Title Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep Series --- Author Philip K. Dick Cover Art Bruce Jensen Publisher Ballantine Books - 1996 First Printing 1975 Category Science Fiction Warnings None Main Characters Rick Deckard, John Isidore, Rachael Rosen, Iran Deckard, Harry Bryant, Ann Marsten, Phil Resch, Luba Luft Main Elements Androids Website ---

	Title Volume 1 Author Philip K. Dick Ilustrator Tony Parker Publisher BOOM! Studios - 2009 First Printing BOOM! Studios - 2009
	Title Volume 2 Author Philip K. Dick Ilustrator Tony Parker Publisher BOOM! Studios - 2010 First Printing BOOM! Studios - 2010
	Title Volume 3 Author Philip K. Dick Ilustrator Tony Parker Publisher BOOM! Studios - 2010 First Printing BOOM! Studios - 2010
	Title Volume 4 Author Philip K. Dick Ilustrator Tony Parker Publisher BOOM! Studios - 2011 First Printing BOOM! Studios - 2011
	Title Volume 5 Author Philip K. Dick Ilustrator Tony Parker Publisher BOOM! Studios - 2011 First Printing BOOM! Studios - 2011
	Title Volume 6 Author Philip K. Dick Ilustrator Tony Parker Publisher BOOM! Studios - 2011 First Printing BOOM! Studios - 2011

By 2021, the World War had killed millions, driving entire species to extinction and sending mankind off-planet. Those who remained coveted any living creature, and for people who couldn't afford one, companies built incredibly realistic simulcrae: horses, birds, cats, sheep...

They even built humans.

Emigrants to Mars received androids so sophisticated it was impossible to tell them from true men or women. Fearful of the havoc these artificial humans could wreak, the government banned them from Earth. But when androids didn't want to be identified, they just blended in.

Rick Deckard was an officially sanctioned bounty hunter whose job was to find rogue androids, and to "retire" them. But when cornered, androids tended to fight back, with deadly results.

Graphic Novel

San Francisco lies under a cloud of radioactive dust. The World War has killed millions, driving entire species to extinction and sending mankind off-planet. Those who remained coveted any living creature, and for people who couldn’t afford one, companies built incredibly realistic fakes: horses, birds, cats, sheep . . . even humans. Rick Deckard is an officially sanctioned bounty hunter tasked to find six rogue androids—they’re machines, but look, sound, and think like humans—clever, and most of all, dangerous humans.

[Philip K. Dick’s award-winning Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? served as the basis for the film BLADE RUNNER. BOOM! Studios presents the complete novel transplanted into the comic book medium, mixing all-new panel-to-panel continuity with the actual text from the novel in an innovative, ground-breaking 24-issue maxi-series.]

When I think classic science fiction, I think of books written in a style like this. It's usually dark, at least a little dystopic, it's not space opera but rather a world where we have been consumed in part by our own technology, and it's also often just a little bit weird. Perhaps I feel this way because I read 1984 and Farenheit 451 in high school.

I've watched Blade Runner twice. The movie also has a classic 80's SF feel to it (because it is classic 80's SF but I digress...) being all dark and creepy where technology clearly didn't benefit us as I wouldn't want to live in that rainy world (book has dust due to nuclear fallout but would be about the same). However, I found I could never really understand what was going on in the movie properly. Did the book help? Not sure, the book, though short, actually covers many more things than the movie does.

And so the book starts, with Decker and his wife playing around with a box that controlled their emotions. In fact you could schedule a full day's worth of emotions in the morning, the wife chosing to be depressed in the afternoon, her husband encouraging her to pick something more positive. Next, Decker goes upstairs to the roof to check on his sheep. Since we've managed to mess up the planet so badly animals are in scare supply and people have an almost religious devotion to taking care of some living creature. Unfortunately Decker's sheep died and to hide the shame from his neighbours he replaced it with an electric one till he could afford another animal. I had to laugh as he seriously considered an ostrich. Now I wasn't sure how happy an animal would be living on the roof of an apartment building (the sheep had to share with a horse and a few other creatures) but I guess better than no life at all.

Then there is Mercerism...you sit in front of this box, hold onto this two sticks, and you are plugged into Mercer, this guy who keeps trying to climb a hill which rocks and insults are thrown at him. You feel everything he does, and you are also aware of all the others who are plugged into...well...whatever you want to call it. I wasn't too sure about the point of it other than it was supposed to prove humans had empathy, while androids could not experience the same effects.

Which finally brings us to the androids. Made to be so realistic, that unless you do bone marrow DNA testing, they are indistinguishable from humans except for one thing, a lack of empathy (though there are human pschological disorders with the same symptoms so not sure how they can tell if someone is an android and not just a psychopath...) in fact the android manufacturers keep making them better and better and the tests need to be constantly updated (though why they didn't just use the Mercer machine isn't explained) though you'd think the government would just force the manufacturers to build in some kind of identifier if these rogue androids are really such a problem.

And then we get into the question, are they really a problem? Do they have desires? Dreams? Should they be allow to pursue them? One didn't want to be a pharmacist on Mars so escaped to the Earth. Another wanted to be an opera singer. Clearly they had wants and personalities. But one also took a form of pleasure pulling the legs off a spider (which remember, is a rare and precious living animal, humans would have fought amongst themselves to take care of it).

Then, as androids becomes more advanced, they themselves no longer know they are androids. Which leads Decker to question himself, can he pass the empathy test? And even if he does, is it foolproof? And even if it always catches and android, could he have killed the occasional human that failed the test?

Lots to think about when reading this book, and as I understand it, pretty much true regarding anything else Dick wrote. I definitely look forward to reading more of his work.

All those moments will be lost in time like tears in rain...

September 2022

Poking around the library I found a graphic novel adaptation of Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? and I felt I'd like to revisit it again, after all it is easy to get confused with the movie, as both make quite different points. It was an odd adaptation, as it had the entire original novel word for word. You get a bubble where someone says something, then a box that says "he said" and then more speech bubbles. Usually one strips that out because firstly in a graphic novel the image can focus on the speaker, and also when the narration bubble describes a scene...which you can see right in front of you. I would have liked it better had it truly been an actual adaptation and not a reproduction with pictures, especially since the pictures already take away from the imagery that Dick creates in your head, I didn't get the same feeling reading this graphic novel series as I got from reading the actual novel. But for what it's worth, the artwork is good, representing this eternally sunless world, run down and empty, you look out into the city and see only a handful of lights on in the apartments.