We Can Build You
First British edition, 1977
We Can Build You (1972) is a science fiction novel by Philip K. Dick about a small electronics company that begins building android replicas of historical figures, and the obsessive relationship between its narrator and the schizophrenic designer who makes them possible. This is the first British edition, a paperback original published by Fontana Books. Somewhat uncommon.
Softcover. First British Edition. Fontana Books, 614616 (70p). Cover art by Peter Tybus. London: Fontana Books, 1977. Levack 47f. Wintz & Hyde SF37.6. ISBN: 0006146163. #10986.
Fine.
Softcover. First British Edition. Fontana Books, 614616 (70p). Cover art by Peter Tybus. London: Fontana Books, 1977. Levack 47f. Wintz & Hyde SF37.6. ISBN: 0006146163. #10986.
Fine.
Additional Details
We Can Build You was written in 1962 and first appeared in serialized form as "A. Lincoln, Simulacrum" in Amazing Stories (1969-70) before being published as a DAW Books paperback original in 1972. The novel is set in what was then the near future of 1982 and follows Louis Rosen, co-owner of a small Oregon company that sells electronic organs door-to-door with modest success. When his partner's daughter Pris Frauenzimmer, a gifted and deeply unstable young designer, develops a process for building simulacra, lifelike androids modeled on historical figures, the company pivots. Their first two creations are Edwin M. Stanton and Abraham Lincoln.
The Stanton simulacrum adjusts to contemporary life with something like pragmatic ease. The Lincoln is more troubling. He is melancholic, prone to withdrawal, and preoccupied with questions that no one around him can answer. Whether his behavior reflects genuine psychological residue of the historical Lincoln, a flaw in his construction, or simply Dick's own preoccupations with depression and authenticity is left categorically unclear.
Louis's relationship with Pris is the novel's real center. He is obsessively in love with her in a way she neither reciprocates nor particularly acknowledges, and as her mental health deteriorates and she attaches herself to a powerful lunar industrialist, Louis's grip on his own reality begins to loosen. His eventual hospitalization at the Kasanin Clinic and the hallucinatory inner life he constructs there, a complete imagined domestic future with Pris, read less like science fiction than like a clinical portrait of unrequited obsession tipping into psychosis.
The novel is sometimes described as a companion piece to Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, and the two books share character of Pris Frauenzimmer. But We Can Build You is less concerned with what androids are than with what it means to love something that cannot love you back, whether that something is a person, a simulacrum, or a manufactured version of the past.
The Stanton simulacrum adjusts to contemporary life with something like pragmatic ease. The Lincoln is more troubling. He is melancholic, prone to withdrawal, and preoccupied with questions that no one around him can answer. Whether his behavior reflects genuine psychological residue of the historical Lincoln, a flaw in his construction, or simply Dick's own preoccupations with depression and authenticity is left categorically unclear.
Louis's relationship with Pris is the novel's real center. He is obsessively in love with her in a way she neither reciprocates nor particularly acknowledges, and as her mental health deteriorates and she attaches herself to a powerful lunar industrialist, Louis's grip on his own reality begins to loosen. His eventual hospitalization at the Kasanin Clinic and the hallucinatory inner life he constructs there, a complete imagined domestic future with Pris, read less like science fiction than like a clinical portrait of unrequited obsession tipping into psychosis.
The novel is sometimes described as a companion piece to Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, and the two books share character of Pris Frauenzimmer. But We Can Build You is less concerned with what androids are than with what it means to love something that cannot love you back, whether that something is a person, a simulacrum, or a manufactured version of the past.
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