We Can Remember It For You Wholesale And Other Classic Stories (2002)

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Best read upon a steel toilet, pictured above.

Author Phillip K. Dick

Things You Might Like

• Sci-Fi that doesn’t feel cliched
• The humanness of the themes
• The impending doom of nuclear annihilation
• The way the author treats the subject of aliens

Things You Might Not Like

• Twitching at the ‘future’ technology
• Arnold Schwarzenegger does not travel to Mars
• Characters can seem cut-copied-and-pasted

Conclusion
The collection of short stories makes an excellent primer of Philip K. Dick’s work as well as sci-fi done right.

5 out of 5 Bought Gods

Aaron Simon

***

I bought this book hoping to see what the hell the original version of Total Recall would be like. I mean, that’s a seminal movie. Arnie as a sci-fi hero in a, honestly, pretty damn good sci-fi movie. And I’d heard that Phillip K Dick was a great author from a whole host of people, so that didn’t hurt, either.

Well, turns out that the story on which the film was based—“We Can Remember It For You Wholesale”—is vastly different from the film. Like the other stories in this volume, the scope of the short story is much more focused. Quaid does not zoom to Mars to fight a war. He fights with his psyche, and the omnipresent Government, here on Earth.

And, you know, it’s just right for a short story. The theme in the movie—war and amnesia as a deus ex—is cinematic, not literary. The theme in the short story, paranoia and an encroaching, Orwellian government, is literary.

And those two themes, along with a couple others which I’ll get to in a bit, form the backing of, I’d say, 90% of the stories in We Can Remember It For You Wholesale And Other Classic Stories.

So, background: These stories were written at the start of Dick’s career as a writer. He started up in the 50s, during one of the US’s many bouts of Red Scare Disease, when the looming presence of nuclear annihilation was on the horizon. And it’s that fear of a world turned to ash that is present in this volume—many times a lot more obvious than others.

The heroes in these stories aren’t the Schwarzeneggers of Hollywood, but individuals who happen upon things severely bizarre. You know, that method that allows the reader to build that golden bridge called “Relating to the Character.”

These characters must often face a broken world, destroyed by war via nuclear holocaust, wars with extraterrestrials, or an oft-recurring robot threat. Further, the characters must often rediscover their own humanity, society having changed to the point where humans having decided to emulate robots in their cold, logical precision.

Those are very human themes, you know. Things that keep the reader interested and wondering about how much of the story is mirrored in the world at large. The SF bits—time travel, extra-solar journeys, mind-replacing alien beings, inter-dimensional police gods—are all flavor to make the stories more interesting to the reader. The real conflict falls within the classic rubrics of “self vs. society;” “self vs. self;” etc etc.

Phillip K. Dick’s writing style, it should be noted, gets kind of difficult to read if you’re tackling this in one marathon session. It’s not that his style is rough or anything, it just boils down to a matter of repetition in rhythm and cadence of passages. Part of this, I’m sure, has to do with the trying-it-outness of the author’s career, but part of it is also–quite possibly–part of the fact that Phillip K. Dick was churning these stories out at an amazing pace. (Seriously, check out the dates in the index. The man was a machine.) However, only a complete madman like myself would try to read this all at once as if it were a novel.

Of course, none of the stories happen to feature Arnie almost popping on the surface of Mars. So there’s that to consider.

Aside from that, the negatives are pretty obvious—and if you read the Introduction to the book, you’ll get the feeling that it’s probably because the author was, at this point, just finding his footing. The characters get pretty repetitive, the plots are pretty predictable by our standards, and, yes, the Earth-based technology is already out of date. (Though we don’t have that whole space colony thing down quite yet.)

As interesting as fears of nuclear demise and robots are, I think the thing that drew me the most to the writing was the story Human Is. In the handy NOTES section, Philip K Dick is quoted as saying:

To me, this story states my early conclusions as to what is human. I have not really changed my view since I wrote this story, back in the Fifties. It’s not what you look like, or what planet you were born on. It’s how kind you are. The quality of kindness, to me, distinguishes us from rocks and sticks and metal, and will forever, whatever shape we take, wherever we go, whatever we become. For me, ‘Human Is’ is my credo. May it be yours. (1976)

Shit, yeah. That’s some refreshing stuff, right there.

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