Blade Runner -1982, 1989 and 2049

We live in a strange new world. Not so much a brave one. We have too many cowards in our world today. Those who view lies and fake realities over that of actual facts and reality, just because it suits someone, allows them to win, or to profit.

I went alone the other Monday to the Bremerton SEEFilm Theater to see Blade Runner 2049 in 3D. It was worth it. It looked and sounded great. I had planned to go on a work day so no one would be there but when I arrived they mentioned it was a holiday (Columbus Day). But still, only about seven people showed up for the 2PM showing I attended.

As I sat before the show began playing with my Kindle Fire and trying not to listen to banal adverts on the screen, I got an odd feeling. We have had so many mass shootings, I couldn't shake the feeling of impending doom.

I hadn't brought a firearm myself even though I legally could. I hadn't even thought about it, On concealed carry, I have a rule. If I think I should take one I do. If I can't make up my mind, I do. If I don't feel it necessary (which is usually), I don't. But sometimes you just don't think about it, until later. This was one of those days. Typically, not a big deal. Let's face it, there is a lot of to do about nothing most of the time. Most people don't ever need to carry a gun. But that's a topic for another time. I only mention it because it calls to my state of mind in the theater.

I was just focused that day on going to see the long awaited, and potentially never going to happen, Blade Runner sequel. So in sitting in the theater, I tried to shrug it off. But with things like the recent Las Vegas mass shooting, our biggest mass murder to date, it was kind of hard to shake. So many nuts around anymore. However, once the show started, thoughts of it evaporated.

I've had an interesting experience with the Blade Runner universe. Same as many, different than most.

It goes back to when Blade Runner came out. I saw it just like everyone else and fell in love with it, just like many other. I started to check out all of Ridley Scott's films. I liked his late brother's films too, like Top Gun when it came out and others. I worked at a few Tower stores in the 80s (Tower Posters, Records and Video stores, in two cities) and watched Ridley's other films on both VHS and Beta as I had both, and came to love especially his first film, The Duelists.

Anyway, the quality of the film in the theater was excellent. The film itself, I couldn't be happier with. At the end, I just sat there... stunned. I planned to watch the titles to the end as I frequently do, and just after the best of the initial title music, I realized we were all still there and I flashed again on the whole mass shooting issue. I had to wonder...what if?

What if someone hated the sequel we had just watched? What if they wanted to watch the film, then just kill us all and go out on a Blade Runner (a violent film) high note? It was then that I remembered the death threats I'd gotten back in the late 1980s when I had said online that I was considering writing a sequel to Blade Runner.

I put those thoughts behind me for the moment. I just wanted to enjoy the last vestiges of this new film, even if it was just the titles. Besides I like to try and see if I know any names I see scroll by. Not to mention, I've had to generate my own title sequences in films before and it's interesting to note how new films are put together.

Finally, I realized I was alone in the theater. Then a theater attendant showed up. We ignored one another for a moment as I contained to read and listen to the end title sequence. He said something to me from the end of my aisle. I couldn't make it out so I reluctantly got up and walked over to him, a little disappointed in my somewhat euphoric mood being broken.

When it first came out, BR was my favorite film for some time (along with Brainstorm which I based my first screenplay, Ahriman, on in various ways). Toward the end of the 1980s I had decided I wanted to write a sequel to Blade Runner. Back then I was on various newsgroups on the Internet, which at the time was all text based. The World Wide Web still had a few years to get started up. My web page back then, JournalED.com (Journal of ExtraOrdinary Diversions, based on a print magazine I never quite got off the ground in the 1980s), which eventually grew to a sizable web site, and is now just online for historical purposes (but still, it's been online since 1995).

One newsgroup in 1989 had been talking about BR and I felt emboldened to mention I was thinking of writing a screenplay sequel to it. Within hours I had two death threats for even considering writing one. I was happy to note however that within a day or so someone offered to help me if I liked, and we both disregarded the death threats. I had thanked him, but I didn't really feel I needed the help.

