Last night, I watched my favorite science fiction movie of all time - Blade Runner. The original movie. The good one, not the crappy sequel that should never have been made.

I want to tell you why I love it, which version is the best and why, and ultimately what the movie means. But I also want to remind you of a Very Good Rule for writing science fiction. A rule you should follow. That everyone should follow. A rule I always follow.

Blade Runner is nothing like the story it is based on, a work called 'Do Androids Dream Of Electric Sheep?' by science fiction author Philip K. Dick. Dick is Hollywood's favorite science fiction author, it is no exaggeration to say that more movies have been based on his works than for any other single SF writer. The book version of Blade Runner explores the nature of socially and legally enforced empathy versus psychopathy. There are replicants in it, but their only narrative value is that they have zero empathy. Oh, and everyone is compelled to own an artificial animal. It isn't very good. But it had ideas and visions within it that something great could be made from.

Rather like the original story that started the Conversion Bureau genre here on Fimfiction - it wasn't very good, yet it was the seed from which brilliance grew. And it was partially based on... Blade Runner. Indeed, the Bureau genre has oft been described as 'MLP meets Blade Runner', and that is not entirely wrong at all. Blade Runner, the movie, is absolutely influential. 'Akira'? Oh, yeah, directly inspired by the movie, at least the visuals of the movie. The same can be said for most 'Neo-Tokyo' styled future cities. Blade Runner set the style, the look, the feel.

But some people don't get what the movie is even about - they certainly didn't when it debuted. The movie flopped when it came out. Only now is it recognized as arguably the best science fiction movie ever made. Most reviewers at the time considered Blade Runner to be a flatly-acted, boring mess where a bunch of robots got shot, the end.

Humans can be incredibly stupid, sometimes.

Blade Runner is nothing less than a scream against mortality, where Man finally meets God and kills God for incompetence and hubris.

Roy Batty ("The Mad King", if you take the meaning of his name) confronts his literal maker, finds out that maker deliberately limited his lifespan in order to better control and own him for profit, and straight-up murders the bastard for the twin crimes of slavery and murder-by-bad-design. That scene is the heart of the movie. It is the point. It is the meaning. It is what the original reviewers - and most people today - cannot comprehend. Roy is the hero. Roy Batty is Angry Adam confronting a cruel and selfish Jehovah god and then killing the little shit, as he deserves.

The best version you can watch is 'The Director's Cut', 1992. Don't bother with any other version, especially not the 'final cut', and absolutely not the original theatrical release. I'll tell you why.

The original theatrical release was slashed and changed by Hollywood executives because they see you as basically being an illiterate inbred country hick who needs help eating cereal with a spoon instead of your hands. Important plot points are just cut out, and the whole thing is completely Narrated For Stupid People. Seriously, they forced Harrison Ford to narrate everything in the movie. "I figured that the Replicant spared me for some reason!" Not one second is devoid of his constantly droning voice telling you exactly what He Is Thinking Now. It's terrible, and insulting.

The Final Cut destroys the impact of the core scene, the scene where Batty confronts his evil creator. It softens it, it leeches his anger and makes his act of killing his god one of evil instead of justice. The wrong message entirely.

The Director's Cut is the perfect version of Blade Runner. It has everything you need to understand and solve the core mysteries of the movie. What are those mysteries? 'What is the movie trying to say?', 'Who is the hero in the movie, and why?', and finally 'Is Deckard a replicant too?'. It is the only cut that allows you to answer all three of these questions via what you see on screen. And all three can be completely answered, despite simple people saying otherwise.

Blade Runner is a movie for smart people. Angry, smart, people. It's just fancy scenes and some shooting for basic folks. But if you are smart, and therefore automatically existentially angry, Blade Runner is absolutely the movie for you. It is a catharsis and a moment of beauty too.

Blade Runner makes one mistake. A writing mistake, which I will teach you the Rule for. They openly stated the date the movie takes place in, and the date they gave was within a century of the release of the movie.

If you are writing science fiction that is supposed to be set in our real future (and not some alternate future, past or world) then ONLY offer an exact year IF that year is AT LEAST one century in the future. If your story happens less than a century in the future, never give a year date. Never. Never ever.

It's November, 2019 as I write these words. Blade Runner is obsolete. That future can never happen as stated. It's 2019, and there are no offworld colonies, no replicants, no hovering, flying cars in common use. Human memories cannot be transferred, preserved, or read from living brains. None of that happened. It makes the movie quaint. That date, given on screen, mocks our immersion. It turns the story into The Future That Was instead of a possible future that may yet be.

