Customer Reviews

BLADE RUNNER 3 : Replicant Night

5 star:		(1)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(4)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(5)

 

 

Jeter's "Blade Runner 2: The Edge of Human" was a fairly good read that captured most of the feel of the movie Blade Runner. (It's important to realize that these books are sequels to the film, not the Phillip K. Dick Book "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?") I got the feeling that Jeter's intention of his first sequel was to provide closure to what happened after the events of the film and would create new adventures in the Blade Runner future. Instead, in "Replicant Night", he goes right back to Los Angeles 2019 and revisits scenes that were done in the film. I felt I did not need those scenes embellished any further, I wanted something fresh. Unfortunately, there was nothing fresh about this book at all.

What can I possibly say that is GOOD about this book?? The Blade Runner trademark! I guess that's all Jeter needed to sell this book. Obviously so, because the book itself is only useful for emergency burning paper.

It suffers from the 2nd book's replay of the movie's events, ONLY MUCH MUCH WORSE. There were just TOO many replays this time, and it just became a rediculous "Find The Replays" Activity Book!

My advice (and apparently many others' too) is to skip this installment of the Blade Runner books. Just pretend you never saw it....

I enjoyed the moive, and the original and the blade runner 2 book. However, this book 3 is not worth the read. Once you start the book, it gives you teasers, and deckard the information but not you. So you wait and read to find out what deckard knows. Then when you do, it was not much. It reads more like a crime drama that takes place in a movie set than anything to do with science fiction. The author must have been hanging around movie sets at the time of writing. The book basically makes deckard look lame, he does nothing on his own, he only reacts to all these people feeding him different information. The story does not even make a good case for why he is picked for this information. Some author's write a private bible of the world they are writing about, then they write the book based on that world they created in their bible. However I get the feeling that this book is lacking so much information because the author never took the time to write a bible before the book and doe not know any of the answers himself to this world in the book. My advice is to stop at the second book. Don't let this book ruin the series for you. Too bad someone like Kevin Anderson did not write this.

This book is not lost scenes from the movie. It would be hard to be further from it. There is an annoying habit of trying to use as many of the original characters as possible. Especially bad because most of them died in the original movie. Tons of misguided effort goes into making major revelations about these characters without contradicting the original movie.

Jeter does continue exploring the line of what is human, what are dreams, and what is death. I have more criticisms of the story but as you might have guessed, I am going out of my way not to spoil it for you. Why? Because it is interesting once you get used to the style of delaying explanations. It feels more as if the answers are used as teasers instead of a mystery with answers to be ferreted out.

Other criticisms: I thought Roy Batty was a constructed ultimate fighting machine, no longer. I find time dilation easier to accept and better science fiction then fluid time. A goof with the wild owls. Metaphysical drugs don't fit with the tech style of the story.

I finished the book. Due to unfounded biological claims, the premise of the entire mystery, I have to recommend against reading this book.

K.W. Jeter is an exceptional and creative author. His first sequel to BR, The Edge of Human, was almost flawlessly Phildickian and definitely fascinating. That said, Replicant Night is a letdown. The creativity is still there (many new and interesting concepts are explored), but the ponderous reiteration every other chapter reads like a marketing decision: "Now, K.W., people only read one chapter per night. Don't want to lose them. Also, Dick was always so vague. Make sure you spell things out and hammer them in. After all, we can't expect commercial success if the reader has to think, can we?" Apart from the dead horse syndrome, still twitching in the form of "who's really human?", and the silly role-reversal device of Earth vs. Anywhere Else, Jeter has no qualms about re-enacting exact scenes from the movie in EVERY SINGLE POSSIBLE WAY, usually with re-incarnations of primary characters. In fact, new characters never seem to last very long. Break out of the cycle, dude. Please.

All the characters were familiar and that can be a big draw in reading a work in a series. There's a feeling of comfort since you know them, even if you don't particularly find them attractive.

The opening will be confusing if you don't know the characters and maybe will be anyway. It jumps from a scene being filmed to the action and back again. In the end you see the same cast as the original movie doing pretty much the same stuff as before.

I found the book to be tedious as he retold old scenes from the movie and wove them into the new plot. I would rather have had new material covering new ground entirely, but that is a personal preference.

I did not finish this book completely and probably will not do so.

Phil Dick was strange and maybe that's why his stories were appealing. Ridley Scott did a masterful job making Dick's disjointed writing into a classic dark and dystopian science fiction film. Replicant Night ignobly retires the concept by forcing where it should never have gone. Based on the film and not Dick. Noir becomes gris. Pure drek. Nothing original. No real story. So plodding I had to stop about half way through. I can't tell you how it ends because the author simply made it so I could not care less. Why do I have an image now of Deckard in a wife-beater, as Willy Lomond living a life of dissipated desperation? Damn you Jeter.

The book could be condensed and made more enthralling without Jeter's constant references to the first two installments of the trilogy. This is especially true in the beginning of the book.

I wouldn't recommend it to die hard BR (movie) fans as it lacks the depth of the original. While the movie embellished existing technology and explored moral and philosophical questions surrounding it, this book is more of a fantasy/action story.

Nor will it be of much interest to someone new to the BR universe. Despite Jeter's constant references to past events, you really need to know the original story and how the characters fit into it.

That said, it's a decent read with some interesting plot twists towards the end. So, if you like sci-fi and have a casual interest in BR, this book may be of some interest to you.

Jeter is very good at incorporating noir into sci fi, and that is certainly true in both Replicant Night and Edge of Human. The novels follow the storyline of the film, but in flavor, if not in plot, are more similar to Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep.

Unfortunately, I'm more of a Ridley Scott fan. I found Jeter's portrayal of the characters wholly unsympathetic. That's pretty much par for Jeter (or Dick for that matter), but it really bothered me in this case. About the only exception was Sebastian, but even he was too much like his dim-witted counterpart in DADOES. I also wished he'd gotten in the heads of the replicant characters more. I really would like to have known what was going through Rachael's head as her life slipped away, but Jeter doesn't give her any voice at all.

When all is said and done, though, I suspect I'd also have problems if a more cinematic author had written the Blade Runner novels. Though they might be truer to Scott's vision, they would leave out too much of Dick's.

There is little to recommend for this book. The only way I finished reading it was by reading only the first and last sentences of a paragraph. Near the end of the book, I was only reading the first and last paragraph of a chapter.

This book is really bad.