I just realized something:

Also it is a world where empathy is valued and this is expressed through taking care of animals, this combined with the Christian symbolism does not point to the habit of counting sheep, but more like a shepardlike quality.

Yeah. Does it matter? I'm talking about the title. If Terry Pratchett called it "Disc-Globe," I'd still point out the logical inaccuracy, no matter how good it was.

>Does it matter?
Well, the title is literally a line from the book and makes complete sense, Deckard does dream of electric sheep and him asking himself "do androids dream of electric sheep?" Is fairly important. "Count" would make no sense thematically and remove all point from the question.

i just read this book today in one sitting. ive seen blade runner like 5 times but had never read the book. i was surprised how different they were, and i think pretty much all the changes in the film were for the better. i also thought the prose was pretty bad; it’s my first PKD book, and people generally praise him, but maybe it’s bc his stories are good moreso than the actual writing? felt like a YA book a lot of the time

I've heard that a lot from people whose first exposure to PKD is Androids. It's a pity that due to Blade Runner, this is the one that many people start with. It works a lot better if you're already acclimatised to his writing and themes, but I'd still put many of his other books ahead of it.

yeah, i've thought so too. dick kind of a shit author, DESU.

If electric sheep exist outside of a dream, you can count them. Dreaming is something humans do. Humans can count; certainly they can count sheep, electric or not. Can artificial humans dream?

Dream sounds way cooler and more fitting.
Count makes it seem like something the AI is doing in reality. Kinda boring.
The dreaming is something we would not expect AI to do.
I liked this book. It was recommended to me by a friend and he lent me a copy.

>i think pretty much all the changes in the film were for the better
hehehehe hahahahahaaha hohohohohohoho heeeheeeehehe ahahahahahahaha lmaoooooooooooooooo

>"Do Androids Count Electric Sheep."
that makes no sense, for counting sheep you first have to dream of them before. If you want "Do Androids Count the Electric Sheep they dream of?" but it is unnecesary because the actual question of the title is "how much do androids differ from humans?". And the fact they count the sheep or they don't doesn't matter, one isn't less human for not counting the sheep he dreams of

stay mad, it’s true. the movie streamlined a lot of the messier plot/characters and the story feels more cohesive. the wife character in the book is pretty much pointless, and the arc w rachel in the book just kind of ends. the electronic animals in the book are also kind of silly, it makes sense how they fit into the theme (too bluntly) but the movie manages to get the same idea across with way less exposition (in the book rick is checking the price of animals every 5 pages). plus, the visuals and music in the movie are so good, and make the difference between the androids and humans more visceral by virtue of being a different medium more suited to the material. i dont think movies are always better than the book, but in this case ill take a 10/10 masterpiece of tone over a clunky sci fi YA book, and if you disagree ur in denial

Then they shouldn‘t have picked sheep because they saying is to count sheep to fall asleep, not to dream about them. They should have called it do they dream of flying or falling or something like that.

>fit into the theme
not him but the film guts theme and reduces to a plot element.

i disagree. i felt this way the first time i saw the film, but on subsequent viewings i think the themes are richly baked into the film’s content, it just doesn’t beat you over the head with them. It’s more like a sensory/textural/emotional thing than the book, which makes the themes more literally embodied in symbols with the mood organ, the electronic animals, and Mercerism. If anything I would argue the book is more plot-focused than the movie. The movie is pretty low key and slow-paced, the plot is minimal. And in the film, the central theme of human vs artificial plays out between the characters, in their performances, as well as the mise en scene. If I could boil it down, I think the book is a lot more focused on “world building” and establishing this hermetically sealed environment where Dick’s themes can be neatly illustrated through tons of exposition, whereas the film just immerses you in the world without much exposition, and the interactions between characters naturally tease out the themes

lol. Please gives me a run down on the books themes, be sure to support them!

idk if youre being serious but im bored and the book is fresh in my mind (also just rewatched the movie). i would say the book’s main themes are empathy, simulacra (for lack of a better term), and freedom.

for empathy, it’s constantly mentioned that the androids lack empathy, and this is the main thing separating them from humans. they’re more calculating, willing to deceive, to get what they want. but this assumption is constantly challenged—human emotions are shown to be just as arbitrary via the mood organ, the androids are shown to be capable of making great art (Luba), and they also have a tribal camraderie with each other. Also, Rick comes off as just as autistic as the robots, especially when he constantly checks the animal prices. also, the Mercer stuff which ostensibly seems to demonstrate human empathy, is revealed to be an illusion, which leads me to

simulacrum—there is a constant mixup between objects and their copies. the animals that people keep as pets, people questioning whether or not they’re actually androids with false memories implanted, rachel and pris being of the same model, the transcendent experience of Mercerism (and Rick’s climactic re-experiencing of it) which is revealed to be a hollywood hoax, and the toad rick finds that turns out to be electronic. as with the simulacrum, there’s not always a clear division between original and copy, the existential status and meaning of each is constantly in question.

