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✔️ Exceptional writing
✔️ Mind-blowing world building
✔️ Master storytelling
✔️ Insanely rendered sci-fi capitalism


Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? is THE book of baffled expectations and skewed realities. Of fake-dom, or, colonised authenticity. Of chillingly overlapping parallel worlds.
↪️ Where the blurred boundaries between human and android are confounded to the power of infinity, and you will have to question whether you're sufficiently human, after all.

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Meet Rick Deckard, bounty hunter working for the San Francisco police agency. Aka killer of escaped humanoid robots. His dream? To have a real sheep (as he did once, a long time ago: in pre-War blissful times). Or a colt, a goat, an owl, a toad, for that matter. A real animal. Will his dream come true? Does he humanly deserve it?

Meet John Isidore. A special, aka a chickenhead. Yes, low IQ, high empathy. His weakness? He is alienated - forbidden from abandoning the kipple and dust-infested Earth for the publicised better life: on Mars. Not bothered by the dire difference between human and android, Isidore rather seeks community, and reads the world feelingly.

Life on Earth is quasi-apocalyptic. Penetrating dust, everywhere. Decay. Animals, extinct: replaced by their ersatz - electric - equivalent. Androids in the sinister shape of humans. Political power, in the hands of those who know that the human is, to say it with Nietzsche, all too human; and knowing this, they will exploit it, come what may.

Philip Dick's narrative, I suggest, is not so much a prophecy as a self-fulfilling prophecy. What it does is interpret an equation, provocatively replicate the spirit of an age, giving an ending to a horror story. This, above all, is a political and heavily politicised account of humanity that exposes human double standards, and is filtered through a genre that very suggestively makes of human extinction a possibility, or rather, a probability.

The Rosen Association is fast advancing. In record timing, it has invented the Nexus-6 variant, the new challenge to the Voight-Kampff empathy scale test. The association is tasked to efface this difference. Dismantle 'empathy' as it did 'intelligence'. What better way, then, than to manipulate the enemy into viewing its humanoid counterpart empathically? This, Rick's fate and trajectory, rendered multi-stratified and complex via the increasingly overpowering sense of loss, of human loss, in the face of killing that which feels ��ܳ�����.��

Achilles's Heel orchestration? Indeed. For the Rosen project is to take over: colonise. Mercerism, the ideal of communism, equality, and hope, itself a propaganda, is blown to smithereens by this all-pervading power emblematised by Buster Friendly, the TV programme running 24/7 that acts as a counter-propaganda. The problematic evolutionary question that Dick delves into throughout the novel seems to be that of the range between authenticity and artificiality, between animal and android. The human ambition to gain entry into pure authenticity via the acquisition of a rare, real animal is tragically tramped upon till the very end, disclosing it as a mere illusion. And yet, it all operates on a platform of convoluted reversals. Humans possess empathy boxes and mood-altering machines. The humanoid robot Luba Luft has a sublime voice, a beauty that is all too human. The bounty hunter of a parallel Mission, Paul Resch, appears to have become as cold and cruel as an android. 

You see, it is simply not that simple to tell: are we more human, or more android? Do androids, also, dream of sheep?


4.75 ��

Definitely a departure from my more earthly reads, and yet this classic is all that sci-fi readers make it out to be, and so much more.
Delightful from start to finish. The fun counterpart of thought-provoking. And yet, also, insightful; exquisitely haunting.