Rating: 
(198 reviews)
Author: Philip K. Dick
Publisher: Del Rey
Book Description
“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
5 Comments
Really I don’t know what I can add that hasn’t already been said about this fantastic book. A must read for even non-sci-fi fans as it could be the book that converts you to the genre!
(This review is based on the novel as it is printed in the Library of America edition.)
Famed for being the basis of the cult movie “Blade Runner”, this novel is, in my opinion, not as good a book as the movie is as a movie. There are big differences between the two, as far as the plot is concerned, and the mood, and quite frankly, I prefer that of the movie. But to the novel itself.
If you are familiar with Dick’s style, you will not be in foreign territories here. All the features that define Dick’s prose are there. Interestingly enough, and as for his other novels that I read, I never find myself bored, and it’s always a pleasure to read Dick’s work; and that, despite the shortcomings.
If you’ve never heard of “Blade Runner” or this novel, then here is a short sum up of the basics: it’s set in the future, where humans colonise the universe, and have reached the level of technology enabling us to create androids, a sort of organic machines resembling humans. Those androids are illegal on earth and whenever some of them flee to this planet, bounty hunters are after them. The main Character of the book, Rick Deckard (named after René Descartes, the French thinker famous for his “cogito ergo sum”, or “I think therefore I am”) is one of those bounty hunters. As usual, Dick creates a very interesting dystopian world, the kind that you can’t get enough information.
The story is a lot more complicated than that, and for those who know “Blade Runner”, there are many things that you never heard of in the movie. Mercerism, to name but one. The fact that Deckard is a married man, and not much like the Deckard of the movie.
What I disliked about the novel was similar that what I dislike in every Dick novel I know of. For one, this novel has one of the worst titles in existence that I had the displeasure to lay eyes on. “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?”, I cannot think this is anything close to a good title. Dick is quite bad when it comes to naming things. One reflex he has that I cannot stand is that he somehow feels obliged to give ridiculous names to either people or companies, and it just makes the whole thing sound grotesque. In “The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch”, one big company was called “Perky Pat Layouts”; in this novel, a TV host is named “Buster Friendly”, and I won’t list the others. Or just this one more: “andy”. That is the word by which Dick has his novel call the androids. In plural form, this becomes “andys”. Not very thrilling.
The movie changed those things. “Andys” become “replicants” and “bounty hunters” become “blade runners”. All for the better, if you want my opinion. I believe the plotline of the movie to be far superior to that of the novel even though they share a lot, as would be expected. My feeling on Dick is that he crams so much material in his relatively short novels that he cannot get the best of it. Mercerism, mentioned above, is a quite obscure religion that never gets fully explained in the book, and is completely absent from the movie, and one understands why all too easily.
Another thing I think Dick is short on is descriptions. For all I remember, Dick rarely, if ever, describes much; and the result of this is that one doesn’t really see the world in which the characters evolve. If you expect visions similar to those in the movie, you will be disappointed. In Dick’s novel, Earth is being abandoned by everyone, and it’s mostly desert and gets less and less populated. Quite unlike the Earth of the movie, quite unlike the megacities people live in. I think it’s an impressive feat that the people who made “Blade Runner” based it on this book. The themes are excellent, and Dick, in my opinion, doesn’t reach the full extent of what he could have done. To name one example, the relation between creator and creature, à la Frankenstein, is entirely nonexistent in the novel, whereas it’s central in the movie.
If you love the movie, you will only get disappointed by this book if you expect it to do the movie justice; it won’t. But it’s nevertheless a good read and an interesting one with regards to the “Blade Runner” universe. It won’t be as good as the movie - that’s hard - but it is a good read, and that is why despite all my negative comments I still gave this novel 4 stars. I would recommend to people who enjoy the movie, but I’m not sure I would have enjoyed the book the same had I not known of the movie first. Yet, there definitely are good things in the book.
In this second piece found in the omnibus “Counterfeit Unrealities (contains Ubik, A Scanner Darkly, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep [aka Blade Runner], The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch),” we find ourselves working between two intertwining plot lines. One is based around Rick Deckard, a bounty hunter who “retires” escaped androids - who have killed their owners off-world in the colonies and then come to Earth to live and try to blend in. The latest model - the Nexus-6 - can only be told from humans through use of a sophisticated psychological testing mechanism that measures empathy levels; empathy being the one thing that androids quite simply lack. The other plot line revolves around J. R. Isadore, a “chickenhead” (that is to say, a man who has mutated enough that he is starting to lose his cognitive abilities, but not so much that he cannot still manage to take care of himself and serve the public in some small way). He works for the Van Ness Pet Hospital, which serves people who own electric animals. However, his day gets off to an uneven start when first he discovers another tenant in his previously empty building, and then he is given a real cat - which subsequently dies on the way in to the hospital before he even realizes it is actually alive.
Similar in theme to the previous Philip Dick novel I reviewed, this book explores the differences between reality and fantasy by probing the differences between man and machine, as shown by the differences between human and android (sometimes that line is very blurred), electric animal and real animal, and so forth. Always in the background is the constant back and forth of Mercerism vs. Buster Friendly, who always gently (and sometimes not so gently) accuses Mercer as a fraud and fake.
Please note, those who have seen “Blade Runner”; it has been years since I have seen the movie, but from what I recall - the movie is only VERY LOOSELY based upon this novel.
Nonetheless, I did find the story enjoyable; dense and difficult at times, but the interchange and interplays are always deft and intriguing. This classic bit of surreal sci-fi is not to be missed.
To me, Philip K Dick’s significance as a writer and a thinker is best described by Baudrillard, who (quote from the Wikipedia follows) “[saw him as] the ultimate articulation of hyperreality:
“It is hyperreal. It is a universe of simulation, which is something altogether different. And this is so not because Dick speaks specifically of simulacra. SF has always done so, but it has always played upon the double, on artificial replication or imaginary duplication, whereas here the double has disappeared. There is no more double; one is always already in the other world, an other world which is not another, without mirrors or projection or utopias as means for reflection. The simulation is impassable, unsurpassable, checkmated, without exteriority. We can no longer move “through the mirror” to the other side, as we could during the golden age of transcendence.”"
In plain terms, it means that the 21st century belongs not to Orwell or Huxley. It belongs to Phillip K Dick. This is how it’s going to be and this is how things, in many ways, already ARE — because this is how we already THINK. Remember that when reading this powerful and gripping novel, IMO one of Dick’s best.
Second class synthetics.
In a dystopian future androids are used by humans, and look so similar sophisticated tests have to be used to be able to tell them apart, based on functions that they are not able to perform - having children, etc.
Humans don’t allow them rights, and some of the robot people variety rebel at this - which gives people like Deckard a job, tracking down these rogues.
An investigation of racism, of course, as well as a squalid, trashed planet.
4 out of 5