An android is a humanoid robot or other artificial being often made from a flesh-like material. Historically, androids existed only in the domain of science fiction and were frequently seen in film and television, but advances in robot technology have allowed the design of functional and realistic humanoid robots.
Blade Runner is a 1982 science fiction film directed by Ridley Scott from a screenplay by Hampton Fancher and David Peoples. Starring Harrison Ford, Rutger Hauer, Sean Young, and Edward James Olmos, it is an adaptation of Philip K. Dick's 1968 novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? The film is set in a dystopian future Los Angeles of 2019, in which synthetic humans known as replicants are bio-engineered by the powerful Tyrell Corporation to work on space colonies. When a fugitive group of advanced replicants led by Roy Batty (Hauer) escapes back to Earth, burnt-out cop Rick Deckard (Ford) reluctantly agrees to hunt them down.
Cyberpunk is a subgenre of science fiction in a dystopian futuristic setting said to focus on a combination of "low-life and high tech". It features futuristic technological and scientific achievements, such as artificial intelligence and cyberware, juxtaposed with societal collapse, dystopia or decay. Much of cyberpunk is rooted in the New Wave science fiction movement of the 1960s and 1970s, when writers like Philip K. Dick, Michael Moorcock, Roger Zelazny, John Brunner, J. G. Ballard, Philip José Farmer and Harlan Ellison examined the impact of technology, drug culture, and the sexual revolution while avoiding the utopian tendencies of earlier science fiction.
Michael John Moorcock is an English writer, particularly of science fiction and fantasy, who has published a number of well-received literary novels as well as comic thrillers, graphic novels and non-fiction. He has worked as an editor and is also a successful musician. He is best known for his novels about the character Elric of Melniboné, which were a seminal influence on the field of fantasy in the 1960s and 1970s.
Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? is a 1968 dystopian science fiction novel by American writer Philip K. Dick. It is set in a post-apocalyptic San Francisco, where Earth's life has been greatly damaged by a nuclear global war, leaving most animal species endangered or extinct. The main plot follows Rick Deckard, a bounty hunter who has to "retire" six escaped Nexus-6 model androids, while a secondary plot follows John Isidore, a man of sub-par IQ who aids the fugitive androids.
Timothy Thomas Powers is an American science fiction and fantasy author. His first major novel was The Drawing of the Dark (1979), but the novel that earned him wide praise was The Anubis Gates (1983), which won the Philip K. Dick Award, and has since been published in many other languages. His other written work include Dinner at Deviant's Palace (1985), Last Call (1992), Expiration Date (1996), Earthquake Weather (1997), Declare (2000), and Three Days to Never (2006). Powers has won the World Fantasy Award twice for his critically acclaimed novels Last Call and Declare. His 1987 novel On Stranger Tides served as inspiration for the Monkey Island franchise of video games and was partly adapted into the fourth Pirates of the Caribbean film.
William Seward Burroughs II was an American writer and visual artist. He is widely considered a primary figure of the Beat Generation and a major postmodern author who influenced popular culture and literature. Burroughs wrote 18 novels and novellas, six collections of short stories, and four collections of essays. Five books of his interviews and correspondences have also been published. He was initially briefly known by the pen name William Lee. He also collaborated on projects and recordings with numerous performers and musicians, made many appearances in films, and created and exhibited thousands of visual artworks, including his celebrated "shotgun art".
Leigh Douglass Brackett was an American author and screenwriter. Nicknamed "the Queen of Space Opera," she was one of the most prominent female writers during the Golden Age of Science Fiction. As a screenwriter, she was best known for her collaborations with director Howard Hawks, mainly writing Westerns and crime films. She also worked on an early draft of The Empire Strikes Back (1980), elements of which remained in the film; she died before it went into production.
William Francis Nolan was an American author who wrote hundreds of stories in the science fiction, fantasy, horror, and crime fiction genres.
A novella is a narrative prose fiction whose length is shorter than most novels, but longer than most novelettes and short stories. The English word novella derives from the Italian novella meaning a short story related to true facts.
