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Blade Runner

Blade Runner

philip k. dick

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It was January 2021, and Rick Deckard had a license to kill.
Somewhere among the hordes of humans out there, lurked several rogue androids. Deckard's assignmet--find them and then..."retire" them. Trouble was, the androids all looked exactly like humans, and they didn't want to be found!

216 pages, Mass Market Paperback

First published January 1,1968
Series
Blade Runner
Literary awards
nebula award, 
Places
san francisco california, california, the united states of america, 

This edition

Format
216 pages, Mass Market Paperback
Published
October 1, 1984 by Del Rey
ISBN
9780345323880
ASIN
0345323882
Language
English
Characters More characters

More editions

About the author

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philip k. dick

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Philip K. Dick was born in Chicago in 1928 and lived most of his life in California. In 1952, he began writing professionally and proceeded to write numerous novels and short-story collections. He won the Hugo Award for the best novel in 1962 for The Man in the High Castle and the John W. Campbell Memorial Award for best novel of the year in 1974 for Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said. Philip K. Dick died on March 2, 1982, in Santa Ana, California, of heart failure following a stroke.

In addition to 44 published novels, Dick wrote approximately 121 short stories, most of which appeared in science fiction magazines during his lifetime. Although Dick spent most of his career as a writer in near-poverty, ten of his stories have been adapted into popular films since his death, including Blade Runner, Total Recall, A Scanner Darkly, Minority Report, Paycheck, Next, Screamers, and The Adjustment Bureau. In 2005, Time magazine named Ubik one of the one hundred greatest English-language novels published since 1923. In 2007, Dick became the first science fiction writer to be included in The Library of America series.

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Community Reviews

Rating(3.9 / 5.0, 99 votes)
5 stars
31(31%)
4 stars
27(27%)
3 stars
41(41%)
2 stars
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99 reviews All reviews
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KaiserCva
★ ★ ★ ★ ★
April 26,2025
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I really enjoyed the first 90% of this book or so. After that, a few very odd things started happening that did not seem to be in line with the rest of the story. Because of this, I didn't really fully understand the resolution. But, overall it was better than I expected!

The aspect of the story where animals are so rare that they are highly cherished and have a Blue Book value was interesting.

I sympathized with Isidore. Just a lonely, simple man who wanted some friends and got mixed up with androids and bounty hunters instead!
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kyahaku
★ ★ ★ ★ ★
April 26,2025
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It seldom happens that a movie proves to be better than the book from which it was adapted, but in this case one can hardly deny that Ridley Scott's Blade Runner one-upped Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep big time. Now don't get me wrong, Philip K. Dick's book is a very good read and everything, but compared to the movie, I can't help but think that it sorely lacks the gravitas, grandiosity and otherworldly atmosphere Ridley Scott conjured up on screen. To say nothing of the plot and characters, which to me were far more interesting and intricate than on paper. Still, I'm glad I read it, if only to gain a deeper understanding of what is for me the best SF movie of all time.

OLIVIER DELAYE
Author of the SEBASTEN OF ATLANTIS series
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Gipshaw
★ ★ ★ ★ ★
April 26,2025
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This is the book Blade Runner was based on. Which is why I decided to read it. You might think this was a bad idea on my part. You might be right.

This novel is a cult classic. You're supposed to love cult classics right? Right. Well guess what? Not only did I not love this book, it pretty much bored me to death, too. Yay.

Don't get me wrong, this book is somewhat brilliant. Well, okay, if it had actually been brilliant I'd obviously have given it a 4-star rating. So let's just say this book is potentially brilliant. Some of the themes PKD develops here are very interesting and I loved some of his ideas: mood organs did you just read mood orgasms instead of mood organs? Why am I not surprised?, empathy boxes, the electric menagerie... The problem is, at 244 pages, the book felt like it was 600 pages long and I struggled to finish it.

Blade Runner is one of my favorite movies ever so you might think that this is a case of "the movie was better than the book," but it's not. Actually, Blade Runner has little to do with the book and, strangely enough, it doesn't do it justice. The movie is just too simplistic compared to the book. And yet both are complementary. And yet I still like the movie a lot more than I do the novel. Does this make any sense to you? Probably not. But there you have it.

Blade Runner lacks the philosophical dimension of the book and its complexity. Mercer (a messiah-like character) is completely left out of the movie so you don't get the theological aspect of the novel either. Some of the themes developed by PKD are present but the movie never quite manages to convey the full extent of their significance. And yet Blade Runner is still one of my favorite movies ever. So cool. Ha.



I think the main problem I have with these electric sheep is PKD's writing. I wouldn't know how to describe it but it just doesn't do anything for me. Too convoluted maybe? I don't know, but reading this novel was a complete drag. I've read a few of PKD's novels and still haven't come across one I actually enjoyed. I always love the idea behind the story but the actual book? Nope nope nope. Ugh.

The other BIG problem I have with this book is the way women are portrayed. Bad move PKD, this is one of my major pet peeves. There are few female characters in the novel and let me tell you, PKD doesn't paint a very attractive picture of the female gender. Women here are weak, manipulative, plain crazy, cold-blooded, sometimes depicted as having a whore-like behaviors and generally flawed. Lovely. What also bothered me is the fact that there is only one actual woman in the story (and a pretty pathetic one at that). The other female characters are all androids. Then again I might be reading too much into it. And ultimately it doesn't matter: human or robot, all the women in this novel seem to be dysfunctional and beyond salvation. Very cool ← in case you were wondering, this is a slightly ironic statement.

