Book Club
"Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep" by PKD
A while ago we said we’re gonna do a book club. For our first book we’re picking Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep by PKD — it’s fitting for our times as it deals with issues of empathy and collapse.
As I was reading the Curtis Yarvin profile/mild takedown in the New Yorker, I was annoyed to see that the journalist who wrote the profile mentioned the famous Voight-Kampff test as something out of Blade Runner…
…I would think this educated liberal journalist would know better. The Voight-Kampff test is a fictional empathy test to identify whether someone is an android pretending to be human. It didn’t originally come from Blade Runner, but from PKD’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep — a novel that is much richer and deeper than Ridley Scott’s film adaptation. It depicts a post-apocalyptic dystopian America and marriage as well. Most importantly, the novel offers a radically different view on androids than the film. But I don’t want to spoil the book for you.
So go read the book, and we’ll discuss it in two weeks — on June 17th on Substack’s threads. We have to figure it out but we might incorporate some kind of live video discussion if technology permits.
—Evgenia
PS: We discussed PKD on a recent episode with John Dolan.
Jesus. For a supposed "intellectual" of the Counter-Enlightenment, Curtis Yarvin is an utter mediocrity of a thinker. He's like a Temu Carl Schmitt, or a "slightly-soiled" Joseph de Maistre one gets half price off Ebay.
Look at his usage of "NPC": one of those insults where the user is telling on themself. "I go through life seeing other people as not really human". PKD would get the irony straight away. Curtis never would.
Perfect timing! Your recent interview inspired me to read some PDK work and now I know where to start.