Book Review: We Can Remember It For You Wholesale by Philip K. Dick

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Venganza Media, Inc.

Tv & Film, Film History, Tv & Film:film Reviews, Film Reviews, Film Interviews

4.5 • 3K Ratings

🗓️ 14 January 2011

⏱️ 14 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

If you don't recall this story, it is time for you to read it! Books & Nachos is now part of Now Playing Podcast. Before our book reviews were branded as Now Playing Podcast Book Reviews, they were released under a separate show called Books & Nachos. That podcast focused on book discussions, most of which tied directly into films we were covering on Now Playing. We’ve now merged those episodes into the main Now Playing Podcast feed for easier access and a complete archive. But these older episodes still have the original Books & Nachos intro and credits on those older recordings. In this episode, Stuart dives into We Can Remember It for You Wholesale, the razor-sharp short story by Philip K. Dick that asks a deceptively simple question: what if your memories aren’t real, and worse, what if they’re better than your real life? Long before exploding heads and Mars rebellions, Dick’s original tale is a lean psychological puzzle about identity, desire, and the fragile line between fantasy and reality. Stuart breaks down how the story plays with implanted memories, government paranoia, and existential dread in just a handful of pages. This isn’t the bombastic spectacle many associate with the title. It’s tighter, darker, and more ironic. A story about wish fulfillment that becomes a nightmare about who you really are when the wish comes true. {Philip K. Dick Series} {Total Recall Series} {Book Review}

Transcript

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0:00.0	This is Books and Notchos, a podcast for those of us who find excitement in the pages of a good book.
0:12.5	Fiction and nonfiction, graphic novels, and more.
0:15.5	We are here to help you find something great to read.
0:25.9	Music something great to read. Hello and welcome to books and nachos, the Vinganza Media podcast about all things in print.
0:31.6	I am your host, Stuart in L.A., and this is our second entry in the Philip K. Dick book retrospective,
0:36.9	which corresponds with our now playing movie retrospective the Philip K. Dick book retrospective, which corresponds with
0:38.2	our now playing movie retrospective of Philip K. Dick works. Right now, we're reviewing the movie
0:44.4	Total Recall, and I'm about to take on the short story that inspired it. We can remember it for
0:49.8	you wholesale. It's only 20 pages, so you could probably click stop right now on this podcast,
0:56.1	go read it, and come back and we can have the discussion. Obviously, with it only being 20
1:01.7	pages long, this is going to be spoiler-filled. There's no way for me to talk about 20 pages
1:06.3	and not tell you beginning to end what happens. It was first published in 1966. I'm not entirely sure
1:13.1	when it was written, but I'm going to presume that it was sometime around that. Philip K. Dick
1:18.1	was also in the process of writing the last work we covered, Do Android's Dream of Electric Sheep,
1:24.5	right around the same time. He was also experimenting with LSD. I think you can
1:28.9	kind of got that sense of the idea of having a vacation you don't really have in which you just sit
1:34.2	in a chair and you have all of the memories. It definitely seems to play on some of his drug habit,
1:39.6	and that becomes increasingly more prominent in his writings and his life throughout the decade. I'm sure by
1:46.5	the time we get to Scanner Darkly, we will see him in the throes of a real full-on drug addiction. But for
1:53.7	now, he's merely experimenting with it and having out-of-body experiences, struggling with debt, struggling
2:00.6	with being a lowly writer, and yet having
2:03.6	a career within the science fiction genre of being highly established. Well, let's get into it.
	...

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