Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?

Philip K. Dick
1968

Introduction

The importance of Philip Kindred Dick may never be fully assessed or accepted by mainstream analysts of English literature. The reason is simply that Dick's chosen genre, science fiction, has little standing with academic critics. In addition, Dick's fiction can be incredibly difficult to grapple with. As Robert Scholes and Eric S. Rabkin noted in their Science Fiction: History, Science, Vision, "His work is not easy to discuss, since it does not fall neatly into a few books of exceptional achievement and a larger body of lesser works. All his books offer ideas, situations, and passages of considerable interest. None quite achieves that seamless perfection of form that constitutes one form of literary excellence." Nevertheless, Dick is widely regarded as a master of his chosen medium and through more than one hundred short stories, some fifty novels (mostly science fiction), many essays, and lectures, he has created a cult following around the world. Most people know him as the writer behind the epoch setting 1982 film Blade Runner. Sadly, few outside the science fiction community have read the more complex original work that formed the basis for the film, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?

In this novel, Dick furthers his exploration of his staple obsessions: What is reality? What does it mean to be human in a digital, mechanized world? Where, if anywhere, does one draw a line between the value of real and artificial life? Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? takes place on a post-nuclear apocalyptic Earth, where eight androids —artificially constructed humanoid robots—have recently arrived after killing their human masters on Mars. Androids are not allowed on Earth and Mercer, the religious cult figure of the book, has declared that killers must be killed. The increasing difficulty of distinguishing androids from humans disturbs Rick Deckard, a bounty hunter called in to "retire" the fugitives. In a world where animal life is prized so highly that people buy artificial sheep to tend, why should androids be treated any differently? In examining these questions, the novel provides a brilliant pause for reflection on the meaning of human life and humanity's responsibility for the environment it is so determined to destroy.

Author Biography

Son of Joseph Edgar Dick, a government employee, and his wife Dorothy Kindred, Philip K. Dick was born in Chicago in 1928. He lived most of his life in California, however, and spent his life commenting on America and encouraging Americans to break through to a better, less strife-filled reality. A music lover, Dick worked as an announcer on a classical music station, KSMO, in 1947, and worked in a record store from 1948 to 1952. In 1950 he attended the University of California at Berkeley, but dropped out because the University's required ROTC courses conflicted with his antiwar convictions. Meanwhile, he had begun writing, and in 1952 sold his first story, "Roog," to the Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. In the same year, Planet Stories published his more well-known short story "Beyond Lies the Wub."

In 1953, Dick published twenty-eight short stories, and another twenty-eight followed in 1954. After the success of Solar Lottery in 1955, he focused mainly on science fiction novels. In 1962, he won the Hugo Award for The Man in the High Castle, an "alternate reality" novel in which the United States has lost World War II and has been split by the Germans and Japanese. He was most prolific during the years 1964 to 1969, when he published sixteen volumes; Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? was part of this peak. In 1974, the author claimed to have had a mystical experience during which a "transcendentally rational mind" inhabited his consciousness and straightened out his life. This led him to explore religious themes in the novels VALIS (1981), The Divine Invasion (1981), and The Transmigration of Timothy Archer (1982).

During his lifetime, Dick was active in the antiwar, anti-abortion, and animal rights movements. He was also involved with drug rehabilitation programs, both out of concern for others and from personal experience. Like many artists of his generation, Dick viewed drug use as a tool for breaking through the reality of the everyday world and freeing the creative spirit. Drug use, Dick said, allowed him to experience as different a reality as possible and, therefore, to believe not only in alternate dystopic worlds but that a better world could be created. His 1965 novel The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch explored issues of drug use and reality in its focus on a hallucinogen that never seems to wear off. Dick recognized, however, the toll that drug use had taken on him and others. He suffered pancreatic damage and the use of amphetamines resulted in high blood pressure, which eventually led to the stroke which killed him.

Dick died from heart failure after a stroke in March of 1982, soon after the release of Blade Runner. He was survived by five ex-wives and three children: Laura, Isolde, and Christopher. While Dick also wrote mainstream fiction—two novels of 1950s America, Mary and the Giant (1987) and The Broken Bubble (1988), were published posthumously—his greatest successes were within the genre that permitted him to explore questions of reality to the fullest. "My major preoccupation," Dick said, "is to question, 'What is reality?" As the author wrote in an afterword to The Golden Man: "SF is a field of rebellion, against accepted ideas, institutions, against all that is. In my writing I even question the universe; wonder out loud if it is real, and wonder out loud if all of us are real."

Plot Summary

The Situation

Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? takes place in the year 1992, after World War Terminus has spread a cloud of radioactive dust across the globe. Many plant and animal species are extinct, and many of the surviving humans have emigrated to colonies on Mars. The remaining humans are divided between regulars and "specials," people who are either too stupid or too affected by radiation to be allowed to reproduce. As a result of these combined factors, cities are underpopulated and ownership of animals is considered both a status symbol and a sign of righteous empathy. Both real and imitation animals are expensive, with price lists updated monthly. In demand by Martian colonists are androids, manufactured to be as much like humans as possible, both in flesh and in emotion. Colonists are offered custom designed androids when they emigrate, and the androids serve as slaves. Discontented androids can escape from servitude by killing their masters and then returning to Earth to hide. Bounty hunters from Earth's various police forces are sent to locate these escapees and "retire" them. As the androids have become more human-like, retiring them has become more and more like killing.

The novel opens in the apartment of bounty hunter Rick Deckard and his wife, Iran. As he leaves for work, she tries to decide what mood to "dial up" for herself with their Penfield mood enhancing machine. Going to his car on the roof, Deckard stops to feed his electronic sheep. He takes a moment to admire his neighbor's real, living, horse. Upon hearing that the horse is pregnant, Rick's frustration surfaces and he admits to his neighbor that his sheep is false.

At work, his superior explains Deckard's new mission to him: eight androids have escaped from Mars, and San Francisco's lead bounty hunter, Dave Holden, has been shot down after retiring two. Deckard's first step is to go the androids' manufacturer, Rosen Association, to learn about this newest, most realistic model, the Nexus-6. The company's president, Eldon Rosen, doubts the accuracy of the "Voigt-Kampff" empathy test that the police use to distinguish androids from humans. His niece, Rachael, takes the test, and when it concludes that she is not human they assume that the test is flawed. The Rosens then attempt to bribe Deckard by offering him a real owl. Following a hunch, Deckard asks one last question that proves that his test results were accurate: Rachael Rosen is indeed an android.

Alternating with Deckard's story, the novel follows the day of John "J. R." Isidore, a "special" laborer with a low I.Q. who works for a veterinary clinic that cares for artificial animals. Isidore is a devotee of Wilbur Mercer, the religious figure that most people, including the Deckards, believe in. They relate to Mercer via "empathy boxes": they watch video images of him climbing a mountain, pelted with stones by skeptics, and when a stone hits Mercer the viewers who have real empathy for him will also bruise or bleed. Isidore is also a fan of Buster Friendly, the cheerful show business personality who somehow hosts talk shows on both radio and television simultaneously for twenty-three hours a day. On this morning, Isidore comes across a strange woman, Pris Stratton, in one of the empty apartments in his building. She is mysteriously cold and factual, but the idea that she is an android does not occur to Isidore, both because he is desperately lonely and because of his limited mental capacity. Later that day, Isidore picks up a cat for repair and it expires in his van. Only later does he discover it was actually a living creature.

The Hunt

Deckard is assigned to work with a Soviet bounty hunter named Kadalyi while hunting the android named Max Polokov, who ambushed Dave Holden and put him in the hospital. Almost immediately after they meet, Deckard realizes that Kadalyi is Polokov, and retires him. The next android on his list is an opera singer, Luba Luft; he listens to her and is surprised at the quality of her voice. "Perhaps the better she functions, the better singer she is, the more I am needed," he muses. When Deckard interviews her at the opera house, she accuses him of being a sex criminal, and he is amused when she calls the police, certain that they will support him. The policeman who answers her call, though, is unfamiliar, and he takes Deckard to a police station that is not the Hall of Justice that he knows.

The investigating officer at this station, Inspector Garland, is the next name on Deckard's list of androids to retire. He tells Deckard that the bounty hunter in this parallel police force, Phil Resch, is also an android, but that he does not know it. When tests prove that Polokov was an android, Resch leaves to get equipment to test Garland. Garland pulls a laser when Resch returns, and Resch retires Garland in turn. He then goes with Deckard to the art museum, where they apprehend Luba Luft and retire her. The coolness with which Resch destroys androids seems to support Garland's claim that Resch is an android himself, but the test Deckard gives him proves that he is not. Deckard is disgusted with Resch's emotionless killing and how it reflects his own lack of empathy in dealing with androids. To affirm his humanity, he stops at the store and puts a down payment on an expensive live animal, a goat.

Deckard wants time to rest, and at home he uses the empathy machine on impulse. While using it, Mercer tells him "there is no salvation" and that he will always be "required to do wrong." Called by his office to find the remaining androids, Deckard takes up Rachael Rosen's offer of help. They meet at a San Francisco hotel room, drink, and become romantically involved. Rachael tells Deckard that she has fallen in love with him; later she admits that seducing him is a standard maneuver used to make bounty hunters feel uncomfortable about killing androids. On a lead from his department, Deckard goes to John Isidore's apartment building to find Pris Stratton. The remaining androids, Roy Baty and his wife Irmgard, are living at the building too, sheltered by the innocent Isidore.

While Deckard is on his way to the building, Isidore finds out two discouraging facts. The first comes when Buster Friendly announces on the television that Mercer is a fraud, and supports his claim with expert analysis of the artificiality of Mercer's ascent up the mountain and evidence that Mercer is played by an old, unemployed, alcoholic character actor. Isidore's second revelation is that his android friends are not simply, like him, misunderstood, persecuted humans. When Isidore finds a rare spider, a living thing which he treasures, Irmgard Baty proceeds to snip its legs off out of curiosity, offering to pay Isidore the catalog price of the spider, ignorant to the inherent value of life. Roy Baty tells Isidore that "Mercerism is a swindle. The whole experience of empathy is a swindle."

