+(Large).JPG)
Random House Canada, Copyright 1968,
Printed 1982,
216 pages
ISBN: 0-345-30129-3
Read: February 2012 (at age 33)
First time read
What to Expect:
The alternate (original?) title, Do
Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, is much, much better on many levels. It’s a stand-alone work of dystopic
science fiction. More action-adventure
than anything else.
From the back cover:
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 assignment – find them and
the…”retire” them.
Trouble
was, the androids all looked and acted exactly like humans, and they didn’t
want to be found!
My comments: (spoilers ahoy!)
I quite enjoyed much of the book. It kind of fell apart on me when the action/police
procedural took a right-turn into a surreal religious bit at the end. Other than that, I enjoyed the characters and
the setting. There were several ways
that I thought the book could have gone – my preference would have been "can’t kill the escaped slaves
androids, let’s support them as citizens instead." The book kind of wavered to that direction, but
instead the main character just killed them all, and decided that he was the
messiah for a while, and then fell back to square 1.
Rating: 3
Premise:
Our hero is a bounty hunter, chasing down
rogue androids (who killed their masters in the solar system colonies, and
escaped to earth.
Characters:
There weren't too many characters that were very developed – our hero and his wife, his bosses, and the androids and their pal.
Setting:
Earth has been devastated by nuclear war
and is almost depopulated. Animals are
almost extinct, but somehow there are lots of people still around. It’s a pretty neat setting, but doesn’t seem
very strong when you stop and think about it.
I never did really *get* the whole “must own an animal” thing. I loved how there was a single television
show – that must be an artifact from the sixties – it sure turned out
differently to today.
Plot:
Well, we have to find the androids, and we
have to kill them. Um. This pretty much happens. There are some twists and turns along the way
that help reveal setting. It was pretty
straightforward and fast-paced. There
were some pretty fantastic scenes along the way.
One thing I liked about the book:
The story raised some interesting questions
about what humanity is, and hung a decent story on the questions.
One thing I didn’t like about the book:
I didn’t like the ending – things were all
gritty and realistic, and then boom! Surreal! Back to square 1!
Readability:
Very readable and fast paced.
Other opinions:
Good review. Similar read to mine, but I think liked it a bit more.
I was missing the depth that some other people found, I think.
Similar read to mine.
There were a bunch more – a lot of very
very positive reviews, a few more like mine – it had interesting questions, but
didn’t always work for me.
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