Short Story Review: Total Recall by Philip K. Dick

Total Recall by Philip K. Dick (Kindle e-book)
Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2012
e-book list price: .99
(Story originally published in 1966)

Even though Harcourt is packaging this story with the title "Total Recall", if you are a sci-fi fan you know the actual name of this story is "We Can Remember It For You Wholesale". It was originally published in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction way back in 1966. It has subsequently been adapted into two movies in 1990 and 2012. I loved the Ahnuld film from the 90s but was pretty meh about the new Colin Farrell film. So having never read the original short story upon which both were based, I was curious to see Dick's original intention. Although you can find this story in many Dick anthologies, I purchased the Kindle version from Amazon for 99 cents, which is a decent price for something you can read in about 30 minutes.

Douglas Quail wants to go to Mars. Really bad. You might even say he's obsessed with it. Even when he sleeps, he dreams of the red planet. His wife, Kirsten, is getting sick of it. Both of them know that only government agents and important officials are  privileged enough to visit Mars. Doug is just a "miserable little salaried employee", a minor government cog.

But Doug does find a way to visit Mars. He goes to REKAL, a company that specializes in implanting memories so vivid that they are BETTER than real ones. Unlike real memories, REKAL implants never fade or get lost over time. Doug decides to go with the Interplan secret agent package but trouble soon develops as the REKAL employees discover that, unknown even to himself, Doug really IS an Interplan secret agent that has already been to Mars!

I've had very little exposure to Philip K. Dick's original work. Besides this story, the only thing I've read is Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, the basis of the movie Blade Runner. I wasn't really impressed by that book.  From what I remember, the writing was lazy, the dialogue cliched, and the action pretty nonexistent. Total Recall is not much of an improvement upon those first impressions.

You can tell Dick was raised on 1930s and 40s goofy pulp sci-fi with his use of adjectival ray guns and non-sensical props. Kinda hilarious that Doug is still using a typewriter and he has a "tele transmitter" implanted inside his skull that allows his enemies to monitor his thoughts. One of the worst props shows up at the end of the story which makes an eye roll a requirement if you want to read this story to its ridiculous conclusion. It's not quite as ludicrous as Colin Farell getting into a fistfight with a 65-year-old senior citizen at the end of the newest Total Recall movie but....actually, its probably equal in ludicrousness.

And yes, we have a glaring cliche in this story when the narrator describes the receptionist at REKAL as having "melon-shaped breasts". It just seems like there's always a one-liner from Dick that makes me cringe. A sentence or phrase that is so much the brand of a hack that I cannot take this author seriously. In Sheep it was a character threatening to snap Deckard's "pencil neck".

Dick seems to have good ideas for stories, just like George Lucas, but the actual writing and fleshing out of those stories was probably something best left to others. So far, I've enjoyed the movie adaptations of Philip K Dick's prose far more than his actual writings. Maybe someday that will change as I read more of his stuff. But for right now, I have no idea why there is so much mystique about this author. He seems like a pretty average sci-fi writer who seemed eternally entrapped in the primitive sci-fi of his youth.

My Grade: D