047. Do Androids Dream Of Electric Sheep? (1968).

Do Androids Dream Of Electric Sheep? by Philip K. Dick (1968).

This is it!! The famous novel that helps create BLADE RUNNER!!

Blade Runner is one of my favorite and Philip K. Dick is one of the craziest. So naturally, this book is crazy and awesome at the same time.

Where Arthur C. Clark is a historian/genius,

Philip K. Dick is a mad scientist /prophet!!

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Rick Deckard. The famous BLADE RUNNER. One of the bounty hunters for San Francisco Police Dept. 

The book-version of the detective is far more domesticated than tough Rick Deckard Harrison Ford plays in film. He has a round face and hairless head which makes him look like a regular office clerk than a demonic android hunter. He lives with wining wife who thinks depression is way of life. He is constantly checking Sidney’s Animal Price guide for a deal (having a LIVE animal is a status since there are no wild animals left on Earth anymore) and always looking around him for a live animal because each one of them is worth fortune however small they are.

I think he is in the middle of mid-life crisis: job, marriage, self-esteem all are suffering from the hard reality of post war Earth. On top of that, now he is not quite sure if he likes being a human. You see, he is a lot deeper than film version of himself. 

Racheal Rosen. An android own by Rosen cooperation. Like all androids, she is born with a false memory which tells her that she is a human and a member of Rosen family who owns huge Rosen cooperation which is the only cooperation run by a family in the world.

After Rick identifies her as an android, at first she is shocked like all other androids. But later accepts the reality and offers her help for finding other androids or that’s what she wants Rick to believe? Or maybe she is really innocent? You’ll find it out at chapter 16.

Mercer. Some kind of religious figure who sells salvation. He is a really weird man whom I just can’t explain properly because I don’t really understand him.

 John Isidore. A pickup truck driver for a small animal repair shop (people who can’t afford the live stocks buy electric animals and pretend they have real ones because it’s really hard to tell the difference except the price, off course).

He is a special. Specials are the people who get contaminated/mutated by the dust. They are slowly losing their mind and memory and degenerated into walking dead. They are not allowed to leave Earth for the fear of spreading their diseases. People call them “chickenhead”.

He is a good, gentle man and the only resident in a huge abundant apartment building until suddenly an android named Pris moves in.

He tries to become a friend with android and later even tries to sort of protecting them, but is it worth it? Go to chapter 15.

Here is the list of 8 androids who make it into Earth. There is no specific of how they obtain their human identifications but it is done by murders, I think. They have a life span of 4 years so no human can run away with them. Clever.

1. Anders and 2. Gitchel are retired by Dave, Rick’s former boss who is in hospital with critical condition hence never appeared in this book other than name. 

3. Pris. Isidore’s neighbor. She is identical to Racheal.

4. Luba. Popular Opera singer.

5. Roy Batty and 6. Irmgard are husband and wife. Roy is the calculating brain who comes up with the plan to escape into Earth.

7. Polokov is a city worker who beats up Dave and sends him to hospital.

8. Garland is a police chief who hires lots of Blade Runners under him just to blend in. He does a great job until Rick figures him out.

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lace. –Post war Earth. Year 2021. There is not much talk about politics or war but you can easily guess that the world is run by one big government, UN I think, and citizens of Earth do not have many choices or even freedom.

There are tons of empty buildings at the end of city line and they are filled with specials. Remain of the war.

People need machines (An Empathy Box which you grab with the twin handle and a guy comes out and tell you what to do. Like a little Jesus in the box) to control their feeling/mood and buy animals to ease their anxiety. It’s grim, dangerous and depressing place.

There are no mention of Mars and how people are actually doing in there. But judging by some of conversations between androids, Mars sounds horrible too. The bottom line is Earth in 2021 is hell. Mars, too. We humans are doomed!!  

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lot. – Philip K. Dick is a mad scientist and drunken genius. He has a mind of prophet who can foresee future however gloomy it is. The only problem is (this is where “drunken” part comes in) that he is just not a good writer. He is genius at imaging the future but not good at putting those vision into the storyline at all. All his books are the masterpieces of concepts but hell to read. The story jumps around all the time and is too drastic in many cases (honestly, I’ve only read three so far and they are all very hard to finish) and quite often, because they are so dense with concept/philosophy, I have to work little harder to finish the books.

The good news is that this book “ Do Androids Dream ….” is one of the better one from his library. It has a straight story and cool main guy which is quite rare for Philip K. Dick.

If you are familiar with the film “Blade Runner”, than you understand the basic setting of the book. However, as you know, because books are ALWAYS better than their adaptations, there are much more in here.

The basic setting is like this. There is a WWIII (Terminus) a few years back which nobody quite remember why or how it started and even who won. What remains is something called “the dust”. 

The Dust effectively wipes out all animals on Earth starting from owls for some mysterious reason. Then it slowly causes mutations on humans.

