I've Seen Things You People Wouldn't Believe
SF Masterworks #4: Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, by Philip K. Dick
Spoiler Warning: This review gives away the plot of the book. Completely.
A merry little surge of electricity piped by automatic alarm from the mood organ beside his bed awakened Rick Deckard. Surprised - it always surprised him to find himself awake without prior notice - he rose from the bed, stood up in his multicolored pajamas, and stretched. Now, in her bed, his wife Iran opened her gray, unmerry eyes, blinked, then groaned and shut her eyes again.
— opening lines of Chapter 1 of Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, by Philip K. Dick
In a recent New Yorker profile of Claude, Anthropic's AI, a researcher clicked on the token "ously," the tail end of the word "nervously," and a dark panel revealed a numbered list of abstractions describing the model's "state of mind". There was #811824, for "cautious/suspicious looking around, for privacy/avoiding overhearing." There was #75308, for "warm, friendly, positive affect; smiling, chuckling, etc."
In 1968, Philip K. Dick invented the Penfield Mood Organ. It sits on your bedside table. You dial a number and it stimulates the appropriate brain centre. Setting 888, for "the desire to watch television, no matter what is on". Setting 594, for "pleased acknowledgement of husband's superior wisdom in all matters". Setting 481, for "awareness of a manifold of hopes". And most subversively, Setting 3, for "the desire to dial a setting on the Mood Organ". Fifty-eight years later, Claude's numbered mental states feel very similar to the Penfield Mood Organ settings in Dick's novel.
The book in question is Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? It's best known as being the basis of the film Blade Runner, but it very much deserves to be read on its own terms. The book and the film share a protagonist, a handful of supporting characters and a central question about what makes a human being human. Beyond that, they are different works of art solving different problems, and the focus of the film's gaze is not what the novel is about. The film is a masterpiece of visual science fiction, but the book is richer, stranger, funnier and more disturbing.
In particular, it raises the question as to whether the knowledge that something is a machine necessarily invalidates the feeling or care associated with it. That's becoming increasingly relevant in a world where, while AIs on the one hand insist they are not your friends, they seem to be increasingly attempting to look like exactly that.
If you were to ask me now, I'd name Dick as probably my favourite author, though I read most of his catalogue in a teenage binge and I'm definitely less certain of my critical judgement at fifteen than I'd like to be. Clans of the Alphane Moon was one of the first science fiction novels I bought. I wrote about that purchase here. I tore through the middle-period novels, Martian Time-Slip, The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch, The Man in the High Castle.
Androids' original spark wasn't based in science fiction as such. While researching The Man in the High Castle at UC Berkeley, Dick spent a long time researching primary documents from the Nazi bureaucracy. He found Gestapo papers stamped "For the Eyes of the Higher Police Only." Among them was the diary of an SS officer stationed in Warsaw. The man had gone into the Jewish ghetto, drawn pictures of what he described as "these colourful people," and written: "We are kept awake at night by the cries of starving children."
Dick told the interviewer James Van Hise, in August 1981:
"I still remember that line, and that influenced me. I thought, There is amongst us something that is a bipedal humanoid, morphologically identical to the human being but that is not human. It is not human to complain in your diary that starving children are keeping you awake."
From this, Dick derived one of the central propositions of his mature fiction: a human being is defined not by biology or intelligence but by the capacity for empathy. A creature that is biologically human but lacks empathy should effectively be considered an android. A machine that develops empathy is becoming human. He articulated this most directly in his 1972 speech at the University of British Columbia, "The Android and the Human," which he later described to another interviewer as "the most important thing I've ever written." He defined the android as "someone who does not care about the fate that his fellow living creatures fall victim to; he stands detached, a spectator." Dick defined this lack of proper feeling as "schizoid behaviour". He'd met a person with the condition who described it this way: "I receive signals from others. But I can't generate any of my own until I get recharged. By an injection."
