We Can Build You [Paperback]

Philip K. Dick (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: May 31, 1994

Louis Rosen and his partners sell people--ingeniously designed, historically authentic simulacra of personages such as Edwin M. Stanton and Abraham Lincoln. The problem is that the only prospective buyer is a rapacious billionaire whose plans for the simulacra could land Louis in jail. Then there's the added complication that someone--or something--like Abraham Lincoln may not want to be sold.

Is an electronic Lincoln any less alive than his creators? Is a machine that cares and suffers inferior to the woman Louis loves--a borderline psychopath who does neither? With irresistible momentum, intelligence, and wit, Philip K. Dick creates an arresting techno-thriller that suggests a marriage of Bladerunner and Barbarians at the Gate.

Editorial Reviews

Review

'The fact that what Dick is writing about is reality and madness, time and death, sin and salvation - this has escaped most critics. Nobody notices that we have our own homegrown Borges.' Ursula K. Le Guin 'No other writer of his generation had such a powerful intellectual presence. He has stamped himself not only on our memories but in our imaginations' Brian W. Aldiss --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From the Inside Flap

Louis Rosen and his partners sell people--ingeniously designed, historically authentic simulacra of personages such as Edwin M. Stanton and Abraham Lincoln. The problem is that the only prospective buyer is a rapacious billionaire whose plans for the simulacra could land Louis in jail. Then there's the added complication that someone--or something--like Abraham Lincoln may not want to be sold.

Is an electronic Lincoln any less alive than his creators? Is a machine that cares and suffers inferior to the woman Louis loves--a borderline psychopath who does neither? With irresistible momentum, intelligence, and wit, Philip K. Dick creates an arresting techno-thriller that suggests a marriage of Bladerunner and Barbarians at the Gate.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Paperback: 256 pages
• Publisher: Vintage; 1 edition (May 31, 1994)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 067975296X
• ISBN-13: 978-0679752967
• Product Dimensions: 5.2 x 0.6 x 8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 7.4 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 3.6 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (30 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #985,937 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

26 of 26 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Another neglected PKD masterpiece, January 5, 1999

By 

Eric M. Van (Watertown, MA USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: We Can Build You (Paperback)

Not one of PKD's famous novels, but one of the very best of the rest (see my review of NOW WAIT FOR LAST YEAR for more on this phenomenon). Dick actually wrote this in 1962, immediately after THE MAN IN THE HIGH CASTLE and at the same time as MARTIAN TIME-SLIP, when he was at the height of his powers. It was conceived, written, and shopped to publishers as a mainstream novel with an sf setting -- and, like Dick's brilliant 50's mainstream novels, it failed to sell (a setback which had a huge influence on his subsequent career). When Dick wrote DO ANDROIDS DREAM OF ELECTRIC SHEEP in 1966, he recycled the unforgettable dark-haired girl character, Pris Frauenzimmer, as Pris Stratton. And when his life fell apart in the early 70's, he finally sold the ms. as a magazine serial.

This is, I believe, the only PKD novel written in the first-person. Our hero, Louis Rosen, falls in love with a young schizoid girl. There's the usual amount of brilliant PKD sf speculation (in this case, about what it means to be human), wedded seamlessly to the very best portrayal of a male-female relationship in all his fiction. The dialogue is priceless; there's a scene in a hotel room that has more quotable lines than most writers can muster in a career.

There are two aspects to the novel that may bother people who read only sf -- but they are central to the conception and true nature of the book (as both an sf novel and a highly experimental postmodern novel, without compromise to either). First, it changes horses midway, leaving a lot of plot strands dangling (what Kim Stanley Robinson calls Dick's "broken-backed" novel structure), as our narrator becomes more and more obsessed with his femme fatale. In the same way, there's not a lot of *plot* closure in the ending, but there's total emotional closure (a lot like real life).

This one will break your heart, as it undoubtedly broke PKD's, in more ways than one.

