Book Description
"The most consistently brilliant science fiction writer in the world."
--John Brunner
THE INSPIRATION FOR BLADERUNNER. . .
Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? was published in 1968. Grim and foreboding, even today it is a masterpiece ahead of its time.
By 2021, the World War had killed millions, driving entire species into extinction and sending mankind off-planet. Those who remained coveted any living creature, and for people who couldn't afford one, companies built incredibly realistic simulacrae: horses, birds, cats, sheep. . .
They even built humans.
Emigrees to Mars received androids so sophisticated it was impossible to tell them from true men or women. Fearful of the havoc these artificial humans could wreak, the government banned them from Earth. But when androids didn't want to be identified, they just blended in.
Rick Deckard was an officially sanctioned bounty hunter whose job was to find rogue androids, and to retire them. But cornered, androids tended to fight back, with deadly results.
"[Dick] sees all the sparkling and terrifying possibilities. . . that other authors shy away from."
--Paul Williams
Rolling Stone
Customer Reviews:
What exactly makes the difference between man and machine?.......2007-09-15
In this second piece found in the omnibus "Counterfeit Unrealities (contains Ubik, A Scanner Darkly, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep [aka Blade Runner], The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch)," we find ourselves working between two intertwining plot lines. One is based around Rick Deckard, a bounty hunter who "retires" escaped androids - who have killed their owners off-world in the colonies and then come to Earth to live and try to blend in. The latest model - the Nexus-6 - can only be told from humans through use of a sophisticated psychological testing mechanism that measures empathy levels; empathy being the one thing that androids quite simply lack. The other plot line revolves around J. R. Isadore, a "chickenhead" (that is to say, a man who has mutated enough that he is starting to lose his cognitive abilities, but not so much that he cannot still manage to take care of himself and serve the public in some small way). He works for the Van Ness Pet Hospital, which serves people who own electric animals. However, his day gets off to an uneven start when first he discovers another tenant in his previously empty building, and then he is given a real cat - which subsequently dies on the way in to the hospital before he even realizes it is actually alive.
Similar in theme to the previous Philip Dick novel I reviewed, this book explores the differences between reality and fantasy by probing the differences between man and machine, as shown by the differences between human and android (sometimes that line is very blurred), electric animal and real animal, and so forth. Always in the background is the constant back and forth of Mercerism vs. Buster Friendly, who always gently (and sometimes not so gently) accuses Mercer as a fraud and fake.
Please note, those who have seen "Blade Runner"; it has been years since I have seen the movie, but from what I recall - the movie is only VERY LOOSELY based upon this novel.
Nonetheless, I did find the story enjoyable; dense and difficult at times, but the interchange and interplays are always deft and intriguing. This classic bit of surreal sci-fi is not to be missed.
Classic Dick.......2007-09-10
(This review is based on the novel as it is printed in the Library of America edition.)
Famed for being the basis of the cult movie "Blade Runner", this novel is, in my opinion, not as good a book as the movie is as a movie. There are big differences between the two, as far as the plot is concerned, and the mood, and quite frankly, I prefer that of the movie. But to the novel itself.
If you are familiar with Dick's style, you will not be in foreign territories here. All the features that define Dick's prose are there. Interestingly enough, and as for his other novels that I read, I never find myself bored, and it's always a pleasure to read Dick's work; and that, despite the shortcomings.
If you've never heard of "Blade Runner" or this novel, then here is a short sum up of the basics: it's set in the future, where humans colonise the universe, and have reached the level of technology enabling us to create androids, a sort of organic machines resembling humans. Those androids are illegal on earth and whenever some of them flee to this planet, bounty hunters are after them. The main Character of the book, Rick Deckard (named after René Descartes, the French thinker famous for his "cogito ergo sum", or "I think therefore I am") is one of those bounty hunters. As usual, Dick creates a very interesting dystopian world, the kind that you can't get enough information.
