This paper looks at the various textual “repurposing” of Philip K. Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? and analyzes the way in which the production of multiple versions of the novel challenges and redefines the traditional notion of text and text production. Dick’s novel was first published in 1968 and has been re-created in different media for almost forty years. Ridley Scott’s film adaptation of it, Blade Runner, instantly brought the status of quintessential classical SF film upon itself. The popularity of the film generated numerous spin-offs including the comics of the same title, a series of novels based on the film and the original novel, and even a video game. Moreover, the director himself constantly retouched his own film to perfect his artistic vision, and repeatedly re-released the same film in different versions in 1992 and in 2007. Such diverse forms of re-creation or “repurposing” of the story of “Blade Runner” blur the distinction of original and copy as well as complicate the relationship among text, author, and reader/spectator. By critically examining the multi-level process of reception and reproduction of “Blade Runner,” this paper intends to suggest a new way of defining a “fantastic text’ that activates its readers/spectators to eagerly cross the border of their own lived reality and the non-reality of the textual world.

This paper looks at the various textual “repurposing” of Philip K. Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? and analyzes the way in which the production of multiple versions of the novel challenges and redefines the traditional notion of text and text production. Dick’s novel was first published in 1968 and has been re-created in different media for almost forty years. Ridley Scott’s film adaptation of it, Blade Runner, instantly brought the status of quintessential classical SF film upon itself. The popularity of the film generated numerous spin-offs including the comics of the same title, a series of novels based on the film and the original novel, and even a video game. Moreover, the director himself constantly retouched his own film to perfect his artistic vision, and repeatedly re-released the same film in different versions in 1992 and in 2007. Such diverse forms of re-creation or “repurposing” of the story of “Blade Runner” blur the distinction of original and copy as well as complicate the relationship among text, author, and reader/spectator. By critically examining the multi-level process of reception and reproduction of “Blade Runner,” this paper intends to suggest a new way of defining a “fantastic text’ that activates its readers/spectators to eagerly cross the border of their own lived reality and the non-reality of the textual world.

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original, copy, repurposing, adaptation, fantastic