“The electric things have their lives, too.”

Philip K. Dick has a rep for crazy. The word is as many as 14 of his books were accomplished with the use of psychedelics, consistent with the Harvard LSD experiments in which Aldous Huxley was engaged and reported about in The Doors of Perception. Androids is darkly imaginative, a strange and sometimes disrorienting dystopian novel, but it does not seem particularly acid-soaked (as others seem to be).

Rick Deckard is an android bounty hunter for the government, and not initially much reflective about that: Androids, made to be slaves for those who have left Earth for Mars because of the nuclear holocaust, are being made smarter and some of them have revolted, killing some humans, and have returned to Earth. Deckard, as a member of the San Francisco Police Department “retires” some of them for a bonus. How does he find out they are androids? He tests them for empathy with some elaborate equipment.

With this bonus he saves money to buy an actual, organic animal, though they are expensive, since most humans and animals are now dead. In lieu of an actual electric one, Deckard and his wife Iran own an electric sheep.

The real focus of Androids is empathy. At first, it seems clear-cut, but not too much consideration will take you to the fact that many humans seem to lack empathy; and with the development of androids, it seems many of them have it, or something like it.

Or love, which becomes a related focus of the book. Can humans fall in love with androids? Deckard and Iran are struggling in their relationship; Deckard seems to have trouble killing attractive and talented female androids, and one in particular. Ethical and epistemological issues abound.

So, a dystopian romance? The ending is strange, and strangely powerful, and worth my thinking through, again, but I liked rereading it (this time with a class), and seeing Blade Runner with them. I think for sci fi fans this is a must read.

Interesting dimensions of the book:

*Mood organs for adjusting psychological states

*Mercerism as a world religion; you can “fuse” with Mercer

*Kipple (accumulating “stuff” of consumerism, filling homes

*Connections with Edvard Munch’s “Scream”

*Connections with Mozart’s The Magic Flute.

The trailer for the 1982 Blade Runner:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eogpI...

It's hard to know where to start with this book. On the one hand, I want to say it was amazing and highly original and extremely thought-provoking. On the other I want to say it was often confused, contradictory and obscure. Well, I guess I just did :)

After wars and then radioactive dust obliterated much of the planet, the majority of the human population fled to colonies on Mars and elsewhere, taking their own personal android servant. Some stayed behind, either because they had been contaminated by the dust or for whatever personal reason they have. With apartment buildings mostly empty and rubbish and dust everywhere, it's a bleak existence (and not actually terribly realistic - with hardly any vegetation left there shouldn't be any breathable air at all), yet life for the androids in the colonies must be worse if some are escaping and trying to have "normal" lives on Earth.

These androids have to be hunted down and "retired". Rick Deckard is a bounty hunter for the San Francisco Police Department, earning $1000 per andy. One of the other bounty hunters, Dave, retired two andys of a group of eight but was shot by the third, Roy Baty. Now Deckard has taken over the assignment and must track down and retire the remaining six, who are all masquerading as humans. The one test they have to distinguish these realistic machines is the Voight-Kampff test, an empathy test - because the one difference between humans and androids, they believe, is that the andys are incapable of feeling empathy.

When it was first published in 1968, it was set in 1991. Later editions changed that to 2021 - this edition is set in 2021. I expect they'll probably change it again in a few years. It's interesting that Dick had such little faith in us - that we would ruin the planet so quickly and absolutely - and such enormous faith - that we would be advanced enough, technologically, to escape it. Having given it such a short time frame, and no doubt excited by the advent of space exploration and television in the 60s, I get the impression Dick, and everyone else, had high expectations of human achievement.

The book is very different from the movie, so I'm not going to bring up Blade Runner except to say that if you've watched it, it won't have spoiled the book for you. Although it did lead me to expect some kind of revelation or focus on the possibility of Deckard being an android, which isn't the case. He's not an andy. The possibility looms because of the callous indifference the bounty hunters have towards the androids, their ability not to be taken in by their human appearance and to kill them. Ironically, Deckard suffers from too much empathy and starts feeling sorry for the andys. Briefly.

