown show. I think there is a comic with the Zap Gun, nobody knows what it does, and neither of the weapons designers have thought it up on their own.
Don't remember much else.
An alien invasion is involved evidently, which I still have not memory of. The probably brainwiped me, darn aliens, when they took over the Earth.
This quote from Ubik perfectly reflects how I feel on a regular basis.
Reality is weird. What's even going on here, anyway? Perhaps we should just put our faith in Ubik. It's safe when taken as directed, of course.
That's essentially the point of the ending, yeah. Well, less so that "it doesn't make sense" and more "actually, it's entirely unclear what is even going on".
Reality is slippery -- at the very moment you think you've got a grip on what's going on, it jumps out of your hands.
You'll see this same theme reflected in many of his other books, if you end up reading and more.
That's a good way of putting it and it does fit the theme of the book. I just spent a bit thinking about the ending again and while it's not any clearer I do like it more now.
But seriously, Ubik is a great book - one of Dick's best.
Most fiction doesn't make any sense if you really think about it, much less Science Fiction, much less Science Fiction in which Reality mutates unrecognizably several times in the course of the book.
Dick was a fantastic writer. Noone can alienate me like he can.