The story is a lot more complicated than that, and for those who know "Blade Runner", there are many things that you never heard of in the movie. Mercerism, to name but one. The fact that Deckard is a married man, and not much like the Deckard of the movie.
What I disliked about the novel was similar that what I dislike in every Dick novel I know of. For one, this novel has one of the worst titles in existence that I had the displeasure to lay eyes on. "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?", I cannot think this is anything close to a good title. Dick is quite bad when it comes to naming things. One reflex he has that I cannot stand is that he somehow feels obliged to give ridiculous names to either people or companies, and it just makes the whole thing sound grotesque. In "The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch", one big company was called "Perky Pat Layouts"; in this novel, a TV host is named "Buster Friendly", and I won't list the others. Or just this one more: "andy". That is the word by which Dick has his novel call the androids. In plural form, this becomes "andys". Not very thrilling.
The movie changed those things. "Andys" become "replicants" and "bounty hunters" become "blade runners". All for the better, if you want my opinion. I believe the plotline of the movie to be far superior to that of the novel even though they share a lot, as would be expected. My feeling on Dick is that he crams so much material in his relatively short novels that he cannot get the best of it. Mercerism, mentioned above, is a quite obscure religion that never gets fully explained in the book, and is completely absent from the movie, and one understands why all too easily.
Another thing I think Dick is short on is descriptions. For all I remember, Dick rarely, if ever, describes much; and the result of this is that one doesn't really see the world in which the characters evolve. If you expect visions similar to those in the movie, you will be disappointed. In Dick's novel, Earth is being abandoned by everyone, and it's mostly desert and gets less and less populated. Quite unlike the Earth of the movie, quite unlike the megacities people live in. I think it's an impressive feat that the people who made "Blade Runner" based it on this book. The themes are excellent, and Dick, in my opinion, doesn't reach the full extent of what he could have done. To name one example, the relation between creator and creature, à la Frankenstein, is entirely nonexistent in the novel, whereas it's central in the movie.
If you love the movie, you will only get disappointed by this book if you expect it to do the movie justice; it won't. But it's nevertheless a good read and an interesting one with regards to the "Blade Runner" universe. It won't be as good as the movie - that's hard - but it is a good read, and that is why despite all my negative comments I still gave this novel 4 stars. I would recommend to people who enjoy the movie, but I'm not sure I would have enjoyed the book the same had I not known of the movie first. Yet, there definitely are good things in the book.
One of the best sci-fi books ever...........2007-09-08
Really I don't know what I can add that hasn't already been said about this fantastic book. A must read for even non-sci-fi fans as it could be the book that converts you to the genre!
What a Vision.......2007-09-04
I noticed that many commented on the quality of Dick's writing. This may not be Shakespeare-quality prose, but what sci-fi novel is? (Dune was actually exceedingly well written, though.) Dick is so committed to his vision that he draws you in, and by the end it's hard to escape the eerie despair of life after World War Terminus. It may be clearer after a second or third read, but my only objection is the concept of Mercerism as it's developed late in the book. Its relation to the characters is not explained in-depth, and I was left wondering why it affected certain characters in certain ways. But I don't want to give too much away! This is a definite buy if you enjoy sci-fi lit of any kind.
Are Humans Better than Machines? Let's Hope So..........2007-08-09
Dick presents us with yet another bizarre vision of the future in this fast-paced adventure novel. The protagonist is a bounty hunter who tracks down renegade androids who have killed their off-planet masters and fled to Earth to lose themselves among the general human populace. Complicating his job is the inevitable fact that as technology improves, it becomes increasingly more difficult to tell the androids from real people. So the hunter has to administer very subtle tests to his subjects in order to verify their non-humanity. These tests require the co-operation of the subject, even as the androids - knowing they are about to be detected - are preparing to kill him.