The post-apocalyptic aspects of this story interest me perhaps the most, but they're not all that satisfying. It's a horrible, horrible world, highly polluted and littered. There's a lot here that's unanswered, and doesn't always make sense. That closed-in feel of the movie is here - it has such a narrow geographical scope, with little world-building structure to hold it up. Who is running things? Some kind of government, but not the same kind as now. Why are abandoned suburbs still getting electricity and clean water? Where does the food come from if nothing can be grown? What kind of fuel do they use? How does the Mood Organ work and why do they need it? (perhaps to counter the bleakness.) There's mention of the Soviet Union and the UN, but nothing about any other country, giving the feeling that the United States is a lone land floating in a big empty sea with nothing to anchor it.

And what of Mercer? The empathy box? Grip the handles and you are drawn into a shared existence with everyone else who's gripping the handles of the box at the same time, bodily transported (it feels like) to a desolate desert where you climb along with old man Mercer up a hill, toiling and being hit by rocks which make you bleed in real life, only to suffer greater torment at the top and be sent to the tomb world to start again. Sounds like a complicated computer game but it's more like a religion. Empathy is the only thing that separates humans from androids, and the only way the humans left on Earth can dispel the utter lonliness of their existences. There are no children here.

There were too many contradictions here for my liking. When Rick tests Rachael Rosen and finds out she's a Nexus-6 android, he asks her "father" if she knows and he says "no", and it's evident from Rachael's reaction that she doesn't. But then later she's sent to seduce Rick (not a difficult task) to help the escaped Nexus-6 andys escape, again, or make it hard for him to retire them, especially Pris who looks the same as Rachael - and Rachael, when he realises and confronts her, tells him she's done it before, with other bounty hunters, and shares her knowledge and philosophy about being an andy. Which means that she's known she was an android all along, and that, what, she cares what happens to the others? But they're incapable of caring, that's the whole point. And she feels enough to kill Deckard's goat, because he loves it more than his own wife, and certainly more than her. That's vindictive. That's jealousy. That's feeling.

There are other things that bugged me, obscure things mostly, and I don't have the time or energy to read it over and over again until I got it. If it's possible to get. I still think it's an amazing book, and raises a lot of questions about what it means to be human and so on. It's also a quick read and, set in one single day and night, quite fast-paced. It's structured well, and, for a science fiction book, relatively easy to read. There are some very surreal scenes, like when Mercer "manifests", and some tense ones - the worse scene in the entire book, I found, was when Pris was cutting the legs off the spider. There's not a whole lot of violence and the ending wraps up quickly - there's no drawn-out fight scene, the andys aren't very confrontational or aggressive, unlike in the movie. They have superior intelligence but weren't designed to be killing machines.

Which begs the question: why do they need to be retired? They only have four years of life anyway, because their cells can't regenerate, and they just want to live their own lives. And if this is unacceptable then why create them that way? It doesn't make sense. I can understand the human need to kill any rogue andys, and the need to feel superior over another being etc., but why make them so realistic? And surely the need these rogue andys have to escape their servitude is a clear indication that they have dreams and aspirations like humans do, and therefore some amount of feeling?

"Do androids dream of electric sheep?" is a very good title, and meant literally. The humans aren't aspiring to make the world a better place or have children or anything like that, only to make enough money to buy an animal, or at the very least, an electric one, like Deckard's electric sheep. If he were an android, would he still have that desire? The humans measure empathy by how much they feel towards animals - the questions in the test measure reactions to bear-skin rugs and mounted deer's heads and meat for food. Yet despite this "empathy" they do nothing about making the few surviving animals' situations better; the empathy equates more to a possessiveness than to a genuine concern for the animal as another living being.

I'm just talking out my cluttered thoughts here, sorry to ramble on. You can go round and round with this book and never arrive at a satisfactory conclusion, but it's still worth the ride (if I were to use a cheesy line, which I just did, and won't change, because this has exhausted me and I'm falling back on cliches just to wrap it up).

