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Feuyaer
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PostPosted: Thu Jan 10, 2008 3:18 pm    Post subject: About the Book Reply with quote

So I finally got around to reading Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?

And I'm a tad confused.


Can somebody please explain to me the point of Mercerism, or what the heck was happening when they "fused" with him, or whatever, and were pelted by rocks?

I mean, I understood what was basically happening with that, but why were they doing it? And what was with dialing those emotions? What was the point of THAT? Those bits felt a bit abstract to me...
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The Loyalizer
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PostPosted: Thu Jan 10, 2008 9:10 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

The empathy boxes in the book are a kind of collective shared experience, where in any humans currently using the box both share the experience, and experience the emotions of others using the box, and vice versa. The world of DADOES is barren and empty, not the crowded metropolis you see in the film. The empathy boxes are also used as a device that confirms one's essential humanity, as the androids cannot use the boxes, because they themselves lack empathy. Mercerism is also a new religion in a way, it also speaks of transcendance. It blurs the line between real and unreal, such as when Mercer appears to Deckard, it raises the question of is it really happening, or is it a product of Deckard's subconscious?

As far as the emotion box, its another consumer product. If you look at TV nowadays, you'll see quite a few ads for antidepressants and other mental health drugs. In the world of DADOES, the mood organ is pretty much how this is handled, you feel depressed, you dial in for feeling uplifted and confident. Its also the idea that while people build and control machines for slave labor and social stauts, those same machines control human emotions. Somwhere Dick once said 'Living and unliving things are exchanging properties'.

Overall there's alot more going on in that book than just the retirement of 6 escaped androids. The questions of what is human, what is real, what isn't real. What does it mean to have empathy for what is basically an artificial construct? A lot of these things are common themes in his work.
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Feuyaer
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PostPosted: Thu Jan 10, 2008 10:23 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

The Loyalizer wrote:
Mercerism is also a new religion in a way, it also speaks of transcendance. It blurs the line between real and unreal, such as when Mercer appears to Deckard, it raises the question of is it really happening, or is it a product of Deckard's subconscious?


This is what confused me the most as I read it - at first he's just a vision but then appears in front of Deckard....so I'm guessing it's not supposed to be obvious whether he's real or not.

I guess the rest was sort of obvious(-ish?) to me - I was wondering if there was something that completely went over my head but I guess I got the point...sort of.

I was just thinking things like obtaining information through a vision and transmitting emotions to be a little abstract, even in a world of humanoid robots and flying cars...
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The Loyalizer
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PostPosted: Fri Jan 11, 2008 2:43 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

I've always viewed the manifestation of Mercer that appears when Deckard enters Isidore's building to be a manifestation of Deckard's own subconscious, both his outlook on what he does for a living and his instincts as a bounty hunter, which is why the manifestation tells him to look behind him on the stairs. Its a hallucination, not an actual spiritual manifestation.
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Masao
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PostPosted: Wed Jan 16, 2008 8:31 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

I see it more as a residual effect like persistence of vision than a simple hallucination. In this case, the brain is reacting to a stimulus (or lack of) resulting in something like losing a limb.
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