We Can Build You

Name: We Can Build You
Brand: Recorded Books
Availability: InStock
Author: Philip K. Dick
ISBN: 9798894864891

Author: Philip K. Dick

Narrator: David Aaron Baker

Unabridged: 9 hr 2 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Publisher: Recorded Books

Published: 09/30/2025

Categories: Fiction, Science Fiction

Synopsis

In this lyrical and moving novel, Philip K. Dick tells a story of toxic love and compassionate robots. When Louis Rosen’s electronic organ company builds a pitch-perfect robotic replica of Abraham Lincoln, they are pulled into the orbit of a shady businessman, who is looking to use Lincoln for his own profit. Meanwhile, Rosen seeks Lincoln’s advice as he woos a woman incapable of understanding human emotions—someone who may be even more robotic than Lincoln’s replica.

About Philip K. Dick

Over a writing career that spanned three decades, PHILIP K. DICK (1928–1982) published 36 science fiction novels and 121 short stories in which he explored the essence of what makes man human and the dangers of centralized power. Toward the end of his life, his work turned to deeply personal, metaphysical questions concerning the nature of God. Eleven novels and short stories have been adapted to film, notably Blade Runner (based on Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?), Total Recall, Minority Report, and A Scanner Darkly, as well as television's The Man in the High Castle. The recipient of critical acclaim and numerous awards throughout his career, including the Hugo and John W. Campbell awards, Dick was inducted into the Science Fiction Hall of Fame in 2005, and between 2007 and 2009, the Library of America published a selection of his novels in three volumes. His work has been translated into more than twenty-five languages.

Reviews

Goodreads review by David on September 04, 2025

My 25th PKD novel. One of his least-talked-about books but an honest-to-God surprise! It's like no other book of his (I've read enough of his work by now to spot when something stands out as a thing wildly apart). More than likely it's his funniest work; unexpectedly accessible, it careens from goof......more

Goodreads review by Bradley on July 31, 2019

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 relat......more

Goodreads review by Maureen on October 31, 2011

We Can Build You, as a novel, is perhaps as schizophrenic as its characters are. It begins by introducing the narrator, Louis Rosen, co-owner of a not entirely legitimate distributor of organ and spinet pianos with Maury Rock aka Frauenzimmer. Maury's daughter, eighteen-year old Pris has recently be......more

Goodreads review by Jim on July 26, 2015

This Philip K. Dick novel is like two different novels cobbled together. Except, it works. Partly because the "heroine" of We Can Build You -- Pris Frauenzimmer -- is probably the most repulsively attractive heroine I have ever seen in a Dick novel. It is Pris who holds the two parts together, first......more

Goodreads review by Dan on September 04, 2025

Aside from reading Ubik and having watched Bladerunner God knows how many times, my exposure to Philp K. Dick’s work has been limited. This 1962 story, published as a book in 1972, is set in the then futuristic 1980s, and imagines a society not much different than we see in Bladerunner, where androi......more