Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? by Philip K. Dick (American, 1968)

Summary:
This story follows Rick Deckard, a bounty hunter who works for the San Francisco Police Department. It all begins when he is assigned the job of retiring six androids from the Nexus-6 model that have caused a lot of trouble during their escape from Mars, which includes the murder of several people. Due to the difficulty of catching those androids, the bounty hunter knows that he will need his electric sheep, his only weapon in this mission, since, at the moment, he cannot afford to buy a real one. Before plunging into his task, Rick travels to Seattle to visit the Rosen Association Androids Factory to test the effectiveness of the Voigt Empathy Test. Doing this is very important because this test is able to identify androids, which is precisely what he needs.
 The test indicates that Rachael Rosen, niece of the factory’s CEO is not a human being but an android; moreover, he discovers that Rosen has tried to trick him into renouncing this case because the murder of human beings by androids was actually on purpose, and confirms that Rachel is not a human being, which makes it clear that the test can truly identify androids. After these discoveries, Rick meets Polokov, one of the androids he is looking for and who is posing as a Soviet policeman. The bounty hunter retires the android and continues in search of his next target: an android whose facade is an opera singer called Luba Luft.
 The singer calls the police when Rick tries to apply the test on her and he is arrested and taken to a police station where he meets Officer Garland, who turns out to be one of the fugitive androids and who accuses Rick of being an android. Rick discovers that not only Garland is a fake cop, but the station itself is a lie and full of androids. He manages to escape after Phil Resch, the station's bounty hunter, shoots Garland and, fleeing together, they find the opera singer and Resch kills her. His quick form of acting raises Rick's suspicions, so he practices the empathy test on him and confirms that he is human.
 After learning that the androids he still needs to find are in an abandoned building, Rick calls Rachel Rosen to help him find them. They meet in a hotel and she does not accept to help him, but she tells him that one of the androids looks exactly like her. They end up having sex and she confesses to having done the same with other bounty hunters to make them withdraw from their missions. He gets very upset with her and decides to go to the abandoned building where those androids are supposed to be.
 Sure enough, there they are, and, while Rick plans to catch them, they plan to escape from him. Once in the building, Rick meets John Isidore, who works in a repair shop for pets and is the only person who lives there besides the androids; he then meets Pris Stratton, the android who looks exactly like Rachel, and she tells him that there is a bounty hunter chasing her. She is joined by Roy and Irmgard Baty, the other androids, and, when they ambush him, Rick takes the opportunity to kill them without even testing them for empathy. That gives Rick a record of having killed six androids in one day, which earns him a reward. When he returns home, he finds that Rachel Rosen went home and murdered the goat he had given to his wife. He makes a trip to Oregon, where he discovers what appears to be a real toad; he is excited because the toad is a very precious animal and is supposed to be extinct. He takes it home and, after Rick decides to go to sleep, his wife realizes that it is really an electric toad. His wife stays in the kitchen with the toad and prepares a cup of coffee.

Another summary:
Rick Deckard is a bounty hunter for the San Francisco police department. He lives on Earth in a time after which a massive world war has rendered the planet nearly uninhabitable. Almost everybody has fled to colony planets and only a few humans remain, as well as a very reduced number of animals. After his fellow bounty hunter is injured by a rogue android, Deckard is sent to finish the mission of exterminating the remaining androids in order to use the bounty money to acquire a real animal to replace his electrical sheep. There is a total of eight androids of the new Nexus-6 model that have to be taken out and two are already out. Before being able to continue with the mission, Deckard is required to go to the Rosen Association headquarters, the institution in charge of making the new model of androids, to learn whether the test they currently use to tell androids apart from humans is good enough to detect them. There, the head of the company and his niece, Rachel Rosen, try to convince him that his test giving abilities are not good enough when he tests what seems to be a false positive. But after a second test, he determines that she is indeed an android. Rick then goes after the remaining six androids which have been identified by his fellow bounty hunter. The first android goes to him in the form of a law enforcer. Deckard detects him immediately and takes it out. He then goes onto the next target which turns out to be an android that is an opera singer. He goes down to its dressing room to administer the test but while he does, the android calls the police claiming that he is harassing her. When the police officer arrives, he tries to explain his situation but is confronted with the fact that the officer doesn’t know him. He is taken to a police station he has never seen to meet with another official who has also never heard of him. A bounty hunter is called in and Rick is accused of being an android himself. There he discovers that the polce officer was the next in his list. In private, the officer confesses to him that he is an android and states that most of that police department are also androids, including the other bounty hunter that was called in. The latter takes care of terminating the officer and together they leave in hopes of maybe catching the opera singer in a museum exhibit. They find her as soon as they arrive and have the intention of taking her away to be liquidated outside of the museum, but the other bounty hunter decides to do it in the elevator. Rick decides to test whether this bounty hunter really is an android or not, and finds out he isn’t. He also discovers that he is developing a sort of empathy for the androids. With the bounty money he goes to the pet store to buy himself and his wife, who has been suffering from a severe depression, a goat. Back home, his superior calls him to inform him that the remaining three androids have been located in a building complex and that he is to take them out that same night before they have a chance to escape. He calls Rachel Rosen to ask her to come and help him with this last part of the assignment. She refuses but goes to see him even though he promises to not finish the job if she does so. They meet in a hotel where they have sex and he discovers that the sole purpose of her existence is to dissuade bounty hunters from doing their job. Meanwhile, John R. Isidore, a man whose mental capacities have been affected by the radiation, has taken in the three remaining androids. They are all hiding in his apartment waiting for some bounty hunter to take them. As they watch the only talk show in TV, the host reveals that Mercer, a prophet of the time, is in fact a fake. Deckard arrives as Mr. Isidore is releasing a spider he happened to chance upon. They have a brief talk and the bounty hunter goes up to meet the androids that he knows are there. He is encountered in the stairs by one android that looks just like Rachel, but he manages to terminate her with nearly no problems at all and thanks to the warning that an apparition of Mercer gives him. He then goes up to the apartment and gets in pretending to be Mr. Isidore. After some struggle, he manages to finish off the last two androids. He receives the bounty for those last three androids and is congratulated for having taken out six Nexus-6 androids in a single day. Upon arrival home, his wife informs him that Rachel has killed their goat and he leaves. He drives to an uninhabited place where he walks up a hill and rocks are thrown at him, which is supposed to be the experience that Mercer went through. He also believes that he has now become one with Mercer. In that wasteland he finds a toad and is excited at the prospect of having a real animal again but when he arrives home he realizes that it is not real.

