Do Androids Dream of AMAZING Sci-Fi? Review and Thoughts on the Philip K. Dick Classic!

It's time to talk about the silver lining of reading All Systems Red: it got me to go and find a copy of Philip K. Dick's classic novel, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? My original goal was to figure out if All Systems Red was closer to Do Androids fanfiction or Blade Runner fanfiction.

Now I had seen Blade Runner once at that point. On a crappy old VHS that I borrowed from my local library when I was fifteen or so. Frankly, it didn't do much for me, but part of that was no doubt due to the poor condition of my media back then.

I certainly didn't expect Do Androids to blow me away.

And boy was I wrong.

From the first page, the first chapter of Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? it is abundantly clear that PKD is completely out of Martha Wells's league. His prose is shockingly brilliant. The number of interesting science fiction ideas in the first chapter of Do Androids is larger than the entirety of All Systems Red.

Let's list some of the cool sci-fi ideas in Do Androids:

• The Mood Organ and its many numbers
• Official encouragement of empathy as a way to deter war
• Taking care of an animal as a way to improve or maintain empathy
• The Empathy Machine
• Permanent radioactive fallout and the government response to be encouraging offworld colonization, lead codpieces, and IQ tests and fitness tests for exit--though this eugenics angle is not really explored.
• Mercerism, empathy across all mankind. "You shall kill only the killers." And Mercer shown to be ultimately right.
• The sole fault of androids being a lack of empathy; the arms race to detect them; and the lack of empathy being what stands between androids and organized resistance.
• PKD's depiction of mostly-abandoned cities
• The idea of "kipple"
• A "laser jammer"
• Androids holding their breath in order to die

How's that for a large number of sci-fi ideas packed into one book?

I was entranced.

I consumed that whole book as quickly as I could. Here are a few of my thoughts.

• PKD's prose is simply brilliant. I don't know how else to describe it. He fits more meaning into fewer words, and yet he doesn't rely on lots of big words to sound literary. It's really something you have to read to believe.
• He handles tension amazingly well. There are three major scenes with enough tension that you have to bite down to get through it. The scene right after Deckard meets with Luba Luft, the scene with Garland, even a scene with a simple house spider near the end drip with tension.
• There is a scene with some momentary confusion (I won't spoil it) that is so convincingly done it had me doubting my own senses.
• The split narratives of Deckard and Isidore are handled incredibly well.
• Deckard's perception of androids develops interestingly over the course of the story.

As for things that didn't quite sit right with me,

• The sidestep of using something like probable cause to order more tests on a potential android is a little weird.
• The motivation stated by the androids for why they want to come to Earth didn't make a lot of sense to me.

Even so, the book is incredible despite these minor points of criticism.

It was good enough that it made me go and watch Blade Runner again, too. A few thoughts there:

• Roy Baty is not as well-developed in the book as in the movie, and the climactic final fight of the movie is much weaker in the book.
• The book is gray; the movie is noir.
• Isidore in the book is replaced by Sebastian, and their characters are very, very different.

Long story short, Do Androids is an incredible book, way way more interesting than Blade Runner, although a little less exciting, comparing peaks. Still, it was amazing to me how much this 1968 book that didn't win the Hugo outclassed a multi-award winner from 2017.

They just don't make them like they used to.

Grab a copy of Do Androids here:

https://a.co/d/3PprEVL