Mars

Mars is the principal colony world in the novel, a desolate planet that Earth's government promotes as the only viable alternative to a contaminated homeworld. The slogan "Emigrate or degenerate! The choice is yours!" blares from posters, TV ads, and government junk mail, framing departure as both a patriotic duty and a survival imperative. For those who remain on Earth, the radioactive dust from World War Terminus threatens to classify them as "specials" — biologically unacceptable individuals barred from reproduction and, effectively, from humanity. Emigration to Mars thus becomes the sole escape from this biological and social death sentence.

The Emigration System and the Android Incentive

Under United Nations law, every emigrant automatically receives possession of an android subtype of their choice, a policy designed as the ultimate incentive: the android servant as carrot, the radioactive fallout as stick. By 1990, the variety of subtypes had proliferated beyond all understanding, in the manner of American automobiles of the 1960s. The Rosen Association, the system's largest manufacturer of humanoid robots, produces these androids on Mars, operating under colonial law that places their parent auto-factory beyond the reach of Earth-based police agencies. The Nexus-6 brain unit, which gives the androids intelligence surpassing many human "specials," is manufactured there, creating a direct pipeline from Mars's factories to Earth's bounty hunters.

Life on Mars: Loneliness and Desolation

Those who have lived on Mars describe it in terms of profound isolation and spiritual barrenness. Pris Stratton, one of the escaped androids, tells John Isidore that "all Mars is lonely. Much worse than this," referring to his nearly empty apartment building. She explains that the planet "wasn't conceived for habitation, at least not within the last billion years. It's so old. You feel it in the stones, the terrible old age." The colonists cope through hobbies — stamp collecting, drug use, and the smuggling of pre-colonial fiction, stories written before space travel but about space travel, which depict a romanticized version of what Mars ought to be: crisscrossed with canals, populated by beings from other stars, and free of radioactive dust. This fiction, stolen from Earth's libraries and shot by autorocket to Mars, represents a desperate imaginative escape from a reality that offers none.

The Android as Colonist and Commodity

Mars is not merely a destination for human emigrants but also the birthplace and factory floor for the androids who later flee to Earth. The Rosen Association's production facilities on Mars stamp out humanoid robots as commodities, each with a limited lifespan of about four years due to unsolved cell replacement problems. The androids who escape — like Roy Baty, Irmgard Baty, and Pris Stratton — are those who have killed their masters and fled the colony, seeking a better life without servitude. Roy Baty, a pharmacist on Mars who organized the group escape, experimented with mind-fusing drugs in an attempt to create a group experience similar to Mercerism, which remains unavailable to androids. The planet thus becomes the site of both the manufacture of synthetic life and the birth of android rebellion, a colonial space where the exploited begin to resist their creators.

Narrative Significance

Mars functions as the novel's unseen but ever-present other world, the place where the androids are made and from which they come, and the destination that the human characters both desire and fear. Rick Deckard considers emigrating after his traumatic day of killing six Nexus-6 androids, but the planet offers no real escape — only a different form of the same moral compromise. The colony world embodies the novel's central paradox: the system that promises salvation through emigration is the same system that produces the androids who must then be hunted and killed. Mars is not a frontier of hope but a factory of despair, where both humans and androids are reduced to their utility, and where the dream of a new life is always already contaminated by the logic of exploitation.