In “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?”, the bounty hunter protagonist is Rick Deckard. Philip K. Dick’s 1968 dystopian novel follows Deckard as he tracks six escaped Nexus-6 androids in a post-apocalyptic San Francisco.
Deckard works for the San Francisco Police Department and is assigned to “retire” the androids, the novel’s bureaucratic euphemism for killing them. He hopes the mission will earn enough money to replace his electric sheep with a real animal, a valuable status symbol in a world where most animals have been killed or driven to extinction by environmental catastrophe.
The other names can cause confusion because they are important figures in the same investigation. Phil Resch is another bounty hunter, while Eldon Rosen is associated with the corporation that manufactures androids. John Isidore is a human character who encounters the fugitives and provides the novel’s parallel perspective. The 1982 film Blade Runner adapts the story but changes terminology, calling androids “replicants” and bounty hunters “blade runners.”