Week Eleven: Cyberpunk and Steampunk

The selected reading for this week was Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? by Philip K. Dick. The story itself is the one that the movie Blade Runner is based off of, although it is a bit different. The topics of discussion this week deal with the subgenres of cyberpunk and steampunk, and the idea of alternate realities.

Cyberpunk stories are usually always set in the future, and are, much of the time, dystopian or following a great World War or apocalypse of some sort. They usually always deal with the possibilities of what could be following a tragic event like this, or sort of what horrors humanity would have to deal with if all of this went sort of wrong. Much of the time cyberpunk explores the idea of technology gone wrong, specifically designed to help humanity but always ending up turning on us in some way.

In Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? the story is centered around Rick Deckard, who is given the job of 6 man-made androids gone rogue. The world he lives in has been catastrophically ravaged by a nuclear war, and much of the environment lays in waste. It's a status symbol to be able to own a living animal, and much of Deckard's ennui in the story comes from the fact that he is only able to afford a malfunctional electric sheep instead of a real, living animal like his neighbor. The story itself holds a large amount of angst as opposed to the movie, and Deckard experiences a lot of existential crisis and struggles to find meaning in his life. Living in a world without animals, whom humans experience great empathy for, as well as having to coexist with a type of human who doesn't experience empathy at all (androids) seems to be very difficult for the average person to cope with emotionally. I think that was much of what Dick was trying to explore in this book, and what much of the cyberpunk genre tries to explore in general. That is, what circumstances may we have to live under if we let technology and war get too out of hand? How will the human experience be if we don't take care of our planet? The genre continues to raise questions about humanity and our future, even today.