Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?

Science fiction

Print length: 244 pagesBallantine Books

Description

After nuclear war has poisoned Earth, bounty hunter Rick Deckard works in a depleted San Francisco where living animals are rare luxuries and electric imitations mark their owners’ poverty. His latest assignment is to find and kill six escaped Nexus-6 androids, artificial servants whose human appearance defeats ordinary detection. Deckard accepts partly because the bounties could replace his electric sheep with a real animal. Yet the specialized tests meant to separate people from machines become less reassuring as he begins to empathize with his targets. The hunt turns a hard-edged science-fiction thriller into an inquiry about consciousness, compassion, and whether humanity can be measured by the qualities it denies to others.

Reading profile

About this profile

Collected’s assessment, not reader ratings. Complexity runs from 1 (least demanding) to 5 (most demanding).

Writing: How much attention the sentences and language require.
Ideas: How much interpretation or abstract reasoning the book asks of you.
Structure: How much you need to keep track of speakers, timelines and connections.
Background knowledge: Prior knowledge needed to follow the book, beyond what it explains.
Emotional intensity: Emotional pressure, from gentle (1) to intense (5). Separate from difficulty.

Writing style

Atmospheric · Direct · Spare

Pace

Brisk

Tone

Cerebral · Dark · Tense · Unsettling

Structure

Linear

Focus

Ideas · Mystery · Plot

Emotional intensity

4 / 5

Reading complexity

1–5 · higher means more demanding

Writing: 3 / 5
Ideas: 4 / 5
Structure: 3 / 5
Background knowledge: 2 / 5

Themes

ClassIdentityKnowledge and truthMoralityNature and environmentTechnology and society

About Philip K. Dick

Philip K. Dick was an American science fiction novelist and short story writer whose 45 novels and roughly 121 stories repeatedly examined reality, perception, identity, and human nature. He approached these questions through ordinary people living under pressure from corporations, authoritarian governments, surveillance, drugs, and altered states of consciousness. Familiar settings often become unreliable, leaving characters unsure of their surroundings or even their own identities. In Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, Rick Deckard’s pursuit of escaped androids weakens his confidence in the tests used to separate humans from machines. In Ubik, objects regress through time and contradictory messages make it difficult to determine what world the characters inhabit. Such disruptions are central to Dick’s work, but so are the practical choices people make when the systems around them no longer provide dependable answers.

Books by Philip K. Dick

Book details

For the print edition listed above.

Publisher: Ballantine Books
Language: English
ISBN: 9780345404473

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