Product Description

It was January 2021, and Rick Deckard had a license to kill.
Somewhere among the hordes of humans out there, lurked several rogue androids. Deckard's assignmet--find them and then..."retire" them. Trouble was, the androids all looked exactly like humans, and they didn't want to be found!

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #64985 in Books
• Published on: 1987-07-12
• Released on: 1987-07-12
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Mass Market Paperback
• 272 pages

Amazon.com
Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? is a book that most people think they remember and almost always get more or less wrong. Ridley Scott's film Blade Runner took a lot from it, and threw a lot away. Wonderful in itself, the film is a flash thriller, whereas Dick's novel is a sober meditation. As we all know, bounty hunter Rick Deckard is stalking a group of androids who have returned from space with short life spans and murder on their minds--where Scott's Deckard was Harrison Ford, Dick's is a financially strapped municipal employee with bills to pay and a depressed wife. In a world where most animals have died, and pet keeping is a social duty, he can only afford a robot imitation, unless he gets a big financial break.

The genetically warped "chickenhead" John Isidore has visions of a tomb-world where entropy has finally won. And everyone plugs in to the spiritual agony of Mercer, whose sufferings for the sins of humanity are broadcast several times a day. Prefiguring the religious obsessions of Dick's last novels, this book asks dark questions about identity and altruism. After all, is it right to kill the killers just because Mercer says so? --Roz Kaveney, Amazon.co.uk

Card catalog description
In the year 2019, lifelike robots clash with their human makers in an effort to alter the destiny for which they have been programmed.

From the Publisher
The classic novel behind the cult film classic directed by Ridley Scott. As atmospheric and even more compelling than the film. A dystopian tour de force.

--Fred Dodnick, Vice President, Director of Trade Production

Customer Reviews

This book makes you think
I really wish I had not seen the movie until after I had read this book. But it was Ridely's amazing vision of Blade Runner that made me want to read "do androids dream of electric sheep?" The film deviated greatly from the book, as many others here have also pointed out. I kept expecting several parts to play out in a certain way and they really differed - not that this is a turnoff. That said, I found the movie to be better than the book, not because the book is not enjoyable -because it is very much so - but because I felt the overall idea and ending has been done more tastefully in the film. You can also see how Ridley incorporated his original vision and interpretation of DADOES?, and by doing so took BR onto new dimensions.

I felt the book was overall very good. It had a deep build of characters (although I could not stop seeing Harrison Ford in my head, as detective Deckard...) and it also had sundry unexpected twists and turns. Part of the beauty of this book is that it makes you think a lot. You cannot help but ruminate about the depressing, dystopian world PKD has created. The concept of trust constantly yet implicitly keeps turning up in both the book and the movie. I highly recommend reading this book. NON-SPOILING SPOILERS AHEAD. Albeit thoroughly enjoying reading DADOES? I had two problems with it, the first, and the lesser of the two, was that I thought the whole Mercerism (religion?) scenes were, well, beyond strange, and although they served a purpose in describing mankind's need to feel empathy and join in with others, they were nevertheless very weird. The second problem I had with this book is the way it ended, specifically and generally. In many ways the book ended where it started. It seemed like there was no real progress accomplished by the end of the book whereas in the film, Ridley went to great lengths to enhance the ethical issues, so at the end of the film, viewers had even developed empathy for androids. The ending of the book however, left no complex aftertaste, but rather, the initial attitudes in the book, that is, those of the unquestionable legal retirement of androids.

Better than the movie, at least
I finally saw the movie Blade Runner - The Final Cut (Two-Disc Special Edition) a couple of weeks ago, and shortly after that I ran across the book in the library and read it. The similarities between them are so slight that I wonder whether it is fair for them to share a title (actually I guess they didn't, originally).

I was struck by two of the major elements in the book that are not even hinted at in the movie: the fact that the earth has been through a cataclysmic war that has wiped out a lot of natural life, and the religion of Mercerism. The movie's lack of these core elements leaves it seeming hollow and pointless.

In the book, people are divided into "regulars" and "specials." "Regular" people are eligible to leave earth to become colonists on Mars or other (never named) planets. "Special" people are either too unintelligent to be considered worth shipping to another planet, or they have been affected by radiation to such a degree that they cannot reproduce healthy children, so they are not desirable colonists either. ("Regular" men wear uncomfortable lead-lined "codpieces" to protect their sperm factories from radiation.)

The role of Mercerism is never fully explained, but you get the impression that it helps most people, regular and special, to hold themselves together by mutual interdependence on what seems like a desolate wreck of a planet. The movie really misses the boat by omitting this pervasive part of the fabric of the story.

This book isn't what I consider one of the great works of science fiction, but like lots of good sci fi, it does get you thinking about some potentially knotty ethical issues. I think clones are a more hot-button issue these days than androids, but I suppose that both looked about equally distant and threatening in the 1960's.

So much more than "Blade Runner"!
This is NOT the movie. It is bigger, deeper, more meaningful and philosophical -- one of Philip K. Dick's best books ever. (It has been explained to me that the primary significance of the movie "Blade Runner" was that it presented a fully imagined future.) I wish I could get this book with the original title, so much more revealing of the core -- "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?" (I owned it years ago, and wore it out -- wish I had bought extra copies then!)