Blade Runner Books in Order

The Blade Runner universe begins with Philip K. Dick’s 1968 novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, later reissued under Blade Runner‑branded titles. Set in a radioactive, half‑empty San Francisco, it follows bounty hunter Rick Deckard as he tracks advanced androids and quietly yearns for a living animal in a world where most real creatures are extinct. The book uses this thin detective plot to ask what empathy means and whether there’s any hard line between human beings and the machines they build.

Ridley Scott’s 1982 film Blade Runner took those ideas and transplanted them to a rain‑soaked, neon Los Angeles in 2019. Harrison Ford’s Deckard hunts "replicants" designed as off‑world labor, moving through crowds, advertising blimps, and industrial ruins that feel permanently on the edge of collapse. The movie keeps Dick’s interest in empathy, memory, and identity but shifts much of the story into mood and imagery, leaving key questions—especially about Deckard’s own nature—deliberately unresolved.

After the film became a cult classic, the setting expanded. Jeter wrote three licensed sequels that continue the movie continuity on the page, threading in elements from Dick’s novel and exploring what happens to Deckard and the Tyrell Corporation’s legacy. More recently, a second film, Blade Runner 2049, pushed the timeline forward with new characters and a deepened sense of ecological and social decay, while comics and short fiction have filled in side stories around the edges.

What ties all of these works together is a preoccupation with what counts as a person in a system that constantly turns beings into tools. Whether you start from the stark, often funny unease of the novel or the brooding noir of the films, you’ll find recurring images of artificial memories, corporate pyramids, and cities that feel both overbuilt and hollowed out.

This page pulls the various Blade Runner‑related books into one place: Dick’s original novel under its different titles, Jeter’s prose sequels, and later tie‑in anthologies. It gives you a reading order and short notes so you can decide whether to trace the story chronologically, follow a favourite incarnation of Deckard, or simply dip into the pieces that most interest you.