The verdict
Messier and better than its reputation suggests, and very different from the film that made it famous.
Quick facts
- First published
- 1968
- Publisher
- Doubleday
- Series
- Standalone
- Best for
- Readers who like Blade Runner and want to see what was left out of it
- Skip it if
- You want a tidy narrative, or an ending that resolves anything
Author Philip K. Dick
Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? is Philip K. Dick’s 1968 novel about a bounty hunter on a dying Earth whose job is to kill machines that have learned to pass as people. Rick Deckard wants a real animal, which he cannot afford, and the job pays bounty money. That is the whole engine of the book, and it runs the character and the story in the same direction.
The idea behind it
Earth is mostly ruined and most people have left, and the ones who remain are encouraged to own an animal as proof they are still human. Real animals are expensive, so a good deal of the population keeps convincing electric copies, and the novel treats this as a small daily lie that everyone has agreed to accept.
Set against that, Deckard’s targets are androids that are faster, calmer and in some ways kinder than the humans hunting them. Dick’s question is not whether the machines are people. It is whether Deckard still is, and the novel is honest enough not to answer it.
The story, spoiler-light
Deckard is given a list of six escaped androids and a day to work through it. The work is unpleasant and he is good at it, and the money would buy the animal he has been pretending to own in a cheaper form. His wife stays home with a machine that sets her mood on a dial, which is less a gadget than a description of a marriage.
The novel moves like a procedural and then stops being one. Two things are worth knowing first: the empathy test at the centre of it is a test that measures the examiner as much as the subject, and the ending is famously unsettled in a way that the famous film adaptation does not share.
What makes it science fiction
Dick writes about entropy. Everything in the novel is wearing out: the planet, the buildings, the animals, the people, and the machines have been built to be more durable than any of it. That gives the book a texture that most android stories lack, because the danger is not that the androids will win. It is that there will be nothing left worth winning.
There is also Mercerism, a shared religion delivered through a machine that lets everyone experience the same suffering at the same time, and a dial that lets them skip it. It is a small, sour joke about empathy that pays off later, and it is one of the reasons the novel resists being reduced to the film.
Who should read it, and who should give it a miss
Read it if you like the film and want to see what was left out, which is most of it. The novel is stranger, drier and considerably more interested in failure, and it rewards a second read once you know where it is going.
Give it a miss if you want a tight, clean narrative. Dick writes in bursts, the pacing is uneven, and characters arrive and leave without ceremony. Blade Runner is the tidier piece of work. It is not the more interesting one.
Where to start, and what to read next
Start here if you want Dick’s most famous book, and consider starting with The Man in the High Castle instead if you want his most controlled one. Both are short, and reading them together is the quickest way to see what he was actually good at, which is doubt rather than plot.
After this, A Scanner Darkly is the closest in feeling, and Neuromancer is the book that took the same questions about bodies and machines somewhere far noisier.
The verdict
Messier and better than its reputation suggests, and very different from the film that made it famous. Read it for the dying world rather than the androids.
Frequently asked questions
Is it the same story as Blade Runner?
Only partly. The film takes the bounty hunter, the androids and the empathy test, and leaves out Mercerism, the mood organ, the animals and the ending. They are different works with one shared setup.
What is the Voight-Kampff test?
In the novel the test is usually called the empathy test: a series of questions designed to provoke a bodily reaction that androids cannot fake. The Voight-Kampff name belongs to the film and to later editions of the book, and the two versions of the test work differently.
Why does everyone want an animal?
Because ownership of a living animal is treated as proof of status and, by extension, of humanity. Real ones are costly and scarce, so electric substitutes are common, and pretending yours is real is a normal social lie.
Does it stand alone?
Yes. It is a self-contained novel and there is no series to follow.
Where can I buy it?
It is available in paperback and as a Kindle edition, and the buy links for Amazon.com and Amazon.in are on this page.