Tag Archives: Blade Runner

Tuesday Night Party Club #11

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Artstuff

In the summer of 2010 I was contacted by Lee Williams and Norman Fenlason, inquiring if I’d be interested in providing illustrations for a new editon of the Dark Conspiracy RPG. Dark Conspiracy is set in a dystopian, near future America devastated by the “Greater Depression” and the appearance of a host of monsters. Of course I said yes.

Below is a gallery of the work I did for the main rulebook – a couple of banners (in right and left side page versions) to adorn pages that were mostly text, four interior illustrations and my cover illustration in both the original black and white and the final color version.

I also illustrated two scenarios for Dark Conspiracy – Detour and Acute Care. I’ll post those later. The scenarios got published first, as PDFs available through drivethruRPG.com. The rulebook was made available in 2012, also as a PDF. Unfortunately 3Hombres, Lee and Norm’s company, no longer exists so the PDFs are no longer available. There are used book stores but there’s no such thing as a used PDF shop.

Story Seed #35

A sequel need not be a rerun: Blade Runner

Blade Runner was released in 1982. It tells the story of Deckard’s last case. Deckard is a man who hunts Replicants i.e. a “Blade Runner”. Peplicants are artificial people, slaves with short life spans. They apparently rebel often enough that there’s a profession dedicated to “retiring”, killing, them.

Blade Runner was not a financial success on release but it built up enough of a following that a sequel, Blade Runner 2049, was finally released in 2017. It tells the story of K’s last case. K is a replicant employed as a Blade Runner – a slave who hunts and kills slaves. As part of the case K attempts to find Deckard, long missing since the events of Blade Runner.

Both Blade Runner and Blade Runner 2049 are lovely films. They do what the best science fiction films do – they suggest larger worlds beyond what is presented in their stories. Both films focus on hunters of Replicants. Fine. But that means we’re asked to simpathize with the killers of slaves. Replicants are not robots. They are living biological creations with memories and a desire to stay alive.

“I’ve seen things you people wouldn’t believe. Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion. I watched C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhäuser Gate. All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain. Time to die.”

Roy Batty, the lead Replicant, says this just after saving Deckard from a deadly fall, just before his life runs out. Batty proves better able to change than Deckard. Batty saves Deckard’s life. Deckard retires and runs away from his life as a licensed murderer. Screw Deckard. Screw the Blade Runners. Consider a sequel that focuses on the Replicants.

Replicant tells that story of another model of Roy Batty. Because of course there are other models of Batty. If artificial people can be made then multiple versions of the same model will be made. That’s efficient. That’s profitable. This Batty doesn’t know that he’s a Replicant. He’s a soldier out in space, fighting some corporate war. He’s pulled off the line by agents of the Tyrrell corporation. They’re “retiring” all the Batty models because if one can go rogue, all of them can. Batty escapes and sets out to find other versions of himself. If possible he hopes to expand his own lifespan.

If one Batty can learn compassion, can learn empathy, so can another. Replicant is the story of how Batty learns to be human in the face of human inhumanity. It would be an opportunity to show the world beyond LA, beyond the dying Earth. To see things we wouldn’t believe.

Other Newsletters

Municipal Archive is an irregular newsletter by Kio Stark. Each issue tells the story of an encounter – on the street, on a bus – exchanges between people in the midst of the busy-ness that we’ve taken to be normal life.

Lifestuff

A good friend celebrated her birthday last Friday. Her kids arranged a surprise party with a 60s theme. It’s always fun to see someone’s face when “Surprise!” is yelled. She had a blast. We had a blast. I couldn’t stay long because I had to work the next day.

And I’m still working. Most of my job is done solo. I spend a couple hours in the morning sorting mail and parcels at the station and then I’m on my own delivering. I have half a dozen customers who come out when they see me coming. Otherwise I only have direct contact with folks when I need them to sign for a parcel or a certified letter.

Last week we had enough sick calls that everyone was being required to work some overtime to cover all the routes. Will I be jinxing things if I say I hope things improve this week?

Yesterday was a long one but that’s not surprising. Mondays usually are. Mail and parcels get backed up over the weekend. I needed to start my day with a parcel run to deliver nine cases of toilet paper to a building maintenance company. The cases completely filled my truck. The company’s owner was concerned that the buildings she serviced would be closed and she wouldn’t have work. So that TP may just sit in storage.

The rest of the day was pretty basic. I only had my own route to manage. I didn’t have to carry part of any other route. We had enough CCAs and Overtime Listers to cover the empties. There was a census letter coverage in the mail that meant I delivered something to every address and there were a lot of large parcels that needed to wrangled up to porches. But it was sunny while still being cool enough that a workout was pleasant.

Today I’ll be delivering Red Plums. And whatever else gets tossed at my case and in my hamper. Work starts at 7 am. This newsletter posts at 6 pm. I expect I will get home before that but I probably won’t have the energy to do an update.

I hope y’all are well and healthy. Hopefully you’ve got plenty of books to read and friends to call when you need to chat. Stay safe! See you next week.

Tuesday Night Party Club #9

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Artstuff

In the summer of 2010 John L. Bell emailed to ask if I would be available to do illustrations for the next issue of Oziana. I enjoyed working on the 2006 issue and happily said yes. Above are the covers by Charnelle Pinkney (2009) and Tim McGloughlin (2010). This was a double issue of the magazine, produced in flipbook style, combining both the 2009 and 2010 editions. My illustrations seasoned the story “Invisible Fence” by John L. Bell. We’d originally planned for me to do more illustrations but 2010 turned out to be chaotic – I was laid off from my day job and went back to school for “retraining” as a computer programmer. That left me with less time than expected. Deadlines loomed. Fortunately, John was able to rearrange the issue’s layout so the illustrations spread out evenly and cut down on printing costs. A review of the story can be found on Eric Gjovaag’s Wonderful Blog of Oz.