The title is a riff on the reigning philosophy of the period, a faith called Mercerism, which advocates the sanctity of all life (spiders, chickens, goats, whatever) and provides a communal experience that validates human empathy. Dick postulates that no matter how closely the machine mind may approximate humanity, it can never achieve empathy with the living, and so must ultimately fail. Even if Mercerism is a sham, it is better to believe in humanity, it is better to believe that we are not alone, it is better to believe that someone will help us when we find ourselves stuck in the tomb world, than to give in to despair. The machines, which know neither despair nor empathy, have nothing to bind them together, to take them beyond the confines of their own short existences, while humanity, which has the potential for community, can see a bigger, and ultimately more lasting picture.
This is one of Dick's best novels: well-constructed around a strong central character, with a reasonable ending instead of the jaw-dropping "twist" that (while cool) sometimes mars his books. Readers new to this giant of the genre might do well to start here.
Book Description
Known in his lifetime primarily to readers of science fiction, Philip K. Dick (1928-82) is now seen as a uniquely visionary figure, a writer who, in editor Jonathan Lethem's words, "wielded a sardonic yet heartbroken acuity about the plight of being alive in the twentieth century, one that makes him a lonely hero to the readers who cherish him." Posing the questions "What is human?" and "What is real?" in a multitude of fascinating ways, Dick produced works-fantastic and weird yet developed with precise logic, marked by wild humor and soaring flights of religious speculation-that are startlingly prescient imaginative responses to 21st-century quandaries.
This Library of America volume brings together four of Dick's most original novels. The Man in the High Castle (1962), which won the Hugo Award, describes an alternate world in which Japan and Germany have won World War II and America is divided into separate occupation zones. The dizzying The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch (1965) posits a future in which competing hallucinogens proffer different brands of virtual reality. Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (1968), about a bounty hunter in search of escaped androids in a postapocalyptic future, was the basis for the movie Blade Runner. Ubik (1969), with its future world of psychic espionage agents and cryogenically frozen patients inhabiting an illusory "half-life," pursues Dick's theme of simulated realities and false perceptions to ever more disturbing conclusions. As with most of Dick's novels, no plot summary can suggest the mesmerizing and constantly surprising texture of these astonishing books.
Customer Reviews:
dick novel sayer.......2007-09-30
The book is worth owning for the quality of the binding work. Fine paper, pages are well set, the binding is cloth and durable. The novels are also interesting, a combination of time capsule and science fiction.
Interesting but not earth-shaking collection of 1960's sci-fi.......2007-09-25
This is a collection of 4 of Philip K. Dick's sci-fi novels of the 1960's including Hugo award winner "The Man in the High Castle". The other three books are "The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch", "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?", and "Ubik" (see my review).
The Library of America has done the reading public a great service in printing collections of great American authors. This is the 173rd in the collection. I have read almost all of them. This one seems a little out of place, not because of the genre (I love science fiction and look forward to more LOA sci-fi), but because Dick is a second tier sci-fi author.
I know that there are Dick fanatics. But Dick's novels are dated, the characterizations are weak, the dialogue is stilted, and the plots often make no sense - and that's just what his admirers say.
Like all LOA offerings this is an excellent, low-priced hardback book that is well worth the money. Dick is still read-worthy mostly because several of his books have been made into movies - the best known of which are "Total Recall" with soft-core porn star and serial-groping Governor of California Arnold Schwarzenegger and "Blade Runner" with Harrison Ford. These movies are pretty good and "Blade Runner" was a great movie that has been influential. The problem is these movies are nothing like the books. The plots and characters have been changed by the screenplay authors, and I'm not talking a little bit but major changes in plot and character. So it really isn't fair to credit Dick with these movies that are loosely based, at best, on his works.
To really get the most out of these books and understand Dick's place in literature you need to understand a few things about the author. First of all Dick was nuts. Certifiably. In and out of asylum kind of nuts. His whole life. He was also into every drug you can imagine. His personal life was a shambles. His books never really sold well - as a matter of fact he was on welfare or bummed off of friends most of his life. No one knows whether anything Dick said was true or not. Many of his claims are clearly false. Some are not. He apparently was monitored by the FBI at some time, but then so were most malcontents of that period. But the prime suspect in a break-in of Dick's house was - Dick himself - as Dick himself admitted.