When Deckard arrives, he runs into Isidore, who tells him that he is looking after the three androids and that he will not help Deckard capture them. Inside of the building Deckard is aided by an apparition of Mercer, the religious figure, who assures him that retiring androids is not contrary to the teachings of Mercerism:

Mercer said, "Mr. Isidore spoke for himself, not for me. What you are doing has to be done. I said that already." Raising his arm he pointed at the stairs behind Rick. "I came to tell you that one of them is behind you and below, not in the apartment. It will be the hard one of the three and you must retire it first." The rustling, ancient voice gained abrupt fervor. "Quick, Mr. Deckard. On the steps.

The first android, Pris, is most difficult because she is the same model as Rachael Rosen and resembles her exactly. After retiring her, Deckard goes to the apartment and retires Irmgard Baty. Just before shooting Roy Baty, Deckard has a realization: that Baty loved his wife, Isidore loved Pris, and he himself loved Rachael, but that none of it mattered because they were all androids.

The Aftermath

Retiring six Nexus-6 androids in one day is a record-breaking achievement, and the bounty Deckard receives for it makes him wealthy. Nevertheless, the emotions stirred up by the day's events leave him depressed. His depression worsens when he returns home to find that Rachael Rosen, showing emotions that androids are not supposed to feel, has killed his goat. He flies off in a hovercar to a desolate area near Oregon, and climbs a hill in an imitation of Mercer. While analyzing the source of his depression, he makes an amazing discovery: in the dust at his feet is a toad, although toads are supposed to be extinct. With renewed faith, Deckard returns home to his wife Iran and shows this marvelous creature to her. While examining it she opens a panel in the toad's back, revealing that it is really just another mechanical animal. Deckard goes to bed feeling more depressed than ever, while Iran phones the pet store to find out what supplies are needed to take care of Deckard's mechanical toad in the best way possible.

Characters

Bill Barbour

The neighbor in the Deckards' apartment building who is wealthy enough to own a real live horse. Deckard and Barbour's interaction is mainly one of competition, and provides an interesting commentary on interpersonal relations in their society. When Barbour reveals his horse is pregnant, Deckard asks if he can buy the colt from him. After Barbour refuses, Deckard's desperation leads him to reveal that his sheep is a fake. Barbour can afford to feel sorry for Deckard—"you poor guy," he sympathizes—because he has a live animal, after all. His empathy does not extend to helping Deckard with his problem, however. Only after Deckard brings home a live goat does Barbour consider dealing his future colt to his neighbor.

Irmgard Baty

Wife of Roy, Irmgard is a "small woman, lovely in the manner of [1940s film star] Greta Garbo, with blue eyes and yellow-blonde hair." Of all the fugitive androids, she seems nearest to understanding human attributes—if only from a cold, objective standpoint. She appreciates Isidore's peaches as Pris cannot, and she is able to recognize how Isidore has emotionally accepted them. But while she seems to be sympathetic to Isidore, she cannot comprehend what the spider means to him, and she is the one who suggests they cut off its legs to see what will happen.

Roy Baty

Leader of the renegade android troop, Roy is the android who proposes flight to Earth for the eight "friends." Roy is the most intelligent and most dangerous of the eight illegal androids. Deckard's report tells him how Baty framed the escape attempt within the context of a new religion. The basis of this ideology, says the report, is the "fiction" that android "life" is sacred. Baty attempts to instill an ideology within the group that would somehow mimic human Mercerism. That is, he attempts to fake the very emotional empathy that the eight androids are unable to experience. To further his plan and improve the fakery, he experimented with various drugs.

Despite his efforts, the cooperation of the androids lasts only as long as it takes to make their escape. After that, they break up. In the end, one reason the Batys are the last to be retired is that they understand that they are different from humans. The others, particularly Garland, Polokov, and Luft, tried to masquerade as human, and failed. Roy Baty recognizes that the androids can never duplicate the human sense of empathy, and hopes they will be accepted once Buster Friendly reveals the "truth" behind Mercerism. After the announcement, he proclaims proudly that now everyone will know that "the whole experience of empathy is a swindle." He does not understand, as Mercer tells Isidore, that the revelations will change nothing because humans need to share with each other. Instead, Baty easily falls victim to Deckard's laser tube.

Milt Borogrove

Borogrove is the repairman at the Van Ness "Pet Hospital." He sympathizes with Isidore after he discovers that the wheezing cat he has just picked up from the Pilsens' was real. He tries to diffuse the tension between Sloat and Isidore when the former forces Isidore to call the owner and report the cat's death. He has the best manner on the phone and cuts in on the call to help convince Mrs. Pilsen to replace the cat with an electric duplicate.

Harry Bryant

Inspector Harry Bryant, "jug-eared and red-headed, sloppily dressed but wise-eyed," gives Deckard the assignment Holden could not finish. He is worried about this assignment, particularly by the possibility that the Voigt-Kampff empathy scale may no longer be an accurate method of distinguishing androids from humans. Only after Deckard successfully assesses androids at the Rosen offices does Bryant turn over Holden's notes to assist him in his hunt. Even after Deckard retires three of the androids during one day, Bryant pressures him into resuming the chase that same evening.

Iran Deckard

Wife of Rick, she is the very image of the stereotypical bored housewife. While technology has provided her with a mood machine that enables a toleration of her tedious life, its very artificiality depresses her. This upsets Rick, who, after talking to her during one of her dialled "depressions," thinks that "most androids I've know have more vitality and desire to live than my wife." Rick feels responsible for Iran, however, and so she inspires him to continue on with his job, with the electric sheep, and everything else that seems hopeless. In many ways, she is the only one in the novel to have a practical epiphany. She realizes she loves Rick: when he returns from his assignments, she thinks "I don't need to dial, now; I already have it—if it is Rick." This leads her to cover up the panel on the electric frog and take on its care—she orders some electric flies.

Media Adaptations

• The novel was adapted to film as Blade Runner in 1982. Directed by Ridley Scott, the movie starred Harrison Ford as retired bounty hunter, or Blade Runner, Rick Deckard, called back for a final job. The film is true to the feel but different from the plot of the original novel—in this version, the hero gets the girl. The film has become a phenomenal cult classic.
• Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? was made into an Audio Cassette Cassettes edition in August of 1994 by Time Warner Audio Books.

Rick Deckard

The lead character of the novel is having doubts about himself, his professional abilities, and the morality of his job. His doubts are embodied in his relationship with his electric sheep. He is tired of pretending that his electric sheep is real; "owning and maintaining a fraud had a way of gradually demoralizing one." He is trying to deal with these emotions when he is called on to "retire" six Nexus-6 androids who have escaped to Earth. Although he recognizes that "the empathic gift blurred the boundaries between hunter and victim," he is able to rationalize his duty: "A humanoid robot is like any other machine," Deckard tells Rachael Rosen; "it can fluctuate between being a benefit and a hazard very rapidly. As a benefit it's not our problem." Yet though he tells himself clearly that he is justified in killing killers who have "no ability to feel emphatic joy for another life form's success or grief at its defeat," he begins to have doubts. "This is insane," he says after killing Luba Luft, whose singing could have been a joy to humans.

His experience with Phil Resch creates more doubts. As he later tells Iran, "For the first time, after being with him, I looked at them differently. I mean, in my own way I had been viewing them as he did.… I've begun to empathize with androids." This only makes his task more difficult, not impossible. To get over his doubt, he takes Resch's advice and sleeps with Rachael. The act does not affect him as Rachael had planned, however. She reveals that she has seduced several other bounty hunters, and all except Phil Resch have been unable to continue killing androids. She believes that Deckard has been rendered harmless as well, for he cannot bring himself to kill her. For Deckard, however, her coldly calculated confession gives him new inspiration. His regret, finally, is that he didn't kill her when he had the chance. If he had, the goat would still be alive.

After he is done retiring androids and discovers his dead goat, he flies off for some time alone. He contemplates the day's events: "What I've done, he thought; that's become alien to me. In fact everything about me has become unnatural; I've become an unnatural self." He has a spiritual experience akin to the Mercer story. He finds himself climbing up a hill as rocks are thrown at him. He thinks he has somehow merged with Mercer. Instead, he gives up on the climb and the toad he finds is a fake. He may now be known as the greatest bounty hunter, but in reality he is just another man, feeling confused and defeated.

Buster Friendly

Buster Friendly is on television and radio practically all the time. Unknown to most of his audience, however, everyone's favorite talk show host is an android. He aims to keep the housewives, and anyone else who watches, entertained and happy. He and Eldon Rosen are at the forefront in the struggle of android's rights. Part of his work involves the unmasking of Mercer as a fraud. The thinking is that if Mercer, who originated the rule that only life is sacred, is a fake, then perhaps his rules can be rewritten. As Isidore recognizes, "Buster Friendly and Mercerism are fighting for control of our psychic souls."

Garland

Garland is an officer in an alternative police force summoned by Luba Luft after Deckard's attempts to question her. His police headquarters is unknown to the real police headquarters, and he similarly professes to have no knowledge of Deckard or his superiors. When he finds his name on Deckard's list, Garland tries to confuse the issue by claiming that Deckard is the android. When his own bounty hunter, Phil Resch, seems to support Deckard, Garland admits to Deckard that they are all part of the escaped android group. Garland's police are attempting to create a safe haven for androids by imitating real police security. Resch becomes convinced of Deckard's story, however, and kills Garland before Garland can kill him.

Dave Holden

The senior bounty hunter in the San Francisco police department is Dave Holden. He has been tracking eight illegal androids recently arrived in the district. He successfully tests and retires two androids before the third injures him. He has notes on the remaining six which are passed on to Rick Deckard.

J. R. Isidore

See John R. Isidore

John R. Isidore

"My name's J. R. Isidore and I work for the well-known animal vet Mr. Hannibal Sloat; you've heard of him. I'm reputable; I have a job. I drive Mr. Sloat's truck." So Isidore would like to believe about himself, and so he wants his newly discovered neighbor, Pris Stratton, to believe about him. In reality, at least in the legal terms of the novel's universe, Isidore is "special" or, in slang, a chickenhead. This status is given to those individuals so affected by the radioactive dust that they fail a standard IQ test. Thus labeled, they are given the grunt tasks of earth's remaining society; they cannot emigrate off the planet; they cannot procreate. Isidore is not completely nonfunctional; but he is classified as such and is easily intimidated by his superiors. "I'm hairy, ugly, dirty, stooped, snaggle-toothed, and grey.… I feel sick from the radiation; I think I'm going to die," he protests when Sloat forces him to tell an owner her pet has died.

