I really enjoyed the first 90% of this book or so. After that, a few very odd things started happening that did not seem to be in line with the rest of the story. Because of this, I didn't really fully understand the resolution. But, overall it was better than I expected!

The aspect of the story where animals are so rare that they are highly cherished and have a Blue Book value was interesting.

I sympathized with Isidore. Just a lonely, simple man who wanted some friends and got mixed up with androids and bounty hunters instead!

It seldom happens that a movie proves to be better than the book from which it was adapted, but in this case one can hardly deny that Ridley Scott's Blade Runner one-upped Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep big time. Now don't get me wrong, Philip K. Dick's book is a very good read and everything, but compared to the movie, I can't help but think that it sorely lacks the gravitas, grandiosity and otherworldly atmosphere Ridley Scott conjured up on screen. To say nothing of the plot and characters, which to me were far more interesting and intricate than on paper. Still, I'm glad I read it, if only to gain a deeper understanding of what is for me the best SF movie of all time.

OLIVIER DELAYE
Author of the SEBASTEN OF ATLANTIS series
n  n

This is the book Blade Runner was based on. Which is why I decided to read it. You might think this was a bad idea on my part. You might be right.

This novel is a cult classic. You're supposed to love cult classics right? Right. Well guess what? Not only did I not love this book, it pretty much bored me to death, too. Yay.

Don't get me wrong, this book is somewhat brilliant. Well, okay, if it had actually been brilliant I'd obviously have given it a 4-star rating. So let's just say this book is potentially brilliant. Some of the themes PKD develops here are very interesting and I loved some of his ideas: mood organs did you just read mood orgasms instead of mood organs? Why am I not surprised?, empathy boxes, the electric menagerie... The problem is, at 244 pages, the book felt like it was 600 pages long and I struggled to finish it.

Blade Runner is one of my favorite movies ever so you might think that this is a case of "the movie was better than the book," but it's not. Actually, Blade Runner has little to do with the book and, strangely enough, it doesn't do it justice. The movie is just too simplistic compared to the book. And yet both are complementary. And yet I still like the movie a lot more than I do the novel. Does this make any sense to you? Probably not. But there you have it.

Blade Runner lacks the philosophical dimension of the book and its complexity. Mercer (a messiah-like character) is completely left out of the movie so you don't get the theological aspect of the novel either. Some of the themes developed by PKD are present but the movie never quite manages to convey the full extent of their significance. And yet Blade Runner is still one of my favorite movies ever. So cool. Ha.



I think the main problem I have with these electric sheep is PKD's writing. I wouldn't know how to describe it but it just doesn't do anything for me. Too convoluted maybe? I don't know, but reading this novel was a complete drag. I've read a few of PKD's novels and still haven't come across one I actually enjoyed. I always love the idea behind the story but the actual book? Nope nope nope. Ugh.

The other BIG problem I have with this book is the way women are portrayed. Bad move PKD, this is one of my major pet peeves. There are few female characters in the novel and let me tell you, PKD doesn't paint a very attractive picture of the female gender. Women here are weak, manipulative, plain crazy, cold-blooded, sometimes depicted as having a whore-like behaviors and generally flawed. Lovely. What also bothered me is the fact that there is only one actual woman in the story (and a pretty pathetic one at that). The other female characters are all androids. Then again I might be reading too much into it. And ultimately it doesn't matter: human or robot, all the women in this novel seem to be dysfunctional and beyond salvation. Very cool ← in case you were wondering, this is a slightly ironic statement.

Philip K. Dick, cult author or not, I am done with you. So bye bye and stuff.

Since "Blade Runner" has been one of my favorite movies my entire adult life, it's odd I never read this until now. I expected it to be pretty different from the film, but still, it's not like I don't read SF by the metric ton anyway. I think I just never happened across a copy until recently.

If you've read a lot of SF from the 60s and 70s, you'd know this was written in the late 60s by the end of the first chapter. It has the smell of that period all over it - everyone "official" in any way has two or three layers of hidden agenda and an impressive repertoire of manipulation technique, there's a whole religious/mystical dimension to the story that's never really explored, and of course everyone's speech includes invented slang (though the film's "skin jobs" has a great deal more reverberance than Dick's more believable but less colorful "andys").

