My taste for Philip K. Dick's style of writing has changed since I made that first journal entry. I thoroughly enjoyed this book and felt that it helped fill in a lot of the holes of the film even though there are so many changes between novel and film. Interestingly, the androids (not called replicants), though more talented than they are in the film, are more obviously different than the humans. They lack empathy and faith (though faith is shown to be a human weakness throughout). Decker is not the ambiguous lone wolf that he is in the film; he is married, albeit not necessarily happily but somewhat comfortably. Rachel is not the completely naive child in a woman's body that she is in the film; she is a full-fledged femme fatale! Many of the other names are changed and the setting changed (from San Francisco to Los Angeles) but one can see how the book inspired the film.

Regarding San Francisco, I enjoyed seeing Dick's vision of the city post nuclear war. Especially chilling was ghost town peninsula. Realistically, San Francisco would not be a good choice for survivors to congregate given the weather patterns (replace 10 months of daily fog with 10 months of daily fallout). A better choice would be Dublin/Pleasanton as they are in the rain shadow of the Hayward Hills but at the time Dick wrote this novel, these cities wouldn't have been more than just farming communities.

Finally the inclusion of animals (whether fake or real) in the film take on new meaning after reading the book. The word "dream" in the title refers more to the aspiration to own an animal than for the thinking of an animal when asleep. So the question posed by the title isn't so much: "Do androids count sheep when they're asleep?" to "Can androids love life enough to aspire to own a pet?" It goes back to the central theme of empathy. What will happen to society when androids are built well enough to empathize with living things? Or, if androids keep android pets, is that an equivalent empathy to a human keeping a completely biological pet?