Guest Post: Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep by Philip K. Dick

Please enjoy a guest post from one of my favourite bloggers, Laura from Reading In Bed.

The Assignment

Back in December, CJ of ebookclassics gave me the gift of DADEoS. Kind of.

A couple of us bloggers did a Secret Santa thing where the “Santa” assigns a book to read. CJ was kind enough to choose something on my Classics Club list. I wasn’t that excited about DADEoS back when I added it, I just felt like I needed some sci-fi and that PKD was someone I need to read. But, CJ, ya done good. I loved it so much that I broke my year-long TV ban to watch Blade Runner (though in hindsight, I should have just stuck to the book.)

The Book Review: Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?

My rating: a solid 4/5 stars.

The thing about DADEoS is that it’s set in a really specific time and place, and has a pretty limited cast of characters, but somehow it’s about everything: religion, consumerism, colonization, the environment… it reminds me of that oft-quoted line of DFW’s, “Fiction’s about what it is to be a fucking human being.” That’s literally what the book is about – it asks “are androids human” but really asks “what makes us human?”

Pretty ambitious for a novel that’s under 250 pages, and seeing as it’s set in a future dystopia, devotes a fair amount of those pages to setting the scene. PKD starts in right away, with the title – posing a question is a bold move, and, it gets you thinking: what does it mean, to dream of electric sheep? How is that different from dreaming of a real sheep? Don’t we all picture cartoon sheep in this context anyway?

Empathy, not dreaming, is the only way to tell the difference between “andys” and humans. Our hero Decker is a bounty hunter who administers a lie-detector type test that gauges empathy. It’s pretty archaic (today) and I kept expecting Decker to break out in a Maury-style “and THAT was a lie,” but this book was written almost fifty years ago, so I’ll give it a pass (and a pass on the flying cars. Everyone thought there’d be flying cars.) There’re some interesting ideas about empathy and why (if?) we have it, and possibly some vegan propaganda going on in this instance:

“Empathy, he once had decided, must be limited to herbivores or anyhow omnivores who could depart from a meat diet. Because, ultimately, the empathetic gift blurred the boundaries between the hunter and the victim, between the successful and the defeated.”

Deckard comes to think that it doesn’t really matter whether an android has empathy, it matters whether we have empathy for them. If a human empathized with an android, has sex with an android, loves an android, is it not human? The human-android sex scene may be the unsexiest thing I’ve ever read (“exposed her pale, cold loins”) but Deckard was into it – so was Rachael, possibly even more so.

And further – as humans continually try to control the body and the mind with drugs or diet or whatever, isn’t an android the end game? Still made of organic matter, but never gets sick, never gets depressed? Insert “whoa” face Keanu Reeves here.

Whoa.

DADoES isn’t just introspection and navel gazing. PKD created a convincing dystopia in which various disasters have killed off much of the population, and Earth is so devastated that those who can leave to colonize Mars. This many not sound that groundbreaking now. The Year of the Flood, Children of Men, and even kid’s movie Wall-E all cover similar territory, but PKD did this years earlier. He also did it in such a unique way, with the strange cult of Mercerism, the worship of animals, the Buddy Friendly TV show/propaganda machine, and kipple. What a great word. And what a frightening, confusing, yet somehow familiar world.

I love this book for being deep yet accessible, for being of a specific time yet timeless, and for being both a great example of a genre book and a book that kind of straddles all the genres.

The Movie Review: Blade Runner

My rating: 2/5 stars.

I’m not very good at watching movies. Since I quit watching TV last year, I can’t fathom just watching TV for an extended amount of time. I start itching to do something – read, write, call someone, clean something – after about 15 minutes. It took me four sittings to watch Blade Runner, over about two weeks. I realize this is not ideal.

I didn’t enjoy the movie that much. I realized it was more “based on” than “adapted,” and a lot of the weirdness I loved in the book didn’t make it to the movie. Decker was different, too; suddenly a bachelor and much more of an action hero. Harrison Ford and Sean Young were pretty good. I shouldn’t have consulted IMDB, because has I not been reminded of Young’s role in Ace Ventura, I may not have thought “LACES OUT” every time she was on screen.

The treatment of the romance between Deckard and Rachael was very different too. In the book, it was almost absurd, but very much consensual (as far as an android can consent to anything. I’m not even gonna go there.) In the movie, it was not so clear. The sex scene felt more like coercion than consent, so the happy ending for Deckard and Rachael seemed a bit off. This is an interesting take on the sexual politics in Blade Runner, and it includes an alternate ending in which it’s suggested that Deckard is an android himself – something I wondered about while reading, but didn’t think much about in while watching.

Another thing that bothered me about the movie was how dark it was. I don’t mean in content, I mean literally. It was always night time, and raining; everything happened in alleys or abandoned buildings with no light. I know, film noir and all, but I felt like I couldn’t see what was happening. I realize not liking a movie because of its lighting is about as dumb as not liking books with blue covers, but there it is.

Further Reading

If you’re new to PDK, check out this excellent flow chart, created by SJ of Snobbery. Answer a few simple questions and find out which PKD book is right for you. I got DADEoS, so there’s something to it!

And do check out the other secret Santa guests posts. We’re still waiting on a few, actually – whew, I’m not the last one!

• Carolyn of Rosemary and Reading Glasses reviews Sea of Hooks on Another Book Blog
• CJ from ebookclassics reviews Dubliners on Rosemary and Reading Glasses

Thanks again CJ! Let’s do this again next year.