Roads to Utopia B. Bagchi

1. Roads to UtopiaB. Bagchi Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (1968)

2. One of the Top 10 Dystopian Fictions Chosen by The Guardian • ‘Fictional dystopias are almost always cautionary tales – warnings of where our political, cultural and social surroundings are taking us. • common motifs: designer drugs, mass entertainment, brutality, technology, the suppression of the individual by an all-powerful state – classic preoccupations of dystopian fiction. These novels picture the worst because, as Swift demonstrated in his original cautionary tale, Gulliver’s Travels, re-inventing the present is sometimes the only way to see how bad things already are. • Dick definitely belonged to the grimy school of apocalyptic dystopias. His noirish detective thriller shares many themes with the other less typically sci-fi books…: the fusion of the human with the technological and, as suggested by the title, the nature of consciousness in an artificial world.’ • Robert Collins, The Guardian, 24 August 2005 • http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2005/aug/24/top10s.dystopian.novels

3. Androids, Man-Machine Relationships • An android is ‘a thing somehow generated to deceive us in a cruel way, to cause us to think it to be one of ourselves’? Dick, Selected Literary and Philosophical Writings, New York: Pantheon, 1995, p. 99. DADES plays with and makes us question boundaries and borders between the human and the mechanical, in a dark, bleak universe and landscapes of the future.

4. Setting • Post-nuclear holocaust, post-World War Terminus San Francisco. • 1992 or 2021. • A decaying earth. • Radiation poisoning. • Those who stay are seen as sub-normal, the dregs.

5. Setting • Off-earth colonies. • Emigrants offered a humanlike android in Mars. • Some androids return, to be hunted and captured (and ‘retired’)by bounty-hunters like Rick Deckard. • Tests, such as the Voigt-Kampff tests, administered to distinguish between androids and humans.

6. ‘Feelings’? • The Penfield mood organ. • A brain stimulation machine that can create feelings and moods. • A schedule mood may be, for Rick, ‘a businesslike professional attitude’, while for his wife at the same time, it may be ‘a six-hour accusatory depression.’ • What is real, what is artificial, in the domain of ‘human’ feelings and affect, then?

7. Animals • Real animals scarce due to radioactivity. • Real animals are a precious, scarce commodity. • Allow humans to feel empathy. • But fake animals are also flourishing—a cheaper, inferior alternative. • Rick wants to use his earnings from retiring five ‘andys’ to buy a large animal, such as a sheep.

8. Forces us to question borders between binaries • Authentic versus inauthentic • Reality versus illusion • Hope versus despair • The sublime versus kitsch

9. Disruptive • DADES disrupts our cognitive familiarities. • Do we know what we think we know?

10. Mercerism • Attempts at communal unity with Mercer’s ascent into fusion with all life. • Produces powerful affect. • Yet possibly an elaborate hoax, also to contain political dissent.

11. Deckard and Rachael • To love an android! • Rachael's revenge: kill Deckard’s goat. • Again, grades and scales of experience anatomized. • Non-judgmentally.

12. Deckard’s concluding epiphany in the desert • Is it revelatory of a true empathy for life forms? • Is it rationalization or false consciousness? • The novel resists being seen as a comedy, with a resolved, happy, bourgeois marriage which has now again turned harmonious.

13. Ambiguous Dystopia? • With so many shades of grey woven into this dystopia, DADES makes us ask, is another rosy, utopian world at all possible? • Perhaps this is what all worlds are like? • Decentres our notions of what may be ‘normal’, or ‘good’, or ‘valuable’, or ‘ethical’, with its noir scaping of humanity at the edges of what we conventionally think of as humanity.