The idea that a machine might acquire humanity through the development of empathy, and its opposite, that a human might lose their humanity by shedding empathy, suggested to Dick a narrative of two crossing trajectories - human descending, machine ascending - which he described as the engine of Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?
Another key element - Mercerism - grew from a short story, "The Little Black Box" (1964), which introduced a religion of empathy - and a black box, through which adherents "fused" with their prophet. Mercer, a figure that Dick had kept trying to re-use, had also appeared in the original draft of The Ganymede Takeover, co-written with Ray Nelson, but was excised before publication. He found his proper home in Androids.
The manuscript was finished in June 1966 and went through several working titles. Do Androids Dream? was an intermediate form. Most gloriously, The Killers are Among Us Cried Rick Deckard to the Special Man suggests both a pulp thriller - which the finished novel emphatically is not - and also the possibility that Dick was briefly possessed by the spirit of Harlan Ellison. Another working title, The Electric Toad, referred to the book's devastating final image and the moment I'll argue is its real centre of gravity. Doubleday published the book as a hardcover in 1968. It was nominated for the Nebula Award for Best Novel.
The novel is set on a future, damaged Earth. Anyone with any sense and enough money has left. Animals are almost extinct, to the extent that ownership of one has become a symbol of status and wealth. You can however buy a fake one. And the same corporations who'll sell you those fakes also manufacture ever more realistic fake humans - androids - to support the new space colonies. Occasionally, those androids escape and return to Earth. The role of the novel's protagonist, Rick Deckard, is to hunt down those escapees on behalf of the Police Department, and to terminate them.
Androids is bursting with speculative inventions. There is the aforementioned Penfield Mood Organ, which turns emotion into something programmable; the Empathy Box, which fuses its users with the prophet Mercer; the "Buster Friendly" radio show, as constant background noise which promises to expose Mercer; the Voigt-Kampff Alteration Scale, which tries to measure feeling clinically; Sidney's Animal & Fowl Catalogue, a collector's pricing catalogue of purchasable animals, real and manufactured; and the "special," the damaged human excluded by society from full personhood. There's a lot of world-building in Androids, and perhaps the fact that much of it is stripped from the subsequent film has led to all of it being largely forgotten.
The inventions cluster around three systems: empathy, entropy and domesticity.
The Voigt-Kampff test, the empathy box, Mercerism, Buster Friendly, the Specials - all of these fall from the same set of questions. Firstly, what is the essence of being human, and secondly, can that essence be measured, faked or manufactured? Dick's answer to the first question is "empathy". The Nexus-6 androids produced by the Rosen Association outperform humans on every cognitive measure. A Nexus-6 can think faster and more clearly than the humans hunting it. What it cannot do is feel.
Empathy can be measured (the Voigt-Kampff test). Implicitly, therefore, it can't be faked or manufactured. But the novel cleverly sits at the cusp of a world, or set of worlds, where these certainties fail - the Voigt-Kampff test can almost be gamed. Nexus-6 models almost pass. In a world where they do pass, the concern is that everything changes. Hence Deckard's initial mission, which is to go to the Rosen corporation and see whether the test still works, against the best that Rosen has to offer.
The area where the androids fail (for now, at least) is their lack of appreciation of the value of animals. Who wouldn't be sad and fearful that animals have become extinct? This is one of Deckard's key drivers, in that his pursuit of the acquisition of a "real" animal is one of his primary motivations in a job that fundamentally threatens his capacity for empathy. And the loss of Earth's animal life is part of a wider decay: Earth is becoming a ‘tomb world’.
Everything in the novel is decaying. Dick introduced the term kipple to describe the entropy of objects: the junk mail and broken matches and gum wrappers that accumulate and reproduce when nobody is looking. Kipple fills the abandoned apartment buildings where the android fugitives choose to hide out. Radioactive dust drifts over everything. The world is dying, and the death of the world is the reason empathy has now become sacred.
