{See: A. LINCOLN, SIMULACRUM}

1st.EDITION:

OTHER ENGLISH EDITIONS:

FOREIGN EDITIONS:

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 Presses Poche, pb, ?, ?, ?,?(?){tr. into French as LE BAL DES SCHIZOS}

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 Like, pb, ISBN 951-578-576-6, 1998, 240pp, ? (Tommi Hanninen){tr. into Finnish as RAKENNAMME SINUT}

{For the best bibliographic info in French goto: www.multimania.com/ggoullet/pkdick/frames.html Thanks for the cover pix, Gilles}

FDO-2  3
Pick your fave PKD Novel  "#1. WE CAN BUILD YOU. The only one of PKD's novels, in my opinion, which completely integrates the unhinged sci-fi elements of his most famous and popular works with the literary quality and depth of his "mainstream" novels. Like all his work, the generosity of his spirit invades every corner, and illuminates every character sympathetically. Yet the attention to the day-to-day details, the gentle exposition of the characters' introspective struggles, set against the backdrop of simulacrums-as-plot-device, make this book enormously charming. Restraint paid off big, too, in that there are so few elements which are sf-ish, whereas in most of PKD's SF novels and stories, the wealth of gizmos, left-handed technobabble, and curiously consistent technologies intrudes slightly on the immediacy of the reader's identification with the characters. And as icing on this cake, the Lincoln simulacrum's behaviour and dialogue are unequivocally delightful. {Andy Watson}

TDC 42

(PKD:) Oh, I'll tell you another {Wollheim} story. He was late in paying me for WE CAN BUILD YOU. I was really broke; matter of fact, I was starving to death. My wife and I were living in Southern California, sharing one can of Chunky Chicken soup a day; that was all we could afford. So I wrote Wollheim this piteous letter: "Dear Don: I must tell you that I have been forced to give up writing science fiction and am going to work at Disneyland as one of the janitors who sweeps things up. The reason is because you have not sent me the money due me on WE CAN BUILD YOU. And you know what his answer was? "Why don't you come to New York and go on Welfare?" (general hilarity) He said that! Talk about your heart of stone! Shit!

TDC 43

(PKD:) I wrote that novel before Disney even proposed to build the Lincoln simulacrum. I couldn't sell it for years and years and years and years. I wrote it while I was trying to fuse my mainstream stuff with my sciene fiction stuff, so its not quite science fiction, in the usual sense of the word. Finally Ted White, who knew of the existence of the manuscript, asked for it so he could publish it in a magazine. Ted added a final chapter to it, because -- as is well known -- writers are incapable of writing their own books. (explosive laughter on our part; Phil deadpans the whole routine with perect sincerity) If it wasn't for kindly editors, who are your best friends, who'll help you out by adding another chapter, or removing one here or there, or turning one inside out, or changing all the names, or whatever, you'd never have gotten off the ground. Naturally I was very indebted to Ted White, and I let him know. The way I let him know was that when Wollheim published the book, I told Wollheim to remove the final chapter. So one day I ran into Ted White, and he said, "Do you know what they did to our book?" I says, "I know exactly what they did to 'our book', Ted. They took the 'our' out of 'our book'!" {note: See A.Lincoln, Simulacrum for Ted White's reply -- Lord RC}

I have seen the Lincoln simulacrum down there. I cut out the notice in the newspaper that Disney planned to build the Lincoln simulacrum and pasted it up on the wall of my study. I remember doing that because the novel had already been written. So he built it and I went to Disneyland and looked at the goddam thing...

TSR 211

Within the universe there exist fierce cold things, which I have given the name "machines" to. Their behavior frightens me, especially it imitates human behavior so well that I get the uncomfortable sense that these things are trying to pass themselves off as humans but are not. I call them "androids," which is my own way of using that word. By "android" I do not mean a sincere attempt to create in the laboratory a human being (as we saw in the excellent TV film The Questor Tapes). I mean a thing somehow generated to deceive us in a cruel way, to cause us to think it to be one of ourselves. These creatures are among us, although morphologically they do not differ from us; we must not posit a difference of essence, but a difference of behavior. In my science fiction I write about about them constantly. Sometimes they themselves do not know they are androids. Like Rachel Rosen, they can be pretty but somehow lack something; or, like Pris in WE CAN BUILD YOU, they can be absolutely born of a human womb and even desing androids -- the Abraham Lincoln one in that book -- and themselves be without warmth; they then fall within the clinical entity "schizoid," which means lacking proper feeling. I am sure we mean the same thing here, with the emphasis on the word "thing." A human being without the proper empathy or feeling is the same as an android built so as to lack it, either by design or mistake. We mean, basically, someone who does not care about the fate which his fellow living creatures fall victim to; he stands detached, a spectator, acting out by his indifference John Donne's theorem that "No man is an island," but giving that theorem a twist: that which is a mental and a moral island is not a man.

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