Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?

By -
Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? by Philip K. Dick (1968)

Here we have the famous inspiration for the movie Bladerunner, which isn't necessarily all that much like the novel.  As I recall, Bladerunner features a crowded Los Angeles...

Rick Deckard, android bounty hunter, is having a pretty rotten time of it, but he gets his chance when a notice of six rogue androids comes in.  If he can take them out, the bounties will really help his finances, and let him buy a real animal again.  In this future depopulated earth, many animals are extinct and people are required to own and care for one.  (It's a status symbol to have a big animal, and Deckard's real sheep died a while back, so he replaced it with an electric one.)  The trouble is, androids are always being made better, and these are the new model Nexus-6; smarter and tougher than plain old humans, the only way to detect them is to administer an empathy test.  As Decker hunts for androids across the near-empty San Francisco Bay Area, he experiences mental and emotional turmoil around the question of what androids really are.

Like most PKD novels, this one is fairly bizarre, involves a future Bay Area, and kind of goes all over the place.  There is a lot about humanity's new religion, Mercerism, and electric vs. real animals.  The planet is covered in radioactive dust, so nearly everyone has left for colonies on other planets; if they go, they get an android servant to do all their work.  Androids may not come to Earth, but sometimes they escape and try to hide, which is where Decker's job comes in.  Anyone who lives on Earth long enough eventually suffers genetic damage from the radiation, and at that point they may not leave.

It's a pretty good read, strange and questioning.  A classic of SF, of course.  I'm going to try to read Ubik, too, and I don't know what that one is about.

Comments

  1. RebeccaJanuary 23, 2017 at 8:21 AM

    I read this a bit ago and I really enjoyed the read. I remember expected it to be more like Blade Runner since the movie was based on this book, and it was so different. Bizarre and surreal, much more so than Blade Runner. Great read. Great review!
    Rebecca @ The Portsmouth Review
    Follow me on Bloglovin'

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

I'd love to know what you think, so please comment!

Popular posts from this blog

The Four Ages of Poetry

By -
Image
  "The Four Ages of Poetry," by Thomas Love Peacock I am becoming fond of Thomas Love Peacock.  Besides his unbeatable name, he was a lot of fun.  Peacock was a minor literary figure of the early 19th century; he tried his hand at poetry but mainly succeeded in satire.  I read his short novel Nightmare Abbey last year, but at the time I didn't know that the young hero of the story, Scythrop, was modeled on Peacock's good friend Percy Shelley.  He and Shelley were quite close and Peacock was the executor of Shelley's will. Thomas Love Peacock Percy Bysshe Shelley "The Four Ages of Poetry," a tongue-in-cheek essay on the history and development of poetry, was published in 1820 in a new magazine called Literary Miscellany , which promptly died.  It would probably have been completely obscure and unknown--it nearly is anyway--but for Shelley.  Peacock sent a copy to his friend, who I guess didn't really have much of a sense of
Read more

A few short stories in Urdu

By -
Image
 Back in August, I got hold of a book of Urdu short stories translated into English.  It's a large book, so I wanted to read just the women authors for WIT, and that would still be a good amount.  August got away from me, and I only read one or two stories back then, but I've continued reading them since.  I've now finished all the short stories in the book that were written by women (luckily for me, there are short biographies in an appendix, since I could only tell from the name about half the time).  I'll just highlight a couple: "The Wagon," by Khalida Asghar, is a hallucinatory, apocalyptic story.  The narrator meets three strange men who are watching the evening sky and point out that it has become red.  No one had noticed until they said so, but the sky is now strangely red.  Then a smell arrives, so offensive and sickening that it causes real pain -- but only once it's pointed out.  And finally, a mysterious wagon, which may be the source of the s
Read more

Faerie Queen Readalong I: Redcrosse, the Knight of Holiness

By -
Image
I did it, I read all of Book I!  My minimum requirement was two cantos a day, but I managed three a couple of times.  I'm hoping to read ahead, because I'll be gone for two weeks in the middle of this event and I'd like to be able to prep a post ahead of time...but the schedule is already pretty demanding.  The reading is not terribly difficult, but it is slow.  I keep thinking that I've read a large chunk, only to look back and realize that in fact I have read six verses.  So here we go with analysis... Each book in the Faerie Queene features a knight, and a story, about a particular virtue.  The Redcrosse Knight, to be known as St. George after he accomplishes his feats, is all about Holinesse .  This does not mean that Redcrosse already exemplifies holiness; he doesn't.  Holiness is what he's working towards and struggling with.  His foes symbolize various forms of unholiness, and he falls into their clutches at least as often as he defeats or avoids th
Read more