1968.
168 pages, including an afterword by Jon Bing, translator and professor of information law.

In the not too distant future humans have made Earth almost inhabitable by nuclear war. Colonies have been established on Mars and elsewhere, and most of mankind has moved there. Many still remain, though. Some because they don’t want to go, some because they haven’t been allowed to yet, and still others because they’ve been influenced too much by radiation.

In order to persuade Earthlings to go settle other planets, they’re offered androids as personal slaves. As time has passed the androids have become increasingly sophisticated, and by the time Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? takes place they’ve become almost impossible to distinguish from humans. Because of this some androids have started questioning why they’re treated the way they are, and some have even rebelled. Many have fled to Earth.

So the Earth police employs bounty hunters called Blade Runners (as I read a translation of the novel I don’t really know if the bounty hunters were called Blade Runners in the novel, but I’ll use the phrase here, if only because it sounds a lot cooler), whose only task is to track down suspected androids, identify them as such, and “retire” them if necessary. But this isn’t easy. There are few observable differences between humans and androids, and the android manufacturers always strive to close the gap. At this point in history (I wasn’t entirely sure whether it was 1991 or 2019; it’s 2019 in the movie, but I seem to remember the early 1990s being mentioned more often), one of the few things that distinguishes androids from humans is the former’s inability to feel empathy, and so (at least some of) the Blade Runners use empathy tests to find their prey.

Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? follows Rick Deckard, a Blade Runner, through one day, in which he is tasked with hunting down and retiring six androids of the newest model. His hunt takes him through a devastated California, where animals are seen as status symbols, radiated “freaks” live in abandoned apartment blocks on the outskirts of the old cities, “ordinary” people use devices called “mood organs” (my translation, based on the Norwegian one) to control their emotions, and everyone lives in the hope that they’ll be allowed to emigrate soon.

Against this backdrop — and that’s all it is; like all science fiction and fantasy worth reading, the setting is hardly more than an context in which the theme can be handled; but that might be true for all literature — against this backdrop Dick investigates what humanity is, what it means to be human. He does this by way of contrast, by placing the androids’ lack of empathy to the humans’ dependency of the mood organ and the trappings of Mercerism (a kind of new religion, resembling Christianity quite a bit), for example. The ideas presented in Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? are hardly groundbreaking (I’ve thought similar thoughts myself, actually, in my attempts to justify my socialist leanings), and they’re not necessarily true, either (I tend to agree with Bergljot Hoberg Haff here, and her thesis about the only generalization that can be applied to all humans is that no generalizations apply to all of us), but they still provide some food for thought, as well as some gravitas to the story.

However, the novel has more to offer than mere metaphysical speculations. It also has a thrilling plot, which included one of the most paranoia-inducing sequences I’ve ever read. At a certain point Deckard questions everything, as does the ones around him, and his whole existence seems to come tumbling down. In addition to the rest of the novel, Deckard was impressively many-faceted and nuanced when compared to the Blade Runner movie. I don’t say this to demean Ridley Scott’s masterpiece — it is an example to follow for all who adapt novels into movies — but rather to praise Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? where Deckard not only struggles with his mission, his feelings about his profession, and his views on androids, but also with his wife, his poor, electrical sheep which is all he’s been able to keep since his real sheep died many years ago, and so on. Dick’s Deckard has a lot of worries, and becomes a better rounded character than Scott’s Deckard because of it.

As always, I also thought it was great fun to see an author’s vision of the future — although it of course was no such thing; not really. As I said above, it is quite clear that the author chose the sci-fi genre because it offered him the freedom he needed to explore his theme (Dick labeled himself a “literary philosopher” someplace), not because he thought this was how the world would develop. Still, much can be inferred from these kinds of things, especially, I often find, from dystopian works, but mostly about the author him- or herself and his or her time, and my (well-nigh) ever-present inner historian finds this more interesting that just about anything. Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? is a goldmine in this respect, with many rich insights into the fears and anxieties of an 1960s’ American, just as 1984 is for the mind of a British socialist from the 1940s.

I’ve already mentioned the impressive width and depth of Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, but I feel like it’s important to emphasize that this is impressive only because the novel is such a short one. In a mere 150 pages Dick not only tells a thrilling detective story, but he also examines and discusses the essence of human beings — although this party is more polemical than not — and presents a whole vision of the future. Naturally, this means that Dick’s prose is extremely economical, but still, as Jon Bing pointed out in the afterword, it has a couple of dead ends, and he mentions a few things that seem to be given importance early on, but aren’t mentioned at all later. On the other hand again, that the novel is short and a fairly quick read doesn’t mean that its descriptions are sparse. In fact, I found them to be just about perfect, balancing brevity with descriptiveness, and approaching impressionism, with only a few, vital characteristics with a few, vital objects or characters.

All in all quite the splendid read, and I can only agree with all the people I’ve talked to who’ve praised it. As an additional bonus it made me want to watch Blade Runner again, or should I say, it strengthened my wish to watch that magnificent movie again.

9.0/10.