It takes five full pages for a character to buy a goat and ONE FRIGGIN' SENTENCE for a character to "fall in love". This book was so amazing in the beginning...and then suddenly everything plummeted downhill. It was almost as if Dick got 150 pages in and then said "awwww screw it...uh, sentence, sentence, sentence, THE END!" Why did there need to be any sort of "love" storyline anyway?

Along with being the only geek who made it through puberty without reading Phillip K. Dick books, I also am one of the few who has never seen Blade Runner. I'm a little scared to now.

I was so convinced I was going to give this one 5 stars while I read the first 100 pages. It felt truly original, hauntingly believable, and seemed gearing up for some big revelation. Man, did this one disappoint.

Dear Mr. Dick,
Thank you for the lovely short story...but what was with all of those extra pages glued in after?

I really enjoyed this book. It was a fairly quick read for me and jumped into a lot of questions on what it means to be human. What makes a human different from a machine designed to look and act just as humans do? I loved it, even if it the ideas of empathy at times felt silly—as if it is impossible to fake.

I also loved the future that Philip K Dick had built, even if it was nothing like the 2021 we had, it still felt like an inevitable future of some kind.

There was one scene towards the end that I did not like and I did not understand. It involved a hotel room. It didn’t make much sense to me, and afterwards it had felt fairly unnecessary. I struggled to find the relation between that scene and what the author was trying to get across.

But aside from that scene, I really did enjoy this read.

I Love Dick. There I've said it. No, not a “Mood Organ” or blood filled skin sack made to facilitate reproduction but Philip K. Dick.

Is it really possible for androids to acquire human traits like empathy and the desire to understand the meaning of life and avoid death at all costs? What would the role of socialism play in an android world? Would self aware androids seek out to destroy anything that threatened their existence or tried to control their thoughts (ie programming)?

A Google search revealed that the search for intelligent android life is alive and well. I learned that there are no less than 15 groups attempting to create intelligent android life.

Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep was a joyous adventure into mans struggles with ideas such as real vs. unreal, life vs. un-life, mind control, intelligence vs. mental deficiency, decay vs. regeneration, the value of religion (real or imagined) and the value of individualism vs. the collective. Sounds like something that should have a “King James Version” doesn't it? I would consider attending mass at a church where the virtues and values explored in this book were studied and ‘preached’.

Would an intelligent android society have a need for religion even if they understood that the religion they followed was created (divinely inspired or not) to give them hope and a forum where they would feel like a part of something bigger and more consequential than oneself? What value does religion have in the lives of mankind? This is one of the fundamental issues Dick toys with in the world he creates in this novel.

And now I digress. . .

While in college I played around a little with writing an Artificial Intelligence (AI) program I called “The Oracle”. It was a simple program where input from the user was stored in data files along with key words that would allow the program to associate the users input with the key words. The result was that “The Oracle” could use input from the user to “learn” custom responses to questions the user might ask. My rudimentary computer skills and the memory storage limits of my Commodore 64 resulted in my abandoning the project after numerous attempts to avoid the “out of memory” errors. Oh, the limitations of computers! Would a memory error like this in humans be considered something like a seizure?

If we succeed in creating self aware computers I wonder what they would think of their creators. Would they treat their parents better than we treat our own human parents or would they tend to migrate to their own, creating a separate mechanical society?

Dicks Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep explores this question and presents one look at how this might work out.

If you are a fan of relevant science fiction I would recommend this book. I ended up reading this one twice in a row to make sure I didn’t miss anything. Others more familiar with Dick might suggest other Dick works that could/should be read before taking on this philosophical/social work.

By the way a “Mood Organ” is an invention by Dick. It’s a device used by humans to manipulate their moods. The user dials in a code which correlates with a specific emotion, mood, or desire. Sounds like something that should take two “D” sized batteries and be stored at the bottom of the underwear drawer huh?

