STEPHEN LEWIS welcomes the return to print of some science fiction classics.

IN RIDLEY Scott's classic sci fi movie Blade Runner, bounty hunter Rick Deckard (Harrison Ford) stalks six intelligent robots through a nightmarish future Los Angeles.

In Scott's gloomy, teeming future world of towering office blocks, brightly-lit malls and sleazy, decaying backstreets, it quickly becomes difficult to tell the real from the fake, the human from the artificial.

Realities shift, and the final confrontation between Ford and the robot leader, Rutger Hauer, high on a crumbling tower block, asks questions about who really has more of a soul - the robot who only wants to live or the human hell-bent on killing him for money.

If you thought Blade Runner was bleak and unsettling, however, try reading the novel on which it was based. Philip K Dick's Do Androids Dream Of Electric Sheep? surely has one of the greatest titles ever for a novel of any description; and its strangeness, bleakness and sense of desolation makes Blade Runner seem pale by comparison.

Again, Deckard stalks six robots through a Los Angeles of the future. But whereas Scott's Los Angeles is nightmarish but vital, Dick's future world is dying and full of despair.

The air is a toxic soup; most of the world's plant and animal life is long since extinct (so that lonely humans desperate to cling to a memory of a vanished world keep electronic animals as pets); and whole city blocks of crumbling apartments stand empty and neglected as the population dwindles away.

It's a schizophrenic world where the surviving humans rely on 'mood organs' - electronic gadgets that stimulate brainwaves - to cheer them up; and where nothing, not even Deckard himself, is what it seems.

Rightly viewed as one of the great science fiction novels, it is one of five of Dick's finest books that are now brought together in a new omnibus edition by Gollancz.

Also in the same volume you will find Martian Time Slip; A Scanner Darkly; The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch; and Ubik. All are tales of twisted perceptions and false realities in the classic Dick (and Blade Runner) style, that will leave you doubting everything - even who you are.

As Monty Python Terry Gilliam said: "For everyone lost in the endlessly multiplicating realities of the modern world, remember: Philip K Dick got there first."

The Matrix eat your heart out.

Updated: 08:56 Wednesday, May 19, 2004