* * * * * * * * * * 10 / 10
Philip K Dick
Sci-fi isn’t normally something I would choose to pick up, but after seeing a short video on the differences between the book and the film I had to read it myself. The film is a very poor copy of the book.
Some problems books set in the future have are that they are limited by the technology of the day they were written. Video-tapes instead of DVD’s, DVD’s instead of streaming and so on. The author dealt with this by using a nuclear war, World War Terminus to provide reason why Earth’s technology is so lacking.
D.A.D.O.E.S deals mainly with empathy and life. The main character, Decker, yearns for a real animal, embarrassed and ashamed of his electric sheep, which he pretends is real to avoid being shunned by his neighbours. Keeping a real animal is a sign that a person is capable of love and compassion, a social status in a ruined world where real animals are extinct or almost so.
Decker’s job is to hunt down androids. When five commit murder and flee, he gives little thought to hunting them down and killing them… but if it was as simple as that there wouldn’t be a story.
