FRANK ROSE

Wired 15.10
October 2007

It's a classic tale of failure and redemption, the kind Hollywood loves to tell. Fresh off his second successful movie, an up-and-coming director takes a chance on a dark tale of a 21st-century cop who hunts humanlike androids. But he runs over budget and the financiers take control; the film plays to near-empty theaters, ultimately retreating to the art-house circuit as a cult oddity. That's where we left Ridley Scott's future-noir epic in 1982. But over the next 25 years, Blade Runner's audience quietly multiplied. An accidental public showing of a rough-cut work print created surprise demand for a re-release, so in 1992 Scott issued a hastily assembled director's cut. Now he's releasing Blade Runner: The Final Cut, which hit theaters in Los Angeles and New York in October, with a DVD in December. To accompany Wired Senior Editor Ted Greenwald's interview with Scott, I asked a wide range of people how the film had changed their world.

Zack Snyder
Director
I first saw Blade Runner as a sophomore in high school. I was 16 and it was an R-rated movie, so I shouldn't have been there. Star Wars was my favorite movie at the time, but Blade Runner just rocked my world completely. All those awesome Syd Mead designs for buildings and cars and things—just incredible images that get burned into your psyche like some sort of involuntary reference that gets recycled through cinema for the rest of time. It was one of those movies you can’t help but start to quote. You could be making a doughnut commercial and if for a second someone goes, “Gosh, that looks like Blade Runner,” you're like, “Oh, that's awesome.” It becomes this lesson from the master that says, “Go out into the world and do good.”

Craig Venter
Geneticist
The movie has an underlying assumption that I totally don't understand: that people basically want a slave class. As I think about the potential of engineering the human genome, I think, wouldn't it be nice if we could have ten times the cognitive capabilities that we do have? Or if we could improve the ability to survive in a higher CO2 concentration, which we may be faced with as a means of survival? But people ask me if I could genetically engineer a very dumb person to work as a slave. I've gotten letters from guys in prison asking me to engineer women they could keep in their cell. I don’t see us as a society doing that.

Ray Kurzweil
Futurist
This scenario of biological humans hunting four human-level cyborgs—that's not how artificial intelligence will roll forward. If you are a Parkinson's patient today, you can put a pea-sized neural implant in your brain that allows you to download new software. Increase that device's capability by a billion and decrease its size by a hundred thousand and you get some idea of what will be feasible in 25 years. We also will have intelligent robots, some of which may look human-like and some of which may not. But even completely non-biological entities will be derived from human intelligence. So it’s not going to be a matter of walking into a room and saying, “Okay, cyborgs on the left, biological humans on the right.” These entities are going to be all mixed up.

Raymond Kelly
New York City Police Commissioner
The movie’s accolades as a cult classic and a sci-fi masterpiece are well deserved, but at bottom, I see Blade Runner as a very human and familiar story—a police story. Anyone with an ounce of the police-blue blood in his veins must love the hunter portrayed by Harrison Ford as Deckard. He’s reminiscent of many a seasoned NYPD detective whose job is to bring to ground replicants of another sort—the sociopaths, gun traffickers, and drug dealers who managed to commit some 500 murders last year in New York City. In the year Blade Runner debuted, they killed 1,668. And though it was set in L.A. in the year 2019, Blade Runner would have resonated with the many who, in 1982, imagined an irrevocable downward spiral for American cities in general. Police agencies and other arms of government were behind the technological curve. Then as now, large corporations were more likely to have the technological edge. In that respect, the film was prescient.

Will Wright
Game Designer
When I was researching Sim City I read a lot of city planning documents, and it was amazing how often the term Blade Runner came up—you know, 'We don't want Union Square to turn into Blade Runner.' But there was a concept that we used that was nicely realized in Blade Runner—the idea of arcologies, these massive structures that are like whole cities within a single building, like the pyramid where Tyrell lives. You have these giant arcologies where everyone has gone because they're the modern places, yet you have all this old infrastructure that's ignored and abandoned right underfoot. A lot of squatter cities have a similar dynamic—you have people living in the cracks without standard infrastructure, kind of like rats in the sewer.

Mamoru Oshii
Anime Director
Twenty-five years ago, I was feeling dissatisfied with Japanese animation's focus on characters and stories at the expense of environments. Suddenly, the world that I was vaguely imagining appeared in front of me. I felt totally overwhelmed, but at the same time I realized that what I was attempting to do was not wrong at all. Ridley Scott succeeded in creating an epoch-making movie conceptualized around a worldview. He visualized a world that nobody had ever seen, using elements familiar to anyone. Spinners coexist with bicycles; Asian-style food stalls spring up in the alleys between highly technological skyscrapers. I did not get fascinated by Harrison Ford or Sean Young. I got intoxicated by the Blade Runner world itself.

