There are few creators who can influence the collective imagination as much as Philip Kindred Dick. Fantastic visions of the writer, who died in 1982, have been repeatedly transferred to larger and smaller screens - from the iconic Blade Runner Ridley Scott, through Steven Spielberg's Minority Report , to Man in the High Castle , produced for Amazon Prime Video . We Can Build You is a less known novel by the author, which - thanks to the Rebis Publishing House - can once again be reached by Polish readers.
Who are you man?
1982. Louis Rosen and Maury Rock run a small business selling electronic organs and clavichords. Sales are falling, and the interested parties themselves have slightly greater ambitions, so they decide to construct an artificial man. The first prototypes adopt images of figures from the Civil War era – President Abraham Lincoln and his adviser, Edwin M. Stanton. Sam Barrows is interested in the idea – a billionaire who wants to use these simulacra to sell residential plots on the moon. Machines rebel against their constitutional rights, and Rosen himself seems to be slowly falling into madness …
We Can Build You contains many elements of Dick’s prose. The story takes place in a dystopian future (the first edition of the novel came out in 1972), in which the Federal Bureau of Mental Health keeps society in check. Citizens undergo compulsory psychiatric examinations, the results of which determine their immediate future. It is a manifestation of an oppressive system and a flourishing totalitarianism, in this case only subtly suggested. The characteristic problem of institutionalization and over-control is giving way to the humanist theme; the first violin is played by people – both real and mechanical.
More human than humans
The recognizable feature of good fantasy is how it relates to reality through its own narrative. Dick continues the tradition of smuggling sociological commentary between the lines, confronting different concepts of perceiving humanity. People in the world created by him are broken in various ways, led by prosaic instincts, ready to trample whatever stands in their way for profit. One would like to say: dehumanized. Greedy and amoral, unscrupulous heroes in comparison with good humanoids seem completely… inhuman. Simulacra, on the other hand, although showing many features indicating a full understanding of the situation in which they found themselves, are treated by him instrumentally, like slaves (which becomes definitely ironic if we realize that that Abraham Lincoln made a major contribution to the abolition of slavery and the liberation of the black people of the United States.) So the question that has always bothered the author – what is the meaning of the word “human”? What does it mean to be human?
Do everything for the sake of sick love
It is worth paying attention to the high aesthetics of the latest edition. The novel is bound in a hard, canvas-like cover, covered with a paper dust jacket. The whole is decorated with illustrations by a recognized Polish artist – Wojciech Siudmak, an internationally recognized representative of the fantastic realism trend. Unfortunately, in the text itself, a trained eye can catch single typos and correction errors. Well, it happens to the best.
We Can Build You is a novel representative of the work of one of the most interesting science fiction writers. Stuffy, schizophrenic, although quite optimistic in its pronunciation, can be a good complement to the library of genre lovers. However, I would not recommend it to people for whom it would be the first contact with Philip K. Dick’s prose – in this case it may turn out to be almost too hermetic to encourage further exploration of the writer’s imagination.