And the concerns of the story are also very much of that time. Rick Deckard, the protagonist, is a bounty hunter, a de facto freelance killer of rogue androids who is de jure attached to what passes for a police department in a San Francisco depopulated by nuclear war and off-planet emigration. He inherits an assignment to "retire" a group of androids who have illegally returned to Earth from the colonies. This group were made with a new type of brain unit that makes them almost indistinguishable from born humans, except for a lack of empathy. In one view, the whole book is about empathy, what it is, whether anyone actually has it, and how it is experienced and expressed. Deckard experiences a serious crisis of conscience when he begins to question his own ability to empathize, and then his ability to avoid empathizing with the andys he must kill. That leads to his over-empathizing with, and confusing himself with, Wilbur Mercer, the possibly invented central figure of Mercerism, a quasi religion that seems to be about empathy and nothing else. Ah, the age of LSD and MDA!

Despite its obvious datedness, many of the questions considered are still interesting (and relevant). PKD handles them with genuine concern though he delivers little satisfaction, having no answers himself.

n  

تمام آن لحظات
ناپدید خواهند شد در زمان
همچون قطرات اشک
در باران

n  
n
n  n

"یه دختر با موی تیره جلوی درب شخصیت اصلی پیداش میشه و بهش میگه دنیاش توهمه"
پیشنهاد میکنم این پنج دقیقه صحبت کردن فیلیپ ک دیک در مورد ماتریکس و جهان رو ببینید و گوش کنید و دقت داشته باشید که این سخنرانی مربوط به سال 1977 هست

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0LDv8...

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توی دنیای کتاب بلیدرانر بخاطر جنگ و تغییرات زیست محیطی، بیشتر موجودات زنده کمیاب یا منقرض شدند و به همین خاطر داشتن یک موجود زنده باعث افزایش شأن و منزلت اشخاص میشه و هزینه خرید موجود زنده سرسام آوره و به این دلیل بیشتر افراد مجبورن که حیوانات مصنوعی (الکتریکی) خریداری کنند و امیدوار باشند که همسایه ها و اطرافیانشون متوجه نشن که حیوونشون زنده نیست
در واقع هدف اصلی دیکارد که جایزه بگیره و درآمدش رو از کشتن اندرویدها بدست میاره، ابتدا خرید یک حیوان زنده برای خودش و همسرش هست
توی فیلم هم به مصنوعی بودن حیوانات چندبار اشاره میشه ولی این موضوع کلا به حاشیه رفته
عنوان کتاب هم بخاطر همین عجیب غریبه

کلیت داستان فیلم و کتاب یکی هست، ولی تفاوتهای زیادی دارند و دیدن فیلم اصلا باعث بی مزه شدن کتاب نمیشه
برعکس تجربه ی بلیدرانر رو زیباتر میکنه
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اون کوت بالا فقط توی فیلم هست

Review to come. Reading this book for a second time has changed my life for the better.

I'd watched Blade Runner several times, but hadn't read Philip K. Dick's Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep. The book and movie don't entirely match up, but they are both thought-provoking and entertaining in their own right. Fans of the film will notice serious discrepancies in the book as I did (and vice versa). Still, they somehow compliment each other. That's not a common response when I read a book after watching a film, or more commonly watching a film after reading the book. Before reading the book, I hadn't understood the title (a significant plot-line in the book which isn't explicitly explored in the movie). So I guess that's my message for fans of the movie who are wary of reading the book which they've been told is different than the movie; they are both solid and neither experience detracts from the other. In fact, I'm now a fan of both the novel and the movie!

i do agree with your point regarding morality and how folks aren't necessarily born with that. i guess i just disagree when it comes to traits or attributes, such as empathy. for example, a person can learn society's morals, come to believe in them and strive towards them, and so eventually become a moral or even moralistic person. but they can have all that and still not be an empathetic person - possibly because they never learned how to be empathetic, but also possibly because they weren't born with that attribute in particular.

