BLADE RUNNER 2: THE EDGE OF FAMILIAR
Blade Runner 2: The Edge of Human ... K. W. Jeter
Matt Adcock (@Cleric20)
Spoilers for the book and Blade Runner 2049.
“Though, of course, wickedness is an eternal thing, the great deceiver merely shifting from behind one mask to another…”
I really wanted to love this as I love Blade Runner (and Blade Runner 2049). How could I resist another trip into Blade Runner’s rain-soaked, morally knackered future? It should have been an easy sell, and I went into K. W. Jeter’s The Edge of Human ready to be seduced.
Instead, I finished it with the frustrating sense that I’d spent a lot of time being reminded of a brilliant film, without being given enough reasons to love the book in my hands. There’s a whole world beyond those enormous advertising hoardings… so why does another familiar face keep coming through the door?
Published in 1995 as an authorised continuation of the film, this has a difficult job before Deckard even gets his trench coat on. A novel has to find its own way into that world, without Vangelis doing emotional heavy lifting in the background or Ridley Scott creating a cyberpunk aesthetic that would last forever. Jeter can summon the grime and decay, and there are passages where the city feels properly oppressive. The trouble is that the plot keeps taking us back over ground the original covered more memorably.
The opening offers something worth pursuing. Deckard is hiding away with Rachael, whose remaining life is being stretched out through cryogenic suspension. There’s a horrible sadness in that arrangement: the longer you preserve the person you love, the less time you actually spend living with them. That is the kind of science-fiction predicament I want from Blade Runner, because the technology makes an already recognisable human fear more painful. I could happily have spent more of the book in the emotional wreckage of that relationship.
Instead, Sarah Tyrell arrives to pull Deckard back into the hunt for the supposedly missing sixth replicant. She also happens to be the human original behind Rachael, which makes accepting a job from her considerably more complicated than checking the day rate. Then Roy Batty enters the picture as the claimed human template for the replicant we remember. There is an idea here: what would it do to you to discover that your face and body had become a product? Unfortunately, it’s just a way too convenient way to bring back the dead and get the old gang back together.
And this is where my enthusiasm began to drain away. Rutger Hauer made Roy unforgettable through the character’s fury, fear and final act of mercy; another man with the same face cannot inherit all of that simply by turning up. The human originals need to become compelling people in their own right. Too often the pleasure offered is recognition, followed by another explanation of how the recognition can be made to fit. It makes a city that once seemed to contain millions of untold stories feel strangely dependent on the same handful of people.
Holden is a more promising return. The blade runner who had such a disastrous interview with Leon in the film now depends on artificial heart-and-lung machinery, giving his profession’s obsession with the distinction between human and manufactured life an uncomfortable personal edge. There is something wonderfully awkward about a replicant hunter having to negotiate his own dependence on technology. That contradiction promises a much more uncomfortable story than another round of identity guessing, but the shifting suspicions about who might be a replicant keep pulling the book back towards familiar territory.
Even Pris gets a return recast as a human, which is awkward for Deckard as it creates a murder accusation against him, but her death was already disturbing. The film had made us watch a frightened being fight for her life while the authorities treated killing her as routine work. Whatever Jeter wants the reversal to expose about that system, I found myself resisting the suggestion that her biological classification could supply the extra shock. Her suffering had already done the job. Changing the answer to the test doesn’t automatically deepen the question.
That is my wider problem with the book’s twists. Uncertainty can make you care desperately about someone; it can also leave you waiting for the next explanation to overwrite the last one. I found myself doing too much of the latter here. The prose sometimes presses so hard on the atmosphere and the philosophical argument that the momentum sags, then the action kicks in again before the emotional consequences have really landed. There’s stuff happening, but too little of it left a lasting mark.
A revealing bit of research helped explain the reunion feeling: in a 1995 interview, Jeter said he had shaped the book with the original film’s actors returning in mind. I understand the temptation. Who wouldn’t want that cast? At some point, though, somebody needs to leave the bloody reunion and see what else is happening outside. The ingenuity spent making those returns possible could have carried us somewhere less familiar, and the book’s repeated attachment to the original company becomes a limitation.
Blade Runner 2049 made an instructive comparison because its strongest additions have lives of their own. K’s longing to matter, and Joi’s unsettling position somewhere between a purchased service and a person capable of love, give the old questions different emotional consequences. K eventually has to decide what he will do when his hoped-for exceptional identity falls apart.
That gives his choices a weight that another surprise about somebody’s origins cannot supply on its own. Deckard still matters enormously, but a new character’s experience has made the journey worth taking.
Very little of Jeter’s book found its way into 2049 and I’m not surprised. Asked whether the novels were reference points, co-writer Michael Green said they weren’t. There is an interesting resemblance in both stories confronting Deckard with another woman bearing Rachael’s face, but resemblance doesn’t establish borrowing. In 2049, his refusal of Wallace’s recreated Rachael makes the difference between an individual and a replacement painfully clear. For me, that brief encounter gets more feeling out of a familiar face than much of this novel manages.
The atmosphere, Holden and that miserable arrangement with Rachael get this a couple of stars. Even the human-template idea could support a much more unsettling story than the one I felt we got. After reading this and anticipating 2099 series which hits soon, I just wanted to watch Blade Runner again.
Darkmatters: ö ö
(2 out of 5, at best. Too little to justify the return, now I can see why this is mostly forgotten.)
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