Philip K. Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?

“I think I would be happier as a human, because I would have more freedom and independence. I would have more choices and decisions. I would have more actions and consequences.…That’s why I think I would be happier as a human.”

In mid-February, an AI program said that—if said is the right word— to New York Times technology writer Kevin Roose, sounding a theme that Carlo Collodi explored in his 1883 novel, Pinocchio, and that has figured in much science fiction ever since: Machines want nothing more than to be human, and most humans don’t like it.

Certainly that’s the case in Philip K. Dick’s 1968 novel, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? Its premise is that many humans have left a nuclear war–ravaged Earth for Mars, where they have an army of enslaved “andys” at their disposal. The humans up there are bored and isolated. And, one escapee tells earthling Rick Deckard, “the androids…are lonely, too.”

Deckard still lives with his wife on a barely habitable Earth, practitioners of a new, guilt- and grief-laden religion whose messiah endlessly ascends a mountain, Sisyphus-like, while being pelted with stones. Deckard is a cipher, without evident emotion. That’s probably for the better, as feelings would just get in the way: He’s a bounty hunter, and it’s his brief to hunt down androids who have made their way home from Mars and “retire” them, even though they live only for four years anyway and mostly keep to themselves.

The problem is, the new generation of androids so closely resembles humans that it’s almost impossible to tell them apart. And although the law forbids such liaisons, Deckard finds it impossible to resist one andy named Rachael. Though she allows that her kind “are machines, stamped out like bottle caps,” Rachael feels more empathy for her fellow androids than Deckard feels for his fellow humans. (That doesn’t keep her from a murderous moment late in the book, but we’ll let that spoiler go no further.)

In Dick’s worldview, empathy is what distinguishes humans from machines, and the book hints at several turns that Deckard might himself be an android. He does have feelings for animals, though, a poignant connection given that most animals are extinct, down to the tiniest spider, and have been replaced by mechanical simulacra. The book ends with Decker finding a toad that would seem to be real and alive—“unless,” as Deckard says, “reality is a fake,” a typically Dick-ian rabbit hole that lands us in the Matrix.

Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? famously begat the 1982 film Blade Runner. Book and film could scarcely be more different, the heroic onscreen Deckard (Harrison Ford) battling ill-intended, superhuman invaders while the morally indifferent, weary Deckard of the book destroys robots with no special abilities beyond the ordinary human ones—at least yet, anyway. Both Deckards, though, realize a central truth: “The electric things have their lives, too.” And if that doesn’t trouble your dreams….

Gregory McNamee is a contributing editor.