Nevertheless, Isidore has a highly developed sense of empathy. As Milt Borogrove observes, "To him they're all alive, false animals included." Thus Isidore befriends the renegade android band even after he discovers their secret. He knows they are using him but given his caste-like status as a special, he enjoys the trust and society the androids seem to be giving him. Irmgard recognizes this: "They don't treat him very well either, as he said.… He knows us and he likes us and an emotional acceptance like that—it's everything to him." He vows to be loyal to them and protect Pris from the Bounty Hunter. But when Pris begins to amputate the legs of a spider he found, Isidore is enraged. He rescues the spider and puts it out of its distress. His hopes seem to die then. Buster Friendly has announced that Mercer is a fraud, and the cruelty of his "friends" bewilders him.

Isidore's tale is similar to Deckard's, however. The humanity that had been sacrificed to his chickenhead label begins to assert itself again. Out of his depression comes renewed contact with Mercer, who reassures him that "nothing has changed" and gives him a healed spider. While he reveals the androids' presence to Deckard, he refuses to help him hunt them down. He cries at their deaths, just as bewildered over their executions as he was at the spider's torture. He yearns for society once more and tells Deckard he is moving in to town.

Sandor Kadalyi

See Max Polokov

Luba Luft

Luba Luft is an escaped android trying to pass as a human opera singer. She disturbs Deckard because of the way she handles the test—confusing his reading and insisting on questioning his own humanity. Cleverly, she says he must be an android because he does not care about androids. She is retired by Phil Resch, but not until Deckard proves himself human (and possessing a growing empathy for androids) by granting her last request. He purchases a copy of Munch's Puberty for her—something that Phil would be incapable of doing. Her death upsets Deckard gready, for he wonders why someone with such talent should be considered a liability to society.

Wilbur Mercer

Mercer is the central figure of a religion that is supported by the government. Mercer's legend recalls how he had the gift of reversing time, which he used to bring dead animals back to life until the government stopped him. He was then "plunged into a different world," and began to ascend from the pits of this world onto a mountain, where he is attacked by "Killers." Mercer's followers can join him on this ascent by use of an "empathy machine," which links their consciousness together. They feel his struggle and those of others linked to them, and they also experience the wounds he receives. The sole tenant of Mercerism is empathy for all living things: You shall kill only the killers, Mercer announced from the beginning. Just who may be defined as "killers" is left up to the individual, however.

Adhering to Mercerism, or having empathy, clearly marks humans as separate from the constructs they have made. The androids believe that proving Mercerism a fraud will aid them in gaining status as "living" beings. Buster Friendly, in a Wizard of Oz move, does reveal Mercer as a drunken actor named Al Jarry, pretending to climb a mountain on a poorly constructed set. But because the shared experience of Mercerism has relevance for humans, the revelation will not change anything, despite Roy Baty's euphoria. Deckard's final encounters with Mercer, which seem to happen without the use of an empathy box, seem to reinforce this notion.

Mrs. Pilsen

Mrs. Pilsen is the owner of a real cat, and her husband has mistakenly called the Van Ness "Pet Hospital" after it became ill. When Isidore informs her of the cat's death, she is unsure what to do. Ironically, although her husband loved the cat "more than any other cat he ever had," he never got "physically close" to the cat. As a result, Mrs. Pilsen would rather attempt to fool her husband with a mechanical replica than inform him of its death.

Max Polokov

The android who injured Dave Holden, senior bounty hunter, has taken on the identity of a chickenhead garbage collector. Now discovered, he poses as a soviet officer from the WPO coming to help and observe Deckard. Deckard retires him.

Phil Resch

One of the bounty hunters working for the false policeman Garland is Phil Resch. After revealing his own identity, Garland tells Deckard that Resch is an android because he hopes that Deckard will kill Resch—thus making him guilty of murder and putting him out of commission. The problem with Resch, according to Deckard, is that he enjoys killing too much. Disturbed by Garland's real identity, Resch starts to wonder if he too might be an android, despite the fact that he loves his pet squirrel. Resch demands that Deckard test him—and he passes. The contrast between Resch and himself leads Deckard to reconsider his line of work.

Resch kills two of the androids on the list but Deckard will take the credit since Resch is now a fraudulent bounty hunter who just killed his boss. Deckard then confides his doubts about the job. Resch proposes an easy solution which he himself used—sleep with Rachael. Deckard follows this advice, but it has different effects on him than he expects.

Eldon Rosen

Eldon Rosen is chairman of the Rosen Association and is Rachael's "uncle." He is nervous about Deckard's pursuit of the escaped eight androids. If the bounty hunter's test is unable to distinguish humans from androids, his corporation will have to cease production of the androids until a replacement test is developed. Thus, Deckard, "a little police department employee," is in the incredible position of being able to stop production of all Nexus-6 androids. One direct result of this would be a system-wide business failure, because Rosen's output is one of the essential pivots for the working of the economic system. The colonization effort depends on the allure of the settler being given an android. If the androids are not available, colonization ceases. The economic system of the planets would then collapse.

Eldon faces the problem by attempting to call the Voigt-Kampff Test into question. If Deckard is convinced Rachael is a schizoid girl who grew up on a colonization ship then her positive result on the Voigt-Kampff means that the test is no longer valid. "Your police department," Eldon says to Deckard, "… may have retired, very probably have retired, authentic humans with underdeveloped empathic ability.… Your position … is extremely bad morally. Ours isn't." The manufacturing of androids is an essential component of systemic operation. If retiring androids is suspect due to the inherent risk Eldon sites, then it may be done away with. Eldon can then buy Deckard's allegiance and continue to perfect his androids and dominate the market. Still not quite convinced, Deckard is offered a bribe. Fortunately, he comes up with one more question when he hears Rachael repeatedly refer to the Rosens' owl as "it," and proves she is an android. The Voigt-Kampff test still works and production can continue—but so can the retiring of escaped androids.

Rachael Rosen

Rachael Rosen is a Nexus-6 android made available to Deckard by the manufacturers to see if the police tests will work on this new model. Although his test indicates she is an android, the Rosens claim she is human. Deckard is not sure, but a final question solves his dilemma and proves her origin. This near misidentification causes him to begin feeling empathy for the nearly human androids. The doubt this causes him leads him to take Rachael up on her offer to help him catch the remaining fugitives. This leads the two into bed, and Rachael confesses that she loves him and will give him an instrument to render the fugitive androids helpless. Rick begins to wonder if he might love her in return. He considers that she only has two years of life remaining—androids live for four years because technology has failed to master cell replacement. However, the revelation that her agenda is to curtail bounty hunting efforts causes him to reject her. She takes revenge by murdering his Nubian goat.

Hannibal Sloat

The famous (in Isidore's mind) Hannibal Sloat owns a fake animal repair shop called the Van Ness Pet Hospital "—that carefully misnamed little enterprise which barely existed in the tough, competitive field of false-animal repair." Sloat is too old to emigrate and, therefore, is "doomed to creep out his remaining life on Earth." Though he has a fully functioning brain, he is as susceptible to the radioactive dust as anyone else. He sight is obscured—but he never cleans his glasses anyway— and his other senses are also deteriorating. Still, he is not a special and though he likes Isidore he is not above making himself feel better at his employee's expense.

Sloat's greatest fear is that one day a real animal will be picked up by mistake and brought to the shop. Isidore, innocently, makes this mistake and they have a dead cat on their hands. Remarkably, Isidore handles it—though he is helped by Milt—and tenders them an order for a replacement as well as a new confidential customer in Mrs. Pilsen.

Pris Stratton

Pris hides out in what she thinks is an abandoned apartment building in the suburbs. But it is Isidore's building. He senses another person in the building and comes to make friends. She accepts him grudgingly, even though he senses there is something strange and cold about her: "it was not what she did or said but what she did not do and say." Although she treats Isidore disdainfully, calling him a "chickenhead," she does cast the deciding vote to remain with him in his apartment, rather than kill him, as Roy Baty suggests.

Pris is the same Nexus-6 model as Rachael Rosen—in fact, that is the first name she gives Isidore, until she figures out it might give away her android origin. Deckard believes that he will be unable to kill Pris because of her resemblance to Rachael. Following Resch's advice of having sex with Rachael has not helped. He worries that he might be in love with Rachael. But he realizes it was an infatuation, that she was deceiving him. He further realizes that Rachael is a type of machine and Pris is another version, just slightly different. Disgusted by the idea of "legions" of Rachaels, he retires Pris with no difficulty.

Themes

Science and Technology

One of the goals of Dick's fiction is to show that the idea of technology as passive helpmate, slave, or fantastic mistress is unrealistic. Similarly, the opposite notion—that humanity can somehow return to a pastoral way of life and live in an agriculturally based paradise—is naive. These two beliefs, according to Dick, actually endanger the evolution of humankind: so long as humans are uneasy about their own tools, or regard them as in some way mysterious, those tools will be seen as having some innate power over mankind. In other words, regardless of technology's fallibility, if humans regard themselves as less smart or less able than their tools, then they will be at the mercy of their tools. Technology will advance, regardless of what the majority of humanity feels about that technology. Any struggle to remain the ruler or owner of new technology will surely fail. Dick believes the only solution to human uneasiness with technology is a wholesale acceptance of it.

Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? expresses Dick's ideas about technology in ways very similar to the story of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein. That creature, animated from lifeless flesh, was its creator's scientific success. But the good doctor was so horrified by his creature's grotesque appearance that he ended up destroying it. In Dick's version, the trouble with scientifically created androids is that they resemble their masters too closely. Yet that is what the market has created and that is "what the colonists wanted," says Eldon Rosen. "If our firm hadn't made these progressively more human types, other firms in the field would have." So the problem is not whether androids can approximate humans, but continuing the classification of androids as non-life. It becomes harder to justify the slavery and "retiring" of androids if there is little difference between them and humans. As Isidore tries to teach the group of illegal androids, all life is sacred: all of it, even spiders—whose lack of empathy at one point is compared to the androids' lack. The question then becomes, why can't androids and technology, in all its glorious animation, be defined as a type of life and, therefore, sacred?

