Bounty hunter Rick Deckard signs on to a new police mission to earn enough money to buy a live animal to replace his electric sheep, in the hopes of achieving a greater sense of purpose in life for himself and his depressed wife, Iran. The mission, initiated by a now-hospitalized colleague, is to hunt down and eliminate (called "retiring") a group of six Nexus-6 androids that violently went rogue after their creation by the Rosen Association. Deckard travels by hovercar to the Rosen Association headquarters in Seattle, Washington to confirm the validity of a question-and-answer empathy test: his standard method for identifying any androids posing as humans. Deckard tests Rachael Rosen, the "niece" of the android-crafting Rosen family, who quickly fails the test. Rachael attempts to bribe Deckard into silence, but he verifies that she is indeed a Nexus-6 android and the Rosen Association was just trying to discredit the empathy test.

Norman Niblock House is a rising executive at General Technics, one of a few all-powerful corporations. His work is leading General Technics to the forefront of global domination, both in the marketplace and politically—it's about to take over a country in Africa. Donald Hogan is his roommate, a seemingly sheepish bookworm. But Hogan is a spy, and he's about to discover a breakthrough in genetic engineering that will change the world ... and kill him. These two men's lives weave through one of science fiction's most praised novels. Written in a way that echoes John Dos Passos' U.S.A. Trilogy, Stand on Zanzibar is a cross-section of a world overpopulated by the billions. Where society is squeezed into hive-living madness by god-like mega computers, mass-marketed psychedelic drugs, and mundane uses of genetic engineering. Though written in 1968, it speaks of 2010, and is frighteningly prescient and intensely powerful.