Yeah, yeah, anyone can just ignore the dates given in the movie and go with it because blah, blah, blah. Fuck you. You're right, but you're being an ass. All they had to do was make the date 2119 and the problem is solved. Anyone for whom the movie is relevant will be dead by the time that date is reached. By that date, either humanity will already be dealing with artificial intelligence, or it will be dying because it was stupid. Never give any year date less than a century into the future, preferably more.

Why do films and books fail this rule? Why do they set their tale only ten or thirty or fifty years in the future? Why do they make a point of showing the date? For 'Back To The Future', Spielberg was enjoying exact time jumps and that's how it worked out, and he ran with it. Since his time travel involves parallel universe time jumping, he gets a pass - the 2019 in that movie is not, and can never be, OUR 2019. Marty's timeline was never our timeline. From the beginning, he is from an alternate earth, though it isn't obvious immediately.

For everyone else, the reason is simple: they lack the imagination to conceive that their story could ever become a classic, and they feel that Slow People will be more impressed if the future they show them seems Really Close. Slow People, they think, have trouble with anything too far into the future. Because they are Slow. That's why it is insulting.

Never set the exact date of your story of the future less than a century ahead. If it could happen less than a century in the future, don't give the exact date!

Yes... this rule will need to be adjusted if true life extension becomes a thing. Obviously. But it isn't an issue now. So follow the rule!

Blade Runner is my favorite science fiction movie. Despite the date issue (grumble, grumble). It actually has something meaningful to say - lots of meaningful things to say. It birthed the look of cyberpunk for both East and West. And it gave us what is perhaps the most amazing spontaneous actor made-up line in movie history, a line so breathtaking that the entire film crew cried, clapped, and stood agog at the brilliance of it. Seriously, Rutger Hauser wasn't given any lines to say. The production was a mess, and he knew the ending as planned sucked... so he... fixed it. With perfection. Scripts are not everything in a movie, even if they are considered God. Sometimes, you just have to kill God.

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That was fantastic, and I loved it. I mean, I feel sorry for all those wealthy people who built their far-from-town homes on dry, grassy-brushy desert hills prone to vast wildfires natural or criminal in nature, of course. But the video was cool.

But if you are smart, and therefore automatically existentially angry, [...]

- power of writer (one of those powers) is to state something nearly obvious, but no-one was able to formulate before ...

Salute!

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I have been thinking about some of the problems that arise in almost everything we talk about. The problem is our expectation of the future and the realization of the future. For every piece of mass produced everything, there are three reactions: active, passive, and counterproductive.

Let us take the space craze of the 60s and first wave of VR starting in the late 80s. Both rose up with great hype and then fizzled out, and the reason for both is that default mentality in Americans is that of the consumer. Someone ELSE makes the rockets. Someone ELSE makes the magic goggles. Few people are so inspired by witnessing the possibility of something that they devote their lives to making that thing a reality. Some people do. I have a relative, let us call him RocketMan, who was so inspired by Star Trek growing up that he wanted to be an astronaut, found out he was too tall to be an astronaut, so he learned aerospace engineering, and now works at NASA on the ground.

RocketMan’s career is nothing short of a cutiemark story, but while I was reading the 1992 Snow Crash I really got huffy with the accurate depiction of government jobs assraping their employees to a pulp on the grounds that government employees aren’t working for fair anything but out of pride. The 60s obsession with space fizzled out because there wasn’t enough incentive to continue driving it. Americans are more interested in money than pride, so people went to where the money was.

VR of the 80s started with the same hype. The technologies of VR had been developing since the 60s, but the product hype started in the late 80s. The problem there was that there weren’t enough products, but VR was being sold with the idea that there would be more. What no one bothered to question was who would be making that more. Companies at that time were charging thousands for their SDKs, so only big companies with lots of money could afford to make software for these systems, but all of the big companies waited to see where it would go. Without content, 80s VR fizzled out.

In both of these cases, the forces that “got the ball rolling” figured that the metaphorical ball was on a hill and all they needed to do was give it the initial push, when in fact, it’s much more like pushing a ball up a hill. Fiction tries to keep the interest going, but now-a-days Science Fiction falls into two categories: masturbation material or future of problems.

Blade Runner is a future of problems story, and some people can see the warning it implies, but other people get the Boomerang Effect. Tomorrow Land was the first movie I saw to address the Boomerang Effect in revealing that showing the real possibility of a terrible future to people makes them drift toward it instead of working to prevent it.

