Do Androids Dream of Electric Ship

The lead character of the novel is having doubts about himself, his professional abilities, and the morality of his job. His doubts are embodied in his relationship with his electric sheep. He is tired of pretending that his electric sheep is real; "owning and maintaining a fraud had a way of gradually demoralizing one." He is trying to deal with these emotions when he is called on to "retire" six Nexus-6 androids who have escaped to Earth. Although he recognizes that "the empathic gift blurred the boundaries between hunter and victim," he is able to rationalize his duty: "A humanoid robot is like any other machine," Deckard tells Rachael Rosen; "it can fluctuate between being a benefit and a hazard very rapidly. As a benefit it's not our problem." Yet though he tells himself clearly that he is justified in killing killers who have "no ability to feel emphatic joy for another life form's success or grief at its defeat," he begins to have doubts.

"My name's J. R. Isidore and I work for the well-known animal vet Mr. Hannibal Sloat; you've heard of him. I'm reputable; I have a job. I drive Mr. Sloat's truck." So Isidore would like to believe about himself, and so he wants his newly discovered neighbor, Pris Stratton, to believe about him. In reality, at least in the legal terms of the novel's universe, Isidore is "special" or, in slang, a chickenhead. This status is given to those individuals so affected by the radioactive dust that they fail a standard IQ test. Thus labeled, they are given the grunt tasks of earth's remaining society; they cannot emigrate off the planet; they cannot procreate. Isidore is not completely nonfunctional; but he is classified as such and is easily, intimidated by his superiors. "I'm hairy, ugly, duty, stooped, snaggle-toothed, and grey.... I feel sick from the radiation; I think I'm going to die," he protests when Sloat forces him to tell an owner her pet has died.

Leader of the renegade android troop, Roy is the android who proposes flight to Earth for the eight "friends." Roy is the most intelligent and most dangerous of the eight illegal androids. Deckard's report tells him how Baty framed the escape attempt within the context of a new religion. The basis of this ideology, says the report, is the "fiction" that android "life" is sacred. Baty attempts to instill an ideology within the group that would somehow mimic human Mercensm. That is, he attempts to fake the very emotional empathy that the eight androids are unable to experience. To further his plan and improve the fakery, he experimented with various drugs.

Mercer is the central figure of a religion that is supported by the government. Mercer's legend recalls how he had the gift of reversing time, which he used to bring dead animals back to life until the government stopped him. He was then "plunged into a different world," and began to ascend from the pits of this world onto a mountain, where he is attacked by "Killers." Mercer's followers can join him on this ascent by use of an "empathy machine," which links their consciousness together. They feel his struggle and those of others linked to them, and they also experience the wounds he receives. The sole tenant of Mercerism is empathy for all living things: You shall kill only the killers, Mercer announced from the beginning. Just who may be defined as "killers" is left up to the individual, however. Adhering to Mercerism, or having empathy, clearly marks humans as separate from the constructs they have made.

He is chairman of the Rosen Association and is Rachael's "uncle." He is nervous about Deckard's pursuit of the escaped eight androids. If the bounty hunter's test is unable to distinguish humans from androids, his corporation will have to cease production of the androids until a replacement test is developed Thus, Deckard, "a little police department employee," is in the incredible position of being able to stop production of all Nexus-6 androids One direct result of this would be a system-wide business failure, because Rosen's output is one of the essential pivots for the working of the economic system. The colonization effort depends on the allure of the settler being given an android. If the androids are not available, colonization ceases. The economic system of the planets would then collapse. Eldon faces the problem by attempting to call the Voigt-Kampff Test into question.

The neighbor in the Deckards' apartment building who is wealthy enough to own a real live horse. Deckard and Barbour's interaction is mainly one of competition, and provides an interesting commentary on interpersonal relations in their society. When Barbour reveals his horse is pregnant, Deckard asks if he can buy the colt from him. After Barbour refuses, Deckard's desperation leads him to reveal that his sheep is a fake. Barbour can afford to feel sorry for Deckard—"you poor guy," he sympathizes—because he has a live animal, after all. His empathy does not extend to helping Deckard with his problem, however. Only after Deckard brings home a live goat does Barbour consider dealing his future colt to his neighbor.

Irmgard Baty

Wife of Roy, Irmgard is a "small woman, lovely in the manner of [1940s film star] Greta Garbo, with blue eyes and yellow-blonde hair

By 2021, the World War had killed millions, driving entire species into extinction and sending mankind off the planet. Those who remained coveted any living creature, and for people who couldn't afford one, companies built incredibly realistic simulacra including horses, birds, cats, sheep and humans.

