Jesse Walker on Philip K. Dick's Androids

"Blade Runner"

In Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, the Philip K. Dick novel that inspired the film Blade Runner, a bounty hunter pursues a group of androids who have been posing as human beings. He is eventually arrested and accused of being an android himself. The officers bring him to what turns out to be a counterfeit police station run entirely by androids, not all of whom are aware that they aren't human.

It's a complicated situation. But then, androids play a complicated role in Dick's fiction. As Jesse Walker analyzes, the deep problem, for Dick, wasn't that mechanisms might become more manlike. It's that men might be reduced to mechanisms.