Colonial Mimicry in Philip Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?

In Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, author Philip K. Dick blurs the lines between real and artificial humanity, between organic life and the artificial simulation of life. Nigel Wheale contends that Dick’s indistinct representation of what is real and what is artificial asserts the author’s response to “the supposed lack of ‘human interest’ in the [science fiction] genre” (297). Wheale argues that “Philip K. Dick’s Do Androids Dream? is a special case for this kind of objection because it explicitly plays with confusions between human personality and artificial or machine-derived intelligence” (297). However, while Wheale explores this confusion as it relates to Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner, M. Keith Booker and Anne-Marrie Thomas focus on the philosophical and ethical implications between the natural and the artificial: “The novel anticipates the complete breakdown of the opposition between natural and artificial […] offering a sophisticated exploration of the ethical considerations inherent in the destabilization of the human/android hierarchy” (222). They observe that Dick “calls the definition of ‘human’ into question by blurring the boundaries between human and android, an aspect of its larger blurring of the boundary between reality and simulation” (222). In fact, Dick himself speaks of this blurred distinction between humans and the new automatic creations in his speech “The Android and the Human,” delivered four years after the publication of Do Androids Dream?