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Do Androids Dream of A Modern Prometheus

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 DO ANDROIDS DREAM OF A MODERN
PROMETHEUS?

MLADEN JAKOVLJEVIû

1. Introduction
Brian Aldiss (1973, 18) said that “[s]cience fiction was born from the
Gothic mode, is hardly free of it now. Nor is the distance between the two
modes great”. Science fiction as a genre has origins in the Gothic literary
tradition, and one work that Aldiss (1973, 21) had in mind is Frankenstein;
or, The Modern Prometheus by Mary Shelley, who “imbibed the scientific
ideas of Darwin and Shelley; had heard what they had to say about the
future; and now set about applying her findings within the loose framework
of a Gothic novel”. According to Parrinder (2003, 6), the original preface
to Shelley’s Frankenstein “unmistakably claims for it the status of science
fiction”. Inside Frankenstein, one of the best known representatives of the
Gothic mode and an inaugural science fiction novel, lie, as Aldiss (1973,
26) noticed, “the seeds of all later diseased creation myths, including H. G.
Wells’ Island of Dr. Moreau, and the legions of robots from ýapek’s day
forward”.
Philip K. Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? is one of such
diseased creation myths that sprung from the seed sown by Shelley. Since
science fiction as a genre has developed from the foggy and spooky realms
of the Gothic, it is only natural to seek and find similarities between
Shelley’s story and later novels about the creation of the new human and
the resulting betrayal and loss of basic human values. In Frankenstein; or,
The Modern Prometheus, Shelley reworked the myth of Prometheus, who
“made man in the image of the gods” (Bulfinch 2005, 12) into a story
about a scientist who transgressed divine powers and secrets of human life
by creating it in a laboratory. Shelley’s novel has influenced numerous
science fiction writers and the creation of life by a scientist has become a
well-known pattern in contemporary science fiction. Accordingly, it is
easy to add Dick’s name to the list of those who used it in their works.
There are parallels that can be noticed when the two novels are compared;
 Mladen Jakovljeviü 169

however, there is no intention here to claim that Dick’s’ story was inspired
and influenced by Shelley. The creation motif, for which Shelley’s work is
probably best known, is clearly a point of similarity between the two
novels, but it is not the only one, nor is it the most significant. What stems
from it is far more important. This prophetic image of the posthuman, its
film version with “bolts in his neck, jointless limbs, and a heavy industrial
walk […] is an early cinematic draft of an android, an artificially
constructed body that can be galvanized into a mimetic form of human
life” (Kavka 2002, 218). The vision of the android originating in Shelley’s
work, paired with typically Gothic tropes that can be found in both novels,
raise questions about the consequences of these Promethean efforts to
create life, which are as current, serious and threatening now as they were
when Frankenstein was written.
Gothic tropes, such as dissipation, chase, setting, revenge, murder, and
duality, to name a few, can be interpreted as literary mechanisms that, with
necessary modifications thereto, reflect the time when each of the two
novels was written. For example, the role of the scientist, once assumed by
Victor Frankenstein, is no longer as lonesome as it used to be and reserved
only to a single man. In Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, the role
of the creator is assumed by multinational corporations, whereas his
anxieties and consequences of his actions are projected onto the entire
species. In Philip K. Dick’s novel about post-apocalyptic San Francisco in
2021, after the nuclear war that decimated the population and inflicted
great damage to life on the planet, what Victor feared had become a
reality. The constructs created by science have become uncontrollable,
they have become many, and as such, they are a threat to humanity. One
monster in Shelley’s novel has been multiplied into a myriad of androids
in Dick’s. The singular has become plural and what was once an isolated
incident, albeit taking place in several geographically distant places, now
affects the entire world. Or, as is often the case in Dick’s fiction, the
worlds therein.

2. Gothic Monsters
As mentioned above, there are numerous parallels between the two novels
that can be foregrounded by focusing on the Gothic tropes. They, in turn,
help us consider the circumstances related to them and the consequences
that they produce. One parallelism that is perhaps the most easily noticed
are the similarities between Shelley’s Victor Frankenstein and Dick’s
humans, as well as those between the monster and androids, particularly
when seen through duality and dissipation, which are closely connected.
170 Do Androids Dream of a Modern Prometheus?

