Regular

In the world of Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, the term "Regular" designates a human being who has survived World War Terminus without suffering genetic or mental damage severe enough to trigger legal classification as a "Special." This status is not a matter of self-identification but of official certification: the San Francisco Police Department doctors examine every citizen monthly, and any month the exam can reveal that the omnipresent radioactive dust has pushed a Regular over the threshold into the Special category. The government slogan blared by posters, TV ads, and junk mail — "Emigrate or degenerate! The choice is yours!" — makes explicit the binary logic: those who fail to emigrate risk biological ruin, and those who are ruined lose their place among the Regulars. Rick Deckard, the bounty hunter, reflects that he is still a Regular, able to reproduce within the tolerances set by law, but he knows the dust is always working on him, and that any month the exam could reveal otherwise.

The Legal and Social Boundary

The Regular/Special divide is the fundamental social cleavage of the novel. Regulars are the only citizens who can legally emigrate to the colony worlds, where they receive an android servant as an incentive; Specials, even if they accept sterilization, "dropped out of history" and "ceased, in effect, to be part of mankind." The law makes it easy to emigrate and difficult to stay, so that loitering on Earth potentially means finding oneself abruptly classed as biologically unacceptable, a menace to the pristine heredity of the race. The Regulars who remain on Earth, like Deckard and his neighbor Bill Barbour, cluster in urban areas where they can see one another and take heart at their mutual presence. The Specials, by contrast, are often found in the virtually abandoned suburbs, like John Isidore, who failed the minimum mental faculties test and is therefore a "chickenhead" — a term of contempt that marks him as irredeemably inferior.

The Biological and Moral Logic

The Regular status is not merely a legal convenience; it is tied to the novel's central moral framework, Mercerism. Regulars are expected to own and care for animals, a practice that demonstrates empathy and aligns them with the fusion experience of Wilbur Mercer. Those who fail to maintain an animal, or who own a fake electric one, risk social censure as immoral and anti-empathic. Deckard's electric sheep is a constant source of shame and anxiety, precisely because it marks him as unable to afford a real animal and thus as potentially deficient in the empathic capacity that defines Regular humanity. The system is self-reinforcing: Regulars who cannot emigrate due to their jobs, like Deckard, must prove their worth through animal ownership, while Specials like Isidore are excluded from this entire economy of moral worth.

The Threat of Degeneration

The novel repeatedly emphasizes that the Regular status is precarious. The dust does not discriminate; it creates "new specials" out of Regulars continually. Deckard's own position is fragile: he is a Regular only as long as his monthly medical checkup confirms it, and he knows that any month the exam could reveal otherwise. The dust has already eroded Hannibal Sloat, the owner of the Van Ness Pet Hospital, who is not a Special but is doomed to creep out his remaining life on Earth, his features gray, his thoughts gray, his legs spindly, his gait unsteady. Sloat's glasses are literally dense with dust, as if he has accepted the radioactive dirt and it has begun its job of burying him. The Regular is thus not a stable identity but a temporary reprieve from a universal process of biological and social decay.

Narrative and Thematic Significance

The Regular/Special binary structures the novel's entire social world and provides the ideological justification for the bounty hunter's work. Androids, who are not Regulars and cannot experience empathy, are classified as Killers under Mercerism, and their destruction is framed as a defense of Regular humanity. Yet the novel complicates this binary by showing that some Regulars, like Phil Resch, exhibit a coldness toward androids that mirrors the very lack of empathy they are supposed to oppose, while some Specials, like John Isidore, possess a capacity for compassion that exceeds that of many Regulars. The Regular category, then, is not a measure of moral worth but a biopolitical label that the novel systematically undermines, revealing the arbitrariness and cruelty of a system that equates biological fitness with humanity.