Nine covers of Philip K. Dick's Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (AKA Blade Runner, of course).

Cornell University's Images from the Rare Book and Manuscript Collections on JSTOR features lots more related content, including prequels, video games, movie stills, the covers of Alan E. Nourse's original Blade Runner—which had nothing to do with Dick's novel!—and William S. Burroughs' Blade Runner: A Movie which is an adaptation of sorts of the Nourse novel.

Oh, and there are more than 11,000 additional images that have nothing at all to do with these movies or books! Dig in, the collection is free and open for everyone!

— Blade Runner (1982) dir. Ridley Scott

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Sometimes an adaptation is so strong that it eclipses the source material, so any deviations are assumed to be canonical to the original. This is also true for anything that just happened to filter through pop culture, like King Kong or Godzilla. Some examples that I found:

Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde is a mystery! It's from the point of view of a different character who tries to uncover the relationship between the two characters. Every single adaptation is about how they're both the same person affected by a crazy experiment.

King Kong references just focus on the climax where he climbs the Empire State Building, but most of the movie is about going to the island and what they find there. Natives that revere him as a god, dinosaurs and giant snakes are all present.

Moby Dick is maybe 10% about a guy trying to hunt a white whale and the rest of it is a lot of history and philosophy.

Blade Runner feels like it was based on a dream someone had after reading Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, but without remembering all the details. In the book Deckard is married, owns a machine that helps him experience specific intense emotions, is part of a new age religion based around taking care of animals, has dreams with other people, gets arrested for being a replicant, etc. Every character basically just shares a name, and any events that actually occur in both still end completely differently. There's a scene where Deckard gives a test to someone and finds out they're a replicant. In the movie the creator is pleased because she's a replicant that isn't aware she's a replicant, and she's been passing their tests without being able to pass the police test. In the book they claim she's a human as a way of forcing Deckard to drop the case. It's the exact opposite conclusion.

Blade Runner in particular is the really odd one because it's the only one where the film didn't ruin the book for me. I already know the broad strokes or the important scenes in King Kong, Jekyll and Hyde, Dracula, etc. so there's nothing much there for me to get. Androids is so different from Blade Runner that I had no idea where the story was going to go next and it ended up being a really exciting read for me.

Any piece of media that is adapted and referenced endlessly is probably very, very good and definitely better than the references are so they're worth searching out. If all you know about the Twilight Zone are the Futurama parodies then you are missing out on some prime television.

a sketch I'm kinda excited about...

Bottleneck Gallery will release Blade Runner 24x36 screen prints by Laurent Durieux tomorrow, June 8, at 12pm.

The standard versions (top) are timed editions available through Sunday, June 11, for $75 each for $215 for the set of three. Each design also has a variant limited to 325 for $95 and an aluminum print limited to 100 for $200.

I've... seen things you people wouldn't believe...

Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion.

I watched C-Beams glitter in the dark

Near the Tannhäuser Gates.

All those... moments... will be lost in time,

Like tears... in... rain.

Time... to die...

Electric Dreams - Human Is - Silas and Vera

I feel like in the realm of “science fiction,” Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, Tender is the Flesh, and Snow Crash create an interesting trilogy all surrounding western capitalism and its effects. On one side there’s Androids, where Dick creates an intense drive for empathy (for animals, primarily) as overcompensation for the lack of connection people have in the real lives towards other humans (think pigeon-heads, thing emigration to the moon, think Mercerism and empathy boxes) and the creation of androids as non-human, non-animal slaves that aren’t worthy of empathy but take over the labor that “real and worthy” humans “shouldn’t have to do” because they are intrinsically better than these other groups. And then there’s Tender is the Flesh, the most truly dystopian, that has cannibalism as a deep metaphor for how we’re already destroying and dehumanizing each other in the pursuit of capitalism: the intense cognitive dissonance we all reach for and support, not just allow, in order to go about our daily lives, and the death of empathy that leads humans to do such inhumane acts. And then there’s Snow Crash. The ultimate individualistic hyper-capitalistic future where everything is corporatized and empathy has dissolved to allow survival, because no one can afford to assist anyone else, and everyone relies on avatars to escape the super shitty world they can’t afford to change. I think these three all lend understanding to each other and allow for deeper interpretation of just how deep capitalism can go to undermine the control we think we have over society, and just how much personal power we have in such a deeply flawed system.

asking the real mf questions here. 🤔

My favorite films of all time: BLADE RUNNER (1982), dir. Ridley Scott