Creative Review : Book

The book I recommended at the first creative review was 'Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?' by Philip K Dick. I'm doing my dissertation on the film Blade Runner, and this is the book that it's based on. I'd actually read this book a while ago before I'd seen the film, and decided to start reading it again recently.

The book is a sci-fi novel set in San Fransisco in the year 2021, and follows Rick Deckard, a police officer who's job it is to 'retire' androids. The book is a lot broader in detail than the film in terms of subjects and the different issues it tackles, but still follows the main issue of humanity. With out going into loads of detail about everything that happens in the book, I'd say its definitely worth a read as like the film, it presents an imaginative but not unrealistic future vision, extrapolating the present, and issues such as war, religion and technology are discussed via an interesting and exciting detective story. Good times.

It also contains one of the best words ever : Kipple.

" JR - Kipple is useless objects, like junk mail or match folders after

you use the last match or gum wrappers of yesterday's homeopape. 

When nobody's around, kipple reproduces itself. For instance, if you go to 

bed leaving any kipple around your apartment, when you wake up the 

next morning there's twice as much of it. It always gets more and more.

Pris- I see. 

JR - There's the First Law of Kipple, "Kipple drives out nonkipple." Like Gresham's 

law about bad money. And in these apartments there's been nobody 

there to fight the kipple. 

Pris - So it has taken over completely. Now I understand. 

JR - Your place, here, this apartment you've picked - it's too kipple-ized to live in. 

We can roll the kipple-factor back; we can do like I said, raid the other apartments. But - 

Pris - But what? 

JR - We can't win. 

Pris - Why not? 

JR - No one can win against kipple, except temporarily and maybe in one spot, like

in my apartment I've sort of created a stasis between the pressure of 

kipple and nonkipple, for the time being. But eventually I'll die or go away, and then 

the kipple will again take over. It's a universal principle operating throughout the 

universe; the entire universe is moving toward a final state of total, absolute kippleization. "