Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?

This is the classic sci-fi novel upon which “Blade Runner” is based. It's been a while since I saw the movie, but from what I recall, the film is more noir than the novel. The novel has more androids to “retire,” and the novel also features a religion that doesn't exist in the film (Mercerism). Having sex with androids is illegal in the novel, while one of the androids in the film was built for that purpose IIRC (being a “pleasure model”).

Deckard is also an active police officer rather than a retired one.

The novel ruminates much more on the line between “alive” and “not alive,” and the dignity of the living, with a parallel story about a “chickenhead” (a man mentally deficient due to radioactive fallout), discussion about Mercerism and the worth even of spiders, and the fact that Deckard desperately wants to own a live animal rather than a fake, electronic one. But they're so expensive!

I still need to wrap my head around some of the novel in which consciousnesses seem to fuse via Mercerism, but this is a quick book to read, very interesting, and probably belongs in a modern canon of American (or perhaps Western) literature, as it's a representative work by Philip K. Dick, who wrote a number of famous sci-fi stories that got turned into movies. Everyone knows “Blade Runner,” and everyone should read this book.