Human Condition

Throughout the novel, humans are defined as constructs capable of empathy and "empathetic, role-taking ability." Human empathy is what the Voigt-Kampff test looks for; whether the test subject responds to a described situation as if it were real for them. Even without the test, humans reveal themselves through their need for other living creatures and their being needed in return. "You have to be with other people … in order to live at all," says Isidore. To be human, to be alive, is to depend on other people. Pris, Roy, and Irmgard have accomplished this to some extent, and they decide to accept Isidore. That is all he needs as verification that though "not alive" and illegal, the three are people. Through the ability of the three androids to work as a team and Isidore's acceptance of them, Dick leaves open the possibility of a harmonious future. At present, however, the definition of human is constantly challenged and then reconfirmed by human relations with androids—humans remain humans by eliminating the almost human. Dick is reflecting on man's inhumanity to man by putting humans in the position of defending their identity through the elimination of their imitators. It is a tense condition, and similar to the tension between the chickenhead and his employer, which is full of anger and resentment. The laws separating "human" from "special" from "android" are parallel to the Jim Crow laws in America, Apartheid in South Africa, or ethnic cleansing.

Phil Resch is an example of an exception to this general theory of the human condition as put forth in the novel. (One can make a similar case for Iran, who, until the very end, is absorbed only with her own individual problems.) Resch is a human who shows concern for Deckard, and he takes good care of his real squirrel. Yet his callous disregard for his android victims leads Deckard to doubt his humanity. Resch feels that artificial constructs have no value. He dehumanizes them, similar to the way that the Nazis viewed Jews during the Holocaust. Such a breakdown of empathy in one area of an individual's psyche enables violence. The question then becomes, why single out androids as the ones to be retired? How do you confine the exertion of violence to illegal androids? This worries everyone, especially if the Voigt-Kampff test is no longer valid. What if some schizophrenics are not locked up and one is retired by mistake? What happens when Sloat really goes after Isidore? Deckard comes to realize that humanity can and must extend itself to empathy toward artificial constructs. For the environment, it is the only way to return the owls to the skies.

Topics for Further Study

• Do some research into the pieces of art and music mentioned in the novel. What is the significance of the paintings of Edvard Munch or Mozart's The Magic Flute to the themes or plot of the novel?
• Based on the evidence provided by the novel, what moral distinctions do you think can be made between life and simulated-life? Make sure to cite examples from the text.
• Pretend you are a Martian colonist or an Earth native in Dick's world. Write an essay arguing for or against the abolition of androids.
• Consider the depiction of sexuality and sex roles in the novel: compare Rachael to Pris or Iran or Irmgard. Argue whether Dick is misogynist (a woman-hater) or exaggerating inequality to make an effective commentary. Consider the idea of having sex with the enemy—and then killing "hei"? What does this say about our society, about violence, about sexual attitudes?
• Draw parallels between Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep and other abolitionist novels. Imagine the speech of Shy lock in Shakespeare's The Merchant of Venice ("If you prick us, do we not bleed?") as spoken by an android. Or make direct comparisons with the civil rights movement of the 1960s and discuss how Dick was reflecting on the secondary status of blacks in America in the 1960s. Or compare Dick's bounty hunter to portrayals of southern fugitive slave trackers of the antebellum period.

In terms of Deckard's personal growth, he has realized that his interaction with his Electric Sheep is wearing down his self-respect. Every day he pretends to care for an object as if it were real. He feels oppressed by his need to keep up the appearance that he owns a real animal. "The tyranny of an object … [is that] it doesn't know I exist. Like the androids, it had no ability to appreciate the existence of another." That is why Deckard needs a real animal, so that something not only knows he exists, but needs him in return. Gradually, he finds empathy for artificial life and is even prepared to accept the toad. But, ultimately, peace comes to Deckard as his wife fulfills the role of making him feel needed.

American Dream

The "American Dream" is often defined as the freedom to pursue material success, as symbolized by owning one's own home in a cozy suburb. In a perverse rendering of the suburban dream, Dick presents a society where a home on a space colony is the goal of most people. In his vision, the healthy people of earth are exported to other planets and given a slave robot to work their own homestead. (Ironically, the term "robot" comes from an Czech play about a nobleman who replaces his serfs with manlike machines.) On Earth, home of those not intelligent or healthy enough to emigrate, the dream of most people is to own a real animal. The darker side of this suburban reality is that the wife stays securely at home. She, like her 1950s counterpart, spends her time watching television. In Dick's view of the future, she has a machine for dialing up moods. There is even a number to dial for the mood to watch television—and Dick does not envision the programming getting better. Fantastically, Iran can even dial up her own depression. To ward off loneliness, she can bond with unhappy people everywhere through an empathy machine. These perverse twists on the "American Dream" present a view of suburbia as an inherently alienating society that speeds the decay of human community.

Morals and Morality

Decades ahead of his time, Dick foresaw the moral issues which would develop from a capitalist, technological society. In the world of Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, good moral codes are those which support the economic system and keep people happy. Mercerism teaches people an empathy that is coincidentally profitable; every living being is sacred because of the nuclear war, therefore, the ownership of a living animal marks status. Caring for a living creature is important for Mercerists, but ironically, this responsibility is also market driven. Similarly, Eldon Rosen has no need to consider whether it is ethical to create androids that are indistinguishable from humans, because he is just producing what the customers want. "We followed the time-honored principle underlying every commercial venture," he tells Deckard. "If our firm hadn't made these progressively more human types, other firms in the field would have." Eldon Rosen claims his moral standing is better than the dubious position of the police and their faulty empathy test. The system's security rests on whether the bounty hunter is able to verify and destroy illegal androids—but the growth of the same system rests on whether the Rosen Association can produce androids so lifelike as to make the bounty hunter's job impossible. When the Rosens succeed, industry will take over the job of natural evolution; industry will put perfect animals back in the wild and gradually make a perfect human/android race. But everyone will be happy for there will be no bounty hunters to fret over identity questions.

Style

Narrative/Point of View

Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? is narrated in third person, with the characters described as "he" or "she." The narrator is reliable, but is not omniscient ("all-knowing"). Unless a character speaks his thoughts, they remain unknown. The narrator limits the point of view to the characters of Rick Deckard and J. R. Isidore, with a brief exception for Iran at the end of the novel. The narrator knows the world of this future society well enough to explain Isidore's condition, as well the importance of the Rosen Association. The narrator is not perfect, however, and at times the reader has to just go along with the story. For example, the narrator portrays Deckard's job as very difficult, particularly the challenge posed by the new Nexus-6 androids. Nevertheless, he finds it rather easy to retire Pris, and the "worst" android, Roy, is no problem either. The appearance of Mercer to assist Deckard with Pris is a clumsy type of "deus ex machina" (literally, "god out of a machine"), in which the gratuitous assistance of an outside force sayes the hero.

Science Fiction

The most fundamental requirement of this genre is that it make use of science in some way. Secondly, and perhaps as important, this genre is concerned with the impact of real or imagined science upon an individual or society. Beyond those two principles, the genre is quite open to everything from the most fantastic (e.g. "Star Wars" or Dune) to the most pedestrian (e.g. "Honey, I Shrunk the Kids").

Another frequent, but not necessary, component of science fiction is social criticism. Science fiction inherits this trait from earlier writers, who satirized their own time by displacing and exaggerating their society as a real society somewhere else. Perhaps the most famous version with some remaining currency is Jonathan's Swift's Gulliver's Travels. Were Swift writing two hundred years later, it is easy to see that Gulliver's boat would have been a space ship. In other words, storytellers often have an easier time pointing out foibles and complaining about their own times by placing them to a fantasy world or to other worlds entirely.

Dick is obviously a science fiction writer because he employs hovercrafts, space colonies, androids, lasers, sine wave disrupters, and so on. He also uses the familiar science fiction formula of an post-nuclear holocaust Earth. The idea of Earth after an all-out war is an old one, but the intricacies of possible survival after a nuclear war has offered much cause for speculation. Dick wants the reader to believe life would continue, although society would have to impose caste-like marks on its people for the good of the whole. Further, evolution would depend on the further development of biotechnologies and the acceptance of its byproducts as real.

Detective Story

Detective stories first began with Edgar Allan Poe's "The Murders in the Rue Morgue" (1841) and became a mature genre with Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes mysteries. Normally, a detective story presents a crime that the inspector has to solve. Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? is a detective story with a twist. A crime (murder) has been committed by the androids, and Deckard is assigned to track them down and "retire" them in turn, as dictated by the law. As the novel progresses, however, Deckard comes to question the morality of carrying out the law. The test used to determine the android's death sentence eliminates that android's right to be a productive being. She may fail the test, but Luba Luft was capable of enjoying and participating in a very human activity—art.

From the start, the reader knows who the un-lawful constructs are and it is readily apparent that the purveyor of justice is Rick Deckard, bounty hunter. But this is not a usual assignment. These androids are working together and in league with their manufacturers to win acknowledgement that these new constructs merit legal standing. Deckard's job becomes a potentially immoral act, by unmasking them as escapees and then denying them their rights. In fact, he doesn't even test the most progressive androids because they attack him first. So Deckard solves the "case," but not the problem of whether the androids were advanced enough to warrant a change in their legal standing.

Anti-hero

An anti-hero is a protagonist of a narrative distinctly lacking in heroic qualities. That is, he does not possess outstanding courage, strength, or morals; frequently he is an outsider who has difficulty accepting conventional values. Rick Deckard is an average sort of man who does not have exception skills or strength. He is only a backup bounty hunter, and he has an unsatisfied wife, an electric sheep, and a great deal of doubt about whether he is fit for his profession. Yet all these failings enable the reader to identify with him, root for him, and sympathize with his predicament. In addition, Deckard's doubts about his work, in contrast to Phil Resch's callous manner, highlight an empathy which approaches the heroic. Nevertheless, Deckard's "heroic" final confrontation with Roy Baty—which ought to be the book's climax—is described as a rather boring action. A true hero would be rewarded with his greatest dream, but in the end Deckard's goat is dead and the toad he discovers is false. He also thinks he has merged with Mercer; instead, it is an illusion brought on by exhaustion. By portraying Deckard's achievements and rewards as less than heroic, Dick seems to suggest that perhaps this is the best anyone can do in such anti-heroic times.