The creator’s dissipation and the relationship between the creator and the
constructs bring into focus the questions of what it means to be human.
This question and the one about the boundaries between the human and
the machine are those that Philip K. Dick was so fond of in his fiction and
essays.
Victor’s dissipation, manifested as both physical and mental
deterioration due to the serious consequences his scientific output has on
him and the people around him, as well as those he is afraid humanity
might suffer in the future, can be seen in Dick’s novel as projected onto
the entire species and reality they live in. The fatal effects of the fallout on
reproductive and cognitive abilities have caused deterioration of psycho-
physical and genetic features in part of the population, which is why the
citizens are divided into regulars, i.e. those that have not been affected by
radiation, and irregulars, i.e. those that have been affected, called
chickenheads, who are so damaged they cannot qualify for the emigration
programme. The most notable examples are the bounty hunter Deckard, of
the former group, and Isidore of the latter.
The protagonists of Dick’s novel suffer a fate similar to Victor
Frankenstein’s, who, as the story develops, loses the qualities of humanness
and becomes lonelier and more isolated, even when surrounded by other
people, his friends and family. With a diminished IQ and traits that
prevent him to qualify as a “regular”, Isidore suffers in the lonesome and
depopulated world. The bounty hunter Rick Deckard and his wife are
lonely, in spite of being married and living together. This is evident in
their need to programme their own emotions, which makes them
frighteningly similar to androids. Although the constructed beings in both
novels are seen as monstrous and others, causing feelings of anxiety and
fear due to the progressive diminishing of the differences between them
and humans (ironically, they were created with such an intention), the
human protagonists all develop close and destructive relationships with the
constructs—Victor with his monster, or demon as he calls him, Deckard
with Rachael Rosen, and John Isidore with a group of renegade androids.
The humans’ increasing loneliness and loss of human traits is closely
related to the opposite process that is noticed in the constructs, Victor’s
monster and Dick’s androids. In both novels, dissipation of the human
protagonist takes place simultaneously with changes in the constructs that
take them in the exact opposite direction. This inverse parallelism is
manifested as two simultaneous processes—increasing dehumanisation of
humans and humanisation of human-like constructs. In Frankenstein,
Victor, on the one hand, continues to dissipate throughout the novel. He
suffers spells of illness, seeks solitude and, while trying to escape from his
 Mladen Jakovljeviü 171

monster and erase all relations with it, he gradually loses eloquence and
becomes unable to communicate openly with other people because of the
terrible secrets and fears he holds in. This consumes him from within and
hurts the people he loves, and due to his inability to act sensibly and
responsibly he finally becomes more monster-like than his creation. His
monster, on the other hand, evolves and becomes literate and more
eloquent, appreciates art and seeks the company of other people and
attention, even the love, of his creator. As a result, Victor turns out to be
the true monster of the novel; whereas his creation becomes more human
than he is. In Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, “[the] servant had in
some cases become more adroit than its master” (Dick 2007, 26).
Although one can find similar parallels among individuals, the human-
monster dilemma becomes more powerful if seen as projected onto the
entire species. As a modern day reflection of Victor’s gradual sinking into
monstrousness and monster’s gaining humanity, there is a similar
relationship between humans and androids in Dick’s novel. While androids
become increasingly humanlike and more difficult to detect as artificial,
humans tend to programme their emotions and, in combination with issues
of control of individuals and entire realities, they gradually become more
mechanised, programmable and more like machines. And this could be
another effect of the curse brought forth by Promethean life-creation
efforts.
Gradual sinking into the othered image of themselves, Victor’s in
Frankenstein and human in Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, with
parallel emergence of the other as more human, have similar implications
in both novels—the blurring of distinctions between the creation and the
created, and the boundary between life and death.