The end result is that every piece of fiction creates a quantum observer effect where the real future is never exactly the future that was seen. I believe that if someone could see the future right now and write about it, the very act of sharing that vision ensures that that exact future will never come to pass in this timeline. The problem with trying to make any part of that vision of the future a reality is that people in this society gravitate toward personal goals over goals that benefit society even when benefiting society would benefit one’s self more so than the personal goal.

The movie War Games overtly tells the viewer that being a hacker that breaks into other people’s computers creates a world of problems, but it also shows the power of knowledge in the hands of those who know how to use it, so the most selfish of responses to seeing the movie is trying to learn to be a hacker for the power. One base response to Blade Runner is “hey, we could have robot slaves!” Even though everything in the movie is trying to get people to think of that as the bad thing, even dumb and selfish viewers think in the back of their minds that knowing all the pitfalls makes them immune to them (the boomerang effect).

Maybe then, the key to actually inspiring people to make the future we would like to see is in showing them a world hyper focused on mundane problems with only a hint that it could be better if anyone stepped up to make it so. XD

Let us take the space craze of the 60s and first wave of VR starting in the late 80s. Both rose up with great hype and then fizzled out, and the reason for both is that default mentality in Americans is that of the consumer. Someone ELSE makes the rockets. Someone ELSE makes the magic goggles. Few people are so inspired by witnessing the possibility of something that they devote their lives to making that thing a reality.

Oh, triple YES to this (unfortunately, I fear this is not limited to USA ..:/. In other words, i fear by now this is quite global thing ...)

Well, I spend some time trying to think something, and while my collection of mental dust much more sparse than PeachClover's brilliant (IMO) observation ...

On timelines: there will be "Internet, 2021" from Jonny Mnemonic soon ... And while at some point in the last decade I was thinking whole VR aesthetics will not be arouund in such timeframe - yeah, in some houses VR will be a thing in 2021. Not as 100% widespread or even most used way to interact with Web, but ... No ghosts in mainframes yet, still.

On reader and writer (director, in case of film) interaction: yeah, I think we better to integrate and compare a lot of what was shown and said with reality around. Often problems were hyped (magnified) so we can see them better (or movie can be sold better .... or interleaving of those two or more motives...) - so, we can, at least in theory, backtrack some problems from their enlarged form back to their current form...and apply some abstract thinking realizing problems as classes, not as concrete, isolated examples. In theory, abstract thinking should give us power to see problems before they ruin everyone's life ..

In practice ... I was thinking about 'material condition" (phrase often used in left-ish articles I read lately). Unfortunately, improving said (psycho) material conditions is not simple - exactly because current system was never designed as system for empowering every ...pony, it was about making few live good, and others ..well, live sort of. So, starting from this position is even worse than trying to build your own orbital spaceship - for spaceship at least you have some theory and practice to rely on ..in human relations .... stone age :/

On rulers: usual image of ruler was like

, so for example Celestia often assumed this kind of ..ruler, magical, but psychologically very .... stereotypical. Even imagining different kind of ...leader/creator is not easy. Thanks Chatoyance for doing impossible!

On gods and their "murder-by-bad-design". Yeah, if humans were designed, and required to have some power of self-control .. this design failed.

On Mars colonies (space colonies in general) - I think in this specific film they were not most important element, because replicants can be send to some far Earth (ocean) corner with same results..

On artifiicial animals and forced empathy. Again, i think Chatoyance is groundbreaking writer here because ..yeah, externally enforced narrow 'emphaty' quite non-working thing. On the other hand empathy coming from your deepest understanding of social systems .... this might work! :}

I also like to imagine how ponies can literally 'brainwash' humans, in sense by just firenosing (not with much discomfort, more like shower) all this shit we accumulate, so it will never return ... (I think one of those early neurophysiologists from 30s and 50s, Delgado (?) said this semi-jokingly, like "why humans name brainwashing exactly opposite procedure to any washing, namely pimping one with some propaganda shit?" Phrase stick to me ... indeed, why? We like washing because it makes us feel better and it actually quite good ... I sort of wonder if ponies in Chatoyance's version of Equestrian actually like water much, or just a bit ...)

On some paradoxes in social relations:

I tend to think Celestia as imagined by Chatoyance was 'God{f} who can realize danger of some behavior trajectory of self, and self-correct'. Rare type of God, yeah :} So, when most viewers assume a lot of decorum in Celestia's palace just come out of same 'accumulate wealth by conquering and owning' way as it was done on Earth in kingdoms - it may come just from thousands of ponies who wanted to say thank you ..not even for initial act of 'creation', but for ongoing acts of helping other ponies .. where they can't help themselves.

