AndroidsDream

"Is 'Do androids dream of electric sheep' the book 'Blade Runner' is based on? 

If so, what do you think of the book compared to the movie? No one ever speaks about the book.. is this a case where the movie trumps (haha) the book because of the complex visuals?"

- Alice Kiyoko Braxhoofden


That scene where the replicants take over the city and replace its infrastructure, seizing the detective as a crazy illegal when he thought he was a rogue android hunter. None of his contacts check out. All the andriods have fake and authenticated backstories which verify each other. Its never discussed openly because it is about political coup comparable with Che Guevara installing Castro. Which scares the authorities a lot. Reading it from the cops perception as everything he knows as real breaks down. Its amazing.

The reader is inside the mind of PKD figuring out which reality is real, where is the story going? At that moment the cop has to decide is he is insane, is he a program, is he more than that which would make him human, are people programs, it calls into question assumptions bigger than what the cop thought was the mission at hand. Deconditional devices. This is pkd genius. He explores versions of the same theme in a lot of his work.

By showing us the limitations of self. Machines which can see beyond this are not machines they are life. The cop witnesses that humans are now less life than are the replicants. He understands. And he reacts, the sad limitation of his own degraded monkey being, he reacts within his limitations. PKD follows that through to an extent but after that scene of the cops arrest, there are multiple layers of story. In this book he lunches it out but usually he maintains it to the final plot twist.

Please take into account it is over twenty years since I read DADOES and my memory chip is glitchy. It is possible that reading it again would interpret it as an entirely different situation.