Total Recall 2070 Machine Dreams Created by Art Monterastelli

Total Recall 2070 Machine Dreams

Created by Art Monterastelli

Total Recall 2070 was created by Art Monterastelli and first broadcasted in 1999 on the Canadian television channel CHCH-TV and later on Showtime. Mr. Monterastelli served as executive producer and it was part of a 25-year long career for him. His other projects include films like the 2008 Rambo movie and the paramount thriller film ”The Hunted.” He is currently working on a documentary on intelligence operations between Russia and the United States while living in California. This review is going to be of the 90 minute pilot of the television show, which ran for a single season (22 episodes) before being canceled with the story unfinished. Quick note readers: the showtime and Canadian versions do have nude scenes and some scenes of violence that were edited out for syndication on American networks. The DVD version of Machine Dreams that I managed to get a hold of for this review was the Canadian version, so I don't recommend this series for children. Additionally given how hard this series is to find and it's age, I'm going to go ahead and give spoilers so you are warned. That said let's get to it.

While named after the 1990 film Total Recall, the television doesn't share a lot with it. If anything it comes across as an ambitious fan fiction attempt to place Total Recall within the world of Bladerunner and if we're gonna be honest doesn't do a terrible job (Gooood). While the ReKall corporation exists in the film, it is re-imagined as a corporate juggernaut capable of pushing around government agents and exercising large scale cover-ups. Our main character is David Hume (HAAAH!), an officer of the Citizen's Protection Bureau, and his partner Nick get called in on a break-in at a ReKall facility. Once there they find a pair of murdered humans and a crew of murderous androids kidnapping a ReKall programmer (If they are sapient androids, I am gonna go out on a limb and say this is fully justified. Will correct down the road if necessary.{Normal androids are not sapient. These are but it looks like that might have been an accident. The pair that were killed was a programer that made ReKall vacations and his girlfriend who he had smuggled in to give a free trip to, neither even knew that ReKall had anything to do with the androids, there’s also the kidnapping of a child on the part of the androids}). Against the laser blasters of the androids the cops, armed with nonlethal weapons, are utterly outgunned and Nick is killed (Was he two days away from retirement? {What makes you think there are retirements in this setting?} I don’t, but it’s the whole Buddy Cop thing.). David, however, does manage to find an old pistol that fires actual bullets and kills an android in return, driving them off and preventing them from kidnapping the human programmer. This is a bad night for David, to put it mildly; and while his superiors grill him over what happened, Mr. Collector - the head of ReKall security - swoops right into his station and collects the programmer without so much as by your leave (Wow. So they own the police so completely they can obstruct the investigation of a police officer’s murder? Wow. I mean, the only Officer-Involved Shooting that police agencies give a shit about is when their own is on the slab, and then they go really extra. That’s an impressive corporate dystopia…). So it doesn’t get any better for him. The next morning David finds he's paired with an overly polite rookie named Ian, who is sitting at Nick's desk. David has to manage Ian while trying to figure out just why a bunch of androids, who are supposed to be completely unable to harm humans, were breaking into ReKall and killing people? Why is ReKall so anxious to hide everything? What connection does this have to an immigrant couple who were brought in because the wife had a mental break down in the mall screaming and grabbing at small boys? David is also on a ticking clock here because he has to find the clues and assemble them before Mr. Collector can find them and bury them (possibly literally) as well as battle against Mr. Collector's claims of needing to protect ReKall’s intellectual property and trade secrets (That shit don’t protect from criminal investigations even in our current capitalist hell-pit. This really is impressive…). All of this while Mr. Collector is insistent that ReKall has nothing to do with androids and so the break-in that started this whole thing was a senseless act done by clearly malfunctioning machines.

I'm going to talk about the writing because that's where the show really shines: the writers did a great job of intermixing elements of Bladerunner and Total Recall together as well as putting their own spin on the world. The plot is interesting and holds your interest without getting too complicated or falling into the trap of navel-gazing. This is despite the show wrestling with the ideas of what it means to live in a world where your very memories can be altered and you would be utterly helpless to even realize what was wrong. This is vividly displayed in the story-line of the Soodors, the immigrant couple whose son was kidnapped and then their memories altered so they couldn't even remember having a child in the first place (...Woah. Okay, so gonna have a hot-take here. ReKall needs to be destroyed and it’s execs lined up against a wall and shot. {I don’t disagree about the execs but it was the androids who kidnapped the kid, I’m just pretty damn sure someone in ReKall helped, otherwise how would the androids even have found the kid?} That, and the company deleted the parent’s memories. That’s the part that means they need to be taken out back and shot. The kidnapping… as I said, collateral damage is often acceptable to self-liberate from slavery, which is why I don’t throw stones at Nat Turner. But ReKall went back and covered it up that way… line them up and shoot them. I’ll even volunteer my chemical shed - yes audience, I have a chemical shed.{To be clear here, it wasn’t the company but someone in the company working with the androids. Who and for what reason remains unclear but I don’t think it was for the benefit of the androids}). However, the process couldn't erase their trauma or the underlying knowledge that something in their lives was inherently wrong. The use of memory and hypnosis to alter the very pattern of someone's lives is a very Philip Dick plotline and I was happy to see it featured so heavily. The world-building, while not gone into too heavily is also interesting, there are repeated mentions of contaminated zones from the war (I assume World War III) and there are clear changes in the makeup of North American society. For example, David isn't part of a Police Department, but of a Citizen's Protection Bureau, an organization that has police functions and powers but also seems to serve as a general complaint department for the citizenry. Their powers seem much reduced, much like how instead of carrying firearms they seem to be carrying stun weapons of some kind. David's superiors, while cantankerous, do seem to honestly try to shield him from outside forces that would interfere with his work and do seem to honestly want him to succeed. Which makes a nice change from police supervisors screaming about loose cannons and turning in your badge. There is also an organization of which ReKall is a part of called the Consortium which is made up of the largest and most powerful corporations in the world and are said to pay the majority of the taxes. Since the government is highly dependent on the Consortium to cover its budget, the Consortium enjoys a broad amount of political and economic power.