Enjoy the book and try to ignore the incessant buzzing in the background, it's just the androids busy at work.

Treasure of the Rubbermaids 20: Failing the Voight-Kampff Test

The on-going discoveries of priceless books and comics found in a stack of Rubbermaid containers previously stored and forgotten at my parent’s house and untouched for almost 20 years. Thanks to my father dumping them back on me, I now spend my spare time unearthing lost treasures from their plastic depths.

In the spirit of Phillip K. Dick‘s questioning of reality and identity, it’s fitting that there are two versions of this story. One is the novel he wrote in which a police bounty hunter tracks down and destroys androids while he tries to earn enough money to buy a real animal to snap his wife out of a depression. The other is a film version in which a disillusioned ‘blade runner’ is forced to track down and kill dangerous replicants despite his growing sympathy for them. I also like to think that PKD would probably get a laugh because of the approximately one thousand different director’s cuts of the movie available to further confuse us as to which is the ‘real’ story.

The world is pretty much a wasteland after a nuclear war, and the smart people are getting off the planet. Human-like androids have been developed to help with colonizing other worlds, but they have a habit of returning to Earth illegally and trying to hide. Police bounty hunters use an empathy test to identify them and then kill them on the spot. Rick Deckard is called in after the senior bounty hunter was nearly killed while hunting a group of a new type of android. Deckard is anxious for the big payday that he’d get because he’s embarrassed at not being able to afford a new animal to replace the fake sheep he bought after his real one died. He hopes that being able to get a real animal again will snap his wife out of the depression she’s in that even their mood organ device can’t fix.

If you’re hoping for futuristic tech in this, you’re going to be disappointed. PKD’s strength wasn’t in envisioning what the future would look like, and the idea that Deckard’s electric sheep has actual audio tape in it to simulate noises seems laughable now. Flying cars and laser tubes seem like the kind of sci-fi you’d get from any pulp writer of the era.

But that wasn’t the point, and PKD’s tech was always just an excuse to get at the more interesting issues of questioning reality and identity. In this one, the question is what it means to be human, and the hunt for the androids is used to explore the idea of empathy. It’s also a nice touch that with most of the animals killed by the nuclear fall-out, that owning a real one is the ultimate status symbol and any type of mistreatment is a shocking taboo. Deckard longs for an animal to care for while killing things with human faces. Are they too deserving of sympathy or is their humanity a mask over an overwhelming desire for self-preservation that essentially makes them all sociopaths? That’s the interesting stuff in this book.

Even though the Blade Runner movies adopts the basic story as well as several other elements, it’s not really a faithful adaptation of the book. It’s a sci-fi classic that became the template for the look of dystopian futures in film, but while the two share DNA, they feel like different beings in a lot of ways. (I think that Richard Linklater’s Rotoscoped verson of A Scanner Darkly is probably the best adaption of PKD’s work in capturing it’s tone and theme.)

"I thought as much, sir, when you mentioned rabbits. The thing about rabbits, sir, is that everybody has one. I'd like to see you step up to the goat-class where I feel you belong. Frankly you look more like a goat man to me." (p133)

This is a book set in the far distant future of 2020. Colonies have been established on distant plants, regular space traffic is a matter of fact, as are robots that look identical to humans - even when violently blown apart, at the same time the idea that women might be anything other than receptionists, housewives or secretaries is unimaginable in this story. It was written in the 60s, just curiously in the 1960s rather than the 1760s. Perhaps as often in science-fiction, the writing is about the present and the rejection of what the author doesn't like about contemporary society. Which is why no doubt everybody has a hovercar, for surely there can have been nothing worse than the traffic jam in 60s west coast America.

no one today remembered why the war had come about or who, if any one, had won (p11)

Uh. Years ago I read a newspaper article, probably in The Independent, which for unrelated reasons has since shut down, about Philip K. Dick and Stanislaw Lem. Dick was an admirer of Lem, until paranoia got to much for him imagining elaborate conspiracies possibly a by-product of his experimentation with chemical substances not endorsed by all professional or legal authorities. Anyway, originally, it was written, Dick wanted to write a great realist novel about American Working Class Life with capital letters. Science-fiction was just a way to fund that other never-written novel. Bits of that desire flash up in these stories, particularly here maybe in the desire for unaffordable status-symbols whichThorstein Veblen would have appreciated for their impracticality, the literal desolation of suburban life, and the the alienation beloved of all nineteenth century social thinkers.