Have you ever wondered how we are living in a world where people are becoming more and more mechanical while machines are being turned into more and more human-like? I mean look at it, on one hand, we have people to whom, mobiles have become as important for lungs. They can’t imagine their lives without them – they set alarms on mobiles to determine when to wake up, they carry the thing in their pockets (in their hands at times when it is one of those large smartphones and their pockets are too small). Not only that, the phones create a virtual reality for them – with music and videos and so on. I read a comic book once about these aliens who had become cyborg over time – they got so many things to carry around, that they decided it is just convenient to build the thing in their body. I am not sure how many of us will mind such an in-built mobile, you know it frees your hands for sex and stuff.

On the other hand, we have these robots, which by very definition, are supposed to be more and more like humans. And it is not enough for perfectionist to have a robot that can walk around but they must have a robot that must move more and more in the perfect human manner. It is not enough for them to do physical things like human beings like people but now, they must think like humans too – have artificial intelligence too.

The question then would arise – will there ever be a time (of course, assuming your terrorists, our cute little nucleur, global warming and Trump (sorry, I already said terrorists) do not destroy the humanity) when robots being so alike humans – being intelligent and, who knows, emotional creatures, will ask for same rights as humans? Or will humans start having empathy for androids?

It is easier to answer that second question. One only has to look at the popularity of stuff like sex dolls. One may argue that if they aren’t even more popular than it is because their resemblance is only limited to physical featured and at that features that are constant. If they had facial features and could talk … the resemblance would be stronger. Now, this is about sex drive and, as we know, it is for almost all of us, only humans that attract our sex instinct. And even that can be so easily fooled by robotics.

What chance then our empathy and compassion has, with which we are so liberal as to extend it to animals? How easy it could be to feel sorry for the machine? Remember 'Small Wonder’? The reasons why people – those sensitive fools, find cats and dogs so cute, adorable and so on, is because of the similarity their faces have with us – you know the eyes and stuff. Cartoonists and toy makers make animal faces a lot more vertical (especially when it comes to teddy bears) because that makes them *coughs* ‘cute’.

So how long can it be before robotics get to the level of getting that sympathy?

Of course, it will change the very roles robots might play. They might slowly change from being our servants or slaves for whom we feel nothing to a child for parents who can’t have one for themselves. (there is an amazing Twilight zone episode about one such subject). People always fool themselves, children play with baby dolls – how far we can pretend to be from a kid who makes play with plastic toys and make s castles in sands? Supposing an epidemic disease affecting newborns spreads out – won’t the new wannabe parents want to have robotic children instead? They can be exactly like normal children – assuming they can be made to err, to cry for no reason, smell like children and stuff; while still shielding their parents from fear of that loss. – Hey those sounds like ideas of a great novel, somebody should totally write one like that. (it might also be a good reason to have genetically engineered children – think  Gattaca.)

The walk to humanoids might not be that simple though. if we were to deny humanity to a thing that looks so human, so like us – it is possible that we might question our own humanity. That might explain the eeriness and discomfort (called  Uncanny Valley ) these humanoids generate as they resemble people more and more. In fact, such fears and doubts might be there in creators themselves - what Asimov called  Frankenstein complex.

Some of these themes show up in this book (see! I was always talking about the book). In this case, the change is beginning to be visible. Some of the androids have come to revolt against slavery imposed on them. Some of the humans have developed feeling towards them – sexual as well as platonic. But the government and general laws are still against the mix and match relation (like racial laws of some western countries and caste laws of India).

Since animals are becoming a rarity (the nuclear war thing), electronic animals are cheaper replacements (an actual animal pet is a luxury) – and as far as artificial animals go, humans are more liberal with emotions. The artificial animals must be fed like humans, they fall sick and all. (I can never understand people wanting to have pets and children). It might sound stupid until you realize how much you love an artificial Mickey mouse while actual mouse will probably scare you.

People are becoming more and more like machines – there are moods organs that people use to change their moods by dialing numbers. Trigger warning for feminists kind of folks – they might not like number 594: ‘pleased acknowledgment of husband’s superior wisdom in all matters’. Also, the only woman that is not a machine in this book is a housewife.

