Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?

This felt surreal, at times chaotic, yet also reflective and introspective. I enjoyed it.

Phlebas the Phoenician, a fortnight dead,/Forgot the cry of gulls, and the deep sea swell/And the profit and loss./A current under sea/Picked his bones in whispers. As he rose and fell/He passed the stages of his age and youth/Entering the whirlpool./Gentile or Jew/O you who turn the wheel and look to windward,/ Consider Phlebas, who was once handsome and tall as you. —T.S. Eliot,

The Wasteland, “IV. Death by Water.”

"This performance will end, the singers will die, eventually the last score of the music will be destroyed in one way or another; finally the name “Mozart” will vanish, the dust will have won. If not on this planet then another. We can evade it awhile. As the andys can evade me and exist a finite stretch longer. But I get them or some other bounty hunter gets them. In a way, he realized, I’m part of the form-destroying process of entropy."—Deckard, Ch. 9

Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep carries quite a few big themes in between its slim covers. Nature vs Nurture is the biggest, and certainly the characters portray this well (Luba Luft is easily the most empathetic android, Resch the least empathetic human, and Pris Stratton caught in-between). There is a lot to be unpacked in the arguments about the Theory of Mind: whether the andys are truly incapable of empathy, or, like toddlers who have yet to understand what they know is not necessarily how others think, find themselves simply stuck in an innocent stage of development without the protections of childhood to guide them through it. Certainly, those themes impressed themselves upon my memory of the novel when I first read it.

This time, however, I found myself meditating on the idea of entropy. Life itself falls into senescence; andys have it even worse, with a lifespan of maybe four years. Likewise, Earth in Dick’s novel is doomed to the fate of ‘kippelization.’ Mercerism is not rebellion against entropy—it is a Ragnarokian acceptance of it. The andys become sympathetic in this vein as much as any other, their resistance against death regressing them to the supposedly-primitive limbic system functions, endearingly known as the ‘three f’s’: fight, flight, and copulation. They are going to die. They know it.

They fight anyway, simply because life is precious.

Mercerism does not hate androids. It hates their resistance to the cycle.

Deckard’s final epiphany is not some great realization about morality, but about that primal drive for life. It is why he cannot differentiate between a mechanical and an organic toad, both standing against entropy, both doomed anyway.

As for the craft of the novel? The pacing is quick, and with moments that still read like a drug trip every time Mercerism is invoked; certainly, my 2018-self was not wrong there. Still, I appreciated—now that I know the main beats of the story—the quieter moments: Luba Luft’s fascination with paintings; the mechanical sheep (symbol of innocence) replaced by an organic goat (perhaps a delicate and subtle inversion of imagery—alive, but uncanny).

Rachael’s final act is never explained, but I posit she is fighting against that very replacement: she argues the lamb beats the goat, even if a surface-level examination would suggest the opposite. This is not an argument for transhumanism or post-humanism; it is the last tantrum of a child begging for recognition.

Original 2018 review:

Overall verdict: interesting sophistry, though it felt like parts were a pipe dream.

The prose was beautiful, but a little overwrought at times. The world and plot were clever, and characters were well-developed. The best technique was the ambiguity of the juxtapositions; for example,

Pris’s crying over the ‘meaningless’ gesture of the peaches indicates a burgeoning sense of empathy, whereas mutilation of the spider showed the opposite. We also saw this in Baty’s grief for his wife, as compared to his callousness towards Isidore.

The ending scene was peaceful and bittersweet, reflecting the novel’s themes of nature versus nurture and the nature of empathy itself. Rachael’s final act of defiance illustrates the ambiguity and complexity of the novel, as her motive is never fully explained, and it’s up to the reader to decide the ‘why.’

في ظل التلوث، وبينما يهاجر اغلب البشر الأرض للعيش في المستعمرات ومع كون اغلب الحيوانات نادرة او مهددة بالانقراض اصبح لابد للناس من تربيتها، فمن غير اللائق اجتماعيًا عدم تربية حيوان.

يحلم ديكارد بامتلاك حيوان حقيقي وهو يعمل لدى الشرطة صائدًا للجوائز، حيث يلاحق الروبوتات التي تتقمص دور البشر لاحالتها للتقاعد عن طريق اخضاعها لاختبار للتعاطف، هل تفتقر الروبوتات الى التعاطف فعلًا؟ وهل هي مختلفة عن البشر بل وحتى الحيوانات الآلية؟

So much better than I thought it would be. Better written and deeper than Blade Runner

This was not what I expected. Another future I hope that does not come to life. It did not end well.

The most important book for cyberpunk as a genre. Filled with the existential question of what it means to be human. A must read novel.