Ubik: The Screenplay is Philip K. Dick's own screenplay adaptation of his 1969 novel Ubik, written for a proposed but ultimately unproduced film. The volume includes a foreword, the full screenplay text across more than forty numbered scenes, and an afterword by Dick titled "Ubik: An Afterword."
The screenplay demonstrates Dick's personal engagement with the adaptation process and his vision for translating the novel's complex metaphysical themes to the screen. Ubik, one of Dick's most celebrated novels, explores themes of entropy, half-life states of consciousness, the manipulation of reality, and the nature of time through a narrative involving characters who may or may not be dead and experiencing a shared virtual afterlife.
As a primary document, this screenplay is significant on multiple levels: it represents Dick's only completed screenplay for one of his own works, it reveals his thinking about how to render his characteristically literary and philosophical concerns in visual and dramatic terms, and it documents an early chapter in the long and often frustrated history of attempts to adapt Dick's most challenging novels for film. The afterword provides Dick's own reflections on the adaptation process and the relationship between his novelistic and screenwriting craft.