Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?

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Author

Philip K. Dick, 1928 to 1982, American science fiction writer. Published in 1968 by Doubleday. Set in 1992 in the first edition, a date later editions moved to 2021 as the original overtook publication.

The novel was adapted as Blade Runner in 1982, directed by Ridley Scott, with a screenplay by Hampton Fancher and David Peoples that departs from the book substantially. Dick died four months before the film's release, having seen effects footage and approved of it.

Description

San Francisco after a nuclear war called World War Terminus. Radioactive dust has killed most animal life and continues to accumulate. Those who can emigrate to Mars, and the colonization program uses android servants as an inducement. Those who remain are either unwilling to leave or classified as unfit to breed, the latter designated specials or, in common usage, chickenheads.

Rick Deckard is a bounty hunter employed by the San Francisco Police Department to retire Nexus-6 androids that have escaped from Mars and returned to Earth. Six of them are at large. His interest in the work is financial. He owns an electric sheep and wants a real animal, because in a world where nearly all animals are dead, owning and caring for a living one is the primary marker of status and of moral standing. He consults a Sidney's catalogue for market prices the way one would consult a stock listing.

The androids are physically indistinguishable from humans. The test that separates them, the Voigt-Kampff empathy test, measures involuntary responses to questions describing harm to animals. The premise is that empathy is the human property androids lack. Nearly everything in the novel works to undermine that premise. Deckard's empathy is unreliable and his job requires suppressing it. The androids display fear, loyalty, and cruelty in proportions that do not sort cleanly. One character discovers mid-book that he may be an android and that his memories may be implanted, and the novel does not settle the question.

Mercerism is a religion practiced through an empathy box, a device users grip in order to fuse with the collective experience of an old man named Wilbur Mercer climbing a hill while stones are thrown at him. Users feel each other's emotions and receive Mercer's physical injuries. The mood organ is a household appliance that lets a person dial an emotional state, including the state of wanting to dial one.

John Isidore, a special who drives a truck for a company that repairs artificial animals, gives the novel its second viewpoint. His response to the androids who take shelter with him is the closest thing the book offers to a positive account of empathy, and he is the character the society has classified as subhuman.

Relevance

The book's main question is whether there is any test that reliably distinguishes a person from a sufficiently good imitation, and its answer is that the tests available measure something other than what they claim to. This is the Turing problem posed as a moral rather than a computational matter, eighteen years after Turing's paper.

Dick constructs a society in which caring is compulsory, publicly performed, and available for purchase, then makes the artificial animals nearly perfect substitutes and observes that people still want the real ones and still cannot tell. The status economy around them is the mechanism by which the society enforces its own definition of humanity, and it operates through consumer goods.

Mercerism and the mood organ together form an early treatment of technologically mediated affect. Emotion is delivered on demand through an appliance, and collective feeling is distributed through a network device, both decades before either had a working equivalent.

Relationship to Blade Runner

The film removes Mercerism, the mood organ, the animals, and Isidore's storyline, and replaces the novel's arid comic register with noir. It also inverts the central sympathy: the film's replicants are tragic figures with a compelling grievance, while Dick's androids are largely cold and several of them are casually cruel. Readers who arrive at the book through the film generally find a different argument than the one they expected.

Later editions have been retitled Blade Runner: Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? by publishers, which has produced persistent confusion about which text is which.

Criticism

The novel is structurally uneven, written quickly, and contains threads that go nowhere, which is characteristic of Dick's output during a period of high productivity and considerable personal difficulty.

The treatment of the androids has drawn objection from readers who find the novel's position closer to endorsing Deckard's work than undermining it, since the androids the book depicts are in fact largely without empathy. The counter-reading holds that the novel's target is the society's confidence in its own test rather than the androids themselves.

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