Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?: The inspiration for the films Blade Runner and Blade Runner 2049

Why it's worth it

A bounty hunter tracks escaped androids through a mostly abandoned San Francisco, using an empathy test to tell them from people. Philip K. Dick then spends the novel undermining the idea that the test proves anything at all.

The central question here is sharper than in anything else on this list. If empathy is what makes you human, and a machine can be trained to fake it, what exactly are you measuring? Dick refuses to settle it. The interrogation scenes are extraordinary — quiet conversations where a wrong flicker of feeling is a death sentence, and the reader is never quite sure who should be afraid.

Buy it knowing it isn't Blade Runner. The film took the premise and made something sleek; the book is stranger, funnier and more religious. There's a subplot about a faith built on shared suffering through a machine, and an economy of artificial pets that people buy for status. Readers who come from the movie split hard on this — some find it a revelation, others are thrown.

From our review of 8 sci-fi books about artificial intelligence, by David Sinclair, Managing Editor

What we like

• +The central question here is sharper than in anything else on this list
• +Buy it knowing it isn't Blade Runner
• +It's short, and it moves
• +The paranoia is the point and it's beautifully sustained

What to know

• –The ending withholds the answers the book spends its length promising
• –The detours into Mercerism can feel like a different novel wedged inside this one