Philip K. Dick's Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? inspired the cult-classic cyberpunk film-noire by director Ridley Scott, Blade Runner, yet the novel differs in many respects from this Hollywood production. This essay will explore the novel's images of absence, and will provide key contrasts with the movie. Dick's science fiction corpus explores a plethora of psychological and philosophical issues, yet "two questions obsessed Dick: What is real? and What is human?"! Certain identifiable trends remain prominent in his stories: he constantly explored and scrutinised the tensions between the artificial and the natural, appearance and reality, and superficiality and authenticity. Dick "was one of the first SF writers to explore a new virtual technoculture, in which the distinction between reality and illusion, the real and the virtual implodes"2. This essay employs Androids and Blade Runner to explore questions about the iconic nature of sociality and human being. "According to Peirce, an icon is a non-arbitrary intentional sign that is, a designation which bears an intrinsic resemblance to the thing it designates".3 Seemingly, under Peirce's vision, a text can only serve as a context or symbol for the iconicity of any given sign; this paper does not work under this assumption, but rather treats the images described in the novel and movie from a broader conception of