i n

F

BIGGER

SMALLER

COURIER

GEORGIA

TIMES

VERDANA

COMIC

l

RECENT

POPULAR

e

u

 ^{(it's beta!)}

Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep proposes to cut directly to the heart of what it is to be human, to question what distinguishes Man from machine. It does so promptly, explaining almost immediately that the answer is empathy, the lack of which identifies an android, who can be killed without excess of remorse. The literary mission thus accomplished, we follow a bounty hunter on a series of adventures in finest, truest pulp science-fiction form.

Those looking for Asimovian robots with souls that question our humanity by feeling too realistically would do well to search elsewhere. However, this book offers the equally insightful opposite: When is a man too like a machine? Can an absence of empathy or sympathy, even for androids, make a human effectively inhumane? Dick himself states that this was his intention, as quoted in the after word. Personally, this disappointed me. Asimovian robots are much more to my taste. For the era in which this was written, similar in most ways to that of Cuckoo’s Nest, perhaps it was more relevant to demand if humanity can lose itself by being too much like a machine. However, with so many better portrayals of that question existing, and having read many of them myself, this effort fails to impress. It is too simplistic in it’s approach, not nuanced enough, and leaving little ambiguity at the end, except perhaps in the question of if the robots could eventually learn empathy. There is no doubt that they lack it now, and that such a lack renders them unpeople.

The book is, aside from a few stylistic concerns, more than adequate. There are some stilted points of exposition, and overworked “futuristic” dialogue. While slang evolves over time, calling the apartments “apts” was simply bizarre, and reads less like any concept of a human vernacular, and more like a desperate attempt to make these characters talk "casually", as considered by someone who has never had a conversation in his life. The sentence “In my personal collection, I have tapes by such old-time greats as Elisabeth Schwarzkopf and Lotte Lehman and Lisa Della Casa: that’ll give us something to discuss while I set up my Voigt-Kampf equipment” simultaneously amused and appalled me. Androids provides all the stylistic delights of the genre as well, including beautiful post-apocalyptic ambient specifics and hypothesized technology. The Buster Friendly Show, blaring 23 hours of warm robotic noise, is a disquietingly realistic extension of current media involvement in day to day life. The reaction of mankind to the death of all animals is clever, and Mercerism’s cycle of ascent and empathy ties into the themes while remaining a plausible social development. Dick has created a world to loose his characters and themes in, a filthy, hopeless world of failures. It is perfect.

The moral quandary, although not the one I would have chosen, is accomplished well. This book is very much a genre novel, but a genre novel that fulfills the promise of pulp implied in picking up a schlock science fiction or speculative fiction book.