QUOTE (julezia @ Aug 18 2007, 04:21 PM)I've always wanted to read "Do androids dream of Electric Sheep!" just because the title sounds so weird, and I like weird books.
I've never read any Dan Brown either, I'm probably one of the few on the planet who haven't. I bought the Da Vinci Code, read a few chapters, but it didn't keep my interest..
Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep is an interesting story, like most of Philip K. Dick's stuff it's not very long, I found it in an anthology of his short stories.
It's very different to the film version, BladeRunner, much more philosophical. In the film, the assertion is basically that the androids are effectively human, with their thoughts and feelings. In the book, it's the other way round: that humans are really just biological machines. The book also makes the setting clearer, going into stuff that was alluded to in the film but not really explained properly, such as there are almost no real animals left, they're all extinct, so people really do have electric sheep which graze their lawns etc. Something that's hinted at in the film quite subtlely is that Deckard might be an android too, but like Rachael not know it. In the book it's much clearer, and in fact I'm left with the impression that maybe there weren't any real humans left alive at all, which would be another way of looking at Dick's insinuation that humans are little more than machines.
As for the Da Vinci Code, I thought it was ok as travel fare, it helped me pass the time on some train journeys, but it's very derivative of the Holy Blood & Holy Grail (Dan Brown's claim that he hadn't read that book before he wrote his own story is truly laughable, he steals so much from it).
