![]() It acts as a doorway into the central theme of the story, which is that of empathy. And yet, like most everything in this novel, this concept of animal ownership goes much deeper than that. There’s even a scene later on where Deckard is shopping for a new animal, and the sales tactics are right out of a car dealership’s playbook (true in 1968, and sadly unchanged to this day). This need to own an animal in a world almost completely devoid of wildlife is an undisguised reaction to the American obsession with cars: we compare cars, lust after better cars no matter which one you already own, even form clubs around certain historic or popular vehicles. All his neighbors have real animals, as far as he can tell. It’s not, though, and he’s living a lie by tending it. A sheep that is his most prized possession, or would be if it was real. He then heads up to the roof of his home to tend to his electric sheep. The discussion he and Iran have about dialing emotions is in equal parts hilarious, sad, and terrifying. A professional bounty hunter who tracks down escaped androids, living in a dystopia that rivals anything Orwell wrote, argues with his wife about why she deliberately dialed an emotional state of despair on their mood organ. Rick Deckard’s life is fascinating on every level. And yet right from the first page PKD draws you into something wholly unexpected. Give it a chance.” Whatever the source is, sometimes adaptations leave us with two wonderful things, however vaguely connected.Įven though I first read this novel almost 20 years after seeing the film, it already held a special place in my heart for the simple reason that it inspired the movie. I say to them, and to you, “If the goal in adaptations was to be perfectly true to the source material, we wouldn’t have Blade Runner, or Apocalypse Now. Fans always seem to want the strictest, most literal interpretation possible. The adaptation is the one I always point to when people are fretting over the changes being made to a much-loved book in order to adapt it to the screen. I love them for completely different reasons, which is fascinating to me because it’s theoretically the opposite of the goal when it comes to adapting a book to the screen. ![]() An entire book could be written about the differences between Androids Dream and its on-screen counterpart–one need look no further than the titles to begin that discussion - but what continually amazes me, however, is how the two could be so different from one another and yet, simultaneously, so similar. The film still stands today as my favorite movie, so much so I gave my son the middle name of Deckard (Rachel being high on our list of names for girls, had fate taken us in that direction). Like many people my age or younger, I came to Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? by way of the film adaptation: Ridley Scott’s 1982 masterpiece Blade Runner.
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