Customer Reviews

Blade Runner 4 (Gollancz Sf S.)

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I found this in the bargain bin in W H Smith and read it reluctantly. In the last year I've read it about 3 times. It really is quite good.
It concerns a female blade runner, top of her game, who is asked to find Tyrell's owl - the one you see in the movie. Her investigations lead her to loose her job and set her on a quest for answers all over futuristic LA and deep down into the ruined Tyrell corporation (which was blown up in an earlier book). Unbeknown to her, she is being filmed (in order to create a movie!) and all her actions are being pushed towards a final conclusion in which she realises the truth about the replicant program - what its real purpose was - (not to serve the off-world colonies), and the truth about herself - why she is such a good blade-runner and why she looks like Tyrell's niece, Rachel...
It's been a long while since I read BR 2 & 3. I remember the second one being quite interesting and the third being so awful I wanted to burn it and wash my hands with acid soap.
However, in this novel the characters are set in the same universe as Blade Runner but they are far enough removed from the original book to be able to invent them whole new agendas. And the purpose behind the replicant program is both stunning and believable - and something the film never dealth with (or needed to). You remember that Roy Batty killed Tyrell by squeezing out his eyes? When you find out WHY he killed him that way - you will be bowled over. Third sequels (as films or books) usually suck but I cannot reccomend this one enough. Sure, there are some exceptionally annoying monologues as plot-advancement devices that make you want to scream - but it's worth pushing past them.

The third of these authorised sequels, and this one improved a bit, capturing a little more of the feel and ambience, I think.

Having a cool owl probably doesn't hurt, either. That is part of the focus of the story, is there a real bird of prey still around, or not? This is what has to be discovered as the inhabitants and focal characters of this novel continue to not have a good time at all.

Probably like a number of Philip K. Dick fans I bought this title hoping against hope that just maybe a smidgen of PKD's genius had rubbed off on his friend Kevin. It did not take more than a few pages into the first chapter to disabuse me of that delusion. Iris starts out as a distinctly unsympathetic character and never gains a degree of warmth. Jeter writes this like a hack contemporary cop potboiler, a genre I studiously avoid these days. Jeter himself never seems to warm to the work and it noodles around for most of the book without ever seeming to hit its stride. Jeter tries to toss in a little PC vulnerability to add a nanometer of depth to Iris but I kept turning the pages hoping some skinjob would just air her out. Her little furbie pet only increased my urge to retch. The whole tone of cop sympathetic martydom complex is so antithetical to PKD's antiauthoritarianism that I have to wonder why anyone, aside from Madison Avenue minded publisher would have selected Jeter. Yeah, he was a friend of PKD and he was a writer but anyone who read VALIS and recognized the Jeter character in it, knows he was the last person who should have been selected.

Since the two books in this series were the first time I read anything by Jeter, he may do better with his original writing. I have zero inclination to find out. A few months ago I rented a so-so DVD documentary on the life of Philip K. Dick, "The Pentultimate Truth" which included many interviews with his friends and family. K.W. Jeter was included and his short segment toward the end was the most illuminating in terms of understanding why the "Bladerunner" series is such a disappointment. Right up until PKD expressed some doubts about his perceptions and state of mind shortly before he died, many of his friends considered him quite insane. This began during a conference in the '70's in Europe when Phil in a moment of brilliant prescience declared that he had come to believe that reality as we commonly agree it to be, is a vast computer generated virtual construction constantly undergoing updating. Now whether you subscribe to that idea or not, it certainly does not reflect in these post-Matrix days, the ravings of a lunatic. Sadly, that's just how some of his friends, including Jeter, viewed that statement and they began to distance themselves from him. I'll hand it to Jeter that he did have the decency to stick with PKD to the bitter end but he just never "got it" with regard to Phil's vision. In the DVD Jeter shows the first and only emotional reaction when he throws up his hands expressing gratitude that Phil's expression of self doubt proved he had not gone to his grave a complete lunatic. I don't doubt the sincerity of Jeter's friendship but this Bladerunner series demonstrates his utter inability to fill Philip K. Dick's shoes. But then nobody ever can.