Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?
by Philip K. Dick

Philip K. Dick is an author who is constantly playing around with perceived reality in his books. Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? is no exception. This is the book that the cult movie, Blade Runner, was based on.

As expected, the film differs from the book in many significant ways. The movie focuses more on the game of cat-and-mouse between the Blade Runner, Rick Deckard, and the group of replicants lead by Roy Batty. The book focuses more on Deckard and other characters who struggle for a meaning to existence in a world slowly dying. The replicants are there but their roles are different. They die as the book progresses but their role is to act as a contrast to the way humans behave.

One central theme in the book, glossed over in the movie, is about 'empathy', as shown in the now famous Voight-Kampff Empathy test. The book shows why empathy is such an important factor distinguishing a human from an android; humans can empathise (imagine being in the other person's shoes) with other humans or with the diminishing number of living creatures on the Earth; Androids cannot and would willingly ignore or kill fellow androids to ensure their own existence.

The Voight-Kampff test uses empathy to distinguish between a human and android by measuring the subject's involuntary reaction to various questions. The questions require the person to imagine a situation where the person's empathy reactions are important (e.g. their reaction on being told a bag was made out of human baby skin). Androids have to fake reaction time but as usually found out. The Nexus-6 models are the most advanced and have nearly fooled the Voight-Kampff test which makes things difficult for Deckard. He has to administer the test before retiring an android.

Things are more complicated as there are some borderline humans who can barely pass the empathy test, leading to possible accidental killings. As for the rest of humanity, they empathise daily via machines that meld their thoughts together as they take a tormented journey up a virtual-reality hill.

Another form of empathy is by taking care of animals (whose prices are catalogued). Those who can't afford the animals take care of android equivalents. Deckard starts off in the book by taking care of an 'electric sheep'.

This is a book filled with Dick's usual dose of paranoia and jolts of reality that make you question the situations the characters are in. At one point, Deckard starts to wonder whether he is the android, sent to hunt down humans.

The androids themselves don't make much of an appearance in the book. Roy Batty is the book does not match up to the image Rutger Hauer gave in the movie. Ditto for the other androids like Priss. But the book enlarges on the personality of Deckard as well as giving more depth to the world than the one envisioned by Ridley Scott in the movie.

See the movie and read the book. You won't be disappointed by either.

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Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? by Philip K. Dick

Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?
by Philip K. Dick