The Mechanics of Electric Sheep

Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? would make a great movie. This isn’t me deliberately pretending it hasn’t already been made into a movie, it’s just me saying Blade Runner is a poor adaptation of the novel.

I’ve never been much of a fan of Blade Runner. I’ve always found it plodding and low on action. It’s a very visually spectacular film, very beautiful, and for its time, I guess very original and groundbreaking, but its story is weak and it doesn’t deliver on some the features that really make the novel special.

The film is also too populated for my liking. While it does have scenes in vacant apartment buildings and the like, I don’t feel it quite captures the emptiness of Electric Sheep. Electric Sheep has a distinct feeling of being left behind, left to rot, and a feeling a worthlessness that comes from that. It is a world of media and loneliness – and nuclear fallout. It’s a dying world in which most people – those lucky or wealthy enough – have left to live on another world.

My question is: Is Electric Sheep a homage to Ludditism?

Spoilers!!!!!

Electric Sheep

There’s a pleasing 60s sitcom feel about Electric Sheep. At the beginning of the novel, Deckard is chatting with a neighbour, pretending his fake sheep is real while he tends to it. People still feel the need to keep up with the Jonses. And that is another feature that is missed from the film: The humans in Electric Sheep long to own a real animal of any kind. Most animals are extinct and everyone has a huge desire to capture and capture and own a real one. And they’re not necessarily glamorous animals like pedigree dogs or horses; any animal will do, from insects to racoons.

It’s never really explained precisely why. You’d think the government would take it upon itself to conserve animal species, but perhaps the governments have all left, or they are more concerned with other things. It appears animal conservation is down to individual owners and commercial entities who deal in animals and set prices. To own an animal is about the status symbol of it: that you are wealthy enough to own one, with the rarer animals being more costly.

There is something both ridiculous and believable about humans craving to possess animals. This is how Dick chose to build his world, and how less ridiculous is it to the things wealthy people aspire to do and have in real life? There is a sense of just is about it. It’s just the way things are and no one questions it. It’s an important feature in the book because it’s one of the main things that drives Deckard, and it also ties into one of the central themes in the book: Empathy.

Low Action Film Noir

Electric Sheep is like a detective novel set in the future, complete with a femme fatale. But it is also Dick’s style to make action clumsy and awkward. In many ways it’s an action story with poor quality action. Deckard isn’t a high-energy action hero. Probably the nuclear fallout is partly to blame for that. He mostly fumbles his way through retiring the androids, really only barely escaping with his life. It is the mystery and detective work that drives the story forward more than the action.

There’s a curious feature of Dick’s writing which I’ve seen in a few of his books. He has a tendency to reveal something quite suddenly, without warning, and in doing so, it can be jarring to read. Or he can kill the rhythm and excitement by muddying what is happening, again mentioning something out of the blue that jars and confuses.

One example is when there is a threat on Deckard’s life. He is in his flying car on the roof of a building where he meets the Soviet bounty hunter, Kadalyi. But when Kadalyi shows Deckard a ‘triggering circuit’ on his hand, Deckard understands Kadalyi is really an android, but he responds by getting the android’s name wrong. He says: "You're not Polokov, you're Kadalyi," To which the android responds: "Don't you mean that the other way around? You're a bit confused."

So instead of confirming to the reader the situation the text it setting up, the reader is left a little confused. The effect of this kills the exciting build up, leaving you questioning what you are supposed to be interpreting. And it’s totally unnecessary. I’m not sure why it’s in the book. I don’t know what the intended effect is supposed to be.

Reality Flip

Dick does a great job flipping reality where the reader is suddenly questioning which parts are real within his fictional world. Kim Gordon in her memoir says that Dick’s novels perfectly capture the experiences of schizophrenia. While I personally cannot confirm that, it is something I can easily believe. You are left with a sudden weightlessness, unable to determine what the (fictional) reality is.

In Electric Sheep Dick flips the world on its head so everything you thought your were reading becomes doubtful. Even having read the book before (and forgetting most of it) I found this literary device worked very well. And even when the problem is seemingly resolved, there are still doubts. It is still only a partial resolve and what is really going on is still unclear.

One interesting scene has the android Luft plant seeds of doubt into the supposed reality the book is relating, but also planting doubts whether Deckard is human or not:

"An android," he said, "doesn't care what happens to any other android. That's one of the indications we look for."

"Then," Miss Luft said, "you must be an android."

That stopped him; he stared at her.

"Because," she continued, "Your job is to kill them, isn't it? You're what they call — " She tried to remember.

"A bounty hunter," Rick said. "But I'm not an android."

"This test you want to give me." Her voice, now, had begun to return. "Have you taken it?"

"Yes." He nodded. "A long, long time ago; when I first started with the department."

"Maybe that's a false memory. Don't androids sometimes go around with false memories?"

The other function of this scene is to draw attention to the flaws in the ways the police department test to determine whether someone is human or not. The entire novel is built on the notion of not really being able to tell the real from the replica, and the means to do this – the Voigt-Kampff Empathy Test – is faulty or soon to be obsolete.

"Mercer isn't a fake," he said. "Unless reality is a fake."

In fact, it is quite possible that the entire story is in fact a dream of some kind. Towards the end of the novel, Deckard finds himself being helped by Mercer, an apparition from a kind of VR experience called an empathy box. In the novel it is revealed that Mercerism is a sham and Mercer isn’t really a messiah type, but later he appears to Deckard and warns him of danger that saves his life. This happens while Deckard isn’t using an empathy box.

