Blade Runner(Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?)

Philip K. Dick ponders what it means to be human.
The title of Philip K. Dick's Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? may have been altered to snare fans of Ridley Scott's film version, but it's the differences from the same that make Dick's novel worth revisiting. His Deckard is not a futuristic Philip Marlowe, but a working stiff in a failing marriage, a mercenary who kills androids for the money. Dick's Earth is a massive radioactive junkyard, populated only by subnormal humans and those unfit for offworld emigration. Even the androids look run-down, paunchy and sallow. There's no perfection in this future, just an endless, doomed fight against entropy.

As Deckard tracks down androids one by one, his faith in his mission begins to fray, as do the boundaries of the world around him. As he's attempting to interrogate an android opera singer whose voice is as beautiful as any human's, Deckard is whisked off by a rival bounty hunter who claims to work for a parallel police force. For a few head-spinning pages, you're not sure which is the fake and which the real. Has Deckard been an android all along, retiring humans in the service of some unknown plot? Or is his rival the simulacrum, an android who's not even aware he is one?

While he's pondering what it means to be human, Dick also takes aim at the overlap between religion and celebrity worship, and the way the desire for social status drives people to falsify themselves, creating a public image so divorced from the truth it might as well be made of tin. By the end of the book, Dick has tied your brain in knots that will take weeks to untangle, but it's the kind of confusion that leaves you more enlightened after the fact.