Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? by Philip K. DickRead about the other entries on the list.
Honestly, I struggled with whether to include this one. I figured I’d get a bunch of people yelling at me if I didn’t at least acknowledge it, even though there really isn’t a central love story. Dick’s works often grapple with what it means to be human, both how we can know ourselves and what the world around us is. Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? follows the (sort of) bounty hunter Rick Deckard, tasked with “retiring” rogue androids. He ends up in a tangled relationship with the very nearly human android Rachael, and, you know, could be an android himself. One of the novel’s central questions is empathy, that ability to imagine and honor the interior states of others. Maybe it’s love, maybe it isn’t—maybe you’re human, or you aren’t—but if you can’t tell the difference, what’s the difference?
Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? also appears on Ryan Britt's list of six of the best detectives from science fiction literature, Weston Williams's list of fifteen classic science fiction books, Allegra Frazier's list of four great dystopian novels that made it to the big screen, Ryan Menezes's list of five movies that improved the book, Amanda Yesilbas and Charlie Jane Anders's list of the twelve most unfaithful movie versions of science fiction and fantasy books, Katharine Trendacosta and Charlie Jane Anders's list of the ten greatest personality tests in sci-fi & fantasy, John Mullan's list of ten of the best titles in the form of questions, Charlie Jane Anders and Michael Ann Dobbs's list of ten classic sci-fi books that were originally considered failures and Robert Collins's top ten list of dystopian novels.
--Marshal Zeringue
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