The Making of Blade Runner: Like Tears in Rain

I always wondered how Dick's Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? became Ridley Scott's cyberpunk noir Blade Runner. Watch this documentary to find out!

See also Philip K. Dick's First Science Fiction Story.

Philip K. Dick's first science fiction story

15 year old Philip K. Dick's short story The Slave Race (his first published science fiction) appeared in the Young Authors' Club column of The Berkeley Gazette (1944).

From Divine Invasions: A Life of Philip K. Dick by Lawrence Sutin.

In the future, androids created to ease humans' toil have overthrown their lazy masters. Explains the android narrator: "And his science we added to ours, and we passed on to greater heights. We explored the stars, and worlds undreamed of." But at the story's end the same cycle of expansive energy followed by sybaritic idleness that doomed the human race threatens the androids as well:

"But at last we wearied, and looked to our relaxation and pleasure. But not all could cease work to find enjoyment, and those who still worked on looked about them for a way to end their toil.

There is talk of creating a new slave race.

I am afraid."

The rise and fall of civilizations pursuant to cyclical laws and limits of human (and artificial) intelligence was a favorite SF theme in the forties.

See also Don’t Worry, Smart Machines Will Take Us With Them: Why human intelligence and AI will co-evolve.

Ecclesiastes 1:9 King James Version

The thing that hath been, it is that which shall be; and that which is done is that which shall be done: and there is no new thing under the sun.

Amazon's The Man in the High Castle

Season 2 will be released soon on Amazon Prime. If you like The Man in the High Castle, you might like David Brin's short story (and graphic novel) Thor meets Captain America.

Related posts on Philip K. Dick.

Android Dreams

These videos will be very interesting to Blade Runner fans. In the first, Dick talks about

"... the problem of differentiating an authentic human being from the reflex-machine which I call an android... The word android is a metaphor for someone who is physiologically human but psychologically ... non-human. I got interested in this when I was doing research for Man in the High Castle [excellent alternative history novel in which the Japanese and Germans won WWII] and I was studying the Nazi mentality. I discovered that although these people were highly intelligent they were definitely deficient in some kind of ... appropriate affect or appropriate emotions."

Hence the "affect Turing test" used on androids in Blade Runner / Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep.





A lovely Sean Young, at the beginning of her movie career, talks about the challenges of playing an android.




The love scene between Rachael and Deckard, uncut.




Rutger Hauer: "Harrison is the villain." I've seen things you people wouldn't believe. Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion. I've watched C beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhauser gate. All those moments will be lost in time like tears in rain.

What is reality? Philip K. Dick

I found this via longform.org. Much more here. Was Dick schizo?

Has anyone read The Grasshopper Lies Heavy? :-)

The God In the Trash: The Fantastic Life and Oracular Work of Philip K. Dick.

Alexander Star The New Republic Dec 6 1993

Dick grew up with his mother on the fringes of Berkeley's fledgling bohemia. A troubled student, he was often "hypochondriacal about his mental condition," as one of his wives later put it. And like many troubled boys of the time, he became a voracious reader of the science fiction pulp magazines that were then at their peak. In Confessions of a Crap Artist, a novel written in 1959, he wryly portrayed himself as an awkward kid spouting oddball ideas from Popular Mechanics and adventure stores: "Even to look at me you'd recognize that my main energies are in the mind."

... Throughout his career Dick longed for a wider audience, and sought to escape the science fiction ghetto. He envied writers such as Ursula Le Guin, who acquired a serious reputation and was even published in The New Yorker. His readers, he complained, were "trolls and wackos." In the '50s and early '60s, he wrote a series of non-science fiction novels, all of which were rejected by publishers at the time. These books were mainly somber tales of thwarted love in northern California, peopled with cranky record salesmen and bitter couples and narrated in a glumly painstaking fashion. On the whole, their vision of domestic life is an unhappy one. In Confessions of a Crap Artist, an accumulation of errant jealousies and petty insults leads to illness and insanity. The novel ridicules the newly formed UFO cults of Marin County, though years later Dick reflected that the cults "didn't seem as crazy to me now ..."

Rebuffed by "mainstream" publishers, Dick abandoned his realist writings in 1963. By then he had discovered a different way out of the Ace formula: he would transform the genre of science fiction from within. Concerned with psychic dislocation, and its moral and philosophical consequences, he began to ignore the expectations of his editors. In particular, he disregarded the most honored conventions of "hard s.f.," that science fiction should be rigorously "extrapolative" of hard science, and that it should be "prophetic" of plausible futures.

... Philip Dick's fictional worlds have a great many attributes, but sanity is not among them. Campbell, the monarch of postwar science fiction, refused to publish his stories because they were "too neurotic." In his preoccupation with abnormal psychology, collective delusions and implanted memories, Dick in part followed the path of irregular science fiction writers of the '50s such as A.E. van Vogt and Theodore Sturgeon. Yet he ranged further in his subversions. Dick continued to rely on the ready-made materials of science fiction, the pulp prose, the planetary conflicts, the "psionic" powers of "precogs" (who read the future) and "telepaths" (who read minds); but he employed these materials to his own extravagant ends.

