Honestly a disappointing and often infuriating read. We Can Remember It For You Wholesale is Volume Five of Philip K Dick’s collected short stories, covering 25 stories from the mid-60s to early 80s, and is also the title of the most famous story in the collection. I had read this before maybe seven years ago and have been carrying it around since. As part of my effort to weed out my fiction shelves, I figured I would re-read it and see if it was a keeper. It is not often that I have such a diametrically opposed experience on the second go-round of reading a book, as my opinions tend to be pretty stable. However, I guess I’ve grown up or living through this period of history has changed me or something, because this did not age well.
In the interest of transparency with my viewpoint going into this, I have read barely any PKD and this is really my only exposure to him. But I have read a lot of sci-fi, especially from this time period, and this was for the most part the same slog through terrible depictions of women and the kind of blathering stories you get from people doing way too many drugs (he was on a lot of amphetamines during this period and had a nervous breakdown). I think the amount of speed he did was not helpful for his writing, because a lot of these stories are not comprehensible or even very interesting. He also is obsessed with snuff, which he apparently used a lot himself — at least five stories here have snuff as a plot point, which was distracting.
The introduction talks about PKD as a writer of ideas, which he definitely had a lot of. You can tell he was a fountain of story ideas. But they are not aging well (the idea that we would have computers run by punch cards/tapes in particular), and the complete sameness of the narrative viewpoint and opinion was boring and repetitive. This book is 400 pages and I really should have given up when I wanted to halfway through. I also will say that I did some research on him after and apparently he tried to push his third wife off a cliff in their car and then had her involuntarily committed, so this also didn’t help my bad opinion of his portrayal of women throughout the book — all the wives in here are shrews who torment men.
I know that he is a very famous part of the field and well-regarded, but his work is not for me. SF/F as a field has made such strides forward and has so many more interesting and nuanced stories that there is little reason to read stuff like this that re-treads the same ground over and over again. Especially when it is so retrogressive and full of boring, morally bankrupt portrayals of the world. “We Can Remember It For You Wholesale” is the best story in the collection and it holds up. “Faith of Our Fathers” stuck with me from the last time I read this, so it is memorable. The rest are a mishmash. Go read Bradbury or Asimov if you want classic SF, or give Sherri Tepper or Octavia Butler a try. Or almost anyone! Not recommended.