Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep: Book Review
Disclaimer: The blog below is all my own opinion and interpretation. Obviously. Please don’t @ me about how the Stranger is more existentialist than absurd. Also, there are spoilers ahead.
When I ask someone what their favourite book is and they name one of those 20th century classics, I generally make one of two assumptions:
1) They’re someone who studied English past high school. A lit-nerd who really appreciates the literary aspect of reading. Well meaning, but a real risk of waffling at you about everything except the actual story.
2) They were forced to read the book in high school, and it’s their go-to answer since they’ve never read another book. Likely they may not have even read it then.
Clearly, I’m a people person.
So, I never really expected to become someone whose favourite book is a classic. That changed when I picked up Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep in 2024. I hadn’t seen Blade Runner, but I had a rough idea that it would be a gritty sci-fi about a man who hunts down androids pretending to be people. What I was not expecting, was an extended metaphor that used one day in the life of a detective to delve deep into absurdist philosophy. It resonated with my own worldview so intensely that it was instantly my favourite book. After I finished it I read The Stranger, just to see how Camus compared. Spoiler, Phillip K. Dick wrote a better absurdist novel than Camus did. Way more entertaining too. I loved it enough to reread it for this book review.
Androids starts with Rick Deckard waking up in a good mood. He has a machine called a mood organ that wakes him up and puts him in the mood he programmed into it. His wife, Iran, has one too, but she isn’t using it. They get into an argument, since she refuses to use it to make herself pleasant. She explains that having switched off the television during an annoying commercial, she noticed the utter silence and emptiness of the world around her. She felt an utter despair at the dark reality of the world, and feels like she’s supposed to be depressed at it.
In her words, when she switched the TV off: “I was in a 382 mood; I had just dialed it. Although I heard the emptiness intellectually, I didn’t feel it. My first reaction consisted of being grateful that we could afford a Penfield mood organ. But then I realized how unhealthy it was, sensing the absence of life, not just in this building but everywhere, and not reacting - do you see? I guess you don’t. But that used to be considered a sign of mental illness; they called it ‘absence of appropriate affect’.”
She’s right, of course. The natural human reaction to the world Dick portrays is utter despair. In fact she feels that way so strongly, that she sets her mood organ to create a six-hour depression for her a few times a month. Setting aside the absurdity of even having the option for despair, it’s terribly ironic that she needs an artificial method to create something she should be able to feel naturally.
Their argument peters out, and she sets her mood organ to a faith in her husband’s superior wisdom in all things. By this time I realise this book has an understated but frankly hilarious sense of humour. Deckard leaves their apartment, and visits his electric sheep upstairs. We find out that, since earth became desolate after a great war, most humans left the planet to one of two colony worlds (heaven and hell maybe? Maybe not, the evidence is flimsy, but it’s the kind of thing you start thinking about with this book). The few that are left follow a religion called Mercerism, which venerates nature and human connection. It is essential to have an animal to care for, and to be seen having doing so. It’s such a staple of life on Earth, that people who can’t afford real animals buy electrical imitations of them. They lie to everyone around them, and go through the motions of caring for something that isn’t real, but that will break if you don’t. Deckard comes to resent his electric sheep for this reason. I believe the animals represent ‘meaning’ or ‘purpose’ to people, and it is important to any person to imagine they have one. Even when they can’t purpose for themselves, they need other people to believe they have. Androids, conversely, are distractions or illusions. Anyone who leaves Earth (i.e. the real world) is given an android companion to accompany them in the colony worlds. These people effectively bond themselves to a permanent illusion that means they never need to see the world for what it is. They live their lives in comfort while the world is slowly degrading and falling apart.
Which leads into the plot. Deckard wants to have a real animal. And to afford one, he needs to hunt down and kill androids who have killed their owners in the colonies, before escaping to earth. He wants to find meaning, and to do it, he needs to kill his illusions and distractions. He has a test to see whether a person is an android or a human, which tests for their empathy towards people and animals. Androids (illusions) are incapable of caring for people. They are exclusively interested in self-preservation. Prolonged interactions easily expose this, but in a pinch, Deckard has the test.
Meanwhile, our other protagonist, John Isidore, sits alone in his apartment. He’s been brain-addled by radioactive fallout, and spends his days working for repair shops posing as vets. He goes from watching Buster Friendly and his Friendly Friends - the talkshow host who presents 23 hours of television and another 23 hours of radio shows every day. Buster Friendly epitomises illusions and distractions. He talks endlessly, about nothing at all. After a while, during a commercial, John is startled by the same silence Iran felt. He wonders if all people experience emptiness the same way, or if he is alone in being frightened of the true nature of the world. He uses his empathy box - a holy instrument in Mercerism. It shifts his consciousness into that of Wilbur Mercer, alongside all other humans who are using their box. They gather and feel a connection here that they can’t in the real world. All of them are together in their solitude. In the body of Mercer, they climb a hill while hecklers throw rocks at them. Their real bodies suffer the actual wounds inflicted on Mercer. In the empathy box’s world, they find something painful, but real. A connection beyond themselves, even though it isn’t flashy. It is the Sisyphean hill all humans share, whether they admit it or not. And it stands in stark contrast to Buster Friendly’s endless distraction.
Throughout the rest of the novel, Deckard begins hunting down the androids, and kills them one, by one, through many twists and turns. As he considers which animals he’d be able to afford, he gives us my favourite line of the book: “What good does it do, my risking my life? She (Iran) doesn’t care whether we own an ostrich or not.” The metaphor continues on so well, that you can read the book as an entertaining detective story, or as this deeper contemplation of the human condition. The major crisis point comes when Buster Friendly exposes Mercer as a fraud, using detailed analysis, and a series of experts to prove that the scene was filmed in a studio, and that Mercer is just an old man who lives out of public view. The androids believe this revelation will create a new world where all humans discard the ideas and ideals of Mercerism. Yet it ultimately changes nothing.
Deckard continues his business. he kills every android on his list, and he finds himself in the desert, climbing a hill similarly to the real Mercer. He has killed his illusions and is now seeing the hill for himself, without any artificial aid. He waits to die, until he spots a toad - the single most precious animal in Mercerism. He takes it back home. Once there they realise that the toad is electric. Mercer’s most precious meaning is not real.
But the crux is, that Mercer continues. It doesn’t matter if these things are objectively real, or if they have intrinsic value. My final take on the meaning is that the human condition does not change, and we need meaning or purpose in order to live. We can spend our whole lives distracted by tv, phones, or whatever we occupy our time with. But the world does not change because we do, it is still decaying, and we are still dying. We can admit this, or lie to ourselves. And once we dig deep enough, and become honest with ourselves, we will live authentically, even if that does not imply ‘comfortably’. We pursue our meanings, and even if they cannot change the fundamental nature of the universe, it doesn’t really matter. We must know what the world truly is, and try to live with purpose anyway.
Final score: 6/5 stars.
The human condition
I’ve written longer piece here than I expect most people to read. But this book has articulated my own worldview in such a wonderful way, that I believe I’ll read it every year. If you haven’t read it yet, and this makes you want to, then I sincerely apologise for the spoilers, but read it anyway. It could change the way you live.
