The Novel and the Film

"regular" citizen, because he is still medically fertile and intellectually stable, but he still risks becoming impotent due to the radioactive dust that is present in the atmosphere. This radioactive dust was caused by a historical war called "World War Terminus" (W.W.T.). The remaining male occupants of Earth protect their testicles by wearing an "Ajax Model Mountibank lead codpiece", but this is only a temporary measure, they must emigrate to another planet or accept the risk of becoming a "special". The character John Isidore is classed as a "special", but he shows more compassion towards the non-human or androids than the "regulars" who are supposed to be more humane, which again comments on the question, "who is human?". Philip K. Dick's abhorrence of malicious mindless beings is emphasised by the character Phil Resch, a bounty hunter who is able to have sex with female renegade androids before he destroys them, without feeling any remorse or empathic response towards them. The empathic relationship toward androids	is the personal struggle of Deckard because his empathic feelings become more intense towards certain androids, particularly Luba Luft, the opera singer who is finally retired by Resch, and Rachael Rosen, the latter android he actually had sex with. This also complicates his task of retiring the illegal group of Nexus-6 replicants, because Pris Stratton is an identical double of Rachael, an idea that Ridley Scott thought inappropriate for the film. Deckard even feels sympathy towards Luba Luft and gives her a glossy volume of the artist Munch's book entitled "puberty", even though he may have had to retire her himself during her arrest in an art gallery. This image of policemen as dehumanised creatures is a recurring theme within Dick's work. Ridley Scott is often misrepresented as the person that ripped the heart out of Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? and discarded the rest of the story, but as the quote at the head of this chapter shows, this is not the case. There are at least as many similarities between the novel and the film as there are dissimilarities.

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