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