I was married at the time. We had a young one year old son. I told my wife about all this and she agreed one night to help me come up with the concept. So we sat down at our dining room table in our ratty little apartment above a wine store on 65th and Revenna in Seattle, got a bit drunk, had fun maybe got stoned on some pot, and recorded the session. I still have it. It wasn't great, but in the end there was a concept. In listening back on it I can hear that she really didn't offer much and I did most of the talking, but it was fun and it lent some emotional support in my creating the concept.

I found that cassette, after all those years of it having been lost in my papers. A tiny little cassette tape for a micro-cassette recorder that I'd inherited from my late grandfather. Through the first of the 1990s and after we divorced, I worked some more on from time to time. I have the paperwork from that period on those efforts. I plan now to get them together and write something from it. It just won't (obviously) be a Blade Runner story.

At the end of the show of the sequel it had left me in a kind of fugue state. As if in a trance, almost. All these years since first seeing the original. I'd once had the Criterion Laser Disc version of it. I had magazines on it. I watched documentaries on it. I saw the Director's Cut when it came out and premiered at Seattle's Egyptian Theatre. I read the sequel books (yes, there's sequels and I didn't much like them). And all the other things about it that had left me sitting there in the theater a bit stunned. So I thought I'd come home and write this up to share it.

And here we are.

I have to highly recommend the film as well as Ridley and his chosen director Denis Villeneuve and writers Hampton Fancher, Michael Green, with story by Hampton Fancher. Of course initial credits have to go to the great Philip K. Dick in being based on characters from his novel "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?"

As I've said, I have a long and personal history with BR as well as Ridley. Many do. There were two choices for me about a BR sequel, the original being somewhat of a near religious consideration for many. A sequel, most sequels really, are either worthy of being a sequel in the first place, or not. Anything over that is gravy. I saw it in 3D.

All I can say and the highest praise I can give it is... I accepted it. And I liked the gravy.

Liked Interstellar? Consider reading Expedition of the Arcturus

I keep doing this. I write a story and publish it, then a film comes along on a similar topic. At least I seem to be staying abreast of the Zeitgeist of what's interesting.

I wrote and released "Simon's Beautiful Thought" sometime before the film "She" was released. That film was in the works for about ten years though so I'm not claiming anything here other than that I see a relevant and current topic and I like to write about it. I consistently come up with stories prior to film's being heard about or released.

By the way, if you haven't read my story about Simon yet, it's a good story to check out, and it's always free. It will give you the idea however, of whether it's worth checking out my other works and I suppose, it gives you a good perspective on whether or not I can write. Though it is one of my more general audience, tamer tales of in this case, science fiction.

ebook version cover

I'm happy to say that coming up with timely stories has happened again with the release of Christopher and Jonathan Nolan's, "Interstellar", by way of my short story, Expedition of the Arcturus (also available as an audiobook I should add). It's a quick but fun read.

audiobook cover version

I produced and narrated the audiobook myself. It was an interesting and lengthy process requiring some degree of technical expertise on the recording and production end. So far I've produced three of them. Arcturus, The Conqueror Worm, which is the first full chapter of my book, Death of Heaven, and The Mea Culpa Document of London, a medieval tale of horror and regret by a Judge of the Inquisition and a Witch Hunter.

The Arcturus story was first released on PerihelionSF.com, a first rate, "hard" sci fi kind of an online magazine, where stories on the magazine are free to read online. I highly suggest, if you love good sci fi, to definitely check them out and support them. Let your friends know.

I also reported on an incredible documentary for PerihelionSF titled, Chasing Ice (page down a bit there to see it; there were originally two parts and there is only one left on the magazine archive now. For the entire article including the Q&A with a team member after the film and with photos, you can download my pdf of the article from my web site. I highly recommend watching this documentary, for the visuals if not for the reality it portrays and the warnings it offers.

I am also currently working on a new sci fi story for the magazine called, Rapture.

Expedition of the Arcturus, is a story about Earth's first generational spaceship sent to find a new home for humanity because of an impending global disaster. This isn't your clean, straightforward kind of story however, but it's not a bloody mess either. So if you like SF and not gore, this is a good story. Sam (the publisher) is strict about sci fi and not horror.

There is something else going on under the surface on Arcturus, however.

Told in reverse timeline, we are at first introduced to some of the crew of the spaceship Arcturus at the end of their journey. Then we step backward through time as we come to know more of them and about them and their situation until finally, we see how it all began and start to understand why things turned out how they did.