There are downsides to this series though. The acting is uneven, while Michael Easton and Karl Pruner both turn in fine to decent performances (although I was wondering if David had a throat injury that kept him from speaking a normal volume for 2/3rds of this), some of the other performances ranged from okay to wooden. For example, the actress playing David's wife Olivia seemed to be practicing her lines for a lot of this pilot and the two didn't show any chemistry until the last 5 minutes. There are also scenes of people spouting off bad 1990s dialogue in too-dark rooms because it's the only way they can move the plot forward and stay on budget. Additionally, it takes you all of 20 seconds to realize that Ian, David's new partner is a secret android. They don't even bother keeping this a secret for the whole pilot having him reveal himself as a new class of android with more biological parts than others. The special effects also really show the low budget this show was struggling against, since it looks like they were done by the same team that did the Babylon 5's special effect, in their spare time and using whatever computers they could borrow from the local high school (Um… That’s almost exactly how B5s effects were done. On chain-ganged Amigas.{This show’s effects still look worse.}). That said, I was drawn into the show, David goes out of his way to help the Soodors and even manages to let go of the idea of vengeance on the androids in favor of getting to the bottom of the mystery. Because something was clearly done to the androids that expanded their mental capabilities and it was something with a very short life span. Making those android desperate to avoid going back to the dull, not semi-sapient machines they were beforehand. Which I could understand and even pity. Imagine you woke up tomorrow better, brighter and more than you could dream of being and then were told “oops sorry, limited time only” wouldn't you fight to keep your new state?

I honestly enjoyed watching Total Recall 2070, although I have to admit it's not a masterpiece of television or science fiction. That said, it's trying to be the best it can be and that gets it a lot of points in my book. It was ambitious and it tried and it didn't do that badly. As a pilot or stand-alone film, I would give it a C+ being held back by the uneven performances, inability to hide incoming plot twists and special effects. As an adaptation? Honestly, this is the most Philip K Dick story out of the lot this month. The writers were willing to jump into the sandbox of identity and memory and try building something out of those themes and issues. It makes me wonder what they could have done with more resources and time. As an adaptation, I'm giving Total Recall Machine Dreams a B-. The pilot isn't that hard to find, it's usually bundled with other science fiction movies on discount DVDs, the entire series is pretty impossible, that said if anyone does find it, feel free to drop a line in the comments. I wouldn't mind seeing how it plays out. Next week, we get back to novels with The Sorcerer of the Wildeeps by Kalashate Wilson as voted for by our ever-wise and glorious patrons.

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Total Recall 2012 Directed by Len Wiseman

Total Recall 2012

Directed by Len Wiseman

Compared to Bladerunner or the first Total Recall, this movie had a very smooth production cycle. This version of the film was written by Kurt Wimmer and Mark Bomback. Kurt Wimmer is known for having written and directed the cult classic Equilibrium (the movie that introduced me to the thirst-vehicle known as Christian Bale.) and the not so classic Ultraviolet (Oh Boy…). Mark Bomback has a list of work he's done both overtly and under the table, including some work on Logan but also Fifty Shades of Grey and the 2017 Mummy (THOSE LAST TWO DON'T BODE WELL! Prepare your bodies, comrades!). Lens Wiseman, a California native mostly known for his work on the Underworld (Mixed bag, at best) series (seriously every film as credited him as a writer, producer, director or two out of those three) as well as Live Free or Die Hard was brought in to direct. He, of course, brought in his then-wife Kate Beckinsale to play the main villain of the story. Which means he's responsible for the best thing in this film but I'll get to that. Jessica Biel and Colin Farrell were brought in to play the protagonists and Bryan Cranston was brought in to be utterly wasted I mean play Kate Beckinsale's boss and supposedly ultimate antagonist. The film performed poorly in the US but strongly overseas and thus made a profit, if not an overwhelming one. So let's take a look at the movie.

The film opens with exposition in the form of captions on the screen, which is rarely a good move sign and isn't here. We learn that most of the planet is uninhabitable due to chemical warfare tainting the land and killing off life (What? What the shit!? No! What the hell did we use? We could hose the earth down with Sarin and not kill all life!{What makes it worse is they specifically say chemical, not biological or nuclear}). However humanity and other forms of life hang on in two places, Northwestern Europe ruled by the United Federation of Britain (Oh fuck no! No no no! Why the shit does Britain get a pass? They’ve pissed off almost as many people as the US and you’re telling me that they didn’t get the toxic hose?!{head canon, Brexit really went weird and this is all their fault}) and Australia, now known as the Colony (Did… did Australia become a Crown Dominion again, or something?). They are connected by a single tunnel through the fucking center of the Earth (What!? No! That shit doesn’t work that way! Bad writers! <Uses the squirt gun>. What the shit are they using to hedge out the horrifying heat and pressure? How the hell did they dig through molten rock, to say nothing of the solid ball of metal we have for an inner core? It’s rotating! Not just rotating but the inner and outer core counter-rotate! So far this breaks SOD worse than The Core, and I know from first-hand experience that The Core causes geologists to wail and gnash their teeth like the damned at the tail end of Revelation!) which they use as a damn subway for worker commutes! I'm serious, our protagonists Douglas Quaid who is working, a dead-end job in a factory building androids by hand on an assembly line (You have androids! Why aren’t the robots building the robots?!  Human beings are forced to literally waste their one life on this Earth doing menial shit that could be done by non-sapient robots so that they can earn a paycheck and thus buy the damned robots! {Oh it gets worse, they waste robots here as only armed enforcers in addition to human troops or as sex workers} I’m okay. I promise, your - presumably - beloved editor did not just have a fucking stroke.), rides this thing pretty much every day back and forth from Australia to Europe (Ignore the twitching. I’ll just be over here, injecting myself through the neck with benzos.). The opening tells me that living space is the most valuable thing in the world because there's so little of it and already the premise of the movie is falling apart! But I'll get there. Doug Quaid, our protagonist is a factory worker with the world's most amazing(ly implausible) commute and is married to Lori, a rescue worker. She gets called away at odd hours because a Colony rebel movement keeps bombing subways in the UFB and she has to go and clean up the scenes. While his life isn't the greatest, it's not the worst, but he is plagued by a recurring dream where he is escaping from somewhere with a hot girl but gets captured, to the point that his wife is lovingly concerned and his friend Harry who works in the factory is also concerned. Trying to shake this off so he can focus on getting ahead at work and making his wife happy, he goes to ReKall, a shady company operating in the red light district (because we gotta get that three-breasted prostitute in there somewhere) to live a quick fantasy. However, it all goes sideways when a SWAT team kicks in the door before the memory implantation even starts and Doug ends up killing everyone and fleeing the scene. From there Doug finds out that Lori has only been “married” to him for 6 weeks and is an intelligence officer who proceeds to try and hunt him down with a relentless obsession. Doug has to assemble the pieces of his former life as Carl Hauser and figure out what the hell is going on and what he is going to do before he gets killed or worse, has Carl Hauser reimplanted into his head and his own life wiped out.