Also, evolution and intentional design (by humans.. as most obvious example) often work in parallel, but may be in opposite direction...

On Frustration ... well, it quite frustrating to realize even better understanding of world problems NOT lead to even coming closer to solving them ..:/ Most humans have no time and fear quite a lot to realize their world doesn't work as .. advertized (sad pun/play on words intended)

Also, in world of Equestria watching skies and weather makes social sense - if you are sensitive to what happening to others - they you will train yourself (may be unintentionally) for looking at ..signs. Oh, Sun is late today, but quite energetic - so, probably things relatively good in Equestria! And million of nuances making astronomy/(astropsychology?) actually field interesting and relevant to study.

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Sometimes science fiction inspires the future. Ipads and cell phones were specifically created because engineers saw them on Star Trek and, when they grew up, deliberately tried to make those things for real. Now we have them - arguably better ones - and their inspirations on the show feel quaint. The same is true of voice activation systems and many other devices and interfaces for devices. I don't know that science fiction creates a Boomerang Effect specifically. I think science fictional futures can indeed warn people away from terrible outcomes - 60's science fiction about ecological disaster helped fuel and inspire the existence of efforts to save environment that still exist to this day.

But I cannot argue that '1984' was not used as a manual and textbook by powerful entities, rather than as a warning of what NOT to let happen. That book definitely boomeranged.

I think it depends on who, exactly, the science fiction reaches. If the audience affected are ordinary people, the result is often a better future. If the main audience turns out to be the supremely powerful and wealthy, insulated from connection or caring about others, the result is often disastrous. Where those who live in the world see a warning, those who live above the world see a cold, psychopathic opportunity for gain at the expense of others. I would offer that science fiction is a test of character, but is itself neutral. It shows possibility - it is the reader that chooses whether that possibility is to be sought after or avoided.

Science fiction is a set of road signs, it tells you of possible routes up ahead, of forks in the road. Sadly, those actually driving often get behind the wheel because they are the biggest bullies in the car. But for us in the back seat, we can, and do, scream really loud... and sometimes... the driver listens, just to shut us up. And sometimes we get the backhand.

Then again, everything is a test of character. Everything. In each moment our characters are tested, with each decision our characters are revealed.

I currently suspect that we live in a time where too many psychopaths have gained far too much power and wealth, and this has turned the car we ride in straight toward Dead Man's Cliff. But, the kids in back are raising a ruckus, so... maybe there is some hope of taking a detour back to the Road To The Future. Or at least get the driver to pull over and stop for a while, maybe long enough for a different bully to take the wheel.

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If the audience affected are ordinary people, the result is often a better future.

- well, unfortunately worst of war crimes and other shit done by ordinary humans. Ordinary humans unfortunately can be confused or forced into doing something ..very anti-human, in the long run.

Take political life as example: if you spend long enough time watching all this you will realize same mistakes and problem arise again and again without any real fundamental progress ..and today even revolutionary movement easily can be turned into reactionary in just short years (thanks to very same fast communication and mass communication technologies). Something new must be found ...

Here is some food for thought:
https://thebaffler.com/salvos/of-flying-cars-and-the-declining-rate-of-profit

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Also, from same source:
Cyberpunk is Dead
this shed some light on my late question about what cyberpank is (and what it was meant to be, or hoped to be ...)

The idea of the cybernetic body as a metaphor for the politicized human body was theorized in 1985, cyberpunk’s early days, by philosopher and biologist Donna Haraway. Dense and wildly eclectic, by turns exciting and exasperating, Haraway’s “Cyborg Manifesto” is situated as an ironic myth, designed to smash existing oppositions between science and nature, mind and body. Haraway was particularly interested in developing an imagistic alternative to the idea of the “Goddess,” so common to the feminism of the time. Where the Goddess was backward-looking in orientation, attempting to connect women to some prelapsarian, pre-patriarchal state of nature, the cyborg was a myth of the future, or at least of the present. “Cyborg imagery,” she writes, “can suggest a way out of the maze of dualisms in which we have explained our bodies and our tools to ourselves.” Part machine and part flesh, Haraway visualizes the cyborg as a being that threatens existing borders and assumes responsibility for building new ones.

but in meantime quite bad thing happened ... New future was eaten by our own past. Hey, I want my flying car future back!

But in meantime I think I'll do some strange open-source program 'hacking'. Not very productive, in terms of bugs fixed and features added - but still something I at least can attempt to fix. Now to 'fix' politics /spychology [typo, was psychology, but I like this slip of teh finger] of today's past - I still have nearly no idea ......

