I'd meant to read this multiple times over the last decade but must have kept forgetting - probably because the book of Blade Runner does not share its name with the film. Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep might be well lost in the shadow of the film, which I love, and has become iconic in itself. In seeing Bladerunner 2049, I had been wondering how a movie, which had already become the blueprint for cyber punk, could push any limits while staying within its own world. However, I thought they did a great job, while retrospectively (anachronistically?), I also feel like Blade Runner was an amazing adaptation of this book.
While I enjoyed it, and while it has themes that aren't in the film at all - e.g. Dekkard's wife, and the electric sheep (which he owns because everyone has to own an animal and if they can't find an animal then they at least need a fake animal so that no-one realises that they don't own an animal), I got a lot more out of the film. The idea of 'empathy' being the quality that distinguishes robots from humans is more prominent in the book, however such a message might come across as pretty heavy-handed if done in film.
At first, my previous experience of the film was a little distracting, trying to fit the characters in the book to their movie representations, however after a while I got into the flow and enjoyed some of the language and character developments. The ambiguity of Dekkard being a replicant isn't really a theme in the book, and so anyone looking for answers in this regard won't find any :)
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