“Do androids dream? Rick asked himself. Evidently; that’s why they occasionally kill their employers and flee here. A better life, without servitude” (Dick 184).
This sentence just about captures the central theme in Philip K. Dick‘s seminal work, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? Some of you might know it better by the 1982 film adaptation Blade Runner, but both works deal with the same themes: questions of identity and humanity, drawing the line between man and machines, and what respect is owed to living beings.
These questions have been asked in dozens of other science fiction stories, but it was in Philip K. Dick’s tale that they were delved into in a way we modern audiences now find familiar.
The Story: “Retire” The Andys Before They “Retire” You
After another World War devastates the earth and wipes out nearly all non-human creatures with nuclear fallout, humanity takes to colonizing other worlds in the solar system. Androids that mimic human beings are invented, but a tendency soon emerges: they rebel, kill their masters, and escape. And men like Rick Deckard are employed as bounty hunters to find and destroy them–or as they call it, “retire” them.
But Rick’s latest assignment is not an easy one. He has to retire six “andys” who fled from Mars and now pose as ordinary human beings, but his prolonged contact with androids forces him to question his own existence and whether there’s anything more to him than being just a hired killer.
The Cast: Hard To Tell The Difference Between Good And Bad Guys
Rick Deckard is the protagonist of the story, a bounty hunter in San Francisco on post-war Earth who didn’t to emigrate to the colonies on Mars or beyond. He’s essentially going through the motions of being a human being even while testing for artificial humans as part of his job. He wants to own a real animal and provide for his wife Iran and do all the things that make life worth living, but until then he just moves relentlessly toward his quarry, hoping for a break.
The deuteragonist is J.R. Isidore, a man of low mental capacity dubbed by the government as a “special” and by everyone else as a “chickenhead.” His role in the story is threefold: to be the simplistic lens by which we view so much of this post-apocalyptic world, to give us some perspective on the fugitive androids being hunted by Deckard, and to uphold the tenets of Mercerism, a post-war religion that emphasizes intense empathy and a respect for all living things.
Between the two, I felt a lot of sympathy and pity for Isidore, who tries so hard to understand what’s going on and really doesn’t get a satisfactory ending as far as I can tell. That said, Deckard really grew on me, as the last chapter reveals how much this story is about how he overcomes his despair and doubts, seeing life for what it is and finding the empathy that Mercer preaches–even toward androids, his professional quarry of all things.
The Setting: Reads Like Cyberpunk Before It Was Even Invented
The thing that struck me most about this story was the sense of immersion. Philip K. Dick writes about mood organs, androids, video phones, hovercars, and electric sheep as if these are things to be taken for granted–which, in his fictional future, they most certainly are. It’s a sign of bad science fiction writing when the author has to point out the novelty of every little thing for the sake of his readers, if only for the fact that it drops them out of the world he’s creating.
I can also see how the gritty cyberpunk atmosphere of Blade Runner was inspired by this story. This Earth isn’t the shining, happy Earth of so much utopian sci-fi. This is Earth with radioactive dust and extinct species, with signs of ecological decay and a government urging its citizens to emigrate elsewhere before their genes are too ruined to pass on. In true cyberpunk fashion, for each new device or technology that Philip K. Dick gives us, he also shows how just how life really won’t be any better than we have it now.
Final Verdict: Science Fiction At Its Best
It’s easy to think that science fiction stories are nothing but robots and starships and other kinds of cool technology, but the real stuff has questions. Questions about what it means to be human, about the relationship between human beings and their environment, and about man’s injustice to his fellow man. And all three counts, Do Androids Dream scores very well. I’ll admit that the tone might seem a bit strange for modern readers, but once you get into it, it’s got a story and a premise that’ll leave you asking a lot more questions about yourself.
—
Bibliography: Dick, Philip K. Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? New York: Random House Publishing Group, 1968.
Mr. Rhapsodist 