Blade Runner 3
August 7, 2006
It’s like a bad dream. A random visit to an Oxfam on a book-hunt for a little light reading I uncovered a hardback BLADE RUNNER™ 3: Replicant Instinct. By K. W. Jester, sorry, Jeter. It’s not so much bad as shit. It reads exactly as you would expect if a fourteen-year-old with a failed comprehensive education tried to write a sequel to the novelisation of the movie Blade Runner. For a work “fully authorised by the Philip K. Dick Estate” this “an evocative and haunting novel” as the publishers gamely hoax but is a fanboy rewrite of Blade Runner, and certainly not anything to do with Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?
The publisher dreadly warns us “in his first sequel to the movie, Blade Runner™2: The Edge of Human, Jester, sorry, Jeter, resolved many of the discrepancies between the movie and the novel upon which it was based”. I’ll bet it does, but what I doubt it’ll do is correctly inform us why the two are so different, and that’s down to Ridley Scott being a competent action movie director and PKD being a genius-at-work. I enjoy the movie, it’s about a space-age bounty-hunter flashing about in a hover-car. The novel is about crisis of identity, in fact a good number of them.
I’ll finish the work and not be so tough on it. I’ll enjoy it at some vapid level, like I’d enjoy a Marshall-Smith. Genius it ain’t.
[...] UPDATE. I haven’t gotten any further with Blade Runner 3 and probably I never will. I do want to show you an extract of dialogue. Of course K. W. Jeter isn’t going to write in the style of PKD’s Do Androids Dream…? but he doesn’t even make an effort to write well whatsoever. In this section Deckard is talking to a film director about why one of the replicants was shot on-set, mimicing one of his own Blade Runner ‘retirements’: ‘Can it.’ Deckard had had enough of the director’s rattling on. ‘The Kowalski replicant didn’t faint. I don’t need to know aobut video production to see what happened to him. I’m hip to death.’ His voice owered to a grim frequence. ‘That was my job … for a long time. I know what a dead body looks like.’ [...]