Review: A Reality Course
Rating: 5 out of 5
Date: 12 24, 2012
"Total Recall" or "We Can Remember It for You Wholesale," a short story by Philip K. Dick, challenges you to separate the story-true from the story-false.  Douglas Quail wants to go to Mars; his wife thinks he's obsessed; since he's a clerk with no plausible way to go, he settles for a simulated trip, which can be embedded in his memory--or so the story begins.  It develops into something quite different.  The fantastic and the story-real merge.  Why does the author go to these lengths, creating layers of the real and unreal within the story, and what is the effect?  It seems the author wants to deal with questions about freedom and authority in a world of his own creation, I suppose to get a better handle on it.  I think the effect is that a deeper impression, in this case of tyranny, stamps itself on the psyche, both on the conscious and the unconscious.