Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? in Classics Without All the Class

Jul 12, 2017 Dioni rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: 1001-books, guardian-1000-novels

First published at: http://www.meexia.com/bookie/2017/07/...

Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? is the book that the movie Blade Runner (1982) is based of, and it's Philip K. Dick's first book I read, though I've watched many movie adaptations of his work, like Minority Report and The Adjustment Bureau.

I watched Blade Runner pretty late, only a few years ago, but didn't remember much of the story, apart from the whole androids vs humans thing, so I read this book almost afresh. Another factor t First published at: http://www.meexia.com/bookie/2017/07/...

Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? is the book that the movie Blade Runner (1982) is based of, and it's Philip K. Dick's first book I read, though I've watched many movie adaptations of his work, like Minority Report and The Adjustment Bureau.

I watched Blade Runner pretty late, only a few years ago, but didn't remember much of the story, apart from the whole androids vs humans thing, so I read this book almost afresh. Another factor that pushed it to the top of my TBR is that a new Blade Runner movie is coming out, starring Ryan Gosling - titled Blade Runner 2049 , so if you're like me and would like to know more about the original work, now is a good time to start :).

The main character is Rick Deckard, a bounty hunter who goes after androids who "run away" - as androids have no rights to independence. The world building is very well done. The world as we know it has practically ended because of some mysterious dust, and most of the earth population has migrated to other planets. Thus the setting is a decaying earth, featuring characters who are left behind or have come back or stayed for some reasons. An interesting aspect that I observed is that the whole story is actually just set in one single day (or a single day and a bit). It's a full on day for Rick Deckard!

It's a very fun book to read, and perfect for me who often feel stuck on some slow going books - this one just flew by. But for a science fiction - a genre that mainly runs on ideas, I don't think there's any deep meaning or message in the book. If there's any I couldn't find it. The book was published in 1968, and the story is set in 2021. We are now in 2017, and we now know that we're so far from making androids remotely close to being human. Not sure if that would ever happen in fact, not even for the next 100 years. So the idea of right to independence and freedom for androids seems moot. The idea that an android may have "soul" is irrelevant in even today's world - it's so pie in the sky.

And the book actually felt a bit dated for me. In Dick's world, technology has advanced so far that people are having difficulties differentiating androids and humans, but there is no mobile phone. People use coin to make calls on land line - the only 'advance' thing being it's a video call. Reading this in 2017, it felt very much that it was written before mobile phone technology was invented - and that it didn't cross the author's mind that in the near future, before humanoid androids are invented, everybody has a mobile phone with them 24/7, the size of a small calculator, which has plenty of functions including - guess what - a video call, and access to a vast amount of information. But this could be just me. I have previously mentioned about the phone technology being a thing that makes a book feel dated.

But at the end of the day it was a fun read, and I'll definitely be up for more Philip K. Dick in the future!
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