I Hope I Shall Arrive Soon

I Hope I Shall Arrive Soon is the title of a short story by Philip K. Dick. (The short story was first published in Playboy in December 1980, under the title Frozen Journey.)

In the story, a man (Victor Kemmings) regains consciousness during a failed attempt at cryosleep on board a spaceship. The ship's artificial intelligence cannot repair the malfunction and cannot wake him, so Kemmings is doomed to remain conscious but paralyzed through the ship's entire ten-year-long journey. To maintain his sanity, the AI replays Kemmings's memories to him. But when this goes awry, the ship AI asks Kemmings what he wants most -- and the answer is that Kemming wants the trip to be over and to arrive at his new home. The AI constructs such a scenario for Kemming and plays it to him over and over for the next ten years. When the ship finally arrives at its destination, Kemming cannot accept reality and believes his arrival to be yet another construction.

Like most of Philip K. Dick's work, I Hope I Shall Arrive Soon involves a questioning of what it is to be human and of what reality is. The story also has a theme of guilt, as the memories of the passenger are spoiled by the guilt he retains about his past actions.


Works of Philip K. Dick
Novels
1950s
  • Gather Yourselves Together
  • Voices from the Street
  • Vulcan's Hammer
  • Dr. Futurity
  • The Cosmic Puppets
  • Solar Lottery
  • Mary and the Giant
  • The World Jones Made
  • Eye in the Sky
  • The Man Who Japed
  • A Time for George Stavros
  • Pilgrim on the Hill
  • The Broken Bubble
  • Puttering About in a Small Land
  • Nicholas and the Higs
  • Time Out of Joint
  • In Milton Lumky Territory
  • Confessions of a Crap Artist
1960s
  • The Man Whose Teeth Were All Exactly Alike
  • Humpty Dumpty in Oakland
  • The Man in the High Castle
  • We Can Build You
  • Martian Time-Slip
  • Dr. Bloodmoney, or How We Got Along After the Bomb
  • The Game-Players of Titan
  • The Simulacra
  • The Crack in Space
  • Now Wait for Last Year
  • Clans of the Alphane Moon
  • The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch
  • The Zap Gun
  • The Penultimate Truth
  • Deus Irae
  • The Unteleported Man
  • The Ganymede Takeover
  • Counter-Clock World
  • Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?
  • Nick and the Glimmung
  • Ubik
  • Galactic Pot-Healer
  • A Maze of Death
  • Our Friends from Frolix 8
1970s
  • Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said
  • A Scanner Darkly
  • Radio Free Albemuth
1980s
  • VALIS
  • The Divine Invasion
  • The Transmigration of Timothy Archer
  • The Owl in Daylight
Short story collections
1950s
  • A Handful of Darkness
  • The Variable Man
1960s
  • The Preserving Machine
1970s
  • The Book of Philip K. Dick
  • The Best of Philip K. Dick
1980s
  • The Golden Man
  • Robots, Androids, and Mechanical Oddities
  • I Hope I Shall Arrive Soon
  • The Collected Stories of Philip K. Dick
  • Beyond Lies the Wub
  • The Dark Haired Girl
  • The Father-Thing
  • Second Variety
1990s
  • The Days of Perky Pat
  • The Little Black Box
  • The Short Happy Life of the Brown Oxford
  • We Can Remember It for You Wholesale
  • The Minority Report
  • Second Variety
  • The Eye of the Sibyl
  • The Philip K. Dick Reader
2000s
  • Minority Report
  • Selected Stories of Philip K. Dick
  • Paycheck
  • Vintage PKD
Short stories
1950s
  • "Beyond Lies the Wub"
  • "The Gun"
  • "The Skull"
  • "The Little Movement"
  • "The Defenders"
  • "Mr. Spaceship"
  • "Piper in the Woods"
  • "Roog"
  • "The Infinities"
  • "Second Variety"
  • "The World She Wanted"
  • "Colony"
  • "The Cookie Lady"
  • "Impostor"
  • "Martians Come in Clouds"
  • "Paycheck"
  • "The Preserving Machine"
