1983 Hugo for Dramatic Presentation - BLADE RUNNER

People will endlessly tell you that Blade Runner is a brilliant exploration of identity and artificiality in a corporate universe. It is those things, though I’d have to say that the source material, Philip K. Dick’s amazing novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, explores these themes in much more daring and challenging ways. No, the real brilliance and influence of Blade Runner is the rich world that Scott creates for the story and characters to inhabit. Every time I watch it, I find myself almost ignoring the plot and characters to stare at the sets and art direction. The city is gorgeously dark and forboding with its giant ad blimps, stark pyramidal mega-buildings, and flying cars zooming through polluted darkness. Scott also does a great job blending noir and sf. This film almost single-handedly plants the seeds for the genre of cyberpunk.

In 2019, Los Angeles is a densely populated, overcast, polluted hellhole in a world run by amoral corporations. Lifelike robots called replicants have been invented to serve humanity, especially in space, but these robots have a tendency to rebel. Some escape and try to blend in to the human population. Rick Deckard (Harrison Ford) is a blade runner, tasked with finding and “retiring” rogue replicants. Deckard is drawn out of retirement to hunt a group of replicants that are trying to extend their brief lives. He also begins to fall in love with an especially complex replicant named Rachel (Sean Young), in the film’s best scenes.

I’ll readily admit the film’s greatness, though I’m personally not as fond of it as most sf fans. Really, anytime the replicants Pris (Daryl Hannah) and Roy (Rutger Hauer) are at the center of attention, my eyes glaze over…and that’s most of the film’s final third. I think Scott was more interested in creating threatening villains than exploring the aforementioned complexities of identity. So, these replicants spend all of their time threatening and killing (and flipping around and punching Harrison Ford), and we don’t get much of a sense of the emotions they’ve developed or the moral complexities of their situation. On paper, this should be a very ambivalent situation, but Scott can’t resist a brutally physical confrontation between “good” and “evil” at the film’s climax. Things do thankfully get more complex at the end of the fight between Roy and Deckard, but that only serves to make the preceding twenty minutes of flipping, punching, and shooting feel all the more pointless. The film has gone through several different cuts, but I’m still yet to see one that’s paced well. But, the subtext is there if you look for it, and, most importantly, the film looks gorgeous.

1982 was a great year for science fiction films. It also saw the release of Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, which is still the best Star Trek film, in my opinion, and easily one of the top five science fiction films of the ‘80s. Still, it’s hard to argue with Blade Runner beating it for the Hugo. I’m not as keen on E.T. beating both Khan and Blade Runner for the Saturn, but that is an understandable decision as well.

Grade: B+

2010 Hugo, Locus Fantasy, WFA, Clarke, 2009 BSFA Winner: THE CITY & THE CITY by China Miéville

One of the central stories of the twentieth century is the drawing (and redrawing) of borders. As empires rose and fell over the course of the first two world wars (the Ottoman, the Austro-Hungarian, the British, the Soviet, etc.) borders kept changing, countries were partitioned, and we got immigration debates, ethnic cleansing, and global terrorism as a result. So, it’s an immensely important issue, but one that sf has not delved into often.

China Miéville’s The City & The City is all about the fictions and realities of borders, which are always arbitrary on some level. The Eastern European (maybe Balkan?) cities of Besźel and Ul Qoma not only border each other, they share the same space and are almost everywhere entagled. Therefore, just walking or driving down the street, citizens must always watch not to violate the border by seeing into the other city or even accidentally stepping into it. The novel is full of rich cultural details that explain how much the border defines the everyday lives of the people in this “divided city;” Miéville highlights the fact that borders are human constructions by creating a situation in which people must constantly construct one. Anyone who does violate this border falls into the grasp of a secret police force that bridges the cities called Breach. I would’ve liked a little more history as to how this came about, but I see why Mieville avoided the question (what would be believable?). Still, it would be nice to hear more about how these cities existed on the contentious borders of the Ottoman Empire or the Warsaw Pact.

The actual plot unfolds as a noir mystery. Tyador Borlú is a police detective in Besźel who is to solve the death of a young woman with ties to Ul Qoma. As the mystery unfolds, it raises all sorts of questions about the border, the cities’ twinned histories, and Breach. These genre conventions keep the novel moving at a brisk pace and they make it imminently readable. They also provide some of the novel’s few problems. It is, by necessity, somewhat formulaic, and parts of this novel will feel very familiar if you know the genre at all (it’s very reminiscent of Chabon’s Yiddish Policeman’s Union, either through direct inspiration or the shared inspirations). It’s very well done here, though, and the result makes for an engaging read that still leaves a lot to think about. I also personally prefer this concrete murder mystery approach to the dreamlike version of a similar idea in Valente’s Palimpsest. This was a fantastic novel, and it’s easy to see why it’s won so many sf awards this season.

Grade: A-

1978 World Fantasy Award - OUR LADY OF DARKNESS by Fritz Leiber

One thing that worried me about the World Fantasy Award was that Fritz Leiber won one. He was not my favorite Hugo-winning novelist, but I know that his fantasy work was pioneering, genre-establishing stuff. Our Lady of Darkness isn’t really science fiction or fantasy though; it’s a horror novel. And it’s horror of the subtle, “there’s something dark and unsettling out there” style pioneered by Lovecraft (who warrants several mentions within the novel).

The main character is a genre writer named Franz Westen (which is similar enough to Leiber’s name to raise an eyebrow). Westen is living in San Francisco, and he’s become fascinated with a book called Megapolisomancy by a turn-of-the-century spiritualist named de Castries. Megapolisomancy turns out to be a form of magic that uses the reality distorting nature of big cities with their high (and, in San Francisco’s case, even sometimes pyramid-shaped) buildings to work. Most of the book actually reads like a love letter to San Francisco, which is my personal favorite city, so I enjoyed this quite a bit. The first third consists almost entirely of Westen hanging out with his quirky neighbors, and it almost feels like an Armistead Maupin knock-off. But, there are hints that something creepy is going on in Westen’s building, as he seems to witness a strange creature lurking in his room from a nearby hill. The next third of the novel consists entirely of a discussion of de Castries' life with a fellow connoisseur of the supernatural, and here we basically get Leiber’s love of Lovecraft and a discussion of Crowley and other figures of early twentieth-century mysticism.

It’s a bit creepy, but it’s not until the final third that any real sense of thrill, horror, or even suspense works its way into the book. The climax comes rather suddenly and ends even more quickly. In other words, the pacing is a little off. Still, compared to the other novels of his I’ve read, Leiber has reined in his reliance on stereotypes and his need for over-the-top, oddball characters (though neither is entirely gone). I didn’t mind the fact that this rather short book consists almost entirely of conversations or that the plot moved slowly, and I found megapolisomancy an interesting enough concept to make it all worthwhile. This was definitely my favorite Leiber book of the three I've now read.

Grade: B