Straws pulled at random - the book.

The only merit this book has is that it has PKD written on the cover. I can't imagine anyone giving this a second thought if that wasn't the case. ( )

This is kind of a delightful, oddball story

Dick is up to his usual psych tricks: A robot Abe Lincoln, with more soul than its schizophrenic teen creator, appears as deus ex machina.

Yet another classic PKD. :) A lot of great humor in this one, too. Lincoln and Edward Stanton, brought back to life and running a corporation that sells simulacra, android re-creations of real people? Well, that's hardly everything in this novel.

Most of it knocks the ball out of the park about relationships, madness, and a misdiagnosis. I really think it's not Schizophrenia he's talking about, but Autism. Or in the spectrum. And that's all kinds of cool, too, when it comes to modern novels. But of course, PKD has always jumped feet-first in that particular pool.

Interestingly enough, this novel deals with the pre-Do Androids Dream Of Electric Sheep time, with Simulacra JUST getting on the market, getting that push to take on and prepare colonies off Earth, and EVEN Mood Organs. :) So much of that is hilarious and/or disturbing when you think about how things go later on.

This is definitely one of the livelier and light PKD novels out there, focusing more on doomed relationships and fantasies than most. Kinda fitting, considering the theme. Are we just machines? Are we slaves to our passions, or are we making new slaves for our passions? Even funnier when you consider that LINCOLN himself has become a slave of sorts. :)

( )

Philip K. Dick is one of my favourite authors of all time, but it's fair to say that We Can Build You doesn't represent his best work. There's little to no action and it re-uses tropes that have been dealt with better elsewhere, such as simulacra, artifical intelligence, a lunar colony, small business management, the nature of consciousness. It also leans heavily on a rather disturbing sub-plot about the main character's sexual obsession with his business partner's barely-legal and mentally unstable daughter. ( )