Philip K. Dick

Roy Batty is a character in the Blade Runner universe.  He is the leader of the Nexus-6 replicants.

Jorge Francisco Isidoro Luis Borges Acevedo , known as Jorge Luis Borges , was an Argentine short-story writer, essayist, poet and translator born in Buenos Aires. His work embraces the "character of unreality in all literature". His most famous books, Ficciones and The Aleph , are compilations of... short stories interconnected by common themes such as dreams, labyrinths, libraries, mirrors, animals, fictional writers, religion and God. His works have contributed to the genre of science fiction as well as the genre of magic realism, a genre that reacted against the realism/naturalism of the nineteenth century. In fact, critic Angel Flores, the first to use the term, set the beginning of this movement with Borges's Historia universal de la infamia . Scholars have also suggested that Borges's progressive blindness helped him to create innovative literary symbols through imagination. His late poems dialogue with such cultural figures as Spinoza, Camões, and Virgil.
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Fyodor Mikhaylovich Dostoyevsky ; November 11, 1821 – February 9, 1881 was a Russian writer of novels, short stories and essays. Dostoyevsky's literary works explore human psychology in the troubled political, social and spiritual context of 19th-century Russian society. A Slavophile,... nationalist and monarchist, he criticized the bourgeois, pre-materialist West and nihilism in many of his works. Although Dostoyevsky wrote books in the mid-1850s which were influenced by realist and romanticist writers, most notably by Dickens, Gogol and Balzac, his best remembered work was done in his last years, including such masterpieces as Crime and Punishment, The Idiot and The Brothers Karamazov. Dostoyevsky overall wrote 11 complete novels, 3 novellas, 17 short novels and 3 essays. He is often acknowledged by critics as one of the greatest and most prominent psychologists in world literature. Fyodor Dostoyevsky was born and raised within the grounds of the Mariinsky hospital. At an early age he was introduced to English, French, German and Russian literature, as well as to fairytales and legends.
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Gustave Flaubert was a French writer who is counted among the greatest Western novelists. He is known especially for his first published novel, Madame Bovary , and for his scrupulous devotion to his art and style. Flaubert was born on December 12, 1821, in Rouen, in the Seine-Maritime department... of Upper Normandy, in northern France. He was the second son of Achille-Cléophas Flaubert , a surgeon, and Anne Justine Caroline . He began writing at an early age, as early as eight according to some sources. He was educated at the Lycée Pierre Corneille in Rouen. and did not leave until 1840, when he went to Paris to study law. In Paris, he was an indifferent student and found the city distasteful. He made a few acquaintances, including Victor Hugo. Toward the close of 1840, he traveled in the Pyrenees and Corsica. In 1846, after an attack of epilepsy, he left Paris and abandoned the study of law. From 1846 to 1854, Flaubert had a relationship with the poet Louise Colet; his letters to her survive.
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Immanuel Kant was a German philosopher from Königsberg , researching, lecturing and writing on philosophy and anthropology at the end of the 18th century Enlightenment. At the time, there were major successes and advances in the sciences using reason and logic. This stood in sharp contrast... to the skepticism and lack of agreement or progress in empiricist philosophy. Kant’s magnum opus, the Critique of Pure Reason , aimed to unite reason with experience to move beyond what he took to be failures of traditional philosophy and metaphysics. He hoped to end an age of speculation where objects outside experience were used to support what he saw as futile theories, while opposing the skepticism of thinkers such as Descartes, Berkeley and Hume. He stated: Kant proposed a ‘Copernican Revolution’ in reverse, saying that: Kant published other important works on ethics, religion, law, aesthetics, astronomy, and history.
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