A review by cpaig
Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? by Philip K. Dick

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