If you loved how Joe Chip kept finding Runciter’s face on money and in ads while the world regressed to 1939, you’ll relish the drug-warped realities of The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch. As colonists use Perky Pat layouts to enter shared hallucinations, Eldritch intrudes like Runciter’s messages from beyond—only far more malevolent, with stigmata that bleed across layers of reality. It’s the same vertigo of not knowing which world is real, but dialed up to cosmic menace.

In Ubik, Runciter’s post-mortem communications and the decaying artifacts hint that reality might be a projection from the half-life cold-pac. Solaris channels that same philosophical unease as the planet’s ocean manifests living “visitors” from the scientists’ minds. If Ella’s liminal existence intrigued you, Kris Kelvin’s encounters with a resurrected lover will scratch that itch for profound, unsettling questions about consciousness and what counts as real.

When Joe Chip spritzes Ubik to stabilize a world that’s unraveling, it feels like a literal can of metaphysics. Permutation City gives you that same charge: software constructs and copies of people run in artificial universes where code rules are godlike, allowing reality “resets” and forks. If the idea of Runciter and Ella manipulating a boundary realm fascinated you, Egan’s digital demiurges and simulated afterlives will hit the sweet spot.

The ad copy and product jingles that open Ubik’s chapters give the story a biting, collage-like rhythm. Stand on Zanzibar amplifies that technique with headline bursts, ad clippings, and corporate chatter spliced between plot scenes to skewer consumer culture. If those Ubik commercials made you grin even as the world fell apart, Brunner’s montage will feel like a sharper, broader-spectrum version of that satirical buzz.

In Ubik, Joe Chip pieces together a death and a conspiracy from impossible hints—coins, graffiti, and phone calls from Runciter. The City & the City offers a similarly mind-bending investigation as Inspector Borlú tracks a murder across two cities occupying the same space, with forbidden perceptions functioning like your beloved reality glitches. If the puzzle of who really died on Luna grabbed you, this procedural’s rules of seeing—and not seeing—will, too.