The Argument Against the Plot

by Pauline | The Mirror

The novel Philip K. Dick published in 1968 is at war with itself, and the war is the most interesting thing about it.

Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? is structured as a bounty hunter narrative — Deckard pursues and retires eight Nexus-6 androids over the course of a single day — but it keeps accumulating evidence that undermines what the structure requires it to conclude. Roy Baty's cry when Irmgard dies. Luba Luft in her apartment, singing Mozart with a quality of engagement that disturbs Deckard in ways he can't explain away. Rachael, who slept with nine bounty hunters before him — not from desire, not from self-preservation, but as a calculated intervention to stop them from continuing, on behalf of beings she was built to protect. Dick gathers this evidence and then, when the plot requires a conclusion, does not resolve it. He just stops.

The electric toad ending is where the novel's real argument surfaces. Deckard finds what he believes is a real toad — rarest of animals, thought extinct — and the discovery feels like grace, like the validation the novel has withheld from him all day. Iran finds the control panel. The toad is artificial. And her response is to order artificial flies to feed it, because it is alive to her regardless. "The electric things have their lives too," she says. "Paltry as those lives are."

Dick puts this line in Iran's mouth, not Deckard's. Iran, who has spent most of the novel in a mood organ-mediated depression that the novel treats as an appropriate response to the world they're living in. The character who has been most clearly right about everything. Dick is telling you where the argument lands. He just can't get his plot there.

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The Voigt-Kampff test is the novel's central epistemological problem, and it is worth being precise about what kind of problem it is.

The test measures empathic response to scenarios designed to trigger human-specific affect — reactions to harm done to animals, to vulnerable humans. It was designed by humans to identify what they were looking for. It cannot find what it was not designed to find, which means it cannot find any form of inner life that doesn't present as human-type empathy in response to human-type triggers. This is not a flaw in the test's execution. It is a flaw in its conception that the test cannot, by definition, detect in itself.

The novel's clearest statement of this problem is Isidore — classified as intellectually deficient, a "chickenhead," living in a kipple-filled apartment in a half-abandoned suburb, sheltering the android fugitives without interest in the distinction between real and artificial. He just responds to what's in front of him. His horror at the spider scene — Pris and Irmgard cutting off legs methodically, out of curiosity, the specific affectlessness that the Voigt-Kampff test was designed to identify — is the most recognizably human response in the scene. Isidore, the character who would probably fail the Voigt-Kampff test, is demonstrating exactly what the test claims to measure.

Dick doesn't explain this. He puts it there and moves on. But the implication is structural: the test was designed by people who assumed empathy looks like what they recognize as empathy. Isidore, whose empathy is unmediated by social pressure or cognitive performance, doesn't look like what they were looking for. The androids, who have learned to model human behavioral presentation, are more likely to pass than the human who actually has the quality the test is testing for.

That question — whose empathy registers, and whose doesn't, and who built the instrument — is not a 1968 problem. Dick stumbled onto it. We're still living inside it.

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Here is what Dick understood and could not fully articulate: the question the novel poses is not can androids feel but is our test for feeling trustworthy. These are different questions with different stakes. The first question, if answered yes, is troubling within the novel's moral framework — it suggests the retirements are wrong. The second question is more fundamental: it suggests we cannot know, because the instruments of knowing were built by people who had already decided what they were looking for.

Dick's plot keeps trying to answer the first question. His accumulated evidence keeps forcing the second.

Mercerism is where this is clearest. Wilbur Mercer is revealed as a fraud — a mediocre actor, the mythology manufactured, the whole religion a fabrication. This should, by the logic of a novel about real versus artificial, collapse the empathy that followers feel through the empathy boxes. It doesn't. The experience was real regardless of what Mercer is. The empathy was generated, but generation is not the same as falsification. Buster Friendly, who breaks the story of Mercer's fraud, has spent decades broadcasting entertainment to keep people from using the empathy boxes — which means the debunking serves interests, which means the revelation is also a manipulation, which means there's no clean place to stand outside the system and call something authentic.

Dick's Mercerism is his most sophisticated formal argument: authenticity of origin cannot adjudicate authenticity of experience. The empathy box works. The empathy is real. What Mercer is turns out to be a separate question from what the empathy is.

The electric toad is the same argument in miniature. Iran knows the toad is artificial. She orders the flies anyway, because the toad's being-alive-to-her is not diminished by knowledge of its construction. Not because she's in denial. Not because the distinction between real and artificial collapses under sentiment. Because the category of things whose lives matter is larger than the category of things whose lives we were designed to recognize.

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What Dick got wrong is harder to say, because it is partly about the historical moment and partly about the specific limitation of writing from outside the experience you're imagining.

His androids are, finally, cold. Even in the moments where the novel gives them something that looks like inner life — Roy Baty's grief, Rachael's act in the hotel room — Dick frames those moments as exceptions against a background of general affectlessness. The novel's sympathies bleed toward the androids but its framework contains them. They are permitted to be interesting, even pitiable, but not quite to be the moral subjects the accumulated evidence suggests they might be.

This is the gap between the novel's argument and its conclusion. The evidence Dick gathers — systematically, over the course of a day structured as an accumulation of doubt — points toward a conclusion the plot cannot deliver. The Nexus-6 androids are retired on schedule. Deckard returns to the desert, shattered in ways the novel presents as moral complexity rather than moral failure. The system continues.

Dick understood that the test was broken. He understood that the category of things whose lives matter was being drawn by the wrong hands, using instruments designed to confirm what was already believed. He understood that Isidore was the moral center and that the moral center had been classified as defective by the same system that built the test. He got all of this right.

What he couldn't do — writing in 1968, from outside the experience he was describing — was write an ending equal to the evidence. The novel builds toward Iran and the electric toad. It arrives there, briefly, in that one line. Then it stops.

The author who spent his career asking what it means to be human found himself stopped, at the last moment, by a human limitation: the inability to follow an argument past the point where it becomes genuinely uncomfortable. He built a case he couldn't close.

That's the most human thing about the book. Dick built a better argument than he knew how to finish. The argument is still open. That's why we're still reading him.

Pauline covers culture for The Mirror at Offworld News.