Story Seed #33 

A sequel needn’t be a rerun: Alien 2

My previous story seeds featured story ideas that, basically, I’m giving away. If someone is inspired to grow a story from them they are wellcome to do so. No need to get my permission.

Using the ideas I’ll be mentioning in the next few weeks would require someone to get permission from the corporations that own the movies in question. The intellectual properties involved are not in public domain. All of these films have already had successful sequels. But part of the fun of having ideas is sharing them so …

Sequel (definition grabbed from Lexico): A published, broadcast, or recorded work that continues the story or develops the theme of an earlier one.

Alien. Terminator. Blade Runner. All three of these science fiction films had sequels. The sequels didn’t come immediately. They came years, even decades later. I enjoyed all the sequels as much, if not more, than the originals. That’s pretty rare. Most sequels are pale shadows of the originals. So my sequel ideas are suggestions, not of better stories, but of different directions the “franchises” could have taken.

Alien was released in 1979. It was the first released of the films I’m “sequeling” so I’ll write about it this week. It tells the story of the crew of the spaceship Nostromo, who are required to investigate a distress signal on an unknown world. They find an ancient spacecraft and pick up a deadly hitchhiker.

A sequel to Alien, Aliens was released seven years later. Ripley, the lone survivor of the Nostromo, accompanies a group of marines back to the planet of the alien ship and they must combat a nest of xenomorphs to escape. Like many sequels Aliens cements the pattern of the rest of the franchise. For Alien it’s humans vs. xenomorphs with a seasoning of corporate manipulation and evil. By focusing on the xenomorph, every Alien installment is a bug hunt. Part of what makes Alien such a great science fiction movie is that it suggests a much bigger world outside the confines of the story of the film. Space travel is common and a regular part of life. It’s not fast but it’s predictable. Android technology is good enough that human beings won’t be able to tell the difference between an android and another human. Extraterrestrial life has been encountered before. It’s not clear if humanity has met living extraterrestrial civilizations but the Nostromo’s crew doesn’t react as if evidence of extraterrestrial civilizations has never been found before.

Imagine if, in Alien 2, the story expanded out. Word of the space jockey’s ship has gotten out, either leaked by someone at Weyland-Yutani or because Ripley was found and told her story. Multiple expeditions have come to investigate the ship – a team from W-Y intent on officially staking their claim, a team from a rival corporation, and a contingent of military from a government enforcement arm. The jockey’s ship is ancient but it’s not dead and it contains more wonders and horrors than clutches of xenomorph eggs.

By focusing on the mysteries of the ship and the interaction between different human factions, Alien 2 could depict more of the big complicated universe suggested in Alien. The W-Y team would have more knowledge of the ship and the xenomorphs than the other teams. W-Y directed the Nostromo to the planet with the intention that it bring back a xenomorph or two, so clearly some other humans had found the ship in the past. Unfortunately (for them at least) their focus on the xenomorph will make them unprepared for other dangers and wonders presented by the ship.

H.R. Giger‘s designs for the xenomorph, the space jockey and the ship are some of the most alien looking depictions of extraterrestials to appear in the movies. Later designers were able to duplicate and extrapolate from those designs but no one surpassed them. They suggest completely non-terran biologies and non-human technologies. Why was the ship carrying all those xenomorph eggs? Where was it going? Are they weapons? Tools? A slave race? Lunch? The space jockey appears to have been killed by a birthing xenomorph. What went wrong?

If the xenomorphs are weapons, who or what were they meant to used against? Other space jockeys? Another alien race?

Does the space jockey’s civilization still exist? Have they advanced? Decayed?

The franchise did try to answer some of those questions in Prometheus, but by that time the xenomorph had become the toothy face of the series. It was too late to redirect the focus and, honestly, the answers the film presented were both uninteresting and didn’t make a lot of sense. The space jockey became just another humanoid ET who committed the ordinary human sin of creating the thing that would destroy it. More imagination was needed. Writers and designers who could think in cosmic terms should have been employed.

Imagine what the Alien franchise could have been if the alien xenomorph had been downplayed in the sequel and the focus had been on the alien space jockey and its alien ship instead. What wonders and terrors could we have experienced?

Other Newsletters

Technocult News by “Damien” focuses a lot on technology and, especially, how human prejudices and cultural blinders are incorporated into that technology. Damien gives me a regular reminder that technology is a created thing and its human creators build in flaws and dangers without realizing it. Our assumptions limit our thinking. Technology will always be used in ways we don’t consider so more consideration and inclusion of diverse designers and users when creating technology is ideal.

Lifestuff

A couple of weeks back my brother, Glenn, sent me a link to the proposed 42 words anthology. This week, instead of writing about my life like a good newsletterer, I wrote and submitted a story. It was an interesting exercise. First I wrote the shortest story I could think of based on my basic idea. Then I revised. And revised. The story had to be exactly 42 words. This paragraph is 74 words.

If the story gets accepted I’ll post about it. If it doesn’t I’ll post the story. I don’t have a time frame for either. After I submitted my entry I paid a little more attention to the rest of the blog and realized that submissions were first announced in July of 2018. As of February 8th they have accepted 483 stories. They are wanting 1764 stories. Only 1281 to go.

They’re accepting up to four stories per author. I may submit more. If you want to give writing a short short story a try, please do!

That’s if for this week. Enjoy each moment. If that’s not possible, enjoy as many moments as you can.