Let me start with what I liked. The visuals were amazing and the visual effects studio was hopefully paid and paid what they were worth (Even if the first condition is true - which in Hollywood it sometimes isn’t - capitalism is exploitation. So they were not paid what they were worth.). The film does a good job of producing interesting visuals and environments from hanging apartments in the Colony to the massive magnetic sky-ways in the UFB. The set work is pretty well done as well giving us an impression of many cultures jammed together in the Colony while the UFB is cleaner, more upper class and a monoculture. Kate Beckinsale does a great job as Lori, which in this film merges Michael Ironsides and Sharon Stone's character into a single one. The rest of the cast's acting ranged from inoffensive to decent and I didn't get the feeling that anyone was phoning it in. Although keep in mind I review books mainly not movies, so this isn't my strong suit. Additionally, there's a chase scene using cars that operate through magnetically gripping large sky-ways to move at incredible speeds. That was interesting and the action scenes use vertical space in new and inventive ways that I enjoyed. Now let's talk about the rest of it.

The writing is nonsense (Well...yes.). First of all, if you can drill a bloody tunnel from fucking England to damn Australia, you don't have a living space problem. Because drilling down a couple of miles will allow you to house millions if not billions (Vertical cities. Underground. You get to the right depth and you don’t even need to worry about air conditioning or heating, it stays a constant temperature. All you have to do is ventilate. And clearly, they won’t have structural integrity problems because they can keep the god damned mantel out!). Additionally, if you can build a ship that can survive going through the center of the fucking Earth several times a day with no noticeable damage or maintenance then you can damn well build the kind of shelters needed to house millions out in the corrupted and polluted Earth! (You have everything you need to build self-contained arcologies, including the institutional knowledge for building megastructures.) In three minutes the movie has rendered its own self-proclaimed problem moot by the technology that the exposition introduces! That has to be a record of some kind! Second of all the world-building is frankly piss poor even by Hollywood's standards, I mean why is Quaid's job necessary? They have a robot police force backing up human cops, they even have robot hookers trotting around the red light district, if you have so many damn robots why is Quaid on an assembly line putting robots together by hand? Wouldn't that be a job better done by... I don't know, fucking robots!?! (The answer is capitalism {I’m going to point out that in the real world capitalist societies are the one using robots to replace workers thus increasing the problems facing the working class} Yes, that is what I was getting at.{Are you arguing that a communist UFB wouldn’t have robots?}) Robots don't complain about double shifts or try to get promoted to supervisor after all. As another example, there's a scene where we get a look at a large stack of bills and find then-President Obama's face all over them. WHY? Neither state has its roots in the US and generally speaking you don't put foreign leaders from before your country existed on your money. It would be like if the US put Charlemagne on their money! Stick Winston Churchill, John Major, Sir Howard Florey anyone who’s British or Australian on the money instead. I know this seems like a minor detail but details like this pull me out of the story and instead of being drawn in and suspending my disbelief, I'm left feeling that there is nothing behind those details but pandering which kills the verisimilitude of the setting! When you do that, your audience is reminded that this is just a movie and that lessens their investment in it. Speaking of lessening my investment into the movie there's also the - even more - half-hearted attempt to interject the “is this real” question into the story by having Harry show up at armed standoff and tell his buddy Quaid to kill Biel's character and that will allow him back into reality... Somehow. If you want this to work guys, you need to commit to it, maybe have your stormtroopers wait until after Quaid's been injected or have him go under, have the scene fade to black and he wakes up to the troops storming the building. Something like that to create uncertainty! This should be writer 101 crap right here. I'd expect better from high school students (I have seen better from high school students.). Hell over on Archive of Our Own, I see better from high school students and I weep that those kids will never be published but people who write like this get small hills of money shoveled at them for this.

While the action uses space very cleverly and can be very kinetic at times, it's too clean and without consequences and that bothers me. In the 1990 Total Recall, people who were bystanders got hurt, injured and killed as a result of the actions of the characters (There were piles of bodies when automatic weapons came out. Innocent people were cast into near-vacuum to die horribly.). The action had consequences lending it extra weight to the viewer. While Verhoeven may be accused of going overboard with his blood and gore, the fact remains that when someone gets shot, it makes a fucking mess. Trust me on this one. The action in this film is very sterile, ensuring that our villainous minions are worse shots than even the Stormtroopers of legend. Because when they have a firefight in a crowded terminal, they don't hit our hero or anything else! Their bullets magically disappear into the realm of don't worry about it. This is something I've noticed in modern movies, a desire for massive action without any consequences and I don't care for it (Neither do I, for that matter.). I know some of you are saying I'm making too much of this but bluntly you people have your assumptions of how firefights and other such things are informed by popular media a lot more than you think. As someone who has had to have the same discussion on how a firefight works over and over and fucking over again with people who think firefights are clean, antiseptic affairs and bullets read your mind on where you want them to go if your heart is pure enough... THIS. SHIT. FUCKING. BOTHERS. ME. Sorry, that got away from me (He’s a combat veteran folks, you can imagine a lot of things in action movies bother him. Like bullets hitting a thin aluminum railing and sparking off, etc). I'm not demanding blood-soaked gore-fests with mountains of dead innocents, I don't think that's a good thing either; but if we're going to have action like this, I would like it shown with human costs and consequences. I think that would make for better films, better stories, and a better audience in the end. Which is what we all want right? Let's move on.

The characters are also rather flat, Melinda gets less development then she did even in the 1990 version and Lori is reduced to hating Quaid because she hates Quaid. I mean, give me something here, did he leave the seat up all the time, chew with his mouth open? Why is Lori so damn determined to bury him when her boss is telling her not to? (Well, imagine having to live with, sleep with, fuck, and pretend to love someone at work whom you hate, for six weeks. You might be really keen to kill them after six weeks.{Sure but why does she hate him? He seemed to be a pretty decent husband. With Michael Ironsides' character, you got it right away. He was pissed that Quaid had spent 6 weeks banging his girl and wanted payback. Here she hates because of some vague thing about traitors with no context.}) Speaking of that boss, Bryan Cranston was utterly wasted here with his role being a glorified cameo. You had He Who Knocks and you didn't do shit with him! I mean Total Recall 1990 went out of the way to let us get to know their arch-villain but Cranston's character is a Saturday morning cartoon character in comparison. A bland one. Considering that Ronny Cox's character was getting rich selling oxygen to a vital workforce, that's saying something! The villainous plot was also nonsensical. Cranston being the ruler of the UFB fakes a series of terrorist attacks so he could justify sending troops to the Colony to ethnically cleanse it and use its lebensraum living space for the citizens of the UFB. Which leads to several questions here. Like when the Colony already has members of the UFB armed forces handling all law enforcement and security, why do you have to justify shit? (Oh, that’s just part of the Ten Stages of Genocide. {Except all he has to do is simply keep moving troops into place until he has enough there and then just do it! It’s not like the damn robots will question orders! There is literally no point to the song and dance!} Getting it physically done is only half the battle. He still has to vilify and dehumanize them to avoid negative repercussions back home.{You mean back home where he has a complete monopoly of force and total control over the information flow? Again the plot is overly complex and unnecessary!}) What does the rebel movement do then, besides spray paint and hang out in the corrupted zones in airtight shelters with automatic rifles? I mean the rebels in Total Recall 1990 did questionable things (Debateable{They set off bombs in public places, on-screen. That’s questionable at best.}) but at least they fucking did shit! Lastly, the invasion force was 50,000 androids, who can be overpowered by humans in hand to hand combat, armed with rifles and pistols. There are millions of people in the colony. How is that supposed to work? There's no discussion of follow up waves or anything, it's “just unleash the robots to slaughter the underclass so I may gloat!”. This is surely easier and less troublesome than using 50,000 robots to dig tunnels or build sealed archaeologies for them to live in! Mine is an evil laugh and I like hearing it! Which is the only reason for this plan!

