What is the source novel for BR? Who wrote it?

In 1968 Philip Kindred Dick wrote a science fiction novel "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?" (commonly abbreviated as DADoES) which won that year's Nebula Award. The Nebula is an award given annually by the Science Fiction Writers of America, to acknowledge excellence in science fiction writing.

In recent years, since BR came out, the book has been reprinted using the double title "Blade Runner / Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?"

More about the author

Philip K. Dick was born in Chicago in 1928 and lived most of his life in California. He attended college for a year at Berkeley. Apart from writing, his main interest was music: at one time he ran a record shop and also a classical music programme for a local radio station. He won the Hugo award for his classic novel of alternative history, The Man in The High Castle (1962). He was married five times and had three children. He died in March 1982.

[Source: Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? Harper-Collins paperback edition, Voyager series, 1996; ISBN 0-586-03605-9]

Did the author ever get to see the movie adaptation?

Unfortunately, Dick passed away about 4 months before BR was released, so he never got around to seeing the final product. However, shortly before Christmas 1981 Ridley Scott invited Dick to a private showing of about 20 minutes of completed BR footage.

Reportedly, he was blown away by what he saw, stating after the showing how the "texture and tone" of the images, and the environment that was shown, corresponded to what he had imagined.

[Source: Future Noir]

Philip K. Dick was a prolific writer and sometimes operated on the fringes of sanity and drug use. At other times he was a well-read, articulate scholar. A certain sense of paranoia pervades many of his stories and is brought out in Blade Runner. Much of this came from his real sense of paranoia, suspicions of being watched by government agencies, etc. It seems very likely that if he were alive today, he would see even more reason in our world to be paranoid.

His stories lend themselves quite well to being made into films, though not through direct translation from page to screen. Think of "Total Recall" based on short story "We Can Remember it for you Wholesale" and starring Arnold Schwarzenegger. Or "Screamers", or "Impostor", or the latest big film to be made from one of his stories, "Minority Report" starring Tom Cruise. Other of his stories are destined for the big screen soon, such as "A Scanner Darkly", "Paycheck" and "King of the Elves".

Gratuitous picture of the environment: