Philip K Dick’s 1968 dystopian sci fi novel is often overshadowed by its adaption Blade Runner, but Dick’s original foretells a prescient and frightening future where nuclear war has devastated Earth and animals are commodities. Here we consider the environment premonition in Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? and its modern-day ramifications.
The rhetorical question in the title defines the new technology in the dystopia, a world where uncanny androids exist as human servants and all-but extinct animals are reproduced in robot form. Both are the side-effects of radiation caused by planet-wide nuclear war, a situation the ‘real’ world had faced at least six times before Dick’s story, and one it has faced time and again in the decades since.
Such is the dystopia’s miserable standard of living that mankind begins to emigrate off-world, a warning from Dick that in destroying our world humanity forces itself to colonize others and, perhaps inevitably, destroy them too. Similarly, the reliance on artificially intelligent androids – xenophobically called ‘andies’ in the novel – seems to eerily foreshadow our modern dependence on machines to help us live and work, where mankind’s rate of evolution has simply outgrown itself.
The mass extinction of most animal species places inflated value on living specimens, Deckard’s titular ‘electric’ sheep an example of aspiring to owning a real animal which conveys status and success. While Dick on the surface crafts a sci fi tale of AI gone rogue and human’s struggling with their existence, the novel in fact ominously warns its readers on the dangers of human endeavour and the catastrophic effect of an unchecked nuclear arms race.
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