Philip K. Dick, cult author or not, I am done with you. So bye bye and stuff.

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doomsday_clock
★ ★ ★ ★ ★
April 26,2025
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Since "Blade Runner" has been one of my favorite movies my entire adult life, it's odd I never read this until now. I expected it to be pretty different from the film, but still, it's not like I don't read SF by the metric ton anyway. I think I just never happened across a copy until recently.

If you've read a lot of SF from the 60s and 70s, you'd know this was written in the late 60s by the end of the first chapter. It has the smell of that period all over it - everyone "official" in any way has two or three layers of hidden agenda and an impressive repertoire of manipulation technique, there's a whole religious/mystical dimension to the story that's never really explored, and of course everyone's speech includes invented slang (though the film's "skin jobs" has a great deal more reverberance than Dick's more believable but less colorful "andys").

And the concerns of the story are also very much of that time. Rick Deckard, the protagonist, is a bounty hunter, a de facto freelance killer of rogue androids who is de jure attached to what passes for a police department in a San Francisco depopulated by nuclear war and off-planet emigration. He inherits an assignment to "retire" a group of androids who have illegally returned to Earth from the colonies. This group were made with a new type of brain unit that makes them almost indistinguishable from born humans, except for a lack of empathy. In one view, the whole book is about empathy, what it is, whether anyone actually has it, and how it is experienced and expressed. Deckard experiences a serious crisis of conscience when he begins to question his own ability to empathize, and then his ability to avoid empathizing with the andys he must kill. That leads to his over-empathizing with, and confusing himself with, Wilbur Mercer, the possibly invented central figure of Mercerism, a quasi religion that seems to be about empathy and nothing else. Ah, the age of LSD and MDA!

Despite its obvious datedness, many of the questions considered are still interesting (and relevant). PKD handles them with genuine concern though he delivers little satisfaction, having no answers himself.
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malmga
★ ★ ★ ★ ★
April 26,2025
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n  
تمام آن لحظات
ناپدید خواهند شد در زمان
همچون قطرات اشک
در باران
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"یه دختر با موی تیره جلوی درب شخصیت اصلی پیداش میشه و بهش میگه دنیاش توهمه"
پیشنهاد میکنم این پنج دقیقه صحبت کردن فیلیپ ک دیک در مورد ماتریکس و جهان رو ببینید و گوش کنید و دقت داشته باشید که این سخنرانی مربوط به سال 1977 هست

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0LDv8...

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توی دنیای کتاب بلیدرانر بخاطر جنگ و تغییرات زیست محیطی، بیشتر موجودات زنده کمیاب یا منقرض شدند و به همین خاطر داشتن یک موجود زنده باعث افزایش شأن و منزلت اشخاص میشه و هزینه خرید موجود زنده سرسام آوره و به این دلیل بیشتر افراد مجبورن که حیوانات مصنوعی (الکتریکی) خریداری کنند و امیدوار باشند که همسایه ها و اطرافیانشون متوجه نشن که حیوونشون زنده نیست
در واقع هدف اصلی دیکارد که جایزه بگیره و درآمدش رو از کشتن اندرویدها بدست میاره، ابتدا خرید یک حیوان زنده برای خودش و همسرش هست
توی فیلم هم به مصنوعی بودن حیوانات چندبار اشاره میشه ولی این موضوع کلا به حاشیه رفته
عنوان کتاب هم بخاطر همین عجیب غریبه

کلیت داستان فیلم و کتاب یکی هست، ولی تفاوتهای زیادی دارند و دیدن فیلم اصلا باعث بی مزه شدن کتاب نمیشه
برعکس تجربه ی بلیدرانر رو زیباتر میکنه
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اون کوت بالا فقط توی فیلم هست
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Animeted_love7
★ ★ ★ ★ ★
April 26,2025
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I'd watched Blade Runner several times, but hadn't read Philip K. Dick's Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep. The book and movie don't entirely match up, but they are both thought-provoking and entertaining in their own right. Fans of the film will notice serious discrepancies in the book as I did (and vice versa). Still, they somehow compliment each other. That's not a common response when I read a book after watching a film, or more commonly watching a film after reading the book. Before reading the book, I hadn't understood the title (a significant plot-line in the book which isn't explicitly explored in the movie). So I guess that's my message for fans of the movie who are wary of reading the book which they've been told is different than the movie; they are both solid and neither experience detracts from the other. In fact, I'm now a fan of both the novel and the movie!
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orchidscout
★ ★ ★ ★ ★
April 26,2025
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i do agree with your point regarding morality and how folks aren't necessarily born with that. i guess i just disagree when it comes to traits or attributes, such as empathy. for example, a person can learn society's morals, come to believe in them and strive towards them, and so eventually become a moral or even moralistic person. but they can have all that and still not be an empathetic person - possibly because they never learned how to be empathetic, but also possibly because they weren't born with that attribute in particular.
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