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The TV set shouted, '-duplicates the halcyon days of the preCivil War Southern states! Either as body servants or tireless field hands .... [a] loyal, trouble-free companion' for all settlers.
'I think what I and my family of three noticed most of all was the dignity... Having a servant you can depend on ... I And it reassuring'. (Dick 1999: 16-17)
No, not a neo-Confederate promise to secessionists fleeing a multicultural United States and a testimony from a happy slave-owner, but a fictional advert promising a robot slave to any human prepared to abandon a postapocalyptic America for a new settlement on Mars, backed up with a Martian emigrant extolling the virtues of her robot factotum. Like many of Philip K. Dick's novels, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (1968) offers a philosophical exploration of such themes as consciousness, emotion and the nature of humanity. As important, it operates as a commentary on the response of slaves to servitude and as a quasi-slave narrative that sheds light on race relations in the United States.
Thanks in part to its film adaptation as Blade Runner (1982), Androids has received reams of critical analysis. It has been read variously as a 'meditation on the presence of evil in the world' (Rossi 2011: 170), a defence of empathy (Rhee 2013), an allegory for autism (Morton 2015), an interface between humanity and technology (Sims 2009), a study in entropy (Palmer 2003) or posthumanity (Galvin 1997), and a critique of either scientific racism (McNamara 1997) or 'speciesism' (Barr 1997). Yet, despite Darko Suvin's observation that Dick 'always speaks directly out of and to the American experience of his generation' (Suvin 1975), few have examined Androids through the prism of contemporary American race relations. Peter Fitting briefly mentions the possibility that the androids might be black (Fitting 1987: 343-4) while Christopher Palmer touches on the novel's relationship with the American Civil War Centennial and the civil rights movement (Palmer 2003: viii). This oversight may be because none of the characters are explicitly black, as for example in Counter-Clock World (1967) (see also Jakaitis 1995), but it is even more surprising when one considers that the novel yokes the condition of the androids to the historical legacy of slavery. This reading becomes...
