The best praise I've ever seen for Philip K. Dick was from The New York Times - they called him "A kind of pulp-fiction Kafka, a prophet." I think that's an apt description. Do Android Dream of Electric Sheep is one of my all time favorite novels. It's not long -- the prose is succinct and sparse, the opposite of anything Bradbury or Tolkien, who are also on this list, ever wrote -- but the story is GOOD. The pacing is fast. A sense of danger and stress pervades the whole text.
I get the sense that the novel could be twice as long. Would be twice as long, even, if someone else had written it. Very few authors can masterfully imprint such grave questions as is our narrator even human? Are the characters on the page that believe they're human actually human? This was HBO's Westworld's origin text, I suspect, and for good reason.
This is not just a novel that impacted me deeply, but one of my all time favorite novels. Philip K. Dick is a true master of the craft. And I think, aside, maybe, from Patrick Rothfuss's The Name of the Wind, that Do Android Dream of Electric Sheep is one of the best titles for any novel, ever.
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