Dick does not make easy reading. He lacks the informality of [Arthur C.] Clarke, the vocabulary of [Anthony] Burgess, the pointillism of [John] Fowles. His phrasing is often clumsy, bathetic, despairing, a tangle of moods and impressions hurled like warnings of imminent catastrophe. His characters tumble angrily past as if their appearance in the narrative were an unwelcome distraction. The first paragraphs of a Dick novel habitually plunge us into an environment so intact with images, purposes and objectives as to incline us to reconsider the accuracy of our own perceptions. The typical Dick hero is similarly in a state of confusion, seeing himself as an insignificant component in an elaborate social mechanism requiring effort, conformity and commitment for no very clear reward. The rules of the game may change at any moment, nothing is permanent, and a malignant, vaguely godlike presence monitors his every move in the expectation of failure. Dick's is the science fiction of the average citizen attempting an unremarkable survival in an environment that considers him uninteresting and expendable. Far from the bright, muscular heroic myths of Star Wars or Superman, it lurks in the dark labyrinths of paranoia.
What renders his work so absorbing is its inventiveness and its humour, dizzyingly based on a lunatic logic. Both are combined in the premise of Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, the 1968 novel on which [the film] Blade Runner is based. The near eradication of Earth's animal life other than man has resulted in the measurement of wealth by ownership of livestock, and in accordance with a catalogue that gives current values as if for antiques or second-hand cars, people acquire goats, sheep and cows as status symbols. If they can't afford genuine animals, they settle for working models. One of the most valuable creatures listed is the toad, said to have been extinct for years; when, near the end of the book, one is discovered in the desert, hopes of a fabulous reward are high until it proves to have a tiny control panel in its abdomen. Against this bizarre background of pervasive fakery, the erosion of authentic humanity by undetectable android imitations has all the plausibility of a new and lethal plague whereby evolution would become substitution and nobody would notice the difference. The notion is rich with political and metaphysical implications, but Dick pins it firmly on the obvious target of technology through which, should man wish to lift a finger, future prosthetics will do it for him. And in his view, defeat is already in sight. (pp. 169-70)
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