K.W. Jeter picks up the tale of Rick Deckard, the `blade runner' created by Phillip K. Dick and popularized by Ridley Scott's cult classic film. Consistent with the sordid vision of 21st century Los Angeles crafted by Dick and Scott, Jeter creates a stylish piece of thrilling, futuristic suspense that finds Deckard not only in the role of hunter, but also hunted. Again, Deckard is on the trail of an replicant, not knowing that it may be the most elusive and dangerous android of all.
Embargoed to 5th October Officer K (Ryan Gosling), a new blade runner for the Los Angeles Police Department, unearths a long-buried secret that has the potential to plunge what's left of society into chaos. His discovery leads him on a quest to find Rick Deckard (Harrison Ford), a former blade runner who's been missing for 30 years The Art and Soul of Blade Runner 2049 goes behind the scenes and reveals how this epic production was brought to the screen. Featuring incredible concept art and on-set photography, this deluxe book is a rare treat for fans as key cast and crew tell the story of how Blade Runner was revived and was given a whole new lease of life. See the trailer here
RickDeckard has sold his story to a young Turk film director, Urbenton and shooting is scheduled at an orbital station off planet. Watching his past hunt for the replicants being repeated on the set is doing weird things to his mind. As soon as filming is over he is going straight back to Mars where he has been living incognito with Sarah Tyrell. But before corporation loyalists determined to resurrect the vanquished company.
Fully authorised by the estate of Philip K. Dick and written by the author they felt best equipped to take forward the vision of one of the great names in SF, BLADE RUNNER 4: BEYOND ORION combines the dark imagery, paranoia, tension and pace of Dick's original novel and the cinematic genius of Ridley Scott in a novel that takes the Blade Runner series into a new millennium.Blade Runner has become one of the most recognisable and well loved brands in SF and K.W. Jeter has only added to its reputation and impact.
The 1992 release of the "Director's Cut" only confirmed what the international film cognoscenti have know all along: Ridley Scott's Blade Runner, based on Philip K. Dick's brilliant and troubling SF novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, still rules as the most visually dense, thematically challenging, and influential SF film ever made. Future Noir is the story of that triumph. The making of Blade Runner was a seven-year odyssey that would test the stamina and the imagination of writers, producers, special effects wizards, and the most innovative art directors and set designers in the industry. A fascinating look at the ever-shifting interface between commerce and the art that is modern Hollywood, Future Noir is the intense, intimate, anything-but-glamerous inside account of how the work of SF's most uncompromising author was transformed into a critical sensation, a commercial success, and a cult classic.
This book of essays looks at the multitude of texts and influences which converge in Ridley Scott's film Blade Runner, especially the film's relationship to its source novel, Philip K. Dick's Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? The film's implications as a thought experiment provide a starting point for important thinking about the moral issues implicit in a hypertechnological society. Yet its importance in the history of science fiction and science fiction film rests equally on it mythically and psychologically resonant creation of compelling characters and an exciting story within a credible science fiction setting. These essays consider political, moral and technological issues raised by the film, as well as literary, filmic, technical and aesthetic questions. Contributors discuss the film's psychological and mythic patterns, important political issues and the roots of the film in Paradise Lost, Frankenstein, detective fiction, and previous science fiction cinema.
Early in the 21st century, the Tyrell Corporation advanced Robot evolution into the Nexus phase – a being virtually identical to a human – known as a Replicant. Replicants were used Off-world as slave labor. Those who escaped to Earth were hunted by Blade Runner units, ordered to kill any trespassing Replicant on detection. In 2022, a Replicant attack on the Tyrell Corporation destroyed all records of existing Replicants and forced the company into bankruptcy. The surviving Nexus 8 models disappeared with the help of the Replicant underground. Many Replicants remained in servitude. In 2027, Aahna “Ash” Ashina, a former Blade Runner, rejoins the LAPD to once again hunt down fugitive Replicants. Her superiors are unaware that her loyalties are divided. Her lover, Freysa, is a leader in the Replicant underground. Ash’s activities have brought her to the attention of Yotun, a rogue Nexus 6 that she failed to capture 12 years ago. Somehow this dangerous radical Replicant has lived far past his inception date. Los Angeles, 2029
Ridley Scott's dystopian classic Blade Runner, an adaptation of Philip K. Dick's novel, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, combines noir with science fiction to create a groundbreaking cyberpunk vision of urban life in the twenty-first century. With replicants on the run, the rain-drenched Los Angeles which Blade Runner imagines is a city of oppression and enclosure, but a city in which transgression and disorder can always erupt. Graced by stunning sets, lighting, effects, costumes and photography, Blade Runner succeeds brilliantly in depicting a world at once uncannily familiar and startlingly new. In his innovative and nuanced reading, Scott Bukatman details the making of Blade Runner and its steadily improving fortunes following its release in 1982. He situates the film in terms of debates about postmodernism, which have informed much of the criticism devoted to it, but argues that its tensions derive also from the quintessentially twentieth-century, modernist experience of the city – as a space both imprisoning and liberating. In his foreword to this special edition, published to celebrate the 20th anniversary of the BFI Film Classics series, Bukatman suggests that Blade Runner 's visual complexity allows it to translate successfully to the world of high definition and on-demand home cinema. He looks back to the science fiction tradition of the early 1980s, and on to the key changes in the 'final' version of the film in 2007, which risk diminishing the sense of instability created in the original.
This book provides a collection of Lacanian responses to Denis Villeneuve’s Blade Runner 2049 from leading theorists in the field. Like Ridley Scott’s original Blade Runner film, its sequel is now poised to provoke philosophical and psychoanalytic arguments, and to provide illustrations and inspiration for questions of being and the self, for belief and knowledge, the human and the post-human, amongst others. This volume forms the vanguard of responses from a Lacanian perspective, satisfying the hunger to extend the theoretical considerations of the first film in the various new directions the second film invites. Here, the contributors revisit the implications of the human-replicant relationship but move beyond this to consider issues of ideology, politics, and spectatorship. This exciting collection will appeal to an educated film going public, in addition to students and scholars of Lacanian psychoanalysis, psychoanalytic theory, cultural studies, film theory, philosophy and applied psychoanalysis.
By 2021, the Terminus War had driven mankind off-planet and entire species into extinction. Now only the rich can afford living creatures; others may buy amazingly realistic simulacrae: horses, cats, sheep ... Even humans. These artificial people are so advanced it's impossible to tell them from true men and women--except for their lack of empathy. Without empathy, androids can--and do--kill their owners and blend into society, so they're illegal on Earth. It's Rick Deckard's job to find these rogues and "retire" them. But "andys" tend to fight back--with deadly results.
