Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? by Philip K. Dick
174 pages
Published 1968
Read from February 7 to February 8
Rating: ★★★★ out of 5
1960s
futures can feel more dated and unrelatable than the worlds of older
science fiction. Even though (or perhaps because) it was a time of
experimentation and change in the genre, the authors of the New Wave
seemed to have a fixed, limited set of ideas and concerns: psychoactive
drugs, psychic powers, messiahs, the nature of perception, the nature of
reality, what it means to be human, where one human ends and society
begins. Plopped on top of that was a layer of cultural baggage, all the
more baffling in retrospect because of how soon it would get swept away
in the culture at large. For instance, women, in this novel and others
I've read, only exist as secretaries and housewives (and android femme
fatales, naturally). The combination of dated experimentation (within
sharply proscribed limits) and soon-to-be-antiquated social expectations
marks New Wave sci-fi, inescapably, as a product of its era.
That
said, this was an excellent novel. Intervening years have discredited
the whole "empathy is unique to human beings" angle, but that is just me
being pedantic. The portrayal of the empathy-less android thought
process was creepy, unsettling. The hardboiled trappings were thoroughly
entertaining. Now I'm eager to read more of Dick's work.
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