"Why?" Rick said. "Why should I do it? I'll quit my job and emigrate."
The old man said, "You will be required to do wrong no matter where you go. It is the basic condition of life, to be required to violate your own identity. At the same time, every creature that lives must do so. It is the ultimate shadow, the defeat of creation, this is the curse at work, the curse that feeds on all life. Everywhere in the universe." (p141)

Alternatively these books come out of his pharmacological habits.

For me in all the Philip K. Dick stories that I have read so far have featured reality being cracked apart. The principal character has lived inside an egg, and as the tale is told a massive spoon descends and cracks it violently open. You think you are alive - well you're actually your brain is on life support and technically you're dead, or your entire existence is false and the real world is in fact described in a political fable written by a man living high among the Rocky Mountains. In one of the film versions of this book the same thing happens you know, although I have forgotten vast swathes of the film, I feel that it is a better story than the book. The joy of Philip K. Dick books is the wild flora and fauna of his ideas, the problem with Philip K. Dick books is the wild flora and fauna of his ideas, which the film shows can benefit from vigorous gardening, Dick doesn't embrace the potential for that here, although the possibility is present and would, I felt, have been a logical conclusion. At first reading it seemed impossible to imagine that the main character - Deckard - was human given the flatness of his tone, but then I remembered that I was reading a Philip K. Dick novel - there vividness is reserved for descriptions of clothing.

Ubik and The Man in the High Castle both worked better for me because the illogic of the story ran with the grain of the narrative, here it cuts against it. How does Rachael Rosen know where Deckard lives? There is an entire Police station operating independently from the rest of the city police that has been infiltrated by robots - nobody notices and the discovery makes no impact on the rest of the stories characters despite the central narrative conceit that Deckard's boss is organising the hunting down of robots. Why do they bother hunting them down when they only have short lifespans? Having come to that why are they making robots indistinguishable from humans when they clearly don't like them and they only need them to do basic labour on the colony planets - isn't this a fundamentally crazy society since it isn't producing conscious combine harvesters instead? If the Robots are dangerous killers oughtn't bounty hunters have very short working lives since they have to administer these intricate obvious tests during which time they'd be vulnerable to assault?... You don't want to read this too sober, ideally the more adrift you are from the conscious mind the better it might work. The reality of this book is tangibly different from our own. The faked prophet denounced by the robot TV presenter manifests himself twice with concrete effect, the cut sustained in imagination is physically visible stigmata like. There is no clear boundary between the fantasy world of the mind and the physical world of the body, matched perhaps by the interweaving of artificial sheep and spiders with people who care for them and experience deep empathy for their programmed experience.

Well that was crazy cool!

Pues.. estoy algo decepcionado esperaba más, de hecho creo que la película es mucho mejor.
Toda la parte de las mascotas me ha parecido extraña y aburrida y el mercerismo lo mismo, demasiada filosofía para mí.
Si me ha gustado la duda de si los androides son diferentes a un ser humano o no, si tienen sueños de una vida mejor, pero no da para mejorar al libro.
Sinopsis: Tras la guerra nuclear, la Tierra ha quedado sometida bajo una gran nube de polvo radioactivo. La gente ha emigrado a otros planetas del sistema y se ha llevado a androides que les asisten. Algunos de estos han escapado de la servidumbre y han vuelto ilegalmente a la Tierra. Y Rick Deckard, cazador de bonificaciones, es uno de los encargados de acabar con ellos. Pero, ¿es justo matar a los humanoides sólo por el hecho de serlo? ¿Cuál es el límite entre la vida artificial y la natural?
La parte que habla de la caza a los androides es la única parte interesante pero el resto meh
5/10
# 23. Un clásico que tengas entre tus pendientes. Reto literario lecturas pendientes 2022.
# 49. Dos libros ambientados en ciudades hermanas (hermanadas) (parte 1). Reto popsugar 2022