Dick liked to go to sci-fi conventions and use drugs. The 1968 Bay area sci-fi convention was known as "Drugcon" (Drug Convention) due to the prevalence of various mind-altering chemicals. This is important because one of Dick's novels main problems is that Dick's novels and stories often don't make sense.
And so we come to the four novels in this book. The first, "The Man in the High Castle" won the Hugo award of 1962. (The Hugo and the Nebula award are the highest honors in Science Fiction writing for you non Sci-Fi lovers) This novel is an alternate history if the US lost the Second World War. Interesting concept but the book's characters were particularly weak with none of them being particularly sympathetic. And the ending was a typical Dick ending where he made it possible that the whole book prior to that point may have been an illusion. The middle part was slow, but hey, it won a Hugo so give it a read.
The second book, "The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch" is a confused work that doesn't make sense as characters die and re-appear from various time-lines. Dick's favorite theme was "Is reality real", but this book has all kinds of plot inconsistencies. And any book that Yoko Lennon wanted to make a movie of is clearly suspect.
"Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep" is the third book and the source of "Blade Runner". The movie screenplay is more interesting than the book. Dick's female characters almost always tended to by tricky, sex-starved, and one-dimensional. The movie does a much better job with the female characters.
The last book, "Ubik", is by far the best of the lot, though it won no prizes. The constant making fun of capitalist, American culture is one of my favorite things in this book. See my review for further details.
Overall, these are interesting books with the faults noted above. I think Heinlein, Card, Asimov, and other Sci-Fi writers are better though.
Much-deserved canonization.......2007-09-19
One needn't have been a sci-fi aficionado to have recognized Phil Dick's importance in American letters. His work had a prescience that relied only partly on the imaginative constructs that are staples of the genre. Dick's looks into the future were always grounded in a profound understanding of the eternal present of the human psyche -- man's desires and capabilities and the tensions created by the failure of the latter to achieve the ambitions of the former.
The four works in this collection reflect that sensitivity. They also explore, in successively more comprehensive ways, the relation between man and God, how each is a reflection of the other. In a real sense, they are works of remarkable piety.
As its inclusion in the Library of America suggests, these novels are well worth the time of the reading public.
Remarkable.......2007-07-26
I read alot, mostly sci-fi. I have never read anything like these stories by PKD. He must have been really deep into these stories as he was writing them. Very enjoyable.
The Definitive PKD.......2007-06-08
In the 1960s, when he wrote these four novels, Philip K. Dick was not known, as he is today, as an acclaimed "literary" science-fiction writer and visionary who inspired many films. Since his death in 1982, his reputation has steadily soared, a little bit too late, and now this former genre journeyman toiling in obscurity has become the first sf author to be enshrined in a handsome omnibus volume in the esteemed Library of America series. Of course, I had to buy it even though I already owned multiple copies of all these novels. It is a genuine pleasure to read any of the LOA volumes, so lovingly produced they are. And this one especially so, compiled as it was by an author heavily influenced by Dick, Jonathan Lethem. You will never see a biographical chronology so interesting to read in its own right: we even learn that Timothy Leary called Dick during John and Yoko's bed-in and he put the famous pair on the phone to tell PKD that they wanted to film one of the four novels contained here, The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch. Incidentally, Lethem's taste is impeccable. Though Dick wrote no fewer than 21 novels in the 1960s (plus a couple of dozen more before and after), these are without a doubt the four best: The Three Stigmata, The Man in the High Castle, Ubik, and Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? One could easily compile another such volume with four more extremely strong novels of this period: Clans of the Alphane Moon, Dr. Bloodmoney, Now Wait for Last Year, and Martian Time-Slip. However, the ones collected here are the ones I would pick, if I could have only four. They are all absolute classics and support many rereadings. I remember when in the 1970s, I encountered Three Stigmata for the first time and could not totally make sense of it, but I was intrigued. It was hallucinogenic, it was trippy, it was theological. A few years later I found myself seeking it out again, rereading with a passion, finally really "getting it," and then compulsively seeking out everything I could find by PKD. It took me years but I eventually tracked down every last out-of-print forgotten paperback. Since then all his works have been reprinted and made easily available. But my original "discovery" experience is why this LOA volume means so much to me now. The Man in the High Castle is perhaps the best alternate history ever written, a speculation on what life would have been like if the Germans and Japanese had won World War II. Ubik is a brilliant ontological quest into the very structure of reality. Do Androids Dream, the novel on which the film Blade Runner is based, is among other things a meditation on what it means to be human. These four novels have become like cornerstones in my own life's journey. For them to have been given this respectful and definitive publication is something that brings me a lot of pleasure, and would also, I think, have pleased Philip K. Dick.