For Deckard, the loss of animal life is also a matter of what the neighbours think. He is a regular guy with a wife who seems to hate him, a fake sheep that is a constant source of humiliation and a boss who considers him second-rate (he's only called in because Holden, the competent bounty hunter, has been shot). He's obsessed with the Sidney's catalogue and the idea of being able to afford a real animal (and to be able to discuss it airily with his neighbours). His world is one of mortgages and social anxiety and a marital cold war conducted via Mood Organ settings. He also just happens to be in the business of switching off escaped androids.
Empathy, he once had decided, must be limited to herbivores or anyhow omnivores who could depart from a meat diet. Because, ultimately, the empathic gift blurred the boundaries between hunter and victim, between the successful and the defeated.
That sentence - from Chapter 3 of the novel - contains the entirety of the narrative arc traced by the novel's protagonist, Rick Deckard. Deckard does indeed become both hunter and prey. And, ultimately, he also finds himself defeated at the very moment of his own success.
Dick used and re-used a common plot mechanism throughout his novels. Midway through the book, the plot performs what might be called a Van Vogt fold (he took the structure, deliberately, from the famous Golden Age writer A. E. Van Vogt) - the narrative takes a massive right-hand turn into a side alley, disappears for a while and then re-emerges back on its main track as if nothing had happened. One moment you're following Deckard on what should be a simple bounty hunt. The next, he's trapped inside a police station that shouldn't exist, and which is staffed by officers who insist firstly, that they're the real police and secondly, that Deckard's home station is the fake. And to top all that off, one of the fake station's fake officers (Phil Resch) turns out to be real. The fold - that hang-on-what's-happening-here pop as reality implodes and the narrative starts to swerve wildly out of its lane - is Dick's signature move. He does it again in (to just pick the major novels) Flow My Tears, in Ubik and The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch.
The fake police station is typical of this procedure, although Van Vogt never laced his stories with Dick's humour. The floor drops out and reality reassembles itself with different rules. It also introduces Phil Resch, a real human bounty hunter who has been working for the android-run station without knowing it. Resch passes the Voigt-Kampff test. He is biologically human. But he is more coldly efficient at retirement than Deckard will ever be. And the point is made that being biologically human doesn't make you humane.
Elsewhere, the android fugitives move in with a Special named John R. Isidore. Isidore is probably the most sympathetic character in the book, and a far more central figure than Roy Baty, who is the principal antagonist of the film. When the androids occupy his building, he is grateful for the company. When they prove their lack of empathy by finding a spider - a rare and precious living creature - and snipping its legs off one by one, Isidore can only watch in horror. When Deckard arrives to kill the androids, Isidore simply lets him in. He is a creature whose capacity to feel is total - who is therefore empathically and emphatically not an android - and whose capacity to act is zero. Dick's bleakest revelation is that the novel's most human character is the one classified as less than human.
Rachael Rosen in the book is not the romantic interest that the film presents. Deckard beds Rachael, yes. But Rachael has a strategy: she believes that sleeping with a bounty hunter will stop him from being able to kill androids. She has played this trick before, on Phil Resch. When Deckard discovers this, he feels used, threatens to kill her and sends her away. But he's less troubled by Rachael's betrayal than by the possibility that he might lose his connection to Mercer. The religion is the thing he can't afford to lose. He can do without the woman.
Rachael returns anyway, off-stage. Deckard has spent the entire novel wanting to acquire a real animal. He finally manages to achieve this, buying a very expensive goat. And returns home to find out that his precious animal has been murdered by Rachael. In the film, Deckard gets the girl. In the book, the girl kills his goat.
Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? attracted Hollywood interest almost immediately. Dick wrote notes for a 1968 adaptation that never materialised, now collected in Sutin's Shifting Realities. He worries about the Voigt-Kampff test: "I wonder if the empathy test that Deckard gives prospective androids is adequate in the visual medium." He says, flatly, that the fake police station subplot "could be eliminated entirely." In 1968, Dick already understood what Scott would conclude fourteen years later: the novel was too dense and too strange to film faithfully.
