The Reality in Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?

This week I read Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? by Phillip K. Dick. It was really interesting! I got through the whole book in a day because it was such a page-turner... even though I was listening to the audiobook... The main theme in this book was empathy and what it means to be human: where the line between human and nonhuman was drawn, and how it blurred. This is a really common theme in science fiction about artificial intelligence. It brought up memories of the movie AI and the book I, Robot because they shared this theme. It also made me think about Fahrenheit 451 and Brave New World because of the weird futuristic settings and strange human behavior.

One of the main similarities I saw between Brave New World and Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (which I am going to start calling Androids because that title is kind of long...) was the religions present in the books. In BNW, everyone worshipped Ford as their god. In Androids, people followed Mercerism. The big difference was that in BNW this was seen as a bad thing. It was the brainwashed people who followed the religion, and they did lots of weird things as parts of the religion. In Androids, it was more complicated, and it was kind of like Life of Pi where religion was shown as good, but may or may not be real, but still may be good despite not being real.

The way that some of the characters acted kind of reminded me of Fahrenheit 451, thought I read that book four years ago so I don't remember it super well anymore. However, the wives in both books were kind of similar, because they were both kind of dumb and lost in the futuristic world. Actually, I think the lady in BNW who the main character had a crush on was kind of like this too, if I'm remembering right. For the wife in Fahrenheit 451, I just remember her using the seashells a lot, which were like little earbuds that spewed government propaganda. The wife in Androids wasn't quite this dumb, but it bothered me that she was purposely getting depressed using the mood organ. Perhaps I was interpreting her motives wrong, but to me it just seemed kind of childish and irresponsible to purposely get depressed. It seemed like she was taking shallow amusement out of a real problem that seriously plagues some people, but again, maybe I was not interpreting this right; I wasn't totally sure why this was something she wanted.

I kind of wondered when I was reading this if Phillip K. Dick was a vegetarian or something. He seemed to really like animals. From the start, Rick really wanted an animal, a real animal, not a fake sheep android. He was hoping that his neighbor would give him one of his horses (get it? NEIGHbor!?), but the neighbor said no, even though the main character tried to use Mercerism to convince the neighbor to give him one so it would be fair. Animals were highly valued by all of this society. Later, Rick got some money from killing a bunch of androids, and immediately he wanted to spend it on an animal, so he got a goat--this was the first priority he had to spend his extra money on. Towards the end of the book, Isadore finds a spider, and one of the androids wonders why spiders need so many legs, so she decides that she wants to cut off four of its legs and see how it does. This was one example of how androids don't have empathy, but humans do. Isadore was really freaked out by the android cutting the spider's legs off, but the android was completely unbothered by it. The weird thing about this though is that in today's world, there are TONS of humans who torture animals in some way. In comparison to some things that humans put animals through in today's world, cutting four of a spider's legs off seems very tame. So is this Phillip K. Dick's way of saying that anyone who tortures animals isn't really human? The humans in this book viewed animals very differently than the humans do in our world; they gave them a lot more respect and value. It could be his way of saying this should be part of what makes us human.