Amazon.com
Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? is a book that most people think they remember and almost always get more or less wrong. Ridley Scott's film Blade Runner took a lot from it, and threw a lot away. Wonderful in itself, the film is a flash thriller, whereas Dick's novel is a sober meditation. As we all know, bounty hunter Rick Deckard is stalking a group of androids who have returned from space with short life spans and murder on their minds--where Scott's Deckard was Harrison Ford, Dick's is a financially strapped municipal employee with bills to pay and a depressed wife. In a world where most animals have died, and pet keeping is a social duty, he can only afford a robot imitation, unless he gets a big financial break.
The genetically warped "chickenhead" John Isidore has visions of a tomb-world where entropy has finally won. And everyone plugs in to the spiritual agony of Mercer, whose sufferings for the sins of humanity are broadcast several times a day. Prefiguring the religious obsessions of Dick's last novels, this book asks dark questions about identity and altruism. After all, is it right to kill the killers just because Mercer says so? --Roz Kaveney, Amazon.co.uk
Book Description
It was January 2021, and Rick Deckard had a license to kill.
Somewhere among the hordes of humans out there, lurked several rogue androids. Deckard's assignmet--find them and then..."retire" them. Trouble was, the androids all looked exactly like humans, and they didn't want to be found!
Book Description
This book of essays looks at the multitude of texts and influences which converge in Ridley Scott’s film Blade Runner, especially the film’s relationship to its source novel, Philip K. Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? Essays consider political, moral and technological issues raised by the film, as well as literary, filmic, technical and aesthetic questions. Contributors discuss the film’s psychological and mythic patterns, importance political issues and the roots of the film in Paradise Lost, Frankenstein, detective fiction, and previous science fiction cinema.
Customer Reviews:
Essays that , like, prove it's amazing and stuff.......2005-05-26
For the ignorant fools who didn't know what they were watching the first 168 times around, this book has essays with subtexts and subconcious imagary that will blow your mind.
A box office failure shined to gold by looking-back critics and an army of fans, Blade Runner is now the requisite sci-fi inspiration film. It's still a stylish but bleak, cold film and has rightfully earned its supercult status. A lot of people responded to it in their own way.
The book has plenty of food for thought, but it gets to be much after a while. Authors compare the various themes in Blade Runner and use this as a springboard for ruminations on Frankenstein, feminism, film noir, you name it, Blade Runner has it. Slave narrative, horror film, it's in there. And there's room for an updated version as plenty of published material has appeared since this book did in the early 90s. Recommended for the obsessed Blade Runner fan--and there is no other kind.
Fascinating and Exhaustive.......2001-08-30
I thought my 10 year career as Blade Runner appreciator would have overturned all the 'stones' of interest - and yet this book yields countless articles many of which containing subtleties and revelations totally new to me. Of course, if you're not a major blade runner fan you'll want to become one first.
Oxygen for any Blade Runner fan.......2001-08-21
A must have for any die hard BR fan. Well crafted essays and opinions covering every angle a fan could ever hope for. Reads similar to a textbook. If only Scott could release a DVD version of BR this detailed.