... Dick's biggest literary advance came in 1962, when he published The Man in the High Castle. This study of an alternate universe in which the Axis won the Second World War was entirely devoid of the usual sci-fi devices. ("No science in it," a character observes. "Nor set in future.") Mr. Tagomi, a Japanese bureaucrat and connoisseur of American antiques, is one of Dick's most sympathetic characters. Repelled by international intrigue and devoted to the occult beauty of old bottle caps and cheap jewelry, he resists Nazi brutality with a fragile but steady will. After Bormann dies, a power struggle breaks out among the remaining Nazi leaders (Hitler has long since entered a sanitarium) and Tagomi unhappily plays one faction off against another, aware that they are all unspeakably evil. Ingeniously, the book contains its own counterfiction: in this America divided into German and Japanese zones, rumors spread of an incendiary novel speculating that the allies actually won the war. The narrative adroitly maneuvers back and forth between these two competing accounts of what is real. The Man in the High Castle was Dick's most assured and subtle work, and he hoped it would win him a wider audience. He was chagrined when reviewers treated it as just another thriller. Ironically, it was the science fiction community that celebrated the book, bestowing the Hugo Award on it in 1963.

In the early '80s Dick's hopes for renown revived, as younger writers arrived at his doorstep, royalties increased and German, French and Japanese editions of his work proliferated. Back in the early '70s he had optioned his 1968 novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? to Hollywood; by 1980 the producers of the film promised that it would be the next Star Wars. (Dick hoped that Victoria Principal would have a starring role.) In fact, Blade Runner was a commercial disappointment in its initial release. But Dick never knew of its early unsuccess. In March 1982, he died of a stroke after proudly attending an advance screening of the movie. ...

Dick explored the problem of decency in a dead world most forcefully in Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? Rick Deckard is a bounty-hunter, paid to track down and destroy a party of androids that has infiltrated the planet. Deckard employs an "empathy" test that records his subjects' responses to unpalatable thoughts of cruelty and death; the test can distinguish between androids and their identical-looking human counterparts. The typical Dickian twist comes when Deckard, unlike one of his partners, begins to empathize with the androids that he kills. Does this mean that he might be an android himself, or does his powerful feeling of empathy confirm precisely that he is human? Deckard investigates incidents of empathy with the care of an experienced detective, but he cannot take anything for granted. The special horror of his work is that a sudden "flattening of affect" might occur at any time, to others or to himself. The practice of empathy is fragile, uncertain and imperative. ...

This appears to be the full text of The Man in the High Castle.

Blade Runner returns

It's the 25th anniversary of Blade Runner! Interestingly, Blade Runner was a money loser; the summer of 1982 was dominated by the Spielberg blockbuster E.T.

The director's cut came out 15 years ago. This new release is a lovingly crafted digitized version with improved special effects.

Wired Q&A with director Ridley Scott. Full transcript (long, with audio). Apparently Scott never finished the Philip K. Dick novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? on which the screenplay was based.

Deckard is a replicant (Wired interview):

Scott: The whole point of Gaff was — the guy who makes origami and leaves little matchstick figures around, right? The whole point of Gaff, the whole point in that direction at the very end, if Gaff is an operator for the department, then Gaff is also probably an exterminator. Gaff, at the end, doesn't like Deckard, and we don't really know why. And if you take for granted for a moment that, let's say, Deckard is Nexus 7, he probably has an unknown life span and therefore is starting to get awfully human. Gaff, just at the very end, leaves a piece of origami, which is a piece of silver paper you might find in a cigarette packet. And it's of a unicorn, right? So, the unicorn that's used in Deckard's daydream tells me that Deckard wouldn't normally talk about such a thing to anyone. If Gaff knew about that, it's Gaff's message to say, "I've basically read your file, mate." Right? So, that file relates to Deckard's first speech to Rachael when he says, "That isn't your imagination, that's Tyrell's niece's daydreams. And he describes a little spider on a bush outside the kitchen door. Do you remember that?

Wired: I don't remember the — oh, the spider. Yeah.

Scott: Well, the spider is an implanted piece of imagination. And therefore Deckard has imagination and even history implanted in his head. He even has memories of his mother and father in his head, maybe a brother or sister in his head. So if you want to make a Nexus that really believes they're human, then you're going to have to think about their past, and you're going to have to put that in their mind.

Wired: Why didn't the unicorn dream sequence appear in either the work print or the original release?

Scott: As I said, there was too much discussion in the room. I wanted it. They didn't want it. I said, "Well, it's a fundamental part of the story." And they said, "Well, isn't it obvious that he's a replicant here?" And I said, "No. No more obvious than he's not a replicant at the end. So, it's a matter of choice, isn't it?"

