That’s our well-thumbed, extensively annotated, and copiously tabbed instructor copy of Philip K. Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?. To its right is one of the Kipple or Nonkipple? object assortments prepared for the quiz which featured questions pertaining to pages twenty-eight through sixty of the book. Every student was provided with a superficially similar selection of items, asked to examine each in turn to determine whether or not it qualified as kipple, and required to explain their reasoning.
Whenever we explore DADoES in our higher-level courses, it tends to be a class favorite. Needless to say, we’re quite fond of the book ourselves! It’s dense indeed, packed full of provocative ideas and what-ifs that spur thoughtful readers to ask themselves tough-to-answer questions about morality, the value of life, and what it means to be human. Our students devour the novel in twenty-to-thirty-page chunks, over a period of several weeks, and today and tomorrow we’ll be tackling the second-to-last chunk!