Title: Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?
Author: Dick, Philip K.
Date of First Publication: 1968
Place of Publication: Garden City, NY: Doubleday
Bibliographic Reference: isfdb
Type: Novel
Keywords: ANDROID; POSTHUMAN; FRANKENSTEIN MONSTER; RACE and POLITICS; SYMPATHETIC MONSTER
Critical Summary: Philip K. Dick’s major novel continues the science fiction tradition of speculative post-apocalyptic stories. As the title suggests, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? also recurrently raises more general questions of what it means to be alive and sentient by making animals, humanoid robots, and low-IQ humans play key roles in the story. Overall, the novel most clearly reflects Frankenstein by insistently chipping away at what “human” means and how distinct humans are from nonhumans.
When the narrative begins, Earth has suffered environmental disaster following a major global war. An environmentally-induced epidemic has wiped out most of humanity, whose remainder has either left Earth for Mars or stayed in areas less ruined by the pathogenic atmosphere. Most of the animal kingdom is either extinct or endangered – humans have built AI-animals en masse, making live animals rare and expensive commodities. Androids, humanoid robots, were invented for war, but have since been developed into domestic servants of various kinds. When the story begins, androids have long-since been illegal on Earth, existing only on Mars––except for the renegades who kill their owners and escape to Earth.
Like Frankenstein, Dick’s novel uses this backdrop to raise questions about nature. Unlike in Frankenstein––where the natural world provides stability, remaining an impenetrable constant––the setting of Androids portrays a natural disorder that seems easily breakable and in no way ultimate. The plot tracks two men, Rick Deckard––an android-killing bounty hunter––and John Isidore––a low-IQ outcast. Rick has always wanted to replace his and his wife’s electric sheep with a real animal, but cannot afford it. He thinks he may finally have a chance when he learns his senior bounty hunter was almost killed by an advanced android that just landed on Earth with five others.
Before Rick goes to hunt, he must ‘test’ the test used to distinguish androids from humans to ensure that it actually works. The test evaluates the subject’s physical reaction to scenarios which evoke empathy in humans. Androids are distinguished as non-human by their inability to replicate human empathy, despite their super-human IQ.
After deciding the test is still reliable, Rick returns to San Francisco. He tracks the advanced renegade androids while developing a relationship with Rachael, a different female android. This relationship starts making Rick feel empathy towards androids, leading him to question his job. Meanwhile, Isidore goes about his life delivering electric animals alone as a “special” (the slur for lower-IQ humans remaining on Earth). Eventually, one of the rogue androids moves into his apartment. Soon, the other three join him for safety, believing he is the only human who will accept them since he too is an outcast.
The story makes much of humans’ unique capacity for empathy and that capacity’s connection to nature, drawing a few parallels to Frankenstein. Rick resembles Victor in Byronic ways––a dark, solitary figure whose work isolates him from others and from his own humanity. Considering the violent work of his hands, Rick describes himself as “an unnatural self,” a quality mirroring Victor’s reckless pursuit of knowledge in defiance of the natural order, his own health, and his relationships. The difference is that Rick recognizes this unnaturalness in himself as a “[violation] of [his] own identity,” not necessarily a violation of the natural order.
Shelley’s most striking influence on Dick’s novel, however, comes in considering the androids. Like Frankenstein’s Creature, the androids resent their rejection as sub-human and yet long to join human society. Both novels cast monstrous creation as sympathetic. Unlike Victor’s Creature, however, the androids look exactly like their human counterparts, differing from humans only in their non-empathy. Victor’s Creature, on the other hand—despite his monstrous appearance—seems deeply empathetic. Dick’s novel starts out clearly defining empathy as humanity’s critical distinctive: the androids’ incapacity to replicate or even understand human empathy shows their inhumanity. The more the story unfolds, however, the more ways it calls that distinction into question.
Administrative Notes: Ian Heisler, CSUF. Edited by Adrina Lora and Samuel Ortiz, CSUF