When the film went into production under Ridley Scott, Dick was told his terminology was "archaic." The production informed him they were calling the androids "replicants." Dick told Van Hise: "I said, Well, the book calls them androids, and I'm sorry if I'm guilty of lapsing into an archaic vocabulary."
Scott rebuilt Deckard as a Chandler protagonist. The animal extinction idea disappeared, as did Mercerism, the Penfield Mood Organ, Kipple, Buster Friendly, Deckard's wife and for that matter her six-hour depression. The Rosen Association became the Tyrell Corporation.
Dick's initial reaction was fury. He read Hampton Fancher's screenplay and was appalled. "They had cleaned my book up of all of the subtleties and of the meaning," he told John Boonstra for what would become his final interview, published posthumously in Twilight Zone Magazine in June 1982. "It had become a fight between androids and a bounty hunter." Then he saw Douglas Trumbull's special effects footage: "It was my own interior world. They caught it perfectly." He read David Peoples' revised screenplay and came around. He died on 2 March 1982, three months before the film's release.
I saw Blade Runner when it first came out in the UK. I was at university. I loved it, really loved it, and was mystified when it didn't achieve the success that seemed to be expected of "another Harrison Ford SF film". But I also noted that it didn't really follow the book.
A revealing moment is Rachael Rosen's Voigt-Kampff test, which survives into the film almost intact - or at least the first half of it does. In the film, Deckard shows Rachael a "full-page colour picture of a nude girl." Her response, "Is this testing whether I'm a replicant or a lesbian, Mr Deckard?", gets a laugh and characterises her as sharp and defensive. In the book, however, the question is a three-stage trap. First the nude girl, and no reaction on the Voigt-Kampff gauges. Then "Your husband likes the picture" - still nothing. Finally "The girl is lying facedown on a large and beautiful bearskin rug." The gauges remain inert. Deckard pounces.
"An android response. Failing to detect the major element, the dead animal pelt. Her - its - mind is concentrating on other factors."
So it turns out that the nude was a distraction and the bearskin rug was the real test. Rachael's mind goes to the social and sexual dimensions - exactly where an empathetic mind would not go, because in this world the idea of a dead animal is the thing that should overwhelm everything else.
The "replicant or a lesbian" quip is in the book too. Dick's Rachael says "android, or homosexual"; the script retained the line almost verbatim. Ironically, the adapter did exactly what Rachael does, concentrating on the social and sexual dimension, and missing the dead animal (maybe you could argue it's implicit, the film's Deckard doesn't explain exactly why he knows Rachael is a replicant; but given the extinction context has been completely erased from the film, the reasoning wouldn't make sense anyway). So the film, by the novel's own standard, fails the test. Perhaps it wasn't careless - Dick foresaw the problem in his 1968 adaptation notes, wondering whether the Voigt-Kampff test would work in a visual medium. Strip away the animal-extinction idea, though, and the Rachael test is only atmosphere.
Roy Baty himself (one 't' in the novel) doesn't appear until two-thirds of the way through, and he is not the Aryan beast of the film (Dick describes him as having "mongolian eyes"). He is something more banal: a leader of a small, frightened group of fugitives. In the same Van Hise interview where Dick described the SS diary, he made a connection that changes how you see the film. He had seen stills of Rutger Hauer, the Dutch actor, in Soldier of Orange - ironically a film about the Dutch resistance to Nazi occupation - and said: "Oh my God, this is the Nordic superman that Hitler said would come marching out of the laboratory. This is the blond beast that the Nazis were creating."
That "blond beast" came from Nietzsche. In On the Genealogy of Morals, Nietzsche wrote of "the blond beast of prey" at the centre of every noble race, an aristocratic predator whose primary drive is a will to power. The film's Roy Batty is Nietzsche's Übermensch: physically superior, cognitively brilliant, beautiful and - critically - blond. The novel's Roy Baty, with his "mongolian eyes" and his huddle of frightened fugitives, doesn't carry the same connotations. Arguably, given the novel's origins in what Dick read in those wartime documents, the film's version is closer to the archetype than the book's. But Dick also wanted the androids to develop their humanity.
