Dr. Chelsie Shannon/ Night-Owl

 

Outis Book 3 concept illustrations

 

Outis Book 1 ch 2 illustration [scrapped] (concept art)

 

Outis Book 1 ch 4 illustration (pencil) [scrapped] (concept art)

 

The Comics Pledge

 

The Secret Man Book 1: 3X (book cover concept art) [scrapped]

 

Michelangelo "Mike" Veronese/ The Autolycus concept art (2)

 

Outis Book 3: Lightning & Thunder concept book cover [scrapped]

 

Elia Eads concept art

 

Susan Gilman concept art

 

Willy Patrick Stuart-Houston concept art

 

Janet Monday concept art

 

A Blade Runner Finding His Humanity (essay)

    Philip K. Dick, famed science fiction author, was inspired to write Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, the book that Blade Runner loosely adapted its story from, while researching material and reading diaries of the members of the Nazi Regime for his upcoming book called The Man in The High Castle. Dick was researching and studying the Nazi mentality, discovering that these members of the Nazi Party were “highely intelligent,” but were also “deficient in some manner in appropriate assets,” meaning these people lacked any qualities of humanity. What caught Dick’s attention was a journal entry of a SS officer, who worked at one of the concentration camps, that read, “We are kept awake at night by the cries of starving children (Sammon 244).” Philip K. Dick could not believe that this SS officer was human because this person “could not associate with what he had written.” Someone like this SS officer could not be able to express empathy toward other human beings, especially since empathy was not a “sole German trait (Sammon 244).” This idea that the Nazis were not human but synthetic humanoids dissociated with social interaction and human intercourse inspired Philip K. Dick’s story about a human android-hunter named Richard Deckard trying to find his humanity once again.

    The story followed Richard “Rick” Deckard, a human blade runner, who exterminates, or “retires,” androids, also called replicants, who was called out of retirement to track down and terminate a group of escaped space colonist replicants. Deckard became a shell of a man that he used to be during his early career as a blade runner. It had left him bleak, cynical, distant, even unsympathetic towards others, living in a heavily populated and polluted city like Los Angeles that was deprived of life, hope, dreams, and happiness despite the heavy pollution in the air, even the streets, the neon signs, and advertisements shown in huge television screens plastered all over the industrial buildings of L.A. A world where it was hard to tell which people were real or fake, similar to the replicants, even artificial animals, who were designed to function like their natural counterparts despite being man-made machines. The lethal paradoxical flaw of being a blade runner was to be as cold and merciless of a murderer as the replicants that they hunt down and kill. This would explain Deckard’s retirement of being a blade runner because of how much of a traumatized and dehumanized experience it was for him, and this may include many other blade runners with a guilty conscience. One way a blade runner could determine if a person was either a human or a replicant was through the use of the Voight-Kampff Empathy test, an empathy-measurement machine designed to determine if the subject being tested was a replicant or not. Eerily and intentionally, the blade runner unit, the empathy-test itself, even the replicants themselves were products of the Nazi Regime and their paradoxal mentality such as the Einsatzgruppen, the SS paramilitary death squads who tracked down and murdered Jews and others, and the Mischling Test, a legal test designed and enacted to the Nuremberg laws by the Nazi Germans to identify Jews or mixed-races. Similar to the Nazis, replicants were considered superior in strength, agility, and intelligence, but they were an emotionally defective race because the humans who made them had programmed them to be that way. Plus, replicants were devoid of empathy that only humans have despite efforts by Eldon Tyrell, as well as companies like the Tyrell Corporation, to make replicants “more human than human.” However, the same unnatural manner of the replicants can be replicated to the blade runners in their efforts to hunt and terminate replicants. Performing his job as a blade runner, tracking down and murdering replicants, Deckard was deprived of his human identity. In PKD’s book Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, there was a surreal scene in which Deckard was taken to an alternative police station called The Hall of Justice that Deckard was not aware of. Later, he was interrogated by two other blade runners who questioned Deckard’s existence and his job as a blade runner, insisting that Deckard may be unaware that he was a replicant himself and operating in an elaborate delusion. In an ironic twist, the blade runners tracking down and terminating replicants, devoid of human emotions and empathy, were unaware that they had lacked their own qualities of humanity themselves. Unlike other blade runners, Deckard was aware that he was becoming less human than the replicants, making it hard to distinguish himself differently from the replicants.

