Book Review: Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?

Philip K. Dick
1968
Nominations: Nebula
Rating: ★ ★ ★ ★ –

It is truly a pleasure to be able to review another book by the brain-twisting, reality-suspending Philip K. Dick.

This novel is probably one of his most famous since it was, as the front cover of my 1996 paperback version says, “the inspiration for the movie Blade Runner.” The book was really just that, however—an inspiration. No one should read Dick’s novel expecting it to be a direct parallel to Ridley Scott’s 1982 movie.
   
Both share the same basic plot skeleton: in a technologically advanced Los Angeles of the near future, protagonist Rick Deckard is hired by the L.A. police department to hunt down a group of dangerous androids who have escaped from an off-world colony.
   
However, the meat covering the book’s and movie’s respective skeletons is almost completely different. Which, as I will explain later, is not necessarily a bad thing; both are superb in their own ways.

The novel is set in the 2020s (which would have been pretty far in the future for Dick in 1968). A nuclear war has killed off most of the world’s animals and the radioactive dust that remains is slowly killing everything that was able to survive the war itself. Most of the planet is vacant, desolate desert. All of the humans who could afford to have fled to off-Earth colonies elsewhere in the Solar System; the people who remain eke out their livings while trying to avoid sterilization and death.
   
To cope with the pervasive atmosphere of despair, most people own Penfield mood organs, which offer hundreds of different settings. The machines allow them to be in complete control of their feelings at all times, whether they want to feel happy, or calm, or raunchy, or even profoundly depressed.

Most people also subscribe to Mercerism, the new masochistic religion of the times. Special devices let them connect their brains into the brain of the religion’s founder, Wilbur Mercer. They stay connected to him and to each other for hours, seeing what he sees, which mainly involves him trudging steadily uphill on a path in a desert, often being pelted with rocks by from unseen persecutors.

On an Earth with hardly any animals, owning a pet is the ultimate status symbol. But because the scarcity of real flesh-and-blood animals has driven their prices through the roof, most people can only afford mechanical copies. No one wants their neighbors to know they can’t afford a real animal, so corporations are making money hand over fist by building increasingly realistic robotic animals that can usually pass for the real thing.

Robot technology has not stopped at animals, however. Corporations are now also able to build incredibly highly-functioning androids as well. In fact, the latest models, the Nexus-6s, are indistinguishable from humans without sophisticated empathy testing. Androids are used as slave labor on off-Earth colonies, but they are illegal on Earth. Every once in a while a slave android will escape, make it to Earth, and try to blend in.

This is where our main character, Rick Deckard, comes in. At the beginning of the book, Deckard gets an emergency assignment: find and kill six escaped Nexus-6s who are believed to be hiding out in L.A. They are clever and very dangerous; one of them has already put his superior in the hospital.

Deckard and his wife Iran have so far only been able to afford a mechanical sheep. Bounty hunting is an extremely risky job, but he thinks that with the staggering reward he’d get from bagging six androids—which would be an industry record—he’ll be able to afford a much higher-status animal—maybe even a real one. Maybe even a Percheron. His wife, who is so depressed that she actually regularly sets her mood organ for more depression, urges him on.

The police chief suggests that Deckard first fly to Seattle to talk to Rosen Associates, the company that makes the Nexus-6s, so he can see a sample before he goes after them. There, he meets Rachael Rosen, a staffer who at first is presented as a relative of the company’s founder but who he learns through testing is actually one of the Nexus-6s herself.

This throws him for a loop, because he would have sworn she was human; and it’s even more disturbing to him because she didn’t know she was a robot either.

Back in L.A., Deckard methodically finds and kills the first three of his six androids. Each one is a different challenge, but the most difficult are the ones who try to befuddle him by making him doubt his entire sense of reality. They set up their own false, staffed, police station and they try to convince him that all his memories are fake, that he’s not working for the police at all, that they are the real police, and that perhaps he is an android himself. They are very convincing and he just about believes them (as do you). It is very anxiety producing—and classic Philip K. Dick.

Rachael Rosen, who is very upset upon learning she is an android, begs Deckard for help and they end up sleeping together. This makes him falter and start having doubts about his ability to kill androids and even to see them as non-people. It turns out, though, that Rosen was just trying to distract him in the hopes that he won’t go after one of the remaining androids—the one named Pris—who is the same model as her.

Roy Batty!

Eventually, the final three androids—Roy Batty, Irmgard Batty, and Pris Stratton—worm their way into the confidence, and thence the apartment, of J.R. Isadore, a sterilized, mentally deficient “special” person who lives in a vacant building in the suburbs. They hole up there until Deckard tracks them down and brings on the final showdown.

The book has just about everything: a clever premise, a gripping plot, and a sympathetic main character. It takes place in a creative but still realistic setting that you can picture yourself in, and Dick provides plenty of colorful emotional and physical details to ground you in the book’s world. His writing style itself is clear and straightforward, which is good because his ideas can be pretty twisty.

The movie Blade Runner is really, really, really good also. And the fact is that Blade Runner would probably not have been as great as it is if it had followed the book any more closely. Indeed, in spite of what an ingenious and prolific writer Dick was, there are actually only a couple movies made out of his books that are very good.

Dick’s best writing is about the questions that obsessed him—questions about the nature of reality and humanity that have a lot of potential for cerebral terror: who am I? Is what I perceive real? If someone insists my reality is wrong, should I trust them or my memories? If an android has been given feelings and memories to make it think it is human, is it human? How do I know I’m not an android that has been programmed to think I am human?

These are scary concepts that work well on the page and in the brain but seem to be difficult to translate to the screen. Usually—Total Recall aside—they don’t make for successful popular films.

Blade Runner’s screenwriters were smart to cut out Deckard’s wife, the Penfield mood organ, the Mercerist religion, and the robotic pets. And they were smart to trim down the number of androids and to make them a lot more scary and formidable. All of these changes made the movie into a different, but equally good, animal—a thrilling, gritty, futuristic film noir.