Even today, Blade Runner still looks like the future. But the book it’s based on is more relevant to our blandly hateful present. The genius of Scott’s Blade Runner was in mashing up gritty detective noir with science fiction, creating a policeman hero for the future. But the source material — Philip K. Dick’s 1968 novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? — was both more cynical and more prescient. Its cop hero isn’t a hero, he’s a smaller-than-life monster. Do Androids Dream…? sketches a bureaucratic machinery of terror that, in the age of Black Lives Matter and Donald Trump, looks more queasily familiar than ever. It was written for an age of overreaching policing and sociopathic lack of empathy. (The Verge)
