En smakebit på søndag er et konsept jeg har lånt av Mari på Flukten fra virkeligheten. Alt du trenger å gjøre er å slå opp i boka du leser nå og velge ut noen setninger du synes passer – uten at de avslører for mye av handlingen – før du legger dem ut på bloggen din og legger igjen ei lenke i innlegget til Mari. På denne måten kan vi klikke oss fra smakebit til smakebit, og kanskje oppdage nye skatter?
En av bøkene jeg koser meg med nå, er Philip K. Dicks Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, boka som filmen Blade Runner fra 1982 er basert på. Klassisk science fiction med andre ord. Om det skulle være noen der ute som aldri har hørt om den, er i allefall dette vaskeseddelen: World War Terminus has left Earth an underpopulated wasteland where people keep electronic animals as pets. Through this bleak landscape reluctant bounty hunter Rick Deckard stalks the sophisticated and lethal Nexus-6 androids who have fled their labours in the Martian Colonies. In so doing, Deckard soon learns that the new messiah, the single messenger of hope in a desperate society, may be a fake. Stalking the mean streets of the grim, futuristic megalopolis that came alive in Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner, Rick Deckard begins to question who is human and just what human is.
Smakebiten dere skal få kommer fra side 26, der teksten (og hovedpersonen Deckard) så vidt begynner å flørte med spørsmålet om hva et menneske er:
He had wondered as had most people at one time or another precisely why an android bounced helplessly about when confronted by an empathy-measuring test. Empathy, evidently, existed only within the human community, where-as intelligence to some degree could be found throughout every phylum and order including the arachnida. For one thing, the empathic faculty probably required an unimpaired group instinct; a solitary organism, such as a spider, would have no use for it; in fact it would tend to abort a spider’s ability to survive. It would make him conscious of the desire to live on the part of his prey. Hence all predators, even highly developed mammals such as cats, would starve.
Empathy, he once had decided, must be limited to herbivores or anyhow omnivores who could depart from a meat diet. Because, ultimately, the empathic figt blurred the boundaries between hunter and victim, between the successful and the defeated.
