Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (Blade Runner)

Much better than the movie

In reading some reviews by people who had seen the Ridley Scott movie and then read this book, I noticed that many were disappointed. Not only were they disappointed to not have something so visually stunning to look at, but the personal drama in the book is much slower and awkward than in the movie. To my mind, the ideas that Dick 's writing explore requires more subtle and quiet drama than the screen can easily reproduce. Dick's fiction was not space adventure. It was truly science fiction, the creation of another world, that was enough like our own to be believable, but different enough to fascinate and challenge us. The best part about the book, in contrast to the movie, is that Decker can tell the difference between humans and replicants quite easily. The machine he uses to analyze them is not exactly a formality, but it's sort of like modern DNA testing in criminal matters: we it use to make 100% sure we're right. In the movie, the replicants, whose lives are so short, seem to be more full of life than the humans. They live with fear, and as a result they appreciate each moment, each second, every (false) memory much more than those of use with long life spans tend to. The book is really an inversion of this situation. Decker knows what being a replicant is: it's not human, it's devoid of something critical, something essential to human consiousness. However, when he looks back at what it means to be human, he has a hard time finding answers. The outcome isn't that the replicants seem more human than humans (as is the case in the movie), but that being human is dissappointing and dry, it also is lacking, but in some other strange way. Another innovation that helps us think about this point is the characters' use of a device that allows you to select your mood. You want to feel sad because of a friend's death, but you also want to feel slightly relieved that it's not you...so, you dial up 1376 on the machine, place your hands on either side of the box, and zap! the feelings are yours. The notion that feelings, that aspect of consciousness that is "given" to us, can be selected after the fact is a very innovative idea. One need only look at he number of drugs we use today to help stabilize and improve our mood. That's another neat example of how PKD was really a far-seeing man. If you are going to read this book and appreciate some of it's finer points, of which there are many, I would keep these things in mind.

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