Simulacrum

[Bailey]

Simulacrum (plural: -crums, -cra), from the Latin simulare, "to make like, to put on an appearance of",[1] is first recorded in the English language in the late 16th century, used to describe a representation of another thing, such as a statue or a painting, especially of a god; by the late 19th century, it had gathered a secondary association of inferiority: an image without the substance or qualities of the original.[2] Philosopher Frederic Jameson offers photorealism as an example of artistic simulacrum, where a painting is created by copying a photograph that is itself a copy of the real.[3] Other art forms that play with simulacra include Trompe l'oeil,[4] Pop Art, Italian neorealism and the French New Wave.[5]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simulacrum

mark not-the-real-chimp Bailey[/quote]

[Perry]

Simulacrum and Literature, Film and Television
Simulacra often make appearances in speculative fiction. Examples of simulacra in the sense of artificial or supernaturally created life forms include Ovid’s ivory statue from Metamorphoses, the medieval golem of Jewish folklore, Mary Shelley’s creature from Frankenstein, Carlo Collodi’s Pinocchio and the synthetic life in Philip K. Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (later adapted for film by Ridley Scott as Blade Runner). Simulacra of worlds or environments may also appear: author Michael Crichton visited this theme several times, in Westworld and in Jurassic Park; other examples include the elaborately staged worlds of The Truman Show and The Matrix. Some stories focus on simulacra as objects. One example would be Oscar Wilde’s The Portrait of Dorian Gray.

I knew that I recognised this word from literary fiction.