Total Recall (Kindle Single)

Even though Harcourt is packaging this story with the title "Total Recall", if you are a sci-fi fan you know the actual name of this story is "We Can Remember It For You Wholesale". It was originally published in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction way back in 1966. It has subsequently been adapted into two movies in 1990 and 2012. I loved the Ahnuld film from the 90s but was pretty meh about the new Colin Farrell film. So having never read the original short story upon which both were based, I was curious to see Dick's original intention. Although you can find this story in many Dick anthologies, I purchased the Kindle version from the store for 99 cents, which is a decent price for something you can read in about 30 minutes.

Douglas Quail wants to go to Mars. Really bad. You might even say he's obsessed with it. Even when he sleeps, he dreams of the red planet. His wife, Kirsten, is getting sick of it. Both of them know that only government agents and important officials are privileged enough to visit Mars. Doug is just a "miserable little salaried employee", a minor government cog.

But Doug does find a way to visit Mars. He goes to REKAL, a company that specializes in implanting memories so vivid that they are BETTER than real ones. Unlike real memories, REKAL implants never fade or get lost over time. Doug decides to go with the Interplan secret agent package but trouble soon develops as the REKAL employees discover that, unknown even to himself, Doug really IS an Interplan secret agent that has already been to Mars!

I've had very little exposure to Philip K. Dick's original work. Besides this story, the only thing I've read is Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, the basis of the movie Blade Runner. I wasn't really impressed by that book. From what I remember, the writing was lazy, the dialogue cliched, and the action pretty nonexistent. Total Recall is not much of an improvement upon those first impressions.

You can tell Dick was raised on 1930s and 40s goofy pulp sci-fi with his use of adjectival ray guns and non-sensical props. Kinda hilarious that Doug is still using a typewriter and he has a "tele transmitter" implanted inside his skull that allows his enemies to monitor his thoughts. One of the worst props shows up at the end of the story which makes an eye roll a requirement if you want to read this story to its ridiculous conclusion. It's not quite as ludicrous as Colin Farell getting into a fistfight with a 65-year-old senior citizen at the end of the newest Total Recall movie but....actually, its probably equal in ludicrousness.

And yes, we have a glaring cliche in this story when the narrator describes the receptionist at REKAL as having "melon-shaped breasts". It just seems like there's always a one-liner from Dick that makes me cringe. A sentence or phrase that is so much the brand of a hack that I cannot take this author seriously. In Sheep it was a character threatening to snap Deckard's "pencil neck".

Dick seems to have good ideas for stories, just like George Lucas, but the actual writing and fleshing out of those stories was probably something best left to others. So far, I've enjoyed the movie adaptations of Philip K Dick's prose far more than his actual writings. Maybe someday that will change as I read more of his stuff. But for right now, I have no idea why there is so much mystique about this author. He seems like a pretty average sci-fi writer who seem eternally entrapped in the primitive sci-fi of his youth.

My first exposure to Total Recall was the Arnold Schwarzenegger movie version. The original story from which it’s based is a much more condensed version only really sharing the basic premise of the story. Douglass Quail is a bureaucrat languishing through his mundane life while longing for a trip to Mars, something that is out of his reach. The next best thing is to have memories of a trip to Mars implanted in his mind, where he is an interplanetary spy on a dangerous mission. I’m sure most people know how the story goes from there. The story omits all of the actual parts of going to Mars, where the movie expands upon the story.

I have to admit that I’m partial to the Schwarzenegger movie version. The original short story presents a much simplified version of this but it’s still interesting, compelling, and well-written. There are a couple of good twists, which I was already familiar with, but the most interesting part of the story is the whole implanting of the memory and how it’s explained in the story. It’s a type of story that despite its brevity, packs a big punch. The final twist at the end was especially satisfying. This is the type of story fans of science fiction will enjoy.

Carl Alves – author of Reconquest: Mother Earth

This story, like all Philip K. Dick stories adapted to film, is quite a different pace than what we see in the theater. His stories have more thought and less action than their cinematic counterparts, but are nonetheless very entertaining. I have been looking for quite some time for a kindle edition of the story "We Can Remember It For You Wholesale" (a.k.a. Total Recall) that was not included in the $15 download collection, of which I already have a hard copy. This story is under 20 pages long in a book, so do not be disapointed after purchasing that it is not a lengthy tale.

Better known as "We Can Remember It For You Wholesale", it's not the story of either movie. This is a short story from which the core conceit of the films was derived, but the resulting situation spools out quite differently. You'll easily finish in a sitting. Fun read, but very much from the golden age of science fiction writing, like Asimov or Star Trek: the original series.

Some interesting themes in here and a great idea (note: the Arnold movie of the same name bears little resemblance to the PKD story). But the exposition is quite heavy-handed, particularly in the character's marriage.

An absolutely fabulous and imaginative short story. I was a fan of the Schwarzenegger film as a high-schooler and only just learned of the original story, which proved to be far more clever, engaging and just silly enough to be completely epic.