Moby
Musician
It was very seductive—the fact that it was always raining, it was always nighttime, and when it wasn't nighttime it might as well have been because everything had this pall cast over it. And the score was such an integral and perfect component of the movie. It really was the New Wave aesthetic of the time, perfectly crystallized in this movie. If someone were to remake the movie now, they'd probably have to throw in all these, like, Nickelback songs, but instead you have this very, very dark, unrelentingly gritty film with this very ethereal music on top of it. That contrast is what makes it. Without the music the movie would have been good, but with the music it was close to perfect.

Neil Gaiman
Novelist and Screenwriter
The look and feel of Blade Runner, even more than the story—I mean, I had read an awful lot of Dick, but I was lucky Blade Runner came on the scene because visually it helped define a future. The idea of a wasted urban landscape, of a sprawling high-tech conurbation, of a world in which we all stand out in the rain eating noodles—that was utterly Blade Runner. Kurt Vonnegut once said that what science fiction and pornography have in common is that they're both visions of impossibly hospitable worlds, but what Blade Runner did was create a dystopic, inhospitable world. It’s dark and it’s grungy and you wouldn’t want to live there—but you’d love to go there. And it rains.

An Interview with Jonathan Lethem

Wired 15.06, June 2007

With the Library of America's publication of Philip K. Dick: Four Novels of the 1960s — edited by Jonathan Lethem, whose own early fiction owes a lot to Dick's — the most outré science fiction writer of the 20th century has finally entered the canon. The Man in the High Castle, Dick's coolly rendered imaginings of Japanese-Nazi confrontation in occupied America, was his breakthrough work. The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch and Ubik established him as one of the most hallucinatory yet insightful critics of late-capitalist American civilization. And Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? inspired the film Blade Runner. Wired caught Lethem as he was promoting his latest novel, You Don't Love Me Yet, to ask about this sanctification of Dick's oeuvre — or as Lethem calls it, his "irv."

ROSE: Vintage has some three dozen Philip K. Dick novels in print. So, why collect these four?

LETHEM: For a great writer, the marginal stuff should be available—and I believe Dick’s a great writer, so that’s fine. But because Dick was so prolific and there’s been such an appetite for his work, Vintage has reached into the furthest reaches of his “irv” and put them in this irresistible package, so the masterpieces nestle up alongside books that Dick himself might have been horrified to see back in print. So you cringe on behalf of the potentially receptive reader who has earnestly wandered over to the shelf and come away with Dr. Futurity or The Cosmic Puppets instead of the kind of books we’re collecting in this volume, or the other titles I would argue over when I have these impossibly geeky which-books-would-you-take-to-a-desert-island conversations. Believe me, Dr. Futurity does not come into those conversations. So it can be a real turnoff. And that’s what you’re afraid of—someone who’s ready to be converted, but instead of picking up The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch or Martian Time-Slip, they’ll get one of those 1950s novels.

ROSE: Many of his short stories from the ’50s are wonderful. What was it that made his early novels so bad?

LETHEM: It’s not that there aren’t any good novels from the ’50s. There are things to be said for his first novel, Solar Lottery, and Time Out of Joint is a masterpiece. But the real reason the ’50s books are so bad is because his creative energies were elsewhere. There’s a handful of books Dick wrote while holding his own nose as he was expending very serious energies on these unpublished realist novels.

It’s an overslimplification, but one compelling argument you can make for Dick is that what happened with The Man in the High Castle and then Martian Time-Slip and then Stigmata and so many others so quickly was that he unified what had been two avenues of pursuit. He invigorated the science fiction motif with all of the emotion and ambition that he’d been reserving for his mainstream efforts. It’s by feeding all his effort into one stream that he suddenly vaulted up to this other level.

ROSE: Why do you think the mainstream efforts were never published?

LETHEM: He was working with some disadvantages. He was such an untutored writer, and there were inconsistencies to which he was prone almost to the end of his career that would undermine a realist novel of suburban ennui but could almost be seen as an advantage in his other work. The dislocation that people suffer, the way they suddenly slip out of context into this galactic alienation—that’s not accounted for by the fact that their job is bad or their marriage is bad. It sometimes makes these novels seem very arbitrary.