My first Philip K. Dick read, and now I understand what all the fuss is about. The guy is a visionary. Chapter 1 immerses you in a world unlike anything you've ever seen, and yet it's completely understandable. This is where other sci-fi writers fail over and over again. They get caught up in their own imagination and struggle to translate fever dreams into digestible content for readers. Dick's scene structure is character-based, intimate, and uses the mind-boggling elements as intrigue rather than pure information dump. Every beginning sci-fi writer should reader Chapter 1 of this book at least 17 times before daring to type a word. This is how it's done, folks.

I've seen Blade Runner before. It took 3 or 4 days to finish because the dreamy pace and lullaby score kept putting me to sleep. I don't remember it very well, but what I can recall had little resemblance to this novel. For one, the pace is not slow. There are no lulls in the action, no rest from the mystery. Every paragraph launches us forward, demands our attention. Decker is significantly more interesting, with more fleshed out internal problems. He must face himself as much as he faces the androids--a fitting conflict.

If I had any complaint about the book, it's that he seems obsessed with justifying the title. It's a good title, don't get me wrong, but the overwrought energy devoted to animals goes on too long; gets distracting. Decker's insatiable hunt for owls and goats and other creatures is constant, yet that only seems like a medium-sized theme to pursue. I would have preferred, for example, more time devoted to clearly explaining Mercer. Mercer is the one piece that I couldn't quite understand and had trouble believing. In any case, these are minor issues in what is otherwise a classic example of the finest science fiction. Also a good entry book for those who ordinarily avoid the genre.

Is Deckard an android?

"An android," he said, "doesn't care what happens to another android. That's one of the indications we look for."

"Then," Miss Luft said, "you must be an android."

That stopped him; he stared at her.



This is all I could think about when reading. I really looked for evidence to back the idea up, though the novel only provided me with speculation and partial facts. For every little suggestion in the text that he is a robot, there is an effective counter argument. Somehow, though, I am not entirely convinced.

“Maybe there was once a human who looked like you, and somewhere along the line you killed him and took his place. And your superiors don’t know.”

I think Phillip K. Dick left it purposefully open to an extent, and that’s the entire point of the novel.



What is life? How do we define it and what separates us from entities that simulate almost every human experience and emotion? Very little. Phillip K. Dick creates a city full of doubt and conspiracy. Androids could be anywhere and they could be anyone. As technology advances it becomes harder and harder for them to be detected by police. They even think they are human with a will and freedom to choose their own lives. Who has the right to tell them no?

Deckard pushes such thoughts to the back of his mind, though they constantly plague him and creep up in the shadows of his dreams. He is on the cusp of a moral crisis, an identity crisis, a crisis that may change the way he sees the world. Though like most people he is driven by money. Killing (murdering?) androids pays really well and Deckard wants a new animal. His electric sheep died and he dreams of replacing it with an exceedingly rare real life version, something far more important than preoccupations with empathy.

The value of animals and the natural world to the human psyche is firmly established throughout the book. There is an almost depressive quality to the novel, a smoky haze that clouds the cities. The scientific boom of the future world has severed the link between man and his true self. He is detached and has to rely on artificiality to get by, an artificiality of emotions and animals themselves. Animals have become rare and extremely costly. They are highly sought after and as such there is a huge market for fake animals, androids (electric sheep.) Thus Deckard kills more and more robots in order to attain his goal of getting an animal, of finding himself.

