While Dick was always a professed Episcopalian, his writing began to take a more distinctly Christian turn only after his spiritual experience in the early 1970s. Here, his outlook is still shaped more by postmodernism, strongly suggesting that simply believing something can make it true. (Paradoxically, it also exudes the strong skepticism, which informed his writing all through his career, as to whether our ordinary human perceptions actually come anywhere close to seeing reality as it actually is --a viewpoint he propounded more throughly than any other writer in the history of the genre.) The above description of this novel as "grim" hits the mark. Readers concerned about such things should also note that it has some violence (essential to the premise --Rick is, after all, a bounty hunter who "retires" renegade androids by killing them), a certain amount of bad language, and one instance of extra-marital sex, though it isn't explicit.

Nonetheless, Dick's powerfully-stated central message here is a profoundly moral one: that an essential trait that makes us human is our empathy, our capacity to care for other living things, both animal and human (a quality his androids lack, and are therefore capable of casual cruelty). A human being who lacks empathy, he is essentially saying, may as well be an android.

For readers who enjoy this book, I can also personally recommend the author's Hugo Award-winning alternate world novel, The Man in the High Castle (1962), and a posthumous selection of his short fiction, I Hope I Shall Arrive Soon (St. Martin's Press, 1985).