“And as an animate corpse capable of articulate speech and complex

thought, the monster blurs the boundary between death and life, between
‘mere’ matter and matter infused with sentience and spirit. Shelley’s
monster is liminal: it exists at the limen or threshold between two opposing
conceptual categories, and so can be defined by both and neither of them”.
(Hurley 2007, 138)

A double is the symbol of death and the fear of it. According to

Baudrillard (1994, 95) “when the double materializes, when it becomes
visible, it signifies imminent death”. Humans are haunted by androids,
their othered replicas, their doppelgängers, who infiltrate to take over their
place. These materialised technological doubles signify dangers and death
brought about by technological advancement, the most important being a
172 Do Androids Dream of a Modern Prometheus?

loss of authenticity and authentic reality among an infinite number of

simulations and simulacra.
Victor in Shelley’s novel and Rick Deckard in Dick’s gradually
become the chased in their own chases. Both Victor and Deckard chase the
human-like constructs in an attempt to destroy them. Frankenstein pursues
his demon over the polar ice cap, a desolate landscape that symbolically
represents his loss of humanity, or even his vain attempt to grasp it once
again. Dick creates a similarly barren landscape over which Deckard
chases androids—an urban desolation, the remnants of the civilisation that
can be seen as a metaphorical reproduction of the alienated strangeness of
the polar cap. As Aldiss (1973, 18) noted, “Gothic emphasis was on the
distant and the unearthly”. Writers of Gothic fiction tended to place their
protagonists into distant, wild and unexplored landscapes. The polar
desolation in Frankenstein is one such environment. In later science
fiction, writers first explored far corners of the universe, and when human
knowledge, owing to developments and achievements in science and
technology, made the distant parts closer and the unexplored more
familiar, they turned to parallel universes and known, yet radically
changed landscapes. Dick often used nuclear holocaust and alternate
universes to transform the familiar into the “distant and unearthly”, and
the entire Earth into an unearthly landscape, as both a metaphorical and
literal manifestation of a lost humanity.
A Gothic tale usually takes place in an antiquated or seemingly
antiquated space, like a castle, an abbey, an old city, a maze of streets or
urban underground,

“or some new recreation of an older venue, such as an office with old filing
cabinets, an overworked spaceship, or a computer memory. Within this
space, or a combination of such spaces, are hidden some secrets from the
past (sometimes the recent past) that haunt the characters, psychologically,
physically, or otherwise at the main time of the story”. (Hogle 2002, 2)

According to Hogle (2002, 2), the hauntings can take many forms, like
“ghosts, specters or monsters (mixing features from different realms of
being, often life and death)”. In Dick’s fictional reality, this space is the
entire planet, a place that the majority has left for colonies, which
transformed it into an old world, a dark place in which death and decay
dominate. Its inhabitants are haunted by androids, whose purpose and
attempts to create them indistinguishable from authentic humans represent
a secret that emerges to the surface of the desolate world. These android
hauntings are mixtures of different realms of beings—one is life and
authentic humans, the other is non-life and androids. The two realms
 Mladen Jakovljeviü 173

merge to become inseparable and indistinguishable, one mirroring the

other.
As Hogle explains, the hauntings take forms to manifest conflicts that
can no longer remain hidden.

“It is at this level that Gothic fictions generally play with and oscillate
between the earthly laws of conventional reality and the possibilities of the
supernatural—at least somewhat as Walpole urged such stories to do—
often siding with one of these over the other in the end, but usually raising
the possibility that the boundaries between these may have been crossed, at
least psychologically but also physically or both”. (Hogle 2002, 2-3)

Similar to Walpole’s (1791, xvi-xvii) “attempt to blend the two kinds

of romance”, as explained in the second preface to The Castle of Otranto,
by mixing “the ancient and the modern”, i.e. “imagination and
improbability” and “nature” that is “always intended to be, and sometimes
has been, copied with success”, Shelley’s novel (1869, 37-38) blends
occult knowledge of “the ancient teachers of science”, who “promised
impossibilities, but performed nothing” with knowledge of “the modern
masters” who “promise very little”, but who “penetrate into the recesses of
nature, and show how she works in her hiding-places” and who “have
indeed performed miracles”. Dick’s novel mixes the elements of
conventional, everyday reality, or Earth as it is, with the fantastic, or an
imagined Earth that the one we know can turn into. But the most striking
symbol of such a blend of imagination and nature is the android, which
literally represents “nature” that has been “copied with success” on both
physical and mental levels. The dilemmas and anxieties, rooted in the
constructed that becomes indistinguishable from the authentic, are
projected onto the entire reality, which could also turn out to be a
construct, an illusion of the real whose artificiality is hidden. These
androids produced in a system that values profit, manipulation and control,
are perfected and multiplied to an extent that authentic humanity and their
reality may entirely cease to exist. All because of scientific transgression,
a failed attempt of scientists to construct life mirroring their own image.
The creators, instead of rising to Promethean heroes, are reduced to
failed parents who want to kill their unborn offspring, their own deadly
doppelgängers, to prevent them from multiplying beyond control. Victor is
horrified with an image of a new race of monsters that might procreate and
“whose joint wickedness might desolate the world” (Shelley 1869, 114).
He believes and fears that
174 Do Androids Dream of a Modern Prometheus?