Another summary:
The story is located in San Francisco 1992. After a terrible war, the earth is polluted and it is hard for animal and human life to thrive. Here we meet Rick Deckard who works at the police department as a bounty hunter; he goes after androids that are living undercover on earth. The new mission for Deckard is to find 6 missing androids of the new generation, Nexus-6, that escaped from the base on Mars. In order to begin the mission, Deckard goes to the Rosen Association’s to try the empathy test which would tell if someone is a human or an Android. In there, he faces Rachel which at first goes as the niece of the CEO, but after the tests she is shown as an Android. 
 After their encounter he leaves and immediately faces a sovietic policeman who had been following him, after a small fight Deckard kills him because he used to be one of the missing androids. Then he heads for the second missing android which turns out to be a opera singer named Luba Luft, who in the middle of the test begins to panic and decides to call the police. Once the police has arrived, they capture Deckard and take him to the police station; in there he meets the officer Garland who tells him that there are no records of any Deckard, even suggesting that he may be an android, however it turns out that Garland and the rest of the office are actual androids. Deckard founds this out thanks to Resch, another bounty hunter. Since Deckard is still dubious if he is an android or not, he asks Resch to make him the empathy test and viceversa, both are human, however Deckard shows certain liking for androids. 
 Deckard dream has always been to have a real animal, not an Android animal because not everyone could have one. So with the money he had earned he buys a goat. After leaving the goat at home with his wife he heads for the next clue of the remaining androids which is an old building where they have seen a lot of activity. Deckard then calls Rachel to help him figure out who the other androids are, they spend the night together and have sex, Rachel then confess that she is used to have sex with bounty hunters in order to distract them about their missions. Also she says that one of the remaining androids looks just like her, when they say goodbye, Deckard decides to not kill her. 
 Back at the building Deckard feels that there is going to be an ambush, and he is not completely wrong. He goes after Roy Batty, Irmgard Batty and Pris. He takes down first Roy in the stairs, then goes Pris and lastly Irmgard who is the android which look like Rachel and by a brief moment he hesitated to kill her, but he does it anyway. The rest of the police arrives to deal with the outcome. 
 Once in his home, his wife is grieving because while he was gone Rachel killed their goat. Deckard leaves heading north in order to deal with his mixed feelings, once he has stoped he is reflecting and suddenly he finds a toad, an animal thought to be extinct and takes it home, nonetheless when he shows it to his wife, she points out that it is a robot.

World view: The world portrayed in the story is an hypothetical society which seems to be worse than the one the author lives in.
Future projections: It’s a fearful prediction of the possible outcomes of today’s actions. Thus, it warns us against the terrible disasters (e.g. overpopulation, war, climate change) which would follow if there is no change in direction.
Ideology:  It’s either the polarization of an ideology or an absurdist exaggeration of unfortunate or odd circumstances
Characters, plot and writing style: The story features a rebellion against the adverse circumstances (revolutionaries may exploit newer technologies for these ends).
Classification: Dystopia