Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? by Philip K. Dick

Yet another book I picked up from the free book exchange bin at the coffee house near the church. I probably wouldn’t have read it otherwise. I’ve known of this novel as “The Inspiration for Blade Runner” as it says above the title on the front cover, but I’ve never seen Blade Runner and don’t know much about the story except that it involves a bounty hunter charged with the job of killing androids and the difficulty of distinguishing the real humans from the fakes. I also thought I knew that Blade Runner takes place in a future Los Angeles, which turns out not to be true, or at least not true of the book, which takes place in a future San Francisco.

Sometime near the beginning of the twenty-first century the world suffered a global nuclear war. The war caused mass extinction and the fallout continues to plague the survivors. But before the war, humans had already begun to colonize other planets. To encourage more rapid emigration after the war (in order to preserve a genetically healthy human species) the government offered a personal android servant to every person who left earth. The androids on Mars are treated as slaves and some are unhappy enough to be willing to attempt to escape to Earth and lose themselves among the remaining human population. Rick Deckard’s job, as a bounty hunter attached to the San Francisco Police Department is to identify and “retire” (kill) rogue androids in the San Francisco jurisdiction.

The future world, which chronologically is basically now (Dick wrote the novel in 1968), is filled with helpful gadgets. There’s a machine that allows folks to program their moods. Deckard flies around in a hovercar. They communicate with portable “vidphones”. (That prediction came true.) And there’s a machine that gives the users a spiritual experience of merging with other persons through empathy, led by a guru-type figure named Mercer. Mercerism is the pseudo-religion of this world, based on a story of struggle upward, fending off the slights of the forces holding you back, and recreating new life from the ashes of destruction.

Empathy is also the key to Deckard’s work because empathy is the one human quality that the android-manufacturers have not been able to reproduce. Deckard uses an empathy test to identify the androids before dispatching them. And Deckard’s internal conflict arises when he begins to feel empathy for the androids themselves.

The plot involves a group of eight androids recently escaped from Mars. The senior bounty hunter at the Police Department has already killed two but was injured in trying to get the third. While he recovers in the hospital, Deckard takes over the job. His first task is to test whether the empathy test the police have been using to identify androids still works on the latest version of the androids, the Nexus-6. He flies to the corporate headquarters in Seattle on his hovercar. There he meets a woman named Rachel Rosen who tries to deceive him but he’s able to identify her as an android. Then he flies back to San Francisco ready to kill the remaining androids from his colleague’s list.

The third android pretends to be an envoy from the Soviet police but when they meet, Deckard identifies him as Polokov (it’s not clear how) an android already identified by his colleague and kills him. The fourth is an opera singer named Miss Luba Luft. Deckard finds her in rehearsal at the War Memorial Opera house and confronts her in her dressing room. It’s not clear to me how an andoird only recently arrived from Mars can get herself booked in an opera role and already be in rehearsal. Dick does give us some talk about androids being able to replace real humans, implanted false memories and so on, but it’s hard to imagine how that could work and Dick doesn’t explain. In any case, Miss Luft evades Deckard’s empathy test and calls the police on him for harassing her. The police arrive and take Deckard in, but it isn’t the real police. Deckard finds both the fifth android at the fake police station and a real human there who is also a bounty hunter named Phil Resch. Phil kills the fifth android and then Phil and Rick together go back to kill Miss Luft. They find her at an art museum viewing an exhibition of paintings by Edvard Munch. Phil kills her, too, in an elevator as they are exiting the building.

Meanwhile, in alternating chapters, we get the story of J. R. Isidore who lives alone in a huge apartment complex in the suburbs. Most of the population has either died in the war or moved to Mars so the suburbs are empty. Isidore’s brain has deteriorated due to radiation; he’s now a sub-class of human called a “chickenhead” forbidden from emigrating or reproducing. He works a menial job for a company that repairs robot animals that folks keep as pets. Deckard, for instance, owns an electric sheep he keeps on the roof. In Isidore’s empty apartment building Isidore is surprised to hear a noise and discovers he has a new neighbor: a young woman he’s immediately attracted to. She turns out to be one of the androids Deckard is hunting. Soon she’s joined by the other final two escaped androids, a couple named Roy and Irmgard Baty.

