Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?: A Dystopian Vision of the Future

ByPeter Joeseph 'Briefcase Maker' Kalafatis
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Philip K. Dick’s manuscript went through several titles before it became Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? By the account on the fan-run Philip K. Dick archive, which cites biographer Lawrence Sutin, the working titles included The Electric Toad, The Electric Sheep and a full-sentence mouthful, The Killers Are Among Us! Cried Rick Deckard to the Special Man. The toad and the sheep both made it into the finished book.

The novel follows a bounty hunter through a post-nuclear San Francisco and keeps asking one question underneath the chase: what separates a person from a convincing imitation? Most readers meet the story through Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner. The book is a different animal, and a stranger one.

The Author and How the Book Reached Print

Dick was born in Chicago on December 16, 1928, and died in Santa Ana, California, on March 2, 1982, at 53, according to Wikipedia’s biography. The Man in the High Castle won him the Hugo Award for Best Novel in 1963, and Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said took the John W. Campbell Memorial Award in 1975. In 2007 he became the first science fiction writer in the Library of America series. The volume, edited by Jonathan Lethem and issued on May 10, collects four of his 1960s novels, this one among them.

The writing was done by 1966. The fan archive says Sutin dates completion to that year, while other scholars it cites give June 20, 1966, possibly the day the manuscript reached Dick’s literary agency.

Doubleday published the hardcover in March 1968: 210 pages, priced at $3.95, per the same archive. It earned a nomination for the 1968 Nebula Award for Best Novel. Britannica adds that the book was neither widely reviewed nor a commercial success when it first appeared, and counts it a classic of modern science fiction today.

The second life began in 1982. In a June 1982 interview with John Boonstra for Twilight Zone Magazine, Dick said the studio behind the film first wanted a novelization to take the place of the novel, and that he refused so the original could be reissued. Wikipedia puts the declined offer at $400,000. Del Rey issued the novel that May under the title Blade Runner, with the original title in small print on the cover, according to the archive.

A Bounty Hunter, an Electric Sheep and Six Escaped Androids

Rick Deckard works as a bounty hunter for the San Francisco Police Department in a world damaged by nuclear war. Animals are scarce, and a living one is a mark of standing; people who can’t afford the real thing keep a mechanical copy. Deckard’s is a sheep (LitCharts’ plot summary).

A job could change that. Six Nexus-6 androids have escaped from Mars, and the bounty on them could buy a living animal for his depressed wife, Iran (Wikipedia). The trail runs through the Rosen Association, the Seattle company that builds the androids, where Deckard tests Rachael Rosen and finds she is one. It continues through Luba Luft, an android posing as an opera singer, and Phil Resch, a fellow bounty hunter whom Deckard tests and finds to be human. Elsewhere, three of the fugitives (Pris, Roy and Irmgard Baty) settle into a building where John R. Isidore, a lonely man with limited cognitive abilities, befriends them.

“You will be required to do wrong no matter where you go.”

(Mercer, quoted in SparkNotes’ selection of key lines.)

Mercer is the martyr-like figure at the center of a popular religion, shown being struck by falling rocks (Wikipedia). The faith, Mercerism, comes with empathy boxes, and Graham Connor’s review for The Concatenation treats them as the key difference between humans and androids. Britannica notes that the androids are barred from the religion altogether.

Half-empty apartment building in a ruined city at dusk with one lit window

Empathy as the Dividing Line

Deckard tells human from android with the Voigt-Kampff test, which looks for a missing capacity for empathy (LitCharts). Households have a gadget of their own, the Penfield mood organ, a bedside device that dials a chosen mood from a numbered list of settings. An excerpt reposted by Qualia Computing of the first chapter shows Iran setting hers for despair and Deckard choosing a businesslike working mood. A society that dials its feelings has a harder time saying why feeling should prove anyone is human.

Scholars have come at this from several sides. As summarized in Wikipedia’s article on the novel, Jill Galvan (Science Fiction Studies, 1997) reads the book as a coming-of-age story for the cybernetic era, Christopher Palmer (2003) stresses the danger of humans becoming mechanical, and Sherryl Vint (Mosaic, 2007) argues that animals sit at the center of its critique of alienation. Dick pressed a related case in a 1972 speech, “The Android and the Human,” arguing that the made environment around us was starting to behave as if it were alive.

What Critics Praise, and Where They Push Back

Adam Roberts, reviewing the Library of America volume for Strange Horizons in March 2008, singles out this novel for its existential claustrophobia and argues that its empty, open landscapes work better than Scott’s film. On the androids, he offers a comparison that has stuck:

“Dick’s androids are like the children in Lord of the Flies, only more so …”

(Adam Roberts, Strange Horizons, March 2008.)

Roberts is no uncritical fan. He allows that Dick wrote fast, that the prose can be patchy and that drug use left a mark, though he reads the roughness as part of what gives the books their lasting force.

Book bloggers split along familiar lines. Amritorupa Kanjilal’s 2013 review rated the novel A- and admired the mix of thriller and big questions, then marked its limit: Dick, she wrote, does “not attempt to answer the questions he raises.” The PekoeBlaze review from November 2019 gave it five out of five and judged the book and the film about equally good despite their many differences, while listing flaws: androids colder and crueler than their screen counterparts, dated gender politics, a formal prose style and a slower pace.

