Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? was published by Doubleday in 1968 and is Philip K. Dick’s most famous and most accomplished novel — the work that, through Ridley Scott’s 1982 film adaptation Blade Runner, entered global popular culture while simultaneously remaining one of the most philosophically serious novels in the science fiction canon. The question the title poses — can a machine dream? can artificiality generate authentic inner life? — has only grown more urgent in the age of artificial intelligence.
The Novel
San Francisco, 1992 (in Dick’s timeline). Nuclear war has poisoned the earth. Most animal species are extinct. Much of humanity has emigrated to off-world colonies. Those who remain live under a perpetual pall of radioactive dust, sustained by Mercerism (a televised religion of shared suffering) and obsessed with owning real animals — status symbols in a world where most creatures are electric replicas.
Rick Deckard is a bounty hunter whose job is to “retire” (kill) Nexus-6 androids — artificial humans so sophisticated they can pass as human in almost every test. The only reliable diagnostic is the Voigt-Kampff test, which measures involuntary empathic responses. Androids, however intelligent, cannot genuinely empathize.
Over a single day, Deckard must retire six escaped Nexus-6 models. As he does, the boundaries between human and android, real and artificial, empathic and mechanical begin to dissolve. Deckard acquires a real animal (a goat), only to have it killed. He falls into something like love with an android (Rachael Rosen). He questions whether his own empathy is genuine or merely a social performance.
The Question of Empathy
Dick’s central insight is that the boundary between human and artificial cannot be located in intelligence, memory, or behavior — only in empathy. An android can be smarter than a human, can have (implanted) memories, can behave with perfect social grace — but it cannot feel genuine compassion for another being’s suffering.
But the novel systematically undermines this distinction. Some humans (the “specials” damaged by radioactive dust, like the abandoned J.R. Isidore) are clearly more empathic than some other humans. Some androids (particularly Rachael) display behavior indistinguishable from genuine emotion. Deckard himself wonders whether his professional capacity to kill beings that look and act human hasn’t eroded his own empathy to the point where the distinction he enforces no longer applies to him.
Mercerism and Kipple
Two concepts from the novel have entered the broader cultural vocabulary:
Mercerism — a religion in which participants use “empathy boxes” to merge their consciousness with Wilbur Mercer, a figure endlessly climbing a hill while stones are thrown at him. The religion provides shared suffering — community through pain. Whether Mercer is “real” (he may be a former actor named Al Jarry) is irrelevant; the empathy generated by participating is genuine.
Kipple — Dick’s word for the entropic accumulation of worthless objects that fills abandoned spaces. “Kipple drives out nonkipple.” It is one of literature’s great descriptions of decay and disorder.
Publication History
The first edition was published by Doubleday, New York, in 1968. First printings are identified by:
- Doubleday imprint on title page
- “First edition” stated on copyright page
- Cloth binding with dust jacket
- Price of $4.95 on jacket flap
The novel received a modest first printing. Dick was a prolific but commercially marginal writer in 1968.
Collecting Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?
First edition (Doubleday, 1968): Fine copies in dust jacket bring $5,000–$15,000. Dick’s growing posthumous reputation and the Blade Runner connection ensure permanent demand.
Signed copies are very rare. Dick died in 1982, shortly before Blade Runner’s release transformed his cultural status. Signed firsts bring $15,000–$40,000.
The UK edition (Rapp + Whiting, 1969): Scarce, $1,000–$3,000.
Blade Runner tie-in editions (1982) are collected as pop-culture artifacts but have minimal bibliographic value.
The novel is one of the most valuable science fiction first editions — a cornerstone title whose philosophical depth ensures it transcends genre categorization.