Do Androids Dream of Reading Philip K. Dick?

PLEASE NOTE: This course is self-paced. All live meetings have concluded, but the course remains available in its entirety via recordings.

Erik Davis has been thinking and writing about the visionary Californian science fiction writer Philip K. Dick since he wrote about PKD for his Yale thesis in 1988. In his ED101 course, Davis led students through a prophetic reading of PKD’s The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch. With ED102, Davis returns to Weirdosphere with a series of lectures on PKD’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, perhaps best known as the novel that formed the basis for the Ridley Scott cult film Blade Runner.

Erik’s first lecture will present Dick’s work and life in the late 1960s and lay out some of the major themes of the novel, as well as a more general discussion on “prophetic reading.” Subsequent weeks will combine close readings of the novel with focused discussions sessions. Weekly readings will consist of roughly 60-page chunks, plus optional secondary texts.

We will explore a number of themes found in Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, one of Dick’s most explicitly ethical novels. We will look at how Dick presents the vexed human relationship to both animals and humanoid machines; the pharmacological control of personality and emotion; the mechanization of empathy; the ontology of entropy; and the transformations of the Christ figure in an age of immersive “social” media. We will be reading the novel not so much as fiction or science fiction but as a prophetic lens on today’s polycrisis, aspects of which resonate uncannily with Dick’s philosophical and visionary concerns.