“one of the first results of those sympathies for which the daemon thirsted
would be children, and a race of devils would be propagated upon the earth
who might make the very existence of the species of man a condition
precarious and full of terror. Had I right, for my own benefit, to inflict this
curse upon everlasting generations?” (Shelley 1869, 131)

His question still reverberates through fictional and real worlds.

Both Victor’s demon and androids are created without birth, which is
why they are considered if not inhuman, then at least less human and less
worthy. In an attempt to fathom their own existence and possible
humanity, both the demon and android Rachael wonder about the act of
birth, its meaning and all the feelings and bonds that are related to it.

“I heard of the difference of sexes, and the birth and growth of children,
how the father doted on the smiles of the infant, and the lively sallies of the
older child, how all the life and cares of the mother were wrapped up in the
precious charge, how the mind of youth expanded and gained knowledge,
of brother, sister, and all the various relationships which bind one human
being to another in mutual bonds”. (Shelley 1869, 95)

“Is it a loss?” Rachael repeated. “I don't really know; I have no way to tell.
How does it feel to have a child? How does it feel to be born, for that
matter? We're not born; we don't grow up; instead of dying from illness or
old age we wear out like ants. Ants again; that's what we are. Not you; I
mean me. Chitinous reflex-machines who aren't really alive”. (Dick 2007,
168)

While pondering their own existence the unborn “children” wonder

about their creator’s parental responsibilities. Which is why, enraged, as
an act of revenge, they kill what is dear to their failed parents. The monster
kills William, Victor’s baby brother, the closest being to a child Victor
ever had. In Dick’s novel the reality is more unsettling, a gloomy vision of
the future towards which humanity is going as a species. In the entire
novel there are no children and emotions towards other people are
substituted with emotions towards the next best thing. Animals have taken
a child’s place, as objects of human affection, authentic and electrical. To
hurt Deckard, Rachael kills the closest being to a child Deckard has—his
authentic goat.
In Shelley’s novel the struggle takes place between one scientist and
his one creation, announcing the horrifying consequences that humanity
might face one day should his creation gain a chance to live freely and
multiply without control. In Dick’s novel, this horrifying possibility has
happened and the author confronts us with likely consequences. In
 Mladen Jakovljeviü 175

Shelley’s novel, the conflict between the doppelgängers is resolved with

their deaths, which eliminate the causes for anxiety that Victor may inflict
a “curse upon everlasting generations”. In Dick’s novel, death cannot
bring such resolution. The humans and their mirror images merge in a
newly built reality, in which the boundaries between the authentic and the
artificially created not only cease to exist, but also cease to matter. In this
reality, the artificial suppresses the natural, fuelled with extensive
influence of unstoppable entropy manifested as deterioration of the
material—man-made and biological, as well as erosion of emotional
capabilities and physical and mental human capacities. They all contribute
to further dissolution of authenticity, including, finally, the entire reality.
In Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, duality is noticeable on
several levels, all revolving around the differences and similarities
between authentic humanity on the one hand, and created, artificial
humanity on the other. With the development of the production, androids
become more conscious and intelligent, so some of them rebel against
their owners and escape to Earth in an attempt to live freely. This is
another simultaneous yet opposing process: while people emigrate to Mars
to save themselves from radiation and deterioration of the living
conditions on Earth, androids want to reach Earth to escape slavery and
limitations of the machine existence.
Like androids, products of industry that can be replaced easily with
new products, Deckard replaces an android hunter, showing another
similarity between humans and androids that has strikingly serious
implications. Isidore starts seeing bounty hunters the way they see
androids—as disposable machines, products without emotions and faces
that, when killed, can be replaced immediately. This relativisation of
differences between bounty hunters and androids is further enhanced when
Deckard starts having feelings for Rachael and thinking about androids as
humans.

