He thought, too, about his need for a real animal; within him an actual hatred once more manifested itself towards his electric sheep, which he had to tend, had to care about, as if it lived. The tyranny of an object, he thought. It doesn't know I exist. Like the androids, it had no ability to appreciate the existence of another. He had never thought of this before, the similarity between an electric animal and an andy.
Before I actually get down to business with the above quotation , I'd just like to mention that, while at some point I know that I did have this information in my head, when I began this novel with no recollection of the fact that the movie Blade Runner was based on it. So a few weeks ago, after reading the article on Science Fiction that mentioned that the movie was a classic, I actually laid down in my bed and watched the movie, or at least the first half. Flash forward about three weeks and I'm reading the first pages of Electric Sheep, feeling almost immediately that something really odd is going on in my mind. A bounty hunter for android humans? Where have I heard that before... I'm ashamed to say it took me about 30 pages to make the connection in full, I honestly thought until that point that the movie writers had simply ripped off this book, and that I was the first one to notice.
Reading the second half of the assignment with this knowledge, I began to recognize the reasons why it had taken me so long to feel certain that there was a connection between the movie and the novel. There are significant portions of the book that were removed in order to create its cinematic equivalent. Namely, the title. There are no sheep in movie Blade Runner. And more specifically, there is no concept of this status symbol--or any of its implications to the plot--in the movie adaptation. Another elimination is the whole theological concept of Mercer and Mercerism (and, accordingly, all the implications that this phenomenon has to the development of the society and the characters in the novel). Hmm, they take out the religious aspect of the story...and the social status aspect of the story...and they throw in Harrison Ford (as a rugged andy-killing bachelor, in the case of the movie). No wonder I didn't accept the movie as this book's equivalent. All of the literary aspects were removed so that all was left was a slightly cerebral sci-fi action movie focused solely on the "androids are more complex than a single-minded bounty hunter might initially think" vein of the story.
On the one hand, I feel like some essential threads of the literary version are pulled right out of the story's tapestry. But at the same time, as the novel's introducer points out, there are so many themes, so many questions asked, strung out in single paragraphs of this novel that you can't blame Hollywood for just picking a couple--at times I feel like I'm getting mental whiplash just trying to transition between contemplations.
Ok, ok ok ok. Now to the theme I chose to focus on in this first entry. I chose the quote that is at the top of this entry, not for it's insight, but for the doubt it raises in my mind in light of the experiences Rick has in the pages that follow. Focused in the beginning of the story on his own problems, and considering the Androids in terms of how many he can "retire" for his own monetary benefit, Rick is in the perfect place for his life to get really complicated, really quickly. The quote above represents how much room Rick has to grow and change his perception, to begin to wonder more about the andys in light of the Nexus-6 development and the research he must conduct. Thus, this quote represents a prediction, and a point of perspective for the future. By my next entry, I suspect that Rick will be a bit less able to equate the capacities of an andy to the capabilities of his electric sheep. And maybe he'll even be questioning what truly defines the difference between a biological human and an android, and whether the quantitative distinctions really make the android--fearing for its very real life--any less human or worthy of being treated as one. I'm pretty sure I will.
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