By Tom Anderson.
Blade Runner Spinner at the Peterson Museum in Los Angeles. This vehicle is in the SF section and not, alas, the contemporary section.
Picture courtesy Wikimedia Commons.
I hope you are enjoying these Paleofuture articles, because this one was quite challenging to write, as we’ll see.
Mention the title Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? And a fairly large segment of people will recognise it as: “Oh yes, isn’t that the book by Philip K Dick that became Blade Runner?” To which the answer is: “Yes, but there’s rather more to it than that”, as I learned while reading it for the first time for this article. In practice, as well as paelofuture this article is inevitably going to be one analysing the adaptation of the work in the first place.
First of all, let’s consider Blade Runner (1982) itself. It is almost the platonic ideal of a cult classic, a film which failed at the box office in its own time but became hugely influential and critically acclaimed in hindsight. In part this is due to the existence of the Director’s Cut in its various forms from Ridley Scott, which eliminated an over-the-top ‘noir detective’ narration from the theatrical version that was generally disliked. Though, as will be unsurprising to anyone familiar with Dick’s work, it’s arguably an accurate representation of how present inner monologues are in the book.
Blade Runner depicts the somewhat dystopian (then) future of November 2019 in Los Angeles. The sky is dusky orange at all times and the opening shot shows gas flames bursting over a dark city. An opening crawl informs us of the creation of artificial duplicate humans called ‘replicants’, rogue members of which are hunted by police ‘blade runner’ units. Officially, they are not ‘killed’ but ‘retired’. Our protagonist, Rick Deckard (Harrison Ford) is one such blade runner. Reading the book, as I’ll go on to explain, was an interesting experience for just which parts of this were present originally and which weren’t – as well as what was missed out.
In the earliest proper scene, another blade runner, Holden, interrogates a suspected replicant with the ‘Voight-Kampf test’, which consists of watching his emotional response through an apparatus that magnifies the eye whilst being asked a series of questions. We hear a number of these in the film, all of which are either taken directly from the book or modifications of those. The most iconic, which appears in that opening scene (albeit broken up by interruptions from the suspected replicant Leon) is: “You’re in a desert, walking along in the sand, when all of a sudden you look down and see a tortoise. It’s crawling towards you. You reach down and you flip the tortoise over on its back. The tortoise lays on its back, its belly baking in the hot sun, beating its legs trying to turn itself over, but it can’t. Not without your help. But you’re not helping. Why is that?” To say how often it’s quoted, it’s quite remarkable how the context for this is actually lost in the film, but we’ll come back to that later.
Anyway, Leon does turn out to be a replicant, breaking out and badly hurting Holden in the process.
Ridley Scott’s vision of the dark future LA, covered with giant omnipresent advertising, became hugely influential. Younger viewers may not realise that the giant Coca-Cola video screens were innovative at the time, as it’s very much a paleofuture prediction that has come true. The same is true of the fact that Deckard is introduced as eating at an East Asian noodle bar in LA, reflecting the “Japan Takes Over the World” predictions of the 1980s; perfectly unremarkable now, but making a statement back in 1982.
Deckard is brought back to the office by Gaff, a character who is always making origami sculptures out of cigarette papers. Deckard is tasked by his boss, Bryant, with getting on the trail of Leon and the remaining replicants in his group who are on the run: Roy Batty, Zhora, and Pris. It’s noted that Batty was designed for combat, Zhora for murder, and Pris for pleasure, all for use in ‘the outer/off-world colonies’. Propaganda spouted from airships also talks of living the good life in the off-world colonies, another iconic line from the film.
The escaped Replicants are all the new Nexus-6 model from the Tyrell Corporation, so Deckard goes to their giant building and meets Dr Eldon Tyrell, their creator, and his assistant (?) Rachael. He also finds they have a robotic owl. Tyrell makes Deckard issue the Voight-Kampf test to Rachael, and he discovers that she is also a Replicant – which she doesn’t know herself. It shows how sophisticated the Replicants are becoming, with the test taking far more questions than usual to identify Rachael and hinting at the blurred line with humanity (a key theme of both the film and the original book).
