Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?

"The basic tool for the manipulation of reality is the manipulation of words. If you can control the meaning of words, you can control the people who must use the words." (Philip K.Dick)

Philip Kindred Dick was an American science fiction novelist and short story writer who explored sociological, political and metaphysical themes in novels dominated by monopolistic corporations and authoritarian governments.

In later works, he drew on his own life experiences and desire for mystical understanding, writing on the nature of drug use, paranoia and schizophrenia.

It's been suggested by people who knew him well that he partook far too often in these experiments into mystical experience. That may be so, but whatever he did, or did not do, takes nothing away from his writing.

Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? takes place on a post-nuclear apocalyptic Earth.

Rick Deckard is a special police officer/bounty hunter assigned to terminate androids, known as Replicants who live unnoticed in the San Francisco of 2021. The Replicants are perfect reproductions of humans and are manufactured to do hard physical labour in the colonisation of distant planets and also to provide company to human settlers in space.

When a group of replicants go on a murder spree, hijack a ship and return to Earth, it is Deckard's job to search and destroy these villianous androids.

Androids are not allowed on Earth. Especially some that have killed humans.

A religious cult figure, Mercer, daily toils up a virtual hill while he is connected through machines with brain altering results to his myriad followers. As they join him in his Sisyphean task, Mercer preaches that the androids must be killed.

The increasing difficulty of distinguishing androids from humans disturbs Deckard when he is called in to "retire" (kill) the fugitives.

In a world where animal life is prized so highly that people buy artificial sheep to tend, why should androids be treated any differently?

As the novel continues, Deckard finds himself caught between his own feelings and the requirements of his job to kill. The complex and basic human emotions of empathy, love and loneliness are questioned.

The picture that Dick creates of San Francisco in 2021 is dark and disturbing - a grim backdrop for a story that takes us through the dark recesses of the human psyche.

"The morning air, spilling over with radioactive motes, gray and sun-beclouding, belched about him, haunting his nose; he sniffed involuntarily the taint of death".

The whole city is decaying ....

"In a giant, empty, decaying building which had once housed thousands, a single TV set hawked its wares to an uninhabited room. This ownerless ruin had, before World War Terminus, been tended and maintained. Here had been the suburbs of San Francisco, a short ride by monorail rapid transit; the entire peninsula had chattered like a bird tree with life and opinions and complaints, and now the watchful owners had either died or migrated to a colony world.

Mostly the former; it had been a costly war despite the valiant predictions of the Pentagon and its smug scientific vassel, the Rand Corporation - which had, in fact, existed not far from this spot. Like the apartment owners, the corporation had departed, evidently for good. No one missed it".

The film based on Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? is Blade Runner.

The name was changed for a title with less words (to fit on a poster) and all reference to Rick Deckard's robotic sheep, which played a large role in the question of 'humanness' was dropped entirely. The rival religions are also removed.

Philip K. Dick was a fan of Raymond Chandler and absorbed every one of his stories on a personal level. In Blade Runner, this is memorialised in the opening scene where Deckard is seen reading an anachronistsic newspaper while multi-media advertising holograms float by him. There's even a version of the film with a voice-over. Pure Sam Spade.