But he came close, and you can speculate that if one of them had been picked up by a sympathetic editor and published, as opposed to almost published, he might have applied his genius to working out some of these problems and improving the quality of his sentences. The Man in the High Castle is as beautifully written as a novel can be, and many many sequences in the last few novels are elegantly written. He could have cultivated that if he were working in an arena where that was what was rewarded. But he worked with editors who wanted him to be a brilliant extrapolator—that was the criterion he was meeting, and he met that and then some. He became a hallucinatory extrapolator. He became extrapolatively insane, and therefore arguably the greatest science fiction writer who ever lived. The essence of his achievement is the degree of commitment, the way everything was life and death for him. For him it was all crucial. It all mattered utterly. That’s what gives his work its distinctive quality.

ROSE: So is there an alternate reality in which he might have become John Cheever?

LETHEM: Well, I dunno. Another disadvantage is that serious writers in the western half of the country end up being boxed out of a certain kind of blue-blood—I mean Cheever was at The New Yorker. It’s hard to picture Dick figuring out what would tickle the East Coast establishment. Who can we think of who did that in his generation of California writers, without coming to New York and making a commitment to the standards of the East Coast intelligentsia by dwelling among them, like Pauline Kael or Joan Didion? It didn’t really work to stay in California. But then again, you can make up a story where some editor says, “And you’ve got to come to New York.”

ROSE: How did you come to edit this volume?

LETHEM: The Library of America books are so institutional, you don’t even think of somebody editing them—they seem to come out of the mists of canonical authority. But I know Geoffrey O’Brien [poet, critic, and editor in chief of the Library of America], I’m a big fan of his work. One of Geoffrey’s accomplishments there has been to open the door to things like the two volumes of crime novels that Robert Polito edited.

Surprisingly for someone with his appetite for American popular culture, for film noir and crime fiction and other native American forms, Geoffrey hadn’t really responded to Dick’s writing yet. But he had his antenna out there, and he knew that if they were going to break ground with a science fiction writer, Dick was a really important person to talk and think about. And he knew that I was one of the people to have that conversation with.

Of course, the reason it has this authoritative aura is there’s a spine of authority—everything they do gets cleared by this immensely gray and erudite board of directors. So every conversation we had was a tentative one, but I just leapt over the tentativeness and said, Here’s what you do—you need this book and this book, and you really need two volumes, and—. And he said Slow down, slow down. And by a process of negotiation we ended up with a book I’m very, very proud of. I think it’s a fantastic book. It’s a great way for Dick to enter the canon.

ROSE: How did you decide on these titles?

LETHEM: If I had to pick only one novel for someone to read, I think my head would explode. The best novels—and I think there are ten or fifteen of those—collectively form one of the greatest bodies of work in American literature, and yet no single novel or even two or three novels even begin to suggest just how rich and deep it goes. They accumulate power enormously. And I have a lot of dark-horse favorites, books I think are undervalued. Martian Time-Slip and Dr. Bloodmoney in particular are right at the level of the four books I picked. But the Library of America really is the American canon, and it’s probably not the place to be showing off your erudition by advocating for a dark-horse candidate.

There’s a level at which acclaim becomes self-reinforcing. I think Martian Time-Slip is the equal of The Man in the High Castle, but The Man in the High Castle has a greater meaning in Dick’s career and in the history of American science fiction because of the award and the way it changed his career and the way academics have gravitated toward that book to write about. Its meaning was created partly in the reception. So I reached for the books that were the unmistakable classics.

ROSE: Why is this volume restricted to novels of the ’60s?

LETHEM: The most important thing I did was insist that—if we were only going to do four novels, I wanted to at least create the possibility of doing other volumes for other phases of his career. In picking those four novels from the ’60s, I was certainly not surprising anyone. But the important curatorial work was earlier than that, in arguing strongly that there ought to be a volume for the ’60s, which implied strongly that there ought to be a volume for the ’70s. So rather than pick three of the ’60s novels and A Scanner Darkly, let’s say, by carving out a decade of his career I’m reserving I hope the opportunity for there to be a look at the ’70s work.

There are four novels that in my mind would very naturally fit—Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said; A Scanner Darkly; Valis; and The Transmigration of Timothy Archer. I like the The Divine Invasion too, but that’s a very hermetic book. Its virtues are unavailable to people who aren’t really versed in his work, whereas the other four all make their own case. I’m really talking through my hat here because I have no license to edit a second volume, but if it came to pass you’d have eight of his masterpieces.

ROSE: How did you discover him? You were 15, it was the late ’70s...

LETHEM: My friend Carl’s dad bought Carl a copy of The Golden Man. I think that was the first Philip K. Dick book I laid eyes on. I would have been 13 or 14. It feels like one of those fateful moments. I just had to know who this guy was. And my great luck was that I found a copy of Ubik in a used bookstore. That changed my life. It was like a book-length metaphor for feelings that were churning within me that were unnamed at that point. Turning the pages—all epiphany, all the time. He was my favorite writer before I finished even reading that book.