Historical Context

The Cold War and Vietnam

Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? portrays a world that has survived a nuclear holocaust, a possibility that did not seem too far-fetched in the 1960s. Since the end of World War II, when the United States dropped two atomic bombs on Japan, the Soviet Union had been developing their own nuclear arsenal. Many Americans saw the spread of Soviet Communism as the country's greatest threat, and they engaged the Soviets in a "Cold War" throughout the 1950s and 1960s. The two sides never directly engaged each other in combat, although they came close in 1962, when the U.S. challenged the Soviets over their placement of missiles in Cuba. By the late 1960s, both sides had enough nuclear missiles to destroy each other—and the entire world—several times over. The Cuban Missile Crisis, however, had shown both sides that a nuclear confrontation was something to be avoided at all costs: the only thing that it could achieve was Mutual Assured Destruction. By 1968, U.S.-Soviet relations had warmed to the point where several treaties had been signed, including a 1967 treaty that prohibited the military use of space. Pessimists, however, still worried that total nuclear destruction could come with just one press of a button.

America's involvement in the Vietnam War, although involving no nuclear weapons, was another front of the Cold War against communism. The United States had been providing military advisors to the govemment of South Vietnam since the 1950s. The South Vietnamese were struggling against communist insurgents, and the U.S. feared that if Vietnam fell to the communists, the rest of Southeast Asia would follow. By 1968, U.S. military involvement had grown to include over half a million American troops in Vietnam. Nevertheless, the war effort was not particularly successful in driving out the communists. The Tet offensive by the North Vietnamese began at the end of January, 1968, surprising the South Vietnamese and their U.S. allies. These events further embarrassed the U.S., and the war grew more unpopular as people doubted whether it was winnable. In March of that year, although it would be unknown to the American public for twenty months, American soldiers committed what has come to be known as the My Lai massacre. Searching for enemy soldiers, U.S. troops entered a village and rounded up hundreds of inhabitants—men, women, children, old and young—and shot them all.

A World of Political Unrest

As U.S. involvement in Vietnam escalated, so did public opposition to it. People questioned both the effectiveness and the morality of sending American soldiers to fight in another country's civil war. Thousands of Americans, particularly students, protested the war, sometimes clashing with police. The 1968 presidential election provided many opportunities for such confrontations. In August, the Democratic Party convention was held in Chicago, and antiwar protesters found it the perfect forum for expressing their opposition. Some ten thousand protesters responded to calls from antiwar activists David Dellinger, Rennie Davis, and Thomas E. Hayden and radical "Yippies" Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin. Determined to maintain order, Chicago mayor Richard J. Daley called up 16,000 city police officers, 4,000 state police, and 4,000 National Guardsmen armed with tear gas, grenades, night sticks, and firearms. The police clubbed and gassed demonstrators and observes alike in attempting to prevent the demonstrators from marching, giving speeches, and sleeping overnight in the city's parks. The "Chicago Seven"—including Dellinger, Davis, Hayden, Hoffman, Rubin, and Black Panther Leader Bobby Seale—were convicted of violating a federal anti-riot law during a boisterous trial, but later had their convictions overturned.

The late 1960s were a time of conflict, confusion, and moral uncertainty, and demonstrations were not limited to antiwar causes or even America. People all over the world peaceably demonstrated for a better world. 1968 was a particularly violent year worldwide, as the efforts of leaders to motivate people for equal rights, justice, and peace began to pay off. Thousands of people were on the streets marching. From San Francisco to Mexico City, Chicago to Memphis, and all the way to France and Czechoslovakia, people were demonstrating for peace, change, and a better life. People were beginning to protest the inequitable distribution of wealth and governments were answering with force. Thus there is a particular irony in a statement by Dick's character J. R. Isidore, who will not believe that bounty hunters exist, "B-b-because things like that don't happen. The g-g-government never kills anyone, for any crime."

Compare & Contrast

• 1968: The Americans are caught in a space race with the Soviets to reach the moon. Many predict moon colonies and interplanetary travel.

  Late 1990s: The Americans and the Russians are working together on an international space station. There is talk about returning to the moon because ice crystals were discovered at the lunar poles. A return to the moon, some hope, will be a first step to the colonization of Mars.

• 1968: The Pacific Rim economies are humming. Japan leads the way by passing West Germany to become second to the United States in terms of Gross Domestic Product.

  Late 1990s: The Pacific Rim is in financial crisis, if not collapse. Japanese financial companies are frantically warding off bankruptcy after having overextended themselves over the previous decade. The "Asian Contagion" sets off fears of a worldwide financial crisis.

• 1968: Amphibians seem fine although increasing numbers of fish are dying from the effects of industrial pollution.

  Late 1990s: Amphibians are disappearing at an alarming rate. Whether high altitude frogs or desert toads, amphibians are showing up deformed and dead in record numbers. The causes are many: increases in ultraviolet light, fungal attacks, polluted water, or new predators. Meanwhile, "fish kills" now describe commonplace occurrences where miles of streams become de-populated due to accidental or intentional chemical dumping. Fish are also threatened by over-fishing, so that the North Sea is "fished out."

• 1968: Reproductive rights become a hotter topic when the British legalize abortion and Pope Paul VI condemns any artificial means of birth control in his encyclical Humanae Vitae.

  Late 1990s: Reproductive rights are still a hot issue, but the cloning of a Scottish sheep named "Dolly" has raised the level of debate. Bans have been imposed on human cloning but renegade scientists promise it will only be a matter of time. Clones, not androids, threaten some people's notion of human grace.

In April of 1968, several months after FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover's order to shut down "Black Nationalist hate-Groups," civil rights leader Martin Luther King, Jr., was assassinated in Memphis, Tennessee. Racial rioting broke out nationwide as a result, and Chicago's Mayor Daley gave a "shoot to kill" order in that city to stop the rioters. Nationwide, 46 died and 21,270 were arrested. Columbia University students shut down their campus to protest gymnasium construction because it eliminated affordable housing in the area; they were stormed by police and 628 people were arrested. In France, student protests led to a revolution in the University system, events which continue to be discussed in French academia. Meanwhile, the Soviets thwarted a revolution in Czechoslovakia with an occupation army of 650,000 and a system of censorship. In the fall of 1968, Mexico City police fired on student demonstrators in Tlatelolco Square. Officials reported forty dead; other observers put the figure at seven hundred.

The Growth of Environmentalism

In the 1960s, people became more aware of the environment and the need to protect it. Rachel Carson had published her groundbreaking work Silent Spring in 1962, alerting Americans to the potential dangers of industrial contamination of the environment. This work motivated environmentally concerned Americans to create the Environmental Defense Fund, which lobbied for the creation of a federal agency to protect America's environment. Although the Environmental Protection Agency was not created until 1970, Congress still took action on many environmental issues in 1968. They approved two new national parks: North Cascades National Park set aside 505,000 acres, while Redwood National Park contained 58,000 acres along forty miles of the Pacific Coast and included the world's tallest tree. The Congress also issued a report in 1968 which officially declared Lake Erie, one of the five Great Lakes, dead from the effects of pollution. Similarly discouraging reports emerged in that same year. Enzyme detergents made by several companies were reported to create problems in American water and sewage systems. The Coast Guard reported 714 major oil spills for the year, almost double the number from previous years. Not surprisingly, fish kills (a term normally associated with spring thaw, when pollutants are most concentrated) are estimated to have increased to fifteen million fish. Many people warned of coming environmental disaster, similar to the one portrayed in Dick's novel.

Medicine and Health in the 1960s

In Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, a class of physically and mentally inferior humans develops as a result of nuclear fallout. In the world of 1968, a similar subclass of humans seemed to be in the making, as the result of inequitable resource distribution. Many people, especially children, were suffering from inadequate nutrition, despite huge increases in food production levels worldwide. For example, India's food minister, Chidambara Subramaniam, estimated that in his nation between 35 and 40 percent of children had suffered brain damage because of a lack of protein in their diets. In the United States, nutrition investigator Arnold E. Schaefer was appalled at the vitamin A deficiency which he discovered in certain schools. This led him to comment that the low-income children he studied might go blind "five minutes from now or a year from now." Meanwhile, a Citizens Board discovered that federal food aid programs only reached 18 percent of the nation's poor.

Medical advances, on the other hand, seemed to promise longer and healthier lives for humanity. In late 1967, the first successful human heart transplant was performed by Dr. Christiaan Barnard in Cape Town, South Africa. Dr. Denton A. Cooley echoed this success in the United States a few months later. This development increased the anxious discussion about organ replacement and the sanctity of the human body. It also made juicy fodder for science fiction writers, who specialized in androids, cybernetic prostheses, and the loss of identity which comes with the mechanization of the body.

Critical Overview

The first problem with assessing the critical reputation of Do Androids Dream of Sheep? is distinguishing the novel from the film it inspired, 1982's Blade Runner. There are film reviews, there are book reviews, and there are reviews which confuse the two; anything written before the movie's release in 1982 is probably a safe bet, however. Therefore, before engaging with the criticism of the novel in any form, be sure that the critic is discussing the novel by checking its title and its references to the plot line. Reviews of the novel alone are few, and there are many that confuse it with the film. Telling signs of this confusion are references to Rachael (varying last names) as love interest and end of story girlfriend; lack of discussion on Dick's thoughts about real and fake animals; and no interest in Dick's statements about human nature as revealed in his portrayal of Mercerism. Not that this confusion would have bothered Dick, however, who outlined some of these changes in suggestions on making the novel into a film.

Nevertheless, critics have analyzed Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? and compared it to the works of several distinguished writers. One such resemblance is to the fiction of Franz Kafka, a Czech writer who wrote in German; the general theme of metamorphosis is explored by both writers, and Rick Deckard can be compared to Joseph K. from Kafka's novel The Trial. Parallels can also be drawn to the work of nineteenth-century novelist Charles Dickens, for the honesty of "ordinary" people is crucial to both authors: Isidore is reminiscent of Jo in Bleak House, for example. Similarly, Mercer's continuous struggle up a hill, beset by enemies, recalls the principles outlined in French author Albert Camus's essay "The Myth of Sisyphus."