UN for alternate solution, starts sending people to Mars. If you look at the picture of Mars, you can easily see how lonely, desolate, hostile, and depressing Mars is. There is nothing but hills and endless desert.

So as an incentive for immigration to red death planet, UN comes up with a brilliant tactics. One android for everyone who willingly deports to desert planet Mars. It works for a while. However, the demand for more sophisticated servants (androids) arises and each company which has resource/connection to develop androids competes like hell and one of them finally creates the one looks/acts almost like humans with their own mind (they call it NEXUS-6).

Some of those human like androids naturally don’t want to be treated like robots and choose instead coming back to Earth and blending in (being humans).

This is where Rick Deckard, Blade Runner, comes in. As an official bounty hunter for the police department, he has a license to kill (only androids, mind you). In order to identify runaway androids, all Blade Runners have to apply the tests to suspects and once the subjects are cleared as androids, then they can shoot, kill whatever it takes to take them down. 

The problem is that the various tests they apply to androids are based on basic human emotion “Empathy” which even the most sophisticated androids can’t imitate or they thought so. However, the new line of androids (NEXUS-6) actually have deep emotion and can care for each other (androids) like humans. So it gets almost impossible to tell them apart from humans. Adding to the difficulty is that a lot of humans are depressed and no longer care for each other (no empathy). So the fundamental question is what makes human human?

The actual story is like this. 8 NEXUS-6 androids escape to Earth. Rick is called into taking charge of the cases because his direct boss Dave, after successfully retires two of them, is brutally beaten into unconsciousness by one of them.

One by one, he finds them and retires them accordingly. Now, this sounds simple but it’s nothing but. First, Rick has to learn how to identify NEXUS-6 which is never done before so he has to summon all his strength and experience to maximum use to find the proper way to do the job (killing humans by mistake is a huge crime).

 After that, Rick struggles to find reason to hunt them down and kill them all. 

Because they are so close to humans, it’s like killing one of us instead of disassembling machines. And all these happen in only one day. At one point, he is so stressed down, he starts wondering if he is in fact android too.

At the end of the story, he faces a devastation so big, he almost, even unconsciously, throws himself in it (literary). But at the last second, thanks to a rock, recovers from depression, finds himself out of oblivion and discovers possibly how to be a human. I said possibly because there seems to be lots of metaphor or symbolism at the last chapter but they are beyond my understanding. So I am just guessing here. You should read it for yourself.

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erdict. – I have only read three of his books but this one is by far the best and least confusing work by Philip K. Dick.

What this book does is keep asking you the same question again and again from different angles: what makes human human? What is the deference between animals and humans?

It is supposed to be “empathy” that tells the difference between human and all others but what if we lose it? A lot of humans don’t care for each other and not even for themselves. So than again, what is humans? 

Off course, there are no answers here, or anywhere else for that matter, but Philip K. Dick puts Rick in a few different/difficult spots and every situation gives us something to think about.

This is not an easy book to read partly because it’s more a philosophical novel than a science fiction and mostly because story kind of jumps around a bit so it’s not easy to follow the story. But if you somehow get your hands on it, it will leave a huge impact on your mind. 

It’s a timeless/classic Science fiction which will offer wonderfully confusing time to your mind.

046. Still Life With Woodpecker (1980).

Still Life With Woodpecker by Tom Robbins (1980).

Tom Robbins is a writer who can summarize rise and fall of human race in one short paragraph and in that paragraph, you will find humor, knowledge, satire, tragedy and everything else to make your life more meaningful (also, each sentence will be all nicely rhyming with one another cause he is somewhat of a poet, too).

He is an intellectual, a philosopher, a poet, a writer and a guy who knows everything around us past, present and future.

This kind of package can’t come with training. You either got it or else and Tom Robbins got it great. So really great, I think he is one of the champions of 70s through 90s, up there with likes of Hunter S. Thompson, Douglas Adams, Phillip K. Dick…but probably the funniest of all.

It’s really unfair that one guy can have so much for so long…

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Princess Leigh-Cheri. The last heir to the kingdom. Or so the CIA is thinking. Ridiculous. She is a retired cheerleader, a social activist, etc. Your typical tragic beauty who after a bitter split with her boyfriend, exiles into attic of her huge house.

 She has a pet toad named, what else?, Prince Charming!! which she secretly kisses once just in case, you know…(according to Tom Robbins, when your are an actual princess, however ridiculous they are, you have to try certain things that we normal people are not eligible to do like kissing a toad or growing hair 3 story long so a prince can climb on the building with it.)

The story starts when a broken hearted, absolutely gorgeous princess decides to go to Hawaii for some kind of hippie convention called Care Fest and meets terrorist Woodpecker. How romantic.

Bernard Mickey Wrangle. aka Woodpecker. A mad bomber who receives 30 yrs sentence for all his explosive-related terror but blows out of the high-security cell within a year. Some sort of twisted genius.

