Although its box office hasn't quite matched its glowing reviews, Denis Villeneuve's “Blade Runner 2049” is the latest chapter in what has become one of the longest-running discussions of the future in all of science fiction. But amid the comparisons with Ridley Scott's classic 1982 film, the source of it all — Philip K. Dick's novel “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?” — has nearly been lost in the chatter.
Dick, who was born in Chicago, wrote the novel in 1966 and published it in 1968. He had already won the science fiction’s highest honor, the Hugo Award, for his 1962 novel “The Man in the High Castle,” but the new book didn't even get nominated. Still, it was the first of Dick's novels to be optioned for film, and Scott's film finally appeared just a few months after Dick's death. The film took plenty of liberties with Dick's work, and even the title was borrowed from an unrelated novel by Alan E. Nourse, but when Dick was shown a reel of special effects, he was reportedly impressed at how its vision of the future matched his own.
Over the next several years, as the movie attained cult status, that future — and Dick's other work — became catnip for writers and filmmakers. Dick's friend K.W. Jeter wrote three book sequels between 1995 and 2000 — sometimes trying to reconcile differences between the novel and the film — and Scott himself released a "director's cut" in 1992 and a "final cut" in 2007. At least a dozen other Dick stories saw film and TV adaptations, most bearing scant relationship to the originals, but none had the impact of “Blade Runner.”
How does Dick's original 50-year-old vision of the future compare to later versions, and especially to “Blade Runner 2049”? Dick came of age as a writer during the Cold War, and nuclear anxiety played a far greater role in his novel than in the films. The decaying, cluttered world of the novel — set in San Francisco, not Los Angeles like the movies — had come to be as a result of "World War Terminus," and the pervasive dust that cloaks the planet was radioactive fallout. Nearly everyone who could afford it has migrated to one of the colony worlds, and each emigrant was given an android or "andy" (the term "replicant" was invented for the movie) as a kind of personal servant. The androids themselves had originally been designed as weapons called "Synthetic Freedom Fighters."
Because so many species of animals and birds were nearly wiped out by the war and its aftermath, artificial pets such as owls or sheep have become status symbols, and even artificial insects help create the illusion of a living world. (In fact, one of Dick's more unlikely working titles for the novel was “The Electric Toad.”) A pervasive TV personality named Buster Friendly wields enormous influence, as does a cultlike quasi-religion called Mercerism — which unites its followers through "empathy boxes" that enable them to participate in a kind of shared hallucination, much like what we now call virtual reality.
Obviously, much of Dick's vision was left out of the first “Blade Runner” film, although an owl plays an enigmatic role in a few scenes, and the character of J.F. Sebastian (named John Isidore in the novel) maintains a menagerie of robot pets. Dick's vision of a nearly dead world clouded by radioactive dust is reflected in the new film’s version of Las Vegas, even though the city played no role in the origin novel, and the older Rick Deckard somehow maintains a living beehive, even though it's unclear how bees could survive in an environment with no apparent plants or flowers.
The basic plot is similar in all three versions: Deckard, a blade runner (called simply a bounty hunter in the novel), is assigned to track down renegade replicants (or "andys"). Along the way, he meets and falls in love with an advanced android named Rachael, and the investigation eventually leads to the discovery of nefarious corporate secrets. This becomes the backstory of “Blade Runner 2049,” but like the other versions, it's essentially a futuristic police procedural. In both film versions, the plot takes a backseat to the stunning visual and aural landscapes of the production design. It was really that production design, along with Vangelis’ haunting music, that gave the 1982 film its melancholic, retro-noir atmosphere and helped make it a classic. The new film clearly recognizes that.
All visions of the future really tell us less about tomorrow than about the time in which they were conceived. Dick's novel pictures 1992 as seen from 1966, Scott's film shows us 2019 as seen from 1982, and now Villeneuve's film shows us 2049 as seen from 2017. We can now see that neither of those older versions bears much resemblance to the actual world of their target date. Dick was imagining his future from the vantage of a world still very worried about nuclear war, concerned with the growing power of media (TV in particular), and suspicious of shady corporations. Scott's film came at a time when environmental degradation was just becoming a critical issue, when urban populations were becoming more culturally diverse and when cities were often viewed as overcrowded nightmares (John Carpenter's “Escape from New York” was released the preceding year).
What will future viewers of “Blade Runner 2049” conclude about the time in which it was made? As in the earlier versions, it shows that we're worried about the fragility of the environment, distrustful of secretive corporations and not quite certain about what it means to be human in a world in which artificial intelligence grows ever more sophisticated. Dick's original novel may seem remote, dated and even a bit quaint, but he put his finger on some real-life concerns that haven't really aged at all a half-century later.
Gary K. Wolfe is the editor of "American Science Fiction," a Library of America anthology collecting nine classic works from the 1950s.