This moth features Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, Philip K. Dick, Gollancz, 1857988132, £6.99 |
|
I don’t know how many times I’ve started novels by Philip K. Dick without managing to get more than three or four pages into them.
I remember going to Bedford Central Library at the age of about twelve or thirteen, determined that this time I would take one of his books out and crack him, as an author.
At that time, it’s true, I was very confident about starting books and very insecure about finishing them. I read every word, never skipping (that was cheating); if I got bored, I put them aside: when I put them aside, I rarely picked them up again.
There was something about Philip K. Dick’s titles, even, that made them seem radically ugly – ugly because ungainly. Take Flow My Tears, The Policeman Said, or The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch. (And this is without mentioning the short stories. ‘Beyond the Wub’, for instance, a title that has recently been obsessing me. Wub, what a genius word!)
Most of all, I wanted to read Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?. I don’t know why. Ridley Scott’s film adaptation, Blade Runner, was a year or two in the future. It might perhaps have had something to do with that question mark in the title. Years later, I heard about Trollope’s novel Can you Forgive Her? which must be one of the best titles ever. I think I was most likely attracted by the ugliness. Androids I’d met before, lots of them, in Asimov’s robot stories, but did this novel really contain electric sheep?
Well, yes, it did - does.
The main character, Rick Deckard, a futuristic bounty hunter, is obsessed with his electric sheep. There has been a war, World War Terminus, and most of the real animals have died (of radiation sickness, we assume). A robot sheep is the only pet Deckard can afford; a real sheep is quite beyond his means – unless he earns a big wodge of bounty money, fast.
‘After a hurried breakfast – he had lost time due to his discussion with his wife – he ascended clad for venturing out, including his Ajax model Mountibank Lead Codpiece, to the covered roof pasture whereon his electric sheep “grazed”. Whereon it, sophisticated piece of hardware that it was, chomped away in simulated contentment, bamboozling the other tenants of the building.
‘Of course, some of their animals undoubtedly consisted of electronic circuitry fakes, too; he had of course never nosed into the matter, any more than they, his neighbours, had pried into the real workings of his sheep. Nothing could be more impolite. To say, “Is your sheep genuine?” would be a worse breach of manners than to enquire whether a citizen’s teeth, hair, or internal organs would test out authentic.’
This is the beautiful ungainliness of Philip K. Dick. In the film adaptation, Harrison Ford’s Deckard is not motivated by the desire to own a real live sheep. He is a solitary man, without the discontented wife Dick gives Deckard. He is much less the day-by-day bounty-earner and much more the existential Hollywood hero. Needless to say, Ridley Scott provided Deckard with quite a different ending to Dick’s original (and didn’t make him wear a lead codpiece to get there).
The line on the front cover of this edition says ‘The novel which became Blade Runner’, although ‘mutated into’ might be more accurate. The words ‘Blade Runner’ never appear in the book, having been imported from an otherwise unrelated William Burroughs novel, Blade Runner: A Movie (1979) – itself taking its title and situation from Alan E. Nourse’s 1974 novel The Bladerunner. (A ‘bladerunner’ being not a bounty hunter but a smuggler of black market surgical implements within a 2014 health economy that no longer treats patients deemed unworthy of the effort.)
Some of Dick’s basic set-up is retained. Deckard, in the book, retires (kills – though they are only debatably alive) andys (androids – though in the film they are called ‘replicants’). He is the department’s ‘best bounty hunter, the best we’ve ever had’. And so, when several Nexus-6 andys escape from Mars, come to Earth and wind up putting a laser track through the spine of one of his colleagues, Deckard is called upon to hunt them down.
Running parallel to this is the story of John Isodore, a ‘chickenhead’ – a genetically inferior human being, unable to reproduce or leave the planet for cleaner, nicer worlds. The friendless Isodore spends much of his time on his black ‘empathy box’. And here is where Dick does something that Hollywood would never dare. When Isodore grasps the box, this is what he sees:
‘a famous landscape, the old, brown, barren ascent, with tufts of dried-out bonelike weeds poking slantedly into a dim and sunless sky. One single figure, more or less human in form, toiled its way up the hillside: an elderly man wearing a dull, featureless robe, covering as meagre as if it had been snatched from the hostile emptiness of the sky. The man, Wilbur Mercer, plodded ahead…’
Through the medium of the box, Isodore becomes one with Mercer, as do millions around the world.
Mercer ascends the hill, has rocks thrown at him by unseen antagonists, reaches the summit, dies, is buried, is reborn, begins to ascend the hill once again, perpetually.
The vision of a virtual reality Sisyphus/Christ is grotesque, convincing, pathetic and very Philip K. Dick.
The philosophical novel within Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? wants to ask the questions Mercer asks. Why keep struggling up the hill? Why endure the blows? Why bother?
One final point. Surely the title should have been Do Androids Count Electric Sheep When They are Finding it Hard to Get to Sleep?
|
Author interviews
