We Can Build You (Audible Audio Edition) Philip K Dick Dan John Miller Brilliance Audio Books
Download As PDF : We Can Build You (Audible Audio Edition) Philip K Dick Dan John Miller Brilliance Audio Books
In this lyrical and moving novel, Philip K. Dick intertwines the story of a toxic love affair with one about sentient robots, and unflinchingly views it all through the prism of mental illness - which spares neither human nor robot. The end result is one of Dick's most quietly powerful works. When Louis Rosen's electronic-organ company builds a pitch-perfect robotic replica of Abraham Lincoln, the firm is pulled into the orbit of a shady businessman, who is looking to use Lincoln for his own profit. Meanwhile, Rosen seeks Lincoln's advice as he woos a woman incapable of understanding human emotions - someone who may be even more robotic than Lincoln's replica.
We Can Build You (Audible Audio Edition) Philip K Dick Dan John Miller Brilliance Audio Books
Though I've been reading science fiction for fifty plus years, so much of it was written from the 1950s to the 1970s that I've never been able to read it all. When I'm asked why I don't read many contemporary writers, I reply that I haven't finished the earlier ones.Philip K. Dick is a perfect example. He wrote 45 novels. How could you read them all? This is one I missed and it might be his best.
Early SF wasn't known for its attention to character, but as the 70s arrived, SF publishers decided that human psychology was the important science now and characterization was essential. Dick obviously said to himself, "Well, if they want character and psychology, they'll get character and psychology".
This 1972 novel has mesmerizing characters. In particular, there's Pris, a young autistic woman (Dick says schizophrenic, but autism was often diagnosed as schizophrenia in his day). She's an early version of Lisbeth Salander (The Girl With the Dragon Tatoo, etc), vulnerable, smart, tough, and a loner. She has a perverse, quirky, sense of humor too. Whenever she's on the page you can't focus on anyone else.
The narrator of the story, Louis Rosen, a partner with his father in a modest electronic organ manufacturing company that unexpectedly becomes a manufacturer of robots, falls in love with Pris, the robot designer. He's pretty good too, if frighteningly unstable. His scenes with Pris are dynamite.
Then there are the robots. Humanoid robots called simulacrum, they're among the best robots in SF - first is the Edwin M. Stanton, a robot copy of the stern tough-minded former secretary of Abraham Lincoln. Recognizing that he has fallen into a very weird situation, Stanton escapes from the lab and sets out into the "real world" to see if he can set things straight.
Then comes Lincoln himself. The paragraph in which Lincoln "wakes up" is one of the best paragraphs I've read in a long time. So is the argument between Lincoln and Sam Burrows, a rich businessman proposing to buy the new robot technology. Barrows explains to Lincoln that he is nothing but a machine, soon to become Barrow property. Lincoln, in return, demonstrates that Barrows doesn't know the difference between a human and a machine.
There's a John Wilkes Booth robot too, but I won't say any more.
What follows is inventive, unpredictable, and entertaining. It's a wild ride. It has some looseness here and there, and an ending that is a bit like a separate short story with the robots missing, but overall it's so good that Asimov must have envied it. Don't wait forty years like I did to read this book.
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We Can Build You (Audible Audio Edition) Philip K Dick Dan John Miller Brilliance Audio Books Reviews
This novel was first published as a serial in "Amazing Stories" magazine, in issues dated November 1969 and January 1970, under the title "A. Lincoln, Simulacrum." The only difference between the 1972 DAW Books edition (reprinted by Vintage) and the serial is that the magazine's editor, Ted White, was dissatisfied with the ending and (with Dick's permission) wrote an addition to the last chapter. When the DAW edition came out in 1972, Dick cut White's ending, but the rest of the book is the same. I read the "Amazing" version when it was first out (at the tender age of fourteen), and have loved this author's work ever since. It's a shame Dick didn't live to profit from books like this, which he sold for a few thousand dollars. (I've always preferred the title "A. Lincoln, Simulacrum" -- it's more accurate.) But Dick's heirs are now getting his royalties, so it's staying in the family.
This novel is not one of Dick's best, but it's one of his good ones. Abraham Lincoln is a major figure in it, although it's a mechanically recreated version of the real man. (It considers itself to be Lincoln, though.) The main character, as usual in Dick's work, is caught in a bizarre situation beyond his control, and the book ends without resolution (as White sensed). Since it adds to Dick's treatment of the paradoxical nature of reality, I do recommend it.
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...
Though I've been reading science fiction for fifty plus years, so much of it was written from the 1950s to the 1970s that I've never been able to read it all. When I'm asked why I don't read many contemporary writers, I reply that I haven't finished the earlier ones.
Philip K. Dick is a perfect example. He wrote 45 novels. How could you read them all? This is one I missed and it might be his best.
Early SF wasn't known for its attention to character, but as the 70s arrived, SF publishers decided that human psychology was the important science now and characterization was essential. Dick obviously said to himself, "Well, if they want character and psychology, they'll get character and psychology".
This 1972 novel has mesmerizing characters. In particular, there's Pris, a young autistic woman (Dick says schizophrenic, but autism was often diagnosed as schizophrenia in his day). She's an early version of Lisbeth Salander (The Girl With the Dragon Tatoo, etc), vulnerable, smart, tough, and a loner. She has a perverse, quirky, sense of humor too. Whenever she's on the page you can't focus on anyone else.
The narrator of the story, Louis Rosen, a partner with his father in a modest electronic organ manufacturing company that unexpectedly becomes a manufacturer of robots, falls in love with Pris, the robot designer. He's pretty good too, if frighteningly unstable. His scenes with Pris are dynamite.
Then there are the robots. Humanoid robots called simulacrum, they're among the best robots in SF - first is the Edwin M. Stanton, a robot copy of the stern tough-minded former secretary of Abraham Lincoln. Recognizing that he has fallen into a very weird situation, Stanton escapes from the lab and sets out into the "real world" to see if he can set things straight.
Then comes Lincoln himself. The paragraph in which Lincoln "wakes up" is one of the best paragraphs I've read in a long time. So is the argument between Lincoln and Sam Burrows, a rich businessman proposing to buy the new robot technology. Barrows explains to Lincoln that he is nothing but a machine, soon to become Barrow property. Lincoln, in return, demonstrates that Barrows doesn't know the difference between a human and a machine.
There's a John Wilkes Booth robot too, but I won't say any more.
What follows is inventive, unpredictable, and entertaining. It's a wild ride. It has some looseness here and there, and an ending that is a bit like a separate short story with the robots missing, but overall it's so good that Asimov must have envied it. Don't wait forty years like I did to read this book.
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