Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?

• 1. Introduction

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  Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? opens in a San Francisco where the sky itself has turned against its inhabitants. A nuclear war has left Earth's atmosphere radioactive, most animal species are either extinct or vanishing, and the people who can afford to leave have already gone. Philip K. Dick published this novel in 1968, and inside it he planted a question that has never stopped being asked: what separates a human being from something built to look exactly like one?

  The story follows Rick Deckard, a bounty hunter whose job is to "retire" androids so convincingly human that only a clinical empathy test can identify them. Alongside him runs a quieter story about John Isidore, a man the war has left intellectually damaged, who finds himself sheltering the very fugitives Deckard is hunting. Between these two men, Dick draws a portrait of a world losing its grip on the concept of life itself.

  The novel would go on to seed an entire generation of science fiction, and it would eventually become the source for one of cinema's most debated films. But before any of that, it was a book about a man who wanted to buy a real goat for his depressed wife, and who was not entirely sure, by the end, what being real even meant.

• 2. A World After World Terminus

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  The war that Dick called World Terminus did not end life so much as reclassify it. Owning a real animal became a mark of wealth and status in the radioactive aftermath, while those without the means kept electric imitations. Rick Deckard maintains an electric sheep on the roof of his apartment building, a fact his neighbors do not know, because the shame of a fake animal runs deep in this culture.

  The radiation also sorted the human population into categories. Those healthy enough emigrated to off-world colonies, each taking an android servant as a reward for going. Those left behind included people like John R. Isidore, classified by the authorities as a "chickenhead" because radiation had damaged his intelligence. Isidore lives alone in a decaying apartment building, and he is grateful for any company at all, even the kind that turns out to be dangerous.

  Iran, Deckard's wife, copes with this world through a device called a mood organ, which lets users dial in emotional states on demand. She is described as depressed, and Deckard's hope that a live animal will comfort her drives many of his choices across the novel. Dick plants the emotional stakes in an unusual place: not in the hunt itself, but in the longing for something authentic in a world flooded with convincing imitations.

• 3. The Empathy Test

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  Rachael Rosen is introduced as the human host Deckard meets at the Seattle headquarters of the Rosen Association, the company that manufactures the Nexus-6 android model he has been sent to retire. The Rosen Association tries to discredit the empathy test for business reasons, nearly succeeding, but the test ultimately identifies Rachael as a Nexus-6 android herself. She admits it. The scene establishes that the line between human and android runs right through the middle of a seemingly ordinary conversation.

  The empathy test is the only instrument in this world capable of distinguishing the two. It measures emotional responses to scenarios involving animals and suffering. The test's logic is that androids, however sophisticated, cannot feel genuine empathy. But a reviewer in Different Worlds magazine, John Nubbin, pointed out a problem: given the differences between Dick's future and the reader's present, most people today would not pass the test. The questions a reader would fail are, as Nubbin put it, interesting indicators of how civilized anyone really is.

  When Deckard later tests Phil Resch, a bounty hunter from the suspicious police station, the results confirm Resch is human but flag sociopathic tendencies. Resch has just murdered an android opera singer in cold blood, without apparent feeling. Deckard then tests himself and discovers he is human too, but that he has developed a sense of empathy for certain androids. The instrument designed to draw a clean line has instead made the line more complicated.

• 4. The Mirror and the Machine

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  Dick said clearly in a 1972 speech, "The Android and the Human", that the android antagonists in his novel are intentionally more human than the human protagonist. They are, in his framing, a mirror held up to human action, set against a culture losing its own humanity. The speech argued that the man-made world of machines and electronic systems was beginning to possess a kind of animation that earnest psychologists once only feared "the primitive" would see in nature.

  Critic Jill Galvan read the novel's polluted, artificial setting as a direct illustration of the world Dick described in that speech. Galvan argued that only by recognizing how technology has encroached on our understanding of life can we fully reckon with the technologies we have produced. She called the novel a "bildungsroman of the cybernetic age", following one person's gradual acceptance of a new reality.

