Book Review 10: "Do Androids Dream Of Electric Sheep?"

Book Review
Philip K. Dick
Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?
244 Pages

Soooo... I am an idiot. I have seen this book on shelves and heard it referred to and...well... I thought the name was “Do Androids Dream of Electric SLEEP?” Which frankly I believe would be a VERY cool name too. Maybe even more cooler...most coolest? I guess that is why I don’t write books. I read one of Dicks books earlier in the year and found it good but not all that compelling. Still, since I am reading Jonathan Lethem who really loves Dick...I need to read to Dick because as you can all tell by now.... I don’t know Dick.

This is an awesome book. A great summer read.

The book is set in the future...naturally. It is post apocalypse...naturally. Earth is not doing that well. There is radioactive dust which is slowly killing everyone left on the planet. People are being sent out to Mars and other planets to colonize. Things evidently are not going all that well out there either but as an inducement for people to go they are given and android. Evidently some of these very real androids are creating a variety of problems on the colonies and some are coming home. they are so realistic that we earth people have bounty hunters to track them and...”retire” them.

The chief protagonist is a bounty hunter and we are introduced to him as he wakes up and deals with his depressed wife. He then goes to the roof where he pretends to take care of his electric sheep and deals with a snotty neighbor with a real horse. Evidently in the apocalypse animals faired even poorer then humans. He covets his neighbors live horse and is embarrassed regarding his electric sheep.

A new posse of androids has been discovered and one almost killed the chief bounty hunter in San Francisco which gives our hero a chance to make some money to buy a live animal. The story is basically about his life while he is doing so.
At the same time we are dealing with a parallel story of a “chicken-head” who is also dealing with, and falling in-love with these rogue androids. A chicken-head is a “special”...someone who has been mentally damaged by the radioactive fallout. Eventually they meet. The “chicken-head” has run into several androids which our hero is supposed to “retire” and although they have not treated him well they have shown him a type of community which humanity has more recently denied him.
In between we are dealing with all kind of real issues. The religion of the day is “Mercerism” which is as good of a new age religion as any. Wikipedia defines Mercerism this way: Mercerism is a prominent religious/philosophical movement on Earth. The movement is based on the fable of Wilbur Mercer, a man who lived before the war. Adherents of Mercerism grip the handles of an electrically powered empathy box, while viewing a monitor which displays patterns that are meaningless until the handles are gripped. After a short interval the user's senses are transported to the world of Wilbur Mercer, where they inhabit his mind in an experience shared with any other people using an empathy box at that moment.

Mercerism blends the concept of a life-death-rebirth deity with the values of unity and empathy. According to legend, Mercer had the power to revive dead animals, but local officials used radioactive cobalt to nullify the part of his brain where the ability originated. This forced Mercer into the "tomb world." He strives to reverse the decay of the tomb world and ascend back to Earth by climbing an enormous hill. His adversaries throw rocks at him along the way (inflicting actual physical injuries on the adherents "fused" with Mercer), until he reaches the top, when the cycle starts again.

The over arching theme of the whole book though is what does it really mean to be human? At every turn the story is dealing with the main character trying to judge whether the entity he is dealing with is human or android so by definition....inhuman. Also without asking it is constantly raising the question of, who are we to judge what is more...or less human. It explores these themes in a very weird and easily readable way. The book was written in 1968 and when you consider where we were then, and where we are now it has a spooky relevance and that is a quality rarely seen among futuristic books, 40 years later. It is very close to the best book I read this year and certainly a better read then Huckleberry Finn... or at least an easier one.