Even the religion is technological – using a device called the empathy box to replace the traditional churches. This religion has its outcasts too - people who can't pass tests of empathy are treated like mentally retarded are in our present society. Perhaps it is because the people have come to value superiority over machines that comes in form of empathy= especially to animals only thing androids have failed to replicate. So empathy is at root of both religion and economics.

The founder of religion turns out to be a fraud – but like several aspects where real life religion has been discovered to lie (creationism, the source of diseases and like); the uncomfortable truth doesn’t disturb the faith of the people.

What about humanoids? There are two things worth discussing. One is the sort of existential crisis they get – because they are created in a way to observe, learn and be more and more like humans – of course, at some point, they figure out they will never be humans. It must like a dusky complexioned girl who was told only fairly complexioned girls are pretty and they try rubbing whitening creams over and over and over to their disappointment.

The other thing is while humanoids seem to be developing feelings we have for ourselves - self identity, ambition and such like self- worthies thingies (and thus so many humanoid runaways); that doesn’t seem to be the case with the feelings we have towards others – love, sexual attraction, and compassion (let us just call it LSC), whether it is LSC towards human beings or other machines (though in last we have a couple of exceptions.

And thus while the humanoids easily generate such feelings in humans for themselves – LSC, they themselves do not seem to have those feelings in return. Humanoids can look at people and know that the latter is having those feelings – and can pretend to have them too. But they don’t feel anything themselves, thus an obvious advantage over humans vulnerable to sentiments. This might be another reason why humans don't much like Androids. No one like unrequited love or sexual attraction.

And Andys don’t even understand animals’ feelings, maybe because they never were supposed to learn to resemble them. This makes them perfect psychopaths. Studies show that psychopaths can read facial emotions of sorrow and like but they do not react to those feelings the way we do – by feeling the sorrow too. In some cases, they might actually turn curious and or get pleasure from causing pain, that is - be sadists. Moreover, psychopathic criminals too tend to show cruelty towards animals in their childhood. They too might generate feelings in you – and use those feelings to emotionally kidnap and blackmail you. Andys in the book do all these things.

Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep: Nothing like Blade Runner, but both are brilliant
Originally posted at Fantasy Literature
Ridley Scott’s 1982 film Blade Runner was arguably the most brilliant, though-provoking, and intelligent SF film ever made, with a uniquely dark vision of a deteriorated future Earth society and a morally ambiguous tale of a bounty hunter Rick Deckard hunting down and ‘retiring’ a series of very intelligent Nexus-6 type replicants (androids) that want very much to live. The movie changed the way moviegoers looked at SF films, and brought great credibility to its director and the genre for a much wider audience, although it was a box-office failure and Philip K Dick never lived to see the completed film. It raised questions of morality and humanity that are basically unanswerable, but presented this vision in a visually stunning, emotionally compelling and visceral story with complex characters and no easy conclusions.

Philip K Dick’s 1968 novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep is a very different creature altogether. Although the broad outlines of the story are similar, there are some dramatic differences with the novel. In fact, some of the most important aspects of the book were dropped by director Ridley Scott:

1) Deckards’ depression-ridden wife, who deliberately dials up depressive moods on their “Penfield mood organ”. The first chapter shows us the strained married life of Deckard, whose wife sits at home in a catatonic depression, fighting Deckard’s suggestion to dial up happier moods, including “the desire to watch TV no matter what is on”, or even more diabolical, “the desire to dial up more moods” or “the feeling of satisfaction from obeying your husband”. It is his wife’s melancholy and desire for a real living animal (not the electric sheep they own to keep up with the neighbors) that drives Deckard’s need to retire more androids to earn more cash to hopefully buy something like an ostritch or real sheep. In the film, Deckard is a solitary hunter with a dark and cluttered apartment.

