Do Androids Dream Of Electric Sheep by Philip K. Dick

I'm reading a novel called Do Androids Dream Of Electric Sheep by Philip K. Dick.

It's set in a not so distant future in the year of 2021, and most parts of the world are ravaged wastelands where no living being can live due to the radiation poisoning from the nuclear wars during World War Terminus. Only a few places remain and that's where most of the people live. The ones who didn't stay on earth migrated to other planets such as Mars. The places that remain liveable on earth are mostly huge cities with skyscrapers with neonlights lighting up the city. The lights are the only thing i think represents happiness and hope in this novel since everything is just darkness and misery in the broken world. The novel tells us the lives of two men, a bounty hunter called Rick Deckard and John Isidore a man who works as a driver for an animal repair shop. Since the third world war ended, a lot of people have emigrated to other planets and as they do that they receive a so called "Andy". An Andy is an Android which are used in the colonies on Mars as slaves, they look like humans but they do not function as humans. Since they get mistreated as slaves on Mars many of them try to escape to Earth to get rid of the psychological isolation they are being exposed to.

Rick Deckards job as a bounty hunter is to track down these andorids and "retire" them since they can be dangerous, because androids aren't sympathetic and don't react the same way as humans do in certain situations. Earlier androids were easier to detect because of their lack of intelligence, but as the android technology improves it's much more difficult for the bounty hunters to distinguish whether or not it's a human or an android. To do that they make an empathy test called the Voigt Kampff.

By asking questions that would evoke an emotional response. And since the androids aren't sympathetic their response is either feigned or absent. The other main character John Isidore is still on earth due to his low iq. Because everyone has to do an iq test in order to leave Earth and he didn't pass the test. John lives in a deserted apartment all by himself. But one day a girl moves in the apartment below him, the girls name is Pris and she is an android identical in appearance to another android called Rachael which Rick Deckard met at a meeting in Seattle when he was going to test the Voigt Kampff test on the latest android model The Nexus-6. When I read the novel i get some kind of deep insight when I think about the humans in the novel, I mean how do you define a human being?

I think it's not if you are really a human that matters. I think that just having the will to live, as these androids have is a sign of human nature, all the feelings we humans feel gathered all at once as the will to live.

Although the novel is kind of sad it is written in a way that makes you think what's right and wrong and that's what made me interested in the book in the first place.

/Rebecca Black