I've been saying for years that this book is boring. But it's more than that, it's not excusable in the way that a purely boring book can be. Instead, it's a tremendous idea told badly.

It seems that when Dick wrote this he didn't have a good grasp on translating his big ideas into an engrossing--or even active story. It's not that there's no movement in the story. Things happen, but even when they do, even in the throes of the final confrontation, when Deckard is retiring three andys in one abandoned apartment, nothing ever SEEMS to happen.

Making the mundane exciting is one of those rare skills that good writers--if they're going to make it anywhere--must have full command over. Making the exciting mundane is a failing that returns in cause to Truman Capote's characteristically droll critique of On the Road:

"That's not writing, that's typing."

The amazing thing about Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep and Philip K. Dick in general is how easily we can excuse his incessant typing for those moments when--as if by chance--writing catches up with him. There aren't many of those in this book, but occasionally, when the skin of the words breaks and some real pathos shows through, the hundred pages we've slogged through to get to this point don't matter.

That's the glory of PKD's ideas, and why his work has become a well of cinematic creation, that when they work as they should they're masterful stories that explore much of the human condition. The drawback--and in some ways the tax we as readers must pay--is that when they don't work, it's like dragging through a swamp: resistant to forward progress, and distasteful in our mouths.

Dick is one of the authors I’ve been meaning to read for ages, and yet, never got to. This novel, probably his most famous, is not what I expected, at the same time familiar and utterly alienating!

Let me explain. Blade Runner, which I saw in the 80s at a very young age, is a brilliant film that uses several elements of the book. Dick’s story, although having the same ingredients, creates a deeply psychological and philosophical narrative that focuses on the nature of humanity, evaluating not just androids, but humans too. The result is deeply thought-provoking, unsettling, and bleak (a different bleak to the stylised one of the movie). It is insidious too, making you question everything over and over. Even with a few weaknesses, such as a couple of plot threads leading nowhere, I can see how this became a ‘classic’.

Living in a college dorm, subsisting on a diet heavy in beer and mood altering drugs, and not having seen the film Blade Runner or its excellent sequel aren't necessarily requirements for enjoying Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, the celebrated science fiction novel by Philip K. Dick, but they would help. So would a time machine. Published in 1968, this novel, like much of the late author's work, has become a victim of its own success, farmed out to film and television and also picked clean by other authors, that like a tree in Dick's post-apocalyptic story, there's not very much fruit left on it.

Set in the year 2021, what's referred to as World War Terminus has littered the earth with radioactive dust and covered it in perpetual clouds. Much of the world's animal and plant life have become extinct and pet ownership is a status symbol. Most human beings with basic physical, mental and financial means have emigrated to off-world colonies such as those on Mars, while Earth is inherited by the weak, slow and poor. The United Nations has provided each settler with their own free personal android, which outperform humans in labor tasks and increasingly in reflexes as well, making them very difficult to spot and illegal on Earth.

Androids that go fugitive are tracked by bounty hunters like Rick Deckard, who works for the San Francisco Police Department "retiring" rogue andys. Deckard's wife Iran is despondent over their domestic situation. The couple finds no solace in Mercerism, a pop religion that advocates empathy and allows those low in it to tap into a virtual reality where guru Wilbur Mercer is pelted with stones while trying to climb a hill. To make matters worse, their electric sheep has broken down. Deckard sees an opportunity to get ahead when bounty hunter Dave Holden is critically wounded in pursuit of several new model androids on the loose in Northern California.

Deckard's supervisor Inspector Harry Bryant dispatches him to Seattle, where the Rosen Corporation designs these new androids, known as Nexus-6, so lifelike that other than a bone marrow analysis, the only way to tell them from humans is a new and improved test, the Voigt-Kampff Empathy Test. Eldon Rosen resists cooperating with Deckard, and insists that the bounty hunter administer the test to his daughter, Rachael, so he can see what a negative looks like before he provides a Nexus-6 to test negative. The empathy test measures capillary dilation generated when the subject is presented with social situations.

"You're sitting watching TV," he continued, "and suddenly you discover a wasp crawling on your wrist."

Rachael said, "I'd kill it." The gauges, this time, registered almost nothing: only a feeble and momentary tremor. He noted that and hunted cautiously for the next question.

"In a magazine you come across a full-page color picture of a nude girl." He paused.

"Is this testing whether I'm an android," Rachael asked tartly, "or whether I'm a homosexual?" The gauges did not register.

He continued, "Your husband likes the picture." Still the gauges failed to indicate a reaction. "The girl," he added, "is lying facedown on a large and beautiful bearskin rug." The gauges remained inert, and he said to himself, An android response. Failing to detect the major element, the dead animal pelt. Her--its--mind is concentrating on other factors. "Your husband hangs the picture up on the wall of his study," he finished, and this time the needles moved.

"I certainly wouldn't let him," Rachael said.

"Okay," he said, nodding. "Now consider this. You're reading a novel written in the old days before the war. The characters are visiting Fisherman's Wharf in San Francisco. They become hungry and enter a seafood restaurant. One of them orders lobster, and the chef drops the lobster into a tub of boiling water while the characters watch."

"Oh god," Rachael said. "That's awful! Did they really do that? It's depraved! You mean a live lobster?" The gauges, however, did not respond. Formally, a correct response. But simulated.