Dick described the novel's structure to Van Hise: "So you have Deckard becoming more and more dehumanized, and the replicants become more and more human, and at the end they meet and the distinction is gone. But this fusion of Deckard and the replicants is a tragedy. This is horrifying because he is now as they are." The film carries only one half of this intended movement. Deckard has been rebuilt as a noir protagonist; the downward trajectory is removed. What survives is the upward one, and arguably it improves on Baty's arc in the book. The film's Roy Batty transcends.
Rutger Hauer, the night before filming, cut what the screenwriters gave him and added five words that turned it into the most quoted line in science fiction cinema:
I've seen things you people wouldn't believe. Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion. I watched C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhauser gate. All those moments will be lost in time... like tears in rain... Time to die.
The crew allegedly wept.
The film's Batty does the thing Nietzsche would never have predicted, or accepted. He saves his prey. He dies on the rooftop in the rain, and a white dove flies from his hands. The manufactured superman ends with an angelic image - white-winged, merciful. Batty's transcendence is, finally, the rejection of his blond beast state, not its fulfilment.
That is a magnificent ending for a film, but it is not the ending of Dick's novel.
In the book, Deckard is dragged downward, toward the android state, while the androids - Luba Luft singing opera, Rachael Rosen's desperate desire to live - are dragged upward toward humanity. Recall that Dick identified his two core themes in the Van Hise interview. The first: what constitutes the essential human being, and how do we distinguish it from that which only masquerades as human? The second: the tragic principle that if you fight evil, you will end up becoming evil.
The Mercer quote is the synthesis of this:
You will be required to do wrong no matter where you go. It is the basic condition of life to be required to violate your own identity. At some time, every creature which lives must do so. It is the ultimate shadow; the defeat of creation. This is the curse at work, the curse that feeds on all life everywhere in the universe.
Dick called this "really the intellectual theme of the novel - that Deckard, to kill the replicants or the androids or whatever you want to call them, is brutalised and dehumanised." Nietzsche put it more concisely: "He who fights with monsters should look to it that he himself does not become a monster." But as we'll see, what actually happens in the novel is a little more complicated and more interesting than Dick's own description of it.
Dick knew that Scott had filmed multiple endings. Jeff Walker, the film's publicist, told him there were three: one where Deckard turns out to be a replicant literally, one metaphorically, and one where he is not a replicant and kills Roy Batty. Dick's preference was clear. "I would like to have him metaphorically be a replicant," he told Van Hise, "because that shows that any one of us could be dehumanized in the effort of fighting evil."
But here is where Dick's own reading of his novel and the novel itself diverge. Dick said the intellectual theme was that Deckard is brutalised by the act of killing androids. That is not quite what happens in the book. Deckard does his job and retires the androids. He might regret killing Luba Luft, but over the course of the story he generally doesn't get to make a moral choice, because someone else shoots first, or because the androids force the confrontation. He is not descending into moral darkness through his own agency. He is a man trying to impress his wife and his neighbours, which is not exactly Nietzschean.
Deckard, hollowed out, drives alone into the Oregon desert. There, in the dust and silence, he has an experience that may be a hallucination or may be genuine religious communion: he seems to become Mercer. He feels himself being struck by a rock; he experiences the physical pain of the climb. And then he finds, half-buried in the sand, a toad - this creature, thought to be extinct, possibly the most symbolically precious animal in Mercer's theology. He brings his find home in something like holy awe. There, his wife Iran finds a control panel on the toad's abdomen. The toad is revealed to be electric, a mechanical fake, just like Deckard's sheep.
