00:00What if I told you that we owe the world of Black Mirror, Blade Runner, Minority Report, The Matrix,
00:05or even Alice in Borderland to one single person, a mad and mysterious man who wrote a novel so
00:11complex, so visionary, and so ambitious that it has never yet been adapted to cinema? I'm talking
00:18about Philip K. Dick and his novel Ubik. Philip K. Dick is the writer behind several super famous
00:23sci-fi film adaptations like Blade Runner, Minority Report, Total Recall, Iscounter Darkly,
00:29and series like The Man in the High Castle, Electric Dreams, and then there's Ubik, a novel he wrote in
00:341966, which he later rewrote as a screenplay because it had so much potential. Ubik was later
00:40supposed to be adapted into a film until it arrived in the hands of Michel Gondry, who's the director
00:45of Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, but in the end Gondry dropped the project and the idea of
00:49adapting this visionary novel has been forgotten. And that's quite sad. But what is this book all
00:55about? We follow the story of Joe Chip, an investigator in an imaginary future led by Glenn
01:00Ronsider, a corporate executive who is able to communicate with his deceased wife Ella, who is
01:05kept in a state of half-life. Ronsider asks her for advice, even though she is dead, in a cryonic
01:11suspension chamber. And Joe investigates a certain Ray Hollis, a man with extraordinary psychic powers,
01:17and he puts together a team made up of psychics, but also inertials, people whose power is to nullify
01:23the psychic powers of others. And with his team, Joe goes after Ray Hollis, who's hiding on the
01:29lunar station. They all board a rocket, and before we even get to the first third of the book, the
01:34entire crew gets blown up in an explosion. Everything explodes, but Joe manages to save himself and return
01:40to Earth with what's left of the crew. From there, he and his team start seeing and sensing strange
01:45things. Time around them seems to be regressing. Objects, the environment, people, everything
01:51transforms into an older form. And they themselves seem to be also aging and deteriorating. Joe begins
01:57to doubt the reality around him, wondering if he's alive or dead, and he discovers that the only way
02:03to fight this regression in time is Yubi. And this book is a masterpiece. I think it's my favorite novel
02:09of all time. Also, I actually adapted parts of this novel in some short films that I made, and it
02:15would
02:15kind of be my dream to adapt it for the big screen. This novel is truly revolutionary because as early
02:20as 1966, it already talked about people with anti-powers, which is something that I only saw in
02:26this book. It also dealt with really serious themes like doubts about reality, superpowers, simulations,
02:32technology, God. This book actually questions the legitimacy of God in a world where technology
02:38has won. And I think that unfortunately, this book can no longer be adapted for the big screen today.
02:43You can see ideas from Yubiq in The Matrix, Alice in Borderland, there's even a direct reference to
02:48Yubiq in the Better Snatch episode of Black Mirror. So with everything that's been done since then,
02:53maybe adapting Yubiq would be too repetitive or maybe too complex for the big screen today. You tell me.
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