Blade Runner and Electric Sheep

I'd meant to read this multiple times over the last decade but must have kept forgetting - probably because the book of Blade Runner does not share its name with the film.  Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep might be well lost in the shadow of the film, which I love, and has become iconic in itself.  In seeing Bladerunner 2049, I had been wondering how a movie, which had already become the blueprint for cyber punk, could push any limits while staying within its own world.  However, I thought they did a great job, while retrospectively (anachronistically?), I also feel like Blade Runner was an amazing adaptation of this book.

While I enjoyed it, and while it has themes that aren't in the film at all - e.g. Dekkard's wife, and the electric sheep (which he owns because everyone has to own an animal and if they can't find an animal then they at least need a fake animal so that no-one realises that they don't own an animal), I got a lot more out of the film.  The idea of 'empathy' being the quality that distinguishes robots from humans is more prominent in the book, however such a message might come across as pretty heavy-handed if done in film.

At first, my previous experience of the film was a little distracting, trying to fit the characters in the book to their movie representations, however after a while I got into the flow and enjoyed some of the language and character developments.  The ambiguity of Dekkard being a replicant isn't really a theme in the book, and so anyone looking for answers in this regard won't find any :)

Is The Power about gender issues or about power?

I am trying to read again and have found it good that I had a repository of impressions I got from books I read previously. Also, Cracked the website (and youtube channel) ended as it was and some of my favourite folks there branched off, notably into Small Beans and Some More News, and there are some book related podcasts from both, although in the former case, Kurt Vonneguys is mainly housed by Cracked. Katy from Some More News started a bookclub called Some More Books and the first book was Naomi Alderman's The Power. So that's how I came to read this book. What follows is adapted from a comment I made on the Some More Books post.


Women across the world start developing the ability to zap people with electricity (superpower style). The upshot of which, is that women now represent the physically dominant half of humankind. The chapters follow the perspective of a few different characters whose stories become interwoven by the end. There's a couple of passing passages that wryly comment on the gender reversal - parents are worried about their boys walking the streets alone, males are now mainly good for eye-candy, the issue of male consent arises and so on, however rather this book feeling like a commentary on gender issues, it is more the idea of power and its ability to corrupt.


The concept of power is explored in parallels with political instability - female militias rape and pillage refugee camps, female dictators become paranoid with their hold on power, laws are passed that suddenly disempower specific groups. I don't think the central tenet of the book is that 'if women had the power, they would act the same as men do today', nor is it just a catharsis or wish for power from Alderman, who could see herself as part of the female underclass (on the latter point, I had commented that some could argue it's a revenge novel, but I hadn't meant to suggest that that was the intention or how it comes across to me). Rather, I think there's a genuine attempt to follow the beginning premise through to reasonable outcomes as well as exploring some different dynamics.


So what is the impact, for the reader, of being confronted with such a world? For me, a unique impression that came through was experiencing abuses of power as a “new thing”. For example, in the gang-rape of a male during the female militia pillage, the experience of the humiliating aspects of rape, the loss of power felt by onlookers, feels new. If it were a parallel scene in a story about an unstable country, I would be disgusted, I would feel horrible, but it wouldn't be anything 'new'. Women perpetrating violence is certainly confronting in a different way. The only thing that stopped me from getting into the book properly was that the characters didn’t really have an arc, set out from the beginning (no goal in a hero’s journey sense). You’re just seeing history (somewhat similar to how I felt with Foundations), and that stopped me from becoming invested in any of them. Aside from Roxy, there’s also not much in the way of compassionate and likable characters - Especially males are all portrayed as pretty horrible, even Tunde is only self-interested - but yearning for likable characters isn't an everyone-thing. I definitely recommend this to people, as part of our continuing education in female perspectives and understanding feminist issues.