In general, Dick's work is difficult to evaluate because, despite the crudeness of his art, his story is riveting. The visions he offers are earth-shattering and unique but relayed with a careless style. That style delivers a narrative structure that is sometimes incredibly difficult to decipher. As Philip Strick described it in Sight and Sound, "his phrasing is often clumsy, bathetic, despairing, a tangle of moods and impressions hurled like warnings of imminent catastrophe.… What renders his work so absorbing is its inventiveness and its humor, dizzyingly based on a lunatic logic." Some partisan reviewers say these failings simply testify to the author's profundity. More objective critics admit that despite his crudeness, Dick has an amazing ability to portray humanity's condition. Dick is further credited for having sympathy with his own characters and, thereby, making them admirable and believable. He accomplishes this by making his characters anti-heroic and letting them survive only when they are able to care for others.

Throughout his career, Dick played with several themes. One of these themes is the difference between the real and the simulated; for Dick, authentic life and the mechanical are not easily separated or distinguished. Another favorite concept is that of the android, or artificially constructed human. As the android is made into a perfect replica of man, the authentic human becomes more and more mechanical. Eventually the human withdraws into schizophrenic madness until the human, like the android, must be programmed with personality. Given these major themes, it is surprising that so few critics have dealt with Do Androids dream of Electric Sheep? as a serious enterprise. A few have understood, however, that "his novels are linked by obsessively recurring motifs and details, each of which is itself a key or a cue to the nature of reality in the Dick universe," as Ursula K. Le Guin wrote in the New Republic. And Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, while it may be a kind of Dickian parable, renders those "recurring motifs and details" in clear and simple terms.

For example, a close examination of Mercer, said Angus Taylor in Philip K. Dick and the Umbrella of Light, gives fast insight into Dick's theory of the transcendent. As outlined before the author's 1974 religious experience, this theory described people merging into a single empathy field or collective human consciousness (what has been called the noosphere by French philosopher Pierre Teilhard de Chardin). Taylor writes that Dick's metaphysical comment is that a world without a vision of a goal or of a "divine animation" is mechanical. But when that same world becomes informed with a goal that humankind sets for itself (whatever that may be), then that world has life and meaning at every level—even the mechanical. "The concept of God is not to be confused with that of a transcendent deity; it denotes instead the realization of the human potential through the creation of a better world—a dialectical movement whereby man remakes himself and his environment in the process of becoming reconciled to that environment." Taylor's essay is rather typical of critical engagement with Dick's work, exploring the philosophical insights that can be learned from less-than-perfect fiction.

In his 1982 essay, Strick performed a similar analysis. He is moved by the translation of humanity's obsession with status and wealth into the awesome need that Rick Deckard has for a real animal. It is a short way of condemning humanity's awful environmental record and goes straight to the heart. But even more disturbing, for Strick, is the subtle mechanization of the body. "The erosion of authentic humanity by undetectable android imitations has all the plausibility of a new and lethal plague whereby evolution would become substitution and nobody would notice the difference. The notion is rich with political and metaphysical implications, but Dick pins it firmly on the obvious target of technology through which, should man wish to lift a finger, future prosthetics will do it for him. And in his view, defeat is already in sight."

Patricia S. Warrick, however, is delighted with Dick's narrative for the development of its form as well as its philosophy. Her article in the 1983 anthology Philip K. Dick traces the development of Dick's notion of the android as a way to embody human foibles. In this way, Dick is not unlike the early novelists John Bunyan (author of Pilgrim's Progress, 1678) or Henry Fielding (author of Tom Jones, 1749). For Warrick, the android motif expresses the idea that due to pursuit of money or some other fetish, people have become mechanical. They are "humans who have lost their humanness [like Resch] and become mere mechanical constructs unable to respond with creativity and feeling." But Warrick, despite her love of Dick's narrative process, cannot resist an answer to the title question, Do Androids dream of Electric Sheep?: "Yes, as each form contains within itself the shadow image of the potential forms that seed its inevitable transformation, so do androids dream."

Criticism

David J. Kelly

David J. Kelly is a an English instructor at several colleges in Illinois, as well as a novelist and playwright. In the following essay, he compares Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? to Blade Runner, the popular movie that was adapted from it.

It is awkward to tell friends that you are reading Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? The title is long and complex, and besides, few people outside of the small, particular community of science fiction fans are familiar with it. Much easier is to tell friends that you are reading the book that Blade Runner is based on. Why not? The publisher even uses this shorter title on the paperback reissue editions, remembering to include Philip Dick's original title only in parentheses. The 1982 movie Blade Runner was a critical success upon its release, and its reputation has grown since then. Special effects technicians point to this movie as a turning point in cinematic design. The Library of Congress has listed it with the "culturally, historically or aesthetically significant" films on the National Film Registry. Fifteen years after the movie's release, a video game based on it has become a best seller, introducing a new generation to the Blade Runner idea.

The problem is that the Blade Runner idea is not the same thing as the complex examination of humanity's goals and weaknesses found in Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? The film does have its virtues, but, as is almost always the case with cinematic adaptations, the book is better.

The emphasis of the movie can be found in its title, which uses a phrase for bounty hunters that never appears in the novel. The words "blade" and "runner e suggest weapons, action, fighting, hunting, and, by extension, survival. Rick Deckard is played by Harrison Ford as a familiar movie type, a man of few words, the lonesome, weary private eye slogging through the filth and hopelessness of a corrupt society. Rather than taking place in a deserted San Francisco, the film moves the action to jam-packed Los Angeles, where the street scenes are dominated by twin influences of advertising and Asian design: aspects of today's Los Angeles projected to an extreme. This setting keeps the viewers' eyes busy and realistically projects the social changes that Southern California is expected to undergo in the decades to come. It has less to do with Dick's novel, though, than with the detective movies of the 1940s and 1950s that spun off of Raymond Chandler's fiction. In the film version Deckard struggles against the dehumanizing effect of the corrupt culture that he lives in, which actually is a different thing than the book—Deckard's struggle to retain his humanity. Only his growing respect for android life is presented in the film, dramatized by Rachael Rosen's simplified role as a traditional love interest and by Roy Baty's touching sacrifice of his own life at the end.

While the film is able to insinuate the ways in which humans and androids are similar (very convincingly, since the androids in the film are played by humans), it is unable to come near the book's intricate understanding of the many ways we humans relate to the world around us. Focusing our concentration on hunting and killing the androids invites the viewer to think of them as objects, to focus on the ways that they deserve to be found and destroyed, and this draws viewers away from the empathy that is at the core of Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? and that is found throughout most of Philip K. Dick's works.

The quasi-religion Mercerism, based on empathy with the struggles of Wilbur Mercer, is just too complex to convey to a motion picture audience with sounds and images. Introduced in Dick's 1964 short story "The Little Black Box," Mercerism is a well-conceived religion for modern times, offering a touch of the spiritualism that has been pushed aside by technology throughout the twentieth century. Dick shrewdly gave Mercerism the structure that a post-apocalyptic society will require only slightly more than our own: its focus is away from moral laws and toward unity, but it achieves unity, as our society increasingly does, via the shared experience of an image on a screen. Mercerism is a believable practice in the novel because it represents the struggle against the forces that try to isolate us from each other. So convincing is it at fulfilling a human desire that readers tend to empathize with Deckard and ignore the evidence that Mercer is a fraud, a character played by an old drunkard, and to accept Mercer as being more real than ever when he mysteriously, supernaturally, appears to Deckard.

Unfortunately, the only way to include the practice of Mercerism in the movie would be to waste precious screen seconds showing Deckard, Iran, or Isidore staring at a video tube. Dick did suggest a cinematic quality to Mercerism by having the empathy that is felt by its practitioners show up as physical bruises and welts, which is at least a step closer to the visual language of film than simple emotional bonding would be. In a quieter film, it would give viewers chills to see a character on screen who is so entwined with a distant figure that their empathy could draw blood, but Blade Runner is too active, too predatory, to slow down for this kind of abstract point.

The fact that this movie has no way to include animals in its futuristic scenario represents a true loss. In the novel, Deckard's electric sheep, his goat, and the toad that he finds in his moment of despair at the end all are important. They indicate how individuals in this society relate to those they come in contact with, and to society in general.

The electric sheep helps define just how badly people in Deckard's world long for something to care for, to look after and love. The mention of lead codpieces in the first chapter indicates that radiation has made people in this society sterile, unable to bear the children that might otherwise be the objects of their affection. Deckard's electric sheep also functions to give readers a sense of his humanity by showing him as a failed, vulnerable human being: not the chisel-jawed tough guy of the film but a poor schnook, looking at his neighbor's horse with envy.

When Deckard buys his goat, his good fortune is as balanced as it is for real humans struggling in modern society. The fact that he can at last afford a live animal is a mark of his growing success, but the fact that he feels a need to immediately squander his windfall, that he has to get an animal right away, indicates a desperate, slightly pathetic need for something warm and alive. A goat is not the most loveable of creatures—as the android Rachael notes, "Goats smell terrible"—but that is what the shop had available at the time, and Deckard is so in need that he appreciates what he can get. The goat is also significant because, while representing Deckard's attempt to forget society's faults by establishing a one-to-one relationship with an animal, it also traps him in a job that he has come to despise: his mortgage on the goat ensures that he will have to work for years to pay it off. At the end of the film Blade Runner, Deckard escapes with Rachael Rosen to a new, happy life, but the novel's Deckard stays true to his responsibilities.

In the end of the novel, after all of his struggles, his raised and shattered hopes, it all comes down to the toad that Deckard finds. This final touch is so important to the story that one of Dick's earlier titles was "The Electric Toad," to give readers a hint at what really matters. In the final chapters, Deckard finds a life form that is supposed to be extinct, raising his hopes not just for the future of toads, but for life on this planet. He finds out that it is fake, indicating that reality is slipping away, becoming irrelevant in his world. After he has gone to sleep, Iran makes provisions to care for Deckard's toad, indicating that whether a thing is real or unreal is irrelevant; it is caring about it that counts. Compared with this web of despair and hope, the film's ultimate point that Deckard can love a beautiful android as if she were human seems crass and primitive.

