Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? by Philip K. D*ck

Do androids dream of electric sheep? Do they?

It’s a question posed by the title of this famous science fiction novel, and one that is basically posed and/or answered again on page one of the novel as the character, Rick Deckard – who during the course the novel will come to question whether or not he may be an Android himself – dreams not of electric sheep[s], but of real ones (real sheep).

For Rick Deckard has an electric sheep and he is deeply dissatisfied by this.

What Rick Deckard wants is a real sheep, because Rick Deckard lives in the distant future of 1992, and the world has been decimated by nuclear war, and most animals are dead, yet people are encouraged – in their small “nuclear” family groups – to raise one animal per family as a strange status symbol, and for anyone who cannot afford a real animal – or if your real one has died – they are socially obliged to buy and maintain a very good fake one. So this is a world with hardly any sheep in, but big numbers of electric ones. Electric ostriches, electric frogs, electric cats, electric anything…

People shell out for rare, real, animals, but also for less rare, not real, animals, in order to look like they’re fitting in. Deckard yearns for his personal finances to shift in a way that permits him to rejoin the cadres of the animal owning class. And soon, yes, soon… he thinks that will happen.

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Rich people have moved off planet, to Mars, and these interplanetary colonisers have most of their basic needs met and serviced not by the poor (because most of them are dead), but instead by incredibly realistic humanoid androids. Like the fake animals on Earth, the humans who have moved off-planet are using future technology to fake something they, too, cannot live without: an underclass. A proletariat. Servants. Slaves. A disposable labour force. Yes.

And, of course, these increasingly intelligent, increasingly human-like androids are increasingly prone to escape from their Mars shackles and fly back to Earth, where they hope to integrate into the remaining society that’s there and live free (or as free as anyone ever can be here)…

However, the Earth is filled with people like Rick Deckard, bounty hunters¹, who work for Earth-based police forces and are tasked with hunting down and “retiring” – the polite term for “killing” – these humanoid androids. The bounty hunters get a very tasty hot cash bonus whenever they do, though this is becoming harder and harder to do because the androids are getting more and more intelligent and more and more human-like. I don’t know why I’m summarising this, I’m sure you’ve seen Blade Runner.

I haven’t seen Blade Runner for a very long time, though I do intend to rewatch it soon.

(I believe there’s a TV series coming out imminently, too, which will be a further adaptation of the narrative of that film and its sequel, and having read this book I’m intrigued (and possibly excited) to see a 10-hour visual adaptation of it.)

Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? has a very simple cat-and-mouse type of premise, and there’s much more complexity and variants in the world building than I would have expected from having seen that 1982 film (starring, of course, Joan Didion’s carpenter-handyman).

Androids can be implanted with false memories, so it is possible for androids to not know that they are androids. Androids cannot feel sufficient levels of human empathy to pass as human, though the latest android model might have been tweaked up to express higher levels of empathy than most average humans.

BUT humans can definitely be implanted and influenced by machines that alter their moods, and not just moods, but their instincts, their urges, their desires… What can be changed and edited by machine is changing and developing, and it increasingly causes questions to rise over the course of the novel: Are far more people androids than they realise? Does this mean that almost everyone left behind on Earth is somehow not quite human anymore?

…

Television is prevalent and strange, there are boxes that propose to link the consciousnesses of people across the planet at all times, there are hover cars (seemingly unregulated in their flight paths and basically personal helicopters available to all), there is hardly any animal life, there are layers of nuclear dust falling everywhere over the de-populated planet, there are people born with mutations due to the fallout that possibly – it is hinted – manifest as near-supernatural powers…

Yes, this is a complex and dangerous, terrifying, future, yes, this distant future of 1992…

In part it’s an action detective procedural, in part it’s about selling out morality and ethics in pursuit of material advancement and a non-electric sheep. It’s about danger and risk and polarisation, but crucially, yes, it’s about the way in which colonisation demands the use of disposable human bodies, and how mass depopulation due to nuclear war necessitates the artificial creation of these blunt tools.

…

Themes include: Uncanny valley, prejudice, fear, rigid societal structures, complexities, cruelties, invention, lack of creativity and change…

It’s a good, and not wildly serious, novel that directly explores and questions what does and what doesn’t make someone a person (regardless of whether they are an android or a human) and takes in relationships and responsibilities people hold as employees, as lovers, as friends, as partners and just as members of the same society.

It’s interesting, enjoyable. Yes.

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1. Who, sadly, are not referred to as “blade runners” in the book. This is a phrase – as anyone who knows how to read widely will already know – which was made famous by William S Burroughs (off of Junk and Queer fame) though invented by a S-F writer called Alan E. Mourse, and originally it a fictional term used about people who smuggled medical supplies, including scalpels, i.e. people who were “running blades”, not assassinating androids. ↩︎