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Of course, things got a little mixed-up when they actually went to implant the memories. Evidently Quail had, in fact, been a secret agent who took a secret mission to Mars to assassinate a rather important political figure there. Now his cover had been blown. The government didn't want him remembering what he'd done and now they had to kill him. A chase ensued that resulted in negotiations between him and the agency - he would agree to have more desirable memories planted in his mind - memories of being something of an intergalactic Don Juan having sex with various things all over the galaxy - and in exchange for willingly having these memories implanted in his mind to erase the very real ones he'd had of being on Mars as a secret agent, the agency wouldn't kill him.

The punchline for the story is remarkably clever. The memory implant company is searching Quail's brain for fantasies that would be strong enough to override Quail's subconscious desire to go back to Mars. It had been that longing for Mars that had triggered the dreams of Mars in the first place. If they merely wiped out the memories he already had, those dreams would return and he'd go straight back to the memory implant business and the whole headache would start all over again. Thus, they had to find fantasies strong enough to override those desires to go back to Mars.

They found them in the form of a childhood fantasy that has mid-'60s overtones of a Dick version of E.T. Quail's childhood fantasy is running across tiny aliens that had come to take over the Earth. His boyhood fantasy is that he shows them kindness and they agree to spare the earth because it is home to such a remarkable boy. So long as he is alive, they will not invade the earth. It's kind of a twisted childhood fantasy, but it's a very powerful one, so they agree to use it. They go to implant the childhood fantasy, only to discover that it is actually a repressed memory of childhood. He actually did save the world from alien invasion as a child, and the alien race that spared the earth because of him caused him to forget those memories. It’s kind of a cute ending to a story that toys with reality a bit more than the initial premise. It's a clever funhouse of a story, and it’s not hard to see why it got nominated for a Nebula.

The Original Movie


The long and torturous process of working on the screenplay for this film has been relatively well-documented. The film hard spent the better part of a decade in development hell. It passed through a lot of different creative hands in those times. Legendary filmmaker David Cronenberg went on record as saying the producer Ronald Shusett had told him that a version of the script he had been working on looked too much like the short story. When Cronenberg told him that he was under the impression that they were doing an adaptation, Shusett told Cronenberg that he wanted "Raiders of the Lost Ark on Mars."

The final screenplay was credited to Shusett, Dan O'Bannon (with whom he'd worked on Alien) and Gary Goldman (who also wrote Big Trouble in Little China.) The film opens more or less in a kind of sync with the original story and mutates gradually from there based on little plot elements that get implanted into the narrative pretty early.

We see the Martian landscape of the main character’s dreams transform into a nightmare for some reason. Also, his name is Quaid in the movie rather than the Quail of the short story. Quail wakes up in bed with Sharon Stone. This is perfectly okay and nothing to be ashamed of, because he is Arnold Schwarzenegger. Once again we have a bureaucratic Philip K. Dick hero played by an overly masculine Hollywood star, but this is only the second time that's ever happened as of 1990, so it's still a novelty. There's an establishing conversation between the mesomorphic Quaid and his beautiful wife as they talk about how he would like to go to Mars. She's concerned with his obsession with the red planet. He heads off to work and sees the commercial for the memory implanting company. He's interested in the idea of going to them to go have memories implanted. Quaid brings the subject up with a co-worker, who warns him against it. In appreciation of the male lead’s physical prowess, we see him working with a jackhammer in a rock quarry rather than a menial office job. After work he goes to get some more information about the procedure.

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