Then at the very end, Deckard seems to slip seamlessly into a Mercer experience. So the whole story, or part of it, could be an empathy box hallucination – including the debunking moment. This is why the movie Total Recall is in many ways a closer adaptation to Electric Sheep than Blade Runner is. Total Recall captures the confusion and doubt and reality flips that Blade Runner does not do so well (or at all). And it seems to me that the writers of Total Recall were channelling Electric Sheep for a lot of the story.

There is also a curious part where John Isidore seems to psychically destroy the room around him. The scene could be interpreted in many ways, including Isidore physically destroying the room with his hands but being unaware of what he is doing. Isidore also complains (to himself) about junk forming by itself in the places he inhabit, suggesting he is either psychically attracting junk or bringing it in himself but not realising it. Whether he has psychic powers is never really confirmed.

Exactly which parts are ‘real’ and which are hallucinations isn’t clear, and depending on how you decide that would change the interpretation of the novel. It is either written to be deliberately ambiguous, or there is a clear distinction between the real and unreal, and if that’s the case, you’d probably have to sit with the novel for some time and careful read it to decipher its exact meaning.

Rachel Rosen

Rachel Rosen is a true femme fatale and her character is quite enjoyable for that. But there is some real creepy description of her in the novel. At one point Dick describes her via the male gaze with more detail and scrutiny afforded to any of the other characters. It seems a bit uncalled for. While you could say this is Deckard’s viewpoint, it’s not quite written that way; and you could see it as a character inspecting a commodity, like they would a car, but something about her being indistinguishable from human stops it being entirely innocent. It’s like her androidness makes it OK to objectify her, so it is both creepy and not creepy at the same time.

Rosen is basically described as having a child’s body with a woman’s head. You could think this is some prescience from Dick, predicting the kind of AI generated imagery you sometimes see posted on spam social media accounts, but I don’t think that’s the case. While Dick does describe Rosen’s proportions as ‘odd’, I’m not entirely sure he’s making a commentary on the misogyny by the powerful or the corporate idealising of women’s bodies in media. I just find this description of her a bit on the creepy side.

Empathy

The persecution of androids is intended to be questionable – genuine persecution – because the story is about questioning what we know to be true. While Roy Baty is a human-hating killer, Luba Luft is a talented opera singer, just bringing joy to the world. But having said that, Dick gives all the androids a distinct disregard to animal life. So with all the ambiguity, it seems clears Dick wants the reader to accept androids inherently lack empathy and retiring them, in the end, is justified:

Evidently the humanoid robot constituted a solitary predator.

Rick liked to think of them that way; it made his job palatable. In retiring — i.e. killing — an andy he did not violate the rule of life laid down by Mercer. You shall kill only the killers, Mercer had told them the year empathy boxes first appeared on Earth … A Mercerite sensed evil without understanding it. Put another way, a Mercerite was free to locate the nebulous presence of The Killers wherever he saw fit. For Rick Deckard an escaped humanoid robot, which had killed its master, which had been equipped with an intelligence greater than that of many human beings, which had no regard for animals, which possessed no ability to feel emphatic joy for another life form's success or grief at its defeat — that, for him, epitomized The Killers.

Mercerism is in part pitched in opposition to android, and the empathy box is one thing that the androids are unable to use (which poses the question: Why aren’t the empathy boxes used to test androids?) The scarcity of animals brings a heightened sense of the need for empathy so even the killing of a spider induces much trauma, since all animals are sacred.

I personally do not enjoy or approve of the harming of animals and the spider torture scene is a pretty unpleasant scene. Within the Electric Sheep world, the mutilation of an animal becomes an even greater crime in terms of value and conservation of a species. In that scene, Dick shows clearly that all the androids have a complete lack of empathy, as well as a morbid fascination to what is human. They are shown to be innately callous, making retiring them completely justified.

John Isidore

I’ve read a few reviews which state confusion of Isidore’s inclusion in the novel, which ask what is the point of his subplot. But Isidore is really the key to understanding the novel’s message. I think Isidore’s story is quite clear: he is a lonely, supposedly intellectually impaired individual who needs compassion. His fellow humans don’t give him compassion, showing that most humans show a lack of empathy. The fact he is described as a ‘chickenhead’ demonstrates a kind of state-sanctioned lack of empathy.

Isidore is the character who shows the most empathy but he is also a character in isolation, away from most technology (except the TV). He seeks friendship from the androids, but they too lack empathy. The androids are not pleasant beings and what the novel appears to be saying is that humans are becoming more and more artificial.

It’s not the androids that are becoming more like humans (as the novel’s premise supposes), but the humans that are becoming more like androids. It is humans that are losing their empathy. That’s why it is getting more and more difficult to tell them apart. It’s not a case of man-made creations overtaking what it is to be an authentic human, it is that human’s reliance on the man-made that is reducing humans to the level of machines.

The Electric Sheep world is full of the artificial: artificial moods, android animals, people pretending for social status, etc. It is also a world where a man-made nuclear war has destroyed so much of nature. This is the backdrop to a story; a story where technology destroys the planet and negates what it means to be human. It is fakery negating humanity.

John Isidore, with his lacking intelligence, is someone more in tune to his feelings. Perhaps his character is a metaphor for what remains of human empathy: alone and shunned and hated. He is left confused and abandoned, while the rest of the world pursue the fake and meaningless and worship a fake religion.

The End

The novel ends with Deckard finding a toad whilst in the nuclear wasteland. He is fooled by the authenticity of a mechanical toad. Because no matter what the outcome of the story, the process of the unreal is ongoing and Deckard, like everyone, is increasingly being pulled into it.

Over and out for now, guys!

xxx