What Do I Read Next?

• Dick presents some insight into his fictional cosmology in his essay "Man, Android, and Machine," published in the anthology Science Fiction at Large (1976), edited by Peter Nicholls. There he describes the complexity of a dream universe wherein there are beings aware of man's plight but offering no help. There are also entities existing outside the dreams of humans which are helping.
• Dick's Hugo Award-winning novel The Man in the High Castle (1962) explores notions of authority and political oligarchy by supposing that the United States had lost World War II. Japan and Germany divide the U.S. and Dick shows how easily Americans adopt their respective rulers.
• Perhaps the best insight into the very enigmatic figure that was Philip K. Dick is the one offered by Paul Williams, close friend and literary executor. Using his access to all of Dick's papers and tapes as well as his own experience with his friend, Williams' portrait of Dick, Only Apparently Real: The World of Philip K. Dick (1997), is a must read for any fan.
• Scientific and technological progress has always been accompanied by the fear that a creation or discovery would somehow turn on its creator— an idea as old as Adam. But this story was not classically defined (in English) until Mary Shelley won a contest, amongst vacationing friends in Switzerland, with her story, Frankenstein; or The Modern Prometheus (1818). Since then, Frankenstein has become a byword for any situation in which a created being (android, computer, or clone) turns on its master. A fictional rule has hence arisen that such a thankless being must be, in Dickian terminology, retired.
• Arthur C. Clarke, though he is very dissimilar, was a contemporary with Dick. Clarke is honored as having given a great deal of respectability to Science Fiction as a genre. One of his great contributions was 2001: A Space Odyssey (also 1968) which grew out of a short story, "The Sentinel" (1951). In terms of computer fiction, this story's main computer, the HAL 9000, has best merited the "Frankenstein" label.
• The science fiction giant Isaac Asimov first set forth the laws of robotics in his story collection I, Robot (1950). There he creates the archetype of the helpful robot to which Dick reacts. Most notable in the basic programming of Asimov's machines are the laws of robotics. The foremost of these is that a robot cannot harm a human.
• An early Isaac Asimov novel, The Caves of Steel (1954), deals with many of the same issues confronting Rick Deckard. In Asimov's crime story, detective Lije Baley is a New York cop who must swallow his hatred for robots when an android is assigned to help him investigate the murder of a colonialist on earth.
• A Philosophical Investigation, by Philip Kerr (1992), is in many ways very close to Dick's work. Instead of testing out androids and retiring them, Jake Jakowicz works for Scotland Yard in a world where a small minority of men are "VMN-negatives"—they lack a certain brain structure and are, therefore, unable to control their murderous impulses. In this world, the testing is for this condition, not for being an android. In Kerr's story, somebody is using the confidential test results as a list of victims and Jakowicz must stop the killer of the killers.
• Another huge cult, known as cyberpunks, took their inspiration from the novels of William Gibson. Beginning with Neuromancer (1984), Gibson places the struggle for universal dominance not over planets or systems but information. His world of high intrigue depends to a large extent on virtual reality and cyberspace as the site of action. Thus, rather than killing real androids, space cowboys must infiltrate security systems or kill other virtual characters. In a similar fashion to Dick's detective's test-giving ability, the fate of the universe depends on the cowboy's ability to hack into a secure system and retrieve information.

Other animals are mentioned in the story, and although they are not as prominent, they help the reader refine a sense of what Deckard's world is like. In the first chapter he recalls a sheep he once owned that Iran's father had left to the Deckards upon emigrating to Mars. From this little fact we gain a perspective on how valuable real animals are, that a policeman's salary would not be able to buy one on the open market. The film gives no such realistic detail. Later, when the owl owned by the Rosen Association is introduced, readers have some idea of how phenomenally expensive such a rare animal must be: we understand the magnitude of Rosens' power, and of the bribe Deckard is offered and rejects. The cat that dies while J. R. Isidore is taking it to the hospital informs readers of Isidore's inability to distinguish real from imitation, a particular manifestation of his radiation-induced weakness that becomes significant in his later dealings with Pris and the Batys. Though Isidore accepts the androids as being enough like himself for friendship and maybe even love, he does realize, when Irmgard mutilates the spider—an insect that most of the novel's readers would destroy without a second thought—what the difference between a false human and a true human is.

The omissions made when translating this novel for the screen may thin out the story's substance, but it would be wrong to imply that this is one of those cases where the author had to suffer the indignity of watching his work watered down. Philip K. Dick suggested most of these changes. In 1968 he wrote notes on different ways the novel could be handled as a film script. Some of his suggestions seem quaint from a perspective of modern time—Gregory Peck seemed to him a good choice to play Deckard, and his idea of a good contemporary film script shows an obsession with the newly released film The Graduate, which was indeed cutting-edge artistry in its time but seems raw and clumsy compared to the film that became Blade Runner. Dick's main concern for the film was that it raise the question of what reality is, which might be why he related it to a coming-of-age movie like The Graduate. He was quite willing to sacrifice much of the novel. "We can have a many-sided film …" he wrote, "or, I would think, some of the moods (and plot, etc.) can be eliminated entirely, however important they are to the novel." His notes specifically recommend keeping "the search and destroy androids theme" and the sexual relationship between Deckard and Rachael, which, probably not by coincidence, would have been the elements to most interest prospective movie makers. Dick was still a fairly obscure and underpaid science fiction writer when he prepared these notes, and he may well have been simply doing what he could to sell the screen rights and make a buck, but there can be no question about whether Hollywood surprised him by changing his story. The filmmakers probably were not following his directions, but the simplification they did in 1982 ended up following the changes he anticipated in 1968.

Source: David J. Kelly, in an essay for Novels for Students, Gale, 1999.

Nigel Wheale

In the following excerpt, Wheale examines "the conflict between 'authentic' and 'artificial' personality".

It really is time to take science fiction seriously. The genre now forms about ten per cent of paperback fiction sales, and with the continuing success of comics such as 2000 AD and graphic-novel fiction such as Watchmen there's every reason to think that the readership will continue to grow. Literary syllabuses in schools and colleges have traditionally been slow to catch on to the study of contemporary forms of popular narrative, whether they are soaps, pulp romances, detective novels, or science fiction. But the growing number of self-constructed course work options does offer the possibility of bringing new kinds of contemporary writing and reading-experience onto the syllabus. I want to suggest some ways of approaching the writing of one of the most celebrated SF authors, Philip K. Dick, through a discussion of his novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (1968) and its acclaimed film realisation as Ridley Scott's Blade Runner (1982). I concentrate on the central theme of both novel and film: the conflict between 'authentic' and 'artificial' personality, that is between people and robots.…

A common reason often given for not paying attention to science fiction is the supposed lack of 'human interest' in the genre: technology dominates to the exclusion of developed personalities or relationships. Philip K. Dick's Do Androids Dream? is a special case for this kind of objection because it explicitly plays with confusions between human personality and artificial or machine-derived intelligence: what would be the difference between a physically perfect android kitted out with memories and emotions passably like our own, and a person nurtured through the usual channels? The question can stimulate good discussion: name as many robots as you can think of; do we believe artificial intelligence will ever equal human resources; and if all robots look like the Ford automated-assembly line then why are we even beginning to take the idea of androids seriously?

One answer to the last question is that in all periods 'human-Things' have been imagined as entities which test or define the contemporary sense of human value: the incubus or succubus in Christian tradition, the Golem in Jewish folklore, Prospero's Ariel and Caliban (and perhaps even Miranda too?), E. T. A. Hoffmann's Sandman, and of course Mary Shelley's Frankenstein. Philip K. Dick's androids are no exception; they belong to their period, the late 1960s, in the way that they are defined in relation to authentic human emotionality and sanity. But as soon as we have written the glib phrase, we are brought up short, in exactly the manner which the novel provokes: what is an authentic human psyche?

Do Androids Dream? is set in the decaying megalopolis of Los Angeles, AD 2020, a post-holocaust society where the human population has been decimated by the effects of radiation sickness. So far, so conventional; the scenario is one major cliché of pulp SF. This novel's originality is created by the compelling logic to be found in the de-tails of the North Californian world which it evokes. The effects of 'World War Terminus' have induced progressive species death, beginning with birds, then 'foxes one morning, badgers the next, until people had stopped reading the perpetual animal obits.' This species-scarcity induces a kind of religion of animal-ownership in the surviving human population, where everyone aspires to possess and care for one of the beast creation. Curating animals is also partly a replacement for child-rearing, because the fear of genetic damage has discouraged human reproduction. The bounty-hunter hero of the novel, Rick Deckard, keeps a black-faced Suffolk ewe on the roof of the apartment block where he lives with his wife Iran. But the sheep is not ideal, in fact it's electric; Deckard can't afford a real one, and he continually checks the list-price of animals in 'his creased, much-studied copy of Sidney's Animal & Fowl Catalogue.'

At the verge of its extinction, the natural world becomes a valuable commodity; the process of collecting and buying the living merchandise itself accelerates the destruction, increasing scarcity, raising prices. Here the often-praised predictive aspect of good science fiction is very evident. But the keeping of animals in the future world of the novel is an element of a larger belief system: everyone views their own life as part of 'the Ascent', a progress up an increasingly steep incline which they share with the god-like figure of Wilbur Mercer. This religious empathy, or feeling-with, is generated and experienced through technology. By tuning in to an 'empathy box' each individual shares in the Ascent of Mercer, and shares the antagonism directed to their god-figure by some unknown enemies, 'the old antagonists': 'He had crossed over in the usual perplexing fashion; physical merging—accompanied by mental and spiritual identification … As it did for everyone who at this moment clutched the handles, either here on Earth or on one of the colony planets.'