The title of the story came from a book I read years ago, A Voyage to Arcturus by Scottish author David Lindsey, published in 1920. A fascinating tale considered by some to be one of the top 100 greatest books of all time.

I'm not trying to compare my story to Lindsey's in quality or story, it was just a tribute to a book I had greatly enjoyed and appreciated, and I wanted to pay tribute to the author and his tale. Much like I did with my first published story of social horror, In Memory, Yet Crystal Clear in Anthology of Evil, 2012, which we have begun a re-edit on, and was a tribute to Isaac Asimov's first autobiography, In Memory, Yet Green, as I mentioned in last week's blog.

My Arcturus tale is a straight forward sci fi story. If you want something closer to David Lindsey's, you'd have to check out my book, Death of Heaven. Or perhaps the story I'm current writing on Wattpad, The Unwritten, a free and curious tale involving backwoods incestuous, serial killers, scientists in another universe and, a demon spawn's repeated attempts to literally escape from Hell.

I put all parts of The Unwritten into a Word doc and so far it comes to, 41 pages and 23,286 words with more to come. The gory, grisly scenes I had been talking about the last half of November (in case anyone reading this remembers or knew about that), those scenes are finally written and now available on there. That scene, part sixteen, grew into three parts and went on for a ways; but hey, when you have ten people tearing one another apart, well....it took some space. As well as some time to plot out where everyone was standing and what they were doing.

Regarding Arcturus, people wonder sometimes if a story written in a reversed timeline was originally written in a straightforward, linear fashion, then cut and pasted regressively into form. Maybe some are. But I wrote this story of earth's first generational spaceship, a ship where people live and love, procreate and die during the course of their seventy-five year mission as it is and how you would read it now.

I wanted to open with some action. In coming up with the opening I thought it might be interesting to show the end of the mission, first. From there, came the thought to write it backward. I decided on the time frames to leap backward through, and then I wrote it that way, then repeated the process until the final and first scene played out in the end. It was a fun though somewhat melancholy story to write and I wasn't sure if Sam (the publisher at PerihelionSF.com) would like it or not.

See, originally I had written and sent him another story. About twenty years ago, I had come up with an idea for a story. Quite different than the story that played out and was eventually published, the original had a scientist who invented a new technology, trying to sell it off to avoid being killed for it. It involved spies and intrigue but it just didn't work out for me in the end for some reason. That story was about a new technology, something no one saw coming, and which may just be coming someday.

There have been advances recently actually leading toward that. It was also a technology first shown in the neo-noir dystopian sci fi film, Blade Runner, which they are now gearing up to producing a sequel to. I'm hoping that Ridley Scott gets to direct, but that's still up in the air. Interesting side note many people don't know, there are sequels to the first novelization of the original film (Blade Runner The Edge of Human (book 2), Replicant Night (book 3), Blade Runner 4: Eye and Talon), all by K.W. Jeter.

According to Wikipedia: "These official and authorized sequels were written by Dick's friend, K. W. Jeter. They continue the story of Rick Deckard and attempt to reconcile many of the differences between the novel and the film."

The Blade Runner story originally being from a Philip K. Dick book: Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep and having little to do with the film, really. I had posted in newsgroups back in the late 1980s that I was working on a sequel screenplay to the original film and got several death threats from around the country. I wished them all the best and indicated I lived in Seattle at the time if they wanted to come visit. No one took me up on the offer. However two people did offer to help me with the screenplay, which I never got around to completing, though I did map out a story line.

The story I was getting around to mentioning using the new technology, was EarVu and  the story is about a technology that could blow the social structures of the world because of what would ensue from it's utilization.

Consider what would happen if you could take an audio tape, any audio tape, play it through a machine and then be able to watch a 3D video of whatever was going on in the environment surrounding the microphone(s) at the time of recording. Of course, that's not just what happens in this story, not by a long shot.

Getting back to my Expedition of the Arcturus...

Check out my own story on my version of Earth's first generational space ship, if you get a chance. And see, Interstellar, as from what I hear, it's a definite yes on a film to go see.

Cheers! And a very merry Holiday season to you all, all around the world!