2) The obsession with owning living creatures since so many animals have become extinct from nuclear fallout. Throughout the book many characters yearn to own real animals, and all the people in Deckards’ building keep animals (both real and artificial) on the room in a sort of competition for social status. There is also a fascinating back story for JR Isidore, who in the book works for an animal repair shop that poses as a veterinary clinic to preserve face for its customers. There is a very poignant scene where JR picks up an ailing cat from a customer and seeks to change its batteries, too slow-witted to realize it is a real cat. His cruel boss forces him to contact the owner and offer a fake replacement. When Deckard visits the Rosen corporation, Eldon Rosen attempts to bribe him to conceal that the Voigt-Kampff test is flawed by offering a real owl, which is incredibly valuable. The ending of the book also features a toad that Deckard finds in the desert, a creature thought extinct.

3) The Specials, often called “chickenheads”, humans who have been so genetically damaged that they are not allowed to have children or emigrate offworld. JR Isidore is a special, but it is frequently his behavior that is most humane and empathetic, whether towards animals or to the androids Pris Stratton, Roy & Irma Batty. Even after realizing that he is harboring androids, he doesn’t care because he still considers them friends (and regular humans always treat him with contempt).

3) The ubiquitous Buster Friendly and his Friendly Friends TV show that everyone watches. This TV program is played 23 hours per day, and the host Buster Friendly is basically a Jay Leno-type TV show host with an endless stream of clever quips, interviews, and guests. It becomes clear that Buster Friendly must be an android, along with his guests, and it is never clear who is controlling these androids, though their role is obviously to pacify the population. At the end of the novel Buster Friendly also makes a big on-screen debunking of the Mercer religion, suggesting that someone in power feels threatened by this populist movement, but it has little effect because the adherents of Mercerism still seek the shared suffering that makes them feel alive.

4) The fake police station infiltrated by androids where Deckard is taken when he tries to retire Luba Luft, who is posing as an opera singer. At the station, he encounters the station chief, who when questioned turns out to be an android and is then killed by another bounty hunter named Phil Resch. Since Deckard’s Voight-Kampff test is different from that used by Resch to recognize androids, Deckard suggest’s that Resch administer it to himself, and Resch begins to have doubts about himself. Nonetheless they track down Luba Luft and Resch kills her, but shows his cruelty in taking pleasure from the killing. Even though he may be human, he is far less sympathetic than Luba Luft herself, who appreciates art and opera and only wants to be left to live the short timespan alloted to androids.

5) The religious cult of Mercerism, which unites believers via an Empathy Box with a martyr-like figure named Wilbur Mercer who endlessly climbs a mountain while being stoned by unseen assailants. This is certainly the biggest departure between the novel and the film, but understandable that it was removed from the film screenplay. Mercerism is depicted in a very ambiguous light by PKD: it seems to be a legitimate means for people to connect with each other, and are uplifted by the shared pain from the Empathy Box and the fact that Mercer comes back despite that punishment he endures. Although it is revealed that the artificial reality experience of the Empathy Box may have been staged, we see that it still has spawned a legitimate albeit strange religion than transcends its beginnings.

6) The repeated motif of slowly-creeping entropy, symbolized by the ubiquitous "kipple" that invades and takes over every corner of this dystopian world, turning order to chaos and draining life of vitality. The building that JR occupies is completely consumed by kipple, which takes over room by room, rendering them uninhabitable. It also ties in with the world of the dead that Mercer extracts people from who have fallen into it.

As you can see, there are so many interesting story elements missing from the movie, so what do we get in return? In my mind, the decision to drop these parts was both wise and necessary, since Ridley Scott and his screenwriters wanted to create a SF visual experience like nothing ever seen on screen before, along with a brilliant synth-music soundtrack by Vangelis. The haunting images of the film are now so iconic that people who have never seen the movie might still recognize them: a dirigible slowly floating about a dark, rain-soaked LA streets, projecting some Japanese geisha ad, Harrison Ford running through the streets chasing a helpless female android and shooting her down in cold blood among bustling streets of bystanders, Rutger Hauer holding Deckard’s hand danging from a building roof with a symbolic nail thrust through his wrist, giving his perhaps the most famous and powerful death speech is SF cinema history:

I've seen things you people wouldn't believe. Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion; I watched c-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhäuser Gate... All those... moments... will be lost, in time, like tears... in... rain. Time... to die.

If you want to know more about the making of the film, there are two excellent references: the documentary Dangerous Days: Making Blade Runner and the book Future Noir: The Making of Blade Runner.

