The novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? is similar to the movie Blade Runner which was based on it, but also very different. Rick Deckard is married rather than single and surprisingly, owns an electric sheep. Since animals are nearly extinct, owning one is a status symbol. Those who can’t afford a real animal, buy electronic facsimiles. Due to the lack of animals, everyone on earth is a vegetarian through necessity and eating meat is considered atrocious.

Deckard, like most men, wears a lead codpiece to keep the radiation in the atmosphere from making him infertile. Most humans have left for the colonies, so Earth is nearly empty. Radiation has turned some people into mutants called specials. (In addition to Deckard, the other major viewpoint character is John Isidore, a special with diminished mental capacity who’s not allowed to go to the colonies.)

The television series Futurama takes place in a city called New New York. In this book written decades earlier, New New York is the name of a city on Mars. This book also uses “fork” as an expletive decades before the television show The Good Place did.

There’s a piece of technology called a mood organ that lets you change your mood. You can make yourself happy with a push of a button, but Deckard’s wife Iran makes herself depressed because you should be depressed about how horrible the world is.

Another standard bit of home technology is the empathy box which allows you to share the thoughts and feelings of everyone else who is using it at the same time. It’s considered immoral to keep good feelings to yourself. You need to share them.

The empathy box is part of the religion called Mercerism which worships a man named Mercer. Mercer apparently had the ability to bring dead animals back to life by reversing time, but is also forced to repeatedly die over and over. People share the experience of him climbing up a hill while stones are thrown at him. The religion is revealed to be a fraud, but despite this, it’s still true. I was surprised to discover the book Blade Runner was based on devotes so much of its pages to a substantial examination of religion. I even think it’s one of the best depictions of religion in fiction.

Androids are explicitly linked to slaves. Colonists each get a personalized android of their own. The androids only live for a few years. It’s illegal to have sex with them, but people still do. Deckard is a bounty hunter whose job is to kill escaped androids. His wife calls him a murderer for killing androids on the first page. Earlier models of androids were only indistinguishable from humans by not having empathy, but the latest model might be empathetic. The empathy test to check for androids also picks up humans with low empathy, so the possibility is raised that humans with low empathy might be mistaken for androids and killed.

This book is not futuristic in some respects. Despite everyone using vidphones, secretaries get people on the phone for their bosses and can listen in on their calls. Bosses are all male while their secretaries are all female. Wives are subservient to their husbands and don’t have jobs. Philip K. Dick was never very good at writing female characters, but it’s a nice touch to have the last chapter be from Iran’s point of view.

I can’t believe it took me so long to read this book. It’s now one of my favorites. It’s wild and out there in all the right ways and the descriptions of Mercerism are stunning.