freedom—the book implicitly and sometimes implicitly raises the question of whether humans are replicants are really more “free”. many of the examples i listed also contribute to this theme, but JR Isidore is probably the most emblematic of this. as a “chickenhead” he’s basically considered a second class human. biologically, hes organic, but because of his damaged intelligence he’s considered by rick and others to be on par with the androids, if not more useless. despite everyone’s low expectations of him, he is depicted positively, doing well on the vidcall with the woman who’s cat died, showing empathy towards pris and the other androids, and to the spider that they dismember. So he’s probably the only morally “good” character, but is underestimated and looked down on by everyone. does being biologically human automatically make you free? no. so why does being an android automatically make you a slave?

this is a rough summary and im writing on my phone so not editing. these are a gloss on the books major themes, and i think the movie covers most of them despite losing the mood organ/ricks wife, mercerism, and the animals (these appear in different forms in the sequel anyway)

And you missed the main theme which those all support despite repeatedly bringing it up while you explained them, it is the very thing Deckard is questioning when he asks himself if androids dream of electric sheep. What is human, what does it mean to be human, is it just an idea as fake as that electric sheep or is it actually something unique and special. Deckard questions his authenticity and then the idea of authenticity itself and ultimately reality. The movie only covers a tiny portion and really just poses the question; is Deckard an android. You might want to reread it a bit more carefully.

I wouldn't say I missed the main theme, as you said the themes I mentioned are all in service of the larger question of what it means to be human and my explanations all point towards it, but I was specifically bringing those up because they're 'supported' by the text. The indistinguishability between copy and original, the 'tiers' of humans, whether it is empathy that makes humans what they are or something else, etc. Just because I didn't explicitly state 'what does it mean to be human' doesn't mean I didn't pick up on it.

I don't think the film 'covers a tiny portion' of this, it just does so in different ways, the climax being Baty saving Rick in the end and his monologue recounting his memories. The movie does more than just pose the question of Deckard being an android; it doesn't even come up explicitly in the movie until the ending in the directors/final cut (which I take to be the official ending). But even then, it's more of a culmination of everything else the film has been building towards, it's not a direct question in the movie until then, whereas the book raises it more explicitly early on with the question of whether Phil Resch, the other bounty hunter, is also an android. The sequel also continues this theme with the question of whether K is a replicant or human, and whether it actually matters. The movie also expands on the relationship between the creator (Tyrell) and his creations, has a more nuanced arc in the relationship between Rick and Rachel (and dispenses with the wife character, which is translated into Joi in the sequel), and has a more interesting presentation of the theme of dreams/implanted memories, which suits its medium as a film--the film, suiting its medium, is concerned with appearances as emblematic of the uncertainty of humanity--at times we can see the replicants because of their distinctive eye glints, but not always, and the replicants are mostly visually indistinguishable from humans. In a movie, what makes an 'android' different than a human, as they're all human-like avatars acting out roles on a screen; the film plays into this tension which culminates in the ending--we as an audience have seen Rick's dream, and we see the unicorn origami. It's the perfect coda because it experientially puts the audience in the same position of questioning reality as Rick--can we trust everything we just saw, can we trust our eyes, our experiences, our reality, to know what is 'real'? what does it mean to be 'real'? I'll grant that the book and movie take different approaches to the same questions but I don't think doing it via prose (imo, not great prose) where the themes are necessarily spelled out more via exposition, vs images where the affective dimension is allowed to play into it more, automatically makes one better than the other. Personally I prefer the film but I think both are valid

>Just because I didn't explicitly state 'what does it mean to be human' doesn't mean I didn't pick up on it.
I didn't say you did not pick up on it, I strongly implied you did but that you did not see it as the main theme, which that response clearly shows, you do not show how those things support main theme, you just mention it almost as an aside. You are playing games.
>I don't think the film 'covers a tiny portion' of this
Book covers everything which society holds important and explores their relation to the question and takes apart that relationship. For example, androids are tested for through an emotional response, empathy, because their programming can not replicate empathy, Deckard can program himself to feel any emotion through his mood organ just as the programmers of the androids program the androids, but Mercer proves empathy but Mercer is not real but hey, wounded by a rock, is Mercer real? I have these emotions towards my fake sheep and my disconnected wife, but i have stronger emotions towards an android. Dick takes it further than I just did and ties it into everything else, but eh, you get the point . The movie reduces it to your standard existential crisis.
>but there is a sequel which elaborates on it!
The sequel was primarily a tool for Scott to build another franchise and bringing it in to show how it elaborates on the original's failings is admitting that the original fails and your own failure.