Emigrates to Mars received androids so sophisticated it was impossible to tell them from true men or women. Fearful of the havoc these artificial humans could wreak, the government banned them from Earth. But when androids didn't want to be identified, they just blended in.

The book follows one day in the life of two persons on Earth that come together at the end of the story.

One plot of the book follows the android bounty hunter, Rick Deckard. Deckard is seeking to "retire" (kill) a group of androids that have escaped from a colony on Mars and are living illegally around the San Francisco area.

The entire drive, and hence the title for the book, is that Deckard is saving money to buy an electric sheep for his front lawn. Since it is nearly impossible to find live animals any more, electric animals are a status symbol and the better they are constructed, the more realistic they look, the better. In fact the entire society tries to go on as if the animals are actually real. Decker is saving his ransom money from the replicant hunts to try and save up for a top of the line sheep.

After several life-threatening confrontations and a sexual encounter with one of the androids, Deckard realizes that the world he inhabits is very unnatural and slowly dying under a mass of radioactive dust anyway. He resigns himself to this entropy and decides he can in fact continue to do daily battle with the increasingly complex androids.

The other plot of the book follows Isodore, a driver for a electric animal service.

Isidore has a much lower position in society than Deckard because of the fact that he is a special. Not only has he failed the test of his genes but he has also been unable to pass the ''minimum mental faculties test'' which makes him what is commonly known as a ''chickenhead.'' In his profession, he takes care of artificial animals that have broken down and drives them to be serviced. Even though the artificial animals are kept by humans as pet substitutes, his work can be seen as helping a primitive kind of androids and thus his profession is a humane counterpart to Deckard's.

Philip K. Dick (1928-1982) was a great philosophical writer with a very fertile imagination. Dick mostly wrote science fiction, although he has tried to enter the mainstream field during his life. Questions he asks in his work are: What is reality? What is human? His works further deal with schizophrenia, paranoia, using drugs, religion (Gnosticism) and madness. His characters are mostly anti-heroes, and his witty stories are very enjoyable.

Philip Kindred Dick was born on 16 December 1928 in Chicago, Illinois, USA. Dick is one of the two or three genuinely great writers born and bred in the world of SF, and remains one of the most significant interpreters of America in the latter part of the twentieth century and a genius visionary of the future. He was not an easy man - erratic, married five times, half-insane for years, paranoid - and his publishing career was not an easy one. His bibliography is deceptive: many of his early books did not appear until after his death, and he wrote fast and erratically when he was in spate, with the result that masterpieces and clumsy commercial fictions appeared one after another.

For his alternative history masterpiece The Man in the High Castle (1962) Philip Dick was awarded the 1963 Hugo Award. He was also awarded the 1967 British SF Award for The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch (1965). He also won the 1975 John W. Campbell Memorial Award for Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said (1974), and the 1979 British SF Award for A Scanner Darkly (1977).

Another great work of science fiction, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (1968), was the basis for the famous cult movie classic Blade Runner (1982), directed by Ridley Scott. Philip Dick's short story We Can Remember it for You Wholesale inspired the shoot-em-up film Total Recall (1990), directed by Paul Verhoeven. Later on, Dick's story Second Variety was turned into a motion picture called Screamers (1995), directed by Christian Duguay. More recent (2002) movie adaptations include Impostor (starring Gary Sinise, directed by Gary Fleder), and Minority Report (starring Tom Cruise, directed by Steven Spielberg), based on the short stories with the same name.

Philip Dick died on 2 March 1982 by heart failure in Santa Ana, California, USA.

Mercerism and the empathy box:
Mercerism is the religion of the mass and the humans have at their homes a empathy box that brings them to oneness with Wilbur Mercer, climbing a hill as people throw rocks at him. You can do nothing for Mercer, except to feel empathy for his plight, and walk with him in his path. The androids are damned because they feel no empathy. Lack of empathy damns, but having the moral dimension of empathy does not mean your actions are correct either: "As Mercer said, I am required to do wrong. Everything I've done has been wrong from the start". At the end of the book the secret behind Mercer is lifted, he is just an old man ....

Mood machine:
This is a machine that humans type in different numbers to get in to different moods.

