Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (1968)

What can you say about the inspiration for Blade Runner? ( )

I read this book because Blade Runner went completely over my head. I now have to watch it over again, because reading this book did absolutely nothing to enlighten me.

My friend insisted that I had to see the 1998 Harrison Ford/Ridley Scott hyperdepressing cult classic, and I didn't get it. Granted, this may be largely because I watched it with a bunch of friends at 11 PM while the guy next to me tried not to pass out from post-finals crazy, and we demolished at least one bottle of good red wine in the process. Also, Lore kept making text-referential jokes about the movie, which means I missed a lot of the dialog in addition to having no idea what she was talking about.

Basically, I was bored. I couldn't follow what was happening, didn't like the characters, and was disinterested to the point that I do not remember the plot. I remember Space. I remember Harrison Ford Angst. I remember something with friggin silver metal unicorns. I remember thinking just how much I disliked Philip K. Dick adaptations, having been subjected to two in four days by the same bloody woman.

You know what I don't remember from the movie? Sheep. I definitely would have remembered the sheep.

The electric animals are heart-wrenching. Surrogate animals, despised at first, used as a facsimile of life as the future's tech wars/space race. Instead of coveting the latest technology, the people of the post-apocalyptic world revere all living organisms and dub spiders sacrosanct. I can get behind that world, in all honesty. Not to the extent that I want to mortgage my property to put a goat on the roof, but okay.

With the introduction of electric sheep, this transformed from something I was reading because I was, for no apparent reason, in a mood to read Philip K. Dick, to a book I couldn't put down. I read this almost straight through. It's a book about civil rights, but more interestingly, about what it means to be alive. At one point, Rick Deckard -- an infinitely more interesting human being in the text contrasted with the movie, I might add, where he was Indiana Jones with some serious manic depressive issues -- starts thinking about his electric sheep and wonders why he is compelled to care for it. The tyranny of an object.

At the same time, you have parallel images of Deckard hunting down androids and a delivery boy who picks up the electric animals to take them to be repaired. Some people, it seems, become attached to their electric animals despite the stigma against owning a mechanical bird.

Then there's a lot of stuff about God and some clever roundabout references to a God Machine. Heh.

It's... I don't know. I was less interested in the androids than I was in the electric animals. Even though they were clearly supposed to be two sides of the same coin, I felt more empathy for the circuit board livestock than the non-empathic (but sentient) humanoid robots. Maybe it's just what the animals represented that got to me.

And that's why I didn't like Blade Runner. They didn't have electric sheep. ( )

I can't say exactly how many years have passed since I first read this novel, but I can say that seeing the film "Blade-Runner" totally warped my memories of it. So, I enjoyed rereading it and comparing the very different pleasures of Dick's original story and intentions to those of Ridley Scott. Another surprise was seeing in this novel the intimations of some of Dick's later preoccupations and rediscovering his acerbic take on American society and culture. ( )

I can't remember how many times I've read this, but I love coming back to it once the years have taken away distinct memories. It took a little while to get through this time - I found it a bit too bleak to bear when I first picked it up only a month or so after dad's death. A couple of weeks ago I returned to it and found it fascinating and enthralling once more. The richness of themes--the philosophical and mystical questions that are examined--are a big part of what makes Do Androids Dream such an enduring favourite for me. It is also finishes in a satisfying way--something P K Dick had problems with in many of his novels. I always felt as though he was *really* the master of the short story, and my complete collection of those will always get 5 stars, while many of his novels were brilliant and complex throughout 95% of their course, only to end peremptorily.

Needless to say, this is not Blade Runner, despite the cover. Some people talk about "a certain disparity" between the two, but I would go further. The bare bones of the plots of the novel and the film have similarities and some characters have the same names, but that's about it. The conclusions drawn in the book and the film are diametrically opposed, and the really gorgeously intelligent stuff from the novel about the human condition, religion/mysticism, animal extinction and the degradation of human beings post nuclear apocalypse etc is missing or glossed over. I often find myself wondering how much was changed after Dick's death during production. I don't know. It just seems odd that he would have been in agreement with filming "his novel" in such a fashion. Hmm.

All of which is not to say that I don't love the film Blade Runner. It just ain't Do Androids Dream! ( )

an absolute must for any critical animal theory course ( )