Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?

Earth after nuclear war. Most animals are extinct. Rick Deckard is a bounty hunter whose job is to identify and retire androids — biological machines indistinguishable from humans except by a test that measures empathy. The question the novel will not let go of: if empathy can be perfectly simulated, what is it actually measuring? If an android passes as human in every observable way, what does human mean? Dick published this in 1968 — the same year Debord published Society of the Spectacle — and both books are asking the same question from different directions: what remains of authentic experience when everything can be manufactured? The FBI had a file on Dick. His paranoia about simulated reality turned out to be partly justified. The most important science fiction novel for the P&P catalog that isn't Le Guin — the book that most precisely asks what it means to be human in a world that has decided humanity is a product, and refuses to give a comfortable answer.