Empathy Enough: The Disorienting Power of Androids in a Posthuman World

In the 1968 science fiction novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, Philip K. Dick envisions a world where synthetic beings have become advanced enough to walk among humans unnoticed, blurring the boundary between human and machine. In a later interview, he claims that the inspiration of the novel came from reading a Gestapo officer’s diary, believing that the writing represented a “humanoid other” that is morphologically human and yet is not human in essence. Using critical theory on object-orientation, technology, and identity, I investigate the novel’s use of space, object description, and references to the ersatz to uncover the conditions under which a humanoid other emerges, and what Dick offers as the remedy for our “bifurcated” humanity