Reviews with content warning for Violence - ¿Sueñan los androides con ovejas eléctricas?

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¿Sueñan los androides con ovejas eléctricas? by Philip K. Dick

34 reviews

fkshg8465's review against another edition

adventurous emotional sad tense medium-paced

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

3.75

Until this book, I had only watched Philip K Dick's books on screen (Blade Runner having been the first in my childhood). All the movies and shows seemed really complex, so I'd been hesitant to read the books. Plus, I'm a bit picky about science fiction. This one surprised me. It was actually much easier to read than anticipated. It was entertaining and thought provoking and the underlying social commentary is still relevant today. I guess that's why it's a bit of a modern classic.

Only thing that really annoyed me was that Deckard was a pretty skilled bounty hunter, but he was terribly obtuse emotionally, which was ironic since part of his required skill set was to be able to identify and analyze his subject's emotional responses spontaneously and instantaneously. Yet when it came to his own feelings and reactions, he was really dull in his self-awareness.

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autonomous_lass's review against another edition

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adventurous dark emotional tense fast-paced

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

4.25

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jbran24's review against another edition

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adventurous dark emotional tense fast-paced

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

4.5

a very very interesting story of empathy, intelligence, and religion. it’ll take me a while to fully understand my feelings towards the themes, but it is absolutely thought-provoking in that regard.

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beckyyreadss's review against another edition

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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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kergo's review against another edition

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adventurous dark mysterious fast-paced

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

3.75

This book is quite interesting for me - having watched the movie almost 10 years ago and not remembering it clearly, having watched the second movie 2-3 times and loving it dearly - I wanted to visit the world as it was envisioned by Dick himself.

There are 2 Perspectives - one of a Bounty Hunter that is hunting Androids and one of a delivery driver for a synthetic animal clinic - which is categorized as a "special" person because he is infertile and therefore not deemed human and also he has low intellectual abilities.
And thats already where the problems arise.

I think the main subjects in this book want to be the philosophical question about what empathy entails and how this affects every one of us. The book is seeped through with classism, religious propaganda of a made up religion, and ableism but I am not sure if the book is trying to point out that the ableism in that world is something unjust, but as there is no resolution to the theme I will think of it as a weird form of ableistic representation of someone disabled.

The "special" people are almost excluded from every form of life and live in ruins in this distopic world. The person we follow missed the intelligence test just barely, which would've enabled him to at least partake in certain aspects of the communal life of those who stayed behind on the destroyed remains of earth. He was lucky enough to score a job where he could drive, something not everyone labled like he is is able to do. Through the book we learn of many moments of exklusion for him and he makes friends with the antagonists of the book - which lead to an disappointing ending of that arc but more of that later. The only thing he can partake of is the religion of the world, where people can connect thorugh an "empathaor" with the religious figure of Wilbur Mercer, a person who is reincarnated again and again and walks a path of struggle, combined with all the other people that are connecting through those devices at the same time. Thats the only sense of community that person percieves and that is also one the androids are prohibited from.

The hunted Androids are basically personal slaves that have fled from being used like that and only seek freedom and not being opressed anymore. In the book it is revealed that they only have a life span of about 4 years and still they are considered rogue and dangerous to all society. The ones we encounter in the book are a group of 8 friends which fled the colony of mars together, some seeking shelter, some to finally express their own personalities. At the beginning of the story 2 of them were already hunted down and the other six are on the hitlist of a higher ranked bounty hunter which was incapacitated by the third target, so our main protagonist takes that list over.

This character feels like the clicheed film noir PI, doused in his own scandals (he has an electric pet although society wants everyone to keep an alive animal to shelter them, scandalous) and a marriage that is kinda in shambles. He does nothing to mend that relationship, instead they bought a device that sets their moods to certain values and after a fight he put the value of his spouse to "appreciate the husband" or something like that. really scummy and weird (but thank god she changed that value (but why to depression)). We follow this twisted person, his only drive being owning a real pet and gathering the money for it what he will only achieve by "disabling" lots of androids. In the beginning he deemed that possibility impossible because his superiour must be down for that and lucky enough 10 pages later he is! what great suprise! After a while of the story he realises that he feels empathy for the androids, which does not hinder him from doing his job. Another bounty hunter tells him he should enter sexual relations with one of them and then shoot them, which he later kind of does, still not respecting their partner or any social code he has. The conflicting topic for him still is his drive to get an animal and how to do his job with his newfound empathy for androids (but he does the job for ages mind you!) and all other aspects of life seem kinda empty regarding him.

The main conflict results in him inexplicably merging with the religious figure, disgarding the other main character which after meeting the bounty hunter just vanishes and is nowhere to be seen again and him having an epiphany about his own resurrection and finding an animal in the wild (which are all deemed extinct, particularly that kind of animal) And the spouse ordering him electronic companions for his found animal.

None of the issues of the book are really resolved apart from the main storyline and

him killing all the androids wow who would've thunk

. There are no consequences whatsoever. The only choice that had a reaction felt pretty disconnected -

He kills 3 androids, buys an animal with the money, sleeps with another "good" android, she gets jealous of that animal because he loves it more than anything else, after he killed all the other "rogue" ones he comes home to find it killed by her. She thought she stopped him from killing Androids in the future by sleeping with him (worked with others) but he relentlessly did.

If you read the whole thing as an adventure it was a pretty lame one, with a few physical struggles but no real dilemma or something that drives him apart from the resolution - his empathy for androids was always more an afterthought or a suspicion than a consequence, he says repeatedly that he cannot kill anymore, only for him not hesitate at all. He wants to quit but he only takes one day off.
He is not a charakter to be liked, not one to be inspired from, and noone who really impacts the reader.

The main themes of classism, (minor) effects of colonialism, ableism and the results of the war were the main driving force for me to wanting to read more of the book - I thought about certain scenes of the second movie, some of the first movie, which had more satisfying moments to be honest and I was really thinking about that worldbuilding.
I would be intrigued how the lifes of upstanding people in that world could function, the whole society is pushing people of "worth" (their words not mine) to go to colonies and if you arrive there you get your own personal android! how convinient! The main entertainment of that world is done by another android which is advocating against the main religion and those themes, the world shining through, were so enriching and nicely done that i overall found the book quite okay. It didnt blow me away, It didnt change my view of things, the main discussion of people talking about the story - if the bounty hunter is an android or not did not seem feasible to me and was not that interesting of a topic honestly.

Going to read another book of Dick's in the future, maybe I didnt understand his style of story quite yet, but i hope he can immerse me more and suprise me with a compelling tale.

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jazzy_cat's review against another edition

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adventurous challenging dark reflective tense fast-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? It's complicated

5.0

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helen777's review against another edition

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adventurous dark mysterious reflective fast-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? It's complicated

4.0

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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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