Lamron Lit Corner: Philip K. Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? and what a title means

While the genre of science fiction is generally believed to find its origins in 1818 with the publication of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, its roots dig far deeper than the 19th century. But, instead of looking that far into the past, let’s instead look to the most recent evolution of the genre: modernism to postmodernism. This conversation, inevitably, will include Phillip K. Dick and his oft-called magnum opus, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?.

Dick’s novel is more colloquially known by its film adaptation’s name, Blade Runner, though I find the original name more emblematic of what Dick aimed to achieve in the 1968 novel. Following the bounty hunter Rick Deckard on his job assassinating escaped androids, the novel seems to, in essence, ask the kind of philosophical questions the title prompts.

While Dick’s writing, as is more usual during the shift away from modernist writing in the mid-1900s, does not spend time being overly philosophical, the title prompts readers to look deeper into what they experience. Yes, on the surface the novel is an action plot about an android-retirer, but Dick also peers deeply into questions about where technology is leading us and asks about things many humans weren’t quite ready to imagine yet.

The term “Artificial Intelligence,” while originally coined in the 1950s, didn’t become embedded into our collective vocabulary until stories like Dick’s, along with other pop-culture icons like Terminator raised the real, far reaching consequences of what it would be like to live alongside robots that are essentially at the same level of intelligence as humans.

In Dick’s novel, we get to look into the perspective of these androids, all of which are banned from being on Earth after a nuclear apocalypse. Dick employs another interesting tactic by introducing major worldbuilding ideas, but not necessarily interrogating them all. For example, in the world of Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, Mars is colonized and populated by androids. Those who are still forced to live in the wasteland that is Earth feel cheated by the androids, thus causing this violent feud between the groups.

Yet, despite the massive conflicts and the heart-pounding action in the novel, it all comes back to a deeply emotional core. Deckard is doing his job—brutally killing androids—in an attempt to make himself feel more human. He does it to make his wife love him again, to take back what little beauty is left in the debris-ridden Earth. Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? offers the reader not answers, but questions.

By focusing on a human heart in the story, we can look inside ourselves and see how we would react to a distraught world akin to the one Phillip K. Dick envisioned. By forcing this introspection, Dick is what all sci-fi writers ultimately strive for: predicting the future and questioning human nature.