WE CAN BUILD YOU
British Editions
From the back cover of the 1971 Fontana edition
We started out making electronic organs and spinets - the Frauenzimmer Piano Company. that was us. Then the bottom dropped out of the market, so we turned over to simulacra - exact reconstructions offamous personalities. We made an Abraham Lincoln, for instance - stupid, because he had ALL Lincoln's characteristics, and he wasn't about to be anybody's puppet. That was when things really started going wrong. First off, we got tangled up with Sam K. Barrows-America's most enterprising young multi-millionaire - and a plan to settle the moon with our creations. Then we got tangled up with our own identities, and reality started falling apart.
And from there on in, things just got worse...
Another masterpiece of bizarre invention from the Hugo-winning author of THE MAN IN THE HIGH CASTLE.
From the back cover of the 1986 Grafton edition
It Was as good as a real Abe Lincoln...
Or as bad, if you looked at it that way. Maybe going into simulacra production wasn't the obvious step for a firm hitherto devoted to the manufacture of electronic organs, but the organs weren't selling as well as they used to. It was a creative leap, admittedly: a creative leap suggested by Pris Frauenzimmer, and Pris had been a schizophrenic- but that didn't mean the simulacra was a bad idea. It just meant a takeover bid by a millionaire huckster, a project to colonise the Moon with fake people to keep up real estate valuesand either madness or love for Louis Rosen. Even the Federal Bureau of Mental Health couldn't tell which. . .