Meanwhile, a lonely genetic designer named JF Sebastian discovers Pris on the street and gives her and her comrades a home in his apartment building. Back in his own apartment, Deckard uses an ‘Esper machine’ to analyse the background of a photograph, inspiring a dozen “zoom, enhance!” scenes in later films. He identifies a scale from a piece of evidence as coming from an artificial snake, and tracks it down to a bar from which he calls Rachael on a video payphone.
He finds Zhora in the bar, about to do a burlesque show, and pretends to be from “the American Federation of Variety Artists’ Confidential Committee on Moral Abuses”, putting on a voice to draw her out.
Deckard ‘retires’ Zhora and Leon, leaving only Pris and Roy Batty (the latter played memorably by Rutger Hauer). Much of the scenes involving the Replicants’ perspective focuses on their paltry four-year lifespan, deliberately engineered by the Tyrell Corporation in a (failed) attempt to stop them developing their own emotions. There’s (apparently) a certain kinship with Sebastian, who has a genetic condition which means he, too, ages more rapidly than other humans. All Batty really cares about is using Sebastian to get to Eldon Tyrell and demand more life from him. When Tyrell can’t give it to him, he gouges Tyrell’s eyes out, and is also implied to have killed Sebastian. Deckard ‘retires’ Pris (who’s hiding amongst Sebastian’s creations) and then confronts Batty, with the latter breaking Deckard’s fingers in the process in revenge for his lost comrades.
Rutger Hauer as Roy Batty.
Picture courtesy Britannica.
Hauer, as Batty standing on a roof in a rain-filled night, then gives one of the most iconic monologue speeches in film history, not based on anything in the book: “I’ve seen things you people wouldn’t believe. Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion. I watched C-beams glitter in the darkness at Tannhäuser Gate. All those moments will be lost in time… like tears in rain. Time to die.” A symbolic dove flies away as Batty passes away, perhaps hinting he truly has a soul.
Like tears in the rain. One of the great improvised speeches of movie history.
Picture courtesy Screen Rant.
Deckard and Rachael choose to run away together in the aftermath, with Gaff offering another iconic line: “It’s too bad she won’t live. But then again, who does?” I can see why most people hated the theatrical version, as it promptly switches to Deckard’s noir narration saying actually, Rachael doesn’t have a termination date, donchaknow, ruining the poignancy of the line.
Also in the final release version, Deckard picks up one of Gaff’s origami sculptures and it’s a unicorn – Deckard himself had a dream of a unicorn earlier – thus dropping the hint that maybe Deckard is also a Replicant. There is also a bit of a hint from the fact that Replicants are shown as having a gold reflection in their eyes in certain lights, and Deckard himself can be seen to have one at times. Though, of course, this does raise the logical question of why you need a Voight-Kampf test when you could just look for that!
That’s a very brief précis of Blade Runner the film, although the written world really cannot do justice to the – I will use that word again – iconic depictions of the world Ridley Scott made. Blade Runner is one of the most significant influences in creating and popularising the genre of cyberpunk, along with William Gibson’s 1984 novel Neuromancer. Cyberpunk was defined by Bruce Sterling as a: “Combination of low life and high tech”. One pictures a dark city lit by neon lights, in which we see the underbelly of society incongruously enhanced with technology.
Cyberpunk is a land of unrestricted, nefarious corporations, ruthless organised crime and casual violence, and a sense that the law has failed and the state has withered on the vine – reflecting the gloomy trends of the early 1980s. Despite this, as someone who grew up with the genre/setting becoming established, I now find it strangely nostalgic. At least in classic cyberpunk people own the bio-discs they connect to the Meta-net with holographic VR on!
Joking aside, a disturbing number of things that used to be dystopian cyberpunk predictions have gone on to be true in the 21st Century. Familiarity breeds apathy, however, and we now shrug our shoulders at some things that used to be alarming calls to action. Blade Runner was also one of the biggest influences on Red Dwarf, along with Alien.
