Pris's birthday today

For the Bladerunner fans among you, here's a little Easter egg from the movie: today, 14Feb16, happens to be Pris's inception date. Never noticed it before, but its clear as can be.

She's a military/leisure model. Which translates into someone you DO NOT want to fight (stronger, faster, tougher than any human). But her leisure-mode provides for advanced doxy skills, which presumably are also superhuman.

I always liked the idea of a doxy bot (sex bot) who was also a superhuman warrior. A nice combination of traits. I mean, if you are taking a long journey into danger, what better companion.

Used that concept a lot in my AU stories, all inspired long ago by Pris.


A decent article and picts here...

io9.gizmodo.com/happy-birthday-pris-1759078355

Shadar

That reminds me. Do yo think any of our politicians would pass a Voigt Kampf test?

--Brantley

brantley wrote: That reminds me. Do yo think any of our politicians would pass a Voigt Kampf test?

--Brantley

Bernie would pass the test and then get the guy giving the test to buy him lunch. Hilary would talk about something else. Trump would fire the guy giving the test. Jeb would keep asking what was going on. Cruz would try to change the test to include Jesus.

(And no, this isn't political commentary... hopefully humor. But I wrote down the first thing I thought of with each one in any case.)

Excellent, Shadar. I think you captured each personality as they are in real life. It is often our first thoughts that are the truest to how we actually feel about something. Humor is also a way to say what is on your mind and speak the truth without getting killed (sometimes).

brantley wrote:

That is such an awesome movie, and that scene... absolute gold. Just don't ask about the mother he doesn't have.

Many years past I used to argue that the movie wasn't true enough to Phillip K. Dicks novel that it was based on (Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep), but those days are long passed. The movie stands well on its own, as does the book.

It explores a 19th century concept that the frontier (in this case the other planets) is where things are happening, where this is vitality, and those left on Earth, who didn't emigrate, are sinking into the ooze, so to speak. Replicants (androids) are essential out on the fringe, but not allowed to return to Earth, what with their more-than-human abilities, so they are hunted and "retired".

But that isn't the future that Tyrell (as in Tyrell Industries, maker of replicants) sees. He's making androids who think they really are human. A scary concept, but an open door to all kinds of SF, including my own flavor of it.

A machine like Rachel who looks very human, thinks she's human and can even pass the test that supposedly detects replicants. But which could have all kinds of more-than-human abilities. Is he defining a new kind of humanity, or destroying our humanity?

Woodclaw wrote:
My general feeling is that the movie took many concept of the book and tried to make them more approchable in many ways. Dick's narrative is so peculiar and so very personal in many ways that it's really hard to figure out the ideas behind it most of the time. Even the logic behind the V-K Test is pretty damn hard, all of it rely on some perceived defects in the replicants' way of behaving, but this imperfections can as well be human flaws, so the question remains: what defines a human as a human.

To answer Fats's question, I much prefer the Director's Cut, the original ending with Deckard telling about life away from Earth really didn't suit the noir atmosphere of the movie (and the whole cyberpunk genre).

Every PKD novel has so much in it, that it's impossible to put it in a movie. (And a lot of PKD adaptions are shitty movies. Payback and Next for example loose all the nuance that made the story great. Blade Runner is true to the essence of the novel.)

My favorite part of the V-K test is that it relies upon being culturally human from the future, and the entire conceit of why the book is called "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep". All life on Earth is almost extinct and people need to have a pet to show they care and to do their part to keep things alive. Even casual things (killing a spider) is anathema to the humans of the future. I love the "Electric Sheep" part of it, PKD really does do a great job of world building and psychology. Some people can't afford a _real_ animal, so they get a fake one (with fake vets). Totally awesome. But he builds all this, so that when they ask those questions in the V-K test, they have a framework around them.

The androids don't have the emotional response to harming a turtle or killing a spider, so they show up as "non human".

If you read the V-K questions in the book, most humans of the 20th century would fail. We simply don't have the emotional attachment to killing a spider or a fly, most think that's a good thing and would feel a thrill of victory/success instead of horror. That would show up in the V-K test, and would be worse than the android's response.

The book asks "what is human" and does it in a frame work that says "you, the human reading this book, would not be considered human." And this puts the ethical question up front and personal. If the difference between something and human is so little that a test that would FAIL real humans ... are they not human? (You can then unpack this for lots of questions on race, gender, religion, and identity.)

Part of the idea of Rachel passing is not just technological. She was raised to be human, and raised in human society. That cultural programming sank in. She reacts appropriately to the emotional laden questions. The androids aren't psychopaths by hardware.

Rachel is human. You, the reader of the book, is not.

That's PKD for you in a nutshell.

I love both the book and the movie. But the movie really can't be called "Do Android's Dream of Electric Sheep" as most of that context doesn't properly make the movie. It's just too much/too dense to spend time on. Instead it only slices part of the book but does an excellent job of that. It's really a great example of how to adapt a work into it's own unique thing.

Might be time to re-read the book and re-watch the movie. It's been awhile.