Book review: Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?

Book Review: Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?  
                                                            by Philip K. Dick  
              (the book on which the film Bladerunner is loosely based)

Okay, I’ll admit it—I really wanted to hate Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? by Philip K. Dick. Why? Well, I’m usually averse to things that are wildly popular and have a crazed fan base. I mean, PKD’s fans actually built an android replica of him! Crazy, huh? I know Bladerunner is only loosely based on the book, but I have always been annoyed by Bladerunner’s extreme popularity, probably due to the fact that I don’t like film noire. At all. (And really you can't expect the movie to be like the book--in this case, it wasn't at all, just the idea of androids and bounty hunters). Anyway, suffice it to say that Philip K. Dick had the cards stacked against him in my deck. But I felt I had to give him a chance—how can I form an opinion about a book or author I haven’t read?

Well, I didn’t hate it. In fact, I loved it.

I had no idea that the thrust of this book was going to be empathy. Coming off the heels of reading a supernatural book about an empath who absorbs everyone’s physical and emotional pain (Bruiser by Neal Shusterman), my reading pump was primed. The theme of empathy runs throughout the book and helps us look at the essence of humanity. Dick even takes the idea of empathy so far that in his post-apocalyptic world, he has created devices that enable empathic experiences. Empathy is the key to differentiating humans from androids. And Dick also expertly pulls out of his reader emotions as they identify with the complex characters in the book, not to mention the animals. I mean, if you can't empathize with the lowly spider depicted in the book, then you are clearly not human. In fact, this book is one giant test to see if you are an android or not. If you don't feel for the characters or animals in this story, then you are clearly an android and should be retired.

I struggled a bit at the beginning of the book because I had trouble following the pathway into the world that Dick created. You pick up nuggets of information, bit by bit, until finally you start to get the big picture. The Earth was polluted by the fallout of World War Terminus. Check. The best human specimens went to Mars as refugees, along with android companions/slaves. Check. Animals are scarce, revered, and expensive—people collect them like precious museum pieces. Check. Occasionally androids escape to Earth from their meager existence on Mars and are chased down by bounty hunters. Check. With the new and improved androids, the Nexus-6 model, the only way to tell them apart from humans is their lack of ability to empathize. Check.

Now that we know the basics of our world, we can delve down into the good stuff. Oh, certainly there’s action and suspense. But that’s not the heart of the good stuff. This book is special because of the inner conflict of our main character, Rick Deckard. He’s having an existential crisis (is he an android with pre-programmed memories?), second thoughts about his occupational choice (is it moral to kill androids?), and the more mundane keep-up-with-the-joneses issues (will anyone find out my sheep isn’t real?). And as he suffers these inner conflicts, we suffer them as well. We question our own moral principles and our own life choices. Really--who goes through the day without rationalizing something? The undercurrent of cognitive dissonance sweeps you along until you breathe a sigh of relief at the end of the book—because Rick Deckard has finally gone to sleep after a very long and stressful day.

This book isn’t perfect, but it’s most excellent. I’m no longer annoyed by the fanaticism surrounding Philip K. Dick, and in fact I look forward to reading another of his books! A friend recommended A Scanner Darkly…maybe that will be next. 


P.S. To answer the book's title, my opinion is no.