Content area
Full Text
Criticism on Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? has focused on androids and ignored animals. The novel's ethical concerns are best understood through animal studies, revealing political deployments of the species boundary to disenfranchise certain humans. The novel suggests another model of subjectivity best understood through Marx's "species being."
Central to Philip K. Dick's fiction is the question of what it means to be human, a question generally explored through the opposition between "authentic"human beings and various artificial beings made to imitate humans. Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, whose popularity perhaps derives from the wide influence of the film Blade Runner which it inspired, is his best known novel in this mode. Similarities and differences between the two texts have been discussed at length and it is not my purpose to rehearse or contribute to those arguments or to engage with scholarship on these differences. Rather, I want to focus attention on an aspect of the original text neglected in both the film adaptation and criticism: the importance of animals, electric and real. Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? develops its ideas about being human through two comparisons: animals and androids.
Dick's novel is set in a future earth that has been devastated by nuclear war.Most of the population has left the planet, a colonization effort aided by the free labour of androids. Those left are either too poor to emigrate or else are designated "specials," a category denoting decreased intelligence and hence ineligibility for emigration. Androids are illegal on earth, although some have escaped slavery in the colonies and try to pass as human. They are hunted down and killed-retired-by bounty hunters such as protagonist Rick Deckard. The remnants of human culture are held together by a religion called Mercerism, which is practiced through empathic fusion with others via a technology called the empathy box. Animals, almost or perhaps actually extinct, are sacred to the religion of Mercerism and the culture in general. Owning and caring for an animal is a sign of one's social and economic status and also an expression of one's humanity. Androids, in contrast, do not care for others, neither animals nor other androids. Their inability to feel empathy is what sets them apart from humans and justifies...