20220307 - Review: Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?

 

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An authentic dream, \ the myth of the modern man, \ transcends suffering.

#HAIKUPRAJNA - Review: Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?

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"... I am required to do wrong. Everything I've done has been wrong from the start. Anyhow, now it's time to go home."

Philip K. Dick's "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?" is the myth of Rick Deckard, a modern Sisyphus, an absurd man whose job of bounty hunting lists of runaway androids was killing his soul, and who learned to love the electric animals he had hated because he had believed them to be fake; this is a nihilistic and existential story in the vein of Camus that deviated from the Absurd by rooting itself in neoplatonic concepts of the good, in the necessity of suffering for the alchemic transmigration of life.

"A mammoth corporation like this--it embodies too much experience. It possesses in fact a sort of group mind. And Eldon and Rachel Rosen consisted as spokesmen for that corporate entity. His mistake, evidently, had been in viewing them as individuals. It was a mistake he would not make again."

April had bought this book for me because she knew I was a fan of the story, which contains a few of the author's typical tropes, including laser tube pistols and hovercraft, with the focus on the differences and similarities between androids and humans, which we see through androids making mistakes when posing as humans, such as one running a parallel police agency, either due to a lack of humanity's shared social knowledge of from never being told they were an android to begin with, all lending to well-written action scenes and tense moments where humans distrust each other's authenticity.

The source material for the sci-fi hit "Blade Runner" was still somehow better without "tears in rain", and even asked the same "Is Deckard a replicant, or at least would he be better off as one?", but Rick said it might not matter if others knew if he owned a fake "animal" or not, blowing the entire debate out the window while solidifying the definitive answer as human; only a few background story pieces get dropped early on, like lead codpieces, being little referenced from the start, but nonetheless influence or inform the setting.

' "Buster is immortal, like Mercer. There's no difference." '

Still hit some of the usual metaphysical trippiness one would expect from PKD through Mercerism representing empathic love as the human group-mind, but the book is grounded, gritty and real foremost, which is why "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?" is one of my favorite stories and why Philip K. Dick is one of my favorite writers, because of his ability to portray intangible concepts in reality, where animals represent the idea of feelings with no way to assume if they are real or fake until knowing by measuring one's objective empathic reactions or undergoing bone marrow examination, where Rick's hatred and inherent suffering are transcended into a deeper understanding of both real and fake emotions in both biological and artificial beings, as he realized that all suffering is both artificial in the sense of being self-imposed, and authentic by being a catalyst for transcending the suffering of others, but only if one had first transcended themselves alone without anything but the wisdom they had gained from others.

' "I can't see them." "You're too close," Mercer said. "You have to be a long way off, the way the androids are. They have a better perspective." '

Philip K. Dick wrote about what it means to be alive through how the different kinds of existence perceive each other, with desperate androids being as far from the platonic concept of "the good" as possible, yet still were striving to see for they only wanted to know the truth of empathy and Mercerism, and so, in discrediting the human nature to love, they had acknowledged that it in fact existed for the humans; but the androids had only displayed their inability to understand, or perhaps--echoing the primeval Fall of Man--their inability to grasp that they were just as capable of these feats but were both wholly transcendent of them and entirely defeated, by them, in life.

These Goodreads poems will be collected in a future edition of the HaikuPrajna Collection. More can be found on my Book Reviews page, including my Goodreads Years in Review (add me as a friend!): https://haikuprajna.blogspot.com/p/goodreads-book-reviews.html

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It's been one year since "SM-SARA, Poems and Other Stories" was released on Amazon, and we are celebrating this anniversary by releasing "The Artifact" as a standalone ebook!

https://haikuprajna.blogspot.com/2022/03/20220303-first-anniversary-of-sm-sara.html

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Thank you for reading.

Until next time,

Allen W. McLean

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