“An android”, he said, “doesn't care what happens to any other android.
That's one of the indications we look for”.
“Then”, Miss Luft said, “you must be an android”. (Dick 2007, 88)

Deckard is compared to an android by a suspected android, Miss Luft,

and he is even tested when she calls the police that take him to the parallel
police station, populated and run by androids. The results of the test show
that he is human. Like everything else in Dick’s fiction, this could be yet
another illusion.
Androids want freedom, existence indistinguishable from the one their
creators have. However, like the demon, seen by Victor and everyone else
176 Do Androids Dream of a Modern Prometheus?

as abomination, they are considered inferior and not worthy of receiving

such treatment. For Deckard, an android is an “electric animal”, “a sub-
form of the other, a kind of vastly inferior robot. Or, conversely, the
android could be regarded as a highly developed, evolved version of the
ersatz animal. Both viewpoints repelled him” (Dick 2007, 36).
The most frightening consequence of their existence is the following—
if a human is equated with a machine, then humanity will no longer exist
and such existence is similar to death. What is more important, Deckard is
repelled because making androids similar to humans would not mean that
they are human, but that humans have lost their humanness. Humans are
afraid of becoming androids because it would mean a loss of freedom,
subjection to absolute control and final disappearance of abilities to
perceive reality as it really is.

3. Scientific Monsters
In a globalised world shaped and governed by corporate entities, the
dilemmas about the possible consequences of misuse of science and
technology remain similar to those that haunt Victor. He is guilty for not
assuming responsibility for his own creation who, to everyone, is
physically repulsive because he is unlike other humans. Victor claims to
be blameless, other than the fact that he has created him. The companies,
producers of androids, ignore the responsibilities they should have towards
their creations which/ who, when free, are repulsive to everyone because
they are so similar to humans. They claim that they produce androids
because if they do not do it someone else will. The sins of the creators are
the same. Both creations, the demon and androids, suffer equally. They
want love, freedom and empathy—which they cannot have. Hence, their
uncontrollable and consequently dangerous behaviour. However, there is
one significant difference. In Frankenstein, the source of fear is difference,
which becomes the marker of otherness. Victor’s monster is frightening
because he is different from everyone else. In Do Androids Dream of
Electric Sheep?, the source of fear, and the marker of otherness, is sameness.
Humans are afraid of androids because they are indistinguishable from
them.
In an analysis that compares Dick’s fiction to Kafka’s and particularly
Dick’s “Roog” with Kafka’s “Investigations of a Dog”, Jason P. Vest
noted that

“Kafka confounds his reader’s perception of the animal narrator, its

society, and its biography by destabilizing the boundary between human
and animal subjectivities. This confusion induces perplexity, fear, and
 Mladen Jakovljeviü 177

cognitive dissonance (or estrangement) that undermine four dichotomies

important to Western philosophy: human/ animal, culture/ nature,
individual/ community, and intelligence/ mindlessness”. (Vest 2009, 5)

Most of Dick’s stories and novels dealing with the question of what it
means to be human, including Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?,
undermine not only these dichotomies indicated by Vest as important, but
also another one, and that is sameness/ difference, which could be said to
encompass all of the above-mentioned and to have emerged as perhaps the
most important dichotomy in Western civilisation, and human civilisation
in general.
Whether based on difference or sameness, the fears and anxieties that
surface in both novels effectively warn about the same things—the
dangers that irresponsible use and misuse of science and technology can
cause to humanity and the world. What appears to be indicated in
Shelley’s novel is later fully developed in Dick’s. Androids are Victor’s
monster multiplied in the posthuman environment, in the reality in which
authenticity and individuality no longer matter because they no longer
exist and each being can turn out to be a machine. The doppelgänger motif
is adjusted accordingly—Deckard is Victor of the modern age, a hunter
who wants to rid humanity of the human-like monstrous creations, a
representative of humanity that has created them. Like Victor, who proves
to be the true monster of the story, Deckard could turn out to be the
monster he is hunting—yet another android.
Gothic tropes should not be seen as borrowed obsolete remnants of an
older literary tradition but a productive mechanism to foreground
contemporaneity of the messages that the two novels were to convey when
they were written, as well as values they promoted and issues to which
they drew attention, Shelley’s in the early 1800s, and Dick’s in the late
1960s.
Victor’s monster reads Milton’s Paradise Lost, Goethe’s The Sorrows
of Werther, Plutarch’s Lives and he speaks the sublime language of poetry
reverberating the set of values that were once seen as supreme, desirable
and unbreakable. Androids in Dick’s novel read cheap old pulp fantasies
and they watch and listen to Buster Friendly, a possibly android media star
who promotes in his shows the corporations that produce them and tries to
undermine the last remaining human trait—empathy. The only true work
of art that one of them likes is Munk’s painting depicting screaming
agony, which foreshadows the fate of its beholder, Miss Luft, who is as
fake as the copy of the painting she wishes to possess.
Shelley’s novel can be seen as a reaction to a then common, yet rather
gruesome problem.
178 Do Androids Dream of a Modern Prometheus?

