Blade Runner

Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? was published in 1968 and has remained one of Philip K. Dick's most discussed works, in part because of its 1982 film adaptation Blade Runner, directed by Ridley Scott. But the novel and the film are ultimately asking different questions, and understanding what the book is doing requires separating it from its famous offshoot.

In the novel, World War Terminus has left Earth blanketed in radioactive fallout. Most animal life is extinct. Most of humanity has emigrated to off-world colonies. Those who remain do so out of poverty, disability, or stubbornness, breathing air laced with what the novel calls kipple, the dead matter left behind by a dying world. As one character describes, given enough time, everything decays into the same gray undifferentiated ruin. Daily emotional life is managed through Penfield mood organs, bedside devices that allow users to dial up specific psychological states on demand, from professional alertness to existential despair. Owning a living animal has become a mark of both social status and spiritual health. Those who cannot afford one maintain electric facsimiles and observe the social forms of animal care in public. Rick Deckard keeps an electric sheep on his roof and tells his neighbors it is real.

The dominant religion of this world is Mercerism, practiced through devices called empathy boxes. A user grips the handles, and individual consciousness merges into a shared experience of suffering with the figure of Wilbur Mercer as he climbs an endless, stone-pelted hill. The sensation is physical and genuine. Stones strike you. You feel them. And you feel, simultaneously, the presence of everyone else holding the handles at that moment, anywhere on Earth or in the colonies. There is something in this arrangement that reads, from a distance, like a premonition of collective social media feeds, with millions of people plugging into a shared stream of feeling, oriented toward the same image, absorbing one another's responses. Dick presents it as both sacred and hollow, an authentic experience built on a manufactured mythology.

Deckard's job is to hunt and retire androids, humanoid robots indistinguishable from humans by any physical test. The only reliable diagnostic is the Voigt-Kampff empathy test, which measures involuntary physical responses to scenarios designed to provoke distress. Androids, lacking genuine affect, cannot suppress a slight delay. The test sounds clinical and definitive. The novel systematically undermines it. Some humans, particularly those whose cognition has been degraded by radiation exposure, score as poorly as androids. Some androids have been conditioned so thoroughly that they believe themselves to be human. What the test actually measures becomes harder to answer as the story progresses.

Deckard's six-android assignment forces him through a compressed moral arc. He retires an android who had been performing opera, who seemed more engaged with human experience than many of the humans around her. He sleeps with an android. He receives help from Mercer himself at a critical moment, despite having been told that Mercer is a fraud.

The film stripped almost all of this out. Gone are Mercerism, the empathy boxes, the mood organ, the kipple, the electric animals as social currency, and most of the novel's philosophical architecture. Ridley Scott relocated the story from San Francisco to Los Angeles and built something visually extraordinary from the remaining bones. Even the title came from elsewhere. Blade Runner was borrowed from a 1974 novel by Alan E. Nourse, a dystopian story with a completely different subject, one that Dick had no connection to. Screenwriter Hampton Fancher encountered a film treatment of the Nourse book written by William S. Burroughs, and Scott liked the title enough to acquire the rights separately. Dick died in March 1982, several months before the theatrical release, having seen a rough cut that reportedly impressed him.

The novel ends with Deckard finding what he believes is a toad in the Oregon wilderness, a creature long thought extinct. The discovery feels, to him, like grace. His wife examines it at home and finds the access panel. It is electric. After a long pause, Deckard decides it does not matter. The electric things have their lives too, he says. The book ends there, with Deckard's wife ordering a pound of artificial flies to feed it. The film ends with a hovercar and an open road. Both endings reach for something, but they reach in different directions.