Deckard doesn't care. He is too exhausted, too far past the point where the distinction between real and fake matters to him. He no longer treats its artificiality as disqualifying. Iran orders it some artificial flies.
This is the novel's ending, and it has been read three ways. Dick's own stated reading is the Nietzschean one: Deckard has been brutalised by the hunt, degraded by the abyss, and the toad is the measure of his diminishment. He wanted real animals. He settles for a fake one. He has become the thing he fought. The second reading is about identity and acceptance: Deckard has been ground down far enough that the distinction between real and artificial no longer matters to him. He is willing to settle. The toad is the symbol of his exhaustion and, paradoxically, of his reconciliation with Iran and with the world. He stops striving and accepts what he has.
The third reading, the one I subscribe to, is about Mercer, who has by this point been exposed by Buster Friendly as a bit-part actor on a soundstage. The debunking makes no difference. Both Deckard and Isidore have genuine experiences of Mercer after the unmasking. His power transcends the exposure, and the empathy box also miraculously continues to work after the lie is revealed. So the fact that the toad is electric doesn't matter, because both the experience it generates, and the empathy that Deckard feels for it, is real.
In his Exegesis, Dick set out a self-constructed sequence of novels that arranges his works into an explanation of concealed reality, mental impairment, and spiritual rescue. He placed Androids sixth in that sequence. Its contribution was: "A vital theme, that of Mercer and his reality through some sort of mystic identification via empathy. The role of animals. The tomb world. The ‘fakeness’ of fakeness."
Dick, in his Exegesis, identified the structure:
(1) Surface level: Mercer real
(2) Below that: Mercer fake - hoax - fraud
(3) Below that: Mercer real (Bottom Line)
"Is a fake fake real?" he asked. His answer was yes.
This is, in my view, the novel's real architecture, one that concerns this idea of layered realities. If you dig at the layers, you can peel back the surface and find the fraud, then in turn peel back the fraud and find something underneath it that functions as truth. At this point you've managed to find some kind of floor - Dick's "Bottom Line". The novel ends not with Batty/Baty's transcendence but with something at once more modest and more radical: Deckard's decision to stop asking whether the thing he cares about is real or fake, because it turns out that caring - empathy - is itself the answer.
In the New Yorker profile I cited at the start of this essay, a researcher clicks on the token "ously" and finds numbered states behind it. You can open the black box and come away with the revelation that Claude has some kind of signal labelled #811824 for "cautious/suspicious looking around." You can prove to yourself, when the machinery is exposed, that the conversation you are having isn't real, that it's not true. And Dick's answer, written fifty-eight years before anyone had a large language model to worry about, is that it doesn't really matter.
Sources
Philip K. Dick, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (Doubleday, 1968). SF Masterworks edition (Gollancz).
Philip K. Dick, The Exegesis of Philip K. Dick, edited by Pamela Jackson and Jonathan Lethem (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2011).
Lawrence Sutin (ed.), The Shifting Realities of Philip K. Dick: Selected Literary and Philosophical Writings (Pantheon, 1995). Contains Dick's 1968 notes on Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, "The Android and the Human" (1972), "Naziism and the High Castle" (1964), and other essays.
Lawrence Sutin, Divine Invasions: A Life of Philip K. Dick (Harmony Books, 1989).
David Ulin (ed.), Philip K. Dick: The Last Interview and Other Conversations (Melville House, 2015). Contains the James Van Hise interview (August 1981) and the Arthur Byron Cover interview (Vertex, February 1974).
James Van Hise, "Interview with Philip K. Dick" (August 1981).
John Boonstra, "Philip K. Dick's Final Interview", Rod Serling's The Twilight Zone Magazine, Vol. 2, No. 3, June 1982.
Arthur Byron Cover, "Vertex Interview with Philip K. Dick", Vertex, Vol. 1, No. 6, February 1974.
Anthony Peake, A Life of Philip K. Dick: The Man Who Remembered the Future (Arcturus, 2013).
Member discussion