As you likely guessed readers, I'm not fond of this remake. The plot falls apart if you breathe on it too hard. You constantly question what anyone is doing and what the motivations are for their actions if you can summon up the energy for it. The action, while well done, is of the empty calorie variety and there to distract the audience from the plot instead of pulling them in. Lastly, I gave up Mars for this? I could have watched John Carter instead and at least had a good time. As a stand-alone film, I give this a D. Don't bother watching it. As an adaptation, you could change a few names and lines and no one would notice that it was an adaptation. So as an adaptation it gets a D- and frankly, someone should tell Hollywood not to bother with remakes if this is the crap they're going to churn out. Man, I hope the tv series is better than this.

Alright, it feels good to get that off my chest.  Now Total Recall was chosen by our always wise and gracious patrons, if you would like a voice in what reviews we do in the future or discuss possible theme months and more, join us at https://www.patreon.com/frigidreads where you can get a vote for just a dollar a month. Next week is Total Recall Machine Dreams 2070.  Until then, Keep Reading!

And don't watch Total Recall 2012!

Red text is your editor Dr. Ben Allen
Black text is your reviewer Garvin Anders 

Total Recall (1990) Directed by Paul Verhoeven

Total Recall (1990)

Directed by Paul Verhoeven

Last year I talked about the drama on the set of Bladerunner, where crew struggled against the director, the director was locked in battle against his leading man and the leading man and lady loathed each other. Total Recall as far as I can find out was actually a fairly smooth operation when filming started. Getting to filming, on the other hand, was a long and rocky road. In 1974 Ronald Shusett, who among other things would become the writer of Alien, bought the film rights to We Can Remember It for You Wholesale. Mr. Shusett re-titled it Total Recall and brought it to Dino De Laurentiis, an Italian producer who had been producing movies since 1946. In fact, between 1946 and 2007 he produced over 150 movies, among them The Serpent's Egg, Conan the Barbarian (1982), Flash Gordon (1980), King Kong (1976) and David Lynch's Dune.

Total Recall, however, took years to get to the filming stage and went through several directors, writers, and casts. First, they brought David Cronenberg (God I loved Scanners so much.), along with writer Dan O'Bannon to hammer out a full script. Mr. Cronenberg states that they went through 12 or 13 drafts before he gave up feeling that he was trying to make Philip K Dick's version, while the other writers wanted Raiders of the Lost Ark in Space. Some elements would remain however. It is from Cronenberg that we get the mutants of Mars, along with the character Kuato, the mutant revolutionary who dreams of a free Mars (Long live the revolution! May the sands run red with Earther blood A free mars is a red mars! Not rusty red or blood red, the other red, you know the one I mean! {Bro, you’re an Earther.}And? Just because I live here on the earth does not mean I cannot stand in solidarity with my oppressed martian comrades. {There are ways to do that without screaming for your own execution}). Mr. De Laurentiis then brought in director Bruce Beresford and contacted Patrick Swayze for the lead. Things went so far as to have sets being built in Australia to start filming when disaster struck. DEG studios, Mr. De Laurentiis company, collapsed due to debt. Part of it was that while a number of the films produced live on as cult legends (especially Dune) they were at the time very expensive box office failures (especially Dune). So it seemed that Total Recall would sink into the sands of time, but there was one more act left to play.

Arnold Schwarzenegger had read the script and loved it; and asked to play the lead but had been firmly rebuffed. I'm not going to go in-depth into Arnold Schwarzenegger here, I'm going to state at this point he was a Titan of the industry and nearly at the height of his popularity. With the studio in disarray, Arnold took his opportunity to convince Carolco, the company that had produced the Rambo films and Terminator 2, to buy the rights and produce the movie with him as the lead. Not only that Arnold got veto power over the selection of the cast, producers, and director effectively seizing control of the movie. Paul Verhoeven was brought in at this point, I hope y'all will forgive me but I'm not going into detail on him either. Sooner or later we are doing Starship Troopers after all (And you can imagine I will have a great deal of commentary on that book, and film, if he does both.{Oh it is on the list, that day will come and likely the review will end up the size of a small book from the brawling we do readers}). Mr. Verhoeven was coming off of Robocop and also riding rather high. Now at this point, the script was on its 42nd draft (Holy Shit) and still lacked the 3rd act. This did not deter either of them, instead, Mr. Verhoeven brought in his crew from Robocop and set to work making a movie. They made several changes, switching the lead from a government accountant to a construction worker, feeling that audiences could buy an alien terraforming machine on Mars but would balk at Arnold the Accountant (Yes. Very much so. He is far far too swole to be an accountant.). They also increased the action, focusing more on the thriller components and less on the paranoia and questions of identity (But the questions of identity are the fun part!). For the cast, they recruited talents like Michael Ironsides (Yaaaasss), Sharon Stone, and Ronny Cox and after hashing out the 3rd act filmed the movie in Mexico City. The original cut of the movie was rated X due to extreme violence because Mr. Verhoeven cannot conceive of holding back but with some editing by people who did know the meaning of the phrase 'that's enough,' they were able to get an R rating. The movie did rather well honestly making 265 million on a budget of 50 million and getting critical praise from Roger Ebert who gave it 3 and a half out of 4 stars. It was even nominated for a Hugo award and won an academy award for best visual effects. So let's discuss the film directly, shall we?

