Product Review

San Francisco lies under a cloud of radioactive dust. People live in half-deserted apartment buildings, and keep electric animals as pets because so many real animals have died. Now only the rich can afford living creatures; others may buy the amazingly realistic electric simulacrae: horses, cats, sheep. By 2021, the Terminus War had driven most humans off-planet and entire species into extinction. Most people emigrate to Mars - unless they have a job to do on Earth - or are substandard health and deemed inferior. Rick Deckard - bounty hunter / android killer for the police and is an owner of an electric sheep. This week he has to find, identify, and kill six androids which have escaped from an off world colony. They're machines, but they look and sound and think like humans - clever, dangerous humans. They will be hard to kill. These artificials are near impossible to tell them from the truly living; except for their lack of empathy. It's Rick Deckard's job to find these rogues and "retire" them. But "andys" tend to fight back; with deadly results. First published in 1968, Philip K. Dick's darkly satirical masterpiece Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep - the basis of the film Blade Runner - is a fascinating fiction about reality and what it is to be "human".