Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?: Book Review and Discussion

I just finished reading Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? by—I want to censor myself for the audience's sake—Phillip K. Penis. This is a science fiction novel written in the 1960s about 2021, a world where the Soviet Union still exists, where video calls have replaced phone calls, where cell phones don't exist, where hover cars are commonplace, and the world has largely been left in desolation due to some undisclosed nuclear conflict. At this point, mankind is now moving on, colonizing the wider solar system, namely Mars. Part of the incentive structure are androids, which are given out to people who leave earth. That is the carrot. The stick is the state of earth, itself. That said, many people remain, and Earth is where the novel is set.

This is the book that inspired the movie Blade Runner. I have not seen it. I have seen the occasional out-of-context clip. And I've heard much about it. The biggest thing is that the movie is nothing like the book. I will probably watch it, before the end of writing this—and I will put in a section comparing the two. (I did end up watching the movie).

This book is not what I expected, and I mean that in multiple senses. In some respects, I probably should have guessed, while in others, I had no way of knowing.

Pacing

The pacing of this book was very quick. Once it takes off, it does not let go, reading much like a thriller novel. And I found that much of the twists and turns actually worked well for the story, too, as it was Sci-Fi. The Sci-Fi element allowed the story to turn completely on its head and make you question your orientation at a few points. I have a few notes that I jotted down as the story was progressing that were relevant to this: "Are androids copies of people? Or are they copies of themselves?" Both of these ideas were explicitly entertained later on, but I had much deeper and more explicit ideas in mind. After a certain point in the novel, I was even considering the possibility that the main character had a copy, and the author was strategically putting us into the head of both intermittently to throw us off. A novel that makes you question this much is doing something right.

At the same time, while the pacing and the associated twists and turns were compelling, there were some downsides as well. I did not feel like there were enough points for the characters and the readers to dwell on the questions at hand. There were important questions being asked, and they were scattered throughout the action, but the story rarely circled back to look at them. Like the Voigt-Kampf (VK) test, which I will return to myself. Or the raised question of whether bounty hunters could be androids. There are obvious implications there, but Dick does not seem to lean in that direction, interestingly enough.

There were also worldbuilding threads that were just dropped. A major, potentially world-shattering, institution is revealed at one point. You would think the focus of the novel would shift to that revelation, given the implications of its existence. Yet, it never does. I don't think it is ever mentioned again. To be fair, it could be just that this book takes place over a single day, but still . . .

Sparse Prose

The prose is another thing that stood out to me, for multiple reasons. Yet, it all came down to the fact that it was fairly sparse. In general. There was not that much description in the book at all. Not of the landscapes or anything that you would expect, especially in a Sci-Fi novel. This is what made it such a strange reading experience. The expectation is that the book would have been packed with atmospheric description to fill out the landscape, but there was little to none of that. Instead, what we were left with was the use of jargon and various worldbuilding items to show that the world had "gone on" in a certain sense, as King would describe it. Terms like Kipple (trash), Dust (that is radioactive), hover cars, mood organs, and also quirks like the obsession with acquiring living animals, as opposed to electric ones (like sheep)—all of this helps fill out the world without using excessive prose.

I think this is a rather important writing lesson. I don't think I will cut away the description in my own novels, but the use of jargon is paramount. How your characters talk and think, the very words they use, is important to worldbuilding, and it will help your word count.

At the same time, there were also places where I thought that Dick's sparse prose was confusing. He was very quick to move from one thing to the next, especially when communicating actions in the middle of fight scenes. This is especially the case when the tension is high and the action is moving, yet apparently I'm supposed to pause at certain points. The only example I saved is a spoiler, so I can't show you the details, but it involves a character opening a door and detaining some others. Given the build up, I was expecting a shoot out from the outset. But the next thing to happen is a dialogue exchange. Then the shoot out is underway. It just feels disjointed. The scene is sloppily written, like it could have been expanded upon to flesh out the progression. Add a line or two showing the reaction as the door is opened. Or, if Dick insists, remove the dialogue and move straight to the action, which is what I expected, given the build up. This is all very vague, but at the time of reading it, I immediately clocked that the problem was a lack of a bridging sentence, which would describe the reaction of the two people being confronted; this sentence would have connected the before and after.

Theme I

I think the themes of this novel are going to be the most interesting to discuss. The most central theme of the novel is the idea of androids and the question of how to distinguish them from human beings. Further, what does it imply about human nature? But I was actually caught off guard by the way in which Dick approached this, mostly because of how scattered it is.

In the novel, my first reading told me that Dick portrays the androids as basically devoid of true empathy. And I was not really sure if there was a point in which they show any toward human beings or even each other. Upon watching/reading other reviews and reflection, I think there are some instances. At the very least, Dick is willing to undercut some of the assumptions you had of the androids, even if the story is not afraid to show how cold and calculating they can be—even sociopathic. There is a sliver of doubt. Interestingly enough, the androids seemed to behave like characters in a grimdark novel.

So, the question being explored is whether human beings are like androids. Are human beings capable of lacking empathy in the same way that androids seem to be? Especially, does being a bounty hunter for androids require you to lose your empathy?

The movie is thematically different, at least slightly. It portrays the androids as capable of empathy, and more explicitly asks if they should be treated as human. Not only that, but the question of their lifecycle is actually made an element of the plot, to make you feel for them.

The book takes a much more dire look at humanity. Comparing humans to androids is not to raise the latter up, but to lower the former. The movie implicitly does the opposite because it builds on our assumptions—but it is also a bit simpler, where a bounty hunter realizes that he has overgeneralized.

