The Clash of Real and Fake in Phillip K. Dick's Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?

1257 Words3 Pages

Phillip K. Dick wrote a great number of science fiction books throughout his life time. His books usually consist of fact/ un-real elements which in due fact create such am un-real imagine of life and all that’s in it, which cause the reader to be at a confused stage wondering what is real and what is fake. Philip K. Dick’s 1968 novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? is set the bay area after World War Terminus has devastated the population of Earth leaving it nearly uninhabitable and created a post-apocalyptic Earth. With the U.N.’s push, many citizens moved to colonies on Mars but some of the already small and weakened population had stayed back. As a little gift the government created these Androids, which looked exactly like a human, in order to help and accompany their human partner to Mars and work as servants and do hard labor for them. By this time the Androids have grown to a point where they can be mistaken for humans and are intelligent as well as sophisticated. This novel Dick has written explores the moral repercussions of dominating a human-like biotic machine, but more focuses on the invention of this bionic human replica to evaluate and define what humanity is and what qualities differ from humans and androids. For the remaining people who decided to stay on Earth and not go to Mars, bounty hunters are employed by whatever police force is left to protect those small few who had not left and protect the small few who could not go to Mars because the degenerative effects of living in a radioactive environment have drastically lowered their IQs. In attempts to escape life on Mars as merely material goods, androids flee to Earth where bounty hunters, like Rick Deckard, hunt them down and “retire” them. A question ...

... middle of paper ...

...egins to wonder how and if he or she can tell what is and what is not fake. The reader then learns about kipple, Buster Friendly, or Mercerism, all of which are lies. The reader then begins to wonder if the rest of the world can tell the difference. In the end, Mercer has been exposed, Rick has slept with Rachel, and his views have been totally torn apart and rearranged, the reader realizes the struggle of differentiating the two. There is no true difference to state that separates what is to be an android to what it is to be human. Empathy is just an excuse, the humans even lack the empathy that was required to be a human. There is no emotion, no element, and no test that can differentiate the actual from the invalid because the differences are too subtle to create a logical separation between the two as proved by Phil K. Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?

Open Document