Blade Runner is definitely an influential trailblazer for cyberpunk; yet, for the most part, its prototype Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep (1968) has very little to do with the genre. Reading the book was fascinating (as well as disturbing, as I’ll go into) because it showed me just how flawed the adaptation into Blade Runner had been. That seems a strange thing to say about a film that I unquestionably enjoy and think is a great work of art, but my surprising revelation was that parts of Blade Runner actually miss the point of its prototype as casually as, say, Kenneth Branagh’s Murder on the Orient Express does.
Before I move on, let’s address the title change. The title “Blade Runner” actually comes from a completely unrelated 1974 science-fiction story, The Bladerunner, written by Alan E Nourse and then adapted to a film script by William S Burroughs. Nourse and Burroughs are acknowledged in the credits of the film, but their work contributes nothing but the title.
In Nourse’s story, a dystopian future America is ruled by Eugenics laws, with medical care being denied to anyone who does not meet the genetic or phenotypic standard (for example, our protagonist has a clubfoot). ‘Bladerunners’ are so called because they are black-market smugglers (runners) who smuggle surgical supplies (blades, in slang). Incidentally, given that it’s noted that everyone who does meet the Eugenics standards gets free healthcare, you would have to pause and think for a bit before deciding that this is still probably worse overall than the current state of US healthcare… just.
Anyway, Ridley Scott used the title pretty much just because it sounds cool, with the opening text of the film saying that rogue Replicants are hunted by Blade Runner Units but not really saying why they’re called that. Really the only person who did make the name make sense was Oscar Pistorius, and the less said about him, the better.
Before reading the original book, the other related media I was aware of was Westwood Studios’ 1997 Blade Runner computer game. This did not attempt to adapt the film’s story, but told a side story within its setting involving another detective named Ray McCoy, who investigates crimes more diverse than hunting down Replicants. While I didn’t play the game much, I do remember liking it a lot and being impressed by how well it captured the setting. I mention it here because early on, the game adds to the film’s worldbuilding by introducing an idea from the original book which is surprisingly brushed over in the film. The word “animal” does not appear once in the script of Blade Runner, which is staggering considering the nature of the original book, as we’ll see. Blade Runner does feature things like Tyrell’s artificial owl and the artificial snake Deckard uses to track down Zhora, but we never actually hear why there are artificial animals. The game, on the other hand, notes that real animals are now so rare that owning a real one is the ultimate social prestige; an early crime McCoy investigates consists of someone attacking a pet shop (a high-end boutique) and slaughtering animals there, which in 2019 is a crime classed as ‘Animal Murder’. Having read the book, it’s actually really weird to think of this concept being transposed into the film’s setting.
In order to explain what I mean, let’s go through the book itself and see how it differs. Firstly, while Blade Runner is set in 2019, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep is, in its entirety, set on a single day set in 1992. While Ridley Scott sensibly pushed it back, we’ve already caught up to it again. Now, the film repeatedly mentions “the off-world colonies”, where the Replicants were assigned, and often in a way that implies there’s an element of snake-oil scam trying to encourage people to go there. The film never really dwells on why these colonies exist, or why the sky is perpetually dark orange. Both of these questions are answered in the opening pages of the book, and were a big surprise to me.
If you told someone unfamiliar with Blade Runner, perhaps especially a younger person, that Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep inspired a later popular visual media franchise and then asked them to read the opening, I think that there is a very high probability that they would reply: “Oh, I see. This is where Fallout came from.” Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep is not set in a cyberpunk dystopia, but a post-apocalyptic dystopia in the aftermath of the nuclear “World War Terminus”. It’s also set in San Francisco rather than Los Angeles, but that seems a rather more minor change. That’s why the sky is perpetually dark orange and why there are off-world colonies. It’s also why animals are so rare, with many having gone extinct in the nuclear fallout, especially birds. Despite this, society carries on in an almost surreal, schizophrenic manner. There’s still a US (and Soviet!) government, there’s still a United Nations, Rick Deckard (merely a “bounty hunter” rather than having a special title) works for the regular police force. Yet people live in the decaying remnants of buildings, Oregon is a featureless wasteland on the horizon, and many people are reduced to “specials”, mutants forbidden from breeding or emigrating. Some have had their intelligence damaged by the effects of radiations, referred to as the semi-intelligent “chickenheads” or the truly long-gone “antheads”. Yet Deckard also drives a flying car. It’s such a bizarre combination.