The novel and film are different enough that it’s difficult to say that one is better than the other, but for me Blade Runner is the more powerful of the two. While Blade Runner is concerned more with questions of the morality of retiring androids that often seem more sympathetic than the humans in a world almost completely drained of pathos, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep is much broader in its concerns, touching on the nature of human consciousness, the importance of empathy, the cruelty of normal humans to ‘specials’, the obsession with real animals vs artifical ones, the clear inhumanity of the androids who nonetheless desperately want to live, and the strange religion of Mercerism.

In the end, I think Blade Runner is the more polished piece of work that pushed the boundaries of film-making and influenced every subsequent SF film, but Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep remains a bizarre, frightening, mordantly-humorous, and hallucinatory vision of the future that only PKD could have written. I listened to the audiobook narrated by Scott Brick, and he does a great job as always.

TUTTA L’UMANITÀ IN UN BATTITO DI CIGLIA


Rick Deckard (Harrison Ford), il Blade Runner.

Il romanzo di Dick (1968) è bello, molto bello, in qualche modo anche importante. Il film (1982) che ha ispirato, diretto da Ridley Scott è andato oltre, è di più: è un capolavoro cinematografico entrato nell’immaginario collettivo. Mi spingo a dire che è probabilmente uno dei film più importanti mai realizzati.
Per me è impossibile parlare dell’uno senza fare riferimento all’altro, senza mettere in comunicazione le due forme d’arte.


Rachael (Sean Young), il replicante più umano di un umano.

Harrison Ford non aveva bisogno di essere il Blade Runner, ma il film aveva bisogno di lui, che era già stato Ian Solo in Star Wars e Indiana Jones (oltre che alla corte di Francis Ford Coppola in “La conversazione” e “Apocalypse Now”, e last but not least, era già stato il falegname di Joan Didion:
I spent a couple of months there in their house, every day. First thing in the morning, last thing at the end of every day, explaining why we hadn’t made more progress and how it was going to cost even more money. I think I became their carpenter for the same reason I became their friend. It’s that I was out of my depth, kind of. I didn’t know where I was going, how I got there.).
Ma entrambi, film e star, hanno saputo collaborare al meglio, il film rendendo l’attore ancora più iconico, l’interprete imprimendo un segno indelebile al film.


Roy Batty (Rutget Hauer), il capo dell’equipaggio Nexus 6, il replicante che ha visto cose che noi umani…

Gli altri intrepreti hanno usufruito dell’immenso successo di quel film, ma sono riusciti a cavalcarlo e sopravvivergli solo per poco: uno dopo l’altro sono sbiaditi, chi più chi meno.


Pris (Daryl Hannah). Nel romanzo è identica a Rachael.

Mr Scott siede alla tavola dei grandi del cinema, pur alternando opere di qualità oscillante, alcune proprio mediocri, altre dignitose, ormai poche luminose, come invece gli capitava al principio della carriera (The Duellists – I duellanti, Alien).


Leon (Brion James) con Deckard: è il primo replicante a essere ‘terminato’ da Deckard.

Libro e film sono parecchio distanti, tanto che all’inizio P.K.Dick era piuttosto scettico: ma si ricredette quando vide set e scenografie, a quel punto diventò sostenitore entusiasta del progetto, ma morì prima di poterlo vedere completo.
L’azione si sposta dalla San Francisco del romanzo alla Los Angeles del film: location presentata come sovraffollata, caotica, trafficata, mentre la città del libro trasmette sensazione di vuoto, silenzio, solitudine.


Zhora (Joanna Cassidy), qui nei (ridotti) panni di Miss Salomè.

Ma direi che la differenza sostanziale è nel tono che si porta dietro il resto: la pellicola è molto più noir, nella classica versione hard-boiled (Chandler, Hammett i riferimenti), che di fantascienza. E il film ha una spiccata nota romantica che manca nell’opera di Dick dove Rachel è sicuramente un replicante che si concede con generosità per proteggere il resto dell’equipaggio Nexus, mentre per Scott la sua natura rimane in bilico, e la storia col cacciatore di taglie Deckard è autentica e passionale.
Proprio il protagonista Deckart si trasforma: da grigio burocrate sposato con moglie depressa e frustrata (Iran, non possiede altro che animali elettrici), sullo schermo diventa single tenebroso e fascinoso.


