Philip K. Dick, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (1968)

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Philip K. Dick, Do Androids Dream of Electric
Sheep? (1968)
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Philip K. Dick, 1928-1982

• American writer
• Briefly a school classmate of Ursula K. Le Guin
• Wrote 36 novels and 5 books of short stories
  between 1952 and 1982
• Mental disturbances, incl. dreams and
  hallucinations, influenced his fiction also
  religious and philosophical works he read
• Has had at least 9 films based on his works, with
  more to come, but none was released within his
  lifetime
• An award for the best SF paperback book of the
  year is named after him

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Dick on His Writing, 1978http//deoxy.org/pkd_ho
w2build.htm

• "Reality is that which, when you stop believing
  in it, doesn't go away."
• So I ask, in my writing, What is real? Because
  unceasingly we are bombarded with
  pseudo-realities manufactured by very
  sophisticated people using very sophisticated
  electronic mechanisms. I do not distrust their
  motives I distrust their power. They have a lot
  of it. And it is an astonishing power that of
  creating whole universes, universes of the mind.
  I ought to know. I do the same thing. It is my
  job to create universes, as the basis of one
  novel after another. And I have to build them in
  such a way that they do not fall apart two days
  later. Or at least that is what my editors hope.
  However, I will reveal a secret to you I like to
  build universes which do fall apart. I like to
  see them come unglued, and I like to see how the
  characters in the novels cope with this problem.
  I have a secret love of chaos. There should be
  more of it. Do not believeand I am dead serious
  when I say thisdo not assume that order and
  stability are always good, in a society or in a
  universe. The old, the ossified, must always give
  way to new life and the birth of new things.
  Before the new things can be born the old must
  perish. This is a dangerous realization, because
  it tells us that we must eventually part with
  much of what is familiar to us. And that hurts.
  But that is part of the script of life. Unless we
  can psychologically accommodate change, we
  ourselves begin to die, inwardly. What I am
  saying is that objects, customs, habits, and ways
  of life must perish so that the authentic human
  being can live. And it is the authentic human
  being who matters most, the viable, elastic
  organism which can bounce back, absorb, and deal
  with the new.

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Stanislaw Lem on Dickhttp//www.depauw.edu/sfs/b
ackissues/5/lem5art.htm

• Philip Dick does not lead his critics an easy
  life, since he does not so much play the part of
  a guide through his phantasmagoric worlds as give
  the impression of one lost in their labyrinth...
  A characteristic of Dicks work, after its
  ambiguity as to genre, is its tawdriness, which
  is reminiscent of the goods offered at country
  fairs by primitive craftsmen who are at once
  clever and naive, possessed of more talent than
  self-knowledge. Dick has as a rule taken over a
  rubble of building materials from the
  run-of-the-mill American professionals of SF,
  frequently adding a true gleam of originality to
  worn-out concepts, and erecting with such
  materials constructions truly his own.

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Dicks appeal to filmmakershttp//www.wired.com/
wired/archive/11.12/philip_pr.html

• At a time when most 20th-century science fiction
  writers seem hopelessly dated, Dick gives us a
  vision of the future that captures the feel of
  our time. He didn't really care about robots or
  space travel, though they sometimes turn up in
  his stories. He wrote about ordinary Joes caught
  in a web of corporate domination and ubiquitous
  electronic media, of memory implants and mood
  dispensers and counterfeit worlds. This strikes a
  nerve.

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Jean Baudrillard on Dickhttp//www.depauw.edu/sf
s/backissues/55/baudrillard55art.htm

• "It is hyperreal. It is a universe of simulation,
  which is something altogether different. And this
  is so not because Dick speaks specifically of
  simulacra. SF has always done so, but it has
  always played upon the double, on artificial
  replication or imaginary duplication, whereas
  here the double has disappeared. There is no more
  double one is always already in the other world,
  an other world which is not another, without
  mirrors or projection or utopias as means for
  reflection. The simulation is impassable,
  unsurpassable, checkmated, without exteriority.
  We can no longer move "through the mirror" to the
  other side, as we could during the golden age of
  transcendence."

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Dick, New Wave, and Cyberpunk

• What makes it New Wave?
• Reply to, and also parody of, SF literary
  conventions and sociopolitical concerns
• Uses a future possible world to ask questions
  about the actual world, and about other literary
  possible worlds
• Late-1960s America as a time when...we had
  become as bad as the enemy

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• What makes it cyberpunk?
• Dark, film-noir-influenced imagery, especially in
  the film version
• Relationship of humans to technology
• Portrays an individual, anti-heroic character in
  opposition to a shadowy corporate power

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Entropy

• Post-apocalyptic / post-industrial setting
  World War Terminus environmental damage
• Common theme of Dick societal and individual
  degeneration
• the dust undoubtedly filtered in and at him,
  brought him daily, so long as he failed to
  emigrate, its little load of befouling filth
• the entire universe is moving toward a final
  state of total, absolute kipplization
• The entire planet had begun to degenerate into
  junk...Earth would die under a layer not of
  radioactive dust but of kipple
• Mercer as symbol of resistance to entropy (and
  the futility thereof?)

