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Rick Deckard is a bounty hunter tasked with hunting down six Nexus-6 androids that have escaped from an off-world colony. San Francisco in 2021 is no fun place to be, as is the rest of the earth: World War Terminus wiped out almost all plant and animal life and has made vast countrysides uninhabitable.

Mercerism is the religion du jour and individuals rely on empathy boxes to help them cope with daily life and to blend for brief moments with others using an empathy box at that point in time. The overall mood in the novel is one of depression, sadness and despair. Since most animals and insects are extinct, live animals are prized possessions. Deckard‘s mission is to make sufficient money to replace his electronic sheep with a live animal. There’s a lot of shame associated with families not owning an animal or having to admit to owning an electronic replica.

In his quest to hunt down the androids, Deckard comes into contact with Rachel Rosen, part of the Rosen empire that is the manufacturer of the Nexus line of androids. Using the Voight-Kampff empathy test, Deckard discovers that Rachel is also a Nexus-6 android model. She is unaware of this fact, having had memories implanted to make her more human. The brief love affair between Deckard and Rachel lasts but a very short time: Deckard informs her of his decision to kill the six androids. Rachel kills Deckard’s live goat as a sign of her displeasure.

The second-most prominent figure in the story is J.R. Isidore, a chickenhead or special. Due to his exposure to high doses of radiation he is doomed to never travel off-world, works for a company specializing in artifical animal repair and lives in an abandoned apartment complex filled to the brim with kipple. The surviving three androids hide in that building and enlist Isidore‘s help.

Of course this 1968 novel is the basis for the 1982 movie Blade Runner. The movie contains elements of the book, but can never highlight the nuances Dick describes in his text. In fact, the entire killing spres Deckard embarks upon and completes takes no time at all. The book is more concerned with the state of the world, how individuals are affected by their surroundings and how an individual identifies with his environment, be that individual a human being or possibly non-human. It’s fascinating, essential science fiction. If you haven’t read Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, I urge you to dive right in. Watching the movie after having read the novel makes for a far more interesting experience.

You have a variety of choices: pick up the paperback, listen to the audio version as I have done or wait a month or two for BOOM! Studios to release a comic book version of the original novel.

Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? is a true classic that has stood the test of time.