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In what unfortunately turned out to be the last years of his life, science fiction author Philip K. Dick had evolved from a writer of traditional science fiction into an author more concerned with purely interiorized speculative realms. This is to say that whereas many of Dick's contemporaries- writers who rose to fame in the 1950s- were concerned with the physics ?? science fiction, its hardware, Dick was concerned with the metaphysics, the software; i.e., the human spirit. Novels like Valis and The Transmigration of Timothy Archer hardly qualify as science fiction at all, but rather as religious meditations on human relationships and higher meaning. This spiritual, redemptive quality also pervades one of his finest classical science fiction novels, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?
It is this redemptive quality, overlaid with a host of other allusions and subjected to the rhetoric of Hollywood film style, which is retained in the film version of the novel, Blade Runner. Criticism of Ridley Scott's version of Dick's novel has focused mainly on its spectacle, that most obvious rhetorical element of contemporary cinematic science fiction, or on its borrowings from other filmic traditions, such as film noir. The most intelligent critique of the film (and as yet one of the few to appear) places Blade Runner within a cycle of science fiction films intimately involved in exploring "the problematic nature of the human being and the difficult task of being human."1 Blade Runner is here linked with films like Inuasion of the Body Snatchers, The Thing and Alien. The dominant motif these films are said to share is the idea of "doubling," the cloning or copying of the self.
While J. P. Telotte's article is certainly one which deserves much attention (and to which the present study will again refer), Blade Runner should also be seen as part of another cycle of science fiction films, a cycle of "transcendental" science fiction. This cycle includes 2001: A Space Odyssey, Star Trek trilogy, and the work of Steven Spielberg, especially Close Encounters of the Third Kind. Blade Runner, precisely because of its roots in Philip K. Dick's novel and the way it uses cinematic and literary allusions, emerges as among the most profound and challenging of these transcendental works.
Blade...