Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?

Like millions of people, I linked to this book through Blade Runner, expecting a similar experience and in many ways it is, while so different in others.

The book is more complicated than the movie because of the secondary concepts explored in more depth, such as Mercerism - a type of religion.

Think of a dystopian future where Earth is no longer a viable place to live and everyone has long migrated to outer colonies and galaxies with a better quality of life. Nobody wants to live on Earth anymore.

Androids (replicants) thrive in the expanded colonies, but for practical and technical reasons have a built-in expiry date that can't be overridden, causing them to die after a set amount years.

A number of rogue androids choose to come back to earth to find the person responsible for their creation and try and extend their time-restricted lives.

This is where Rick Deckard comes in, to terminate these replicants (even though they're going to die anyway) because they're such a hazard while rogue and still alive.

The other important concepts about electric/real animals, Mercerism and a crumbling dystopian Earth aren't as important in comparison to the main plot about eliminating androids. This is the main focus of the movie.

But these concepts are important to underline the differences between human beings and androids. Humans have irrational desires for love, religion, empathy and all sorts of other emotions that androids can't fully grasp. It's a fine line between compassion and logic and the decision, by Rick Deckard, to terminate a replicant when they're practically 99% human.

Hence the title of the book: Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?

You may ask yourself:

Do androids have human rights?

Do they dream like we do?

Will there be a future in which it's almost impossible to tell humans and machines apart?

As a cop, Rick Deckard has no immediate problems retiring androids for bonus cash. It's his job and he uses the money to get by and fuel his frivolous ego-driven purchases of real-life pets. Real animals, not electric ones, at crazy inflated prices.

In the book, replicant androids are not the formidable force they are in the movie, but capitulate when the game is up, making them rather pitiable and sad. Vulnerability and weakness are strong underlying emotions in the book, as opposed to a more direct Hollywood vision of man vs machine and who wins out. This is no Terminator.

Here, we're more focused on our reason for living and why we carry on as we do. What makes us stay put or keep on pushing? Love? Animals, pets, partners, empathy? All of that.

It's a future where people dial codes into machines to set their mood, so why bother working at anything at all, even relationships? When you want to feel good, dial in and tune out in an instant. No need for social skills. Just dials and corresponding medication.

Human beings need to stick together though.

Even though androids operate in tight-knit units, they are inexplicably detached from each other due to lack of empathy. They can relate to things, including sex and love, passion and excitement, fear and loathing, but they can't sacrifice essential individual needs for overall good in the way humans can.

This is emphasized by a religion called Mercerism, the lynchpin of understanding humanity and this book. Humans plug into a religious escalator to get their spiritual and emotional fix by pushing forward up the hill even when it becomes physically painful, by struggling forward, tired bruised and demoralized for reasons that machines can't understand. Suffering reinforces the need to remain connected and stay alive. Mercerism defines humanity over and above mech-based individualism.

There's a further concept in which domestically ownable pets can be inexpensively purchased as near-identical electronic facsimiles of the real thing due to being technology so advanced. But human ego and status doesn't want mech if just anyone can get it, it desires the real thing. If you earn enough money from retiring androids - in Deckard's case - why not buy a real sheep, goat, emu, or something else, but these animals are very expensive and almost out of reach.

It's an interesting parallel with religion and the human need to be organic and real, to feel alive, empathize and compete with each other. Including the focus on androids and the strange pitiable and sentient work of art that this book is.

PKD isn't always the most fluid author, with rough patches and indecipherable holes in places, but he is one of the most ingenious and cohesive writers at understanding humanity.

There's something so lonely, lost and detached about this book, while remaining beautifully organic and identifiable. A bleak dystopian future where machines are taking over but, for now, are necessarily kept at bay.