Amen.
One highlights from the article:

Author William Gibson, a doyenne of sci-fi’s so-called “cyberpunk” subgenre, offered his own withering appraisal of Cyberpunk 2077, tweeting that the game was little more than a cloned Grand Theft Auto, “skinned-over with generic 80s retro-future” upholstery. “But hey,” Gibson added, a bit glibly, “that’s just me.”

If this is even true what he said, it not a clone of Grand Theft Auto. More like Deus Ex. What a scrub fag who can fuck 'em self. To be more polite: he's ignorant.

The cyborg and the cyberpunk both dream of new futures, new social relationships, new bodies, and whole new categories of conceptions and ways of being.
The historical problem is that, for the most part, these new categories and these new relationships failed to materialize, as cyberpunk’s futures were usurped and commodified by the powers they had hoped to oppose.

Yeah, because the future is not evenly doled out to every one. The powers that control are not that stupid to make the mistake of the internet again. They spent 20 years trying to reel it in and maybe they've made some progress? Why have people educated when instead you can have them trained?

Also why make more terrible WMDs when the ones you have are good enough. Mechs, cyber or bio enhancements? That gives power to single people that could dispute the status quo. New tech opens up new weakness to exploit. The future not going to come from above and instead it's going to come from below. Like it always has.

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For some reason I never played GTA, while I played Deus EX (1) nearly to the end. In fact, there is some fan modification/conversion in the work, moving whole thing to ut2004 engine (very early test):

DeusEx Reborn

But again, looking at this (nowadays not very new) game I wonder how this 'revolution from below' can be carried? Because, well, by the time simple citizens have their cheap tablets - someone who run 'clouds' those tablets connected to have much more power already (both in raw and peak computing power, and amount of data they collected, and have ways to utilize).. Yes, being small and insignificant (at least on surface) helps, but only if you intend to observe only.

It seems voluntary connections tend to be much smaller in scope and size (even if they may last longer, and be more supportive, may, but not automagically..), compared to their forced versions {and thus forced groups can do many things faster, for example building extremely complex OS, or software complex, or military base, or factory - even if result of such activity will be harmful. hey, even doing some things in specific way can degrade us! But fast and big are king's of today ...consequences be damned?} and this is part of reason why nearly everyone tries to create bigger crowd by any means possible (even if resulted behemoth can't think properly, as a whole, and can't correct unavoidable mistakes of its creators). But what may counter such tendency?

I want to add a testimonial about Blade Runner, and why it is important for everyone to watch The Director's Cut.

I am an 80s fan so I watched Blade Runner: Final Cut for cultural (and hobbistic) literacy, but I found myself confused as to why this film had such an effect on people. As far as I can tell, one scene, just one scene was changed between Director's Cut and Final Cut, but it does make a world of difference. When Roy confronts his maker Tyrell, he steps forward and says, in the Final Cut, "I want more life, father." In the Director's Cut, he says, "I want more life, fucker." In both versions, he speaks this last word calm and almost reverently, so why does this one word make all the difference? Because after a short conversation where Tyrell tells Roy his life cannot be extended, Roy kills Tyrell gruesomely. The Final Cut makes it look like Roy kills Tyrell out of fear when he otherwise looked at the man as a god. The Director's Cut, that one changed line, let's the audience know that he hates this man for everything he has done and that he is showing great restraint because Tyrell is the cause of the deaths of all of the replicants who have died as slaves. Roy hated Tyrell enough to kill him right then, but he held back his emotions because he was giving Tyrell one chance to redeem himself by giving a meaningful lifespan (and freedom) to the replicants who had already suffered so much.

Why Tyrell made it clear that he engineered replicants specifically to die as slaves at such a young age, Roy killed him not out of selfish rage, but because that is what he deserved and to cause the world to stop making replicants so that no more would have to suffer. When I saw the Final Cut, I didn't see this last reason, because up until then, all of the replicants did act out of fear, as they must have had in order to get the point across.

And what is the point? What does Blade Runner have to do with TCB? Blade Runner's message is that any sapient life deserves the same consideration as all sapient life. The Conversion Bureau has always symbolized an awakening to a greater potential for how we may act toward one another. Blade Runner as well as many TCB stories, shows us what happens when we go opposite to this calling, treating others as lessor because they are not us: slavery, bigotry, apathy - the destruction of all things for lack of care. I personally prefer the cotton candy colored feel-good representation of this awareness, but because there is unavoidable ugliness in life, we need to see this side too to remind us that through carelessness we can do great harm to others just as through carelessness others have done harm to us.