Britannica is blunter about the film. As extraordinary as it is, the encyclopedia says, it remains “a pale shade of the text.”

What Dick Said About His Own Book

His verdicts shifted. In a 1977 interview with Apel and Briggs, quoted on the fan archive, Dick said, “I really loathe that book.” The same page cites writers who knew him and said he admired it regardless, and it records notes from 1968 in which he said his wife thought it good and that he liked its picture of a society where animals are rare and prized. By 1982 he was fighting to keep it in print.

Mechanical sheep in a tidy rooftop pen with a power cable to a wall socket

Spoilers: Rachael, the Goat and the Toad

Rachael admits she has seduced other bounty hunters to leave them unable to kill androids, and Deckard spares her. Back home, he learns she has killed his goat (LitCharts).

Doubt reaches Deckard after the killing, not before it. Kanjilal’s review notes that he starts questioning the cult of empathy only after shooting an android who looks just like the woman he slept with.

The ending turns on small things. Buster Friendly, a television personality, exposes Mercerism as a fabrication, and the faith keeps its hold anyway. Near the end Deckard finds a toad in the desert, believed extinct, and it turns out to be artificial. Iran cares for it regardless (Wikipedia).

From Page to Screen: Blade Runner and What Followed

Blade Runner opened in the United States on June 25, 1982, less than four months after Dick’s death, from a screenplay credited to Hampton Fancher and David Peoples (Wikipedia). Dick judged Fancher’s early script harshly and praised Peoples’ rewrite in February 1981. The title came from William S. Burroughs’ film treatment of Alan E. Nourse’s 1974 novel The Bladerunner; the phrase is not used in Dick’s original.

Dick saw footage of the film’s effects work before he died. His verdict, in the Boonstra interview: “It was my own interior world.”

Reception at first was mixed. The film opened to $6.1 million over its first weekend, per Wikipedia, with some critics praising its effects and complexity and others objecting to its pace. Reappraisal followed, and the film entered the National Film Registry in 1993. The 2007 Final Cut, released October 5, is the one version over which Scott held full control.

The trailer for the 1982 film, from the Rotten Tomatoes Classic Trailers channel on YouTube:

Denis Villeneuve’s Blade Runner 2049 followed on October 6, 2017, and the anime Blade Runner: Black Lotus premiered on Adult Swim and Crunchyroll on November 14, 2021 (Wikipedia’s franchise page). The newest arrival is Blade Runner 2099. Prime Video set its premiere for November 25, 2026, with all eight episodes available at once, and announced the date with a teaser at San Diego Comic-Con on July 24, 2026 (BroadwayWorld). TVLine reports that Hunter Schafer and Michelle Yeoh star, Silka Luisa is showrunner, Ridley Scott is an executive producer and the story is set 50 years after 2049. That report does not mention Dick or the novel.

The novel itself has had quieter second lives, all per Wikipedia. BBC Radio 4 broadcast a two-part adaptation in June 2014, with James Purefoy as Deckard and Jessica Raine as Rachael. BOOM! Studios issued a 24-issue comic series illustrated by Tony Parker that was nominated for a 2010 Eisner Award, and a stage version by Edward Einhorn played New York’s 3LD Art & Technology Center in November and December 2010. K. W. Jeter, a friend of Dick’s, wrote three authorized Blade Runner sequel novels between 1995 and 2000 that try to reconcile the film with the book. The Electric Sheep screensaver is a nod to the title.

Where It Holds Up, Where It Strains

Reviewers keep returning to the same strengths: the claustrophobia of an emptied city, the way animals stand in for status and for feeling, and the open question of what empathy proves.

The same reviewers flag haste in the prose, dated attitudes toward women, androids drawn colder than the film’s, and a book that raises large questions and leaves most of them open.

Both lists are fair.

Close-up of a 1960s bedside mood dial in a walnut case

Frequently Asked Questions

Is the novel the same story as Blade Runner?
Not quite. The film keeps the bounty hunt and the question of what makes someone human, but it is a separate work with its own screenplay. In the Boonstra interview Dick said the novel and the film complement each other.

What is the Voigt-Kampff test?
A test in the novel that picks out androids by looking for a lack of empathy. Deckard gives it to Rachael Rosen in Seattle and to fellow bounty hunter Phil Resch.

Why an electric sheep?
Real animals are scarce and expensive, so people who can’t afford one keep a mechanical copy. Deckard wants a living animal and takes the bounty job partly to pay for it.

Did Dick like the book?
He said he loathed it in 1977, though friends cited on the same archive say he admired it, and in 1982 he refused a novelization so the original could be reissued.

How long is it?
The Doubleday first edition ran 210 pages. The Del Rey paperback linked below runs 256 pages, per its Open Library record.

Which version of the film should a first-time viewer pick?
The 2007 Final Cut is the only one Scott controlled fully. The 1982 theatrical cut had a voice-over and a happy ending, and the 1992 Director’s Cut removed both.

Did Dick write a sequel?
No. The sequel novels came from K. W. Jeter, starting with Blade Runner 2: The Edge of Human in 1995, followed by Replicant Night in 1996 and Eye and Talon in 2000.

Where to Read It

Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (affiliate link). This is the Del Rey paperback first published on May 28, 1996, the edition linked from the buy button at the top of the page.

Further Reading

Sources

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