The Essay

Blade Runner's future is now 40 years old. 5 writers explore the impact and legacy Ridley Scott's 1982 classic where replicants escape to a retrofitted Earth only to meet their end at the hands of the washed out, titular Blade Runner played by, Harrison Ford. Adapted from Philip K. Dick's equally classic 1968 novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep.Both film and book are meditations on what it is to be human but we have been looking through the eyes of the film ever since it plunged us into its acid rain, neon coated, West Coast nightmare of flaming night skies, commercial ziggurats, flying cars and fake animals. Now its future is our present. We live in a world of mass species die off, environmental crisis, rapidly developing A.I., all powerful corporations & extreme divides between rich and poor.Film and book have bled into our culture in many different ways. Frances Morgan, writer and researcher into electronic music at the Royal College of Art, pierces the sound barrier of a film that defined the fu