I've read a few of Dick's novels, and a common theme is a sort of nightmare of suburban reality and domestic life. From the top here you get protagonist Deckard's unhappy marriage, in a home where the "mood organ" is an essential appliance. It allows you to schedule whatever emotion or experience you feel you need to have, be it loving your job or enjoying television. Then there's the status symbol of having a pet. Animals are rare and expensive, but if you can only afford a robotic replica (an electric sheep) you won't impress the neighbours who might own a real one.

As he gets into his action man job, hunting illegal human replicants, Deckard stumbles into part of the city where everything is flipped. Biological humans are illegal, robotic detectives hunt them. But one key question is the same in both worlds: how can you know if you're real or artificial?

I mention the domestic setting and the "mirror world" chapter because they are not included in the film. I can't help comparing it to the film, which I love. But none of the films I have seen of Dick's work fully capture his recurring themes of unreality, asking what is it like to be inside your own mind, when your own mind deceives you so much? Maybe you, the reader, can answer that question with comfort if you are talking about your own thoughts, but when you read a Dick book you are in HIS mind and he is - how shall I put this - crazy? It's not the right word. He was paranoid, in the sense of believing people were out to get him, suspicious of government in a sort on conspiracy theory way, and later in his life subject to a delusional obsession which seems to have resulted from a neurological condition, leading him to believe that he was in contact with some sort of higher power or cosmic consciousness.

In the end, Dick's world is just too much for me. I can't love his books, but I still read them. His ideas are - umm - FAR OUT, and I like that. But his mind is warped and ultimately that's what the books are about.