Philip K. Dick,
Do Androids Dream of Electric
Sheep? (1968)
Philip K. Dick, 1928-1982
• American writer
• Briefly a school classmate of Ursula K. Le Guin
• Wrote 36 novels and 5 books of short stories between
1952 and 1982
• Mental disturbances, incl. dreams and hallucinations,
influenced his fiction; also religious and philosophical
works he read
• Has had at least 9 films based on his works, with more to
come, but none was released within his lifetime
• An award for the best SF paperback book of the year is
named after him
Dick on His Writing, 1978:
http://deoxy.org/pkd_how2build.htm
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"Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away."
So I ask, in my writing, What is real? Because unceasingly we are bombarded with
pseudo-realities manufactured by very sophisticated people using very sophisticated
electronic mechanisms. I do not distrust their motives; I distrust their power. They
have a lot of it. And it is an astonishing power: that of creating whole universes,
universes of the mind. I ought to know. I do the same thing. It is my job to create
universes, as the basis of one novel after another. And I have to build them in such a
way that they do not fall apart two days later. Or at least that is what my editors hope.
However, I will reveal a secret to you: I like to build universes which do fall apart. I
like to see them come unglued, and I like to see how the characters in the novels
cope with this problem. I have a secret love of chaos. There should be more of it. Do
not believe—and I am dead serious when I say this—do not assume that order and
stability are always good, in a society or in a universe. The old, the ossified, must
always give way to new life and the birth of new things. Before the new things can be
born the old must perish. This is a dangerous realization, because it tells us that we
must eventually part with much of what is familiar to us. And that hurts. But that is
part of the script of life. Unless we can psychologically accommodate change, we
ourselves begin to die, inwardly. What I am saying is that objects, customs, habits,
and ways of life must perish so that the authentic human being can live. And it is the
authentic human being who matters most, the viable, elastic organism which can
bounce back, absorb, and deal with the new.
Stanislaw Lem on Dick:
http://www.depauw.edu/sfs/backissues/5/lem5art.htm
• “Philip Dick does not lead his critics an easy life, since
he does not so much play the part of a guide through his
phantasmagoric worlds as give the impression of one
lost in their labyrinth... A characteristic of Dick’s work,
after its ambiguity as to genre, is its tawdriness, which is
reminiscent of the goods offered at country fairs by
primitive craftsmen who are at once clever and naive,
possessed of more talent than self-knowledge. Dick has
as a rule taken over a rubble of building materials from
the run-of-the-mill American professionals of SF,
frequently adding a true gleam of originality to worn-out
concepts, and erecting with such materials constructions
truly his own.”
Dick’s appeal to filmmakers:
http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/11.12/philip_pr.html
• “At a time when most 20th-century science
fiction writers seem hopelessly dated, Dick gives
us a vision of the future that captures the feel of
our time. He didn't really care about robots or
space travel, though they sometimes turn up in
his stories. He wrote about ordinary Joes caught
in a web of corporate domination and ubiquitous
electronic media, of memory implants and mood
dispensers and counterfeit worlds. This strikes a
nerve.”
Jean Baudrillard on Dick:
http://www.depauw.edu/sfs/backissues/55/baudrillard55art.
htm
• "It is hyperreal. It is a universe of simulation, which is
something altogether different. And this is so not
because Dick speaks specifically of simulacra. SF has
always done so, but it has always played upon the
double, on artificial replication or imaginary duplication,
whereas here the double has disappeared. There is no
more double; one is always already in the other world,
an other world which is not another, without mirrors or
projection or utopias as means for reflection. The
simulation is impassable, unsurpassable, checkmated,
without exteriority. We can no longer move "through the
mirror" to the other side, as we could during the golden
age of transcendence."
Dick, New Wave, and Cyberpunk
• What makes it New Wave?
• Reply to, and also parody of, SF literary
conventions and sociopolitical concerns
• Uses a future possible world to ask
questions about the actual world, and
about other literary possible worlds
• Late-1960s America as “a time when...we
had become as bad as the enemy”
• What makes it cyberpunk?
• Dark, film-noir-influenced imagery,
especially in the film version
• Relationship of humans to technology
• Portrays an individual, anti-heroic
character in opposition to a shadowy
corporate power
Entropy
• Post-apocalyptic / post-industrial setting: “World War Terminus”;
environmental damage
• Common theme of Dick: societal and individual degeneration
• “the dust – undoubtedly – filtered in and at him, brought him daily, so
long as he failed to emigrate, its little load of befouling filth”
• “the entire universe is moving toward a final state of total, absolute
kipplization”
• “The entire planet had begun to degenerate into junk...Earth would
die under a layer – not of radioactive dust – but of kipple”
• Mercer as symbol of resistance to entropy (and the futility thereof?)
Androids
• “android is a
metaphor for people
who are
physiologically human
but behaving in a
nonhuman way”
• “I’ve never killed a
human being
before....Just those
poor andys”
Empathy and Artificial Intelligence
• Voight-Kampff Empathy Test as parody of the Turing
Test for AI
• The Turing Test:
“a human judge engages in a natural language
conversation with one human and one machine, each of
which try to appear human; if the judge cannot reliably
tell which is which, then the machine is said to pass the
test. In order to keep the test setting simple and
universal (to explicitly test the linguistic capability of the
machine instead of its ability to render words into audio),
the conversation is usually limited to a text-only
channel.”
