Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?

 
#108
Title: Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?
Author: Philip K. Dick
Publisher: Del Rey
Year: 1968/1982
Genre: Science Fiction
220 pages

The linked cover is one from a more recent run from the same publisher. My edition, like the one pictured, is actually titled Blade Runner (Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep), but that's a movie tie-in title, not Dick's. The novel and the film have about as little in common as Le Guin's Earthsea Trilogy and the Sci-Fi Channel's loosely based, made-for-television movie Earthsea. There are some characters and action elements in common, but very different plots and emotional foci. Like Dick's A Scanner Darkly and Valis, there is considerable confusion between characters' selves and a larger consciousness that is the manifestation of a larger than life, perhaps unnatural intelligence; blurred identities; and at least one character who may be psychotic and/or may correctly perceive artifice and deception by people and systems. Unlike Blade Runner, which is primarily an exterior, action-adventure narrative, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? devotes considerable attention to the characters' concerns about consciousness and empathy, and plays with the reader's identification with characters over time. Like much of Dick's work, it does not answer the questions it poses about artifice versus the numinous, but instead sustains the reader's identification with the characters beyond the end of the book by letting the mystery stand.