Abstract
This chapter examines the works of Philip K. Dick, highlighting the similarities between Dick’s frequent advocacy of animal ethics and the animal liberation movement of the 1970s. The analysis begins with an examination of Dick’s attitudes towards other animals in his early life and the frequent promotion of vegetarianism throughout his early short stories. It then turns to an extensive examination of Dick’s most famous and influential novel, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (1968), showing how the novel anticipated many fundamental arguments of the animal liberation movement while also continuing the Romantic themes established by Shelley. A comparison to Dick’s earlier novel Dr Bloodmoney (1965) is then conducted, elaborating on how similar explorations of speciesism and animal liberation were seeded and developed throughout Dick’s work. Lastly, it examines Dick’s late-life theological turn, showing how his life-long emphasis on empathy and animal ethics remained essential to his religious philosophies and experiences, which were themselves seemingly informed by science fiction’s vegetarian tradition.
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Notes
- 1.
There is some confusion in both Anne and Philip K. Dick’s accounts of the argument about distinctions between hominid types, including Neanderthals, Homo sapiens, and that represented by the OH 5 fossil. They seem to be referring to only a single lineage in the original argument, although Dick makes distinctions between Neanderthal and Cro-Magnon subsets in his later conversations with Rickman (Own Words 92).
- 2.
The name “Dick,” in English, corresponds to “Rick” as a short form of “Richard” (Room, italics removed). The correspondence suggests a potential connection between Dick and Deckard that anticipates his later identification with Horselover Fat and perhaps lends some credence to an identification between the opinions of Deckard and Dick’s own.
- 3.
Adrian Tchaikovsky’s Arthur C. Clarke Award-winning novel Children of Time (2015) features a species of extra-terrestrial spiders who are accidentally transformed from “a species of solitary hunters into a society” by the introduction of empathy, suggesting a possible tribute to Dick, although Tchaikovsky’s spiders remain carnivorous, and even cannibalistic (590).
- 4.
Neither vegetarianism nor carnism play a major role anywhere else in Sheldon’s writing, although she reportedly told McIntyre she was developing plot about a “chicken hatchery set in the asteroids, run by women in competition with a huge processed-foods corporation,” which never came to fruition (Phillips 284).
- 5.
Known recipients of Dick’s Tagore letters include his literary agent Russel Galen, editors Ed Meskys and Lawrence Ashmead and authors Thomas M. Disch and Grania Davis (P. K. Dick, Letters 6:256–60; Locus, “Appreciations” 14; see also P. K. Dick, Exegesis 780–86).
- 6.
Dick’s quotation of Deuteronomy does not seem to match any particular version of the Torah, including the Hertz translation he appeals to in the same letter.
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Bulleid, J. (2023). Should Androids Eat Electric Sheep? Philip K. Dick, Interspecies Empathy, and Animal Liberation. In: Vegetarianism and Science Fiction. Palgrave Studies in Animals and Literature. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-38347-2_5
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