Symbolism, Imagery, Allegory
Setting
Like so much good science fiction, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? takes place in the future, but it's written about the present. Well, it was written about its present day, which is technical...
Narrator Point of View
Third-person Limited Omniscient sounds like a perspective used to play a video game—like if SimCity combined with Gears of War. Actually, that sounds pretty awesome….But beyond being a killer n...
Genre
Like its title androids, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? seems to evolve every time we read it, making it really hard to pin down into a particular genre box.Of course, that doesn't mean we wo...
Tone
Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? takes place in a future where mankind lives among the stars, spread out across the vast, unknown landscapes of extraterrestrial planets. But the tone of the nov...
Writing Style
Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? is relaxed in its writing style, but that doesn't mean you won't have to use that gray matter floating about in your skull. You just get to fire up those neuron...
What's Up With the Title?
Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? is a difficult title for two important reasons. First, it takes forever to type, and our autocorrect hates that question mark.Second, our autocorrect isn't the...
What's Up With the Epigraph?
A turtle which explorer Captain Cook gave to the King of Tonga in 1777 died yesterday. It was nearly 200 years old.The animal, called Tu'imalila, died at the royal palace ground in the Tongan capit...
What's Up With the Ending?
The ending to Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? leaves a whole mess of unanswered questions. Will Rick leave his job bounty hunting? What's up with the electric toad? Iran takes her coffee black...
Tough-o-Meter
The journey through Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? is—like many Philip K. Dick novels—a surreal mixture of accessible and difficult.Dick's writing style and word choice are not overly com...