Famous for being the basis for the film Blade Runner, this centres Rick Decard, a bounty hunter who operates out of Sam Francisco in the future. He finds and “retires” androids and his main, most desperate goal is to have a real animal to replace his electric sheep, embodying the masquerade that is his life.

Some parts of this lived up to expectations of a “masterworks” (the edition I have), and some did not. It is wildly fertile with philosophical ideas. It is fundamental to science fiction too, in that it asks very clearly questions about the human condition. It’s not prescriptive at all, and is so subjective about some elements it can be baffling. Undeniably, though, it provokes emotion and reflection. It reads very quickly, too. Unexpectedly so. My favourite quote of all time comes from this book, and I didn’t even know it:

“You will be required to do wrong no matter where you go. It is the basic condition of life, to be required to violate your own identity.”

This is the beating heart of the thing. The notion that we have erected a society that is fundamentally not able to nourish a person, whether at a community level or an individual one. Keeping up with the Jetsons is having a different, cool, and most importantly, real animal. Empathy is key, and people are so disassociated from themselves that love and contact is so pivotal, it’s their only drive. Not just Decard, it is the obsession of nearly everyone in the novel.

Abstractly, the plot of Decard finding the escaped androids and retiring them in a short time frame is, I think, a pretty great depiction of a man battling entropy and nihilism, fighting to keep the parts of him that make him human—even as the job he’s given and continually spurred to do, robs him of his humanity. But what survival is there when the only thing you can perform in society is that task that dehumanizes you?

Sometimes tiny acts, or the illusion of, or performance of empathy and connection to another person is enough to get you through one more day of constant entropy. There is no catharsis or reconciliation with that dichotomy which pervades western society, certainly, but probably everywhere. This book asks where it is we hurt, as a species. Why do we have empathy and what is it there for?

Thematically it is quite adept at this. But I do have to say it is also shockingly muddled in other areas of the craft. Most noticeably the prose, which, if I were being incredibly kind, would characterize as uneven. Parts of it read like a high school creative writing class. Dialogue is often more poorly executed than even serviceably good. The major plot is fine, but there are many tangents and questions begged from various conceits that are completely, ineptly, handwaved. Fundamental things like how androids actually manage to come to earth and supplant ostensibly human counterparts in high up institutions. We know they have to kill someone and forge documents to get there, yet in the month present on earth one can become a well known and regarded opera singer? Did they assume that person and kill them, or are the papers themselves used to forge the new identity? Who knows.

There are interesting questions raised around psychopathy and sociopathy and mental health correlating to the madness inherent in the construction of society, but it’s never actually explored. The test for androids insinuates that androids could develop the response to pass the test, but no android acts in a non-binary manner to a simply empathy-no empathy perspective.

There are basic exposition versus description issues, and an event in the later chapter with Mercer that makes genuinely zero sense, as far as I can tell. Whether it is a moment of surrealism or something else, it’s used to elide a lot of narrative tension around a conflict. It’s a very strange decision.

On the whole, it’s well worth reading, but a very messy book. And, to be honest, if “masterworks” quality in craft reflect the work in this book, it’s kind of no wonder it took SFF so long to be acknowledged seriously from a literary perspective.