SOURCE: Abbott, Joe. “The ‘Monster’ Reconsidered: Blade Runner's Replicant as Romantic Hero.” Extrapolation 34, no. 4 (1993): 340-50.

In the following essay, Abbott examines Blade Runner and Mary Shelley's Frankenstein as two texts that attempt to address the implications of artificial life.

It was a bold question, and one which has ever been considered as a mystery.

—Mary Shelley, Frankenstein

The “bold question” to which Victor Frankenstein makes reference in the early pages of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein is the question of the origin (or “principle”) of life, a question that haunted, intrigued, and consistently inspired many of Shelley's romantic contemporaries to some of their greatest poetry and philosophic arguments. Her own husband, Percy Bysshe Shelley, would himself propose the question only a year after his wife's novel was first published. In his Essay on Life he writes: “What is life? … We are born, and our birth is unremembered and our...