A difintive analysis of 'Blade Runner'........2001-06-18
This book is a must-have for Blade Runner fans. Wonderfully written essays. Desser's article comparing the film to John Milton's poem/novel Paradise Lost and Frankenstein is a writing at its mind-bending best.
One of the finest books about this amazing film.......2000-07-17
If you are looking for info about the making of BLADE RUNNER you'd best look elsewhere, but if like me you want to read intelligent analysis of this amazing film then this book is one of the finest you'll find. The range of the essays is wide, looking at every facet of the film; the script, music, symbolism and much more. I've read many books on the subject of BLADE RUNNER and this one was one of the most enlightening and informative. There is more to BLADE RUNNER than you might think - and this book will show you in considerable detail. Highly recommended for fans of the film.
Customer Reviews:
What is reality; Who is truly human? .......2007-09-24
In this omnibus, some of the Philip K. Dick stories that explore the borders of reality are brought together:
In "The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch," Dick works through the nature of reality and illusion. Set in a dystopian future, Earth is going through a "fire" age and humans cannot survive more than a few seconds outside during daylight; this has forced humanity to spend daylight hours in a warren of buildings and tunnels. Additionally, a draft is set up to send humans out to the colonies on Mars and various asteroids - whether they want to or not. These colonies are living at subsistence level and the colonists there invariably end up hooked on a drug called Can-D, that allows them to live in an illusory world populated by Perky Pat and her boyfriend Walt, thereby escaping their miserable existence. They use miniature items to create these worlds; these "mins" are provided by the same company that supplies the illegal Can-D, which is run by Leo Bulero.
When the famous explorer Palmer Eldritch returns from his trip to Proxa, he brings with him some lichen, with which he creates a product called Chew-Z - a legal alternative to Can-D. This is a more potent drug that allows people to create their own universes, without needing the mins. However, what most do not know is that all these universes are controlled by Eldritch. Is Palmer still human, or did something else come back in his place?
Playing onto our worst nightmares - namely those in which we continually think we've awakened, only to find we're still inside the nightmare - this story keeps you guessing as to what is real and what is hallucination. It is difficult to explain too much of the plot without giving away key elements that will spoil the story, which is why I've stuck mainly to what is given in the editorial review or on the book cover. However, I found the story to be very much in the lines of a typical Philip K. Dick story - twisted and convoluted. Well worth the read, however.
In "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?," we find ourselves alternating between two intertwining plot lines. One involves Rick Deckard, a bounty hunter who "retires" escaped androids. The latest model - the Nexus-6 - can only be differentiated from humans through use of a sophisticated psychological testing mechanism that measures empathy levels; empathy being the one thing that androids quite simply lack. The other plot line revolves around J. R. Isadore, a "chickenhead" (that is to say, a man who has mutated enough that he is starting to lose his cognitive abilities, but not so much that he cannot still manage to take care of himself and serve the public in some small way). He works for the Van Ness Pet Hospital, which serves people who own electric animals. However, his day gets off to an uneven start when first he discovers another tenant in his previously empty building, and then he is given a real cat - which subsequently dies on the way in to the hospital before he even realizes it is actually alive.
Similar in theme to "Stigmata," this book explores the differences between reality and fantasy by probing the differences between man and machine(sometimes that line is very blurred), electric animal and real animal, and so forth. Always in the background is the constant back and forth of Mercerism vs. Buster Friendly, who always gently (and sometimes not so gently) accuses Mercer as a fraud and fake.
I found the story enjoyable; dense and difficult at times, but the interchange and interplays are always deft and intriguing. This classic bit of surreal sci-fi is not to be missed.
When reading "Ubik," the first comparison that came to mind was Don DeLilo's White Noise (Penguin Great Books of the 20th Century)" Not due to any special thematic comparison, but because of the advertisements for great new products named Ubik at the beginning of each paragraph in the story; this reminded me of the constant low-level onslaught of information that came at you while reading "White Noise."
