25 Years and still Blade Running

Got me around to reading the very novel which was behind this 1982 film. The movie is Blade Runner but it goes by its original name as a novel called "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?" by Philip K. Dick. Philip K. Dick has a number of stories made into movies like Total Recall, Minority Report, A Scanner Darkly and Next to mention. Managed to obtain the book after seeing the cover (See above image) which caught my attention and spurring my curiosity finally of getting it.

There are a notable number of differences between novel and movie, which is par for the course when source material gets processed through the machine of movie production and studio politics/marketing. Some detail changes like Rosen Corporation to Tyrell Corporation and appropriate last name changes to those affiliated with it. Rachael and Pris Stratton (Shortened to Pris in the movie) are identical in appearance in the novel though possibly problematic to handle in the movie. Opera singer Luba Luft in the novel, renamed as Exotic Dancer Zhora. J.F. Sebastian in the movie replaced John R. Isidore in the novel. The novel also elaborated about the high value of other lifeforms besides man and the price for its ownership in a manner of commodity fetishism. A philosophy called Mercerism is perpetuated in the novel which is absent in the film. The interesting note on this novel with the movie is the matter of Deckard being a replicant. In the movie, it was vaguely implied, depending on which version was viewed. The novel heavily deals with the emotional lines between humans and androids where sometimes the distinctions blur given mental illness in human minds would also mimic the androids empathy-devoid psyches. I could rattle on a lot on these differences for more mileage but I don't want to burden the reader about all the nitty gritty nitpicking details in one-to-one minutiae.

All in all, in spite its datedness from 1982 and its now restored and enhanced version for its 25th anniversary, it still sets the bar as an influential film for the cyberpunk genre and its debt to film noir. This movie is where offworld mil-grade replicants are found and retired. It still brings plenty of influence and electric sheep to the fertile fields of imagination in this current time of postcyberpunk and the current wave of transhumanism. *Watches a flock of cybersheep from the top of his doghouse.*