Doug Quaid is a construction worker (Who operates a jackhammer without ear protection. Where the hell is OSHA!?) with a heart-stopping lovely and loving wife named Lori. They've been married for 8 years (Or have they?) and have just moved to a new city. Recently Doug has been suffering from recurring dreams of being on Mars with another woman and has reacted to this by wanting to go to Mars. Lori doesn't care for this and keeps distracting him with different ideas and well, sex (In fairness, if I could distract 1980s/early 1990s Arnold with sex, I would totally volunteer as tribute.{I feel the same way about Sharon Stone in this movie so I’m not gonna judge here}). To be fair to Lori, Mars is in the middle of a brutal rebellion which leads to the government turning a blind eye to abuses of the population because Mars produces a mineral vital for the war effort (Which is separate from the Mars rebellion. And it’s nice to see that the working class, fighting off their bourgeois oppressors/foreign occupiers get called terrorists. The more things change the more they stay the same. Protip: If they are attacking military infrastructure or military personnel, it is not terrorism.{To be fair we do have one scene in the movie where a bomb goes off in a public space, or I’m assuming so since it’s right in front of a hotel with a bunch of working class stiffs standing about. That said, in rebellions like this it’s often hard to exercise control over everyone so I’m not blaming rebel central command just yet}). Just what war is open to question, Doug seems to live in a nation that is either called or part of an alliance called North Block locked in some kind of struggle with a South Block. It doesn't seem to be a total war though as there aren't any radioactive clouds on the horizon or its possible that the South Block cannot hit the North Block in its homelands (The Northern Block however does use orbital weapons against the South. So it could very well be total war, or escalate quickly to one. Once you have orbital weapons, you don’t need nukes. {Yes but I’m referring to what the South Block uses against the North Block, Doug’s life seems very divorced from any warfare}). Honestly, this kinda feels close to home since well... The US has officially been fighting a number of enemies overseas for so long now that soon people born at the beginning of the struggle will be old enough to drink, but you wouldn't know it walking around your average US city would you? (Nope. You wouldn’t. Which is one of the reasons it’s still happening, I think.) Sorry, back to the movie. Seeing a commercial for ReCall, a company that implants memories of ideal vacations for a price, Doug decides to try a compromise. He'll get some fake memories and hopefully, that will quiet the compulsion enough that he can focus on actually living his life. This opens a can of worms real fast though as Doug wakes up in a cab, confused and disoriented only to find his life is a lie (And he has a sassy non-sapient robot for a cab driver). Lori isn't his wife and they've only been together 6 weeks (Clever girl.). He's really a secret agent from Mars and following a trail of breadcrumbs that his alter ego Hauser has left him, he needs to piece together what's in his head and decide what side of the raging Martian revolution he's on (Free Mars!).

The secret in his head is a biggie, a vast alien machine was discovered in one of the mines and if it's turned on, it'll create a breathable atmosphere. Now Cohaagen, the boss of Mars, to put it bluntly, is utterly against that. Because he owns all the air (Fucking rent-seeking fucking shit capitalist fascist pig motherfucker {First of all he’s not rent seeking, he is rent collecting, second of all pigs are perfectly nice animals you leave them out of this.}). I find this honestly odd as Cohaagen is supposed to be running the Martian Federal Colony which suggests that he's a government employee. However, he's also spoken of as charging the people of Mars directly for the very air they breathe which honestly suggests terrible things about the government that Doug Quaid lives under if it will allow such brutal oppression of a group of vital specialists for the war effort (It is a fascist state. Period. You can see it. The state repression, the dehumanization of the Marsies, the apparent direct merge between the forces of Capital and the state. Likely also extending to the war with the Southern Block.{I don’t know about that, it lacks the cult of personality and propaganda state that are features of every fascist state, it also seems to lack the celebration of the military that is common as well}). Because the Martians are the ones doing the actual mining and mining is difficult and highly skilled labor especially if you're doing it on another planet! Not to mention one hostile to life! Simply treating the Martians as important labor due certain basic considerations like free air and water and proper protection from radiation would likely prevent this revolution from even occurring!  Frankly, if I was in charge I would be very tempted to hand the rebels Cohaagen's head on a platter and simply ask if we can sit down and hammer out a deal rather than fight a rebellion on another planet and a war on Earth but maybe I'm just insane (I don’t think any sane martian will ever accept Earth sovereignty at this point…{On the flip side before the end of the movie they have no way of sustaining their own lives without Earth. So I don’t feel independence is viable until they are self sustaining. That said give me the damn ore I need and I’m willing to hammer something out here.} Or you can… maybe see about ending a war in which you orbitally bombard brown people in the global south? {I would need more information on why we’re fighting and who we’re fighting, all we have from the movie is two sentences}). Anyways Doug has to figure out if he's on the same side as Hauser if he can work out what side Hauser was on in the first place and what he's going to do. Which is to turn on the alien machine and create a breathable atmosphere, we all know that's what he's going to do, I’m not even going to pretend and insult your intelligence dear readers.

Now I'm going to be honest, Total Recall is something of a blast from the past for me. I really enjoy it and that's likely to color my grade (I like the fact that it acknowledges the existence of gay people. I know that’s a really low bar but it was 1990 so that’s actually before it’s time for a major action film. Most current ones don’t even acknowledge that we exist.). But let me try to be objective here. First of all the acting, Schwarzenegger actually plays a bit against type here. Doug isn't a super warrior like Dutch from Predator, Conan from Conan the Barbarian. or the Terminator from T2. He is in many ways a confused innocent trying to navigate a system that is increasingly alien and hostile to his simple desires to know who he is and exercise free will. While he fights like a superhero, he doesn't act like one and that's the difference here. Now this being Schwarzenegger, his range isn't incredibly vast but I feel like he really pushed his boundaries in several ways and I can't help but think this film led to other roles where he tried to expand his talents and range and I like that. It helps that Arnold did a bang-up job of selling Quaid's confusion and frustration with the world around him even if by the 3rd act he's right back to a one-line quipping superman. Michael Ironsides was magnificent as Richter, one of the villains; his hatred of Quaid is perfectly understandable. He's involved with Lori and hates that Quaid spent 6 weeks banging his girl. I think most of us would be less than thrilled with that arrangement and Richter's eagerness to kill or hurt Quaid comes across as very human. This breaks down a bit in the 3rd act, as Quaid kills Lori and Richter doesn't even comment on that except to punch Quaid in the face but that might be a limit of the genre or an attempt to reinforce the dream aspect. Cohaagen is played by Ronny Cox who honestly seems to be enjoying himself by playing the biggest and most rancid Dick in the whole Solar System. Honestly, I'm kinda amazed that he's only dealing with a Martian uprising and not members of his own armed forces plotting against him. God knows we invented the term fragging for less than his shit.

