Teaser

Rick Deckard hunts androids for a living. It’s hard work, especially on an Earth ruined by warfare, but it pays the bills. And maybe, just maybe, it will pay for what he really wants. An animal to call his own . . .

Review

I’ve never seen Blade Runner. Despite this, the word replicant, Harrison Ford questioning his own humanity, and speeches about tears in rain have percolated through pop culture into my brain. That’s a solid testament to the imaginative powers of Philp K. Dick. Because even though many people have never read his work, I’m willing to bet most people would recognise something based on it. Minority Report, Total Recall, the short-lived but fantastic anthology series Electric Dreams. I have seen and enjoyed all of these. But until now, I have never read one of his novels.

It’s not that I’ve been put off by the man’s towering reputation. In fact, that’s one of the reasons my resistance eventually buckled. Ask around in sci-fi circles and it’s generally agreed on that a bit of Dick is essential to the canon. But the way his books have been described has been off-putting. People talk about them with phrases like ‘acid trip’ or ‘literary LSD.’ That hardly sounds fun to me. I have a deep aversion to weirdness for weirdness’ sake. See also, my utter lack of interest in Gideon the Ninth. Simply put, I don’t want to read books written by crazy people. I want to read books that make sense.

Curiosity, however, overwhelms all resistance given time. So here I am, reviewing what is possibly Dick’s most famous novel. Much to my surprise, it’s actually quite good. More than that, it makes a shocking amount of sense. Most of the time.

Rick Deckard’s story is excellent. I love a good robot story, and this is exactly that. Deckard’s hunt for undercover androids posing as humans is taught and tense like all the best thrillers. The Voight-Kampff test is a simply brilliant sci fi idea, exposing androids through their lack of empathy, while also drawing into focus the questionable morality of bounty hunters like Deckard himself. Android aside, so much of the worldbuilding is done through hearsay and rumour. We never really know for sure what the off-world colonies are like, nor what happened in the war that effectively killed Earth. The book is full of tantalising glimpses and throw-away ideas. As a whole, it’s easy to see the many influences on later works. The treatment of androids, but also so much of the aesthetic has been cribbed by countless authors in the five and a half decades since Do Android Dream of Electric Sheep? originally hit shelves.

It’s not perfect though. Some of those throw-away ideas are a little too throw-away. I never really understood Mercerism, for a start. It just seemed to exist, until a major reveal occurred with very little impact. And then there are the downloadable emotions that feature so prominently in the early stages. There’s no explanation given. We are simply told that they are commonplace, and that they work. And while the Voight-Kampff test is an incredible idea, I do have to agree with one of those tested, in that it does seem oddly pre-occupied with sex. Which, as we see later on, in no way differentiates between humans and androids.

The big flaw for me though, is John R. Isidore. Isidore is a mentally handicapped man who spends most of the book separate from the main narrative, though the crossover is predictably inevitable. I can only assume Dick was trying to capture the man’s mindset in the prose of these chapters, as they are incredibly muddled. Oftentimes, I wasn’t wholly sure what was going on. Not in a sense of delicious mystery, but in frustrated confusion. The dull-witted man makes for a dull character, and his later interactions with renegade androids are an exercise in exasperation for the reader.

Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? is at its best when Dick’s weirder tendencies are kept at a minimum. Because when Deckard is blasting away androids for a lack of empathy while daydreaming about breeding owls, you start to see why Dick was and is considered one of the greats.

Book Stats

• A Standalone Novel
• This edition published by Gollancz
• First published in 1968
• Social SF
• 214 pages