Curious book. When I was a kid I was bewildered by how it deviated from the film, but enjoyed it a lot more this time. This is my third PKD book recently, and as always I'm impressed by how responsive the characters are to their circumstances, and how their arcs drive the plot rather than the other way around. It means that side characters and subplots flit in and out of the book, giving it an unfinished and incomplete quality, but also lends it some real emotional force.

You'd think it would be right in PKD's wheelhouse, but he's ultimately uninterested in the film's central question of whether Deckard is an android—to the point where it's only brought up once, fleetingly. Instead, his real concern here is empathy and whether that's what makes us human. You'd think he'd go for a nuanced answer here where the androids possess empathy and the humans don't, but instead we get a sort of cartoonish villainy where the androids have no compunction about killing animals. Still, though, Decker's reactions and responses throughout to his journey offer meaningful moral gristle even when it risks becoming didactic or too neat.

Next up in the PKD read-through: UBIK!