21 of 26 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars a marvelous Dickian portrait of a man loosing touch, April 20, 2004

By 

Campbell Roark "tri-zeta" (from under the floorboards and through the woods...) - See all my reviews

This review is from: We Can Build You (Paperback)

Lots of people seem not to care for this book, which (along with Flow My Tears... Dr. Bloodmoney and Deus Irae) is one of my favorites, hands down.

First of all- In this man's honest opinion, Phillip K. Dick is the ONE bona fide (as in Oh Brother- 'he's bona fide!') GENIUS of American letters, post-WWII. No one can match his breadth of vision, his uncanny ability to make his perceptions and dreams work while undermining one's sense of reality and existence as objective. He makes the lit-theory sci-fi jargonmeisters (Pynchon and Delillo, for example) look like the drivel-laden frauds they so clearly are; they write solely to ensure that lit-theory academics can continue their pointless little lives in their ivory towers and not have to work for a living- a relationship that works quite well for all involved, save those few elect that cherish honest literature... I see that damn blurb on many reviews of Dick's works- "The poor man's Pynchon,' what absolute tripe. In fact, Pynchon is the dickless man's Dick.

At any rate, ranting aside, this little novel, published around the time of the first centennial passing of our Civil War, concerns a man (Louis Rosen) who is drawn into a relationship with his business partner's daughter (Pris Frauenzimmer): a cold, spiteful, driven, vicious woman (Dick's prototypical 'dark-haired girl,' a theme that reoccurs throughout his fiction) who creates simulacra of historical personages. These people she creates- one Abe Lincoln, and one Edwyn M. Stanton (Lincoln's Secretary of War) represent two potential poles of human experience- Stanton quickly adapts to the new world and becomes a shrewd advisor to Rosen's company while Lincoln can't really adapt to the world or the fact that he's a robot version of himself. Lincoln eventually becomes an idiot savant/mentor to Louis, who gradually succumbs to insanity and loss...

It's an odd novel, not of the typical sci-fi adventure mode, and not your standard Dickian, hard-working everyman tries to figure out the nature of reality-type scenario. Still, it's an inimitably poignant little novel, one that ends abruptly and without much resolution. I really dig it. It also anticipates that buffoon Baudrilliard by about a quarter century.

Here, I love this quote; "It was as if Pris, to me, were both life itself - and anti-life, the dead, the cruel, the cutting and rending and yet also the spirit of existence itself. Movement: she was motion itself. Life in its growing, planning, calculating, harsh, thoughtless actuality. I could not stand having her around me; I could not stand being without her. Without Pris I dwindled away until I became nothing and eventually died like a bug in the back yard, unnoticed and unimportant; around her I was slashed, goaded, cut to pieces, stepped on - yet somehow I lived; in that, I was real. Did I enjoy suffering? No. It was that it seemed as if suffering was part of life, part of being with Pris. Without Pris there was no suffering, nothing erratic, unfair, unbalanced. But also, there was nothing alive, only small-time schlock schemes, a dusty little office with two or three men scrabbling in the sand..."

It's a novel about a man loosing himself and clinging to the one real thing he knows- being tormented by a beautiful enigma. I can relate if you can't...

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Classic Phillip K. Dick, a must read for his fans., April 23, 1997

By A Customer

This review is from: We Can Build You (Paperback)

As always Dick explores the themes: "who and what are real"; "who is crazy and who is sane". Louis Rosen is a former piano salesman whose family company starts to make simulcra (exact robot replicas). Abe Lincoln is their first construct and he soon gains consciousness and begins to ask for his rights vs. a wealthy mars colonizer. Who is and what is human? Our hero meanwhile falls in love with teenage Pris, a refugee from a Federal Bureau of Mental Health hospital. Is anyone sane? From there on things take delightful dizzying Dickian twists. Its a wonderful book for anyone with a healthy measure of paranoia.