Rating: 
Summary: One of the best
Review: The awkward, stilted and often redundant writing style lends a poetry to the prose (I am also a Dreiser fan). This is one of the most moving sci fi novels I have ever read. The "spider scene" brought tears to my eyes. An unforgettable book.
Rating: 
Summary: Do not believe the hype
Review: This is a TERRIBLE book.
Too many unanswered questions to make it deeper than a dixie cup, too much grammatical acrobatics to read well, and so many cutesy ideas beat to death.
Dick had one hell of an imagination, but he couldn't write his way out of a wet paper bag.
William Gibson took his imaginative direction and made it readable, believable and entertaining. Gibson can take an idea and make it just one story element; Dick had to beat it into your head ad nauseum.
If only Ridley Scott would make a movie out of Neuromancer...
Rating:
Summary: trash
Review: From page one: "Friendlily, because he felt well-disposed toward the world...he patted her bare, pale shoulder."This guy writes lovelily, doesn't he? Aspiring science-fiction authors take note: Avoid turning adjectives that already end with "ly" into adverbs. Someone is bound to try to pronounce your prose aloud, trip over himself, and sue you. In any case, the "friendlily" in the above example is superfluous: ALL shoulder patting is friendly (this is the meaning of the gesture). A simple "He patted her shoulder" would have been much more effective. From page two: "After a hurried breakfast - he had lost time due to the discussion with his wife - he ascended clad for venturing out, including his Ajax model Mountibank Lead Codpiece, to the covered roof pasture whereon his electric sheep grazed. Whereon it, sophisticated piece of hardware that it was, chomped away in simulated contentment, bamboozling the other tenants of the building." "He ascended clad for venturing out" is awkward and amateurish. "Clad", "whereon", "that it was", and "bamboozling" are affected. The nested "whereon"s are confusing. The colloquial "bamboozled" is inconsistent with the formal "clad" and "whereon". In short, anyone with any literary discrimination at all will find this book unreadable.
Rating: 
Summary: Very good read IMO
Review: The only thing I didn't like was how fast I read it. Coming in at about 250 pages, its a quick read. Only took about 2 days to finish. Like other movies based on books, this book is alot better than the movie. The movie left out alot of things that would of been great to see on the big screen. This is my first PKD book, but rest assure I'm on my way to buy some more of them.
Rating:
Summary: How could you possibly not read this book?
Review: Okey, granted that this book is probably over-hyped amongest all science fictions, being the one the movie Blade Runner is based on, this is still a book you must read. First of all, the book adds the background that the movie never could, such as the love for animals, which trensends to the opposition of androids. It is a fairly visual book that will give you an all together different feeling than the movie. I decided to write this review really to counter balance the preious reviewer. Yes Dick's writing is not as a traditional novelist's. He writes in such a way that keeps you guessing what he really meant. Several of his novels have similar flavors, such as "The Man in the High Castle". I have read this book and loved his style, and am in the process of reading through his entire catalog. You will find his style quickly and decide for yourself whether you like it or not. If you choose to give it a try you will find one of the most bizarre mind and most interesting stories.
Rating:
Summary: my first pkd book
Review: i have not yet read any other pkd stuff...but, i think that perhaps i shall. about the book...it is rather short, a little over 200 pages i believe, and very easy to read. one does not find themselves reaching for the dictionary every other page, as with some other (and mainly my favorite) authors. this is a nice thing if you have been reading some of more verbose of pkd contemporaries. the plot is straightfoward, and follows the idea of much of what i deem to be the better of the sci-fi genre...philosophy under the guise of unlimited means. pkd brings us to contemplate what our reality is, and i feel is commenting on how little of our own lifes we actually acknowledge, by showing how empty the androids can appear through the eyes of one who has been enlightened by the fallout. by enlightened i mean simply had theyir eyes opened to what we take for granted: life. the book shows the struggle of artificial life (us?) to make the jump cognitavely to what humans should be valuing. a great read on a couple of levels...enough action to hold most people, and some theoretical philosophy slipped in there.