Deckard is beginning to have moral qualms about his job and is about to give up, but his boss urges him to continue, and he needs the job to pay for the expensive, real, goat, he just bought. Rachel Rosen calls from Seattle and offers to help him dispatch the last three fugitive androids. She happens to know that one of them, the young woman that Isidore first met and is attracted to is the same model as herself. Deckard and Rosen meet in a room at the St. Francis. They have sex. Then they go off together to kill the last three androids. But Rosen admits she’s double-crossed Deckard and tries to kill him. He disarms her, and tries to kill her, but finds he can’t, having grown fond of her. Instead, he returns her to the St. Francis and sets off alone.

The three androids and Isidore are holed up in Isidore’s apartment. They watch an expose on television proving that Mercer and Mercerism is a fake. The androids interpret this to mean that human empathy is also fake and therefore there is no actual difference between human beings and androids. Meanwhile, they disprove this, though, by unemotionally cutting the legs off a spider while the human, Isidore, weeps at their cruelty.

Deckard arrives at the apartment building. Isidore is alone outside. Deckard enters the building. A vision of Mercer tells him that one of the androids is behind him in the hall. Deckard turns and sees the android that looks like Rachel Rosen. He kills her easily. Mercer tells him that sometimes it’s necessary to do bad things; that’s life. Deckard finds the apartment where the final two androids are hiding. He fools them into opening the door by pretending to be Isidore and then kills them quickly, first Irmgard, then Roy.

He flies home to discover that after dropping Rachel Rosen back at the St. Francis she came to his apartment building and killed his goat. Then, feeling dispirited and conflicted, he flys off to a desolate part of Oregon. He lands his hovercar and has another mystical experience where he climbs a hill and has stones thrown at him and comes face to face with Mercer, who he now identifies with. He comes down from the hill and finds a wild toad in the dirt, a species believed to be extinct. He puts the toad in a box, and feeling hopeful again flies back home. His wife greets him sympathetically. She quickly discovers that the toad is actually a robot. Deckard goes into the bedroom and falls asleep not even needing the aid of his mood machine.

Part of the story, the bounty hunter part, is a noir-ish, hard-boiled detective story. But while the build-up is suspenseful, the pay-off is flat. I was quite eager for the show down with Deckard and the last three androids at the apartment building but when it arrived, Deckard outsmarted and killed the androids easily. He never seems to be in real danger. The androids mostly give up when they’re identified. Deckard is only shot at twice and is never injured. The one human that the android Polokov put in the hospital doesn’t die. Despite the interesting philosophical difficulty of identifying an android, Deckard works from a list, which makes the job easy. He only actually administers the empathy test to one of them, Miss Luft. He never kills a real human. He never has doubts about his own identity, or his wife, or neighbor, or boss.

A quote on the front cover attributed to Eric P. Nash of the New York Times says, “A kind of pulp-fiction Kafka, a prophet.” but I don’t find Dick’s musings on the human condition to be anywhere near as provoking as Kafka. Instead, I find a set of interesting philosophical questions: how do we know what’s real, what makes us human, what forms of existence have “rights”, etc., spun up into a rather unremarkable story that titilates with the questions but does little to illuminate them. I find this to be a consistent failure in science fiction. Philosophers often use “thought experiments” to tease out the inconsistencies, conflicts, and unexamined assumptions in our thinking. A thought experiment is like a little story, a paragraph or two, with an open ending that has to be filled in by the person thinking about them. Science fiction takes those thought experiments and blows them up to novel length, or trilogies of novels length, but without adding any further intellectual depth, and leaving the philosophy unanswered.

If the writing were better, it would still be enjoyable as a novel. Some science fiction novels reach that level. But Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? isn’t great writing. As a story it’s filled with plot holes, which is perhaps inevitable when a writer is attempting to create a whole world as well as a story within it. But unanswered questions like how Luba Luft got her job as an opera singer, or the explanation of the supernatural help Deckard gets from Mercer, or the seeming illusion he experiences in Oregon that leaves him with a real cut on his head, nag at the story-telling. As Roger Zelazny says in the forward (from 1975), which praises Dick’s imagination and world-building, “The subjective response, however, when a Philip Dick book has been finished and put aside is that, upon reflection, it does not seem so much that one holds the memory of a story; rather, it is the after effects of a poem rich in metaphor that seem to remain.” That’s my experience, too. But although I enjoy the unsettling feeling of the lingering philosophical problems, and I’ll look at people on the street, and my husband, and myself in the mirror a little differently for the next few days, the philosophical problem isn’t original to Philip K. Dick so I can’t give him much credit for the after effects either.