Author: Phillip K. Dick
Genre: Sci-Fi
Rating: 3.5/5 stars
Rick Deckard is one of the few remaining humans who have not emigrated to Mars. He lives in a mostly abandoned apartment building with his wife Iran, and they (shamefully) own an electric/false sheep that lives on the roof of the apartment building, though Rick is pretty obsessed with obtaining a real animal at some point. He works as a bounty hunter - finding and killing androids who have killed their masters on colonies like Mars and fled to earth. When the book starts out, he is mostly concerned with how to get as many of them as possible so he can afford real animals. When the main bounty hunter in his jurisdiction gets hurt on the job, he gets his chance to go after 6 "andys." One of the challenges of his job is that the andys look and sound totally human, and they can only be caught using a special empathy test called the Voight-Kampff test. He prepares for his job by visiting the android manufacturers of the new Nexus-6 model so he can use the test on real androids and make sure it works properly. During this time he meets a Nexus-6 andy named Rachael who gets under his skin a little. When he begins going after the 6 andys, he discovers it's a little more challenging than he expected, in more ways than one. He has begun to care about the androids more than he should.
I've had this on my shelf for a while, and I didn't make the connection between this book and the movie Blade Runner until I read Ready Player One.
Overall the book is really engaging, and it constantly keeps you guessing. You think it's going in one direction and it takes you in another. The android deaths are not long, drawn out battles (which I sincerely appreciate). The worldbuilding and sci-fi aspects, while bleak, are pretty interesting. The world is very dismal, full of radioactive dust and very few live animals. They have these devices that can alter their emotions - they enter a code, and it makes them feel the desired emotion. It appears they can set it for anything they want, even depression. They also have a religion of sorts called Mercerism, during which they all connect to a device and have shared experiences about a man named Mercer who is walking up a hill and being persecuted and assaulted by some unknown enemy. All the people who are connected share the experience and their emotions at the same time.
Although I like a lot of aspects of this book, I can't give it five stars for a few reasons:
-It doesn't seem to really go anywhere. There is some character growth that happens with the main character. He does discover a lot about empathy and himself. He struggles with whether or not he should continue hunting robots, but he doesn't ever reach any kind of conclusion.
-While the main character feels empathy for the androids, I really didn't. The question of their humanity, which seems to be a common theme of sci-fi, didn't really come through for me in this book. I didn't really care about them at all. They were considered criminals because they killed their human masters, but this wasn't explored very much. It didn't seem like they suffered any particular cruelty, and they did come across as very cold and manipulative.
-The Mercerism cult thing was vague and hard to understand. The technology that allowed them to have a shared experience with Mercer was one thing, but the main character starting having these (hallucinations?) about Mercer near the end that were just odd.
-The characters kept doing drugs as a matter of course, and emotion altering machine came across as a sort of drug also. Then the main character <spoiler> randomly cheats on his wife and then goes back to life as if it never happened with no guilt whatsoever. That was kind of upsetting. </spoiler>
-Rachael Rosnen seemed like an almost completely superfluous character, and although she made the main character feel things and do things differently than he might have, she seemed almost pointless. <spoiler> And for goodness sake, why would she have killed the goat? Deckard didn't kill her, didn't do anything to her. It was a completely meaningless thing to do. I found it very confusing. </spoiler>
I keep thinking maybe I'm missing some larger message. Maybe it will come to me at some point. Not a bad book, but not a favorite either.
No comments:
Post a Comment