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Nearly three decades after Philip K. Dick's Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? sparked Ridley Scott's Blade Runner movie, the novel has inspired a comic book prequel that explores Earth's first wave of droid hunters.
Titled Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? Dust to Dust, the $4 comic book by I Zombie writer Chris Roberson and 48 Stron artist Robert Adler lands May 26.
Roberson says the comic, offered in four variant covers (including the Trevor Hairsine art pictured above left), draws on a major theme running through Dick's 1968 sci-fi classic. "There are a number of references to World War Terminus and the radioactive dust responsible for killing off nearly all animal life and rendering humans sterile," he told Wired.com in an e-mail.
"Our story takes place in the immediate aftermath of that war as the populace comes to grips with the virtual extinction of animal life," he said. "Meanwhile, the off-world colonies lure more and more people away, and androids originally intended for the battlefield are being repurposed to serve as the colonial workforce."
To get a free sneak peek at the story, fans can eyeball an eight-page digital preview on an iPad, iPhone or iPod Touch. The Dust to Dust app, devised by comiXology and Boom Studios, includes a retail locator bundled with a preorder feature for those who want to purchase physical copies. Learn more about Dust to Dust, and see more cover variants, below.
Issue 1 of Dust to Dust follows android tracker Charlie Victor, who functions as a predecessor of sorts to the Rick Deckard character portrayed by Harrison Ford in Blade Runner.
"The sophisticated mechanisms used by Rick Deckard in Dick's novel have not yet been developed, so Victor is paired with Malcolm Reed," Roberson says. "Before the war, Reed was a schizophrenic with an affective disorder who was unable to experience his own emotions or understand the emotions of others. The dust caused him to grow an 'empathic node' in this brain that allows him to feel what people around him are feeling. Since androids don't have emotions of their own, it's Reed's job to identify anyone in a crowd from whom he can't pick up any emotions. Then Victor 'retires' them."
Roberson was especially interested in riffing on the transitional period, alluded to in the novel, during which humans give way to droid domination. "I was always fascinated by the development of the various android-identification techniques and the previous makes and models of androids that go rogue and the growth of the Mercerist religions," he says. "I wanted to see what other stories could be told within this world."
Though he passed muster with the Dick estate, which authorized the prequel, Roberson nonetheless felt trepidation about expanding on the parameters of a revered sci-fi story.
"Dick had such an incredible influence on science fiction, both in print and on screen – to be honest, that was one of my main motivations not to do a direct sequel with PKD characters," he says. "It was just too daunting. By using entirely new characters in a different time period, we've tried to cultivate a little bit of new ground off in one corner."
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