“Shelley chose this source of materials as a commentary on early 19th-

century grave-robbing, a social and economic problem much ballyhooed in
the popular press and discussed by lawmakers”. (Snodgrass 2005, 126)

As the advancements in medical science required dissection materials

for anatomy lessons in medical schools, this illegal activity reached
alarming proportions and became a lucrative business. So is shaping of
realities, minds and bodies, which is what Dick’s novel reflects on. It is a
vision of the advancement in science and technology—a demonstration of
the frightening and profitable power to construct people, and to construct
realities in which everyone will be fully controlled, like androids, or
machines.
The anxieties and dilemmas woven into this novel are actual, reasserting
Shelley’s prophetic vision that misuse of science, and particularly the
creation of life with the attempts to animate lifeless matter into new
human-like beings, can only lead to death and destruction, and possibly
jeopardise the existence of the entire human species. Victor Frankenstein,
Shelley’s usurper of the divine powers, the modern Prometheus who steals
creative fire in order to make a creature and thus bring the boon of life
without death to humanity, is now a classical example of the failed
scientist, and failed science in general, whose ideas and achievements go
terribly wrong and backfire not only at the transgressors, but also endanger
the entire species.

4. Real Monsters
Another significant similarity between the novels refers to the question of
objectivity of the narrated events. Shelly makes each of her narrators
unreliable by creating a complex framing structure that resembles the
Chinese boxes or Russian matryoshka dolls—each narrated story becomes
a second hand account as it is put into another story, which in turn
becomes a second hand account put into another story. Walton writes
letters to his sister Margaret, telling the story of Frankenstein, including
his account of the monster’s story about himself and the De Lacey family,
which incorporates the story of Felix de Lacey’s betrothed Safie.

“Shelley creates a situation in which it becomes impossible to know the

reliability of a given narrator, let alone determine the credibility of the
other testimonies contained within a given narrator’s discourse. This
reading experience, in turn, leads us to examine our own processes of
interpretation, since as readers we are confronted by psychological
 Mladen Jakovljeviü 179

challenges similar to those faced by Shelley’s characters”. (Gamer 2002,

102)

The most significant psychological challenge to the characters in

Dick’s novel, and its readers, is the erosion of reality, its reduction to the
status of a product and a means to exercise power and gain control over
everything and everyone. There is no point of objectivity, no evidence of
authenticity. Every person in the novel could be an android. There are
several realities that permeate one another—the one that the characters
perceive as their objective reality, the reality within empathy boxes, and
the one created by the media. Each of them may turn out to be an illusion.
Mercerism, the system of beliefs exclusive to authentic humans owing to
the fact that androids are devoid of empathy, also may turn out to be fake.
Experienced through empathy boxes, which produce the effect similar to
virtual reality, yet more realistic since the users can be physically hurt and
affected by other users’ emotions, Mercerism is claimed to be another
deception staged in a studio, with an actor playing the role of the divinity
who suffers, dies and recreates everything from death. In Dick’s novel, the
unreliability of narrated events is created by undermining the foundations
of reality in a world where everything could turn out to be inauthentic—
animals, people, media broadcasts, religion, even reality itself, in which
there can be no certainty about the truth of what is told, seen or perceived
by senses. This dilemma is projected onto the reader and his or her reality.
Like Shelley’s work, Dick’s novel reflects and comments on
contemporary social and economic problems, particularly anxieties about
the power to manipulate the perception of reality and the consequences of
the misuse and abuse of science and technology.
Dick’s novel, and his fiction in general, inspires us to wonder whether
the reality we live in is a construct, and we, seemingly free individuals, are
already controlled beings living in an illusion that we still have a free will.
Perhaps our reality and we are already the creations of a new Prometheus,
with much more sinister aims.

