It's easy to get over-excited about Dick - he's everyone's favourite rebel: pictures taken late in his life make him seem like a cuddly homespun dropout, and hardly anyone doubts his genius.I am ambivalent about Dick, in the same way that I am ambivalent about myself - his adamant veering off into the mystical and the Gnostic seems to be at such terrific variance with a lot in his work that seems to fit only in a world made for human intelligence alone, and in which human intelligence alone can have meaning. (And I still cannot figure out why I am a transhumanist Christian)That said, this is an incredible book. There are few writers who can succinctly describe the awful vibrations of sour or dissonant human relationships with the same incisive ability as Dick. There are also only a few cases in Science Fiction literature where you encounter truly unconcerned malevolence: here in a scene late in the work where the andys Pris and Irmgard oversee the cold destruction of a spider, and (if memory serves), the character of Weston nonchalantly destroying the frog-like creatures he discovers on Perelandra in the novel by C.S.Lewis.But these are minor jewels in the crown - a desire for fellow feeling over intelligence, empathy rather than power, hope rather than entropy: this composite aspiration comes through powerfully, in a volume that is in wordage terms pretty slight. Another of my mainstay re-reads ( )

Plot Synopsis
Rick Deckard is a bounty hunter, responsible for tracking down and killing any android that has managed to escape and return to Earth. His current assignment involves eight androids who emigrated from Mars. He knows his job, but androids have become almost too human.

My Thoughts
This was one strange book. For the first 50 pages or so I had a very difficult time getting in to the story. I was quite unsure of what was going on, feeling as if I had been unceremoniously dropped down in the middle of a strange world where I barely spoke the language. Then for the next 50 pages, I found myself focusing on the similarities and differences between what I was reading and what I saw in the film Bladerunner. I wish I would have read the book before watching the movie, but alas, no luck. Because of this, I've decided to organize my thoughts around comparing the two versions of this story.

Book to Movie
The film Bladerunner is based upon this novel, and while the similarities are there, the two stories are markedly different. In both, Rick Deckard is an android bounty hunter, Rachel Rosen is an unusually human non-human, and Earth is a post-apocalyptic mess. That is where the stories massively diverge. One of, if not the, main theme in the novel is absent from the film version: the empathic ability of humans as evidenced by their feelings for animals and their desire to identify with other humans.

In the novel, human beings are obsessed with animals, owning and caring for them in an extremely maternal fashion; their self-worth is in part based on the size of their animal and is very much tied in to whether they can own a real animal or an electric one. Also, humans are involved in a pseudo-religious activity where they plug in to a virtual reality where they emotionally connect to the other humans who are simultaneously plugged in. These two characteristics of the human population are integrally tied to Deckard's journey of self-discovery in the novel, but both are absent - and in effect Deckard's evolution - from the film.

I won't say, however, that I think the film needed these things. The film is fundamentally different from the book in that its purpose was action and entertainment, not philosophical questioning. I enjoyed both the book and the movie, but for very different reasons. ( )

Concise punchy novel that considers the relationship between humanity and artifical intelligence, a bleak future of our planet, and the possible responses to social expectations. This is cyberpunk noir. ( )

Well written, with a few good twists thrown in. ( )

I generally don't like Philip K. Dick; his work hasn't aged well at all. The prose is famously wooden, and his paranoid ideas today appear more like the musings of a stoned college freshman than anything else. This book is an exception. The plotting is well done, and the language doesn't get in the way of his underlying ideas -- or questions, anyway -- about identity. ( )