Chapter 1

We learn that the setting is San Francisco. It is very dusty and kind of in despare.The Rand Corp oration has been the major government-financed "think-tank" whose main job was imagining various nuclear war scenarios in order to justify the building of more and more powerful bombs and missiles.But the question i wonder is why is the rand corp still there when every one is evacuating from earth. The first dead animals to be noticed were owls. The owl seemed important in this novel and I dont know why just that animal. What is the symbolism of the owl, and why are they significant here? Dick here anticipates the "nuclear winter" theory in a striking way. The term "android" was invented by science fiction writers to denote an artificial human made mostly of organic parts, in distinction to a robot, made of purely mechanical parts .I did some research and the word android comes from the Greek word "andros" meaning "man" and the ending "oid," meaning "similar to." They are persuading the people left on earth with androids to migrate to mars on tv commercials.An android could be very useful and in this novel they seem useful but it looks like if most of the citizens on earth dont want or realy care for one, becuase if did they would migrate to mars.I think that is sick in a way because it shows that slavery is used and that is wrong. But it is smart also because it it gets the citizens to migrate. But also there is the fact that they are androids and not humans so in my opinion it wouldnt be called slavery. Sloat, is J. R. Isidore's boss but, it's also the name of a major street in San Francisco. Why does the "silence" have an impact on Isidore? Mercerism is based on the same principle as the kind of Catholicism illustrated by the Stabat Mater: emotional identification with the suffering of a martyr.