Introduction & Overview of Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? by Philip K. Dick

Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? Introduction

The importance of Philip Kindred Dick may never be fully assessed or accepted by mainstream analysts of English literature. The reason is simply that Dick's chosen genre, science fiction, has little standing with academic critics. In addition, Dick's fiction can be incredibly difficult to grapple with. As Robert Scholes and Eric S. Rabkin noted in their Science Fiction: History, Science, Vision, "His work is not easy to discuss, Since it does not fall neatly into a few books of exceptional achievement and a larger body of lesser works All his books offer ideas, situations, and passages of considerable interest. None quite achieves that seamless perfection of form that constitutes one form of literary excellence." Nevertheless, Dick is widely regarded as a master of his chosen medium and through more than one hundred short stories, some fifty novels (mostly science fiction), many essays, and lectures, he has created a cult following...
(read more)