The Thumbnail Book Reviews
by John Q McDonald --- 17 February 1998
by Philip K. Dick
It is 1992, and after a global nuclear war with no winners, the planet is a loser; major extinctions and a vast nuclear winter. People have been emigrating to other planets, where, with the help of huge corporations, they use artificial humans as slave labor. These androids are illegal on Earth, and Rick Deckard's job is to hunt down the escapees and "retire" them. Animals, now so rare, have become objects highly prized. The nurturing of what was left after the war has become a cultural imperitive. People without pets are seen as social misfits. Therefore, many resort to artificial pets to keep up with the Joneses. Deckard, too, sees the retirement of six of the latest model androids as his way to graduate from his electric sheep to a real animal. This book is very different from its movie adaptation, Blade Runner, in that it tells more about Deckard's personal dreams than those of the androids. This difference, among many other details, was sometimes distracting after how popular that movie was. Also, writers describing the future often attempt to postulate a new dominant religion. In this reader's experience, this is never very convincing, and this book left the same unsatisfied feeling. Nevertheless, Dick involves the reader in his thoughts on empathy and that which makes us different from artificial life. We may be number of years away from making robots so very similar to humans (though we're trying), but the ethical issues of artificial life are already with us. This fine story may awaken the reader to those vague questions.
Also by Dick: [A Scanner Darkly]
[Other Science-Fiction Reviews]