After researching some articles about Philip K. Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? I feel that I’m more confused about my topic than before. It might have been that the article I read by Jill Galvan wasn’t actually as related to my topic as I thought. I mean certainly it was interesting, but it pointed out many ideas that I hadn’t noticed while I was reading, ie how the government uses technology to enslave the people, and I don’t believe that was P.K.D.’s intention while writing the book.
I did some very factual, scholarly research of P.K.D. …. on wikipedia…. in regards to his bio and it sounds like he was a great science fiction writer who turned into a nutball. Most of his books deal with reality and how it turns out our perception of reality is our reality. But even if P.K.D. did turn out to be a nutcase who wrote a 9,000 page pseudo-autobiographical religious experience after hallucinating on pain killers (post an impacted wisdom teeth surgery…it’s actually a crazy story), I don’t think that he was a paranoid anti-government hippie at the time he wrote Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (which I feel is what Jill Galvan might have thought he was, albeit to a certain degree, because she focused on this issue in much depth in her work. Anyway..)

I liked his novel because it dealt with a more interesting question than whether or not technology has invaded our lives, I think everyone would agree that it has, but I really enjoyed the existential plight of the main character Deckard as he struggles to understand his self, his purpose in the world, and ultimately what it means to be human. The fact that the book is set in a sci-fi backdrop with androids makes this philosophical playground even more accessible to toying with and teasing our idea of what it means to be human and to be alive.

If you haven’t read this book before and I asked you what the primary difference between a human and an animal is you would have no problem answering the question. The answer is our brains. Animals don’t function on the same cognitive level as humans. But what if an organism were synthetically manufactured, ex-vivo, by humans with essentially the same cognitive prowess as human beings? Yeah changes up things a bit now doesn’t it?

Well these products are know as “Andies”, short for Androids in P.K.D.’s imagination, and while they aren’t human… they are human. You could say that the only difference might be their purpose in “life” compared to a real human being? The Andies were created by humans as an expendable workforce that would be responsible for the hazardous mining and development of Mars and colonies on other planets. You see the Earth was destroyed in a final World War Terminus and is left virtually unviable, save for a few areas where the survivors wear lead codpieces to ensure that they are genetically secure.

Either way the lives of these real people are miserable and some Andies have become smart enough to escape the colony planets, through any means necessary including murder, and come to Earth. Rick Decard is a police agent whose job is to “retire” (kill) Andies as essentially a glorified, uniform bounty hunter. The obstacles he faces as he tracks down the smartest group of Andies out on the market yet utterly destroy the foundations of his being. At one point in the novel he sleeps with an Andy woman and even begins to wonder if he himself is an android…

I don’t want to spoil the ending in case you read, but it’s a fascinating journey. If you’ve watched Blade Runner with Harrison Ford then you probably know that Ridley Scott, the director, recently included a deleted scene where it was implied that Ford was a replicant (the movie’s version of an android).


I guess we’ll never know the truth in either case. Ultimately I suppose it depends on your perception of reality. And well, that’s completely up to your interpretation. So go check out the movie or the book! They’re pretty different since the movie was only an adaptation of the book. The book is incredible, slightly wonky and the movie is just badass, but the ideas in the movie aren’t as rich as they are in the novel.