Science Fiction: DO ANDROIDS DREAM OF ELECTRIC SHEEP?

THE BARE FACTS

Title: Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?
Author: Philip K. Dick
Publisher: Del Rey
Date of Publication: 1968
Pages: 216
Grade That Means Nothing Coming From Me: B+

SO BASICALLY, IT’S ABOUT…
A bounty hunter who tracks down renegade androids on an abandoned Earth is forced to consider the implications of an increasingly blurry line between natural and artificial life.

WHY’D YOU WANNA READ THAT?
Clair had a copy lying around the house, and I’ve been putting off reading the second of the three books about New York City that I got for Christmas. Plus, it’s been several years since I last saw Blade Runner, the cinematic version of the book, Blade Runner. And finally, reading Philip K. Dick is always an excellent way to take your brain and use it as a jai-alai ball.

AND HOW’D THAT WORK OUT FOR YOU?
It’s always tricky to read a book after you’ve seen the movie it inspired. Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? differs from Blade Runner in several important respects, particularly as regards the perception of what is real. But the book is a snappy read, and as long as you can put Harrison Ford out of your mind, it stands on its own.

Dick is a difficult writer, in no small part because the things he’s writing about are…well, oblique. He is remembered for saying, “Reality is the only thing that, when you stop believing in it, doesn’t go away.” His works are obsessed with the nature of reality, the great difficulty in telling the difference between what is real and what is not real, and the struggle to cope either way. So it becomes terribly hard to take anything you read at face value. Everything becomes subtext. There was a spate of movies a short while back which all played with the audience’s expectation of reality, and that made for a dizzying time at the cinema. Well, Dick was way ahead of the curve on blowing reality to kingdom come. So that’s good information to have, going in.

This does add a whole new layer to the reading experience because you can never be sure what things are intentional holes in the fabric of reality and what things are just lazy or bad writing. Consider that a character in this book, a man who is poisoned by the radioactive atmosphere on earth and, as a result, is so brain-damaged that he is often tagged with the unflattering sobriquet of “chickenhead,” goes on to utter what must be one of the most extraordinary sentences in the whole of American literature: “If I hadn’t failed that IQ test I wouldn’t be reduced to this ignominious task with its attendant emotional by-products.” If meant as foreshadowing or subtext, the potential is unrealized. And as irony, the expectations are muddled. Instead, it just sits there, reminding you that you can’t trust anything anybody says about anybody in this book, least of all the omniscient narrator.

And yet, I can’t escape the unsettling (and possibly heretical) notion that some of the writing in this book is really sloppy. Dick often seems in a hurry to get out the next idea, and the plot rolls on in a hurry. The core idea – that there is something inherently human about being able to feel empathy for something or someone else – is a fascinating one, and fits neatly with one of Dick’s central themes, the nature of inhumanity. But the story races through the hero’s encounters with every character, human and android, tossing them aside when through in a mad race to get to the next one. The theme just hangs on for dear life.

SHOULD I READ THIS?
This is not a happy book. Everyone’s motives are subject to question, the future is decidedly bleak, and it is hard to imagine a more beleaguered hero than Rick Deckard. But everything you read doesn’t have to be happy, does it? That’s what sitcoms are for. No, you read a book like this because it is a classic of the genre, and because it illustrates how vital a sense of decency and humanity is to survival in a cruel and uncertain universe. So if you’re up for it, it’s a very interesting journey.

ONE MORE THING…
The paperback edition I read was actually retitled Blade Runner, to tie-in more obviously with the motion picture adaptation (the original title lives on in parentheses). I mention this only because it is possible that if you go looking for a copy of this book, this might be the title under which it will appear. Nevertheless, Dick went to a lot of trouble to come up with a title, and it served just fine for the first fourteen years of publication, and as far as I’m concerned, that’s what the book is called. So there.

Shane Wilson is a writer and contributing editor to The Greenroom, and writes the blog Last Wilson Testaments.