Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?

Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? is the 1968 dystopian science fiction novel by Philip K. Dick, an American writer. Its setting is a post-apocalyptic San Francisco, where a nuclear war has badly damaged the planet's life, and it provided the basis for Blade Runner, the 1982 film, with much of it reused in the 2017 sequel.

In 1992, after a global war has left the atmosphere highly radioactive, most animal species are endangered or extinct. Owning a real animal has therefore become an expensive status symbol, while poorer people keep realistic electric imitations. Rick Deckard is a bounty hunter paid to retire androids that have escaped off-world service and hidden among humans, and he wants a real animal instead of the electric sheep on his roof.

His test for telling a person from an android is whether they can care about the right things, and between assignments he argues with his wife about the empathy box that connects them to a figure the whole world worships. His assignment is a list of escaped androids, and each one is harder to find than the last. A second strand of the story concerns John Isidore, who is not clever and who helps some of the fugitives.

Dick wrote the novel while living in California, and it is one of several of his books that ask what counts as a person. It is a standalone novel, and the film adaptations changed several of its characters and much of its ending.