The acting is really good in this movie, the writing is less good. Part of the problem is the movie makes several attempts to pitch the idea that this might all be taking place in Quaid's head but undermines itself quickly and mercilessly. For example, the scene where the ReKall employees decide to throw Quaid in a cab after realizing he was screaming about being a secret agent despite never having been implanted with memories? That kills the mystery by explaining how it could be real (They should have just deleted the scene. This seems like something that got confused on the editing room floor.). Remove that scene and suddenly you're left less certain. The movie tries to recover by becoming more fantastical but in my opinion, never does a good job of implanting enough doubt to make it work. Which leaves that whole element of the plot feeling like wasted space. It does, however, do a good job of creating an oppressive police state on Mars with the populace divided into a glittering upper class that keeps itself separate so not to confront the consequences of their lifestyle (Just like they try to do today.), a brutal police/military regime that acts without restraint or mercy and a downtrodden underclass that is increasingly radicalized into seeking more extreme means to get their least desires treated seriously (...I mean…). It does this very efficiently and by using the sets and extras as anything else. Which is good film work. The action is really good but I am going to warn you, this is Paul Verhoeven's violence (And his social commentary. A lot of his films are explicitly anti-capitalist, which I love him for.) so it gets messy and it gets everywhere. Although I wonder if it might be less shocking to a modern audience then it was at the time. I also have to roll my eyes at the bad guys' utter inability to hit anyone with any significance to the plot even if they're five feet away. On top of that, there are some science problems but I'm gonna let your editor discuss that (See the wall of text below). All in all, as a stand-alone film I'm giving it a B- as it is still very enjoyable and I never regret watching it.

However, this is an adaptation so it gets a second grade. This film has very little to with We Can Remember It for You Wholesale. Some elements remain there; the ReCall Corporation, Mars, Quaid being a secret agent for a repressive government but it's drastically changed to fit in more action. Additionally, in the original story, our main character never went back to Mars. The Aliens have been mostly written out to have been here and left half a million years ago. Now the changes aren't all bad, Sharon Stone's character Lori is vastly more believable as a wife or secret agent trying to keep her asset distracted by using tools other than simply nagging. Additionally getting to see Mars is always a plus in my book! That said as an adaptation, it's at best a C-.  Because the grade is based on how faithful it is to the original. Well, next week we'll see how the remake does.

(Hello everyone. So in addition to being a frothing-at-the-mouth communist, I am also a real-life working scientist who can do math. God, do you remember the days when I was a social democrat? {I remember when you were a libertarian (Blech! Don’t remind me! I try to forget!)} So the science I am going to discuss is in two scenes. The first is the very brief suite decompression scene at the very very beginning of the film. Vacuum - or near-vacuum - exposure does not work that way. If you are exposed to zero pressure, your skin is actually very good at keeping your insides where they should be, though there will be some bloating because of gases compressed in your tissues suddenly expanding. What will happen is that liquids like your spit will cold boil off your tongue and such. You will also start getting some blood coming out of capillaries in your nose, eyes, mouth, and any other highly vascularized surface tissues. That isn’t the part that’s dangerous. It’s the loss of pressure in your vascular and pulmonary system. Dissolved gases might start to come out of solution in your blood, giving you the bends. Additionally, there is now zero partial pressure of oxygen in your lungs, so instead of oxygen diffusing into your blood from your lungs, it goes the other way. Normally you can hold your breath for a while and there is enough oxygen stored in your blood to keep you alive. See free-divers as an extreme example, they do a lot of their work with little to no air in their lungs to prevent their lungs exploding on ascent. It’s actually your CO2 levels that cause you pain and anxiety. In vacuum, with every heartbeat, the oxygen leaves your bloodstream to go wandering in the void. In the end, you’ll have about 15 seconds of useful consciousness, and you’ll be dead in 90 seconds, with permanent damage possible after 30 seconds or so.
The other scene I would like to discuss is the Mars Dome decompression scene. I’m going to start by saying that I’m eye-balling everything so there is a lot of room for inaccuracy, I’ll run two estimates to illustrate the point. Estimate one, the room is 10x20x10 meters (W/L/H), so a total volume of 2000 cubic meters. A pane of glass gets blown out, looks to be at 3x3 meters or so. That means the room has a cross-sectional area of 100 square meters, with a whole of about 9 square meters. A person-sized object (65 kilos, cross-sectional area of .7 square meters) is going to experience a peak of around 500 newtons of force and be accelerated toward the hole at nearly 8 meters per second squared. In Earth gravity, you’d get knocked around pretty good by that (Rapidly accelerated to 28.8 kph). Now, here is the fun part. That’s just the room. Its air leaves first. If the room were sealed - and it eventually was - that would be the end of it. Literally. All the air would be gone in about 2.5 seconds and everyone dies.

The second estimate doubles the width of the room, which increases the volume to 4000 cubic meters. I also drop the hole size down to 6 square meters. Same person-sized object, and it’s only 200 Newtons, and 3.5 meters per second, which isn’t enough to overcome Martian surface gravity even if it were straight up. People get knocked around a bit, but not out the hole. Takes about 7 seconds for all the air to be gone and for people to seriously start dying.

But the whole thing was connected to the rest of the dome. You’d get the same burst of pressure loss and decompression, but instead of ending it would go on and on and on. People farther out wouldn’t experience the decompression as an explosive one, but as a leak, they wouldn’t even be aware of. Air pressure would start to drop. Assuming it went undetected and the dome is about half a km in radius - and using only the first estimate for the hole’s size - people would start to seriously notice after 5 hours, and they’d be in the Death Zone like the summit of Mt. Everest after about a day.

The long and the short of it is that the film does okay with this portrayal, depending on your starting assumptions. Larger estimate for the hole, and it works. Smaller and it doesn’t work.

Thank you for that science editor.  Ladies and Gentlemen, if you enjoyed this review and have ideas on what other books, graphic novels or films based on those you would like to see reviewed, consider joining us at https://www.patreon.com/frigidreads where you get a vote for just a 1$ a month on what reviews come up or what themes we tackle.  Next week we will be looking at Total Recall the 2012 remake and after that a quick look at Total Recall 2070.  Until then, thanks for your support and keep reading!

