I dream of electric sheep

Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? is a pretty amazing book, especially after Frankenstein, which makes the reader suffer as much as its tortured characters. (I'll never be able to resist cheap shots at Frankenstein.) Dick's style is accessible and fast-flowing, but his content is hella deep. It goes down smooth but stays in your system, like sake. And like sake, it's delicious hot or cold. OK, I'll stop. That last one didn't even make sense. Like reading Frankenstein voluntarily.

But in all seriousness, Androids works on so many levels that it's ludicrous. It plays with its own themes. The human characters are robotic, either because of mental deficiency or chronic ennui. The robots are likable, reasonable, and clever. Buster Friendly, the most powerful android in human space, is humankind's favorite celebrity. Mercer, the emblem of all that's uniquely human, is an alien life form, a hoax or both. And to access his magical empathy adventure, you have to use a machine. There's way too much going on in the book for a 300-word blog post—there may even be enough for a 6 to 8-page paper. Maybe.

Even the title is a joke that can't be fully understood without reading the book. In the future, most humans have never even seen an organic sheep—why shouldn't they dream of the mechanical variety? Do androids dream at all? The questions are endless, and mostly unanswerable. But that doesn't mean they're not fun to think about. It's all dead serious and completely absurd. It's surrealist yet totally believable. Everything is what it seems but nothing is what you expect. If I can revive the author for a second, it's not hard to see why the book is so brain-meltingly multifarious. Dick was a Gnostic tweaker and a Berkeley dropout. He was, in other words, a pretty awesome guy. If I saw him sitting on a milk crate outside Asian Ghetto, I'd totally give him a dollar. And I never give money to guys sitting on milk crates. That's how awesome PKD is.

It's fun not to have a prompt this week. I think we should just do away with prompts—if we can write 5–6 pages without a prompt, surely we can write 300 words. Yes? Prompts are just so...limiting. And worse, they force us into the uncomfortable, poorly defined limbo between academic writing (where words like "thus" aren't obnoxious) and the informal, idiosyncratic, anything-goes style of blogging (where "lol"s run wild). I say bring on the lolage, lol.