Blade Runner / Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?

What Book is Based on?

Blade Runner is loosely based on a Philip K. Dick: Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep (DADoES). The least one can say about the film adaptation is that it borrowed a number of concepts and characters from the book. Dick also wrote the short story that Total Recall was based on, We Can Remember It For You, Wholesale. A recurring theme in Dick's work is the question of personal and human identity. A question explored more in DADoES and Total Recall than in Blade Runner is "what is reality?"

You are most likely to find DADoES in a second-hand bookstore. It has been re-printed as: Blade Runner (Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?).

The movie's title comes from Alan E. Nourse, who wrote a story called The Bladerunner. William S. Burroughs took the book and wrote Bladerunner (A Movie) in 1979. Rights to the title only ("in perpetuity") were sold to Ridley Scott. Similarities between Nourse's The Bladerunner and Scott's Blade Runner are in name only. Nourse's title refers to people who deliver medical instruments to outlaw doctors who can't obtain them legally. Scott thought the title made a good codename for Deckard.

Some of the "visuals" were inspired by a story from Dan O'Bannon and Moebius ( Jean Giraud) called The Long Tomorrow in an issue of the French Wonders of the Universe comic book series. The back of the comic book says (translated from French):

This comic-book also contains other famous stories, like "The Long Tomorrow", which originally was thought to be a parody, but ended up being more real, than what it was meant to be a parody of: the classic American detective-story. This story was later used as a visual reference for the movie "Blade Runner." Giraud did the costume design for the Walt Disney movie Tron, for which Syd Mead did the mechanical design.

Murray Chapman