Now he is in Hawaii with 7 dynamites which he somehow smuggles into the country and is thinking about his next move.

I think his voice is that of Tom Robbins because he supplies us tons of crazy wisdoms which is, off course, Tom Robbins’ specialty.

King Max Furstenberg-Barcalonas. After his exile thirty some years ago to Seattle, USA, King Max becomes a professional gambler. However, after heart-implant surgery, whenever he gets good hand or nervous, you can hear his heart beat which is Teflon verve’s metallic noise from across the street.

So he was forced to quit his profession and, these days, he just sits and watches sports on TV, hoping one day his beloved Seattle Mariners and Seahawks win the championship. Well, at least one did.

Queen Tilli Furstenberg-Barcalonas.  Once a beauty queen of all the known world, now, she is just overweighed, really dumb ex-celebrity. 

Her job these days is attending the tea party/gala/charity, etc which is simple enough task. However, since they don’t have any servants and she is clinically fat and it takes her two hours to dress/undress and she changes her outfit three times a day, Queen’s actual full-time job is dressing/undressing her wardrobes. Brilliantly stupid.

She speaks with really thick accent which I can’t place and whenever she gets embarrassed, instead of saying Oh my God or cursing various kinds of Gods, she says “Oh-Oh, spaghetti-o” 

Gulietta. A really old servant who comes to USA with king’s family to run the household smoothly. 

She is in her eighties, but still very efficient and energetic and strong enough to run all the household chores and prepare six meals per day. (Six meals because Princess is a vegan and King and Queen eat everything but veggies-carnivores. So two meals for each meal).

She is probably the smartest person in this book even though she doesn’t speak a word of English after staying 20 years in US. Since Princess speaks nothing but English, they communicate with gesture, I think.

She is the one who gives a frog to a Princess and goes to Hawaii with her too and later on, she plays a very significant role for the lost kingdom.

Chuck. After CIA provides the house for the exiled King's family, they sends Chuck as an informer which everyone in the house knows about. 

He works as a gardener, a body guard and a driver but as soon as he has time, eavesdrops all the phone calls and conversations even if they are absolutely NOT necessary. Another one of those big, dumb CIA agent.

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lace. –After leaving their home country which is now run by a group supported by US government and, what else?, Roman Catholic Church, the King now resides in a huge three-story house on the shore of Puget Sound, Seattle provided by CIA.

Since their mansion is almost covered by blackberry trees, King Max names his castle, Fort Blackberry, and expects one day, he will be the first king ever to kill by blackberry trees. I love this guy.

After a bitter split, Princess goes to Hawaii for Hippie Fest and somehow ends up in Middle East oil rich country at the end.

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lot. – For Tom Robbins, the story is just a vehicle to carry his philosophy forward. He has so much to say about everything, he doesn’t really need story to tell the story.

However, if there is no storyline what so ever, it will be really hard for simple guy like me to actually read the book. So He comes up with most unlikely love-story between beautiful and legitimate Princess and Mad and twisted Bomber (terrorist) which is strange, funny and gets stranger and funnier at the end.

It starts in Seattle where all the King’s family has been spending their boring life with not much events. Then after couple of broken hearts and miscarriages, princess decides that she absolutely must go to Hawaii to attend Care Fest which is a convention for environment and spirit and hippies. 

On her way to Hawaii, she meets Bernard the Woodpecker and they deeply fall in love with each other.

Just out of excitement and be true to his reputation, Bernard blows up couple of buildings with his dynamite and finally runs out of his luck and get arrested by FBI.

By this time, King and Queen finally realize that their daughter is an unbelievably hot sexpot and starts shopping around for possible candidates for her daughter’s husband and their chance to regain wealth.

After moaning Woodpecker’s imprisonment for months, Princess Leigh-Cheri finally gives in and marries ultra-rich oil man named A’ben Fizel and somehow convince him to build a pyramid for her( yes, actual life-size pyramid). Something to do with spirit and UFO and love, etc, etc.

There is coup and explosion and believe or not, a happy ending at the end.

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erdict. – This is a strange LOVE STORY nicely wrapped up with all the crazy wisdoms which probably will not help improve your life at all but surely gives you a good laugh and something to think about.

Also, in this book, a lot of sentences are neatly arranged with rhythm giving it a song-like feeling which is quite amazing for a novel. According to his recent interview, (yes, he is still alive kicking hard and in fact, just releases his memoir) it takes sometime a week for him to come up with one right sentence. So after all, he is not just a genius but a hard working genius which in my opinion is invincible.

So, this is a book written by an invincible genius, and although according to my friend who read all his books, this is not one of his best works, it still is a fantastic book which has so much in it. You probably have to give it a couple of shots to fully appreciate the value of his wisdom and world view like I do. 

A really funny and interesting book which talks about the meaning of life like it’s nothing more than a cup of coffee. They just don’t write book like this anymore.