Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? Study Guide

Philip K. Dick grew up in San Francisco, a city that would play a major role in his novels and short stories. For most of his childhood, he was raised by his mother. He began writing science fiction stories when he was 12 years old, and his teachers noted his talent for building suspense and telling a gripping tale. He began writing science fiction stories professionally in 1951. From then on, he sold dozens of stories to science fiction magazines, and published several novels, none of which were particularly successful. His fortunes changed in 1963, when he published what was to become one of his most famous novels, The Man in the High Castle, a work of speculative science fiction about a world in which the Nazis won World War II. The novel won Dick the Hugo Award, the highest honor for American science fiction. Over the course of the next two decades, Dick wrote dozens of novels and hundreds of short stories. Although many of these developed a cult following, none were as critically or commercially successfully as The Man in the High Castle. Dick’s mental condition deteriorated in the 1970s, due largely to his experimentation with LSD, mescaline, and other drugs. He died in 1982, poverty-stricken and depressed. Ironically, 1982 was also the year that the first high-profile cinematic adaptation of one of his books, Blade Runner (an adaptation of Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?), was released, to considerable acclaim. In the 80s and 90s, the literary world as a whole (not just the sci-fi community) began to take Dick’s novels seriously. To date, more than two dozen of his short stories or novels have been made into movies, including Minority Report (2002), Blade Runner (1982), Paycheck (2003), Total Recall (1990, remade in 2012), A Scanner Darkly (2006), and Next (2007).

Philip K. Dick’s books reflect his feelings about the state of society in the 1960s and 70s. One of Dick’s main preoccupations in Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? is the threat of consumer culture in America. Following the 1950s, America attained an unprecedented level of prosperity, and the average family could purchase more commodities than ever before. While this economic development was justly celebrated, it also led to a growing homogenization of American culture—everybody competing to buy exactly the same vacuous products. In the futuristic society of Dick’s novel, consumerism runs rampant, with every family competing to buy the best, most exotic pets. Dick’s novel also reflects the realities of the Cold War in the 1960s. Following the detonation of an atomic weapon in Hiroshima in 1945, the world entered a nuclear age: for the first time, countries had the power to blow up entire cities. Throughout the 60s, the United States was locked in a “Cold War” with the Soviet Union, the world’s other dominant superpower. Both sides stockpiled massive numbers of nuclear missiles, even one of which could have inflicted a catastrophic amount of damage if it was ever launched. In Dick’s futuristic society, there’s been some kind of global war, the result of which is the destruction of the environment and irradiation of the entire planet—disasters which Dick’s sci-fi predecessors before 1945 couldn’t ever have imagined.

Philip K. Dick has been compared to many other science fiction and fantasy authors who blur the distinction between reality and illusion, such as Jorge Luis Borges, Italo Calvino, Ray Bradbury, and Robertson Davies. A dark, absurdist sense of humor pervades Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?—there’s a strong sense that some shadowy authority figure presides over the action, but it’s never revealed who this figure might be. In this sense, Dick’s novel resembles the works of Franz Kafka and Thomas Pynchon. Kafka’s novels and short stories, such as The Metamorphosis and The Trial, thrust ordinary characters into similarly bleak and darkly absurd or amusing situations. Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49 (1965) is, like Dick’s book, a satire of 60s culture, structured as a mystery novel and centered around a shadowy organization. Finally, Dick’s novels inspired the grim, paranoid tone of such important works of cinematic science fiction as The Matrix (1999) and Brazil (1985).