Blade Runner by Philip K. DickMy rating: 4 of 5 stars
This movie tie-in edition touts itself as the "25th Anniversary Edition" with "Blade Runner" larger than the book title. Fine, I was wanting to compare the two pieces of art: novel and film. This includes a 24-page afterword by the author of Future Noir: The Making of Blade Runner that does just that including a history of scripts written for the film, attempts to have a film version made and PKD's own journey from hating the film to loving it. In the book, Deckard's obsession with buying a living animal plays into an emotional and philosophical landscape that has a magnitude of dimension as great at the gritty stylism of Scott's gritty, post-noir vision. Really the idea of lacking control and ceding personal choice through Mercerism, “better living through the mood synthesizer” and the ever-running television puts the books more in the league of Brave New World as a dark musing on a dystopic possibility where free will sublimates to numbing comfort in the absence of hope. Also, these mind- and emotion-controlling devices are springboards for effective, hallucinogenic passages as Deckard looks into the abyss of monstrous androids and looking back at him, it infects him with an existential panic.
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