Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?

Coming to this after knowing the movie inside out is its own particular experience, I kept catching myself surprised when the book and the film actually lined up, and then surprised again by how much they diverge once you’re past the setup. The book is messier than the film in a way I mean as a compliment, more ideas crammed in than a two hour runtime could ever hold, a lot of it about what World War III did to Earth and why anyone who could afford to leave for Mars already has.

The android hunting plot is really the frame for something stranger underneath, a running argument about what actually separates human empathy from a simulation of it good enough to fool a test built specifically to catch the difference. My favorite stretch of the book never made it into the movie at all, a second Voight-Kampff test scene that complicates the whole premise in a way I wish more adaptations had the nerve to keep. Once I stopped waiting for the movie’s beats to show up on schedule, the book’s own strange rhythm took over and worked on its own terms.

It’s not the tightest novel Dick ever wrote, ideas pile up faster than the plot can fully use them, the mercerism religion stuff and Buster Friendly’s broadcast and the whole electric animal economy all competing for space in a fairly short book. I think a more focused version of this could have been the genuine masterpiece people sometimes call it, but the sprawl is also part of its charm, wonderful ideas and lesser ones scattered together rather than sanded down into something safer.

If you’ve only seen the film, this is worth reading precisely because it isn’t a novelization of it, it’s the stranger, messier original the movie only pulled one thread from.