We Can Remember It For You Wholesale

A novelette first published in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction in April 1966, about a clerk who buys an implanted memory of a trip to Mars he never took, and finds the implant colliding with memories that were already there. It was adapted as Total Recall in 1990 and remade in 2012.

Context: a16z cite “editing human memories” as one of Dick’s genuinely new ideas, and this is the story that supplies it. Short enough to read in a sitting, and it sets up the question the rest of his work keeps returning to: if the record can be written, what is left to verify it against.

Connections

• a16z Infra Reading List — the list this came from.
• a16z — the firm whose infrastructure team curates it.
• Philip K. Dick — the author.
• Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? — the other Dick work here about tests for what is genuinely yours.
• Memory — the concept the story is built on.
• Historical Futurism — the research lens.