This is a great novel, one that questions existence itself. It certainly made me think. Admittedly though, I think the movie Blade Runner was so much better. Aside from the exquisite cinematography and soundtrack, it was far more effective at delivering the humanity of the androids and the final confrontation was masterful. It capitalised on the themes here and made them stronger.

Más simple de lo que esperaba... ¿Qué acabo de leer?

En realidad 2,8

Este libro reconocido mundialmente como un símbolo de la ciencia ficción, con películas muy famosas y con un público muy adepto, para mí significa una puerta que me comunica con la nostalgia de los años pasados. Como ya lo he dicho en varias reseñas, hace algunos años no disfrutaba de la lectura y justamente en esa época fue que conocí este libro. La historia, comenzó un día en el que mi hermano estaba aburrido en su trabajo, tanto así, que resultó buscando por internet libros de ciencia ficción para distraerse un rato. En ese momento eligió El juego de Ender, se lo devoró y luego me lo recomendó porque solíamos ver películas y anime juntos. Yo le seguí el juego y también lo leí, pero creí que ese era el final de las lecturas compartidas. Para mi sorpresa una semana después nuevamente estaba promocionándome otro libro, esta vez este, porque lo había escuchado recientemente en un audiolibro y le había encantado. Ese día el título me llamó mucho la atención, pero a pesar de ello no lo leí y quedó como una recomendación ignorada. Sin embargo, hace unos meses estaba navegando por internet y sin darme cuenta resulté investigando personas famosas que compartían mi día de cumpleaños. La sorpresa fue grande al enterarme de que uno de esos seres nacidos un 16 de diciembre era Philip K. Dick. En ese momento recordé esta obra y desaparecieron mis dudas: Tenía que leerlo, así no me gustara. Siempre he sentido curiosidad por conocer cómo piensan quienes nacieron el mismo día que yo.

Pero no todas las historias tienen un final feliz. En esta ocasión debo reconocer que aunque el libro me gustó ha sido un texto tan extraño que es inevitable no sentirme contrariado al momento de expresarme sobre esta obra. Intentaré hacerme entender, pero primero es necesario explicar que la historia presentada por Philip trata sobre un cazarrecompensas llamado Rick Deckard que tiene la tarea de desactivar unos robots llamados Nexus 6. La humanidad se ha visto forzada a viajar a Marte para intentar sobrevivir de la grave contaminación que se presenta en la Tierra, debido a la Guerra Mundial Terminus que llenó el aire de plomo y que causó el exterminio de casi todas las especies. El resultado es un mundo desolado, triste y en estado de destrucción, característico en este tipo de libros clasificados como distopías. Los Nexus 6 buscando un futuro mejor huyen a la Tierra para mezclarse entre los restantes seres humanos y así llevar una vida más tranquila dejando atrás la esclavitud, pero naturalmente eso no es permitido por lo que tendrán que permanecer ocultos por su propio bien.

Como pueden leer, la sinopsis y el contexto son excelentes, pero el problema es que entre más iba avanzando más pereza fui sintiendo. Parece que Philip desarrolló tan bien su mundo que cuando tuvo que desarrollar sus escenas no usó la misma dedicación, por lo que a medida que avanzaba el libro se fue volviendo aburrido, predecible y simple; la falta de acción, también fue un factor negativo que afectó directamente la intensidad de una historia muy prometedora. Además fue muy complicado acostumbrarme a su prosa, principalmente en el inicio, porque Philip nos hostiga con muchos términos de su mundo que no comprendemos. Ese detalle nos obliga a leer lentamente porque cada palabra puede ser tan importante, que en una pequeña distracción podemos perder el hilo de la historia. Obviamente Philip conocía su historia y todo ese vocabulario era muy familiar para él, pero da la impresión de que no pensó en sus lectores porque algunas palabras ni siquiera las explicó.

