Unfortunately, I don’t think they do. The book never answered the title question, and that actually kind of bummed me out.

But that’s not exactly the point of the novel huh? The context of this book is actually quite incredible. Written in the late sixties, this title has the pleasure of being something novel: a continuing inspiration for sci-fi both in film and literature of that age and onward. There are obvious criticisms one can make surrounding the direction and details of the book, but to a majority of those I say that for what it was, the book accomplished much.

I’ll start with some criticisms anyway though, to keep things pointy.

A book about androids, not from the perspective of an android.

The flaw right away with this criticism is that, well, if this were true the book would be short(er). The reasoning behind this though is that the entire question of androids leads us to want to see from their eyes as much as possible. The second Blade Runner movie, 2049, did just that. For some members of the long running audience, this book can seem quite boring, giving the perspectives to two humans instead of two androids, or possibly one human and one android. Despite the fact that we delve almost intimately into the perspective of androids and of how their lives are simply led, the lack of a true perspective from their vision does assist to the idea that we are different from them, that androids leave little, and have little to be understood from inside their heads. In addition, it does leave an element of mystery, the question of what an android thinks, feels, and dreams of is left to our wonderment. It seems to be both a good thing and a bad thing when you think about it, which once again leaves something in this book completely up to us.

All sorts of questions, very little answers.

I’m probably an enemy to postmodernism as a whole just because of how I enjoy answers, but even this book presents a slew of questions without answers for something written when it was. Not to say that postmodernism wasn’t already in full swing, but the nature of the book and its literal descriptions, the direct way it carried itself, led one to believe it wouldn’t follow the conceptual steps of say, The Great Gatsby. More so, this book hardly presented the questions in a proper light.

Was the question really concerning the ethnicity of androids? The ending portrayed otherwise, more along the lines of our questioning of life. The beginning of the book certainly questioned the idea of marriage and love, and the middle of the book questioned what it even means to exist. All sorts of interesting questions, perspectives, yet no actual solid answers. I think of these bits as something of a mental carnival, watching the flame spewers create fun feats of danger at their expense and our amusement. Is there a point to that? Of course not. But it sure is fun to watch.

Roads not taken, themes not explored, chapters not written.

To say this book skimmed out on some wickedly cool ideas is an understatement. From the first chapter I was blown away with how quickly the thing caught my attention. A mood organ to control how you feel? The fact that it can be tapped by someone else? A husband forcing his wife to feel a certain way about him? A woman forcing depression on herself for no explicit reason? It was a wonderful idea with such an intriguing urgency in the readers mind to know more. And then the book never touched it again.

I suppose that is the problem with most novel titles, the fact that the entire thing is new leaves some roads untouched. This is my first PK Dick novel, so maybe he did explore this concept later. But in this book, he practically abandoned it while the iron was incredibly hot. It made for a delicious beginning, so it wasn’t too much to say I felt a tad let down when the concept introduced to me wasn’t revisited.

On the topic of not revisiting things, the entire book is physically short, yet feels immensely long. One person I talked to while reading the end of the novel told me that he spent a longer time reading long title Les Miserables, than this little thing. I was surprised, but not in conflict with that opinion. The book is sometimes dry to get through, yet at the end I found myself wanting more. If a book can both do many things undesirable yet have you wanting more of that exact flavor, then I’d say it is a very good book.

While some may prefer the movies this book made, I’d generally say this book has a compact version of the best of both worlds. Deckard was far more interesting in this version, and the entire concept of questioning one’s own identity was hit hard many times throughout the piece. Both elements of the first and second Blade Runner movies strung true in this book, and while it didn’t have the proper length or finesse of either movie, it still, in my opinion, outdid them both.