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Dick, Philip K. Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep. New York: Ballantine Books,
1982, c1968. |
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Philip K. Dick has conjured a lonely Earth, plagued by life-destroying waste and populated only by those humans who haven't left for a colony in space yet. Whole sections of the planet seem to be uninhabited, animals mostly vanished. In what is left of the populated portions of cities, people buy fake electric animals to keep them company or to show off to their neighbors, since real animals are rare and expensive. "Mood organs" are as common as television, allowing a user to schedule their emotions by dialing numbers. And a bizarre kind of experience called "Mercerism" exists, where people can touch their hands to the handles of an appliance and experience the life of a bony old man perpetually walking up a hill and having stones thrown at him. All around them the citizens see ads of a new life on Mars, are promised their very own android to assist them in their work. Staying on Earth is tempting fate, as it is only a matter of time before one will be deemed a Special--damaged by the pollution and not able (or not allowed) to have children.
Rick Deckard is a bounty hunter who has a small salary but collects big bonuses for "retiring" androids who escape to Earth. More lifelike than the fake animals, the androids are indistinguishable from humans except when given a special test to measure their bodily responses to certain questions. Deckard isn't portrayed as a badass, if anything he seems rather domestic and silly as anyone else. He wears a lead codpiece in hopes of protecting his reproductive abilities, and is married to a woman named Iran. He keeps an electric sheep on his roof, keeping up the pretense of its being real with the help of a "veterinary" service who actually service electric animals. This is the Philip K. Dick version of keeping up with the Jones. There is a regular handbook containing the current market value of real animals that everyone knows like the Bible.
Philip K. Dick had an affinity for the absurd, and a penchant for twisting reality, not dissimilar to a detective story where instead of trying to figure out the murderer, the reader wonders what is the reality of the novel, after being presented with several possibilities. Though in Dick's novels there are no shortage of ideas, these are not the reason for his writing. He doesn't care to speculate on the future unless it provides insight into our basic humanity. The setting of this novel gives humanity a reason to collectively hide away, with its mood organs, to escape with TV or Mercerism, to throw a bandage on their loneliness by having electric pets. Or to escape Earth entirely, only to find, as is revealed later in the novel, that Mars is lonely too. (They should have listened to Bradbury...)
Characters in Dick's stories aren't shy about altering their moods artificially, and this novel is no exception. Deckard has no qualms with waking up in the morning to a mood organ, but his wife apparently does: |
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"But then I realized how unhealthy it was, sensing the absence of life, not just in this building but everywhere, and not reacting--do you see? I guess you don't. But that used to be considered a sign of mental illness; they called it 'absence of appropriate affect.' So I left the TV sound off and I sat down at my mood organ and I experimented. And I finally found a setting for despair." Her dark, pert face showed satisfaction, as if she had achieved something of worth. "So I put it on my schedule for twice a month; I think that's a reasonable amount of time to feel hopeless about everything, about staying here on Earth after everybody who's smart has emigrated, don't you think?" (3). |
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Too often in Dick's novels it always seemed to me that drugs or mood-altering devices played a role as a convenient answer to everything, and given Dick's use of drugs, that's not surprising, but here at least he shows their pitfalls, their only appearing to their users as an easy way out. As the novel goes on, Deckard uses his mood organ less and faces a great many challenges to his notions of life. His thinking of androids only as machines has allowed him to succeed in his job, but that comes into question as he encounters several Nexus-6 models, and finds that at least one person he thought human is indeed an android.
Something else--or something similar--common among Dick's stories are a number of transformative experiences, sometimes religious or philosophical. Again, not surprising if you've read anything of Dick's life. Though he is often a little too obscure or symbolic for my taste, he doesn't dwell on Mercerism here, mostly just offering it as Deckard's means in the end of understanding what has eluded him, that life is indeed precious, whatever kind of life that may be.
The prose in Dick's fiction isn't always the most beautiful, but is far from the worst I've read, and because his heart and mind are in the right place it all works. Science fiction gives him a medium for magnifying the reasons we have to hide from life. TV is ever present. Church becomes Mercerism, something communal but also private in one's own home, as are any messages given from the old man to his followers. Mood organs are mood-altering substances taken to the extreme, offering any number of moods, but all ultimately removing its user from responsibility, from learning, from growth. Those unseen or unfelt influences in our lives become much more pronounced in Dick's fiction. Though what follows is an extreme example, Dick does waste a little breath in telling of his imagined world's loneliness: |
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Silence. It flashed from the woodwork and the walls; it smote him with an awful, total power, as if generated by a vast mill. It rose from the floor, up out of the tattered gray wall-to-wall carpeting. It unleashed itself from the broken and semi-broken appliances in the kitchen, the dead machines which hadn�t worked in all the time Isidore had lived here. From the useless pole lamp in the living room it oozed out, meshing with the empty and wordless descent of itself from the fly-specked ceiling. It managed in fact to emerge from every object within his range of vision, as if it--the silence--meant to supplant all things tangible. Hence it assailed not only his ears but his eyes; as he stood by the inert TV set he experienced the silence as visible and, in its own way, alive. Alive! He had often felt its austere approach before; when it came it burst in without subtlety, evidently unable to wait. The silence of the world could not rein back its greed. Not any longer. Not when it had virtually won (16). |
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| Not nearly as economical as he could have been in that paragraph, Dick doesn't usually become long-winded, but like most writers, lacks the kind of poetry that seeps through Sturgeon or Bradbury. (After reading them, how do you go back to reading anyone else?) Dick gets it together later on, as Deckard is on a kind of vision quest: |
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Here there existed no one to record his or anyone else�s degradation, and any courage or pride which might manifest itself here at the end would go unmarked: the dead stones, the dust-stricken weeds dry and dying, perceived nothing, recollected nothing, about him or themselves (204). |
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Deckard has come to a great realization and needs to share it, but finds himself alone in a desert, not unlike that which Mercer seems to perpetually inhabit. Ultimately the novel concludes not too far different from where it started, in Deckard and Iran's apartment, with an electric pet. But its characters are altogether changed for the better, and there's a sense that their lives will be utterly different from that point forward.
If there's a flaw in the novel, it's the relative neglect of the androids who are supposed to be so lifelike. We never really see the world from their point-of-view, only in a few offhand remarks made by Pris to Isidore. Isidore is a Special, also referred to as a "chickenhead" because of his declining intelligence, and though Pris, a refugee android, uses him, she lets only a glimpse of her inner life slip: |
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"Don�t the androids keep you company? I heard a commercial on--" Seating himself he ate, and presently she too picked up the glass of wine; she sipped expressionlessly. "I understood that the androids helped."
"The androids," she said, "are lonely, too" (131). |
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A better speculation as to their inner lives comes when Deckard and a suspected android, one who may have been duped into believing he's human, happen across Edvard Munch's "The Scream," in a museum. Dick's description of the painting doesn't go beyond the academic, but the suspect's speculation that perhaps what it's like to be an android is in that painting speaks volumes. The terrible need that could be either the result or the cause of loneliness, and the lines of reality seeming to bend around it, jibe with the rest of the novel.
Sheep is the kind of novel I like to see, something that will stand the test of time. Its world is ludicrous and not based on likely ideas of what the future will be, but that is not the point. The world of the future is based around what Dick needed to show of his characters' lives, what conflicts they needed to face. And that is squarely where a writer's priorities should be. Fiction isn't about rockets to Mars, it's about the people who make it happen, and why they do what they do. |
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All contents, except where otherwise noted, are copyright Andrew Lee Hunn. |
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