Review on Do Androids Dream of Electronic Sheep

           

        Philip K. Dick's Do Androids Dream of Electronic Sheep focuses on the question of what it means to be human. Once in an interview, Dick explained his idea as he read the journal of a Nazi officer complaining about screaming children keeping him awake. At that moment, Dick realized the irony of "inhuman," which even nowadays, with highly developed technology, makes human contemplate about what is human in the era as artificial intelligence in Blade Runner are possible to exist.

         Based on the novel, the Voigt-Kampff test is the approach to differentiate human from replicant due to the latter’s void of empathy which has “existed only within the human community.”(p.30) when the protagonist Rick Dekard confronts and ponders the vague line drawn between those androids that are empathetic and those are not, he is convinced that “empathy must be limited to herbivores or anyhow omnivores who could depart from a meat diet. Because, ultimately, the emphatic gift blurred the boundaries between hunter and victim, between the successful and the defeated.” (p.31) However, in the later scenario, Phil Resch, a bounty hunter working in a shadow android police agency, cruelly tears down what Dekard at first believes after receiving the Voigt-Kampff test conducted by Dekard. Before the test, Resch asks “If I test out android, you’ll undergo renewed faith in the human race. But since it’s not going to work out that way, I suggest you begin framing an ideology which will account for ---” (p. 140) Resch’s statement challenges the norm of “being human” and echoes how Dick sees the Nazi officer in the journal as “inhuman human.” At this juncture, Dick employs Phil Resch to ask that other than empathy which may not exist within every human, what trait actually define human being? 

           Also, both in the novel and the film Blade Runner, readers may surprisingly figure out even androids can become as empathetic as human, which implies replicant as “life.” “Do Androids dream? Rick asked himself. Evidently; that’s why they occasionally kill their employers and flee here. A better life” (p. 184) Even in Blade Runner the 1982 theatrical version, soon after Roy’s death comes with Dekard’s monologue, “I don’t know why he saved my life. Maybe in the last moment, he has life more than he ever had before. Not just his life. Anybody’s life. My life. All he’d wanted were the same answers the rest of us want. Where do I come from? Where am I going? How long have I got?” This again provokes how we see androids as only intelligence machines, and, above all, trigger us to contemplate what exactly makes us human.