Thursday, March 14, 2024
Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? Is a Great Novel Says The Atlantic
From the world-is-catching-up-to-us-Dick-heads file, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? is an Atlantic pick for one of the 136 best novels of the last hundred years. But tell us something we don't know. The interesting tide that may be turning here is the explicit recognition of the formal quality of the prose. The criteria for their canon involves, "novels that say something intriguing about the world and do it distinctively, in intentional, artful prose—no matter how many or few that ended up being (136, as it turns out)" (Triple emphasis mine) Here's Lenika Cruz's write up, which is pretty good:
"Before there was Blade Runner, there was Dick’s prescient science-fiction noir, which opens not with the movie adaptation’s columns of fire spewing into a degraded sky, but with a tedious domestic dispute. Both scenes communicate dystopia in their own ways, but Dick’s is sneakier: Bounty Hunter Rick Deckard and his wife argue over the settings on the machine that controls their mood, immediately raising the question of just how real they are in comparison to the rogue androids that Deckard is paid to capture and “retire,” or, essentially, kill. This is a bleak, wry, and mind-bending novel—a consideration of the all-too-porous lines that separate human from animal from machine."
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