Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?

Once I started reading this novel by Philip K. Dick that served as the basis for the movie Bladerunner, I couldn’t put it down. I’ve always been interested in how the arts imagine and conceive of the future – especially when it’s a perceived as a dystopia.

The premise is simple: Earth has been ruined by war and a cloud of radioactive dust has caused great destruction. The people that could afford it have gone to Mars (“the colony”). To help them with their relocation, powerful companies have built ever-more sophisticated robots, to the point where they are almost impossible to tell apart from humans. A band of androids has escaped from Mars after killing their masters and it’s up to Rick Deckard to track them down and “retire” them.

In the androids and life on the desolate Earth, we see Dick’s metaphysics. A large part of the book focuses on existence and being and how we define them. The androids look like humans, behave like humans… so much so that only a professional could tell the difference. Some of the androids Deckard encounters are not conscious of the fact that they are androids: the Rosen Association has pre-programmed them with memories; memories that any normal human being would have. Partly because of this, the androids believe they are human. Dick also makes us wonder about what the role of robot in society will be once technology advances that far. Should things that act, think, look and move like humans have the same rights? Is it fair to say that Deckard “retires” them when what he’s really doing is “killing” them in a sense? What separates a human from an advanced android? Is it just flesh?

Dick also asks us to imagine a world void of life, where the appearance of a spider under an abandoned apartment building’s steps is cause for wonder and celebration. What Rick desires most is to own his own, live animal, not the electric sheep that lives on the roof. A popular catalogue with the residents of San Francisco 1992 is Sidney’s, which lists the price and availability of animals. Many of the entries are annotated with an “e,” for “extinct.” People own fake cats, fake birds… all created to so closely resemble actual life that it becomes confusing.

The book doesn’t end on a happy note. Deckard gets what he wants, but it’s short-lived. The androids that were his mission have been retired. The money he spent on a real animal is wasted when an android takes her revenge against him by killing it. And the living frog he thought found… turns out to have a control panel. While Deckard is the hero of the novel, he doesn’t receive a hero’s ending. Maybe it’s the best one can expect in those dark times.