The movie is good but it is simplistic by comparison to the novel.

Anyone read's PKD's We Can Build You ? Although published in the 1970s it was written in 1962 and is a kind of precursor to Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep. There's elements that turn up in both books: androids, mood organs, characters named Pris and Rosen.

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it's not exactly clear that you're referring to dreaming in that title, could easily be intepretted as "can androids be shepherds". could add "in their sleep" at the end but that's even clunkier than the original title. the dream shit is important for the central theme of the book so i don't like any attempt to say the shepherd interpretation would be equally valid/meaningful, it's not.

Seriously, it is not difficult. Dream is used in the figurative sense here, not literaly what you do when you are asleep, but the hopes and desires one haves for their future. Stop feeding OP, he deserves to starve.

Read the next post, sheep are a christian symbol, lambs, shepard etc

But the sheep is ersatz so religion is a fraud. More importantly, sort of ignoring everything Dick had to say on religion and he didn't really use symbolism that way, he defined his own symbols in context.

> You are playing games.
i would argue that you’re playing semantic games by arguing that there is a single canonical “main” theme and that my points are lesser because I didn’t phrase it in your preferred way. i think we’re more or less on the same page here though.

> Book covers everything which society holds important and explores their relation to the question and takes apart that relationship.

i dont know if i would say everything—the book has only a few plot/world elements that the movie lacks, and you mention most of them here—the mood organ, Mercerism, and the electric animals. As I said, these flesh out the world a bit but I think the themes still shine through in the movie via different means. The voigt-kampf test is still in the movie, and the empathy question hinges on Baty saving Rick in the end instead of the mood organ. Same theme, different plot means, but it’s adapted successfully and in a way that relies more on the advantages of film (performance, affect, music). The mood organ makes more sense in a book, the “tears in rain” monologue makes more sense in a movie. The Mercer has no direct analogy in the movie, but i would argue that the movie replaces it with the omnipresence of advertising (i.e. the Japanese woman’s giant face on the billboard). There’s a case to be made that the spiritual dimension of Mercerism is replaced with hyper capitalism and its catering to desire (also ties into the sexuality of the androids). This theme is latent in the book and arguably is a more relevant (at least from the 80s onward) delivery method than the religious surrogate of Mercerism. As far as the animals go, it is nodded to in the movie with the owl at Tyrell and the snake at the strip club, but doesn’t play such a prominent role as in the book. To me this isn’t a huge loss, I agree the animals add a certain amount of depth to this idea of simulacra/questioning reality but it started to feel repetitive and I don’t think it is core necessary to the story—and in the movie it would be tedious to have Deckard constantly checking prices of animals.

Ultimately I guess my point with all this is in any film adaptation there are always going to be compromises and things that are changed, and I think the changes in Blade Runner all play to the strengths of film as a medium. And I don’t think you’re giving credit to the qualities that film possesses that books lack. Themes in film aren’t purely limited to content. The points you bring up are all about aspects of content that are present in the book and absent in the film. But i would argue that not only are these in some cases replaced with other content, but also that in some cases, the form does its own heavy lifting to express the themes in a way that isn’t possible in literature. Hence my points about appearances. In the novel, the question of whether a given character is or isn’t an android is up to Dick. In the film the viewer is implicated in the determination, we have to rely on our own ability to read faces and emotions to determine it, film apparatus as voight-kampf. The score, the performances, the mise en scene, all provide depth in a distinctly cinematic way that isn’t possible in literature, and I don’t think you’re giving enough credit to the ways in which these legitimately do probide experiential value in a way that goes beyond what plot points were directly translated between the mediums.

>The sequel was primarily a tool for Scott to build another franchise
wrong, Scott didn’t have anything to do with the sequel. Hampton Fancher, the writer of the original’s screenplay, also wrote the sequel screenplay, and Villeneuve directed it. Scott didn’t even like it. I brought up the sequel because it does carry some of the plot points into the “canon” but you’re right in that it’s ultimately not relevant to the original. I enjoyed the sequel but I still think the original is the strongest.

True. The reader assumes that's what it means but you're right. Either Dick thought retards would be confused by the "counting sheep" idiom or he was high.