  • "The Cosmic Poachers"
  • "Expendable"
  • "The Indefatigable Frog"
  • "The Commuter"
  • "Out in the Garden"
  • "The Great C"
  • "The King of the Elves"
  • "The Trouble with Bubbles"
  • "The Variable Man"
  • "The Impossible Planet"
  • "Planet for Transients"
  • "Some Kinds of Life"
  • "The Builder"
  • "The Hanging Stranger"
  • "Project: Earth"
  • "The Eyes Have It"
  • "Tony and the Beetles"
  • "Prize Ship"
  • "Beyond the Door"
  • "The Crystal Crypt"
  • "A Present for Pat"
  • "The Short Happy Life of the Brown Oxford"
  • "The Golden Man"
  • "James P. Crow"
  • "Prominent Author"
  • "Small Town"
  • "Survey Team"
  • "Sales Pitch"
  • "Time Pawn"
  • "Breakfast at Twilight"
  • "The Crawlers"
  • "Of Withered Apples"
  • "Exhibit Piece"
  • "Adjustment Team"
  • "Shell Game"
  • "Meddler"
  • "Souvenir"
  • "A World of Talent"
  • "The Last of the Masters"
  • "Progeny"
  • "Upon the Dull Earth"
  • "The Father-thing"
  • "Strange Eden"
  • "Jon's World"
  • "The Turning Wheel"
  • "Foster, You're Dead!"
  • "Human Is"
  • "War Veteran"
  • "Captive Market"
  • "Nanny"
  • "The Hood Maker"
  • "The Chromium Fence"
  • "Service Call"
  • "A Surface Raid"
  • "The Mold of Yancy"
  • "Autofac"
  • "Psi-man Heal My Child!"
  • "The Minority Report"
  • "To Serve the Master"
  • "Pay for the Printer"
  • "A Glass of Darkness"
  • "The Unreconstructed M"
  • "Misadjustment"
  • "Null-O"
  • "Explorers We"
  • "Recall Mechanism"
  • "Fair Game"
  • "War Game"
1960s
  • "All We Marsmen"
  • "Stand-by"
  • "What'll We Do with Ragland Park?"
  • "The Days of Perky Pat"
  • "If There Were No Benny Cemoli"
  • "Waterspider"
  • "Novelty Act"
  • "Oh, to Be a Blobel!"
  • "The War with the Fnools"
  • "What the Dead Men Say"
  • "Orpheus with Clay Feet"
  • "Cantata 140"
  • "A Game of Unchance"
  • "The Little Black Box"
  • "Precious Artifact"
  • "The Unteleported Man"
  • "Retreat Syndrome"
  • "Project Plowshare"
  • "We Can Remember It for You Wholesale"
  • "Holy Quarrel"
  • "Your Appointment Will Be Yesterday"
  • "Return Match"
  • "Faith of Our Fathers"
  • "Not by Its Cover"
  • "The Story to End All Stories"
  • "The Electric Ant"
  • "A. Lincoln, Simulacrum"
1970s
  • "The Pre-persons"
  • "A Little Something for Us Tempunauts"
  • "The Exit Door Leads In"
1980s
  • "Chains of Air, Web of Aethyr"
  • "Rautavaara's Case"
  • "I Hope I Shall Arrive Soon"
  • "The Alien Mind"
  • "Strange Memories of Death"
  • "Cadbury, the Beaver Who Lacked"
  • "The Day Mr. Computer Fell Out of Its Tree"
  • "The Eye of the Sibyl"
  • "Stability"
  • "Goodbye, Vincent"
Film and television adaptations
1980s
  • Blade Runner
1990s
  • Total Recall
  • Confessions d'un Barjo
  • Screamers
  • Total Recall 2070
2000s
  • Impostor
  • Minority Report
  • Paycheck
  • A Scanner Darkly
  • Next
  • Screamers: The Hunting
2010s
  • Radio Free Albemuth
  • The Adjustment Bureau
  • Total Recall
  • King of the Elves

Famous quotes containing the words hope and/or arrive:

    “Your kind doesn’t just kill men. You murder their spirits, you strangle their last breath of hope and freedom, so that you, the chosen few, can rule your slaves in ease and luxury. You’re a sadist just like the others, Heiser, with no resource but violence and no feeling but fear, the kind you’re feeling now. You’re drowning, Heiser, drowning in the ocean of blood around this barren little island you call the New Order.”
    —Curtis Siodmak (1902–1988)

    “The time passes so quickly during these full and active middle years that most people arrive at the end of middle age and the beginning of later maturity with surprise and a sense of having finished the journey while they were still preparing to commence it.”
    —Robert Havighurst (20th century)