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What it argues
Rick Deckard is a bounty hunter in a post-nuclear-war San Francisco, tasked with "retiring" — killing — six escaped androids who have fled a Martian colony to Earth. The androids are nearly indistinguishable from humans except for their inability to feel empathy, which the Voigt-Kampff test is designed to detect. Over one day, Deckard hunts his six targets, grows uncertain about who and what deserves to live, and falls into a relationship with one of them that destabilizes his convictions about what he is doing and why.
The novel's real subject is empathy — what it is, who has it, whether it can be faked, and whether its absence is definitional of non-humanity. In the world of the novel, empathy has become a social religion: Mercerism, practiced via an "empathy box" that connects users into a communal experience of suffering. Owning a real animal (most have been killed by nuclear fallout) signals emotional status; synthetic animals serve as substitutes for those who can't afford the real thing. Dick uses this world to ask whether performed empathy and real empathy can be distinguished — and whether the distinction matters.
What it gets right
- 1.
The Voigt-Kampff test identifies androids by their lack of empathy, but the novel keeps asking whether empathy is a capacity or a performance — and whether the humans in this world are performing it too.
- 2.
Mercerism — the empathy religion — may be a complete fabrication, and the novel suggests that shared fictions of empathy may be more socially useful than authentic feeling.
- 3.
Kipple is Dick's term for the accumulating detritus of consumer society — the entropy that fills empty spaces. It is both literal (junk) and metaphorical (meaninglessness).
What it covers
Who wrote it
Philip K. Dick was an American science fiction writer who published prolifically from the 1950s through the 1980s, often under financial pressure, producing work that ranged from pulp adventure to philosophical fiction of considerable depth. His major works include The Man in the High Castle, Ubik, A Scanner Darkly, and VALIS. He died in 1982, three months before Blade Runner was released. His themes — the nature of reality, the definition of humanity, paranoia and surveillance — became more prescient with each decade after his death.
