Helpful Score: 1
Excellent sci-fi book. A very engaging read. It's much different from Ridley Scott's film version (watch the director's cut of Blade Runner). The end is a bit of a let down, though.
Helpful Score: 1
I didn't like this book nearly as much as its reputation suggested I would. It's dated. Movie may have been better. By the way, the REAL name of this book is Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? I love that title.
Helpful Score: 1
This is actually a book by famous scifi writer Philip K. Dick named "Do Androids Dream Of Electric Sheep?" back in the sixties. The name was changed for the movie starring Harrison Ford and Sean Young. Excellent book, way ahead of its time.
It's January 2021 and Rick Deckard is a bounty hunter for the San Francisco Police Department. He hunts down and "retires" rogue androids (andys). Thanks to technology from companies like the Rosen Association, it's getting increasingly hard to tell the androids from the humans, but there is an empathy test that Deckard can administer; androids don't feel empathy for humans or for each other. Meanwhile, due to the devastation wreaked by nuclear fallout from World War Terminus, animal life is nearly sacred and pets are status symbols. Deckard and his wife have an electric sheep just to try and keep up with the Joneses. Also, the fallout is starting to impact the genetics and fertility of humans, so the government is advocating emigration to Mars, running a Public Service Ad that warns: "Emigrate or degenerate! The choice is yours!" Amidst all of this, a new religion has arisen called Mercerism. It's founder, Wilber Mercer, is an empath who is taking all of mankind's suffering upon his own shoulders. Adherents transmit their pain to him through Mercer Boxes and receive inner peace in return. Now Deckard has been given the assignment of retiring a gang of 8 andys and, to his own horror, he finds that he is starting to develop feelings of empathy for these humanoids while Mercer is telling him that it's wrong to kill the androids, but that he has to go ahead and do it anyway.
Do androids dream of electric sheep? You bet they do!!
One of the fathers of Cyberpunk, and an absolutely essential read!
fyi....
This is the first of Phil Dick's fiction to be made into a movie.
Although the author died before the film's release, he was shown a reel of futuristic Los Angeles by dir. Ridley Scott and by all accounts was "blown away" by what he saw.
"Blade Runner" is credited to the writer William S. Burroughs...Less well known is whatever became of the movie screenplay Burroughs attached to it, or whether Burroughs was paid for the use of it by Scott.
Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? was for a decade many people's first experience reading PKD. That changed with the 1990s resurgence of interest in PKD complete with a stylish reissue of most of his best books; a complete short story compendium; and a bounty of biographical & scholarly works of a writer who transcended the SF genre and has been compared with Pinter, Pirandello, Kafka, and Jorge Luis Borges among others.
Blade Runner's influence continues to this day, deservedly so. The creative team who realized Scott's vision testify to his thoroughness: nothing was simply a window or an apartment landing. Scott always wanted to know what was beyond it: what would be seen or heard or felt by the inhabitants. And slowly he built up the futuristic-noir, rainy metropolis which if you traveled to Hong Kong circa 1980 - 1990 would have given you a good approximation ... a cosmopolitan yet crowded world in which the human impact on the environment is no longer a political issue but a daily (or nightly, since it is almost always dark out) experience. Advertisements beckon the tired huddled masses yearning to breathe free "in a Golden land of Opportunity and Adventure...OFF WORLD" ... Scott's decision to pare the storyline to its essentials, limit character development, including what many feel was the central question posed by the novel: What does it mean to be human? all worked to strengthen the picture.
A few years ago Scott's "Director Cut" was released. Most notable for its interviews with cast & crew, the movie runs a scant 5 minutes longer than the original. One key scene of Deckard waking from dreaming of a unicorn is put back in. Perhaps the best way to pick up the story of Rick Deckard's "humanness" one should read PKD's novel. And if you have not seen Blade Runner then you are doubly blessed.
This is the first of Phil Dick's fiction to be made into a movie.
Although the author died before the film's release, he was shown a reel of futuristic Los Angeles by dir. Ridley Scott and by all accounts was "blown away" by what he saw.
"Blade Runner" is credited to the writer William S. Burroughs...Less well known is whatever became of the movie screenplay Burroughs attached to it, or whether Burroughs was paid for the use of it by Scott.
Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? was for a decade many people's first experience reading PKD. That changed with the 1990s resurgence of interest in PKD complete with a stylish reissue of most of his best books; a complete short story compendium; and a bounty of biographical & scholarly works of a writer who transcended the SF genre and has been compared with Pinter, Pirandello, Kafka, and Jorge Luis Borges among others.
Blade Runner's influence continues to this day, deservedly so. The creative team who realized Scott's vision testify to his thoroughness: nothing was simply a window or an apartment landing. Scott always wanted to know what was beyond it: what would be seen or heard or felt by the inhabitants. And slowly he built up the futuristic-noir, rainy metropolis which if you traveled to Hong Kong circa 1980 - 1990 would have given you a good approximation ... a cosmopolitan yet crowded world in which the human impact on the environment is no longer a political issue but a daily (or nightly, since it is almost always dark out) experience. Advertisements beckon the tired huddled masses yearning to breathe free "in a Golden land of Opportunity and Adventure...OFF WORLD" ... Scott's decision to pare the storyline to its essentials, limit character development, including what many feel was the central question posed by the novel: What does it mean to be human? all worked to strengthen the picture.
A few years ago Scott's "Director Cut" was released. Most notable for its interviews with cast & crew, the movie runs a scant 5 minutes longer than the original. One key scene of Deckard waking from dreaming of a unicorn is put back in. Perhaps the best way to pick up the story of Rick Deckard's "humanness" one should read PKD's novel. And if you have not seen Blade Runner then you are doubly blessed.
It's not Blade Runner. It's Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?
I know that.
I bought this for super cheap in a Big Lots, so give me a break. I'd read it before, gotten it from a library, and decided that I needed to own it. Thus, I have the "wrong" book title on this book sitting here, but the content is the same. The same amount of awesome.
I know that.
I bought this for super cheap in a Big Lots, so give me a break. I'd read it before, gotten it from a library, and decided that I needed to own it. Thus, I have the "wrong" book title on this book sitting here, but the content is the same. The same amount of awesome.
The novel that inspired the movie of the same name. A private investigator of the future has a mission to hunt down and kill human-looking androids, and suffers a crisis of faith when he gets to know some of them in person.
This is the movie tie-in copy of Dick's "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?" First Ballantine Books Edition May 1982. Complete text of the 1968 Dick novel; just the cover shows stills from the movie. Frankly, the movie is a better story, but Dick has his style and his charms in telling his story.
Despite the title, this is Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, which was the basis for the movie Blade Runner. This is classic sci-fi and classic Philip K. Dick.
