BAUMAN RARE BOOKS 30 34DICK, Philip K. Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? Garden City: 1968. Octavo, original gray cloth, dust jacket, custom clamshell box. $25,000 First edition of one of science fiction’s most famous and influential novels (and inspiration for the landmark futuristic film noir, Blade Runner), Dick’s masterful vision of the struggles between technology and humanity, entropy and empathy, in a post-apocalyptic world. Dick looms large as science fiction’s “all-time grand master of… pop epistemology” (Disch, 52). In this novel, one of his most popular and powerful, he envisions a bleak future in which “android animals are marketed to help expiate the guilt people experience because real ones have been virtually exterminated,” and in which bounty hunter Rick Deckard “must hunt down androids illegally imported from Mars. In so doing, he learns that the society’s new messiah may also be a fake; and that [its] landscapes of decay and imposture may in fact only mirror his own condition” (Clute & Nicholls, 329). “A key novel in Dick’s canon” (Anatomy of Wonder II-326). Blade Runner, director Ridley Scott’s visually stunning film adaptation, “did not receive much critical acclaim nor did it do well at the box office” when released in 1982. A “Director’s Cut” a decade later, however, “received highly positive reviews” (Tibbetts & Welsh, 91-92), and subsequent revisions have only enhanced its status as a definitive fusion of hard-boiled detective story and philosophically profound science fiction. Currey, 125. Dust jacket with slight rubbing to edges. A nearly fine copy of a seminal science fiction classic. Scarce. “It’s The Basic Condition Of Life To Be Required To Violate Our Own Identity”
RkJQdWJsaXNoZXIy NDg3OTM=