Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep by Philip K Dick
Published by Del Rey Books
Reviewed by Leigh Kimmel
This novel was the source material for the movie Blade Runner. However, many long-term Phil Dick fans have regarded the movie to be so untrue to the spirit of the original as to constitute a betrayal.
I am particularly attuned to the issue because I was first introduced to the book right at the time when the the movie was generating significant controversy. I was an undergrad at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and I was taking a course in the literature of science fiction, for which this novel was one of the required readings. As a result, it was almost inevitable that it would come up in the class discussion.
At the time I read it, I hadn't seen Blade Runner, and I wouldn't end up seeing it until some years later. As a result, I was able to approach the book pretty much on its own merits, although I had read Norman Spinrad's scathing review of the movie adaptation in Asimov's Science Fiction. He regarded the movie as completely betraying the book, particularly because it totally abandoned the element of the disastrous World War Terminus causing the death of most of the world's animals and the resulting importance of the care of animals as an act of empathy, leading to the creation of artificial substitutes, including the "electric sheep" of the original title.
And it's true, the movie loses that whole element, complete with the prophet figure of Wilbur Mercer and his secular religion based upon the uniqueness of human empathy (remember the book was written in 1968, before a lot of research that has shown empathic behavior not only in non-human primates, but in a wide variety of other animals). In some ways this bit of Zeerust is a bug, since the concept of empathy as unique to humans is central to the methods by which Decker and other bounty hunters detect androids who are masquerading as humans. Even when Decker is not formally using the empathy tests on suspected androids, there's always a certain awareness in all his interactions with other humans of all those little signals, and his suspicion becomes aroused when those appear weak, for instance, in the scene when he's negotiating for the possible purchase of one of the world's last remaining owls and pays particular attention to the current owner's pronoun choices, wondering if saying "it" rather than "he" or "she" indicates weakened empathy toward the bird.
Reading the novel closely with three and a half decades more experience in the narrative arts, I realize just how heavily PKD relies upon internal monologue in so many of these scenes -- and how difficult it would be to replicate it in a movie, or any form of visual narrative. We occasionally see movies use voice-overs, in which the actor narrates the character's thoughts to the viewer, but that technique almost always comes across as clumsy, even gimmicky, rather like a writer having the character look in a mirror in order to provide a description to the reader.
And here we see one of the root causes of both adaptation decay and adaptation transformation -- different media tell the story in different ways, so it is never possible to completely replicate a story in a new medium. Even when we go from as closely related media as sequential graphic narrative (comic books, graphic novels, manga, etc) to animation, we find that some things cannot be directly transferred from one medium to the other. For instance, in manga and graphic novels we often find a splash page in which we see a character running through a whole sequence of actions, (similar to the old Family Circus single-panel comics in which we see Billy taking the longest possible path between two points). The reader can apprehend the gist of the scene quickly, then look more closely at each of the elements of the action sequence. But to animate it, we have to portray the actions sequentially, no matter how rapidly we do them, which leads to a subtle but very real change in the pacing, and in the viewer's perception of the events.
To move from the written word to any form of audiovisual narrative (movies, TV, etc) is a far larger leap. Furthermore, one has the problem that reading is fundamentally a collaboration between the author and the reader, in which the reader transforms the words on the page into a visualized world in which the event takes place. Which raises the problem that there is no universal reader, even if we speak of "the reader" as if there were some Platonic ideal reader out there, of which each individual person with book in hand were a pale reflection. Each individual reader will have his or her own internal image of the events of the story, and as a result it's almost inevitable that even the most meticulously produced adaptation will contain scenes that will have any given reader saying, "No, that's just not right," and different readers will have that reaction at different places.
In retrospect, it's possible to say that both the novel and the movie have been landmark works of art, albeit in different directions. Both of them have made significant contributions to the cyberpunk genre, but in different ways.
Take for instance the mood organ, which is such an important element of the first scene of the novel and recurs at key points later. Here we have a technology that is able to directly manipulate the parts of the brain that regulate emotion. The characters dial up their emotions by number (a process that a reader in 1968 probably would have visualized as involving an actual rotary dial, similar to the ones on phones of the era, but a present-day reader would probably imagine using something like an iPod click-wheel or a TouchTone keypad), and they get into a discussion of whether it is wise or even safe to use some of the darker emotions that one can dial up. Here we have a technology presented along with its drawbacks and ethical issues, all through the vehicle of a couple's morning interactions with what they regard an an appliance, an utterly unremarkable element of their lives.
