Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?

Just re-read this for probably the third time, still love the book. Although I did knock my review down from 5 stars to 4. Still an excellent novel, but on re-reading it's got too many clumsy moments to be perfect.

What I love about this story is the horror of the disassociation, the idea that you can't really tell if something is human or android, animal or machine. Deckard's inability to read the people around him, to be at ease with other people. To murder other people, albeit android people. This theme really hits home in the alternate police station chapters with their own murderous bounty hunter. The whole funhouse mirror feeling, the danger. Part of the general theme of schizophrenia that tragically suffuses all of Dick's writing. It's upsetting but also he's an amazing writer in conveying it so forcefully.

I also love the theme of Mercerism, the empathy religion with its suffering saint. It's a profound and creepy take on Christianity. Also an interesting trope in a sci-fi novel. It's boggling to me how it was left out of the movie entirely, although I suppose that was a good and necessary decision for brevity. (Mercerism makes a cameo in the film Her.) It's just such an odd theme for the book, takes it from being a two fisted tale of bounty hunters to some morose meditation on humanity. Particularly the ending with Deckard's own experience as Mercer. I still don't know what that really means, but the emotion was profound.

Reading this closely again I had to look for all the clues and sadly, I don't think Dick intended Deckard to be read as a replicant. He explicitly talks about how he can use the Empathy Box, fuse with Mercer, and that's a knowledge not available to androids. Doesn't really matter, the horrors of unbalance and unreality and not knowing what is human and what is android is strongly wrapped through the book. Just funny after so many nerd fights about the movie that the book is fairly clear.

I'd love to see someone turn this book into a movie. Blade Runner is a fantastic film but only briefly borrows some elements from the story and setting. I'd love to see a screenplay that hews closely to the novel. It'd be difficult to make in the shadow of Blade Runner. Maybe make it rotoscoped in the style of Linklater's Scanner Darkly, to emphasize the shifting unreality? I hated that style honestly, it gave me a headache, but it might be the cinematographic tool you'd need to make a fresh film. And convey the disease of the novel.

(As a postscript, I recently tracked down a copy of "The Little Black Box", the short story Dick wrote about Mercerism before this book. It was interesting enough but not very well developed. Still, interesting to see the author develop the idea.)