Talk to Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? like its author wrote you back.
Get the ideas that fit your life — not generic summaries.
- Chat with the book
- Audiobook-style main ideas
- Adapts to your life and goals
- Helps you take action
Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, in detail
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.
Dick's prose is not literary in the conventional sense; it is functional, flat, and fast, which suits a novel narrated in the register of a man doing a job. The world-building is impressionistic rather than systematic — details accumulate into atmosphere rather than cohere into a physics. This is a feature for some readers and a frustration for others. Dick was working on ideas, and the fictional frame is the vehicle rather than the destination. The empathy test, the mood organ that lets you dial up your emotional state, the kipple — the creeping entropy of consumer goods — these are philosophical thought experiments in pulp science fiction packaging.
Blade Runner (1982) and Blade Runner 2049 (2017) are both loosely adapted from this novel, and most readers now come to the book having seen the film first. The film is more beautiful and more coherent; the novel is stranger, more claustrophobic, and more interested in the religious and metaphysical questions the films only gesture at. Both are worth your time. The book takes four hours and will leave questions that the films don't ask.
The big ideas
- 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).
