I finished Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, the 1968 book by the science fiction writer Philip K. Dick upon which the Ridley Scott movie Blade Runner was based. The movie was released in 1982, three months after the authors death at the age of 54. I had never read the book before; funny, since I saw the movie when it came out and was affected by it. The book is more naïve technologically than the movie by 14 years, of course, and some of the differences in its post-apocalyptic vision of the future are quite interesting. How Deckard and the reader are almost convinced that he is an android himself, at one point in the book. Radioactive dust and the force of entropy at work on the abandoned earth. The uninhabited suburbs. Pris as smart, from the same model, identical to Rachael. It comes out in the book that androids have a four year shelf life but this is not the religious compulsion for the androids to meet their maker in the book that it was in the movie - to the movies advantage, I think. The touching depth of loss and longing of human beings for the animals they have largely made extinct is an advantage of the book - an ecology perhaps prefiguring our own future. Will we mourn the loss of species, attempt to recreate them with technology? Will we also dream of electric sheep? The whole breathtaking Ray the Androids speech at the end of the movie is not in the book. Neither are the voiceovers added at the studios insistence post-production to the movie that Harrison Ford despised. So, I think the movie was superior in its technology and certainly its stylish vision, but perhaps the book succeeds on a deeper level as a prescient insight into the human loneliness of our inability to empathize with the technology we have invented to replace our companionship with each other, our companionship with animals, after many of us at least spiritually have emigrated off-world. Glad to have finally read the book.
Posted on: Wed, 20 Nov 2013 09:18:32 +0000
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