Does Ridley Scott dream of electric unicorns?
Earlier this summer, I saw Bladerunner for my fourth or fifth time. Could it be my favorite movie of all time? It's certainly up there. Anyway, after seeing it, I did something I'd always meant to do: I bought and read the book it was based on, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? by Philip K. Dick.
I'd known about this book for years, of course. I'd always thought the title was pretty goofy, and that Bladerunner was a much cooler title, even though it didn't exactly make sense: why should someone who hunts humanoid robots for a living be called a "bladerunner"?
The answer turns out to be: Ridley Scott thought it sounded cool. A helpful Wikipedia article explains how he bought the rights not only to Electric Sheep, but also to a second sci-fi novel called The Bladerunner about a future in which medical services are available on the black market -- the blades being run are, I guess, scalpels.
Thus, there are no "bladerunners" in Electric Sheep; they're just called "bounty hunters". I don't seem to recall androids being called "skinjobs", but the execution of them is definitely called "retirement".
So, the goofiness extends beyond the mere title Electric Sheep: there are, in fact, actual electric sheep in the novel. The Earth is enveloped in radioactive fallout from "World War Terminus", and most all species other than man have died out. Owning animals of all kinds is encouraged by the US government so as to repopulate the world with them, and becomes a kind of status symbol, since these animals are so rare and expensive. For those middle-class schlubs who can't afford real animals, there are robotic simulacra with which to fool the neighbors, such as -- you guessed it -- electric sheep. The Harrison Ford character ("Deckard") owns an electric sheep himself.
More of the novel than you'd expect is taken up with descriptions of how these animals are bought and sold and cared for, both the real ones and the fake robotic ones. All of this was, I think, wisely cut from the movie. Some traces of the concept remained in the movie, however. Whenever the sun is out in the movie, the sky is always orange and hazy, which is probably meant to evoke the fallout. This fallout caused owls to become completely extinct in the novel; there's no mention of that in the movie, but when Deckard first visits the Tyrell Corporation and asks if their owl is real, he's told that it's a robot. (In the novel, they lie to him for a while, claiming that it is real, before they confess it's only a robot.) Finally, there's the robotic snake whose synthetic scales lead Deckard to the android who's a stripper -- although I can't even recall now whether there was a robotic snake in the novel at all.
A thing that's clearer in the novel than in the movie is the psychological tests used to distinguish androids from real humans. I never really had a good grasp on these tests from the movie. Even their very name was hard to understand: it sounded like "voidcomp" in the movie, but turns out to be "Voigt-Kampff", named for two psychologists. The movie led me to believe that the point of the tests was to panic the robots, and that this was fairly easy to do because they were inexperienced at having emotions. The book, however, made it clear that the tests were supposed to do the opposite: they were supposed to reveal a lack of empathy in the robots by posing them cringe-worthy questions about suffering.
Various little things got inexplicably changed from the book to the movie. For instance, the setting was originally San Francisco, 2021; the movie makes it L.A., 2019. J.F. Sebastian's name was originally "J.S. Isidore"; and rather than being a brilliant engineer working for Tyrrell (which is called Rosen in the book), he's a mental defective working as a kind of gofer. Interestingly, Deckard is lower in status on the police squad than Holden, the bounty hunter that the androids attack first. Also, he has a wife, and the two of them fight a lot. The leader of the android rebels is married, too (to a fellow android, naturally). All the android rebels specifically escaped from Mars to Earth, rather than from farther out in some unspecified corner of deep space.
An element in the novel utterly lacking from the movie is the odd religion of the future known as "Mercerism". It seems to have taken hold over all of America, such that Deckard can openly reproach a coworker at the office for not following its tenets properly. What those tenets are, beyond saving the animals, is not clear, but the religion's main ritual involves grasping an odd sort of TV set and going into a kind of trance in which the worshipper hallucinates that he is the main character in the show on the TV set. The show is always the same thing: the religion's prophet, Mercer, is attempting to climb out of a stony pit while rocks come flying at him from out of nowhere, often striking and cutting him. Somehow, when the worshipper disengages from the TV set, he'll often have nicks and cuts, presumably from the wounds he sustained in the fantasy world. How this happens is never explained.
Another interesting element that didn't make it into the movie is the parallel San Francisco police department that Deckard stumbles upon. It's staffed entirely by androids, and yet somehow the real SFPD has never heard of it. Nor do we ever see Deckard tell his boss about it. For all we know, after he escapes from the clutches of these fake cops, they go on about their business forevermore.
Overall, while the book had its interesting points, I can't help feeling that the movie was an improvement. Apologies to all the Philip K. Dick fans who find this to be heresy, but that's my story and I'm sticking to it.
I'll admit I'm biased: I came to the movie first and the book second, and I've found that I tend to prefer the second version I see of a song/story/whatever to the first version I saw only if I didn't actually like the first version I saw very much.
