We Can Build You by Philip K. Dick

lemming · Post by **lemming** » 26 Nov 2013, 21:44

The same things some hate about Dick's writing I tend to enjoy, and they're all in this book.

For one thing, it changes focus halfway through. I can see a publisher rejecting the book because it does not follow the three-act structure - we open with questions about whether the character will save his business by marketing androids; we end by finding out whether he can save his own sanity and resolve a love-hate obsession with the androids' co-creator, the troubled, dark-haired jail bait, Pris. But to me this feels like the form reflecting the subject. Both love and madness tend to overwhelm everything; you forget all the work with which you've been distracting yourself up to that point. If you are a man, your work life, even if it's futuristic work, is only ever meaningful insofar as it can get you closer to the girl or give you an identity, so falling in love and losing your mind are really the same struggles one experiences at work, only played out more dramatically.

It's a conscious tactic in many of this writer's novels to start with a relatively straightforward SF premise only to disintegrate it and rearrange the pieces into a picture of strangeness and introspection that Dick's matter-of-fact prose always seems to be trying to describe as objectively as possible. This feeling of not being in the same novel you opened simulates the experience of either a psychotic break or an epiphany. In a famous essay Dick says as much: "I like to build universes which do fall apart. I like to see them come unglued, and I like to see how the characters in the novels cope with this problem." Even so, I think there may have been another, pragmatic reason. While he was alive Dick couldn't get his non-SF novels published, yet no matter how strange his SF novels became, his publishers seemed more confident in finding an audience for those as long as they could put a robot on the cover. Dick's workaround for this problem seems to have been creating novels that contain a few SF props superimposed on a largely contemporary setting.

Nevertheless there's a subtler SF element than the androids in this story - the perception of mental illness in the world of the novel is the same as ours to swine flu - scary, yet common and generally treatable. Schizophrenia comes up so often in conversation that characters sometimes refer to it as "'phrenia". It's an interesting projection based on the decreasing stigma about seeking therapy, and people becoming more open about discussing their psychological difficulties.

Even so if you read science fiction primarily for interesting visions of the future I don't think you'll finish this book. For me what saves it is that for all the unresolved questions at the end, Louis Rosen's emotional plot line does have a beginning, middle and end. He may break down and hallucinate but even in his fantasies about Pris he makes her aloof and emotionally unavailable, because that is part of what draws him to her. I wrote about Geoff Ryman's The Child Garden that its unpredictability made me lose interest - sometimes the more anything can happen, the more it feels like the story is about nothing. Dick takes this risk, too, especially in his obsession with unreliable narrators and the fact that almost anything described may not be real, but what keeps it grounded is that the characters are still limited by their personalities - as Dick put it in an interview, no matter how "fantastical" his fiction gets, "in the final analysis the people must be people".