Jesse Walker on Philip K. Dick's Androids

Panther Science Fiction

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. "What do you do," one of the robocops asks him, "roam around killing people and telling yourself they're androids?" It's a complicated situation. But then, writes Jesse Walker, androids play a complicated role in Dick's fiction.