From Page To Screen: Philip K. Dick’s ‘Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?’ Transformation into Ridley Scott’s Onscreen Cult Hit ‘Blade Runner’

Thursday 1st October 2009


With the steady supply of films inspired by and adapted from books emerging in Hollywood, it’s noteworthy to look back at cult hits that have claimed victory in the arduous task of successfully adapting a novel onto the silver screen without spoiling the beauty of its once literary form.

One such success is Ridley Scott’s 1982 sci-fi noir Blade Runner, which despite less-than-flattering reviews upon release, has only matured with age and is now viewed as an influential building block for science fiction films we know and love today.

However, in spite of the film’s success, the origin of Scott’s cult remains a mystery to the masses. Unbeknown to many outside the sci-fi community, it was not the Aliens director that envisaged the Nexus-6, futuristic squalor and the infamous Blade Runner, but was in fact science fiction visionary Philip K. Dick, literary author of other cinematic successes like Total Recall, A Scanner Darkly and Minority Report, who conceived such revolutionary concepts two decades before the release of the film.

Philip K. Dick’s 1968 book, laboriously titled Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? spawn themes of post-nuclear apocalyptic Earth, organic androids and robotic infiltration. Yet, Dick’s book delves into the themes in a darker and more meditative approach, evoking hollow-felt despair within each turn of the page – concepts that are indisputably lost, or rather stripped of, in the ‘80s Hollywood adaptation.


In Blade Runner’s famous and most memorable opening sequence we see Los Angeles 2019 in all its futuristic light and glory – heavily ‘Japanized’ and thriving in over-populated claustrophobia. This greatly contrasts with Dick’s desolate planet-Earth, which rots in an aftermath of radioactive dust after a nuclear world war. Scott’s intention was to create a ‘future-medieval’ city with the concept of an ‘overloaded’ Asian city, yet this juxtaposes Dick’s idea of Earth having been transformed into an uninhabitable wasteland where the human population is down to mere thousands and animal-life is near extinction; with most people having emigrated to an off-world settlement in Mars, renamed New America. Although Scott plays with this premise using references in larger-than-life digital billboards throughout the city, Dick’s analysis of human behaviour in which social status, epitomised with the ultimate status symbol of owning a live animal, plays an important factor in spite of the steady decay of mankind on Earth itself.

Another interesting concept explored in the book is the idea of the ‘mood organ’ – a device used to induce human emotions with varying dial settings. The concept questions how wide the gap is between humans and androids (Replicants) with the ability to manipulate and schedule emotions at the touch of a button. Blade Runner does not include the ‘mood organ’ within the film, but instead preludes to the debate of what it means to be human by questioning whether killing, or ‘retiring’, a Replicant is as equally devoid of empathy as Replicants are perceived to be.


The most fascinating idea in Dick’s book is the concept of ‘Mercerism’, the prominent religious movement that ‘blends the concept of a life-death-rebirth deity with the values of unity and empathy’ amongst the Earth’s inhabitants. The premise is that each lasting member of Earth can unite as one via an electronic ‘empathy box’ in an attempt to ease the suffocating feeling of isolation. ‘This religion provides a means by which the isolated populations can interact, and promotes needed unification.’ With themes of spiritual faith and hope for mankind, Dick challenges the existence of religion by revealing that ‘Mercerism’ may very well be an artificial construct, which is exposed by the Replicants at the end of the book. Perhaps too complex and heavy a subject for Hollywood to tackle, Blade Runner does not attempt to adapt this into its cinematic counterpart, but does include a node to the book’s fans by placing an ‘empathy box’ in John Isidore’s apartment.

While Philip K. Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? is captivatingly written with desolate themes of suffocating loneliness and psychological unrest, Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner’s success as a sci-fi noir remains a Hollywood classic with loose references to one of literature’s best celebrated science fiction novels.

PUBLISHED IN SCENE 360