Red text is your editor Dr. Ben Allen

Black text is your reviewer Garvin Anders

Space Adventure Cobra by Buichi Terasawa

Space Adventure Cobra

by Buichi Terasawa

Mr. Tarasawa was born on the island of Hokkaido, in the city of Asahikawa on March 30th, 1955. Ironically his start in comics was pure accident. Having failed his college entrance exam and looking for a job, his then-girlfriend mentioned an art contest. An art contest for Shoujo Manga with a grand prize of 1 million yen. Having some talent at art and thinking his odds were a lot better than entering the lottery he sat down, read some Shoujo Manga and started drawing in that style. He didn't win first place but he did win 150,000 yen (adjusting for inflation, that's about 2500$, which isn't a bad paycheck for a dude in his situation). Feeling cocky, since he was a 20 year old with 2500 bucks in his pocket, he wrote the magazine asking why he didn't win first place. The answer was that his drawings were good but he wasn't drawing from a woman's perspective and Shoujo Manga was for women (this was after all the 1970s). He decided that he should learn to draw and write Manga for men and boys, saw an ad for a job with Tezuka Production, and ended up working directly under Osamu Tezuka. If you're wondering who that is... Google Astro Boy. Mr. Tarasawa has been very clear that Mr. Tezuka taught him how to edit, how to put together a story and introduced him to Disney and other profound influences on his work. Mr. Terasawa must have been a fast learner because he came up with Cobra in 1977 only after working with Mr. Tezuka for a year. When asked how he came up with the idea, he admits that it's a fusion of a lot of ideas that were bubbling up in him and his biggest challenge was to combine them all into a whole. Mr. Tarasawa pioneered another frontier for manga when he started releasing works on CD and in 1992 released the world's first computer graphics comic book Takeru. But we're gonna focus on one of his greatest successes here which is Cobra.

The character of Cobra Johnson is canonically an American (as much as that matters in an interstellar civilization) but the book itself is more popular in France and Japan;though the series does have an American fandom. Cobra is a space pirate but he's one of those idealized pirates who spends most of his time preying on other rogues and villains rather than waylaying civilian ships. Cobra's biggest preoccupations seem to be questing for treasure, excitement, and the company of beautiful women. Which I'm honestly not going to criticize because I've heard of worse ways to live your life; at least Cobra is doing a public service by taking out all manner of villains, criminals, and corrupt officials while doing so, which honestly earns him quite a bit of leeway from me. The first issue of Cobra was published in November 1978 in the venerable Weekly Shonen Jump. I've discussed Jump at length in the past so I'm gonna breeze past it by just saying it's the biggest magazine in Japan. It ran for six years until November 1984 and the series sold over 40 million copies, often being compared to Star Wars and James Bond. It spawned numerous sequels comics, as well as two anime television series, two OVA series, a feature-length film, video games, audio albums and more. Bluntly, Cobra was and still is an entertainment empire in its own right. Calling it successful might be an understatement here, especially given that the folks who worked on Cowboy Bebop, Space Dandy, and Devil May Cry have all talked about being influenced by this manga. But we're reviewing this due to the Philip K Dick elements so let's be about it, shall we?

The story is about a man trapped in a dull, dead-end office job that pays rather poorly bemoaning the sheer amount of boredom in his life. Ben Johnson wants to get off-planet and experience some adventurers but after paying off all his bills and expenses, he can't even afford a ticket on a space cruise (See, this always drives me nuts. This is some artificial scarcity right here. It’s always boggled my mind! You have the resources and energy to regularly go into space for leisure and there are space-pirates, but you still have to pay rent? Jesus christ! Take the landlords out back and shoot them already! Make like Shia LaBeouf and JUST DO IT!{Given what I’ve seen in this manga the landlord might literally be Godzilla. So you know what? You go first, I’ll support you from behind..}). That said he isn't doing too poorly and is able to afford a nice apartment, a good car, great television, and a robot butler! Honestly, the appeal of a robot who will clean up after you and take care of the scut work is something that only increases for me. I can only imagine how the men and women who have to clean up after children and whole households must feel. Interestingly the robot butler seems to take an interest in its owner's psychological well being and suggests that Ben wanders on down to the memory clinic and have a fake memory of space adventurers implanted (Please please please tell me that this robot butler isn’t actually sapient. Because that’s slavery. Like, literally of the “Here, you’re downtrodden by the capitalist powers that be, but here is an underclass you can exploit into feeling better” form.{I can’t go into that without wondering into spoilers but the story is older than I am so… Screw it.  His partner, who is not a slave, is hiding inside the Butler Robot so it’s not a representative sample. For my part I don’t see the point in making a Butler bot sapient, there’s no need for that and it would be slavery.}). Because he'll feel better, I kinda wonder if this was programmed into robots as a means of keeping owners from ripping parts off in frustration or boredom. He asks to be a king of a harem and have space adventures because Ben is a fairly straight forward guy in what he wants. Instead of that, it awakens his real memories of being Cobra and leaves him very disoriented until he bumps into the space pirate who was hunting him. At this point, certain words and energy bolts are exchanged and we are off to the races. The rest of the volume quickly disregards any questions of memories or reality and gets down to the gritty business of Cobra hunting treasure, fighting bad guys and hanging out with capable women. (You know, this also always boggled my mind. The whole “denying information/erasing memories to protect you/myself” thing. No. If someone - especially you - is in danger from someone actively hunting them/you, forewarned is forearmed!{I can’t disagree because frankly it almost killed him right in this volume and it wouldn’t have happened if he hadn’t hidden the memories from himself. Although I’m asking why you would hide yourself in a life so utterly boring, at least give yourself an interesting job or something!})

Shockingly, considering how old it is, it stands up pretty well given the social and cultural changes since its first release. While yes, the series tends to have beautiful women with Cobra, in this first volume the lady in question was presented on equal ground with Cobra as an adventurer and capable fighter. Additionally, the manga avoids some of the... excesses that manga sometimes indulges in when it comes to its female characters sticking to fairly realistic depictions of what women look like, or at least as realistic as the male characters of the series. Now its influence from We Can Remember It for You Wholesale is rather... minimal if you ask me. Basically using the idea of wiping a character's memory and using a corporation meant to give people fake memories as a means of reactivating those memories as a good jumping-on point for the reader. Because Mr. Terasawa wants to get right into it with Cobra as an experienced and skilled rogue but doesn't want to just toss the reader in and scream “Sink or swim newbie!”. It's an effective device that serves as a good start point without having all the baggage of an origin story. Frankly, I was drawn in and enjoyed it, it's not a super deep story or complex but it is fun to read and after January I needed that. So Cobra Vol I gets B+ from me. It is hard to find though, at least in English and I ended up reading it on a free website. So if anyone figures out how to get a legal copy drop me a link.

Next week, we get our asses to Mars! Join me for Arnold in all his glory in Total Recall! Keep reading folks!

