Film Enthusiast or Novel Aficionado?

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Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, the classic science-fiction novel from which the popular 80’s movie Blade Runner, directed by Ridley Scott, was adapted, was first published in 1968 by author Philip K. Dick. Throughout both pieces of work, there are many ethical and moral messages and themes that can be compared and discussed through the differences in each authors creative mind. Their ideas and how they feel will be the basis of what the audience sees, thinks, and absorbs. In the story, a bounty hunter, or blade runner, goes on a mission to search and retire Androids that escaped from their planet to establish a new life on Earth, free from their enslavement. Although both pieces convey the same plot, each author goes about describing it in different ways, with different scenes and different themes.

Philip K. Dick was born in Chicago in 1928, but lived in California for most of his life. He attended college for a year at Berkeley, but then decided to drop out and begin professionally writing in 1952. After his brave decision, he had completed thirty-six novels and five short stories in his writing career. Philip K. Dick was a very well respected science-fiction prolific writer and an extremely well read scholar as well. However, his life-style was not so much respected. Dick at times functioned on the periphery of sanity and drug use and throughout his work a clear sense of paranoia was often present and is also very prevalent in the popular film Blade Runner. Not only did he establish a sense of paranoia in his writing, but he also had the feelings himself. He was a very skeptic man always thinking government agencies, and everyone else was watching him and out to get him. Dick worked closely with th...

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