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Comment by TheOtherHobbes | Hacker News Reader

I think Blade Runner and Alien helped destroy mainstream science fiction.

Before Blade Runner almost anything could be science fiction. After Blade Runner science fiction meant detective noir with #tech_upgrade - clones, memory implants, dystopia. Or it was US truckers and/or the military fighting nasty aliens in spaaaaaaace. (Star Wars and its magic space knights was always more fantasy with a science fiction stage set.)

Blade Runner did it far better than the others, but then we had decades of mostly mediocre book knock-offs, especially in the UK. (Gibson gets a pass for taking the new trope even further by being a brilliant stylist, mixing in some tech orientalism, and inventing cyberspace.)

It's a stunning, iconic masterpiece of a movie with an unfortunate chilling cultural effect.

And ironically the Philip K Dick original was... very different.

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Pretty sure Star Wars destroyed mainstream science fiction in film.

Close. Star Trek. Cheapened the entirety of the genre.

"A Trip to the Moon" is what ruined it for me.

>(Gibson gets a pass for taking the new trope even further by being a brilliant stylist, mixing in some tech orientalism, and inventing cyberspace.)

Gibson was also writing in that vein long before the release of Neuromancer, which repurposes some themes, plotlines, and even characters from his earlier short stories. And my understanding is he was working on Neuromancer before Blade Runner was released and without knowledge of it during its production.

I will say I'm reading through his short story compilation Burning Chrome and it is amazing. I don't think he ever matched Neuromancer with his other novels and over time they've just exposed his weaknesses more and more, which is a bummer. But he's absolutely at the top of his game in short stories.

> And ironically the Philip K Dick original was... very different.

True. Ridley Scott and Philip K Dick collaborated very closely to tell it like they wanted it to. Studios liked it ... not so much.

No, Dick did not collaborate with Scott at all. He was not formally involved in the development of the film. He didn't write anything and wasn't given any say.

Dick actually hated the first drafts of the script, which deviated even more from the novel. He was also upset that he was asked to write a new novelization of the script that would essentially replace DADoES in print. He made comments in the press about how Hollywood was ruining his book.

He really only changed his tune after his agent persuaded the producers to invite Dick to the set in 1981. He was basically coddled by Scott and his team (who was told Dick was creating bad publicity and needed to be assuaged) for a whole day, shown around the set and given a rough cut preview that included several major sequences and unfinished VFX by Douglas Trumbull.

After that, he not only spoke highly of the screenplay (which had evolved with the help of David Peoples, though it didn't exactly get more faithful to the novel), he wrote enthusiastically about how the film was going to change the science fiction genre for ever. Unfortunately, he never got to see the finished film.

You are right. I went back and checked on Wikipedia. Now I cannot reconstruct why I believed PKD and Scott collaborated.

(Gibson gets a pass for taking the new trope even further by being a brilliant stylist, mixing in some tech orientalism, and inventing cyberspace.)

Gibson was horrified after walking out of a theater after seeing Blade Runner; in that Scott had visualized and shown onscreen the aesthetic of (at that point unpublished) Neuromancer.

>Before Blade Runner almost anything could be science fiction. After Blade Runner science fiction meant detective noir with #tech_upgrade - clones, memory implants, dystopia.

If only.

Moon. Contact. Interstellar. Gravity. Project Hail Mary.

None of these fit those tropes.

It didn't destroy anything; it just set a mold for the next few decades that was used to cookie-cut copies from. It cut a rut, and movie execs LOOOOVE a profitable rut to wallow in.

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