Stephen Burt writes:

Rick Deckard in Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (1968), the basis for Blade Runner, finds and kills androids for a living; he also sees himself as a machine, dependent on anatomy (‘his adrenal gland . . . ceased pumping its several secretions’) as robots depend on circuitry. Dick makes Deckard’s job seem mechanical, constrained, repetitive (though Blade Runner makes it seem exciting); he goes out of his way, too, to dramatise the androids’ feelings, especially their fear of death (they look like adults but last, at most, a few years). Androids resemble robots elsewhere in Dick, but they also recall fugitive slaves, and other figures outside SF, who survive by concealing their status as legal non-persons. These resemblances are one reason (Blade Runner is another) why Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? remains Dick’s best-known book, despite the baldness of its prose: ‘“Do you think androids have souls?” Rick interrupted.’

(LRB 3 July 2008)

Library of America | hardback 830 pp. |ISBN: 9781598530094