If I could pick one book that deserves a sequel, it would be Philip K. Dick’s 1966 novelette We Can Remember It for You Wholesale, the story that inspired the movie Total Recall. The original story leaves you with one of the great science fiction questions of all time: what if the memories you think are fake turn out to be real, and the life you thought you lived was never your real life at all?
The 1990 movie expanded the story into an action adventure on Mars, but it also left audiences debating the same question more than thirty-five years later: was Douglas Quaid really a secret agent whose memories had been erased, or was the entire adventure nothing more than the fantasy vacation he paid Rekall to implant in his mind?
A sequel could finally explore what happened after the events on Mars. Did Quaid return to Earth as a hero? Did he ever learn the full truth about who he was before his memory was erased? Or perhaps the biggest twist of all would be discovering that even after everything he experienced, he was still sitting in the Rekall chair living out the final moments of a purchased fantasy.
The best science fiction stories don’t just entertain us; they make us question reality itself. Few stories have done that better than Philip K. Dick’s original tale. More than sixty years after it was written and more than three decades after the movie was released, people are still debating what really happened. To me, that sounds like a story with at least one more chapter left to tell.
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