I will admit, I was a bit bewildered when I finished the book, and I knew I would have to mull over my thoughts in order to work out what I ultimately thought. There are passages in this novel where Rick seems to think about androids in a way that is rich for thematic interpretation: "Perhaps the better she functions, the better a singer she is, the more I am needed. If the androids had remained substandard, like the ancient q-40s made by Derain Associates—there would be no problem and no need of my skill."

According to his thinking, the better the copy the android is, the more necessary it would be to hunt them all down. But what if they could copy empathy perfectly, without any spider-leg-clipping hiccups? That would put aside questions of threat and bring up the question of qualia. The movie goes in this direction, but the book only kind of does. It was probably a clever misdirect by Dick, though I do not know enough about the other books in that time to really say.

One thing I do want to comment on is that some people suggested that the main character is the least empathetic character in the book. He is solely driven by a desire for status, and given what I mentioned above, he seems utterly unempathetic. There is obviously a good case to be made for this, though I realized that you can interpret this in multiple ways. Aside from push backs suggesting that the androids are actually cruel or are philosophical zombies, you can also make the case that he is influenced by a mood organ. Indeed, all people are. These mood organs influence how people feel, and he set his to prepare himself for his job. The very concept of mood organs puts forward this idea that people can be constructed, in a sense. People are more artificial with this construct, and the main character constructed a mood in himself that prepared him to hunt down and kill androids right at the beginning of the novel. So, while we are questioning the androids ability to feel, we should note that our main character’s dogged nature is the result of a mood organ.

(Before I move on, I do want to say that I came across one review by Merphy Napier, who had a completely different interpretation of the book than I did. I will link that below.)

Theme II

The VK test is another thing that is called into question, by both characters in the story, and by myself as I was reading the book. It is plain that you are supposed to. A series of questions are read out to a testee, who have their unconscious response time measured. They can't fake their responses, as it has more to do with how their pupils dilate, etc. The questions, then, mostly relate to animals being mistreated. A deer head being mounted on a wall. A nude woman wrapped in a bear rug. So forth. The underlying assumption is that human beings are disgusted by the death of animals, now that so many of them are going extinct, or are in fact. Androids don't care.

And the problem is obvious. What about false-positives? What about instances where the VK falsely declares a human being to be an android? False-negatives? Falsely declaring an android a human. The police care more about reducing the latter, from what I remember. The whole arms race between these corporations and the police is ensuring that these tests, like the VK, are up to date and able to eliminate the false-negatives. These are the questions this book explicitly asks . . .

At least in the beginning.

The book continues to ask the fundamental question, technically, but drops the VK thread quite fast after validating it after all. Which makes no sense. The introduction of the world-shattering institution that I mentioned before was fertile ground to bring the VK back into focus and into question, but the book is moving so fast that it forgets all this. It forgets about the institution, lol.

Theme III

There is also a theme of religion in the novel that is based around empathy, and which is meant to distinguish human beings from androids. It is assisted by a visual reality set that people own, where they can all share their experiences with one another—but it also seems to cross into reality, in some respects. The androids seem to have an obsession with it, or with invalidating it, for obvious reasons. This culminates in what I called a limp-Dicked attempt, though that was only my thinking; the androids just seemed to miss the point. The story as a whole is so sparse that it is hard to say what the people in the story's world really think.

There is a strange parallel between this religion and the main character at the end. I have no idea what to make of it. The vagueness is heavy, and I question whether there was supposed to be any real interpretation there.

Theme IV

There is also passive discussion of evolution, or perhaps the destructive force of entropy. Dick never uses the word "evolution," and a revelation at the end of the book implies that entropy and the eventual destruction of humanity might be the ultimate implication. The book could have had this omnipresent feeling of terror looming over you, as this destructive force pushes further and further in, but I think that was actually undermined. Dick should have made that more psychological. And he was also handicapped by the ultimate question, which was whether androids really felt empathy. If he found a way to turn it around and use that to ramp up the horror, then it might have worked, but I'm not sure that was what he was going for.

Theme V

At the end of the day, the book kind of felt like a grab bag of related ideas all thrown together into a thriller plot, rather than something truly cohesive. I'm not saying that Dick needed to say something definite. There is nothing wrong with simply asking questions, leaving the reader to ponder and answer for themselves. Part of the problem is that there were too many questions. And I just wonder whether Dick even knew what the implications to any of the questions were. He kind of did. He's not stupid. Yet, I was still overwhelmed by how scattershot it was. And underwhelmed by the result.

Ending

The final confrontation seems to say everything at once, answering the key themes about android empathy in both ways. In the above discussion, I mentioned that there was an initial reading as well as a later interpretation, and this was for a reason. Dick was trying to add a level of complexity in the end, especially with the Isedore character, that could not be justified with the length of the novel.

As I mentioned in passing, I thought the ending was confusing when it came to the religion and its connection to the main character. But in other respects, there are thematic implications that are important, when it comes to the revelation about the toad. Though when this revelation is situated within such a cluttered story, it's also rather hard to discern.

Conclusion

As with a lot of reviews, I discovered a lot about this book as I wrote this. I think I became a bit more negative toward it in the process. Overall, I liked it for aspects of its pace and prose. disliked it for others. However, the themes were scattered, like he was trying to say too much all at once, and failed to follow through in ways that were satisfying. I think I will give it a 6.5/10.

My video: https://youtu.be/F1BpKembyS8

Merphy Napier Video: https://youtu.be/Lj5LnjZc7vU?si=ya_XvkotHti7QlBC

iWizard Video: https://youtu.be/qSW8EOQj_OQ?si=NZJLvgmnoqLuQUmR