Pero tranquilos, no todo es malo. Uno de los aspectos más positivos de este libro es la denuncia sobre las guerras y las terribles consecuencias que pueden causar en nuestro planeta. Podemos progresar tecnológica y científicamente, pero por encima de todo hay algo muy valioso que no vale la pena arriesgar bajo ningún motivo. ¿Saben que es eso tan valioso? La vida. Es muy triste ese futuro desalentador donde la mayor parte de animales están extintos y donde los pocos sobrevivientes son exhibidos en jaulas para venderlos como mascotas. ¿Quiénes son los verdaderos animales? Lo peor es que estos personajes no se preocupan por el bienestar de esos seres porque solo les importa mantener la apariencia de que tienen una mascota.

Asimismo, en este libro dos dispositivos presentados por Philip me dejaron mucho que pensar. El primero, denominado Órgano de Ánimos Penfield, tiene la función de alterar las emociones del usuario. De esa manera, si por ejemplo necesitamos trabajar pero no tenemos deseos de hacerlo, tan solo oprimiendo el botón correspondiente, el Penfield nos proporcionará ese empuje necesario para cumplir nuestra tarea; también, sirve para elegir lo que queremos sentir: Alegría, tristeza, depresión, etc… todo eso el Penfield lo hace posible. ¡Qué invento tan peligroso! Debido a este aparato los personajes no parecerán humanos porque han perdido toda su capacidad para relacionarse. El libro está cargado de conversaciones tan extrañas como encontrar un desconocido y decirle «Hola, me he comprado una cabra» hasta acciones sin sentido como comprarle una pintura a alguien que debemos asesinar. El uso constante del Penfield ha causado una sobreestimulación tan grande que terminó por destruir al verdadero ser humano. Lo preocupante es que en la vida real también tenemos un Penfield, pero disfrazado de noticieros amarillistas, de la cantidad de información que recibimos diariamente en internet y de una vida que no tiene pausas y que nos agota sin clemencia segundo tras segundo. Por ello, es que recomendaciones como meditar, hacer ejercicio o desconectarnos de la tecnología son mensajes valiosos que tenemos que considerar y practicar más seguido por el bien de nuestra salud mental. No recuerdo el nombre del otro dispositivo, pero lo que sí recuerdo es que agarrando las dos palancas que lo conformaban causaba que la persona entrara en un mundo virtual donde hablaba y veía a otras personas. Lo negativo es que mientras hacían esta actividad permanecían en un estado inconsciente en el mundo real e incluso podían sangrar estando conectados. Creo que los comentarios sobre este dispositivo sobran, ¿verdad?

En cuanto a lo mejor del libro, este premio se lo lleva el test Voight-Kampff, dispositivo que ayudaba a identificar quién era androide y quién no. Los exámenes, por llamarlos así, fueron muy interesantes con sus preguntas y análisis por lo que captaron todo el tiempo mi atención. De no ser por el test Voight-Kampff no habría conocido la incertidumbre en este libro. La cacería de androides también estuvo muy interesante, pudo ser mejor pero es aceptable.

Y pasando de lo negativo a lo destacable, ahora es turno de platicar sobre lo anormal. ¿Por qué este libro se llama así? Para ser franco, sigo sin entenderlo. Supongo que debe ser por estética o por algún tipo de filosofía personal, pero es un título que no corresponde con lo que encontramos en estas páginas. No entiendo como no pudo encontrar otro mejor. De hecho, Blade Runner o el cazador implacable como esta historia es conocida en sus películas, es un mejor nombre para esta historia porque describe lo que encontraremos, pero ¿Sueñan los androides con ovejas eléctricas? es una pregunta que no se resolverá después de terminar el libro por lo que no tiene sentido. Lo otro extraño fue el final que me pareció confuso, sin emociones y que para ser honesto no me gustó en lo absoluto.

En resumen, un libro que por su excelente contexto merece las cinco estrellas, pero que tiene aspectos negativos e incongruentes que naturalmente le bajan la calificación. Sin embargo, el dilema es que ahora tengo serias dudas de leer otro libro del autor, porque temo encontrar más de lo mismo en sus demás textos. Quizás en un futuro muy lejano intente leer Ubik, pero es algo incierto e improbable.