Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? Philip K. Dick. 1968. 224 pages. [Source: Library]
First sentence: A merry little surge of electricity piped by automatic alarm from the mood organ beside his bed awakened Rick Deckard. Surprised--it always surprised him to find himself awake without prior notice--he rose from the bed, stood up in his multicolored pajamas, and stretched. Now, in her bed, his wife Iran opened her gray, unmerry eyes, blinked, then groaned and shut her eyes again.
Premise/plot: Rick Deckard, our protagonist, is a bounty hunter. He makes his living hunting down artificial humans--androids--and "retiring" them. His favorite thing to spend money on are artificial animals. (Though he, like everyone else still on planet Earth, likes to pretend that the animals are real. That somehow, someway his animal is one of the very, very, very last living of its kind. Perhaps not completely and totally extinct.)
The book spans a day or two. I'd be surprised if it spanned longer than two to three days max. Regardless of how much--or how little--time passes, Deckard is on one case: hunting down some illegal/rogue Nexus 6 models of androids that have recently come to Earth. (I believe they come from another colony.) He'll be tracking them down and eliminating them. Something new about the Nexus 6 model--one reason why there is a zero tolerance level--is that these new models will definitely KILL. Definitely it's an us or them mentality.
When the point of view is NOT Deckard, we meet John Isadore, a very lonely man living an isolated existence. He discovers a couple of these dangerous androids and is entirely sympathetic/empathetic to their plight. He joins forces, if you will, with them and tries to hide/protect them.
Empathy--or the lack thereof--is a major plot point. Measuring empathetic responses is part of test (if not the whole test) of determining who is human and who is android.
My thoughts: Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? is a quirky science fiction novel. The plot isn't solely an action/adventure story. This isn't all about the hunt/chase. The world-building has some depth and offers slower moments.
What do you need to know??? Well, the world is a MESS (and then some). As the result of war (nuclear warfare), earth is almost the last place you'd want to live. Those who can, go offworld to one of the colonies. But not everyone can. Not everyone is allowed. But existence is bleak, bleak, bleakity-bleak. Which leads to some strange sub-plots.
Collecting artificial animals. Since the real deal are all extinct, collecting artificial animals (that many pretend are real, and you don't call out your friends on the lie) is a huge status symbol. It is a hobby that is expensive, and time-consuming.
Mercerism. Here is where empathy comes into major play in the novel. Mercerism is a religion/world view and it links everyone's emotions/feelings/ together through a box. I'm assuming something along the lines of virtual reality. Wilbur Mercer is the perpetual martyr who is the miserable suffering servant symbol 24/7 forever being hit with stones.
Our hero mainly works so that he can afford to make payments on his artificial animal(s). It isn't a love of the job; or a personal *need* to kill/destroy. It is a paycheck. He doesn't like the mechanics of the job. Though he goes from slightly disgruntled to VERY disgruntled in the novel. To be fair, to someone who isn't all that thrilled with bounty hunting, killing/destroying/retiring six androids in one day is a lot to ask.
During this one assignment, he spends some time thinking about what it means to be human. He starts realizing that slowly but surely he's becoming too empathetic to these androids--particularly this newest model. How can he keep killing them--hunting them, etc--when he's beginning to think of them as more human than machine?
I read the book. If the book was a five hundred piece puzzle, I'd say I pieced together most of it. Still not sure I grasped the WHOLE big picture. But it made sense. Contrast that with the movie which I finished, which was ALL confusion. I understood nothing; hated everything. I do NOT think the movie Blade Runner resembles the book at all--not even a little bit. It is completely and totally different--minus a few names and the generalized idea of a human bounty hunter (blade runner) killing androids.
Quotes:
"Dial 888," Rick said as the set warmed. "The desire to watch TV, no matter what's on it."
"I don't feel like dialing anything at all now," Iran said. "Then dial 3," he said. "I can't dial a setting that stimulates my cerebral cortex into wanting to dial! If I don't want to dial, I don't want to dial that most of all..."
"Kipple is useless objects, like junk mail or match folders after you use the last match or gum wrappers or yesterday's homeopape. When nobody's around, kipple reproduces itself. For instance, if you go to bed leaving any kipple around your apartment, when you wake up the next morning there's twice as much of it. It always gets more and more."---
"No one can win against kipple," he said, "except temporarily and maybe in one spot, like in my apartment I've sort of created a stasis between the pressure of kipple and nonkipple, for the time being. But eventually I'll die or go away, and then the kipple will again take over. It's a universal principle operating throughout the universe; the entire universe is moving toward a final state of total, absolute kippleization."
"You mean old books?"
"Stories written before space travel but about space travel."
"How could there have been stories about space travel before--"
"The writers," Pris said, "made it up."
"Based on what?"
"On imagination. A lot of times they turned out wrong. For example, they wrote about Venus being a jungle paradise with huge monsters and women in breastplates that glistened." She eyed him. "Does that interest you? Big women with long, braided blond hair and gleaming breastplates the size of melons?" "No," he said.
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