Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?
by Philip K. Dick
Summary
Rick Deckard, a bounty hunter in a San Francisco left largely emptied by nuclear war, is assigned to track down and retire six escaped Nexus-6 androids, machines built so convincingly human that only a specialized empathy test can reliably tell them apart from real people. Deckard's pursuit repeatedly forces him to question the test's premise: he falls into a genuine emotional entanglement with Rachael Rosen, an android working for the corporation that manufactures them, and finds himself questioning his own capacity for empathy even as he kills android after android in the course of his job. A parallel plot follows John Isidore, a man of diminished intelligence living alone in an abandoned apartment building, who shelters several of the fugitive androids and grows attached to them despite what they are. Deckard discovers near the end of the novel that a toad he believes he has found alive in the wasteland outside the city, a rare and precious thing in a world where most animals are extinct and expensive mechanical substitutes stand in for them, is itself artificial, a small, devastating collapse of the distinction the entire book has been built around.
Dick writes in spare, noir inflected prose, closer in rhythm to a detective novel than to conventional science fiction, and it reads quickly while asking a genuinely difficult question with no comfortable answer: whether the capacity for empathy, the very trait meant to separate Deckard from his targets, can be faked, manufactured or simply worn down by the work of killing.
Doubleday published the novel in 1968, and Dick returned to its question in a 1972 lecture, The Android and the Human, arguing that modern life was already making people behave more like the machines the book imagines.
Historical Context & Significance
Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? was a finalist for the Nebula Award for Best Novel of 1968, losing to Alexei Panshin's Rite of Passage in a year that also saw John Brunner's Stand on Zanzibar take the parallel Hugo Award, leaving Dick's novel one of several strong nominees crowded out by two rival books rather than beaten by a weak field. Contemporary science fiction reviewers noted its philosophical ambition without predicting the afterlife the book would eventually have; it did not become a major seller on its own during Dick's lifetime.
That changed permanently once Hampton Fancher and David Peoples adapted it into Ridley Scott's 1982 film Blade Runner, a production that departed from the novel considerably, dropping Mercerism and the empathy box entirely, while keeping Deckard's central hunt intact; the film's slow rise to a cult and then a mainstream classic pulled the original novel back into print and eventually onto university syllabi it had never reached in 1968. Dick died in 1982, months before the film's release, and did not live to see either the movie's rise or Blade Runner 2049 in 2017, both of which have since made the source novel far better known than the Nebula field that once passed it over.