Kickin' It Old School

Forgive the post title - I often like saying things that sound ridiculous coming out of my mouth. On the plus side, it is accurate.

I just finished reading Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep by Philip Dick. Old school, right? Despite my voracious reading of fantasy in high school, I never read much of its sister genre: straight up scifi. I knew about Dick, though, as well as some of the other heavy hitters in the field, and I loved the movie Bladerunner. Since my husband is a bigger fan of the scifi genre than I, we've had this book sitting around the house for a while* and I finally read it.

What struck me the most about this novel was its light touch when dealing with grim content. The plot, without giving too much away, follows a bounty hunter of androids who works for the San Francisco police. In this future, androids are sent as part of the immigration-to-Mars package, and every once and a while one decides it doesn't like being a slave; it kills the owners and escapes back to Earth, where androids are prohibited. Deckard, the bounty hunter, is sent on one of his biggest missions after another bounty hunter is lasered in the back, and from the beginning he starts to have doubts about his morality in terminating, or killing, these humanoids. Dick does an excellent job of showing the mechanical side of humans and the human side of androids. He doesn't give a heavy-handed message about the sanctity of all sentient life, either - I was feeling sympathetic towards the androids, just struggling to live on their own terms, and then he inserts a scene where they cut the legs off a spider, just to see if it can walk with only four. They have no empathy for anyone or anything, and that is a frankly scary trait.

I have to comment on the world he created, an essential ingredient in a science fiction work. If it's not different and technologically enhanced, it's not scifi, but if it's not believable, it's nothing. Dick does a great job of creating a semi-post-apocalyptic society with a reasonable explanation that is not overly explained. Lots of futuristic details you would expect in scifi, like the androids, laser guns, and hover cars, but all blended into a framework of life that is believable, mainly due to the humanity portrayed. The world may be different but people are the same. For instance, electronic animals. Due to radiation poisoning most of the animal life has become extinct. Few real animals survive, and these are prized and expensive; they've become a status symbol. If people can't afford an animal, they pay money for android replicas that are realistic enough to fool the neighbors. How truly and pathetically real.

In case you were wondering, this book is very different from the movie. If you are interested in the scifi genre, this author is a must read, and I think that this book is a good starting point.

*I won't say just how many unread books are lying around my house; it's a symptom of being a bibliophile.