Philip K Dick is far from unique in the annals of 20th Century science fiction writers to imagine that planting colonies on Mars (there’s even a mention of an attempt to send a starship to Proxima Centauri!) is a trivial thing we’ll definitely have done before the turn of the millennium. It’s all the more surprising to see it in a world with such destruction, however. Technology seems to be everywhere, and not just decaying remnants. Deckard and his wife Iran (who didn’t make it into the adaptation) use a “mood organ” on which they can literally dial for whatever emotion they want to feel, each with its own number code. (Like Stargate, the dialling metaphor made total sense at the time but now probably sounds very incongruous to those who didn’t grow up with rotary phones). Television is still around, even if there is only a single government channel. So is radio, with people throughout the Solar System listening to the 24/7 show of Buster Friendly and his recurring guests. A question few seem to ask is how Buster is able to keep going all the time; we learn near the end of the book that it’s because he’s a Replicant.
No, sorry, he’s an android (or andy in slang). The term was probably less overused when Dick was writing, and it’s not surprising that Ridley Scott came up with the more unique ‘Replicant’ (itself inspiring Red Dwarf’s “Simulant”). The term “Replicant” is also more ambiguous; while “android” simply means ‘man-like’, by 1982 most viewers knew enough to identify it with the idea of a robotic being who resembles a human. Conversely, both Do Androids Dream and Blade Runner are careful to leave the true nature of the Replicants somewhat ambiguous. While book-Deckard does own a titular ‘electric sheep’ (which he bought when his real one died to cover up his shame), he also notes that the andys are different in nature to the simple robotic animals. There’s vague mentions of zygote baths and the like, and in the book the final reliable way to confirm the person-shaped thing you just shot with a laser tube was an andy is a marrow bone test – implying they are come variety of grown human-ish biological creature. This helps blur the lines considerably and leads us to question, as Deckard does, whether we can really see shooting them as just retiring them (that term is from the book).
On reflection, Buster Friendly is almost like a proto-Max Headroom, isn’t he? Another omnipresent factor in the book which didn’t make it into the film is the religion of Mercerism. This isn’t described in too much detail, but Mercerists use an ‘empathy box’ to collectively connect themselves to a psychological virtual reality experience of an old man, Wilbur Mercer, climbing a desolate mountain while being stoned by ‘killers’. Typically of Dick (who went on to claim to have a religious experience some years later) it’s left very ambiguous whether all of this is some sort of pyramid scheme con (as Friendly and the Replicants allege) or whether there’s anything more significant behind it.
Vid phones do appear in both book and film; in this case the book is actually somewhat closer in paleofuture terms to our present reality, as Deckard quite casually has vid-calls at work (Zoom, anyone?) rather than the film having him use a payphone.
Let’s get back to the plot. As in the film, an andy has injured a bounty hunter and now Deckard is called in. He’s eager for the chance as andys go for a thousand dollar bounty a head (treated as a lot; evidently inflation hasn’t run too rampant despite the nuclear war) and he’s desperate to replace his deceased sheep with a new animal. Dick does a really good xenofiction job of portraying how differently Deckard thinks (as he does with the Nazi-influenced characters in the alternate history classic The Man in the High Castle). He practically salivates over the idea of owning an ostrich, is insanely jealous of his neighbour’s horse, and constantly carries around a catalogue of the current market prices for animals (even those which are considered priceless).
