What is the title of the Philip K. Dick short story adapted into the film 'Total Recall'?

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The Philip K. Dick short story adapted into the film Total Recall is "We Can Remember It for You Wholesale." First published in April 1966, the story follows Douglas Quail, an ordinary office worker who longs to visit Mars. He goes to Rekal Incorporated, a company that implants artificial memories, but the procedure begins uncovering evidence that his imagined adventure may actually be a suppressed memory.

The 1990 film, directed by Paul Verhoeven and starring Arnold Schwarzenegger, keeps the story's central ideas about memory, identity, Mars, and uncertainty about reality. However, it greatly expands the plot into an action thriller. The film's protagonist is renamed Douglas Quaid, and much of the movie's conspiracy, combat, and political setting was created for the screenplay rather than taken directly from Dick's short fiction.

A common mix-up is "Minority Report," another Philip K. Dick story that later became a film. "Impostor" and "Second Variety" are also Dick titles, but neither was the source of Total Recall.

Source: Wikipedia · fact-checked Aug. 2026

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