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

I saw Blade Runner again recently, as part of the weekly let's-watch-a-movie Wednesdays with my twenty-something kids. And it made me realize I haven't read any Dick novels since probably the '90s - I collected and read the whole reprint series from Vintage Contemporaries, which was all or nearly all of his work, and re-read some novels for various SFBC projects.

And I still had the result of one of those projects on my shelf: Counterfeit Unrealities, an omnibus of four Dick novels I edited back in 2002. One of those four novels was Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, the novel that turned into Blade Runner (under a title acquired from a very different Alan Nourse novel, for the usual vibes-based Hollywood reasons).

To start off, Blade Runner is a noir; Androids is not - Dick was always more quotidian and grounded than that. The Rick Deckard of Androids is a guy with a job, like a hundred other Dick protagonists, not a elite replicant-hunter. In the novel, he's the #2 bounty hunter for this region, who gets work only when the #1 guy has too much or specifically subcontracts something to him - or, as in both versions of the story, when the #1 guy is seriously injured and hospitalized by one of his targets.

In the novel, it's a somewhat near future, year unspecified as far as I remember. It's a 1968 novel, so call it thirty or so years on from there. There has been a World War Terminal, which smashed a lot of the world, and the survivors are mostly emigrating to the colonies - in the novel, explicitly on Mars, unlike the vague "colony worlds" of the movie. The people remaining on Earth are living in a semi-ruined human landscape, all huge buildings ("conaps," in best '60s skiffy lingo). There are places where a lot of humans live - popular places, fashionable places - but Dick protagonists never live in the fashionable places. So the people we see in Androids are among the few, or only, people living in gigantic, slowly deteriorating buildings originally built to hold many more people in an happier, more optimistic world.

Dick's language is also more grounded. The novels' Deckard hunts androids, or "andys." Not "replicants," not "skin jobs." And the background details of the world are more foregrounded, as the title makes clear. Real animals are close to extinct, which means they are fantastically valuable and the main way people in this society compete through conspicuous consumption - every family has the most expensive real animal they can afford, or an "electric" replica, pretending to be real. There's also an element of empathy or connection there, as often with Dick: everyone wants an animal to care for, to keep, to connect them to a living world mostly destroyed by "W.W.T."

Also important in the novel, and completely absent from the movie, is the invented religion of Mercerism. Just about everyone has an "empathy box," through which they commune, semi-telepathically, with everyone else interacting with the box at that moment, and through which all of them experience moments in the life of Mercer, the prophet of this sect. Mercer climbs a mountain, with unseen forces throwing rocks at him - rocks which his followers feel themselves, which draw their blood when they hit - for a long time, and then is cast into a hell-like space for a time after finally reaching the top, only to begin the cycle over again. Androids cannot use the empathy box, and are hostile to Mercerism - as also is this world's omnipresent TV and radio personality, Buster Friendly.

Deckard is the second-rank bounty hunter for the San Francisco region. Dave Holden was number one. But Dave had just gotten a job to "retire" a group of eight andys the day before, and successfully handled two of them before being shot himself by the third.

So Deckard now has six escaped androids to find and kill. But, again, this is only partially a "you have a really dangerous job" issue. Deckard is also grappling with the question of empathy, and, more prosaically, with thinking about the big bonuses he gets for retiring andys, and how expensive a real animal he might be able to buy if he does it all successfully.

Also, book Deckard is married. His wife, Iran, apparently has no job outside the home - it was a 1968 novel - no real hobbies or pastimes, and is chronically depressed, even though Deckard bought them both fancy Penfield mood organs to orchestrate and control their emotional states. Deckard thinks, or purports to think, that a "better" animal would make Iran happy.

Meanwhile, the narrative also turns to a young man, John Isidore. He's slightly retarded - a "chickenhead," he's called - and thus unable to emigrate to the colonies even if he wanted to. He lives alone in a big conapt building out in the suburbs - but discovers that a woman, Pris, has moved in. She's pretty clearly one of the runaway androids; we can tell because of her lack of empathy and responses to his questions, but John partially doesn't care and partially doesn't realize. Over the course of the rest of the novel, he comes to help the runaways - or they use him and his apartment as a base, if you prefer.

Deckard flies to Seattle to learn more about the Nexus-6, the new, fancy brain that all of this group of runaway androids have. In the novel, there's a robust capitalist competitive market in androids; multiple companies make them, and they've all been improving their "products," making androids where each generation is more human-like and harder to differentiate. These andys were made by the Rosen Association, and he meets with Rachael Rosen, who claims to be a member of the family that controls the company - but is, as in the movie, a Nexus-6 android with an implanted set of memories. The standard current test, the Voight-Kampff, does work on her, and indicates she is an android, but it was more difficult and time-consuming than previously. (Deckard and his colleagues speak frankly of the long sequence of tests - new andy types are always appearing that can't be detected with the current test, and new tests always being worked up to find ever-more-specific differentiators.)

Deckard does some running around, some investigating. He retires three of the andys, one of them working as a police officer in a shadow police office - this comes at the end of a very Phildickian section, where Deckard is arrested by a uniformed policeman and taken to a completely different "new" police station, and the reader is momentarily unsure if we have been following a delusional impostor for the first half of the novel. Eventually, he tracks the last three to the building where Isidore lives, and, with Rachael's help, goes there to kill them at the same time that Buster Friendly's long-promised debunking of Mercerism is broadcast.

The fate of Mercerism - and, by implication, that of the human race - is left unclear at the end. Dick also has some subtle hints that perhaps almost every animal we see in the novel is actually secretly electric, that it's nothing but electric sheep everywhere. The ending is substantially different from the movie, but the feeling, the concerns are not. Those are parallel, though expressed here through Mercerism and the electric animals. But it is still an ambiguous ending: Deckard has succeeded at his work task, but what the reader has learned about the world isn't as easily settled. And what the reader suspects about the world is even less so.