A Book A Week - Week 8: Do Androids Dream Of Electric Sheep?

This week's book:
    Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?    by Philip K. Dick

Grade:
    B+   including the last three pages 
    A     if you stop reading before the last three pages

I'm going to come clean:  I'm a bad nerd.  Until this week I never read any of Philip K. Dick's stories.  Not a one.  This novel is the basis of one of my favorite movies of all time, Blade Runner, but I never got around to it.  My loss entirely.  To kind of make it up to Mr. Dick, who died back in 1982, I bought the e-book.

Set in a nuclear-devasted future Earth, this book examines what it means to be human, and how we're going to tell humans from machines - or manufactured humans - when that eventuality comes to pass.  That scary possibility is much closer now than it was in 1968 when this book was first published.

The story moves at a decent pace, not too fast that you don't know what's happening and not too slow that it gets bogged down in pointless detail.  We see that humans who are left on Earth - who haven't moved on to Mars or somewhere else - are united, and possibly kept from open revolt, by a kind of shared suffering, a communal empathy machine, that has become the worldwide religion.  Spoiler alert, the entire premise behind that shared suffering is exposed as a fraud, which deepens the question the author is proposing.

The book's hero has the same name as the movie's, Rick Deckard, and he's a bounty hunter who has to 'retire' androids who've returned to Earth illegally.  The androids are not actually made of gears and pulleys but flesh and bone just like real people.  The differences are the androids begin life full-grown and have a shelf life of about four years.  And they completely lack empathy for anyone or anything else, which is why they're dangerous and how Deckard can tell them apart from real people.  'Retire' is a euphemism for 'murder,' as a bounty hunter Rick has no 'dead or alive,' option, only 'dead.'

During the hunt for six androids Deckard makes several discoveries about himself and the androids that make him question his job and his place in the universe.  The author had done with this novel what all good sci-fi should do, which is examine the human condition for us now by setting the story in a different time and place.

I really liked the story quite a bit, I was invested in the characters and the situations felt real, if bleak.  I did not, however, like the ending, the last three pages.  I think the book should have either ended three pages earlier, or had a different resolution if the author kept the story going.  The ending was not satisfying, and I think almost invalidated the premise of the novel.  So I gave the book two grades, one with the last three pages, one without.

The 'electric sheep' refers to the fact that nuclear war has rendered almost all animals extinct.  People instead have electronic facsimiles - little animal androids - that they tend to.  Like Tamagotchi pets but in 3-D.


Next week:
   The Perks Of Being A Wallflower     by Stephen Chobsky
    From 1999.  At least I'm getting closer to current books.  It's also a movie.