Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?: Setting 1 key example

The San Francisco of the novel looks far different from any city the reader might recognize. It is a shell of a city, sparsely populated except in specific neighborhoods where most survivors of "World War Terminus" have congregated. People fly hovercars over the buildings because the streets below are and filled with rubble and abandoned "kipple," or junk. There is a eugenicist emigration program through which those humans who can prove themselves unaffected by radiation poisoning are allowed to leave Earth for a new life on Mars. The characters of the novel are largely people who, for various reasons, do not qualify for the program. They are stuck living in Dick's version of "nuclear winter."

While World War Terminus has brought an end to many aspects of the world, it has not stopped technological innovation. In addition to the hovercars, there have also been major developments in robotics and artificial intelligence. Robotic animals like Rick and Iran's "electric sheep" are convincing and affordable dupes for real animals, which after the war and its fallout have turned into a rare, luxury status symbol. In addition to electric animals, there are also highly realistic androids—humanoid robots—that are being manufactured as servants for the lucky humans who emigrate to Mars. Rick Deckard's job as a bounty hunter is to catch and kill androids who have escaped Mars and come to Earth.

Dick's techno-dystopia allows him to explore the far-reaching consequences of unchecked technological development without regard to human and environmental rights. World War II ended just two decades earlier with the development and deployment of atomic bombs that wrought previously unimaginable destruction on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. New long-term effects of radiation poisoning were still being discovered in Japan. Following this devastating and pivotal moment in history, there was widespread fear that the technology of the nuclear bomb would be unleashed on the rest of the world. The United States and the Soviet Union spent the greater part of half a century engaged in a "Cold War," a tense conflict in which no one wanted to make a move for fear that the other country open its nuclear arsenal. In the 2021 of the novel, the conflict has at last "heated up," but it has not ended the world as expected. It only changes it and makes it harder to live in.

Dick imagines nuclear warfare as part of a larger story of technological advancement and the way humans have used it to alienate themselves from the Earth and from the sanctity of life. For instance, the novel compares the androids on Mars to enslaved Black people in the pre-Civil War United States. Instead of learning from the horrors of history, humans instead use technology to recreate old systems and skirt any ethical questions. Dick's novel demonstrates that there is no such thing as a world so advanced—or so far gone—that it is free from the need for ethics and morals.