As far as the story itself - what can one say without spoiling it? The main character is Joe Chip, a tester for the Runciter Group, which is a group of "Anti-psis" - they null out psionic power to help protect people's privacy. I was by stages amused and appalled by the vision of 1992 painted in this novel - apparently we were supposed to have made our way to Mars and the Moon by now, with colonies on each, and we're supposed to be dressing even more outlandishly than we do now. However, it seems odd to me to note the things that are kept in the style of the 50s and 60s. Women are either young and in the service industry or they are matrons and stay at home. If they are other than that, then they are shown as . . . strange, even dangerous, such as Pat Conroy in this story. It is this that makes her such an appropriate foil for Joe Chip, as he stumbles through his attempts to keep the group together after a major fiasco occurs when the Glen Runciter - the owner of the company - takes a group of his most highly skilled workers to the Lunar colony for a job and is there attacked.
The rest of the story shakes down while the surviving characters notice a strange combination of entropy and growth - recession and coming into being. The world seems to be regressing to an older era, but at the same time, they keep getting messages from "beyond" instructing them on what to do. Then the question arises - who is really dead? Who is really alive? What is reality? Who is creating it?
Not for a light evening's read, that's for sure! But well worth the slodge if you have the time. Most intriguing and something to keep the ol' cerebellum stretched. Give it a try.
"A Scanner Darkly" was the most difficult of the stories for me, personally - I'm not quite certain why, but it just didn't hold my interest as much as the others in the omnibus. Telling the story (on the surface) of the deterioration of the undercover narcotics officer "Fred," living as Bob Arctor - due to substance abuse - into paranoia and split personalities when he is told to begin investigating himself intensely (undercover agents wear a "blur" suit and none of them know each other, nor are they aware of whom is who in the field). Additionally, the federal government is seeking the source of Substance D, a deadly and highly addictive drug that invariably leads to burn-out in the case of users. Darkly comical in the earlier parts of the story - and in general any time when Arctor and his friends and roommates are sitting around and shooting the breeze - it is also in its way terribly depressing.
Overall, however, I give a big thumbs up to this omnibus. If you're a fan of Philip K. Dick, obviously you don't want to miss it. If you enjoy fiction that challenges your perceptions of reality, you definitely don't want to miss it!
The best PKD novel collection.......2005-06-17
Counterfeit Unrealities, a hardcover omnibus published by the Science Fiction Book Club, contains four of Dick's best novels:
The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch
Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?
Ubik
A Scanner Darkly
While it lacks an introduction, notes, or any other exclusive content, the convenience of a single volume makes this recommended for any reader looking for all four novels.
Average customer rating:
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Blade Runner: Based on the novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep: Official Movie Tie-In
Philip K. Dick
Manufacturer: RH Audio
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ASIN: 0739342754
Release Date: 2007-11-27 |
Book Description
It was January 2021, and Rick Deckard had a license to kill.
Somewhere among the hordes of humans out there, lurked several rogue androids. Deckard's assignmet--find them and then..."retire" them. Trouble was, the androids all looked exactly like humans, and they didn't want to be found!
From the Paperback edition.
Product Description
4 Book Set By Philip K. Dick; Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?; Radio Free Albemuth; Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said.
Books:
- Dragon's Fire (The Dragonriders of Pern)
- Dreaming in Code: Two Dozen Programmers, Three Years, 4,732 Bugs, and One Quest for Transcendent Software
- Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance
- Drive to the East (Settling Accounts Trilogy, Book 2)
- Dungeons & Dragons Monster Gift Set (Dungeons & Dragons d20 3.5 Fantasy Roleplaying)
- Endymion
- First Meetings in Ender's Universe
- Fleet of Worlds
- Foundation and Empire (Foundation Novels)
- Foundations of Earth Science (4th Edition)
Books Index
Books Home
Recommended Books
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