“There are two paradoxes at the center of Mary Shelley’s novel, and each
illuminates a dilemma of the Promethean imagination. The first is that
Frankenstein was successful, in that he did create Natural Man, not as he
was, but as the meliorists saw such a man; indeed, Frankenstein did better
than this, since his creature was, as we have seen, more imaginative than
himself. Frankenstein’s tragedy stems not from his Promethean excess but
from his own moral error, his failure to love; he abhorred his creature,
became terrified, and fled his responsibilities”. (Bloom 2007, 6)
180 Do Androids Dream of a Modern Prometheus?

Victor Frankenstein may be the true monster of the novel, the coward
whose inability to confess his sins and act responsibly towards his own
creation, the people around him and his environment may be his
unforgivable mistake, a weakness, or a tragic fault. Still, no matter how
guilty of all the accusations he may be, Victor is a visionary who dares,
and succeeds, to venture into the realms no other human managed to reach
before him.

“Whence, I often asked myself, did the principle of life proceed? It was a
bold question, and one which has ever been considered as a mystery; yet
with how many things are we upon the brink of becoming acquainted, if
cowardice or carelessness did not restrain our inquiries”. (Shelley 1869,
40)

If cowardice had restrained all inquiries humanity would still have

lived in the dark ages of ignorance. Dick’s fictional realities are gloomy
worlds, often suffering the consequences of the misuse of technology,
such as ecological disasters, wars and nuclear apocalypse. Nevertheless, he
believed that “science will play more and more of a role in our lives”.
Although not too happy about it, he was ready to bet that science would
help us, claiming that he had “yet to see how it fundamentally endangers
us, even with the H-bomb lurking about. Science has given more lives
than it has taken; we must remember that” (Dick 1995, 13).
The fire that fascinated Victor’s monster, the symbol of Promethean
ideals, knowledge and creation reveals its two-sided nature to the monster.
“How strange”, the monster thought, “that the same cause should produce
such opposite effects!” One effect is “delight at the warmth” he
experienced from it, and another one is felt when in his joy he put his
“hand into the live embers, but quickly drew it out again with a cry of
pain” (Shelley 1869, 82).
The question whether these Promethean efforts to create life will turn
into a gift for mankind, or a curse, as depicted in the novels, is not easy to
answer. Victor is convinced in believing that science and technology that
promise impossibilities must be abandoned for those that have performed
and are expected to continue to perform miracles. But the price could be
exorbitant. Prometheus’s transgression is punished by releasing all evils
from Pandora’s jar to plague humanity. Victor’s pursuits only bring death
and destruction to those dear to him and, finally, to himself and his
creation. However, Victor manages to prevent the evils from spilling onto
humanity. In Dick’s novel the evils have already plagued the world,
infesting it with artificial life, making it impossible to distinguish between
the real reality and the constructed one.
 Mladen Jakovljeviü 181

It is questionable as to how evil the creations actually are, in spite of

all the crimes they commit. Each of them is created as a tabula rasa, and
everything they do is the result of what they have learned from the people
and the world around them. Victor’s demon is not created as a monster, he
learns to become one, as a victim of all the injustices done to him simply
because he is different. Androids are machines acting like humans,
possibly programmed to behave the way they do. The creations are not
only physical doubles of humans, they are what the world and people
around them are like, they are mirror images of those who fear and despise
them. The evil they do is not inherent. It is learned. As is the good in them.
So technology is neither only evil nor only good. It is both. More
importantly, it is what people make of it and how they use it.
The idea of inducing life with electricity was once believed to be
scientifically possible. Now, the idea of creating artificial life is equally
thought to be possible and unlike the story from the beginning of the 19th
century, this one is nearing fruition. Scientists have already created the
world’s first synthetic life form “in a landmark experiment that paves the
way for designer organisms that are built rather than evolved” (Sample
2010). It is to be seen whether this and similar scientific achievements will
result in a delight of quality in life, or a cry of pain, or, perhaps, like fire
on Victor’s monster’s hand, they will have a double effect.

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