Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?
Philip K. Dick, Gollancz

With the new miniseries coming out on 25 November, this seems a good moment to return to the source material behind it and the two blockbuster films. That pot-of-sci-fi-gold source material is, of course, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, a shortish novel by renowned sci-fi writer Philip K. Dick, published in 1968.

I read the book as a teenager, but any memory I had of it was then wiped away by the zillion times I watched , the 1982 movie directed by Ridley Scott, and the handful of times I watched Denis Villeneuve’s 2017 follow-up, , which cleaved closely to Scott’s original vision. I returned to the book, therefore, with few preconceptions.

There are a lot of differences between page and screen. Just for starters, the book version of Rick Deckard, the bounty hunter who tracks down rogue Nexus-6 androids that have entered his city illegally from off-world colonies, isn’t quite the super-cool hero that Harrison Ford gives us on screen.

Book Rick is married to an unhappy woman named Iran, rather than being moodily single in a stunning designer apartment. The couple have a machine that allows them to set their moods every day, but no piano covered in artful photographs. They also have an electric sheep grazing up on the roof where they park their flying car. (The electric sheep, to be clear, isn’t in the movies.) It is a matter of embarrassment to Rick and Iran that they cannot afford a real sheep, when their neighbour has a real horse. In this heavily polluted, post-apocalyptic world, nothing is as precious as a live animal.

You can see why Ridley Scott ditched the pet strand, as well as Rick’s wife, to give us the hero from the films

This matter of the electric sheep sets the scene for an absurdist strand that runs heavy through the whole novel. Book Rick dreams of one potential pet after another, including an ostrich, before finally buying a black Nubian goat. You can see why Scott ditched the whole pet strand (including the goat), as well as Rick’s wife, in order to give us the more sexually available and less ridiculous hero we know from the movies.

Another big difference is that, in the book, a religion called Mercerism is central to the plot. Our characters plug themselves into machines in order to fuse with Mercer, their religious leader. I found this confusing and unnecessary, and I can see why Scott bunged it on the scrap heap.

So, lots of differences. Yet a surprising amount of the novel is rendered very faithfully indeed on the big screen. There’s the whole set-up, of course – a post-fall world, illegal androids, bounty hunters – and the strong connection between Rick and the android Rachael Rosen. (You may choose to ignore his musings on her breasts being too small, this being the work of a male sci-fi writer in 1968.) And then there’s the sympathy that Rachael elicits from both Rick and the reader.

It also preserves the very cool, futuristic vibe that you get from the book, especially when Rachael and Rick are together. The special tests that Rick carries out on suspected androids, with all their weird animal-related questions and focus on pupil reaction, are all essentially lifted from the page.

Would I recommend the book? I think rereading it has given me a deeper understanding of many key elements of the films. The use of animals in the first movie now makes perfect sense, for example. But even if you aren’t a big fan of the films or have never seen them, I would say yes, this is a classic, and well worth tucking into.

Emily H. Wilson is the author of the Sumerians series (, and , all published by Titan) and she is currently working on her first sci-fi novel. She is a former editor of and you can follow her on Instagram @emilyhwilson1

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