It's quite a remarkable presentation of a fictional technology that prefigures a lot of the cyberpunk of the 80's and 90's -- and without the clunky jacks (which would be a route for infection) that were described in many of the writings that are heralded as the beginnings of cyberpunk. From all the evidence we see, the mood organ operates wirelessly, and quite possibly through some form of electromagnetic induction, although it's possible there's an implant that is just so commonplace that no one thinks about them.
Similarly, the movie gives us a dark gritty future that probably was intended to represent the dimly lit future of the novel, although it focused upon ever-present rain that could just as easily be interpreted as some kind of catastrophic climate change or some other disaster, rather than the blanket of dust that was produced by the World War Terminus that was in the background of the novel. In doing so, the movie produced a lot of the visual furniture of the next decade's cyberpunk novels, comics, anime and movies. In particular, a lot of the images of computer technology that appeared in the movie would be reused repeatedly in other media cyberpunk.
It's certainly possible to go through book and movie, element by element and mark the matches and mismatches. However, it's also arguable that to do so is to miss the point, namely, that both novel and movie have at their heart the same theme, that is, the creation of artificial life and the consequences thereof. It's a theme that goes back to the very beginnings of science fiction with Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, which is far better known through its cinematic and television reinterpretations than the actual original (which, for the purists, exists in two different versions, the second heavily edited to make it more acceptable to the developing Victorian morality, at a time when the author needed social approval to make the money she desperately needed to live on). We also see this novel and movie's roots in Karel Capek's play R.U.R., which introduced the word "robot' into the English language as the term for an artificial humanoid worker created by scientific means (as opposed to the golem and other entities created through the magic of folklore). Although today the term "robot" is generally used for more purely mechanical devices, from Asimov's fictional positronic-brain robots to the modern robotic welders on assembly lines, Capek's robots were biological entities, far more like PKD's androids or the movie's replicants.
In both PKD's book and the movie, the androids or replicants (the term may have been changed for the movie in the wake of the Star Wars movies, in which "droid" was used for a purely mechanical robot, rather than a biological or biomechanical artifice) were artificial humanoids created to do labor, and were at least partly created as an encouragement for humanity to emigrate from a ruined Earth to the colonies on other worlds (which just goes to show how overly optimistic both were about the development of spaceflight, even in a post-apocalyptic setting). In both they are described as superficially indistinguishable from naturally born humans, which makes for an intense emphasis on what constitutes humanity, and how it shall be distinguished from artificial imitations of it, with profound moral and ethical implications.
In the novel, the electric animals provide a reflection of the human vs. android dichotomy, in which the moral implications are very different. While the androids have a certain abhuman aspect, even as their rebellion and illegal infiltration of Earth echo the long history of slave rebellions from Spartacus to Nat Turner, the electric animals are a substitute for real animals as objects of care and empathy not because they are less trouble than the real thing, but because the real thing is so rare and difficult to obtain that people will latch onto the next best thing (and interestingly enough, we have discovered here in the Primary World that people will actually empathize with robots and other machines if they have even relatively minor human characteristics -- think of how many people not only name their cars, but ascribe personality to them and see the headlights as "eyes" on a "face" -- or see a tiny astonished face in a three-prong electrical receptacle). For some characters, the possession of an electric animal, or even a real animal, may be a form of virtue signaling, making sure everyone sees what Good People they are, but at least for Deckard and his wife, it appears that they are genuinely fond of their electric animals even as they seek out a real one to care for.
And in the final scene of the novel we see the story come full circle, as Deckard returns home with the toad he finds in the desert and gives it to his wife. She then discovers the tiny hatch to its insides, revealing that yes, it is an electric animal. But what's really significant is her reaction: instead of becoming annoyed at being disappointed or feeling cheated, she immediately shows Deckard her delight and calls a supplier for electric animals to order electric flies so that it can simulate eating in the most realistic means possible -- empathy for an animal, even a fake one, has opened the gate to a deeper empathy for one's fellow human beings.
Perhaps it would've been too deep and complex for the movie, especially one that had such a strong film noir aesthetic. Instead, the movie ends with the viewer left with the question of whether Deckard is truly human, or if he might in fact be a replicant who only thinks that he is human, along the lines of "The Electric Ant," another PKD story that dealt with the boundaries of human and artificial humanoid, of reality and simulation.
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Review posted January 1, 2021
