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

This summer the remake of the movie TOTAL RECALL is coming out. It's directed by Len Wiseman (Underworld) and stars Kate Beckinsale and Jessica Biel. I think some other people are in it, too, but who cares? What you may or may not know is that TOTAL RECALL is based on a short story by master science fiction writer Philip K. Dick. He also wrote the stories that the movies A SCANNER DARKLY and BLADE RUNNER were based on, to name a couple, but the distinguished list goes on and on.

We Can Remember It For You Wholesale is a straight-forward, but certainly simple, story. In the future you may not be able to afford or have time to actually do stuff. So you have memories implanted that are better than real memories. One company that specializes in this business is TOTAL REKAL. You go in, choose your adventure, pay the fee, sit in a chair, and hours later you have a new memory, but none of the going to the memory store part. It's part of your new reality. The story really starts when the process unleashes memories of a customer that he was never meant to recall, and that's when it all turns fun.

This story is only about TWENTY PAGES in a collected works of Philip K. Dick. If you get the book, you'll undoubtedly have other treasures to read as well. Dick's writing is clever and smooth. He also tends to reveal a post-apocalyptic future in his writings which was the main concern back when these things were written, back in the 60s. I'd call the price of any book to get to We Can Remember It For You Wholesale worth it because then you get to see how much the tale was embellished in the earlier movie, and this summer's incarnation.

Find it on AMAZON.