The Replicant's Dilemma

Because I've hit the proverbial wall on...well, basically everything, but I need to post something to make myself feel better about the writing I haven't really been doing, here's an essay that I pulled together last year for a planned recurring column geared toward readers on a start-up networking site - it's a project that never really panned out.

The follow up to this was supposed to be a review of Mikhail Bulgakov's The Master and Margarita, where I was going to talk about how the novel was supposedly Mick Jagger's inspiration for the Rolling Stones' "Sympathy for the Devil", and all of the references to other literary influences and historical figures. (The scene that leads up to the Devil's midnight ball includes  a vague reference to the long-rumored relationship between Queen Elizabeth I and her Master of the Horse, Robert Dudley, 1st Earl of Leicester, whose sickly wife died under questionable circumstances and a cloud of court intrigue...)

I wish I had the opportunity to write pieces like this often. Books are so much more than what they appear to be on the surface, I love exploring them in depth in this way. I've actually composed essays while reading something especially interesting or thought-provoking. I should probably take time to write those down from time to time.

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San Francisco Bounty Hunter Rick Deckard is having a bad day. His chronically depressed wife is in no mood to have her emotions boosted, his neighbor’s horse is pregnant while Deckard has to make due with his own inadequate and wholly artificial sheep, and there are illegal androids loose in the city. In the future of Philip K. Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? a world war to finally end them all has left much of Earth a blasted wasteland clouded by fallout, which has led to mass extinctions. Real animals have become a rare commodity, and most of humanity has fled, migrating off world to colonize Mars.

For those who don’t qualify to emigrate it is a daily struggle against the inevitable consequences of exposure to radiation, and government mandated animal ownership being out of the reach of average citizens, people often have to rely on fabricated pets to maintain their social status. Sophisticated androids, used as laborers in the colonial settlements and almost indistinguishable from their human counterparts, are not allowed on Earth. When any are detected, as they hide among the remaining humans and try to pass as human themselves, simple tests of physical responses to a series of questions gauging empathy are employed by professional bounty hunters like Deckard who are tasked with dispatching them. Of course, they also risk being dispatched by the desperate androids they hunt.

Over the course of the story Rick Deckard’s own humanity and his fundamental faith in the nature of his existence is tested. Deckard is a morally ambiguous, conflicted protagonist. He is not always sure he really is one of the “good guys” and begins to question his job and his basic understanding of the reality he lives in. Philip K. Dick explores the question of what it really means to be human in this novel, which was the fundamental inspiration for plot of the motion picture Blade Runner.

The novel includes a lot of the themes that Philip K. Dick incorporated in many of his works, such as a distrust of authority and the idea that not everything is always what it seems to be on the surface. This is a true dystopian sci-fi story – everything is pervaded by a sense of abandonment and decay, and there is an undercurrent of paranoia that builds as the plot progresses. The difference between the novel and Blade Runner can really be felt in that element: the film is noir in every sense, while the novel feels much more desolate and subdued.

This stark tone is one of Dick’s hallmarks, and as one of the founding fathers of modern science fiction his writing has had a major impact on the genre. Even if you’ve never read a single thing he authored, or you don’t really consider yourself much of a fan of science fiction in general, you may be more familiar with Philip K. Dick than you think. His influence permeates modern filmmaking and pop-culture through films such as Total Recall, A Scanner Darkly, Minority Report, Paycheck, Next, Screamers, and, of course, Blade Runner. Writer John Scalzi cheekily references Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? in his own novel, The Android’s Dream, and Dick’s work is often credited with being a major influence in the rise of cyberpunk.

"In my writing I even question the universe; I wonder out loud if it is real, and I wonder out loud if all of us are real." ~ Philip K. Dick

If you read Do Androids Dream Of Electric Sheep, you may also like:

·         Gun, With Occassional Music, Jonathan Lethem’s slightly manic sci-fi pulp fiction homage to the hardboiled detective novel, features hyper-intelligent babies and talking animals with a penchant for random violence. 

·         The Windup Girl by Paolo Bacigalupi is a slight departure from his previous books which were geared toward a younger audience, but this richly detailed novel set in a future world of rising sea levels and dwindling food resources is as engaging as it is often challenging.