Wired: As a fan reading people's comments about this, I've come across statements of Harrison Ford saying that he was not a replicant.

Scott: I know.

Wired: And watching the director's cut, it seemed to me when Ford picks up the origami unicorn at the end of the movie —

Scott: And he nods.

Wired: The look on his face says, "Oh, so Gaff was here, and he let Rachael live." It doesn't say, "Oh my God! Am I a replicant?"

Scott: No? Yeah, but then you — OK. I don't know. Why is he nodding when he looks at this silver unicorn? It's actually echoing in his head when he has that drunken daydream at the piano, he's staring at the pictures that Roy Batty had in his drawer. And he can't fathom why Roy Batty's got all these pictures about. Why? Family, background, that's history. Roy Batty's got no history, so he's fascinated by the past. And he has no future. All those things are in there to tap into if you want it. But Deckard, I'm not going to have a balloon go up. Deckard's look on his face, look at it again now that I've told you what it was about. Deckard, again, it's like he had a suspicion that doing the job he does, reading the files he reads on other replicants, because — remember — he's, as they call them, a blade runner. He's a replicant moderator or even exterminator. And if he's done so many now — and who are the biggest hypochondriacs? Doctors. So, if he's a killer of replicants, he may have wondered at one point, can they fiddle with me? Am I human, or am I a replicant? That's in his innermost thoughts. I'm just giving the fully flushed-out possibility to justify that gleaming look at the end where he kind of glints and kind of looks angry, but it's like, to me, an affirmation. That look confirms something. And he nods, he agrees. "Ah hah, Gaff was here." And he goes for the elevator door. And he is a replicant getting into an elevator with another replicant.

Wired: And why does Harrison Ford think otherwise?

Scott: You mean that he may not be or that he is?

Wired: Well, he is on record saying that, as far as he's concerned, Deckard is not a replicant.

Scott: Yeah, but that was, like, probably 20 years ago.

Wired: OK, but —

Scott: He's given up now. He's said, "OK, mate. You win, you win. Anything, anything, just put it to rest."

A modern Borges?

As you can probably guess, I read a ton of science fiction when I was a kid. There was a time when I could walk into a book shop and recognize every title in the sci fi section. But I stopped reading it about the time I reached high school, and, except for the occasional guilty pleasure (e.g., stuff by Vernor Vinge), haven't kept up since. Being a physicist makes it tough to read science fiction -- I particularly hate it when the sci fi assumptions or their implications aren't self-consistent or at least treated in an sophisticated way. It's also true that there is very little new under the sun (I suppose this applies to all literature). Every time I pick up a new title I can more or less recall several stories of which it is derivative. Sometimes I wonder if the author knows this.

Recently I came across the short fiction of Ted Chiang. It's the first really good science fiction I've read since I was a kid. I guess others agree, because Chiang has already won 3 Nebulas and a Hugo, despite having only published a dozen or so stories. (Read the reviews at Amazon for his one published collection here.)

This is probably over the top, but he reminds me of Philip K. Dick and even Borges. Some will violently disagree with me, but I think Chiang really understands the scientific or metaphysical concepts that appear in his stories, while at times I feel Borges is just alluding without deep understanding.

Here are some of his stories, available online.

Division by Zero. A mathematician has a mental breakdown when she constructs formal machinery showing the internal inconsistency of mathematics. The theme is eerily reminiscent of these comments by Greg Chaitin!

Understand. A shorter, updated version of Flowers for Algernon?

What's Expected of Us. A brief meditation on time travel and free will :-)

Tannhauser gate

Philip K. Dick was a creative genius -- full of tremendous and deep ideas. Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep (which became the movie Blade Runner) is a meditation on identity, free will and artificial intelligence. (The main character can't be sure whether he himself is android or human, and, ultimately, whether there is any difference. Director Ridley Scott was true to this idea, making it clear that Deckard (Harrison Ford) is, without knowing it, indeed a replicant!) The Man in the High Castle is one of the best alternate history stories I've read--it takes place in an America which has been partitioned in half at the Rockies by the victorious Japanese and Germans. Some of the characters are dimly aware that things might have been otherwise... Dick's life was almost as interesting as his fiction. A serious intellectual, he dropped out of Berkeley, struggling financially and with psychological problems his entire life. He did not live to enjoy his fame.

Dick was an unappreciated genius of his time.

From the final soliloquy of the android Baty (Rutger Hauer), after he spares Deckard's life:

I've seen things you people wouldn't believe. Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion. I've watched C beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhauser gate. All those moments will be lost in time like tears in rain.

That quote popped into my head a few years ago while I was at dinner with some other theorists at a conference in Seoul. We were discussing my recent return from running a startup in silicon valley. Someone leaned over and asked, somewhat dubiously (suggesting that anything but theoretical physics was a waste of time), "But would you do it again?"