We Can Build You
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 Cover of first edition (paperback) |
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| Author | Philip K. Dick |
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| Country | United States |
| Language | English |
| Genre(s) | Science fiction novel |
| Publisher | DAW Books |
| Released | 1972 |
| Media type | Print (Hardcover & Paperback) |
| Pages | 206 pp |
| ISBN | ISBN 0-679-75296-X (recent edition) |
We Can Build You is a 1972 science fiction novel by Philip K. Dick. It was originally published in serial form as A. Lincoln, Simulacrum in the November 1969 and January 1970 issues of Amazing Stories magazine.
Contents |
[edit] Plot summary
We Can Build You is set in a then-future 1982. It centres on Louis Rosen, a small businessman in the near future whose company used to produce "mood organs," which stimulate sensory responses. Rosen's partner wants to begin production of simulacra, or androids, based on famous Civil War figures. The firm completes two prototypes, one of Edwin M. Stanton and one of Abraham Lincoln. Rosen then attempts to sell the robot patents to Sam K. Barrows, an influential businessman who is opening up lunar real estate for purchase and colonisation. Unfortunately, while the Stanton android proves able to adapt to contemporary US society, Lincoln's simulacrum proves unable to do so, possibly due to the fact that the original experienced schizophrenia. At the same time, Louis begins a relationship with Pris Frauenzimmer, the schizophrenic daughter of his business partner, who has designed both simulacra. This becomes an obsession and Louis himself begins to hallucinate about Pris.
At the same time, Pris defects to Barrows, but loses faith in the benevolence of their partnership when his objectives are disclosed as less prosaic than hers, with his plans to use simulacra colonists to entice human settlement on the Moon and other human interplanetary colonies within the solar system. After the destruction of a John Wilkes Booth prototype simulacra, the Stanton/Lincoln simulacra strand of the plot abruptly ends, with no definite resolution.
The remainder of the book deals with Louis Rosen's admission of schizophrenia and his Jungian therapeutic treatment at the Kaisin Centre in Kansas, where Pris was originally released from. It appears that art therapy is the preferred treatment modality for people who experience schizophrenia, which has become increasingly common in this world. Under the influence of his therapist, Rosen creates a virtual hallucinatory reality of his own, where he resumes his relationship with Pris, marries her, they have children, and grow old together, culminating in his 'murder' of her hallucinatory doppelganger, curing him. The end of the novel asks whether he was actually ill in the first place. However, Pris has become unwell again, and returned to Kaisin after a temporary career as a simulacra designer earlier in the novel.
[edit] Themes
As in many Dick novels, We Can Build You addresses important philosophical questions about human nature, artificial intelligence and sentience, and normality. The Stanton and Lincoln androids are more empathic and humane characters than the actual humans who argue over them. In this future, schizophrenia and emotional withdrawal have become endemic. There is a US Federal Bureau of Mental Health, which has become increasingly powerful and important. The "McHeston Act" imposes two psychometric tests as diagnostic tools to evaluate whether or not one has schizophrenia- a Soviet "Vigotsky-Luria Test" and a "Benjamin Proverb Test."
[edit] Trivia
- The name of Rosen's love interest, Pris, is reused for one of the androids in Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?. In chapter 3 of We Can Build You, Pris is described as having "odd make-up, eyes outlined in black, a harlequin effect", which is similar to the make-up worn by Pris in Blade Runner, the movie based on Dick's Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?. Rosen's own name is also echoed in Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? where he is the head of the Rosen (becoming Tyrell in Blade Runner) Corporation. Rick Deckard's romantic interest in that work is called Rachel Rosen.
- In the aforementioned work, humans that experience schizophrenia test similarly to replicants, and this might also prefigure such a plot development in the later novel.
- Simulacra/androids also play pivotal roles in the aforementioned Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, Blade Runner, and The Simulacra.
- A line from this novel was used as the epigraph for China Miéville's Perdido Street Station.