Trips wasted on a retard. Smh

Jesus what a cope lmao

That is the most fucking boring cover art I've ever seen in a series. Makes me want to burn the whole set

>semantic games by arguing that there is a single canonical “main” theme and that my points are lesser because I didn’t phrase it in your preferred way
So it is just a coincidence that they all support a single larger theme and we should treat all themes as equal? You are really reaching now.
>and you mention most of them here
I only mentioned the simple direct connections, maybe a 1/4 of what he dealt with but probably not even that, and I left out a few of the big ones like society and life itself.
>Ultimately I guess my point...
Translation; you are right but I am still "technically" right.
>wrong, Scott didn’t have anything to do with the sequel.
So he was not actually the executive producer and a major force in it being actualized? Scott had a big hand in the movie even if he was not director and it probably would not have been made without his involvement.

>t. never read the book or even the tread. just doing a little fishing.

From reading the thread you seem insistent on interpreting the title divorced from any context of the actual narrative, so I will do my best to explain the logic and show you how it primes readers for the themes they should engage with without relying on the novel itself.
>Do androids dream of electric sheep?
Let's break this down.
>Do androids
Ok, so we are dealing with artificial intelligences and simulacra.
>do androids dream
'Dream' really is the key word here. This asks whether or not artificial intelligences can ever experience subconscious activity, which is to ask by extension whether there can be true 'depth' to them beyond day-to-day tasks, etc. Can they ever be human in the sense that we know it? Is the full breadth of the human mind capable of being replicated? Or, if not, is it truly an artificial intelligence, or just an advanced computer?
>do androids dream of electric sheep?
This final part adds a twist. Assuming androids could engage with the full breadth of the human experience, how would it differ? Would they project upon the world their own design (dreaming of robots as they themselves are robots)? Would they think their own state as the natural state of being? Or would they cling to humanity? Dreaming of living sheep, as the androids are merely simulacra of life, would seem to acknowledge their secondary importance, their artificiality.
>do androids count electric sheep?
Much of this meaning is lost here. The pivotal word 'dream' is removed, so we are left only with the last point I addressed. This boils down to: do artificial intelligences mimic humans or not? This is objectively a much worse title and you should feel bad for suggesting it. It fails to prime readers for the key question of artificial consciousness and the experiential question of constructed intelligences.

>conflates robots with androids
it was a good effort.

For the record, being OP,

a) I am huge fan of the author.
b) I didn't really remember shit about the plot or the details of the book, but just the overall emotional and existential gestalt.
c) I had had a *lot* of rum and pot when I posted this.

See You do make me want to reread it, though, and I think the points you make are not only correct in proving my post as asinine, but are compelling questions that I'd like to see expanded on.

I'm glad my shit-post was able to grow a nice turd-flower, at least, lol...

you may have read the book but you clearly didn't understand it

you can't fact learn your way out of retardation

>Deckard does dream of electric sheep and him asking himself "do androids dream of electric sheep?"
Actually that doesn't make any sense. It would make sense if he asked whether androids dream of biological sheep. Plus who the hell dreams of sheep?

...

Every time you guys try to explain this, you make less and less sense. Now you're claiming Deckard doesn't dream of electric sheep, but he yearns or wishes for electric sheep? Why on earth would he do that?

"he" doesn't, he wonders if androids do, he dreams (desires) of having a real sheep or any animal. As has been repeatedly stated, he is drawing a parallel between himself and the androids and wondering if he is actually any different from them, he is empathizing with them even though he does not really realize it.

Titles that would make more sense according to the interpretations Philip R. Balls experts on 4channel
>Do Androids Dream?
>Do Androids Dream of Actual Sheep, not Electronic Ones Like I Dream Of?
>Do Androids Want Sheep?
>Do Androids Wish They Had Electric Sheep as Much as I Do?

>t. illiterate

Androids count too fast; they'd run out of sheep before they fell asleep.

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op u reminded me to watch a scanner darkly on criterion channel tonight

>he thinks androids can sleep

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I can't imagine being pseud enough to make such a meaningless effortpost about DICK, and to put the cherry on top, not knowing what counting sheep is. Lmao

No, absolutely not. The title is a reference to the question of androids and empathy, not to whether they have a subconscious and are capable of dreaming. Do they want the kind of physical electric sheep that Deckard does, and if so why? What is the meaning of the electric sheep? Status, as for Deckard in the beginning? Or a desire to care for something, a base instinct so important and strong to non-psychopaths that cultivating it is necessary even if the object of care itself is artificial or can't understand it?

Sleeping =/= dreaming and the implications of either are different. 'Counting sheep' implies only sleep, not the conscious phenomenon of dreaming.

I need to rewatch that, I haven't seen it since it first came out. One of the best PKD adaptations. Hollywood should film more of his novels rather than the short stories - it might give them more substance than the short story adaptations, where they take the central idea and turn it into a 2-hour excuse for some CGI chase sequences. I did see something a while ago about a movie version of his novel Vulcan's Hammer, but that's not exactly top-tier Dick.