Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep (a.k.a. Blade Runner) by Philp K. Dick (1968)

You will be required to do wrong no matter where you go. It is the basic condition of life, to be required to violate your own identity. At some time, every creature which lives must do so. It is the ultimate shadow, the defeat of creation; this is the curse at work, the curse that feeds on all life. Everywhere in the universe. (177)

For this year’s Siblings Book Club, we expanded the invitation and so now enjoy selections from our youngest participant, my teenage nephew. His reading favorites of the past few years have been such authors as Orson Scott Card, Frank Herbert, and Douglas Adams, so it’s little surprise that Philip K. Dick would make the list as well.

In preparation for this, our second selection in the Book Club for 2022, I read through a collection of short stories by Philip K. Dick and was surprised at his imagination. Most of the stories from that collection involved some new piece of technology and a twist that turned it menacing and dangerous, which is partly what this book, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? covers as well.

Before I get into a brief review of this novel, though, I want to share a link to his story “The Eyes Have It,” This story, so profoundly simple and humorous, offers a window into the mind of Philip K. Dick and would serve any new reader well as a 5-minute introduction this fascinating author. I doubt that any of his other works float upon such levity, but knowing that such levity exists in the author’s mind prepares the reader to approach properly his other, darker works.

This is especially true with this novel, because electric sheep are literally main a character in Electric Sheep! Had I not been prepared for so many opening chapters about such a silly element, I’d have dropped the book early and missed out on what became an intensely fascinating read.

My copy of this novel bears the image of Harrison Ford and is actually titled Blade Runner with (Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?) as the subtitle. This is good for me, because it also contains a Postlude essay by Paul M. Sammon about the process of turning this novel into Ridley Scott’s gritty sci-fi flick—a film that captures the feel if not the exact plot of the novel.

One quotation from Dick in 1981 (one year before his death) stands out as especially informative about this novel:

Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? is one of my three favorite novels. …Although it’s essentially a dramatic work, the more and philosophical ambiguities it dealt with are really very profound. Sheep stemmed from my basic interest in the problem of differentiating the authentic human being from the reflexive machine, which I call an android. In my mind, android is a metaphor for people who are physiologically human but behaving in a nonhuman way. …Now I wrote Sheep right in the middle of the Vietnam War, and at the time I was revolutionary and existential enough to believe that these android personalities [like the Nazis, “a defective group mind”] were so lethal and dangerous to human being, that it ultimately might become necessary to fight them. The problem with killing them would be, “Could we not become like the androids in our very effort to wipe them out?”

Philip K. Dick from 1981 as quoted by Paul M. Sammon, p.243-244

This insight gives a much greater weight to the novel, in which Rick Deckard, a bounty hunter, is tasked with finding 6 androids who have escaped back to earth from the space colonies. These particular androids are from the Nexus-6 line, the most technologically (and biologically) advanced robots to date (which happens to be 2021). Indistinguishable from real humans in look, feel, and even innards, they can only be proven robotic either through post-mortem bone-marrow scans or through a Q&A exam which measures their level of empathy—for androids can fake a lot, but they cannot easily fake empathy for living creatures.

The whole concept of Mercerism in the book—what’s essentially the new human religion of the 21st Century—was odd and a bit hard for me to grasp, and yet was the essential context for the miserable setting of Deckard’s world. The quote at the beginning of this post comes from Mercer and speaks quite openly of the sin curse that’s upon us all, but of course offers no hope against such a curse. The misery humanity faces without God or his mercy and grace is the foundation for this grim view of the future, but it’s also the reality of humanity’s present, at least internally: lifeless, grimy, and “free” only through synthetic distractions that never truly satisfy.

Although this book took some getting used to, it turned out being a wonderfully thought-provoking read. I’m glad to have this one under my belt and definitely look forward to trying some other books by Philip K. Dick in the future. Next up on our Siblings+ Book Club list is I Must Say: My Life as a Humble Comedy Legend by Martin Short. Not quite on the same wavelength as Electric Sheep (or Ghost Soldiers for that matter), but that’s what makes these books clubs so fun.

©2022 E.T.