Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?
Dick's true subject is always empathy: what it is, whether it can be faked, whether its absence makes you less than human. The novel that *Blade Runner* adapted asks deeper questions than the film. What does it mean to feel?
Deckard’s treatment of his wife and his general self-absorption make him hard to like, and some never get past it, calling the book “deeply flawed and overrated.” An android-human romance goes from hostility to declared love with little buildup, and the femme-fatale material carries “casually ingrained sexism, racism, and pseudoscience.” The plot resolves abruptly after a stronger opening, the ending clipped enough that one reader renders it “sentence, sentence, sentence, THE END.” The tone is relentlessly bleak, its emphasis on human cruelty leaving readers depressed rather than moved. Several find it “easier to engage with intellectually as satire than to relax into as storytelling,” the world only clicking on a second read.
The case for it and the rest of the canon open with Pro.
