Reviews with content warning for Misogyny - Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?

Reviews tagging 'Misogyny'

Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? by Philip K. Dick

28 reviews

beckyyreadss's review against another edition

adventurous dark mysterious reflective medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? A mix
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? No
Diverse cast of characters? No
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

3.0

I decided to read this book because I bought a poster with 100 books to read in your lifetime. This is book twenty-three on the poster. As with most classics and space/galaxy books, I struggle with this and still didn’t get the story.

This book is based on Rick Deckard. World War Terminus had left the Earth devasted. Through its ruin, Rick Deckard is a bounty hunter who stalked in search of the renegade replicants who were his prey. When he wasn’t killing them with his laser weapon, he dreamed of owning a live animal – the ultimate status symbol in a world all but bereft of animal life. Then Rick got his chance: the assignment to kill six Nexus-6 targets, for a huge reward. But in Deckard’s world, things were never that simple, and his assignment quickly turned into a nightmare kaleidoscope of subterfuge and deceit and the threat of death for the hunter rather than the hunted.

I knew this wasn’t going to go well. Just like The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, I got confused. All the space and androids just lost me. I’ve never watched Star Wars or anything like that and don’t really have a lot of interest in space or aliens or androids, so a book based on this was difficult to get into. The storyline kept changing and it just wasn’t my cup of tea. I didn’t really understand the point of view and couldn’t figure out with Deckard was the main character or the villain.

The only thing was keeping me going through the book was the fact that he was going to get this living sheep and then they killed the sheep, the poor soul.

I don’t think I'll be carrying on with this series and hopefully I'll enjoy the next book on the poster.

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classic_toby's review against another edition

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adventurous dark emotional mysterious reflective tense fast-paced

Plot- or character-driven? A mix
Strong character development? It's complicated
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

5.0

Love the blade runner movies, love the book that inspired them. It’s much more bizarre and confusing and has more religious themes, all of which had me completely enthralled. Some of the descriptions of women and some sexy stuff felt strange and out of place though I’ll admit.

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2busyreading's review against another edition

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fast-paced

3.25

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juanrubin's review against another edition

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emotional mysterious reflective tense medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? A mix
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? It's complicated
Diverse cast of characters? N/A
Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated

4.0

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literatureleaf's review against another edition

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adventurous dark reflective tense medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? A mix
Strong character development? It's complicated
Loveable characters? No
Diverse cast of characters? No
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

2.75

Reading time: 14 days

Difficulty level: 3/5

Rating: 2.75/5

In a dystopian future, a world war of catastrophic proportions has led to the death of millions, mass extinctions, and the migration of humankind to the vast unknown of outer space. Earth has become a desolate wasteland, where a class of humans known only as “specials” are shunned and isolated, and the few who continue living normal lives desperately seek the status of owning a sentient being. Reserved only for the wealthy, tech companies have stepped in to fill the void for the poor, creating advanced robots that perfectly imitate animal life.

These companies have also created androids, robots so sophisticated that it is almost impossible to distinguish them from flesh and blood men and women. While these androids are easily accessible on other planets, Earth’s government has banned them, terrified of what these AI machines are capable of. Forced into hiding, illegal androids blend in with humans, living and working among them while simultaneously evading the bounty hunters who are sent to end them.

When Rick Deckard, a career bounty hunter, is hired to retire a group of even further technologically advanced androids known as Nexus-6, he finds himself on a wild goose chase throughout his city, forced to not only fight for his life, but to confront his own conceptions about the duality of androids, humanity, and what it really means to be alive.

Evenly paced and chock full of action, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep packs a punch that will keep you turning pages well past your bedtime. Taking place over the course of a few days, Philip K. Dick masterfully achieves a riveting and compulsive sense of suspense that refuses to let itself be limited by the painfully short timeframe that is given to us to come to know these characters and their stories.

Because of the time constraints woven throughout the plot, character motivations and consistency suffer. The cast undergoes massive moral change and emotional upheaval within the span of minutes, and at times with no discernible reason, leaving the reader in a tailspin. Forced to reconcile what we have come to expect from the characters against what their words and actions are telling us, we are left to wonder if there is any greater purpose to what we are reading at all.

Told from two different viewpoints, the overarching plotlines gradually come together to form a satisfying conclusion for Deckard, but the secondary POV of Isidore feels lackluster and forced. He felt as though he was only a part of the book to further the plot, his story was rushed, and there was no true “end” for his character, lending to a feeling of a good portion of the book being shoe-horned in for no other purpose than cheap plot advancement.

Jumping between advanced literary technique, clinical and standoffish writing, and choppy, disjointed flow, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep is a confusing reading experience. Blending it all together, it quickly becomes clear that it is not the prose, the characters, or even the plot itself that caused this novel to leave such a profound mark on the science fiction world, but rather the thematic elements that the book centers around.

A brutal look at the impact of consumerism and the commodification of life itself, Philip K. Dick paints a bleak and terrifying picture of a world where emotions are false, power is only achievable only through increasingly immoral means, and life is only as sacred as money says it is. Harrowing and propulsive, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep lays bare the blurred lines between sentience and consciousness and forces us to ask ourselves if we are only as alive as we think we are.

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jetix's review against another edition

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funny fast-paced

Strong character development? No
Diverse cast of characters? No

1.0

ah, i see why it's considered sci-fi classic. it's pretty nice for a book written by a man.

"I like her; I could watch her the rest of my life. She has breasts that smile." is an actual quote from this book. this, along with "her breasts bobbing with agitation" from a different story by him, leads me to a conclusion that dick (what a fitting last name) was one of the original men writing women. so he's got that going for him, i guess.

p.s. marking this as funny because it's hilariously bad.

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zombiezami's review against another edition

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dark emotional funny mysterious medium-paced

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itsnicholaslashay's review against another edition

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adventurous dark reflective medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Plot
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? No
Diverse cast of characters? No
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

3.0

I’ve never watched Blade Runner so I didn’t have many expectations coming into this other than what I’ve heard about PKD. Unfortunately, he did not deliver for me and I couldn’t get myself to be interested in this book.

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louisallama's review against another edition

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dark fast-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Plot
Strong character development? No
Loveable characters? No
Diverse cast of characters? No
Flaws of characters a main focus? No

2.0

Read if you enjoy:

Misogyny
Sentences that don't make sense the first time you read them
Action scenes that are over in two sentences

Infidelity
The protagonist sleeping with an 18 year old
The protagonist who kills androids for a living sleeping with an android
Sleeping with someone the day you meet them
Falling in love immediately after having sex with someone
Power imbalances

The stuff about specials was fucking gross, a person doesn't need a certain IQ to be seen as human good grief
I don't understand why this is a classic. I've heard the film is only loosely based on the book which is good because this is garbage. I liked the stuff about animals.

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stjohn58's review against another edition

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adventurous dark tense medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? A mix
Strong character development? It's complicated
Loveable characters? No
Diverse cast of characters? No
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

2.25

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