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syllareads 's review for:
Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?
by Philip K. Dick
dark
sad
medium-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
A mix
Strong character development:
Complicated
Loveable characters:
No
Diverse cast of characters:
No
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Complicated
I read this book as the first of my Scifi Subgenre Exploration challenge this year and while I was certainly intrigued by some of the concepts, I didn't enjoy a good chunk of my experience for various reasons.
Do Androids Dream of electric sheep is a fairly short novel set in some distant future where most of Earth is uninhabitable and a good chunk of humanity has fled the planet already. Some people are left, however - and so are androids, as the title so aptly says. Some of these androids are of human nature, some look like animals for the small human population to possess, since a lot of animal species died out during the catastrophes that brought the earth to the brink of extinction and are driving it down the hill even faster.
The novel deals mostly with an android hunter and his increasing struggle in deciding what actually separates an android from a human being - but this is also sadly where the book fell flat for me. See, he's from an agency that has developed a test for human empathy - and if you're an android, you will fail it in some way. Simple, right?
Except it's not. The entire premise of the book is that a certain firm claims the test is faulty and would also target mentally ill people whose empathy has been "compromised" by their illness. Our MC gets send to said organization to set things straight, and as he tests the (supposedly) human daughter of the CEO, it turns out that his test fails - SUPPOSEDLY because she is indeed mentally ill. As it turns out, this is false: she's in fact an android, and seems to have not known that. The entire thing left a bad taste in my mouth because at the end of the day, it seems like Androids are INDEED different from humans and the whole debate about mentally ill people perhaps exhibiting certain traits themselves is never brought up again. It felt weirdly ableist to me, and I'd like it to not
There's also a very odd sex scene later in the novel that made me all kinds of uncomfortable, so that's a no thank you from me - even though I found the premise to be fascinating.
Do Androids Dream of electric sheep is a fairly short novel set in some distant future where most of Earth is uninhabitable and a good chunk of humanity has fled the planet already. Some people are left, however - and so are androids, as the title so aptly says. Some of these androids are of human nature, some look like animals for the small human population to possess, since a lot of animal species died out during the catastrophes that brought the earth to the brink of extinction and are driving it down the hill even faster.
The novel deals mostly with an android hunter and his increasing struggle in deciding what actually separates an android from a human being - but this is also sadly where the book fell flat for me. See, he's from an agency that has developed a test for human empathy - and if you're an android, you will fail it in some way. Simple, right?
Except it's not. The entire premise of the book is that a certain firm claims the test is faulty and would also target mentally ill people whose empathy has been "compromised" by their illness. Our MC gets send to said organization to set things straight, and as he tests the (supposedly) human daughter of the CEO, it turns out that his test fails - SUPPOSEDLY because she is indeed mentally ill. As it turns out, this is false: she's in fact an android, and seems to have not known that. The entire thing left a bad taste in my mouth because at the end of the day, it seems like Androids are INDEED different from humans and the whole debate about mentally ill people perhaps exhibiting certain traits themselves is never brought up again. It felt weirdly ableist to me, and I'd like it to not
There's also a very odd sex scene later in the novel that made me all kinds of uncomfortable, so that's a no thank you from me - even though I found the premise to be fascinating.