Book Review: Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?

by Philip K. Dick. 1968. 244 p.

This novel about bounty hunter stalking fugitive androids was, as most people know, the basis for Blade Runner, one of the best science fiction movies yet made. Thus it is difficult to approach Dick's creation on its own terms, to read it without picturing the sets and actors from Ridley Scott’s film. While the book is not, perhaps, as brilliant as its more famous progeny, it is nevertheless a work of substance and can stand on its own.

After some future nuclear war, the Earth is covered in radioactive dust, a shadow of its former self. Most survivors have fled to colonies on other planets. Those who are too sick or too stubborn to leave huddle together in crumbling cities that are largely empty. The widespread extinction of natural life has produced a religion called Mercerism that focuses on empathy. Adherents are urged to own and care for an ordinary animal. Due to their rarity, however, such creatures are enormously expensive. This in turn has led to a shady market in artificial animals which convincingly simulate the real thing. What is more, the production of artificial humans, organic androids, has reached unprecedented levels of sophistication. These short-lived beings are used on the colony worlds, largely as slaves, but are forbidden on Earth. Rick Deckard ‘retires’ androids who do escape there, but the latest models are very difficult to detect. When the senior bounty hunter in his region is seriously injured, Deckard is called into action against a group of these dangerous renegades.

As is always the case in Dick’s stories, things are not what they seem. Multiple challenges to self-identity and objective reality arise. Deckard is confronted by questions about the morality of his actions and whether he himself is sane, or even human. Potentially anything in his world is fake, and just what is the difference between fake and real? For that matter what qualities define the genuine human? And what is the point of struggling on in a disintegrating world? These are all profound questions, but Dick spins them into an engaging story, albeit a disorienting one.

He also introduces us to J. R. Isidore, a rather pathetic driver (for a fake veterinarian service) whose mental faculties have deteriorated due to fallout. Isidore must go through his own spiritual crises, first in his job, then when he meets androids, and then when Mercerism is declared a fraud. While Dick stresses the fact that Wilbur Mercer is not a saviour figure, there are points of contact between Mercerism and Christianity. The description of Mercer’s cyclical martyrdom and rebirth evokes Christ’s descent into Hell and the stations of the cross.

The androids seek to destroy what they see as fraudulent human claims to empathy, claims that exclude them from being true persons. As part of this effort they try, successfully, to discredit the process by which adherents psychically identify with Mercer. While this whole plotline could easily have led into a banal lesson on inclusiveness and the evils of intolerant religion, Dick takes it in a more interesting direction. He shows that the androids really do lack empathy, and are in human terms sociopaths. He also turns the indictment of Mercerism around: it is revealed as being phony but true at the same time. Mercer continues have power, even though the compassionless androids cannot understand why. Indeed, Mercer’s ignoble, obscure origins are in fact treated as a sign of deeper authenticity, since, in Dick’s theology, genuine transcendence manifests itself among the trash and the outcasts, amidst the lowly and the weak.

In this part of the story one can perhaps hear echoes of Dick’s real-life response when a friend told him that Christ was a fraud. Dick replied that even if this was the case, it made no difference. He believed in Him anyway. This seems confused and irrational, but in this novel we might be able to glimpse what he meant. It can be seen as a statement of faith, from a highly paranoid artist, that behind all the falsehood and deception that exist in the world there is still, somewhere, a life-giving Truth worth seeking.

4 out of 5