But I can point to some specific things, as well. The plot builds more suspensefully and logically in the movie. For one thing, in the movie, the androids have returned to Earth to seek out their manufacturer and get him to extend their lifespans; in the book, their reason for coming to Earth was simply that they found life on Mars lonely and dull.
For another, all of Deckard's "retirements" of the androids are pretty anticlimactic in the book. He discovers and kills most of the robots in a single paragraph. Even the leader of the androids ends up being pretty easy to deal with, despite his laying all kinds of traps in Isidore's (i.e. Sebastian's) apartment to catch Deckard: the traps simply fail, and Deckard lasers the last three robots in quick succession. There's none of the final showdown of the movie, with the flight through the abandoned apartments. I've always loved that sequence: no music, just the sound of the rain and the scuffling, with Rutger Hauer chattering maniacally at Harrison Ford, who in turn doesn't say a word the entire time, nor tries to fight back, but just keeps running away from an opponent who's got him outmatched.
Incidentally, there's one thing in particular about this Earth of the future which still doesn't make sense to me in either the book or the movie. The movie shows the apartment buildings of L.A. as entirely deserted except for one or two lonely occupants, because everyone who could has escaped to the "Off-World Colonies". And yet the streets are somehow choked with struggling hordes of pedestrians. So is L.A. overpopulated or underpopulated? Surely those apartment buildings would have been overrun by squatters after all the richer folks had gone off to new planets. The only defense I can up with for this set-up is that the forces of law and order still prevail in keeping the riff-raff out of these vacant properties to which they have no legal right. Still seems like it would hardly be worth it, though.
The world of the book has even more problems. The Earth is most certainly not overpopulated: those who survived "World War Terminus" have gone off to those outer-space colonies, and the governments of the world's nations bombard their remaining citizens with propaganda exhorting them to emigrate off-world. It's not clear why these governments would want to rule over empty countries, but maybe they're more focused on their off-world colonies now.
The main reason why the governments encourage people to leave Earth is because the radioactive fallout is slowly poisoning everyone and causing all manner of health problems and mutations. If you get caught out as having fallen ill from this poisoning, as the mental defective J.S. Isidore has, then you literally become a second-class citizen known as a "Special". Why anyone sticks around is therefore not particularly clear: maybe to cultivate those rare animals that the governments also want to be revived? And it's strange, too, that the androids would flee to such an Earth. Perhaps Dick, cynical about anything the government promotes, intended that to show that the colonies are not all they're cracked up to be. By the way, neither the movie nor the book ever explain why it should be illegal for androids to visit Earth.
I'd known about this book for years, of course. I'd always thought the title was pretty goofy, and that Bladerunner was a much cooler title, even though it didn't exactly make sense: why should someone who hunts humanoid robots for a living be called a "bladerunner"?
The answer turns out to be: Ridley Scott thought it sounded cool. A helpful Wikipedia article explains how he bought the rights not only to Electric Sheep, but also to a second sci-fi novel called The Bladerunner about a future in which medical services are available on the black market -- the blades being run are, I guess, scalpels.
Thus, there are no "bladerunners" in Electric Sheep; they're just called "bounty hunters". I don't seem to recall androids being called "skinjobs", but the execution of them is definitely called "retirement".
So, the goofiness extends beyond the mere title Electric Sheep: there are, in fact, actual electric sheep in the novel. The Earth is enveloped in radioactive fallout from "World War Terminus", and most all species other than man have died out. Owning animals of all kinds is encouraged by the US government so as to repopulate the world with them, and becomes a kind of status symbol, since these animals are so rare and expensive. For those middle-class schlubs who can't afford real animals, there are robotic simulacra with which to fool the neighbors, such as -- you guessed it -- electric sheep. The Harrison Ford character ("Deckard") owns an electric sheep himself.
More of the novel than you'd expect is taken up with descriptions of how these animals are bought and sold and cared for, both the real ones and the fake robotic ones. All of this was, I think, wisely cut from the movie. Some traces of the concept remained in the movie, however. Whenever the sun is out in the movie, the sky is always orange and hazy, which is probably meant to evoke the fallout. This fallout caused owls to become completely extinct in the novel; there's no mention of that in the movie, but when Deckard first visits the Tyrell Corporation and asks if their owl is real, he's told that it's a robot. (In the novel, they lie to him for a while, claiming that it is real, before they confess it's only a robot.) Finally, there's the robotic snake whose synthetic scales lead Deckard to the android who's a stripper -- although I can't even recall now whether there was a robotic snake in the novel at all.
A thing that's clearer in the novel than in the movie is the psychological tests used to distinguish androids from real humans. I never really had a good grasp on these tests from the movie. Even their very name was hard to understand: it sounded like "voidcomp" in the movie, but turns out to be "Voigt-Kampff", named for two psychologists. The movie led me to believe that the point of the tests was to panic the robots, and that this was fairly easy to do because they were inexperienced at having emotions. The book, however, made it clear that the tests were supposed to do the opposite: they were supposed to reveal a lack of empathy in the robots by posing them cringe-worthy questions about suffering.