The Voigt-Kampff Test:
The bounty hunters use this test to measure empathic response to uncomfortable social situations and cruelty towards animals. Androids have little reaction because they are not concerned with others, while humans have a slight involuntary tremor when confronted with such situations. In relation to current AI, this preoccupation with measurement of differences is interesting. Traditionally scientists and researchers have been concerned with designing machines to pass the Turing Test - an attempt to blur distinctions between humans and machines. For Dick's characters, the Turing Test is ancient history and they have an entirely new problem on their hands; AI is so advanced that differences between the two are all but imperceptible.

Electric animals:
The story is set in a surrealistic future, after a world war which killed most of the animal life on Earth. As a result, the few surviving species are highly prized and extremely expensive, owning a real live sheep, for example, is an immense status symbol. Owning a fake live sheep is a possibility also, because android technology has progressed to the point that both animals and humans can be convincingly simulated.

Buster Friendly:
This person is in fact an android that makes a sort of nonstop television and radio show that provides an alternative reality for many people.

Different modes of being for androids:
The original idea is that every human who leaves Earth for some other planet will get an android as a servant. In this capacity, the androids are considered a valuable part of society and of great service to humans. Not all androids are content with this life in servitude, however. They escape from their masters and go to Earth where they are treated as dangerous fugitives, hunted down and killed. Thus, the same android can be either a useful servant or a menace to society, depending on where it is and who (if anyone) controls it.

False memory:
The androids don´t always know that they aren´t human and this is made possible with a false memory. In the novel we see how finding out or even suspecting false memories in oneself is a very traumatic experience. Not only is it difficult to ascertain the validity of a memory, it is also a difficult emotional experience to discover that one's memories, something that is very intimate and personal, are in fact just recordings planted there by someone else.

Read chapters 1 and 2. Who is speaking, and to whom? Who or what are they talking about?

4.- What did he take as a present for his new neighbour, and what was strange about her?

Before you read chapter 5, can you guess the answers to these questions?

1.- Which police station is real, the one on Mission Street or the one on Lombard Street? Or are they both real?

2.- Is Rick really an android, with a programmed false memory? Or are Luba Luft and the police officer androids?

Read chapters 5 and 6. Choose the best question word for these questions, and then answer them.

How / What / Who

1.- ............... did Rick persuade Garland not to shoot him?

2.- ............... usually happened when an android with a false memory learned teh truth about himself?

3.- ............... killed Garland and why?

4.- ............... did Resch try to prove that he was not an android?

5.- ............... did Luba Luft know Rick was not an android?

6.- ............... were the two female androids Rick felt empathy for?

7.- ............... were the names of the eight androids who came to Earth in a group from Mars?

8.- ............... did Isidore feel about Pris, Roy and Irmgard, when he realized they were androids?

Before you read chapters 7 and 8, try to guess what happens next. Choose some of these ideas.

1.- Rick asks Rachael Rosen for help, and she agrees to help him.

2.- Rick tries to kill Rachael, but finds he is unable to.

3.- Rick can't find the last three androids, and gives up.

4.- Isidore realizes the androids are using him, but doesn't care.

5.- Isidore tells the police where the androids are hiding

Read chapters 7 and 8. Are these sentences true (T) or false (F)? Rewrite the false sentences with the correct information.

1.- Rick bought the goat to give to his wife.

2.- Iran believed in Mercerism more strongly than Rick did.

3.- If Rick killed all the Nexus-6 androids, the Rosen Corporation would go out of business.

4.- Rachael slept with Rick because she loved him.

5.- Buster Friendly proved that Wilbur Mercer was a being from another planet.

6.- Isidore was horrified by the androids' cruelty to the spider.

ANSWERS

Before you read to the end, can you guess the answers to these questions?

1.- Will Isidore help the androids escape, or help Rick kill them?

2.- Will Rick find the androids and kill them, or will they kill him?

3.- Is Wilber Mercer real or does just exist in people's minds?

4.- What will happen to Rick and Iran?

Read chapters 9 and 10 and answer these questions.

1.- Who warned Rick to watch out for Pris Stratton?

2.- Why did the Batys let Rick into the apartment?

3.- Why didn't Isidore want to live near Rick?

4.- How did Rick feel about his day's work?

5.- Who killed Rick's goat and why?

6.- Why did Rick fly to the Oregon desert, and what happened to him there?

7.- What did Rick think his 'wrong decission had been?

8.- How did Iran feel about Rick at the end?

ANSWERS