Rachael e Deckard.

Nel romanzo gli androidi sono robot, esseri meccanici senza redenzione, sensibili ma spietati, non umani: sulle pagine il rischio è che gli umani siano già troppo inumani.
Nel film gli androidi sono creature la cui natura è più incerta, lo spettatore è spinto a empatizzare con loro che dovrebbero essere incapaci di provare empatia (ma invece, tra loro, il bacio di Roy a Pris morente…). Allo spettatore si lascia pensare che lo sfruttamento nel lavoro nelle colonie extra mondo è pura schiavitù, e quindi gli androidi, ribellandosi al loro status di oppressi, diventano esseri con istanze più che condivisibili, gladiatori.
Gli androidi del film hanno sentimenti umani, ma anche poteri quasi sovrumani che nel romanzo non hanno: il film ribalta il rapporto tra il cacciatore (il Blade Runner) e le sue prede, quest’ultime ben più abili, intelligenti e forti di lui.
Il rimescolamento della concezione filmica dell’androide arriva fino al punto che nella director’s cut (la versione del regista), è lo stesso Deckard, l’eroe, il protagonista, a essere quasi sicuramente egli stesso un androide.


Anche gli abiti del film, disegnati da Michael Kaplan e Charles Knode, rimangono indimenticabili, come le scenografie, la fotografia, la musica, la sceneggiatura, la regia, le interpretazioni.

Poi, certo, a cominciare dal titolo dell’opera letteraria, il tema degli animali, veri o finti, è molto più importante, diventa uno status symbol che nel film è solo vagamente accennato.
E poi certo, il monologo finale di Roy, che nel libro non esiste, è diventato una delle t-shirt più celebri.
E poi, certo, il film è un magnifico mélange di vecchio (i ventilatori, la vasca da bagno…) e moderno, moderno e antico (la piramide della Tyrell Corporation).
E poi, certo:
Io non so perché mi salvò la vita. Forse in quegli ultimi momenti amava la vita più di quanto l'avesse mai amata... Non solo la sua vita: la vita di chiunque, la mia vita. Tutto ciò che volevano erano le stesse risposte che noi tutti vogliamo: "Da dove vengo?" "Dove vado?" "Quanto mi resta ancora?" Non ho potuto far altro che restare lì e guardarlo morire.


L’origami unicorno lasciato alla fine da Gaff (Edward James Olmos): promessa, avvertimento, o minaccia?

Ideas: 5 stars
Execution: 2 stars
Total: 3.5 stars

Mercerism isn’t as weird as you think. (Or maybe it is.)

This is the 3rd “classic” sci-fi novel I’ve read this year that is an absolute train wreck of a literary work. Bad dialogue, horrible structure, logic and plot holes galore, tangents that go nowhere, jerky half-baked scenes, characters as flat as a punctured tyre and relentless in-your-face misogyny.

But with all that said – it is far better than Brave New World and Fahrenheit 451!

The 3 themes of interest in the novel that stood out to me were:

1. Animals as status symbols/collectors' items
2. How the human treatment of the androids is a one-for-one of eugenics & race policies of bygone eras (Nazi opinions of Jews, enslavement of “inferior” groups, etc.)
3. The religion of Mercerism

Since many reviewers have dismissed Mercerism as “some weird religion,” I’d like to focus there in this review. Obviously, the following will be somewhat over the heads of those who have not read the novel, but nonetheless, I will mark a few key moments as spoilers.

Thesis: Mercerism is essentially a comment on Christian belief today.

Mercer acts out a cycle of suffering, death and resurrection.

His uphill climb is clearly a nod to many god stories as well to the Greek myth of Sisyphus, in which a man is doomed to roll a rock up a hill only to have it slip out of his hands and roll back down again before he reaches the top, forcing him to repeat the action ad infinitum.