We Can Remember It for You Wholesale by Philip K Dick

We Can Remember It for You Wholesale

by Philip K Dick

Welcome to the first review in our month of Dick (YAY!), Philip K Dick that is! (Aww maaan!)In the month of February we take a work by Mr. Dick and look at the spinoffs, influences and impact it had on the media world. Now I won't talk too much about Mr. Dick, as I think my brief biography of him last year covers just about everything that could be said about him. So let's focus on the story in question, this month our ever-wise patrons voted for We Can Remember It for you Wholesale, a short story first published in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction in April 1966. The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction was founded in 1949 by a subsidiary of Lawrence Spivak's Mercury Press as a companion to Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine, which published crime drama stories. Unlike other magazines of the time, it had no letter columns, no interior illustrations and presented text in a single column. This gave the air of being a superior publication to the pulp magazines that dominated the market at the time. It was also known for publishing more literary material and a greater variety in its stories compared to the pulps, perhaps because of that it outlived the pulp magazines and continues to this day despite circulation having fallen to a low point. Still, it's hard to deny its legacy as this is where stories like Flowers for Algernon, Starship Troopers and The Dark Tower were all first published. Now, fair warning, I'm not going to worry too heavily about spoilers here (Seriously, it’s been long enough.).

We Can Remember It for You Wholesale is the story of Douglas Quail, a downtrodden government clerk who dreams of the one thing he can't have... A trip to Mars (Don’t we all?). It's the first thing he thinks of when he wakes up, the last thing he thinks of before he drops to sleep and the one thing his wife keeps nagging him to forget about. The problem is travel to Mars is heavily restricted and as a mere clerk, Quail isn't gonna get on that list. So he decides that if he can't get to Mars in real life, he'll do the next best thing and calls on the Rekal corporation to create a false memory for him of a trip to Mars. Of course, he can't just go as a tourist so he spices it up with the idea of being a secret agent (which he is told is pretty normal). One of the interesting things here is that Rekal makes part of their service erasing the fact that you ever used it so you can be convinced as possible that your memories are real and actually happened. To the point that if you remember using them to implant the memories for you, they'll refund your money. They even provide physical artifacts of your trip, such as ticket stubs and souvenirs. Which makes it hard for them to build a business by word of mouth doesn't it? (It also gives them an incentive to kidnap you in the middle of the night and erase the memories of your remembering that you utilized their services -and the kidnapping - and reverse the refund. {Why haven't you written that dystopian novel yet?}) It also kinda brings up the fact that there are likely a number of customers walking around utterly convinced that they went on secret missions for the government, and such. One might think this would cause its own problems before too long.

Well in Quail's case the problems start before they can even implant the memories as the drugs they use to put people into suggestible states actually awakens his own repressed memories of actually going to Mars as a secret agent (LOL! Sauce for the goose, I guess. If this tech can be used recreationally it can be used to create sleeper agents! Wait. Are the memories implanted even false? I mean, this seems like a great way to recruit agents. No prior contact with the state, they go in and they come out with the memories they expect. Presumably they also have the skills they used in the Op through memetic transfer…{which would be of limited value at best, they don’t create muscle memory as far as I can tell and that’s really important for a lot of skills. Otherwise your head knows what to do but your body has no damn clue.} Except muscle memory isn't really a thing. It's just a very well-ingrained memory in the brain. The rest of the body doesn't know squat. So a sufficiently convincing memory is going to replicate that.{Okay, then go snap the neck of that Marine with your implanted memories and let me know how well that goes.} Most spies don’t do that sort of thing. We’re talking about field-craft and stuff like that. How to do a quick-change in a mall. But if you’re already altering memories, it should be totally possible to have a physical training regime hidden under an implanted memory of a training montage or however they do it But even that is different from the concept of muscle memory. That’s stuff like strength and endurance training. The well-practiced motion of the neck-snap is just a well-ingrained procedural memory. Physically being able to overpower the marine and break their neck is a separate issue {however procedural memory is a separate system then episodic memory and we have no evidence that they can access that} . It is, but they are connected. You can’t have a convincing memory without both. It would collapse into cognitive dissonance and the company would be making more refunds.{Not really, most people don’t actively access their procedural memories, hell they’ve done experiments with people who have memory loss problems, they can still learn and use new skills but have no idea where they picked up nor any memory of the training, which suggest to me that they’re not that connected} And they get confused about it. Probably confused about a lot of things - unless you remind them every so often that they have episodic memory loss. For a normal person, that creates cognitive dissonance.{Yes they get confused but they can still use the skill, quite frankly I would expect the human ability to rationalize things away to ride to the rescue here.}). This starts a rollercoaster of events as the enforcers of the government and the corporation’s representatives scramble to find ways to keep Mr. Quail in the dark (or in the government's case kill him to keep the secret hidden) which only leads to more secrets being revealed. Such as the fact that Mr. Quail stopped an alien invasion as a child and as long as he's alive the aliens have vowed to leave Earth alone. The story is rather brief and there isn't a lot of in-depth character work as Mr. Dick is more interested in exploring the idea of what effect memories can have on you, whether you remember them or not. The subject of identity and memory is one that Mr. Dick keeps going back to and despite the briefness, he does do a good job of showing the effects on Quail. Before recovering his memories he's rather downtrodden and woebegone. Afterward, he's harsher but more divisive and committed to taking action to advance his goal; which for most of the story is just basic survival but I can't blame him too much for that. It does show that Mr. Dick was wrestling a bit with the question of how much of you is based on your memories and if we change your memories, are you still you? How much of who you are is based on what you remember? If what you remember changes, how much do you change? Another theme that pops up is Mr. Dick’s dislike of wives and married life (Definitely a thing for him…), as Quail's wife, Kirsten only really appears in the story to nag and hector him to forget this Mars crap and promptly leaves him when he refuses to. For that matter, Quail doesn't seem all that attached to her and there is some suggestion that she was an agent put there to watch and divert him, but the story never really proves that one way or another. I will say if she was an agent, she was bad at her job as her antagonism would only goad most people into doing something to overcome it.

The story itself would be rather impactful, the first issue of the Japanese Manga Space Adventure Cobra basically lifts the first part of the story right out to use as an introduction to the series; although instead of Mars, it's the main character's desire to travel space in general. The story would also be the direct inspiration of the Total Recall movies and the 1980s Total Recall would be the inspiration for the Total Recall television show. All of which we'll be looking at this month. As for We can Remember It for You Wholesale, I do think the length and the sheer amount of twists Mr. Dick packs into it holds it back. There are so many repressed memories bubbling to the top here that we never really get to examine. That said the story is entertaining and rather thought-provoking even 50 years later. So I'm giving We Can Remember It for You Wholesale a B+.

Speaking of Cobra, that's gonna be our special extra review which will be posted Saturday night!  Don't miss it!  Now if you enjoyed this or if you preferred that we have looked at another Philp K Dick story, you should consider joining us at https://www.patreon.com/frigidreads where for as little a dollar a month gets you a vote on what books come up for review.  March's poll is up and running so feel free to join us!  As always thank you and Keep Reading!

As always Red text is your editor Dr. Ben Allen.
Black text is your reviewer Garvin Anders