Extinction and Electric Sheep

“There are no owls, he started to say. Or so we’ve been told. Sidney’s, he thought; they list it in their catalogues as extinct: the tiny, precise type, the E, again and again throughout the catalogue… Sidney’s never makes a mistake, he said to himself. We know that, too. What else can we depend on?” (41.)

In the broader context of the novel, this passage might not be particularly special. It would be easy to skim through, taking note of it perhaps, but not giving it any extra attention. But I found this to be one of the more poignant insights into the world of the novel. By this point the reader knows that there are very few animals left in the world, understands the oppressing nature of the silence of an all-but abandoned planet. But this one phrase brought home the reality of it to me: “the tiny, precise type, the E, again and again…” The way that all this extinction, the loss of thousands of species, of millions of animals, has been boiled down to a single, tiny letter “E.” The word “extinct” comes from the Latin extinguere—the same root of the word “extinguish.” And that’s a fitting symbol, for this E: recognition of all the life that has been extinguished. There it is, in black and white, irrefutable in its precise print. The effect should be alienating; in the grand scheme of things, what difference do mere words on a page make? But instead it draws the reader in further, to imagine a world in which this has become mundane, what it means that these words can be typed so calmly, so precisely.

And yet, for all that these extinctions are exhaustedly noted, itemized and catalogued, the world still keenly feels the loss of all these species, and this comes across in this passage as well. To people who no longer have an animal, Sidney’s offers a fantasy: all the animals ever on earth, yours for the imagining. It seems odd that this, a price catalogue, would list extinct species, but it is clear that it is much more than just a catalogue. Listing the extinct animals along with the surviving ones may seem hopelessly optimistic, but it is a way of keeping them alive, at least in the collective memory. You may never see one in your lifetime, but there were once owls, and birds, and raccoons roaming the planet, and while this catalogue cannot bring them back, it can at least remind you of what you are missing. In a world falling apart, it remains, documenting, but also offering this momentary escape. And so it is not surprising that Sidney’s takes on such an important, almost Bible-like role in Rick’s mind—what else, really, can he depend on?

But there is a nagging doubt: “There are no owls—or so we’ve been told.” “Hope is the thing with feathers” Emily Dickinson said, in this case wearing the feathers of an owl. The “E” is there, solid as ever, but Rick allows himself, momentarily, to hope that maybe Sidney’s got one, just one, wrong, that one owl slipped through the cracks. This is why, season after season, year after year, he keeps looking at Sidney’s, the hope that, impossible as it may be, that someday that “E” will itself be extinguished.