perfect | Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?

Dreaming in Binary: you'll either love it or hate it | Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? | Philip K. Dick

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	• Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? Philip K. Dick Del Rey, 1996 - 256 pages average customer review:based on 211 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

It's okay.

Not the best stuff but not the worst. World would be less without it though.

perfect

This book arrived well before the expected date and was a great buy. I will be buying from them again.

Dreaming in Binary: you'll either love it or hate it

I remember reading this 15 years ago and not caring for it, but on a whim I dusted it off and gave it another go. I'm glad I did.

It's no secret that this book is the inspirational source for the movie Blade Runner. I suspect most people will read this having already seen movie, and will quite likely be let down by the book -- which almost certainly was my original reaction. This is understandable, but to actually "like" this book it is necessary to avoid this trap and basically forget the movie and just read the book as a stand-alone story. The movie takes large chunks of the book's plot, but uses none of the themes (or at best just touches on them lightly.) Likewise, things that are throw-away lines in the book are major plot points in the movie, and vice-versa.

The plot of this book is almost secondary to it's multi-textured, interwoven themes: empathy, the value of life, and what it is to be "human." PKD raises some interesting points and makes some interesting observations, but the answers to these concepts are ultimately left to the reader.

PKD's writing style does take some getting used to, and Electric Sheep is a very good example of this: his prose is rushed, (deliberately) unpolished, and often descriptively spartain. Since he wrote this in 1969, aspects of this may also seem dated: it's set in a post-WW3 dystopia with a still-active Soviet Union lurking in the background. I can forgive all of these, but others might not be so lenient.

My advice is to try to get past any "obvious" stumbling blocks and just give it a go.

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Valuing Fake Animals Above Fake Humans

Androids, of course, became Blade Runner, and I was happy to see how faithful the film was to the book, at least to the main plotline. But of course, the film left out half the story: the animals. In this postwar environment, most of the animals in the world are dead from fallout. All the surviving humans need to have a pet, and if they can't afford a real live one they make due with ersatz electrics. Deckard is bummed because he has an electric sheep on his roof, and he's anxious to kill the latest batch of escaped androids to use the bounty money to buy a real animal. This valuation of the lives of the fake animals over the fake humans, very sophisticated life forms, different but very nearly the equal of man, provides a kind of Clockwork Orange ethical overtone to the story. One little tidbit I enjoyed (and I love the way many Dick books take place in the Bay Area) was, the repairers of electric animals pretend to be real veterinarians, with their white vans and coats. The Van Ness Animal Hospital, one of these services, is where we used to take our cat.

Of course, there are supernatural forces at play in this book that one has come to expect from the best of Dick. The weirdest is the world religion of Mercerism, and the empathy boxes (left behind by alien visitors?) which allow the decimated and dysfunctional survivors of Earth to fuse into the figure of Mercer, as he climbs the same hill over and over, and rocks come flying out of nowhere to strike him. The participants of the experience find real wounds from the rocks on their bodies when they reemerge into their living rooms.

There is one eerie scene that is explained away in the same flawed manner that Lou Stathis complained about in his foreword to Dick's earlier Time Out of Joint, when he observed that "...nightmares do not follow real-world logic, and the irrational can never be satisfactorily explained by the rational." In this scene, the fake cops come to arrest Deckard and take him to the big main police station south-of-market, the baroque Mission Street Hall of Justice, which Deckard has never heard-of before. This scene scared the hell out of me: it's like Deckard has been suddenly projected into a parallel universe. "The Hall of Justice," Rick said, "is north, on Lombard."

"That's the old Hall of Justice," Officer Crams said. "The new one is on Mission. That old building, it's disintegrating; it's a ruin. Nobody's used that for years." The explanation, an android conspiracy, is a letdown, but that was the only flaw I found in this exemplary book.

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Competing Future Religions, Animal Life Extinction, Android Pets & More

Androids is my favorite sci-fi book of all time & is the inspiration for one of the best movies of all time, Blade Runner. The movie & book are very different. Androids deals with future competing religions, the extinction of all animal life & humanities' use of android pets, mood enhancing technologies & other aspects that Blade Runner does not even touch. However the "bad guy" Roy's character (played by Rutger Hower) is much more nuanced in the film; we genuinely empathize with this complex character, even while he is committing unspeakable acts. Finally, the cinematography & music of Bladerunner are unmatched.

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"The most consistently brilliant science fiction writer in the world."
--John Brunner
THE INSPIRATION FOR BLADERUNNER. . .
Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? was published in 1968. Grim and foreboding, even today it is a masterpiece ahead of its time.
By 2021, the World War had killed millions, driving entire species into extinction and sending mankind off-planet. Those who remained coveted any living creature, and for people who couldn't afford one, companies built incredibly realistic simulacrae: horses, birds, cats, sheep. . .
They even built humans.
Emigrees to Mars received androids so sophisticated it was impossible to tell them from true men or women. Fearful of the havoc these artificial humans could wreak, the government banned them from Earth. But when androids didn't want to be identified, they just blended in.
Rick Deckard was an officially sanctioned bounty hunter whose job was to find rogue androids, and to retire them. But cornered, androids tended to fight back, with deadly results.
"[Dick] sees all the sparkling and terrifying possibilities. . . that other authors shy away from."
--Paul Williams
Rolling Stone

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