Reviews

In a dystopian future, a world war of catastrophic proportions has led to the death of millions, mass extinctions, and the migration of humankind to the vast unknown of outer space. Earth has become a desolate wasteland, where a class of humans known only as “specials” are shunned and isolated, and the few who continue living normal lives desperately seek the status of owning a sentient being. Reserved only for the wealthy, tech companies have stepped in to fill the void for the poor, creating advanced robots that perfectly imitate animal life.

These companies have also created androids, robots so sophisticated that it is almost impossible to distinguish them from flesh and blood men and women. While these androids are easily accessible on other planets, Earth’s government has banned them, terrified of what these AI machines are capable of. Forced into hiding, illegal androids blend in with humans, living and working among them while simultaneously evading the bounty hunters who are sent to end them.

When Rick Deckard, a career bounty hunter, is hired to retire a group of even further technologically advanced androids known as Nexus-6, he finds himself on a wild goose chase throughout his city, forced to not only fight for his life, but to confront his own conceptions about the duality of androids, humanity, and what it really means to be alive.

Evenly paced and chock full of action, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep packs a punch that will keep you turning pages well past your bedtime. Taking place over the course of a few days, Philip K. Dick masterfully achieves a riveting and compulsive sense of suspense that refuses to let itself be limited by the painfully short timeframe that is given to us to come to know these characters and their stories.

Because of the time constraints woven throughout the plot, character motivations and consistency suffer. The cast undergoes massive moral change and emotional upheaval within the span of minutes, and at times with no discernible reason, leaving the reader in a tailspin. Forced to reconcile what we have come to expect from the characters against what their words and actions are telling us, we are left to wonder if there is any greater purpose to what we are reading at all.

Told from two different viewpoints, the overarching plotlines gradually come together to form a satisfying conclusion for Deckard, but the secondary POV of Isidore feels lackluster and forced. He felt as though he was only a part of the book to further the plot, his story was rushed, and there was no true “end” for his character, lending to a feeling of a good portion of the book being shoe-horned in for no other purpose than cheap plot advancement.

Jumping between advanced literary technique, clinical and standoffish writing, and choppy, disjointed flow, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep is a confusing reading experience. Blending it all together, it quickly becomes clear that it is not the prose, the characters, or even the plot itself that caused this novel to leave such a profound mark on the science fiction world, but rather the thematic elements that the book centers around.

A brutal look at the impact of consumerism and the commodification of life itself, Philip K. Dick paints a bleak and terrifying picture of a world where emotions are false, power is only achievable only through increasingly immoral means, and life is only as sacred as money says it is. Harrowing and propulsive, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep lays bare the blurred lines between sentience and consciousness and forces us to ask ourselves if we are only as alive as we think we are.

Content Warnings

ap2009's review against another edition

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adventurous dark emotional hopeful informative mysterious reflective sad fast-paced

Plot- or character-driven? A mix
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? Yes
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.75

cpaig's review against another edition

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adventurous dark mysterious tense medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Plot
Strong character development? No
Loveable characters? It's complicated
Diverse cast of characters? No
Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated

3.5

Mediocre people muddle through life with murderous busywork on a dead planet while worshiping suffering and animals.

Despite that synopsis, I mostly enjoyed this book. Having read it on my ersatz book.

SPOILERS AHEAD BECAUSE I APPARENTLY COULD NOT REVIEW THIS BOOK WITHOUT THEM.

It is always interesting to see what people think will stand the test of time when projecting into the future and what they predict will be new. Hover cars, androids, laser guns, and galactic colonization? Yes. Stationary phones, big heavy TV sets, and smoking? Also, yes.

I liked the study of empathy, how status and cultural values change, and the world's heavy, dusty, ashcan schoolishness. I loved the fight against entropy and clutter while knowing it was inevitable. I loved how art still existed and how people still desired to feel, if not be, connected. The whole concept of humans creating androids in the first place to serve humans and do the hard work and the reaction from these humans when they do harm to them and escape because they want more. Chilling. The fact that these freedom-seeking androids are believed, and then proven to be, fundamentally inferior with an unsurmountable defect of thinking. Disturbing.

What kept the book from having a higher rating from me was the poorly written women and this icky thread of desire for pubescent girls (or, if I am being generous, desire for very young women who happen to resemble pubescent girls) that goes through parts of the book. All the women are two-dimensional: indulgently bored, programmed with a devious doe response, or regarded as mosquitos when they are just trying to do their jobs and be helpful. There was also almost no diversity in the book apart from maybe one android thought to be the most deranged and dangerous. Maybe they were all on Mars. One would hope.

To be fair, the men are not painted with too generous of a brush either, but they have depth and at least experience things. Isiadore is sweet and hard working and content for the most part, except for having people to care about, and when he finds them, it doesn’t go so well. Deckard is a man stuck in a spiral of mediocrity, driven by discontent. He thinks he is exceptional. He is not. He is driven in the end by the realization the androids were playing the long game, and he was still around because they (the androids and the android company) believed he was the weak link who would be unable to pull off the task of eliminating them for one reason or another. And then he becomes a hero and disproven deity for a couple of hours? Then, he finds a toad and drinks a cup of coffee.

The rub was that I never understood why anybody cared that these androids were on and coming to earth. Earth is dead - or mostly dead - and inhabited primarily by discarded people only there because they are ineligible to emigrate to the galactic colonies because of age, IQ, or how much the planet has poisoned them. Everyone will continue to be poisoned. I suspect even the people stuck on earth due to work are not considered elite in their fields (to put it nicely). I understand that many (all?) of the illicit androids have hurt people, and they are, for all intents and purposes, “psychopaths” with no regard for living things. Is that enough to put humans at risk by staying on a dead planet to eliminate them? Maybe?

I almost DNFed at the super icky love scene around page 178. I am glad I didn’t for the most part, but the ending - I have been racking my brain for non-gross ways to describe it - just kind of foams and dissipates in this confusing last throes kind of way. The dude just needed some rest. I am glad he got it

ren95's review

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dark emotional reflective medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? A mix
Strong character development? It's complicated
Loveable characters? No
Diverse cast of characters? It's complicated
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

3.75

jennifertijssen's review against another edition

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3.0

Mood organ was leuk, jammer dat die er niet meer in terug kwam. Thema van dieren in post-apocalyptische wereld is leuk.

Thema van Mercer en Mercerism ging grotendeels over mijn hoofd.
Droge humor, soms gekke interacties (androids die zichzelf praktisch overgeven aan de bounty hunter) waar dan geen uitleg bij gegeven wordt.

Jammer dat de hoofdpersoon vreemdgaat en dat daar totaal niet over gesproken wordt.

jordan_garno's review against another edition

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adventurous dark mysterious reflective tense fast-paced

Plot- or character-driven? A mix
Strong character development? It's complicated
Loveable characters? It's complicated
Diverse cast of characters? It's complicated
Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated

5.0

Incredible! I can't believe I didn't pick this book up sooner.

crowsandprose's review against another edition

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4.0

Or, "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?"

hector_viruega's review against another edition

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4.0

Serían 5 estrellas si no fuera porque algunas cosas envejecieron demasiado mal. Aún así este libro tiene demasiasas ideas muy bien exploradas. Blade Runner es mi película favorita y aunque es muy diferente al libro, hay muchas cosas que amo de la película que se empiezan a tratar aquí.

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