It’s a depiction of pointlessness. Of a task that can never be completed (= stopped) and thus loses its meaning in the repetition. What exactly is Mercer's goal with struggling up the hill?

Mercer does not push a boulder, but he is an weary old man, stumbling while sometimes being pelted with rocks and chased by shadowy murderers.

Followers of Mercerism take enthusiastic part in his never ending suffering, his never ending struggle. Literally being bruised and bleeding when the rocks hit them/Mercer while they are connected though the empathy boxes.

They become one in his plight.

Mercer’s death and his suffering is pointless, however. It achieves nothing. The task cannot and is never truly completed, salvation never reached, as Mercer falls again and again into the Tomb World. And, by proxy metaphor, neither does the death of Jesus achieve anything. It has been made redundant by its own logic.

Let me explain.

In ancient times, it was believed that to gain forgiveness, redemption or just help from a god, blood sacrifice was needed. No blood, no forgiveness, no salvation. Christians believe that Jesus of Nazareth sacrificed himself to end that. He was the ultimate “Lamb”, making blood sacrifice unnecessary from that point on.

Today, how many Christians believe that spilling the blood of an animal is necessary to get into heaven?

But Christianity and the divinity of Jesus rests on the idea of a divine blood sacrifice. So what happens when believers no longer believe in the necessity of it?

Perhaps this is why most Christian churches today say little about the blood part, but a lot about the suffering of Jesus. Jesus SUFFERED for your sins! Look how much! Look at the PAIN! The HUMILIATION! He suffered DEATH! All for YOU!!

Feel sorrow, feel pity, feel guilt, feel empathy. Connecting with the pain and suffering of Jesus is to connect with the pain and suffering of the world that he took on. Or translated into Mercerism, the pain and suffering and death of Mercer. Empathise body, mind and soul with his struggle. Literally. (Compare this to the lack of empathy with the suffering and death of billions of animal sacrifices.)

Mercer (close to the word "mercy") is therefore a modern Christ figure. But one with a fatal flaw that undermines an already hazy belief construct. He may not be the real deal.

Buster Friendly (a representation of the Devil) in his big announcement  unmasks Mercer as a fraud, giving evidence that the empathy films are not real, but shot on a pre-war soundstage with painted scenery. And that Mercer himself is some old two bit actor guy called Al Jarry who is alive and well. Not a god at all. He is a Jesus who doesn’t save -who cannot save-because it’s all pretend.

This would point to the modern scientific world’s debunking of religion and the loss of faith in the reality of the Bible.

Being that PKD likes to play with words, I’d guess that “Al Jarry” refers to something in Arabic. But since my Arabic is non-existent, I can’t offer any suggestions for interpretation.

I'd love to analyse Mercer’s appearances at the end of the novel, but I’ve largely made my point. Which is:

Mercerism is a depiction of the state of many (American) Christians trying to make an ancient mystic theology dovetail with a scientific today - and finding that empathy and the group high is the only thing of substance they can hold onto. That's the modern road to salvation -- empathy, not blood.

(Only Mercerites have genuine, unconditional empathy with the andys, we might note. Everybody else doesn't care. This is why it shocks Deckard so much when he moves from conditional sympathy to real empathy. It's a religious conversion to a debunked faith he's always been sceptical of.)

Btw, there are two other points that support this reading of Mercerism = Christianity. The biggest believers in Mercerism in the novel are the chickenhead Isadore and Deckard’s wife, Iran. Who were the biggest promoters of Christianity at the beginning? That’s right, women & slaves/the poor.

The other is Deckard’s purchase of a very expensive goat he can’t really afford. And then Rachael  chucks the goat off the roof killing it. Goats and sheep were the most common Jewish sacrificial animals. Deckard’s electric sheep is not enough to achieve his social climbing goals. He needs something living, that is, something with blood, to get there.

We could interpret Rachael’s act, therefore, as robbing Deckard of his ability to “get into social status heaven” by robbing him of his ticket there: the live animal. The fact the goat is black might indicate that Deckard's goal in buying it was not in alignment with Mercerism empathy, but with an impure, selfish goal.

Buddy read with Inciminci, the Wolf Queen of Berlin!