Brain Snacks: Tasty Tidbits of Knowledge
Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? was originally published in 1968, and the story took place in the then distant, unknown future of January 3, 1992. Had Philip K. Dick only known the true horror wrought by that future year—Snap!'s "Rhythm is a Dancer."
After Blade Runner hit theaters in 1982, editions of the novel pushed the story's date forward to 2021. This could have been to coincide with the movie—although the film takes place in 2019—or it could have simply been because the future was quickly becoming the present. Either way, some anachronisms remain in current editions as the Soviet Union still exists despite the fact that it collapsed some 30 years past. We'll have to wait and see if later editions continue to push the future into, well, the further future or if it will stay in the future's past. (Will the bounty hunters get their assignments through some future version of Uber?) (Source.)
A long time ago, in a lab far, far away, David Hanson and the techs at Hanson Robotics said, "Hey, let's build an android." Why not, right? When they had to decide on a human model for the android replicant, they naturally went with Philip K. Dick. The android was completed, and it later introduced the screening of A Scanner Darkly at Comic Con.
Then, in January 2006 on an overnight flight, the head of Android PKD 1.0 went missing after being stored in an overhead bin on an America West airlines flight. It was never recovered. We at Shmoop choose to believe it got up and has been wreaking paranoid havoc across the continental United States (and portions of Canada) ever since.
The head was replaced in 2011, and the story of this android has become famous among technicians, A.I. enthusiasts and science fiction fans. It even became the subject matter of a book by David F. Dufty. (Source, Source, Source.)
Blade Runner introduced many fans and Hollywood execs to Philip K. Dick's works, and Dick might not have been as well-known today without Ridley Scott's science fiction cult classic.
Sadly, Dick didn't live to see the film as he died in March of 1982, and Blade Runner wasn't released until June of that year. Dick did get to preview the film though and, in a letter to one Jeff Walker, sang its praises. He called the footage "super realism so gritty and detailed and authentic and goddam convincing, that, well, after the segment [he] found [his] normal present-day 'reality' pallid by comparison."
Dick went on to write that the film would be "one hell of a commercial success," which it wasn't, not by several financial miles. He also believed it would "prove invincible," which was more on the mark. The movie stayed alive as a cult classic until today, and it is now considered one of the best science fiction films of all time. (Source.)
Philip K. Dick wasn't in the habit of writing book series, and Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? has no sequels, no prequels, and no inter-mid-half-way-quels. It's a standalone story all the way.
But its filmic counterpart, Blade Runner, has three sequels-in-book-form. These sequels were written by K.W. Jeter—not Dick—and follow the story of Deckard months after the events of the film. They are:
- Blade Runner 2: The Edge of Human (1995)
- Blade Runner 3: Replicant Night (1996)
- Blade Runner 4: Eye and Talon (2000)
These stories contradict the original's plot in several ways—for example, Pris is, somehow, still alive after Deckard trashed her in the film. But Jeter used the movie's plot holes as plot devices in clever ways. In the second novel, he turned the "sixth replicant" dialogue flub from Blade Runner and turned it into the source of a mystery.
There's a computer program called electric sheep that creates fractal flame artwork through algorithms. Scott Davis, who created the program in 1999, calls the process "a form of artificial life, which is to say it is software that recreates the biological phenomena of evolution and reproduction though mathematics" (source). But thanks to time's tendency to move forward, the program is clearly named after the novel and not the other way around—excluding the possibility of a time-looped dimensional feedback portal, naturally.