Review: Blade runner (Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?) by Philip K. Dick

Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? by Philip K. Dick

From the back of the book

The year is 2021.  Somewhere out there, among the hordes of humans, lurk several rogue androids.  Rick Deckard’s assignment: find them and then…”retire” them.  Trouble is, the androids all look and act exactly like humans, and they don’t want to be found.  Originally published in 1968, this foreboding adventure is a masterpiee ahead of its time.  In our own near future, a world war has killed millions, driving entire species into extinction and sending humankind off-planet.  Those who remain covet any living creatures, and this desire spawns the technology to build incredibly realistic simulacra: horses, birds, cats, sheep…and humans.  Fearful of the havoc these artificial huans can wreak, the government band them from Earth.  But androids don’t want to be identified; they just blend in.  And it’s bounty hunter Rick Deckard’s job to track down any fugitives – and destroy them.

My Rating: 2 out of 5

Bookshelf: No

How I got it: Bought

Definitely not my favorite.  I can appreciate PKD’s vision of what the future could be, but I didn’t like the character of Rick Deckard at all. I couldn’t feel anything for him except dislike. There were also quite a few times in the book where I had to stop, scratch my head, and then re-read the passage, and it still didn’t quite make sense to me. (Or as I like to call them, my “Huh?” moments.)  I can see how this influenced cyberpunk and later sci-fi authors, and I appreciate this novel for that, but it just didn’t work for me.  I read this quite a while after I had seen the movie, and I liked them both about the same.  The book and the movie are significantly different from each other, and Deckard follows different paths to achieve the same goal of “retiring” (killing) the androids.  I thought that paths were interesting, just not interesting enough.