Refinished Tu 2/8/22
This is one of my ancient paperbacks that according to the flyleaf I bought at 'Books On Belmont' on Fr 2/5/93. I think this was a bookstore in Chicago, but I'm not really sure. The note implies that I read the novel, but I have no recollection and this is one of my favorite PK Dick books.
A piano/mood organ/spinet company begins making simulacrum (robots). Who do they pick to replicate? Edwin M. Stanton, Abraham Lincoln, John Wilkes Booth.
Nine out of ten people are under treatment for serious mental health issues and many are in government sponsored mental health facilities.
From the book's site on GoodReads:
"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."
Customer Reviews:
"This is definitely one of the livelier and light PKD novels out there, focusing more on doomed relationships and fantasies than most. Kinda fitting, considering the theme. Are we just machines? Are we slaves to our passions, or are we making new slaves for our passions? Even funnier when you consider that LINCOLN himself has become a slave of sorts."
""We Can Build You" takes place in the distant future of the 1980's. Dick seldom bothered setting stories far enough into the future that any of the scientific marvels he works into his plots might be even vaguely possible.) Louis Rosen works for Maury Rock in a shady sales business. They run ads in small-town newspapers announcing the local repossession of a piano or electronic organ, and they are ready to make a deal if it saves shipping. They do pretty well, having survived one Better Business Bureau investigation, but business is drying up. Maury and his engineer have decided instead to go into the simulacra business, creating human simulacra so lifelike they easily pass as the real McCoy, or in this case the real Edwin M. Stanton, Abraham Lincoln's Secretary of State. They have Lincoln himself in the works.
One quarter of the American population is schizophrenic and spends time in government-run facilities. A small number of citizens are radiation mutants -- Louis's younger brother has his face upside down on his head. Thomas C. Barrow is an entrepreneur who needs to unload some lunar real estate. Pris is a beautiful, recovering schizophrenic and Maury's daughter. Louis's love of Pris is driving him insane."
"Although Philip K. Dick's 28th sci-fi novel, "We Can Build You," was first published in book form as a 95-cent DAW paperback in July 1972, it had actually been written a good decade before, and first saw the light of day under the title "A. Lincoln, Simulacrum" in the November '69 and January '70 issues of "Amazing Stories." As revealed by Dick biographer Lawrence Sutin, the book was in part inspired by the centennial of the Civil War and by a simulation of Abraham Lincoln that Phil had recently seen in Disneyland. In the novel, we meet a pair of businessmen in Ontario, Oregon--Maury Frauenzimmer and (our narrator) Louis Rosen--who sell pianos and electric organs and who are about to branch out into a new line of endeavor: mechanical "simulacra" (think: robots) of various Civil War figures. When their Lincoln and Edwin M. Stanton creations come to the attention of Trump-like real estate developer Sam K. Barrows, a plot is hatched to start sending simulacra to the newly developed moon, as a lure for future settlers. But things get a tad complicated, when Louis falls for the dubious charms of Maury's mentally unstable daughter, Pris, and the mechanical creations start evincing more sanity and compassion than their creators....
To my great surprise, "We Can Build You" turns out to be a very sweet, sad, insightful and amusing Dick book; quite lovely, really. It is a comparative rarity in the Dick canon in that it is told in the first person, although Louis becomes an increasingly problematic source of information as the novel proceeds. The book FEELS different from many of Dick's others, perhaps for that reason, although many of the author's pet tropes--cigars, German words, classical music, drugs, the slippery nature of "reality," Cheyenne, Wyoming (of all places!), insanity, divorce and suicide--are again trotted out. The book has loads of excellent, naturalistic dialogue, and the relationship between the two Jewish partners is a touching one. The story, in truth, almost feels as if it could have been written by, oh, Robert Heinlein, with its near future (1982) setting and simply written style; almost, but not quite. The book grows increasingly strange and unsettling toward its conclusion (Phil Dickian, I believe the expression is), as the thrust of the plot veers away from the sci-fi elements and decidedly toward the realm of the mentally disturbed; "I, Robot" meets "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest." Phil's novel has some typically wonderful imaginative touches, such as Louis' mutant brother with his upside-down face, the U.S. president having been married 41 times (36 more than Phil would attain to!), and the intravenous birth-control injections. Pris, grating and obnoxious as she is, yet remains a marvelously complex character; Sutin calls her Dick's "most intense exploration of his 'dark-haired girl' obsession." An 18-year-old ex-schizophrenic, she is certainly an unusual object of adoration for the 33-year-old Rosen; still, they do make for a dynamic, feisty couple. And the discussion that the mechanical Lincoln has with Barrows, regarding what makes a man a man and a machine a machine...well, one might have to wait another 15 years, till the second-season "Star Trek: The Next Generation" episode "The Measure of a Man," to hear a more compelling argument regarding the rights of a mechanical construct.
"We Can Build You," likable as it is, is hardly a perfect Dick novel. Several plot threads just peter out, and even the central story line involving the simulacra is left hanging in midair. Phil makes a few slips in his book, too (Lincoln was 31 in 1840, not 29; Attis was a Phrygian god, not a goddess), although he seems to have taken especial care with his general prose here; it is more mature and well crafted than in many earlier books. In all, kind of a special addition to the Dick canon, and one that I actually found pretty moving. Way to go, Phil!"
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