Various little things got inexplicably changed from the book to the movie. For instance, the setting was originally San Francisco, 2021; the movie makes it L.A., 2019. J.F. Sebastian's name was originally "J.S. Isidore"; and rather than being a brilliant engineer working for Tyrrell (which is called Rosen in the book), he's a mental defective working as a kind of gofer. Interestingly, Deckard is lower in status on the police squad than Holden, the bounty hunter that the androids attack first. Also, he has a wife, and the two of them fight a lot. The leader of the android rebels is married, too (to a fellow android, naturally). All the android rebels specifically escaped from Mars to Earth, rather than from farther out in some unspecified corner of deep space.
An element in the novel utterly lacking from the movie is the odd religion of the future known as "Mercerism". It seems to have taken hold over all of America, such that Deckard can openly reproach a coworker at the office for not following its tenets properly. What those tenets are, beyond saving the animals, is not clear, but the religion's main ritual involves grasping an odd sort of TV set and going into a kind of trance in which the worshipper hallucinates that he is the main character in the show on the TV set. The show is always the same thing: the religion's prophet, Mercer, is attempting to climb out of a stony pit while rocks come flying at him from out of nowhere, often striking and cutting him. Somehow, when the worshipper disengages from the TV set, he'll often have nicks and cuts, presumably from the wounds he sustained in the fantasy world. How this happens is never explained.
Another interesting element that didn't make it into the movie is the parallel San Francisco police department that Deckard stumbles upon. It's staffed entirely by androids, and yet somehow the real SFPD has never heard of it. Nor do we ever see Deckard tell his boss about it. For all we know, after he escapes from the clutches of these fake cops, they go on about their business forevermore.
Overall, while the book had its interesting points, I can't help feeling that the movie was an improvement. Apologies to all the Philip K. Dick fans who find this to be heresy, but that's my story and I'm sticking to it.
I'll admit I'm biased: I came to the movie first and the book second, and I've found that I tend to prefer the second version I see of a song/story/whatever to the first version I saw only if I didn't actually like the first version I saw very much.
But I can point to some specific things, as well. The plot builds more suspensefully and logically in the movie. For one thing, in the movie, the androids have returned to Earth to seek out their manufacturer and get him to extend their lifespans; in the book, their reason for coming to Earth was simply that they found life on Mars lonely and dull.
For another, all of Deckard's "retirements" of the androids are pretty anticlimactic in the book. He discovers and kills most of the robots in a single paragraph. Even the leader of the androids ends up being pretty easy to deal with, despite his laying all kinds of traps in Isidore's (i.e. Sebastian's) apartment to catch Deckard: the traps simply fail, and Deckard lasers the last three robots in quick succession. There's none of the final showdown of the movie, with the flight through the abandoned apartments. I've always loved that sequence: no music, just the sound of the rain and the scuffling, with Rutger Hauer chattering maniacally at Harrison Ford, who in turn doesn't say a word the entire time, nor tries to fight back, but just keeps running away from an opponent who's got him outmatched.
Incidentally, there's one thing in particular about this Earth of the future which still doesn't make sense to me in either the book or the movie. The movie shows the apartment buildings of L.A. as entirely deserted except for one or two lonely occupants, because everyone who could has escaped to the "Off-World Colonies". And yet the streets are somehow choked with struggling hordes of pedestrians. So is L.A. overpopulated or underpopulated? Surely those apartment buildings would have been overrun by squatters after all the richer folks had gone off to new planets. The only defense I can up with for this set-up is that the forces of law and order still prevail in keeping the riff-raff out of these vacant properties to which they have no legal right. Still seems like it would hardly be worth it, though.
The world of the book has even more problems. The Earth is most certainly not overpopulated: those who survived "World War Terminus" have gone off to those outer-space colonies, and the governments of the world's nations bombard their remaining citizens with propaganda exhorting them to emigrate off-world. It's not clear why these governments would want to rule over empty countries, but maybe they're more focused on their off-world colonies now.
The main reason why the governments encourage people to leave Earth is because the radioactive fallout is slowly poisoning everyone and causing all manner of health problems and mutations. If you get caught out as having fallen ill from this poisoning, as the mental defective J.S. Isidore has, then you literally become a second-class citizen known as a "Special". Why anyone sticks around is therefore not particularly clear: maybe to cultivate those rare animals that the governments also want to be revived? And it's strange, too, that the androids would flee to such an Earth. Perhaps Dick, cynical about anything the government promotes, intended that to show that the colonies are not all they're cracked up to be. By the way, neither the movie nor the book ever explain why it should be illegal for androids to visit Earth.