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Androids

• android is a metaphor for people who are
  physiologically human but behaving in a nonhuman
  way
• Ive never killed a human being before....Just
  those poor andys

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Empathy and Artificial Intelligence

• Voight-Kampff Empathy Test as parody of the
  Turing Test for AI
• The Turing Test
• a human judge engages in a natural language
  conversation with one human and one machine, each
  of which try to appear human if the judge cannot
  reliably tell which is which, then the machine is
  said to pass the test. In order to keep the test
  setting simple and universal (to explicitly test
  the linguistic capability of the machine instead
  of its ability to render words into audio), the
  conversation is usually limited to a text-only
  channel.
• http//www.abelard.org/turpap/turpap.htm

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The Voight-Kampff test as described in the
original screenplay of Blade Runner

• "A very advanced form of lie detector that
  measures contractions of the iris muscle and the
  presence of invisible airborne particles emitted
  from the body. The bellows were designed for the
  latter function and give the machine the menacing
  air of a sinister insect. The VK is used
  primarily by Blade Runners to determine if a
  suspect is truly human by measuring the degree of
  his empathic response through carefully worded
  questions and statements."

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Human/Android Connections

• the Voight-Kampff scale applied to a carefully
  select group of schizoid and schizophrenic human
  patients (ref. to Dicks own mental
  instability?)
• Two parallel police agencies...ours and this
  one - destabilization of reality
• Which is superior, and for what reasons?
• Androids with feelings? Humans without empathy?
• Love/sexual attraction between humans and
  androids, or between androids
• Rachael as electric sheep
• Is Deckard an android too?

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• You shall kill only the killers
• Do you think of them as it?...When my
  conscience occasionally bothered me about the
  work I had to do I protected myself by thinking
  of them that way, but now I no longer find it
  necessary
• Do you think androids have souls?
• Do androids dream?...Evidently thats why they
  occasionally kill their employers and flee here.
  A better life, without servitude

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Empathy, Emotions, and Technology

• Mood organs used to produce artificial emotional
  stimulation, in oneself or others, at will My
  schedule for today lists a six-hour
  self-accusatory depression
• Lack of emotional responses used to be
  considered a sign of mental illness absence of
  appropriate affect
• Named for Wilder Penfield, Canadian neurologist
  and expert on memory

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• Empathy boxes, Mercerism, and Buster Friendly
  new religion based on empathy and restoration of
  life
• physical merging accompanied by mental and
  physical identification
• an empathy box...is the most personal possession
  you have! Its an extension of your body its
  the way you touch other humans, its the way you
  stop being alone

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• Mercer as false prophet Buster as ubiquitous
  (and equally false) media person
• How can I save you...if I cant save
  myself?...There is no salvation
• Everything is true...Everything anybody has ever
  thought
• Mercer isnt a fake... Unless reality is a fake

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Animals, Real and Replicant

• Sacred animals (e.g. the epigraph)
• Signs of life in a decaying world
• Markers of catastrophe
• Animals as commodity and status symbol prestige
  based on rarity and on reality She doesnt
  care if we own an ostrich or not
• Sidneys Catalogue as sacred text
• Voight-Kampff questions about animals vs. about
  humans
• Replicant animals require as much care as real
  ones, but are not as highly prized
• Youre not made of transistorized circuits like
  a false animal youre an organic entity
• The electric things have their lives too. Paltry
  as those lives are
• Replicant animals as symbols of nostalgia
• Animals in the fictional world vs. technology in
  the actual world - replicant animals as both
• Types of animals referred to pets, pests,
  livestock herd animals vs. solitary ones

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Specials

• Similarities between specials and other
  humans (humans who stay on Earth - physiological
  or psychological reasons?)
• Similarities between specials and androids
  (Baty and Pris with Isidore)
• Similarities between specials and animals
  (chickenheads, etc.)

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Corporate and Consumer Culture

• designed specifically for your unique needs, for
  you and you alone
• Animals and androids as commodities
• Busters 24-hour broadcasts foreshadowing to
  present-day talk shows?
• The silence of the world could not rein back its
  greed
• We produced what the colonists wanted... We
  followed the time-honored principle underlying
  every commercial venture. If our firm hadnt made
  these progressively human types, other firms in
  the field would have
• A mammoth corporation...embodies too much
  experience. It possesses...a sort of group mind

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Dick and Literary/Artistic Culture

• pre-colonial fiction - response to
  traditional SF self-referential humour
• written before space travel but about space
  travel.The writersmade it up.A lot of times
  they turned out wrong
• Role of classic art and literature (e.g.
  Munchs The Scream and Puberty Mozarts The
  Magic Flute)
• Art vs. entropy at once permanent and ephemeral
• Androids and replicant animals and/as art objects

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Derivative Works

• Dicks ambivalence about the film adaptation
• Differences between novel and film
• Differences between versions of the film
• Related texts K.W. Jeters Blade Runner sequels
  (1995-2000) forming a tetralogy with Dicks
  original 1997 computer game 1982 and 2009
  graphic novels other films influenced by the
  novel

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Dick on Blade Runner(From a letter dated October
11, 1981)

• The impactis simply going to be overwhelmingon
  science fiction as a field.
• Science fictionhas become inbred, derivative,
  staleand now we have a new life, a new start.
• I did not know that a work of minecould be
  escalated into such stunning dimensions. My life
  and creative work are justifiedIt will prove
  invincible.
• Dick never saw the final version(s) of the film

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Designs for Blade Runner
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• Designs emphasized the cyberpunk nature of the
  text visual futurism