He is first sent to visit the Rosen Association (which became the Tyrell Corporation in the film). Unlike the giant pyramid structure seen in the film, in the book there’s more of the post-apocalyptic decay, with even a powerful and wealthy corporation based out of a decaying ruin. In fact, a recurring theme in the book is the idea that you can’t stop entropy, that eventually everything will collapse into homogenous ‘kipple’. (A name taken from an SF fanzine but popularised by Dick here, supposedly from the interpretation of Kipling, as in Rudyard, as a participle). There are no Asian eateries or giant neon advertising signs here. But it does explain why there are off-world colonies, and why the government is so desperate to get everyone (except the ‘specials’) off Earth and into them.
Here is where it became clear to me that, while Ridley Scott produced a remarkable piece of art, the fact that so many scenes in Blade Runner feel free-floating and ambiguous may not be entirely intentional. The scene in which Deckard administers the Voigt-Kampff test (as it’s spelled in the book) to Rachael (Rosen, here) is pretty much directly presented in the film almost word for word, but lacking a lot of the meaningful context. The head of Rosen, who claims to be Rachael’s uncle and disappears from the narrative out of this (unlike Eldon Tyrell), claims that the Voigt-Kampff test is flawed and tries to entrap Deckard by persuading him that Rachael will read as an android when she’s a human. His reasoning is that Rachael grew up on the aforementioned doomed Proxima Centauri mission away from other humans and thus lacks human empathy, meaning she could get killed by a bounty hunter who misidentified her as an android. The Voigt-Kampff test (which is a bit different in the book, involving a pad attached to the cheek for example) indeed records Rachael as an android. (The dialogue is almost identical between the book and the film, including the question about opening a centrefold depicting a naked woman). However, at the last moment Deckard administers a final extra question (about his briefcase supposedly being made of human baby hide) and works out that Rachael is, in fact, an android, defusing the Rosens’ scheme. In this version, she already knows she is one.
Life's hard when you've been grown in a vat. Rachael.
Picture courtesy Warner Bros.
This is particularly interesting because of how arbitrary the Voigt-Kampff questions are. One interpretation some critics have drawn from the film is that we, the viewer, are meant to see the Voigt-Kampf questions there as being so arbitrary that we see there’s no practical difference left between humans and Replicants and the latter deserve rights, and it’s more like one of those arbitrary literacy tests used to stop black people from voting in the early 20th Century US South. I’m not sure if that was intentional, but regardless, in the book the questions are arbitrary in a different way. Why do so many of the questions involve animals, like the iconic tortoise one? Because of post-WWT humanity’s obsession with animals, of course.
One of the questions involves Rachael hypothetically being given a calfskin wallet, to which she is expected to respond with a rejection followed by reporting the gift-giver to the police. The question about a banquet involving boiled dog, which is put into the film in a way that implies we, the viewer, are meant to see it differently from the ones involving eating other animals, is not singled out in the same way in the book. Rather, the book version of the Voigt-Kampff test defines humanity in a way that most meat-eating humans from here and now would probably fail; nowadays we might joke it was designed by PETA. I think Dick’s point was to show that the bounty hunters are deciding who is human and who is fair game based on a metric that only seems to make sense in context of their own setting, and not in ours – making us wonder if, maybe, we might think of the andys as human. On reflection, I’m not sure if Dick ever goes into detail about what people in 1992 do eat.
Also, the Rosen Association tries to bribe Deckard with their owl, which they claim is the last living one in existence. At the end of their interview, they admit that they were lying and that it’s artificial. Thus, the whole point of this owl is completely missed in the film, where Rachael immediately tells Deckard it’s artificial and then it’s never mentioned again.
Another recurring character in the book is John R Isidore, who became JF Sebastian in the film. The two characters are quite different – Isidore is a ‘special’, a ‘chickenhead’ with limited intelligence but a good heart, who drives a repair van for an artificial animal shop which is disguised as a vet’s ambulance so embarrassed customers aren’t outed as having electric creatures. He lives in an apartment in the middle of a giant, decaying, otherwise empty apartment building. He runs into Pris, here given the surname Stratton and noted to be a duplicate of Rachael, which is significant for the plot.
