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Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?

Philip K. Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, published in 1968, is amazing. This book is the basis for Blade Runner, but the movie and the novel seem very separate to me and are masterpieces in their own way. The book takes place years after most of Earth has been destroyed by radioactive fallout from World War Terminus. To encourage people to emigrate to off-world colonies such as Mars, a special incentive is that each emigrant will receive an adroid (andy) as a servant.

Electric Sheep follows bounty hunter Rick Deckard, based in San Francisco, as he tries to track down renegade androids who killed their masters in Mars and have assumed human identities on Earth, and J.R. Isidore, a man who has suffered brain damage (considered a “special”) who lives in an abandoned building and comes in contact with the androids.

This book brings up a lot of questions on whether or not androids with such advanced technologies can have souls. What is the human condition? The novel is fast-paced and takes place all through one day where Rick Deckard even finds himself empathizing with the andys. At one point Rick finds himself in what seems to be an alternate universe, a self-sufficient police station that is run by androids and has his own identity as human or andy questioned.

This book is a three hour read tops. Personally, I happen to like the tone and pacing of the book more than Blade Runner, but I think they both have their merits. Having not seen Blade Runner in years, while reading Electric Sheep you didn’t even feel like you were that far in the future.

Anyway, incredibly thought-provoking.

Side note. Total Recall (starring our good friend Arnold Schwarzenegger) is based on Philip K. Dick’s short story ‘We Can Remember It For You Wholesale’ which I would like to read soon.

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Aravind Adiga’s The White Tiger

From Aravind Adiga’s The White Tiger:

The Great Indian Rooster Coop… Here in India we have no dictatorship. No secret police.
That’s because we have the coop.
Never before in human history have so few owed so much to so many, Mr. Jibao. A handful of men in this country have trained the remaining 99.9 percent– as strong, as talented, as intelligent in every way– to exist in perpetual servitude; a servitude so strong that you can put the key of his emancipation in a man’s hands and he will throw it back at you with a curse.

So I’ve read a few India books lately, Shantaram and Sacred Games. Both of those books are behemoths and extremely comprehensive- they gave me so much context that it made me feel that The White Tiger was a little bit lacking. The White Tiger deals with some similar concepts as the other two, but is considerably smaller and more focused, straight-forward.

That being said, Adiga’s novel is a fun read and chronicles the story of Balram Halwai, who through a series of letters to the Premier of the State Council of China, tells how he went from taxi driver, to business entrepreneur, and killed his master. Balram’s voice is great, and he comes off like a real asshole, but somehow at the end, I didn’t feel the same kind of honesty that I felt after Shantaram and Sacred Games. I think I may have liked this book more if I hadn’t read the other India books first. This may have been a better stepping stone into the other ones because it’s such a fast-paced read.

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The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay

The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay by Michael Chabon.

If you like Prague, New York, World War II, comic books and escape artists – read this. And it won a Pulitzer Prize!