By testing negative, Rachael nearly undermines the effectiveness of the Voigt-Kampff test, but when she refers to the owl in the lobby as "it," Deckard asks a follow-up question which convinces him that the test is sound and that Rachael is indeed an android. Eldon Rosen confirms this and Rachael takes the news well, considering she is two years into her four-year life span as a Nexus-6 android. Working off a list of six androids to be retired--three males and three females--Deckard anticipates getting rich off the reward money, $1,000 per kill.

Meanwhile, a truck driver named J.R. Isidore discovers that he is no longer alone in his apartment building in the suburbs of San Francisco. He follows the sounds of a television broadcasting the universe's 24-hour-a-day talk show personality Buster Friendly and discovers a young girl squatting in one of the empty units. Offering the name Rachael Rosen, she quickly admits it is really Pris Stratton. J.R. can tell that she needs help and it may have fallen on him to do so. Classified as biologically unacceptable for emigration, J.R. ekes out a living picking up malfunctioned electronic pets to a repair shop. Pris helps him sharpen his social skills and grow more confident.

Deckard's hit list begins with Polokov, the male android which lasered Dave Holden and wastes no time being hunted, coming after Deckard. The bounty hunter survives and moves on to Luba Luft, a female android hiding in plain sight as an opera singer. Confronted in her dressing room, she calls the police on Deckard. The officer who responds has no record of Deckard and arrests him. Taken to the Mission Street Hall of Justice, Deckard is interrogated by a supervisor named Garland, who discovers he's the next name on the bounty list. Pris is soon joined by the remaining fugitive androids, a couple named Roy and Irmgard Baty, who debate whether to let J.R. help them or not.

At the open door to the hall Irmgard Baty had been standing; they noticed her as she spoke up. "I don't think we have to worry about Mr. Isidore," she said, earnestly; she walked swiftly toward him, looked up into his face. "They don't treat him very well either, as he said. And what we did on Mars he isn't interested in; he knows us and he likes us and an emotional acceptance like that--it's everything to him. It's hard for us to grasp that, but it's true." To Isidore she said, standing very close to him once again and peering up at him, "You could get a lot of money by turning us in; do you realize that?" Twisting, she said to her husband, "See, he realizes that but still he wouldn't say anything."

"You're a great man, Isidore," Pris said. "You're a credit to your race."

"If he was an android," Roy said heartily, "he'd turn is in about ten tomorrow morning. He'd take off for his job and that would be it. I'm overwhelmed with admiration." His tone could not be deciphered; at least Isidore could not crack it. "And we imagined this would be a friendless world, a planet of hostile faces, all turned against us." He barked out a laugh.

"I'm not at all worried," Irmgard said.

"You ought to be scared to the soles of your feet," Roy said.

As much as I dislike Philip K. Dick's writing--which is tin--there are an abundance of ideas in Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, enough to fill a lively book club discussion or dorm room rap session. There's Dick's vision of a world in collapse that's so overwhelming that empathy is manufactured, with androids now capable of producing at least as much compassion as their human creators and replacing us. There's the question of whether androids with advanced programming would even know they were androids. Dick really digs into how the collapse of animal life would impact humanity, with real animals a commodity and a bustling trade.

"I've got three thou cash." The department, at the end of the day, had paid him his bounty. "How much," he asked, "is that family of rabbits over there?"

"Sir, if you have a down payment of three thou, I can make you owner of something a lot better than a pair of rabbits. What about a goat?"

"I haven't thought much about goats," Rick said.

"May I ask if this represents a new price bracket for you?"

"Well, I don't usually carry around three thou," Rick conceded.

"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."

"What are the advantages to goats?"

The animal salesman said, "The distinct advantage of a goat is that it can be taught to butt anyone who tries to steal it."

"Not if they shoot it with a hypno-dart and descend by rope ladder from a hovering hovercar," Rick said.

The salesman, undaunted, continued. "A goat is loyal. And it has a free, natural soul which no cage can chain up. And there is one exceptional additional feature about goats, one which you may not be aware of. Often times when you invest in an animal and take it home, you find, some morning, that it's eaten something radioactive and died. A goat isn't bothered by contaminated quasi-foodstuffs; it can eat eclectically; even items that would fell a cow or a horse or most especially a cat. As a long-term investment we feel that the goat--especially the female--offers unbeatable advantages to the serious animal owner."

"Is this goat female?" He had noticed a big black goat standing squarely in the center of its cage; he moved that way and the salesman accompanied him. The goat, it seemed to Rick, was beautiful.

"Yes, this goat is a female. A black Nubian goat, very large, as you can see. This is a superb contender in this year's market, sir. And we're offering her at an attractive, unusually low, low price."

Like the two Philip K. Dick novels I've read and a lot of the science fiction of his peers, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? is loaded with material waiting for another writer to structure scenes out of, develop the characters, punch up the dialogue and cut the bits that are obtuse or that just don't make compelling fiction. In other words, everything that director Ridley Scott and screenwriters Hampton Fancher and David Webb Peoples achieved with Blade Runner (1982) or director Denis Villeneuve and screenwriters Hampton Fancher and Michael Green added with Blade Runner 2049 (2017), better movies than this is a novel. It's a close call but I do recommend this for its concepts and ideas, if not the story and characters.





Length: 82,856 words