Coming to Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? from Blade Runner is an interesting experience, given the drastic changes in tone (the glitzy corporate overpopulation of Blade Runner vs. the post-apocalyptic depression of Do Androids Dream?). Shaking the dust of Blade Runner from your sandals is necessary before continuing.

The primary tension in Electric Sheep comes down to empathy vs. cold intellect (human vs. android), and whether an android could develop empathy, which is never properly resolved. In one moment, an android is clipping the legs off a spider just to see if it can walk with four, but in the next is distraught over losing a friend.

Real-world engineer hat: it wouldn't be that difficult to make androids "feel" empathy, any more so than it would be to make them "feel" anything else, including self-preservation. This is, of course, assuming you could get them to read the emotions (or simulate reading the emotions based on scripts of circumstances), which is also not a difficult feat, considering what they've already done. All you have to do is (to paraphrase I, Robot) induce neural feedback upon encountering the suffering of others. But, then again, the core of this novel is not the care, feeding, and bounty hunting of androids, but something more resembling the hypocrisy of man, religion, and the tension of empathy vs. intelligence within ourselves.

Electric Sheep is a deep book wearing the mask of a shallow book, but, in the end, it is only half a mask (the Mercerism plum line cannot be hidden). For those expected a by-the-numbers noire, it's there in spades (Sam Spades, one might say), but everything about the animals and Mercerism might feel strange and out of place. For those expected a scifi, Kafkaesque story involving robots, we've got your alienated protagonist undergoing a mystical transformation right here.

Further thoughts:

- "Sex with robots is more common than most people think."
- It's weird reading future scifi stories written before cell phones and the internet.
- Owning an electric toad would be pretty awesome. In fact, I think I'd prefer it to a real toad.