Storytelling Revived: Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?

By Dan Birlew | Posted March 9, 2010 in Book Reviews | 1 Comment »

Iconic science fiction author and enduring man of mystery Philip K. Dick is back in the media these days for a variety of reasons: Marvel is adapting Electric Ant as a comic book due out April; the powerful Andrew Wylie Agency became the official representation for the Dick estate; and the film version of Radio Free Albemuth filmed a few years ago is finally hitting film festivals and theaters soon (and is by all accounts a highly reverent adaptation).

My favorite Dick novel of all time, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, is also back in the news for both good and bad reasons. BOOM! Studios is almost finished with their comic series adaptation run. But the novel also gained some recent infamy in connection with the sad disappearance and subsequent death of actor Andrew Koenig. Also, Google named their recently launched phone line Nexus One, which may be an infringement of the Nexus-6 model androids from Dick’s book.

People don’t believe me when I tell them that the novel actually forced itself into my life. When Blade Runner hit theaters in 1982 I was quite interested in seeing it. All of eleven years old, I had no knowledge of Philip K. Dick at the time; I was more interested in seeing yet another space adventure movie starring Han Solo. Unfortunately the film was rated R, and I was still subjugated under an oppressive totalitarian regime: my mother. Restricted films were outlawed for young Danny Birlew following an “accidental” viewing of Alien. Fortunately the administrators of my Pennsylvania school were suckers for publisher kickbacks, and so my classmates and I received the monthly Scholastic Book Club sales sheet. Imagine my excitement to see this paltry sales catalog offering Del Rey’s novelization of the movie. Although my mother’s censorship activities prohibited restricted films, I could still read any book I wanted regardless of subject matter. I’d already put several Stephen King novels under my belt by that age, so I could use my allowance to buy the Blade Runner book without even asking.

Lo and behold when I received the book 6 to 8 weeks later, I was surprised to find it had the bizarre subtitle, “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep(sic), a novel by Phlip K. Dick)” Perplexed, I read the inside cover to learn that it wasn’t the cheap movie novelization I actually wanted, it was the original novel published in 1968 and written by some author I’d never heard of with the kind of last name me and my jerky friends immediately derided. Anyway, like Ralphie Parker in A Christmas Story I figured I’d been “skunked again.” Although I tried to read it, my eleven-year-old brain couldn’t fathom the silliness of people being awakened by a mood-altering device and then sitting around complaining about it for five pages. I took the book home, tossed it in my closet, and forgot about it.

(Little did I know that Scholastic subsequently endured something of a minor scandal involving their sale of this edition: When parents found out that a book involving sex with androids and mechanical brain splatters was being sold to school children by Scholastic, a hubbub ensued. I believe Scholastic later had to replace the Dick edition with a Weekly Reader children’s edition that simplistically described the movie shot by shot in remedial vocabulary.)

It wasn’t until my high school years–while full of teen angst and seeking higher knowledge and world view from books like Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and The Catcher in the Rye–that I found Do Androids Dream in the back of my closet, yellowed and smelly with a few year’s age. Let me amend that: I didn’t find the book so much as it fell off a shelf and whacked me in the fucking eye socket while I was cleaning. Having finally seen Blade Runner a few months before, I re-read the first chapter of the book pretty quickly (Oh yeah, forgot about those damn mood organs. Meh.) and then started the second chapter, wherein the mentally challenged J.R. Isidore grabs the handles of his empathy box and fuses with the perpetually suffering Wilbur Mercer.

Wait… what? There wasn’t anything in Blade Runner about a Sisyphus-like demi-god forever climbing a dusty hill while unseen killers hurled rocks at him like snipers. Enduring a lot of agnostic vicissitudes in my teenage days, this book describing a futuristic society that worshipped a false god caught my attention immediately.

Little did I know at the time that I was from then on hooked… and I remain forever mesmerized by Dick’s world. Hello Dickheads Anonymous, my name is Dan and I am a Dickhead.

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Tags: Book Reviews, Philip K. Dick, Science Fiction