'Empathy' joins believers with Mercer, either through use of the black box, or through the empathy which they extend towards the animals they keep or, more rarely, to other individuals. And at the centre of the novel's increasingly tortured attempts to locate absolute differences between androids and human beings, we find the linked ideas of empathy and affect. The Oxford English Dictionary defines 'empathy' as 'The power of entering into the experience of or understanding objects or emotions outside ourselves.' It is a relatively recent word in English, first recorded by the OED in 1912, and imported from the vocabulary of German philosophical aesthetics. Through empathy we know and feel what it is that other people know and feel; it is an experience of (literal) fellow-feeling. 'Compassion' is the medieval word used to designate this sort of emotion (from 1340), and 'sympathy' the Renaissance term (1596).

'Affect' is a much older word that has taken on a new lease of life again in the early twentieth century. It is first recorded by the OED from about 1400, conveying a group of related meanings: 'Inward disposition, feeling, as contrasted with external manifestation or action; intent, intention, earnest', and 'Feeling towards or in favour of; kind feeling, affection'. So even in the medieval period 'affect' was already a word with psychological resonances, and it is used for this reason in our own period by Freudian psychoanalysts to describe emotional value within the psyche. Do Androids Dream? employs this idea of 'affect' to distinguish between a 'person-Thing' and a human entity: humanity experiences affect (and affect-ion), robots don't. But again there is a problem: some people suffer from a 'flattening of affect', and in the test situation could be mistaken for robots, on this criterion.

The androids of AD 2020 are organic beings— soft robots—designed by scientific-industrial corporations for use on the planetary colonies to which people from earth are emigrating because of allpervasive radioactive contamination—'The saying currently blabbed by posters, TV ads, and government junk mail, ran: "Emigrate or degenerate! The choice is yours!"' The robots act as slaves for the off-earth colonies where they labour or work as servants. They are modelled as mature individuals who never age but, tragically, they only have a shelf-life of four years: this also gives them a certain desperation. Periodically androids run wild in the colonies and return to earth, hoping not to be recognised.

Because they don't possess empathy, the androids represent a potential threat to the human population; they are physically powerful but completely lacking in conscience, moral sense, guilt, and human sympathy: 'Now that her initial fear had diminished, something else had begun to emerge from her. Something more strange. And, he thought, deplorable. A coldness. Like, he thought, a breath from the vacuum between inhabited worlds, in fact from nowhere.…' The androids are, potentially, manufactured psychotic killers. And it is only by identifying them through their lack of empathetic response that they can be located and destroyed. Rick Deckard is a bounty hunter, a twenty-first-century version of Raymond Chandler's Philip Marlowe; he traces androids which illegally return to earth, administers the empathy test, and 'retires' them with a laser gun.

This sounds like a no-nonsense kind of job, but Deckard becomes more and more anguished as the boundaries between android response and human response are systematically blurred by the action of the novel. Deckard administers the Voigt-Kampff Empathy Test to suspect androids; this consists of a series of questions which stimulate minute but measurable reflex responses in the subject being tested. The questions are framed to provoke emotional reaction in the 'suspect', the logic being that there is an innate, automatic response within the human psyche which is triggered by particularly emotive descriptions. Ironically, many of the Voigt-Kampff questions describe cruelties which we presently accept as routine, and which presumably would not unduly trouble many people today: lobsters boiled alive, bull-fighting, hunting trophies. In AD 2020 these are crimes against animals which universally horrify humanity, and supposedly leave androids unaffected. But the latest generation of Nexus-6 'andys' approaches nearer and nearer to human empathetic ability, and these robots cause Deckard particular difficulty.

The first Nexus-6 which (who?) Deckard meets is Rachael Rosen, and she very nearly passes the empathy-test ordeal; more difficult still, she ceases to be an inanimate object for Deckard, because he finds himself attracted to 'her'. Rachael also turns the tables on Deckard, accusing him of being in human because of the instrumental, cold way in which he tries to deal with her. But Deckard does not destroy her, because she is 'the property' of the corporation that made her, 'used as a sales device for prospective emigrant.' Luba Luft is the next person-Thing whom Deckard has to hunt and destroy, and who has become a fine opera singer: 'The Rosen Association built her well, he had to admit. And again he perceived himself "sub specie aetermitatis", the form-destroyer called forth by what he heard and saw here. Perhaps the better she functions, the better a singer she is, the more I am needed.' Luba Luft is a cultured andy: Deckard finds her at an exhibition of Edvard Munch's work, and as a last request before being 'retired' she asks Deckard to buy her a reproduction of Munch's painting Puberty. (Why this painting? Is it because it represents a developmental stage which the android never had, and wishes to experience?) He spends $25.00 on a book containing the print, and after he has destroyed Luft, 'systematically burned into blurred ash the book of pictures which he had just a few minutes ago bought Luba'. Who exactly is exhibiting android behaviour in this situation? 'Luba Luft had seemed genuinely alive; it had not worn the aspect of a simulation.'…

The debates which this novel stimulates by creating 'artificial' people who are effectively indistinguishable from 'authentic' people reproduce in fictional form some elaborate arguments from philosophy. For example, I've taken the phrase 'person-Thing' from Martin Heidegger's Being and Time, an influential but now increasingly controversial work, written in Germany during the 1920s. Heidegger's subsequent relations with Hitler and National Socialism cast a long shadow across his philosophical work, but Being and Time remains a unique contribution to many questions. What is the quality of our knowledge of other people? How should we avoid treating other people instrumentally, exactly as person-Things? What kinds of criticism can be made of empathy, as a means of understanding others? Are we condemned to treat the world only as an object, and so progressively degrade it?…

Blade Runner radically simplifies the plot-line and 'metaphysics' of Do Androids Dream?, but constructs a different logic through visual coding, as all films do. This emphasis on appearance can be said to intensify one of the problems of science fiction as a genre, and this has to do with the representation of gender. Is science fiction inescapably a genre written by men, for boys/men? The loving attention paid to technology, and the flattened portrayal of human character, particularly women's roles, might indicate as much. Authors such as Ursula Le Guin and Doris Lessing have taken up the genre with the explicit intention of creating new kinds of SF narrative and value. Do Androids Dream? and Blade Runner are not tender-hearted works, they display the routine brutalities and masculinist attitudes of the popular genres to which they owe so many of their conventions. (e.g. Do Androids Dream?, p. 145: 'He began hunting through the purse. Like a human woman, Rachael had every class of object conceivable filched and hidden away in her purse; he found himself rooting interminably.') Rick Deckard's infatuation with Rachael is the most troubling instance of this problem. In the novel, bounty hunter and android sleep together, prior to the final shoot-out with the remaining three Nexus-6 robots. Rachael articulates the dilenmna: 'You're not going to bed with a woman … Remember, though: don't think about it, just do it. Don't pause and be philosophical, because from a philosophical standpoint it's dreary. For us both.'

That the problem is 'philosophically dreary' is a drole way of putting it, and this goes some way to rescuing the situation. But not all the way. Blade Runner opts for a softer option. The closing sequence shows Deckard and Rachael flying at speed to the good green country in the north, and Deckard reveals that Rachael has no 'termination date'. He has an ageless companion for the duration. Is this also tacky? Or is it a witty rewriting of the Greek myth of the dawn goddess Eos and her mortal lover Tithonus? Eos begged Zeus to grant Tithonus immortality, but forgot also to ask for perpetual youth on his behalf.

Source: Nigel Wheale, "Recognising a 'human-Thing': cyborgs, robots and replicants in Philip K. Dick's Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? and Ridley Scott's Blade Runner," Critical Survey, Vol. 3, No. 3, 1991, pp. 297–304.

Marilyn Gwaltney

Gwaltney outlines the issues of humanity, personhood, and the idealogical problems technology creates in Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?

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Sources

Philip K. Dick, afterword to The Golden Man, Berkley Publishing, 1980.

Ursula K. Le Guin, "Science Fiction as Prophesy," in The New Republic, Vol. 175, No. 18, October 30, 1976, pp. 33–34.

Robert Scholes and Eric S. Rabkin, Science Fiction: His-tory, Science, Vision, Oxford University Press, 1977, pp. 71–75, 180.

Philip Strick, "The Age of the Replicant," in Sight & Sound, Vol. 5, No. 3, Summer, 1982, pp. 168–172.

Angus Taylor, Philip K. Dick and the Umbrella of Light, T-K Graphics, 1975, p. 52.

Patricia S. Warrick, "The Labyrinthian Process of the Artificial: Philip K. Dick's Androids and Mechanical Constructs," in Philip K. Dick, edited by Joseph D. Olander and Martin Harry Greenberg, Taplinger Publishing Company, 1983, pp. 189–214.

For Further Study

Philip K. Dick, "Notes on Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (1968)," in The Shifting Realities of Philip K. Dick, Pantheon Books, 1995, pp. 155–161.

These are the ideas Dick had early after the book was published regarding how to adapt it for a movie.

Kenneth M. Ford, Clark Glymour, and Patrick J. Hayes, editors, Android Epistemology, MIT Press, 1995.

A good introduction to the state of android technology today and where it is headed.

Carl Freedman, "Towards a Theory of Paranoia: The Science Fiction of Philip K. Dick," in Science-Fiction Studies, Volume 11, No. 1, March, 1984, pp. 15–22.

This scholarly work looks at characters from several of Dick's novels, including Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, to put together a theory of the human condition that is constant throughout Dick's works.

John Huntington, "Philip K. Dick: Authenticity and Insincerity," in Science-Fiction Studies, Volume 15, No. 2, July, 1988, pp. 152–60.

One of the central questions in Dick's works, certainly one of the central questions explored in Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, is: what constitutes reality? Huntington surveys Dick's works and at least examines the question, although the answer is still left open.

Hazel Pierce, "Philip K. Dick's Political Dreams," in Philip K Dick, edited by Martin Harry Greenberg and Joseph D. Olander, Taplinger Publishing Co., 1983, pp. 105–135.

This essay, notable in a good collection of essays about the author, examines the reasons readers like or dislike Dick.

Lawrence Sutin, Divine Invasion: A Life of Philip K. Dick, Harmony Books, 1989.

A biography of the author that gives real-life sources that inspired characters and events from the novel.

Patricia S. Warrick, Mind in Motion: The Fiction of Philip K. Dick Southern Illinois University Press, 1987.

This source examines the morality present in Dick's works, especially his special use of the concept of "empathy."