Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?

Plot

By 1992, a global war had left Earth's atmosphere dangerously radioactive, driving most animal species to the brink of extinction or beyond. In this world, owning a living creature became a costly and trendy mark of status, while those with less money had to settle for lifelike electric replicas. The same radiation pushed people to emigrate to off-world colonies, where they were offered free androids as an incentive—biologically engineered servants nearly indistinguishable from humans, except through an empathy test or bone marrow analysis.

Rick Deckard works as a bounty hunter for the San Francisco Police Department, and his current assignment is to "retire"—kill—six rebellious and violent androids of the new Nexus-6 model, which have escaped from Mars and made their way to Earth. Deckard hopes the payment will let him buy a real animal to replace his single electric sheep, a move meant to lift the spirits of his depressed wife, Iran. First, he travels to the Rosen Association's Seattle headquarters, the company that manufactures the androids, to verify that the empathy test still works on this new model.

The Rosen team, for their own business reasons, tries to undermine the test and almost pulls it off. But the test twice identifies Rachael Rosen, Deckard's host in Seattle, as a Nexus-6 android, and she eventually admits it. Back in San Francisco, Deckard starts hunting the rebel group. He kills a Soviet police contact who turns out to be one of the renegade androids in disguise.

His next target is an android working as an opera singer. When Deckard meets her backstage and tries to run the test, she calls the police, who arrest him and take him to a station full of officers he's never seen before. An official named Garland accuses Deckard of being an android with false memories. After a test proves Deckard's work is genuine, Garland pulls a gun and reveals the whole station is a setup, claiming both Deckard and Phil Resch, the station's bounty hunter, are androids.

Resch, not hearing Garland's claim, shoots Garland in the head, and the two escape back to the opera singer, whom Resch kills without hesitation. Desperate for answers, Resch asks Deckard to test him. The results show sociopathic tendencies but confirm he is human. Deckard then tests himself, learning he is human too, but that he feels empathy for certain androids.

Influence and inspiration

Philip K. Dick's novel adopts the stylistic hallmarks of noir fiction, presenting a world-weary investigator navigating a corrupt and brutal landscape. The author also drew inspiration from Theodore Sturgeon's More Than Human, a surreal work exploring a fragmented humanity where one tier controls another through telepathy. In a 1972 speech titled "The Android and the Human," Dick reflected on artificial beings. The androids in his story are deliberately crafted to appear more human than the human protagonist, serving as a mirror to human behavior against a backdrop of a culture shedding its own humanity.

This book became a cornerstone of the new wave science fiction movement and a template for its cyberpunk successors, influencing generations of writers. Its reach extended to music, inspiring sci-fi metal acts like Rob Zombie and Powerman 5000. A loose film adaptation, Blade Runner, was released in 1982, directed by Ridley Scott and written by Hampton Fancher and David Peoples, featuring several characters from the novel. The film's international success led to later editions of the book being published under the Blade Runner title, though the term does not appear in the original text.

A sequel, Blade Runner 2049, followed in 2017, preserving many of the novel's themes. In 2014, BBC Radio 4 aired a two-part adaptation as part of its Dangerous Visions dystopia series, produced and directed by Sasha Yevtushenko from an adaptation by Jonathan Holloway, starring James Purefoy as Rick Deckard and Jessica Raine as Rachael Rosen. The episodes originally aired on June 15 and June 22, 2014. The novel has been released in audiobook form at least twice.

A 1994 version featured Matthew Modine and Calista Flockhart. A second unabridged audiobook, read by Scott Brick and running approximately 9.5 hours across eight CDs, was released by Random House Audio in 2007 to coincide with Blade Runner: The Final Cut, using the film's poster and title as a tie-in.

Critical reception

The 1982 film Blade Runner often overshadows the critical discussion of the novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?. When critics do examine the book, they usually place it within the larger arc of Philip K. Dick’s writing. Many point to Dick’s 1972 speech “The Human and the Android” as a key reference. Jill Galvan highlights how the novel’s polluted, artificial, dystopian world matches the description in that speech of a real-world environment that is becoming increasingly manufactured and possibly sentient.

Galvan sums up the speech’s core idea by stating that only by acknowledging how technology has changed our concept of “life” can we truly understand the technologies we have created. She calls the novel a “bildungsroman of the cybernetic age,” following a character who slowly comes to accept this new reality. Christopher Palmer also uses the speech to stress the growing danger of humans turning “mechanical.” He notes that androids threaten to diminish what makes life meaningful, but also offer a chance to expand or redefine it, much like aliens and gods do.

Gregg Rickman connects the novel to an earlier, less famous Dick book about androids, We Can Build You, arguing that Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? can be seen as its sequel. In a review for Different Worlds magazine, John Nubbin describes the story’s future, where a precise set of tests measuring moral conscience is the only way to distinguish androids from humans. Those who are in tune with nature and sensitive to it pass as human; those who are not, fail.

Nubbin observes that, given the differences between Dick’s future and our present, most people today would not pass the test. The questions that readers themselves would get wrong, he says, reveal a lot about how civilized we are and how strange the author’s sense of humor was.