  Christopher Palmer used Dick's speech to highlight the danger of humans becoming mechanical in their behavior. Klaus Benesch approached the novel through Jacques Lacan's theory of the mirror stage, arguing that the androids perform a doubling function on a social scale: they become the constructed Other through which human identity tries to reassure itself. Sherryl Vint, meanwhile, focused on animals as the novel's true measure of alienation. Vint argued that Deckard's struggle forces him to recognize the artificiality of distinctions American culture uses to exclude both animals and certain humans from ethical consideration.

• 5. Mercer and the Mood Organ

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  Mercerism is the dominant religion of Dick's ruined Earth, and its central figure is Wilbur Mercer, depicted as a martyr-like prophet who climbs a hill while being pelted with falling rocks. Followers connect to this vision through a device called an empathy box, which lets them experience Mercer's suffering collectively. The religion is built around shared feeling as a form of community.

  Deckard encounters Mercer directly in a hallucination during his mission. A vision of Mercer tells him to continue his work, even acknowledging the immorality of it. This is one of Dick's more unsettling moves: the figure of empathy himself tells the bounty hunter to keep killing. Near the end of the novel, Deckard drives to a barren, obliterated region near the Oregon border and climbs a hill, where he is struck by falling rocks. He has become, briefly and bodily, Mercer.

  The toad he finds there appears to be the only surviving member of a species thought extinct, a discovery that momentarily restores something in him. Iran's discovery that the toad is also a machine is the novel's closing wound. She decides to care for the electric toad anyway, a quiet act that refuses to equate authenticity with value. Whether that refusal is wisdom or defeat is a question Dick leaves unanswered.

• 6. Adaptations and Afterlife

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  Hampton Fancher and David Peoples wrote a loose cinematic adaptation that Ridley Scott directed; it was released in 1982 under the title Blade Runner. The film featured several of the novel's characters but changed many of its elements. Following the film's international success, some later printings of the novel adopted the Blade Runner title, even though the term itself never appeared in Dick's original text.

  A sequel film, Blade Runner 2049, arrived in 2017 and retained many of the novel's themes. Dick's friend K. W. Jeter wrote three authorized prose sequels: Blade Runner 2: The Edge of Human in 1995, Blade Runner 3: Replicant Night in 1996, and Blade Runner 4: Eye and Talon in 2000. These books attempt to reconcile differences between the novel and the 1982 film while continuing Deckard's story.

  BBC Radio 4 broadcast a two-part adaptation in June 2014 as part of their Dangerous Visions dystopia series. Produced and directed by Sasha Yevtushenko from a script by Jonathan Holloway, it starred James Purefoy as Deckard and Jessica Raine as Rachael Rosen. BOOM! Studios published a 24-issue comic series illustrated by Tony Parker, which included the novel's full text and received a nomination for Best New Series at the 2010 Eisner Awards. A stage adaptation written by Edward Einhorn ran in New York from November to December 2010 and made its West Coast premiere in September 2013 at the Sacred Fools Theater Company in Los Angeles. In 2025, Sevan Kirder's Thalassor released a concept album called empathy.exe inspired by the novel.

• 7. Legacy in Science Fiction

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  Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? is credited as a founding document of the new wave science fiction movement, and it provided a basic model for the cyberpunk writers who followed. Its influence extended beyond prose into music, reaching artists including Rob Zombie and Powerman 5000 in the sci-fi-inflected metal genre.

  Critical reception of the novel has largely been overshadowed by the cultural weight of Blade Runner, and scholars who do focus on the book often situate it within Dick's larger body of work. Gregg Rickman noted that Dick's earlier, lesser-known novel We Can Build You also dealt with androids, and argued that Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? can be read as a sequel to it.

  The 1998 Locus Poll placed the novel 51st in its All-Time Best SF Novel list for works published before 1990. It had been nominated for the Nebula Award in 1968, the year of its publication. The question the novel keeps posing, whether empathy can be manufactured and whether its absence makes something less than human, has remained a live concern well beyond science fiction. An unabridged audiobook read by Scott Brick, released in 2007 by Random House Audio and running approximately 9.5 hours across eight CDs, tied its release to Blade Runner: The Final Cut, a pairing that shows how thoroughly the film and the novel had become bound together in the public mind.