Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?

Read this one over two weeks in July, the kind of stretch where the haze sits so thick you can’t tell smoke from just weather and you stare at gray for six hours anyway. Good book for that. Deckard spends most of it staring too, at machines, trying to work out which ones are people.

Everyone knows the premise from the movie, bounty hunter kills androids, but the book spends less time on the chase than you’d think and more on what people do to fill a flattened world. Deckard stops in front of a pet shop with a live ostrich in the display window, does the math on the down payment, an entire string of androids just to own one’s very own ostrich, and walks on. That’s the whole book in one scene, wanting a living thing so bad you’ll price it out like a truck.

The Phil Resch stretch is what got me though. A colder bounty hunter, and Deckard starts to wonder if Resch is the android, has him take the empathy test on himself to check. Resch tests human, and somehow that’s worse, a mirror to Deckard’s own apathetic self, a man less human for testing human. There’s a sequence with a fake police station and an opera singer android that’s disorienting the way it unfolds, you’re sure the story’s taken an obvious turn Deckard somehow doesn’t see, lost in the twisted funhouse right alongside him.

Mercerism I went back and forth on, shared suffering piped through a box, lands a little on the nose now.

The ending’s the part that stuck. The toad Deckard finds turns out mechanical, and he prefers to know it, isn’t disturbed by the synthetic nature of it at all, feeds it a fly anyway. Saddest line in the book. Maybe the only hopeful one.

Four stars. Would’ve been five without the sag in the middle third.