A review by literatureleaf
Blade Runner by Philip K. Dick

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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