Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?

Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, by Philip K. Dick, is a fairly well known book. But that does not mean it is necessarily mean it is widely read.  I'm guessing a good portion of its fame comes from being the inspiration for the classic sci-fi movie Blade Runner.  While the book shares the main plot framework as Blade Runner, they are very different beasts. The movie is a melancholy cyberpunk thriller, the book... well Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (DADES) is a violent acid trip bursting with strange ideas.

There is a dream like quality to DADES that caught me off guard. The whole book is like a vivid nightmare. There is an alienness to the post-apocalyptic setting and characters. Conversations veer off in totally unforeseen directions. Time and again the nature of reality is called into question. The facts never seem to quite add up, incongruities abound to trip up careful readers. It is all wholly engaging while simultaneously exhausting.

The story follows a bounty hunter, Deckard, on One Bad Day(TM). His job is to hunt down six advanced killer androids, recent escapees from Mars. These androids are virtually indistinguishable from normal humans- except that they lack empathy. What follows is a bizarre cat and mouse game, complete with a femme fatale, an extra-dimensional psychic entity, and a goat. Dick throws in a lot of  random world building stuff, all of which do relate to the central theme of human empathy. Some of it doesn't work, sometimes element of DADES don't quite mesh. But overall I was quite taken with the messy yet fascinating world of DADES.

Special note must be made of the stars of Do Androids Dream?: the androids themselves. Minor spoilers follow. The androids are basically humans without empathy and we have a word for humans lacking empathy: psychopaths.  The android characters attempt to blend in, but time and again their alienness shines through. It's hard to overstate how well they are written. The androids are at once repellent and terrifying, and simultaneously completely fascinating.  In Blade Runner, androids are noble escaped slaves, full of passion. I much prefer the androids of DADES; the frustrated, brutal, devious killing machines.

Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? is a fine book, one that fully deserves it's fame. It also will not work for some people. I can see the fever dream world in which it is set turning people off.  And as noted, DADES's more surreal elements don't always fit nicely. There are part of DADES written tightly as a drum, it draws attention then to certain slack scenes.  Those quibbles aside, this is a great book, one that rewards close attention and further thought.  Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? scores 9.2/10 on the Voight-Kampf test.