So let’s shake the metaphorical etch-a-sketch and look at one of the central questions of Blade Runner that the “is Deckard a Replicant?” issue really serves as a stalking horse for: What is the relationship between memory and identity?
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This began as a review for Cyberpunk 2077 and changed into something else. From the piece:
The real world didn’t copy cyberpunk, but it rhymed it, and then one-upped it. A novel set in the real 2021, that accurately reflects it, sent back to Gibson or one of his contemporaries, would be an incomprehensible trip: a hit of uncut psychedelia that would be both banal and mind-shattering (equal parts Dick and Ballard, shot as a documentary).
Crafting new metaphors is a difficult task: very few of us try to do it regularly, and oftentimes, when we do, it is supposed to apply to a particular situation that will arise once and then never again – and so our metaphors are purpose-made for one thing and one thing only, and it is only an accident when it becomes more generally applied.
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Because if we're all going to die then we might as well die in luxury SUVs with fuel economy measured in gallons per mile with the Pixar movie Cars playing in the back seat so the kids don't notice that they're breathing in poison.
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But all of this is beside the point: the fact that we can pick out two dominant aesthetics in the visual media form of what is supposed to be a “literature of ideas” is a problem. It indicates, if anything, a lack of ideas. If our options are just a visual vocabulary iteration of the old Star Wars vs. Star Trek debate that no one but the people having it are interested in, we've got problems.
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