She manipulates him through his loneliness and eventually brings in Roy Baty (here spelt with one T) and his wife Irmgard, who previously ran a drug shop on Mars. Unlike the film, Roy is brutal but not the mastermind and seems to have little specific goal in mind. Very curiously, the book mentions that andys have a four-year lifespan – once – and there is absolutely none of the bleak introspection and driving question that the film places on this question, with it forming the basis for Batty’s motivations. Which is all the more surprising, considering Philip K Dick is not a writer one would imagine would ever turn down the chance for some bleak introspection.
One of the andys poses as a visiting Soviet policeman, but Deckard catches on, uses a device that neutralises laser tubes (the most usual weapon in this setting) in his car, and shoots him with a conventional pistol instead. He then attempts to entrap Luba Lee, a suspected andy (roughly equivalent to Zhora in the film) who’s an opera singer. Yes, in the middle of an apocalypse, with weather forecasts mentioning the current state of the fallout, San Francisco still has a functioning opera house. It’s such a weird setting. Much like his film counterpart, Deckard attempts to manipulate Lee (in a different way) but is less successful, as Lee calls the cops on him.
This begins one of the most interesting sequences in the whole book, which did not appear at all in the film except in the sense that the ending opens the question of whether Deckard is a Replicant. In the book, Deckard is picked up by cops who take him back to a completely different police station he’s never heard of before, and the officers there claim they have no record of him. They say they’re the legitimate police, that he’s a rogue andy who has convinced himself he’s a cop, and none of what he tells them about his life is real. It’s a great and classic Dick reality-warping scene where even the reader starts to question what’s real. But, in fact, this is all a ruse by a large group of andys, some of whom have even forgotten they’re not real police themselves. Deckard is able to ‘retire’ Luba Lee and then track down the remaining andys in Isidore’s building.
Rachael features in the book far less frequently than her film counterpart, and has a very different ending. Deckard sleeps with her when he realises he might have developed empathy for the andys, and the last mention of her is having pushed off the roof Deckard’s prized goat he just bought with his bounty money. Even by Philip K Dick standards this is weird.
The following scene, together with a pint of cider on an empty stomach and a rich offering of eggs benedict, served to almost make me faint in a pub in Thirsk on the way to a friend’s wedding. I had forgotten just how disturbing Dick can be. Suffice to say there’s a scene where Pris tortures an animal and we are put face to face with just how inhuman the andys can be. Also, at said wedding a friend I hadn’t seen in eleven years spontaneously brought up animals being kept on the roof in this novel before I mentioned I was reading it. I suspect Dick would approve of that bit of reality-melting reaching into the reader’s reality.
Deckard retires the androids almost anticlimactically, there’s a lot of metaphysical stuff with Mercerism, Deckard heads north and he miraculously finds an extinct toad – then brings it back to Iran and it turns out to be artificial. It’s all very weird and all very Philip K Dick.
So, there’s some musings on how the film differs from the book. Despite the film losing so many contextual aspects (like the reason why Rachael takes the Voig(h)t-Kampf(f) test, the point of the owl, why artificial animals are a thing, why there are off-world colonies), it not only uses many of the most interesting parts of the book, but adds to it with ideas like Batty being motivated by the four-year lifespan. As disturbingly fascinating as the post-apocalyptic setting of Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep is, the cyberpunk of Blade Runner – which feels almost wholesome afterwards – also had a longer and deeper influence on future fiction.
And, perhaps, fact. We still have yet to develop a convincing humanoid android (which Dick seems to expect we would start to do by the 1970s in the book!) But we do have debates over artificial intelligence, and are now starting to wonder where the boundary lies between man and machine, whether machines can ever be truly creative or not, and the like. It’s clear that Blade Runner will continue to be influential even after its setting date of 2019 has passed.
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Tom Anderson is the author of several SLP books, including:
The Look to the West series
among others.