Movie fans who read this novel will recognize some aspects in common with the cult film "Bladerunner," which as everyone knows is the film version of Philip K. Dick's "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?" I hope that by the end of this review, you will consider "We Can Build You" to be worth reading in its own right.

In some ways, this is among PKD's most science fictional work; in its first half, anyway, it concerns the impact of a technological advancement on humans of the future. Two business partners, Louis Rosen and Maury Rock, find their electronic organs less and less saleable; it seems that their major competitor has designed an organ that impacts the audience's mood, not just its sense of hearing. To survive, the partners develop an artificial human, hoping to use it in Civil War reenactments.

Things begin to go south when they attempt to interest the time's leading entrepreneur in their project. They get more complicated when one of the partners, Lou Rosen, falls in love with the other partner's schizophrenic daughter, Pris Frauenzimmer, who suddenly up and takes a job with the aforementioned leading entrepreneur and takes her father's chief engineer with her. Meantime, the artificial humans, in the shape of Edwin Stanton and Abraham Lincoln, grow more human and more interested in the business that designed them, while Rosen himself begins to wonder just how human he and Pris really are.

Before we judge the success of "We Can Build You" in itself, please note the notion of a mood organ, the lead character who finds himself in love with a woman utterly lacking in empathy, the character named Pris, the presence of artificial humans, and the question of what distinguishes an artificial human from a natural one. There's also plenty of material on the colonization of the other planets and a large, threatening commercial enterprise to contend with. Lest there was any doubt, we are indeed in "Blade Runner" territory, folks - you find each and every one of those things in the novel the movie came from, and most of them in the movie itself. However, whereas the movie "Blade Runner" concerns what makes someone human, and the novel "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?" concerns empathy and its limits, "We Can Build You" is about relationships, the constructive and the destructive.

Let's face it - if you were reading a science fiction novel by any other author, and in its first half you read about a set of vaguely threatening androids, you'd know what to expect. Surely said androids would rebel or go mad or take away our TV privileges or something, wouldn't they? Not in PKD. This time, the androids (or in the author's preferred term, the simulacra) exist primarily to help the human characters heal their psychic wounds, and to demonstrate by their comparatively humane behavior that not all humans are worth loving. In itself, that's kind of depressing, but it's not even the truly mind-boggling idea. About halfway through "We Can Build You", the simulacra and their story disappear without a trace, and Louis Rosen comes to understand that as destructive as his love for the schizophrenic Pris can be, his life is banal and totally inauthentic without her. Oy.

Claiming a close relationship between creativity and madness is nothing new, of course. You might even say that PKD's own life and career is a demonstration of that very notion, to some extent. In real life, though, things don't work out that way, as the author and his main character come to realize. This may explain why PKD set "We Can Build You" in the first person for the first of only two times in his career. Louis Rosen narrates the whole thing himself, and however much he insists that Pris is the source of warmth and light in his life, we can see quite plainly because of the first-person narration that her effect on him is destructive of his work, his mind and his soul.

The first-person narration also allows PKD to get away with including long philosophical explanations in the middle of his narration. This actually makes a kind of sense in "We Can Build You" - there's something about a depressed and troubled man explaining himself to the reader that's very touching, as it is not when a third-person narrator explains the same character's inner state from some remove. Maybe PKD should have tried first person more often for the power it gave his writing. Then again, maybe it was too painful for him to engage in. "We Can Build You" is one of only two or three PKD novels that ends with little or no hope. It's tempting to suppose that PKD - poor, struggling, hooked on amphetamines and often alone - could not face both his own life and that of his characters without putting some distance between them.

Which brings us to the place of "We Can Build You" in Philip K. Dick's body of work. Although this novel came out in 1972, PKD actually wrote it ten years earlier, between the Hugo-winning "The Man in the High Castle" and the classic "Martian Time-Slip". He couldn't sell it at the time, maybe because of its more depressing aspects, but it made a good stopgap between the tired "Our Friends from Frolix 8" and the rejuvenated "Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said". Anyone who bothers to read PKD's books in the order they were published might find "We Can Build You" a hopeful sign, just as a reminder of how powerful the author could be and would be again.

Benshlomo says, Madness doesn't really lead to transcendence, but pain might.

I know it's not highly regarded among Dick readers, but this book is very unique and different than the others. The dark and quite humorous dialogue between characters (especially Pris' character) coupled with the wisdom of the Lincoln and intensity of Stanton make for an interesting read. Some might complain that the story doesn't go anywhere, but I would argue that it's not that different from the tradition of putting ordinary characters in insane, yet objectively amusing situations. The interactions, the dialogue, the whole setup, is strangely hilairious and dark but done in a fresh style that doesn't render it the least bit recycled. A good read.

This is a transitional work between Dick's mainstream novels of the 1950s and the science fiction of the 1960s, as the science-fictional element is de-emphasized in favor of psychological themes. Written in 1962, its first book publication was not until 1972. Critics usually unfairly regard We Can Build You as an artistic failure because what seems to be the main plot of the book - the story of a company that produces simulacra, or lifelike androids of historical Civil War figures - bit by bit dissolves into exclusive focus on the narrator Louis Rosen's obsessive love for his partner's eighteen-year-old daughter, Pris Frauenzimmer. Certainly Dick will confound those expecting conventional narrative unity, for this is an experimental novel masquerading as straight science fiction. It's really kind of a Trojan horse, an sf cover on a book about desire, obsession, and madness. As Louis descends into schizophrenia, the center of interest shifts from the projection of human life on the inanimate through building simulacra, to the search for authentic human feeling within oneself.

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...

I picked this book up in the hopes of reading another great story from Phillip K. Dick, but it was really disappointing. My previous favorites from him have been "The Man in the High Castle" and "Through a Scanner Darkly". This book has plot elements, but it's really not well put together or entertaining. The main characters aren't very interesting, and the love & rejection the protagonist gets from Pris is so strange, it's almost like Dick is forcing something that had happened to him into the story. Really, would not recommend this book to anyone.