First off, let me say that I’m a pretty big cyberpunk fan. Ever since I first played Shadowrun on the Super Nintendo I think I was hooked. I’ve spend quite a bit of time watching movies and reading books that other people have described as “cyberpunk.” However, I almost felt the need to turn in my nerd card when I only found out last year that there was a trilogy of novels written by K.W. Jeter that were followups to one of my favorite movies of all time: Blade Runner. After scouring Amazon to find copies of these books and get them ordered, I got myself all psyched up even further by watching Blade Runner special edition on Blu Ray. I was as ready as I was going to be to get my read on.
Blade Runner 2: The Edge of Human
If you haven’t watching the movie in a while, or aren’t a huge movie trivia buff kind of person, you may not be familiar with just how many mistakes, plot holes, and glaring continuity errors there are in Blade Runner. Well Blade Runner 2 takes on these mistakes as its own plot.
The basic plot summary (you’ll have needed to see the movie to understand a lot of this) takes place several months after the events in the movie. Deckard lives in isolation outside LA with the replicant Rachael who is being stored in a Tyrell transport container (which slows down the replicant aging process). He meets Sarah Tyrell, niece of Eldon Tyrell, heiress to the entire Tyrell Corporation and the human template for the Rachael replicant. She asks Deckard to hunt down the “missing” sixth replicant. At the same time, the human template for Roy Batty hires Dave Holden, (the blade runner attacked by Leon), to help him hunt down the man he believes is the sixth replicant: Deckard.
The human Roy Batty doesn't hug doves.
It seems more like fan service than anything else as the book crafts many of the errors like: why does the number of missing replicants change, how did Leon get a gun into a police interrogation room, etc, and crafts these into a mystery/conspiracy plot involving the Tyrell Corporation, Deckard, Batty, and a few other characters from the film. The book spends a good deal of time re-living classic scenes from the movie, and brings back a character from the original novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep. Again, it seems more like a fan service novel than anything else, but overall it’s decently entertaining. If the purpose was to make you say “I remember this” from the movie, and to tie together some of the plot holes, then it does its job. However, the actual meat of the “new story” where the plot holes are filled, just isn’t very interesting. I don’t enjoy huge overarching conspiracy plots that much because they don’t seem that believable to me, and the conspiracy angle that this book goes for is just a little too much.
I give it 3 iconic trench coat wearing heroes
Blade Runner 3: Replicant Night 
I generally read (depending on the page/print size) about 20 pages a night before I go to sleep. Assuming I’m not passing out drunk on the couch that is. I don’t know what it was about this book, but I just could not read more than 5 or 6 pages without either falling asleep, or just getting bored. After watching Blade Runner again I remembered that it’s not a wall-to-wall action movie. I wasn’t expecting a ton of action from the novels, but my god this book is boring. After having read KW Jeter’s Star Wars novels I should have expected that he’d get back to his roots of having tedious, several page-long internal monologues. But I don’t believe that Deckard is the kind of guy who thinks to him this much. There are chapters where nothing but internal monologue happens.
hang on...this book couldn't be THAT bad...RIGHT?!?!
The basic plot of this book takes place after the events of Blade Runner 2 where Deckard and Sarah Tyrell now live on Mars after fleeing earth in the wake of the events at the end of Blade Runner 2. It explores the origins of the Tyrell corporation, Sarah, her parents, Eldon Tyrell, and the attempt by some of the Tyrell employees to bring the company back. It also follows Deckard, who was hired to oversee the making of the Blade Runner movie (yes part of the book is about making a Blade Runner movie), and is drawn into a mission to help out the replicants living out in the far colonies.
There’s a lot of ….. weird stuff …… that happens in this book. Maybe I was expecting cyberpunk and was fed a healthy dose of pretty hard science fiction and that’s why it didn’t sit well. But the only thing “Blade Runner” about this book is the handful of characters and the fact that there are replicants in it. If you’re super into the Blade Runner universe you might find this book somewhat enjoyable. But honestly it’s very boring, really weird, doesn’t have that much to do with the actual meat of the Blade Runner universe that the original movie and Blade Runner 2 dealt with, and it doesn’t really offer much of an ending.
I give it 1 sad Rachel
Blade Runner 4: Eye and Talon
If you were scared off by the last book, then I guess you’re back for more. The 3rd book in the trilogy is actually pretty decent. It’s short, it’s easy to read (no multi-page monologues), and it has a decent amount of action.
The book now follows a female Blade Runner named Iris, who is sent on a missing to recover Eldon Tyrell’s owl (seen in the first movie briefly when Deckard meets Tyrell and Rachel), which has been stolen. For reasons unknown, the owl is very important for something it contains. Things take a strange turn when Iris is attacked and thrust into a conspiracy that unveils the true nature of the Tyrell corporation.
Man, I kind of feel like a tool writing that, but hey, that’s what it’s about. I found this book infinitely more readable, first because it starts with a nice action sequence, and second because the characters are rather interesting. I should note that I enjoyed 4/5 of this book. I hate dialogue sequences where one character knows everything, but refuses to just tell you what’s going on, but rather goes on and on and on with phrases like “you just don’t see what’s going on, do you?” Well there’s about a 25-page section like that in this book where the actual conspiracy plot is excruciatingly drawn out in a terrible dialogue sequence. I don’t know why KW Jeter thinks that this would be enjoyable, but if someone had something to tell me, but rather than just saying it drew it out over a 4-hour conversation, I’d just punch them in the face. But that aside, the conspiracy angle actually makes sense. Even it’s just more fan service to cover up the plot holes that only the most hardcore of fans complain about, it’s vastly more entertaining that Blade Runner 3. Again, you need to be the kind of person who is really interested in the Blade Runner universe to get into this book, but as one of those people I dug it.
I wanted to rate it higher just because it reminded me that I was reading Blade Runner 3, but instead I give it 3 big handguns
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