Rating:
Summary: A Lot Different than Blade Runner
Review: While I definitely enjoyed this novel, I'm surprised more people who've seen the movie Blade Runner before reading the novel (probably most readers) aren't at least somewhat disappointed. The novel moves along pretty quickly, and like most PKD novels, is easy to read, but I do have a couple of complaints. First, the androids that Deckard had to hunt down were somewhat of a letdown. The story builds up to a climax where you expect an explosive ending, at least somewhat of a struggle between Deckard and the androids, but it didn't come across that way at all to me. It was really anticlimactic. In that regard, the movie was more effective. Second, I'm still not too clear on the whole Mercerism thing. I wish PKD had gone into more detail about Mercerism and fleshed things out a little bit. Still, it's a pretty entertaining novel. Of the PKD novels I've read, it ranks around the middle. My favorite is The Man in the High Castle, and I think I'd recommend it for people who haven't read any PKD novels yet before I would this one. One other comment: if you're still interested in the world of Blade Runner, the sequels written by K.W. Jeter aren't too bad at all. Like PKD novels, they're easy to read, and though they're not great, at least you can spend more time (sort of) in the world originally constructed by Philip K. Dick.
Rating:
Summary: Reality does not escape unscathed (another PKD ...)
Review: Dick is often accused of: weak characters, careless prose, illogical plots. Let's get this issue out of the way at once and say that these charges are often true. In "...Electric Sheep" I was bugged by Rachael turning from innocent into conspirator between scenes, and by the potential hinted at but then dropped in Deckard's meeting with the other bounty hunter (this idea was eventually realised in the director's cut of "Blade Runner"). However, this is no reason to dismiss him immediately. It is only after reading "...Electric Sheep" that I finally "got" this writer. His books are snapshots of a mind at the point of snapping, as reality collapses all around. This is the persistant feature of his work, and goes some way to explaining his books' imbalances. His stories are obsessive nightmares that play out in his head, rather than conventional realistic narratives. The trappings of reality are present, but in distorted form (in this post-apocalyptic world all the animals are robots, and fallout is gradually rendering the population sub-normal), and, as the story progresses, reality is alarmingly invaded and undermined by dream logic (in this case the real-world appearance of a fictional religious figure). This entropic pattern, reproduced in most of his books, may be due in part to Dick's personal history of hallucination and mental disturbance, but has a wider interest to us: he shows, in allegorical form, how weak is the foundation for our faith in the world's knowableness. (The easiest introduction to Dick's work is probably "A Scanner Darkly"; for an interesting look at Dick's techniques, see the essay in Stanislaw Lem's "Microworlds")
Rating:
Summary: father of modernscience fiction
Review: as the title indicates, I consider Phillip K Dick one of the fathers of modern science fiction along with Robert Heinlein. This is the only book of his that I have read, but I am well versed in science fiction and cyber punk. The book is strong, the writing style is typically sci-fi, fairly straight-forward with periods of techno-babble which later make sense. THe plot is interesting and thought-provoking, and when Kurt Vonnegutt wrote about sci-fi authors in Breakfast of Champions, I think he must have been thinking of PKD. This is science fiction as well as philosophy, and I recommend this book. If you like it, I also recommend you read Neil Stephenson (Snow Crash, oh yeah), Orson Scott Card (Ender's Game), Robert Heinlein (The Moon is a Harsh Mistress), and whoever it was that wrote Neuromancer, I forget his name. All of their books rule but the ones I mentioned were my favorites.
Rating:
Summary: Another Masterpiece from the Mind of Philip K. Dick
Review: This is Philip K. Dick's best known work thanks to the Ridley Scott movie. The movie is an action-packed special effects extravaganza whereas the book is more introspective philosophical affair. The novel tells the story of one day in the life of bounty hunter Rick Deckard (played by Harrison Ford in the movie). He lives in early twenty-first century San Francisco. A nuclear holocaust has wiped out most life on the planet. Most species are extinct, vast areas of the planet are uninhabitable and many people have migrated to colonies on Mars and other planets. Androids have been developed to function as workers on these colonies but they are forbidden on Earth. It's never made clear why they are forbidden on Earth but the penalty for coming to Earth is death and Deckard is the man who hunts down and kills the androids. Much is made over mankind's newfound love for all forms of life. The peripheral character John Isadore finds a bug outside his apartment and is filled with joy at having found a wild living creature. Isadore is a "chickenhead," genetically damaged and mentally enfeebled by the nuclear fallout of World War Terminus. Isadore starts to live with three of the androids that Deckard must retire. It comes out late in the story that the androids are not mechanical robots but rather artificially created living beings with a 4-year life span. This explains why it is so hard for the bounty hunter to tell if someone is an android and why psychological testing of one's empathy with other living creatures is needed. There's a funny scene where Deckard discovers that Rachel Rosen is an android by noting her lack of reaction to a description of a babyskin wallet. There's little point in trying to link all the plot points that are odds with each other. Dick wrote most of his novels in a hurry and not everything makes sense or is holistically consistent. That's okay. Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep is great escapist science fiction that I'll take any day over The Scarlet Letter or somesuch literary torture.
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