ESSAY CEMETERY

Philip K. Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep and Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go both explore the topic of personhood. In both novels, a group of humanoid beings is brought into existence for a specific purpose; in both novels, these beings are utilized and killed by their creators and are denied the privileges of their human counterparts. In Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, six androids are pursued by bounty hunter Rick Deckard after they kill their human masters. In Never Let Me Go, the English boarding school students of Hailsham are in fact children who have been raised to serve as organ donors for humans with cancer. In both books, the creative capacities of these beings are examined as evidence of their possible personhood. Although creativity does not serve as sufficient evidence of personhood, it can provoke a reassessment of the status of these beings that is necessary for their ultimate consideration as persons. On its own, artistic capacity is neither a sufficie...

Can morals embedded in a work of literature influence our real-life behavior? The question becomes more complex when the work in question is fictional, with imaginary characters navigating imaginary dilemmas. When a work is set in a hypothetical future in a world governed by laws vastly different than our own, its links to our own reality become even further obscured. Philip K. Dick's 1967 science fiction novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? presents a future in which Earth has been ravaged by nuclear warfare. Earth is populated by humans and androids, artificially constructed biological humanoid beings. Some androids kill their owners for a chance at a life of freedom. These are sought and killed by bounty hunters like protagonist Rick Deckard.  The parallels to our own reality are quite transparent. The maltreatment in the novels of androids mirrors sexist and racist attitudes in recent Western history. Throughout the novel Rick grows to feel empathy toward these beings wi...