• http://www.abelard.org/turpap/turpap.htm
The Voight-Kampff test as described in the original
screenplay of Blade Runner:
"A very advanced form of lie detector that measures contractions of the
iris muscle and the presence of invisible airborne particles emitted
from the body. The bellows were designed for the latter function and
give the machine the menacing air of a sinister insect. The VK is
used primarily by Blade Runners to determine if a suspect is truly
human by measuring the degree of his empathic response through
carefully worded questions and statements."
Human/Android Connections
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“the Voight-Kampff scale applied
to a carefully select group of
schizoid and schizophrenic human
patients” (ref. to Dick’s own mental
instability?)
“Two parallel police
agencies...ours and this one” destabilization of reality
Which is superior, and for what
reasons?
Androids with feelings? Humans
without empathy?
Love/sexual attraction between
humans and androids, or between
androids
Rachael as “electric sheep”
Is Deckard an android too?
• “You shall kill only the killers”
• “Do you think of them as ‘it’?...When my
conscience occasionally bothered me about the
work I had to do; I protected myself by thinking
of them that way, but now I no longer find it
necessary”
• “Do you think androids have souls?”
• “Do androids dream?...Evidently; that’s why they
occasionally kill their employers and flee here. A
better life, without servitude”
Empathy, Emotions, and
Technology
• Mood organs used to produce artificial
emotional stimulation, in oneself or others,
at will: “My schedule for today lists a sixhour self-accusatory depression”
• Lack of emotional responses “used to be
considered a sign of mental illness…
‘absence of appropriate affect’”
• Named for Wilder Penfield, Canadian
neurologist and expert on memory
• Empathy boxes, Mercerism, and Buster
Friendly: new religion based on empathy
and restoration of life
• “physical merging accompanied by mental
and physical identification”
• “an empathy box...is the most personal
possession you have! It’s an extension of
your body; it’s the way you touch other
humans, it’s the way you stop being alone”
• Mercer as false prophet; Buster as
ubiquitous (and equally false) media
person
• “How can I save you...if I can’t save
myself?...There is no salvation”
• “Everything is true...Everything anybody
has ever thought”
• “Mercer isn’t a fake... Unless reality is a
fake”
Animals, Real and Replicant
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Sacred animals (e.g. the epigraph)
Signs of life in a decaying world
Markers of catastrophe
Animals as commodity and status symbol: prestige based on rarity and on
‘reality’ – “She doesn’t care if we own an ostrich or not”
Sidney’s Catalogue as “sacred” text
Voight-Kampff questions about animals vs. about humans
Replicant animals require as much care as real ones, but are not as highly
prized
“You’re not made of transistorized circuits like a false animal; you’re an
organic entity”
“The electric things have their lives too. Paltry as those lives are”
Replicant animals as symbols of nostalgia
Animals in the fictional world vs. technology in the actual world - replicant
animals as both
Types of animals referred to: pets, pests, livestock; herd animals vs. solitary
ones
Specials
• Similarities between ‘specials’ and ‘other’
humans (humans who stay on Earth physiological or psychological reasons?)
• Similarities between ‘specials’ and
androids (Baty and Pris with Isidore)
• Similarities between ‘specials’ and animals
(“chickenheads”, etc.)
Corporate and Consumer
Culture
• “designed specifically for your unique needs, for you and
you alone”
• Animals and androids as commodities
• Buster’s 24-hour broadcasts: foreshadowing to presentday talk shows?
• “The silence of the world could not rein back its greed”
• “We produced what the colonists wanted... We followed
the time-honored principle underlying every commercial
venture. If our firm hadn’t made these progressively
human types, other firms in the field would have”
• “A mammoth corporation...embodies too much
experience. It possesses...a sort of group mind”
Dick and Literary/Artistic Culture
• “pre-colonial fiction” - response
to ‘traditional’ SF; selfreferential humour
• “written before space travel but
about space travel….The
writers…made it up….A lot of
times they turned out wrong”
• Role of ‘classic’ art and
literature (e.g. Munch’s The
Scream and Puberty; Mozart’s
The Magic Flute)
• Art vs. entropy: at once
permanent and ephemeral
• Androids and replicant animals
and/as art objects
Derivative Works
• Dick’s ambivalence about the
film adaptation
• Differences between novel and
film
• Differences between versions
of the film
• Related texts: K.W. Jeter’s
Blade Runner sequels (19952000) forming a tetralogy with
Dick’s original; 1997 computer
game; 1982 and 2009 graphic
novels; other films influenced
by the novel
Dick on Blade Runner
(From a letter dated October 11, 1981)
• “The impact…is simply going to be
overwhelming…on science fiction as a field.”
• “Science fiction…has become inbred, derivative,
stale…and now we have a new life, a new start.”
• “I did not know that a work of mine…could be
escalated into such stunning dimensions. My life
and creative work are justified…It will prove
invincible.”
• Dick never saw the final version(s) of the film
Designs for Blade Runner
• Designs emphasized the “cyberpunk” nature of
the text – “visual futurism”