Scientific romance is an archaic, mainly British term for the genre of fiction now commonly known as science fiction. The term originated in the 1850s to describe both fiction and elements of scientific writing, but it has since come to refer to the science fiction of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, primarily that of Jules Verne, H. G. Wells and Arthur Conan Doyle. In recent years the term has come to be applied to science fiction written in a deliberately anachronistic style as a homage to or pastiche of the original scientific romances.
Alan Edward Nourse was an American science fiction writer and physician. He wrote both juvenile and adult science fiction, as well as nonfiction works about medicine and science. His SF works sometimes focused on medicine and/or psionics.
The Bladerunner is a 1974 science fiction novel by Alan E. Nourse, about underground medical services and smuggling. It was the source for the title, but no major plot elements, of the 1982 film Blade Runner, adapted from the novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? by Philip K. Dick, though elements of the Nourse novel recur in a pair of 2002 films also largely adapted from Dick's work, Impostor and Minority Report.
Blade Runner is a 1982 science fiction film directed by Ridley Scott.
Tarzan and the Lion Man is a novel by American writer Edgar Rice Burroughs, the seventeenth in his series of twenty-four books about the title character Tarzan. The novel was originally serialized in the magazine Liberty from November 1933 through January 1934.
Tarzan and the Foreign Legion is a novel by American writer Edgar Rice Burroughs, the twenty-second in his series of twenty-four books about the title character Tarzan. The book, written June–September 1944 while Burroughs was living in Honolulu and published in 1947, was the last new work by Burroughs to be published during his life. The novel is set during World War II in Sumatra, Dutch East Indies. The term "foreign legion" does not refer to the French Foreign Legion, but is the name given in the book to a small international force fighting the Empire of Japan.
Oliver C. G. Harris is a British academic and Professor of American Literature at Keele University. He is the author and editor of eighteen books, including a dozen editions of works by William S. Burroughs: Letters, 1945–1959 (1993), Junky: the definitive text of Junk (2003), The Yage Letters Redux (2006), Queer (2010), The Cut-Up Trilogy, The Soft Machine, Nova Express, and The Ticket That Exploded (2014), Blade Runner: A Movie (2019), Minutes to Go Redux (2020), The Exterminator Redux (2020), BATTLE INSTRUCTIONS (2020) and Dead Fingers Talk (2020). In 2022, he published two short books of essays, A Burroughs Triptych and Making Naked Lunch and in 2023 a collaborative hybrid of criticism and memoir, Two Assassins: William Burroughs/Hassan Sabbah. He is President of the European Beat Studies Network. He served as a consultant to Luca Guadagnino for his 2024 film Queer, based on the Burroughs novel. In 2024, he published a second hybrid of memoir, scholarship, and detective fiction, One Shot: A Beat Generation Mystery.
Blade Runner is an American cyberpunk media franchise originating from the 1968 novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? by Philip K. Dick, featuring the character of Rick Deckard. The book has been adapted into several media, including films, comics, a stage play, and a radio serial. The first film adaptation was Blade Runner, directed by Ridley Scott in 1982. Although the film initially underperformed at the American box office, it became a cult classic, and has had a significant influence on science fiction. A novelization and a comic adaptation of the film were released in the same year. From 1995 to 2000, three novels serving as sequels to both Blade Runner and the original novel were written by K. W. Jeter, a friend of Dick's. A film sequel to Blade Runner, Blade Runner 2049, was released in 2017. To celebrate the 30th anniversary of Blade Runner in 2012, a short film was released, and in the lead up to the release of Blade Runner 2049, several more short films detailing events that occurred between 2019 and 2049 were released. The influence of the franchise has helped spawn the cyberpunk subgenre.
Taking Tiger Mountain is a 1983 American science fiction film directed by Tom Huckabee and Kent Smith, and starring Bill Paxton in one of his earliest on-screen acting roles. Originally conceived as an experimental art film inspired by Albert Camus's 1942 novel The Stranger and a poem by Smith, the film was initially directed by Smith and shot in Wales. Aside from Paxton, the film's cast is made up of townspeople from the areas in which shooting took place. It was filmed without sound, with the intention of adding dialogue in post-production.
Postmodern Metanarratives: Blade Runner and Literature in the Age of Image is a non-fiction book by Décio Torres Cruz published in 2014 by Palgrave Macmillan.
