1960s

The 1960s function in Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? as a vanished baseline of cultural and industrial vitality, a decade whose ordinary products and practices have become, by 1992, almost unimaginably remote. The novel invokes the 1960s primarily to measure the depth of post-apocalyptic decline: what was once mass-produced and taken for granted has become extinct, illegal, or the stuff of legend.

The 1960s as a Benchmark of Lost Abundance

The most direct reference to the 1960s occurs in the narrator's description of the android subtypes available to emigrants under U.N. law. By 1990, the variety of subtypes "passed all understanding, in the manner of American automobiles of the 1960s" . The comparison equates the bewildering proliferation of android models with the peak era of American automotive consumer culture—a time when choice itself was a form of excess. For a reader in 1992, that abundance is gone; the 1960s represent a cornucopia that the present can no longer sustain. The same logic applies to the pre-war world more broadly: the novel's characters live in a world where "before the war" is a shorthand for a time when animals were plentiful, food was natural, and the sky was not filled with radioactive motes.

The 1960s as a Source of Cultural Artifacts

The decade also supplies the novel with its most potent cultural artifacts. The pre-colonial fiction that Pris Stratton and her fellow androids smuggled from Mars—stories written before space travel but about space travel—originates in the 1960s or earlier, a genre that flourished when writers "made it up" based on imagination rather than experience . These stories, which Pris describes as "nothing is as exciting" as reading about cities and successful colonization, represent a form of hope that the actual Mars colony has failed to deliver. The 1960s, in this sense, are the era of optimistic speculation, before the reality of colonization proved barren and lonely.

The 1960s as a Marker of Industrial and Environmental Ruin

The novel's ecological catastrophe is also measured against the 1960s baseline. The radioactive dust that has contaminated most of the planet's surface "originated in no country and no one, even the wartime enemy, had planned on it" . The war itself—World War Terminus—is never dated, but its aftermath has rendered the 1960s a lost golden age of industrial production. The Rosen Association, the system's largest manufacturer of androids, follows "the time-honored principle underlying every commercial venture" , a principle that in the 1960s would have been taken for granted but in 1992 is a desperate act of survival. The dust has eroded not only the environment but the very idea of a functioning industrial economy; the 1960s stand as the last moment when such an economy was viable.

The 1960s as a Personal and Emotional Reference Point

For individual characters, the 1960s represent a lost world of personal history. Rick Deckard's childhood memories include the days when owls fell from the sky and "the 'papes had reported it each day—foxes one morning, badgers the next, until people had stopped reading the perpetual animal obits" . The 1960s were the decade when the extinction crisis became visible, when the daily newspaper carried the obituary of species after species. By 1992, that crisis is complete; the 1960s are the decade when people still had the luxury of reading about extinction rather than living in its aftermath. The novel's pervasive sense of loss—of animals, of hope, of a future—is anchored in this implicit contrast between the 1960s and the present.

The 1960s as a Narrative and Thematic Anchor

The 1960s also provide the novel with its most important narrative device: the idea that the past can be recovered, or at least mourned. The electric sheep that Deckard tends is a replica of a real sheep he once owned, a sheep that died of tetanus contracted from a piece of baling wire . The 1960s, like the real sheep, are gone, but their memory persists in the form of ersatz replacements—electric animals, synthetic memories, and the endless loop of Buster Friendly's show, which itself is a product of the 1960s media landscape. The novel's central question—whether androids can dream—is itself a 1960s question, one that could only be asked in a decade when the boundary between human and machine first became a matter of public concern. The 1960s, in short, are the decade that the novel cannot stop referencing, because they are the decade that made the novel's world possible—and then destroyed it.