My high school years were devoted to finding and devouring all of those out-of-print titles, right down to the maximally disappointing Vulcan Hammer and Dr. Futurity. And then what weird great timing for me, because Valis was published. That was the first book of his that I got hot off the press, and it was right as I was about to go to college and beginning to think about running away to California.

I had this idea that I was going to go sit at the feet of my guru. I was very intent on it. And as I was conceiving this plan in ’81 and ’82, I got the news that he had died. So I sort of did it anyway. I was like a chicken with its head cut off—the thrust was still there, my feet moved to California and I found Paul Williams, who at that point was the nearest thing to a voice of—it’s a pretty funny thought that Paul Williams, who was so deeply of the counterculture, seemed to be the person who gave the imprimatur of the mainstream to this marginal writer, because he’d interviewed Dick for Rolling Stone and in the course of doing so called him the greatest sci-fi mind on any planet. That blurb seemed in the context of Dick’s total absence from the culture to be the greatest evidence that he had mattered. Rolling Stone? Rolling Stone!

And this was just as Paul was becoming Dick’s literary executor, because the same thing that impressed me had impressed Dick—that this was his greatest brush with legitimacy. So he wanted Paul to be the one to usher his work into its posthumous life. What’s so incredible is how devoted Paul turned out to be to this project. Paul published what was basically a ’zine, the Philip K. Dick Society Newsletter, which drew all the people like myself into this community that somehow believed that he was going to get back in print. I think the Society Newsletter had a subscription base of between 750 and 1,000 people worldwide.

ROSE: So that’s why you moved to the Bay Area?

LETHEM: It was part of it, for sure. I lived a couple of blocks from where Dick had lived when he was first writing, in the Berkeley flats. He’d lived on Francisco Street and I lived on Chestnut Street, two blocks away. I used to wander over to the Lucky Dog Pet Store and marvel that these places he’d written about were real and I could dwell in the same landscape. Tupper & Reed, a music store he’d worked at, was still in operation—in fact, the electric guitar I’m seated beside on the cover of my new book I think was bought at Tupper & Reed.

ROSE: Obviously your first couple of novels relate very strongly to his work. What did you discover about him in writing them?

LETHEM: The first couple of books are really strongly influenced, but they’re not nearly as influenced as the one that precedes them—the one I wrote when I was 18 and that will never be published. I was absolutely shameless in imitating him. It was how I learned—I mean musicians learn by playing songs that other people write, and it was sort of morbid and sentimental but I thought, Okay, I’ll write the books he didn’t live to write. I’ll keep it going for him.

But of course you get captivated by your own things that almost involuntarily come to the surface. By the time of Gun, with Occasional Music, I was realizing that there were ways I wanted to write that weren’t totally encompassed by admiration for Dick, that in fact I was thinking about Raymond Chandler and Ross MacDonald and Alice in Wonderland among other things. But he’s still the formative underlying influence on every book. I can see that Amnesia Moon resembles a Dick novel more than The Fortress of Solitude, but for me the evidence is everywhere that he’s still my master.

ROSE: Do you think if he were starting out when you did that he would have had an easier time of it?

LETHEM: It’s really such a strange speculation. He’d have had a different time of it. He’s so deeply a product of the particular pressures of conformity and madness of that immediate postwar American reality—as much as Lenny Bruce or the Beats. He’s so deeply of his time and place that it’s hard to think of what kind of mind he would have been without World War II and nuclear fear and McCarthyism and the glimmerings of the counterculture. It’s easy to overlook that because he seems so contemporary, he has so much to say about the culture of late capitalism, he was such a prognosticator and seems so fluidly of our time. But if you immerse yourself in his work, you realize he’s of his time. So it becomes a very abstract speculation.

One thing it’s easy to say is that if he were inclined to make the kind of implicit criticisms of late capitalism that he did make, he’d be George Saunders or Don DeLillo. His satirical mode is something that has been subsequently legitimated, let’s say that. But I don’t think it’s an accident that he was so marginal. I think he needed to be.

I think there was something about him that was deeply fugitive. I think he might have found a way to work in opposition to whatever status quo he located. And it may seem cruel to say this, but I think his canonization may have only been possible after the man himself and his instinct for disrepute was off fhe playing field. If he’d been around, continuing to write and continuing to give interviews, he would have made sure that anyone trying to espouse his work, including me going around saying he’s one of the greatest writers of the 20th century, would feel uncomfortable doing so. That we’d misunderstood or betrayed him in some way. It’s very hard to believe in a Dick who’s been domesticated to a life of literary prestige the way we are presently domesticating him.