    Deckard was finally able to find humanity from, ironically, the replicants themselves. Two of which were Rachael, a replicant-property of the Tyrell Corporation, and Roy Batty, the fugitive replicant that Deckard was tasked to terminate. For Rachael, she believed she was human and never questioned her existence or her memories before Deckard, in his usual cold and cynical manner, revealed to Rachael that her memories were false, implanted from Eldon Tyrell’s niece’s memories. Realizing that she was a replicant herself, a product of the Tyrell Corporation, Rachael had lost her innocence and had come to doubt her existence. Having realized his guilt, Deckard, in an act of human emotion that only humans can express, showed his empathy toward Rachael and tried to console her in her time of need. Deckard and Rachael shared a connection with each other, both being outsiders and devoid of their humanity, while their only difference was that Deckard was human and Rachael was a replicant. Deckard saw something in Rachael that he knew that she was capable of more than any other replicant, which was her free will. Although Rachael was a replicant, Deckard knew she was capable of expressing human emotion because she had free will and he wanted her to express herself, knowing that she had feelings for him that she was forcing herself to repress. Deckard knew Rachael was only a replicant, but in that act of empathy, Rachael was able to express her love toward him that gave Deckard meaning beyond his existential life as a blade runner. With Roy Batty, he and Deckard oddly shared one common aspect of their humanity which was the fear of death. Roy had already conquered his fear and had accepted his inevitable fate by the hands of his creators who programmed Roy’s life expectancy. It was Deckard, despite being a blade runner, a bounty hunter known for being intimidating and fearful to replicants, who feared for his life. When Deckard was hanging from the edge of the cliff, he was at the mercy of his target Roy Batty who said to Deckard, “Quite an experience to live in fear, isn’t it? That’s what it is to be a slave.” Yet, when Deckard was at his mercy, Roy saved his life, grabbing his hand and hoisting him onto the roof. As Roy lay dying before Deckard, he expressed about the things he had seen, knowing that the moments or memories in his life “will be lost in time, like tears in rain” and had come to accept his death. From Roy’s death and act of mercy toward him, Deckard was able to empathize with the replicant because, like Roy, Deckard cared for his life more than he had before. Not just their own life, but anybody’s life. In that act of empathy toward a dying replicant, Deckard was able to leave behind his life as a blade runner and regained his lost humanity.

    There was a theory suggesting that Rick Deckard was a replicant or android, which the idea was spawned due to a movie mistake where the actor who played Deckard, Harrison Ford, accidentally walked into Rachael’s lights, thus showing Deckard with red tint eyes like the replicants. Ridley Scott, the director of Blade Runner, even supported this theory, whether intentional or not, with a dream sequence Deckard had of a unicorn running in a forest. Although the unicorn dream sequence may seem like it supported the claim of Deckard being an replicant, especially when there was a origami of a unicorn, made by another blade runner named Gaff, placed outside of Deckard’s apartment, it would not be the case given Deckard’s previous history as a blade runner and being a blade runner himself. The method of putting an origami unicorn outside the apartment or home of a replicant might be a fear tactic by blade runners like Gaff and Deckard to let the replicant know that they had found them and know where they lived. This might also suggest that the use of this tactical method of fear and intimidation on replicant fugitives and criminals drove Deckard to guilt, hence why he dreamed of a unicorn because it represented Deckard’s loss of innocence as well as his deprived humanity. Besides, even if Deckard was a replicant, the film’s story would not work if Deckard truly was one because no replicant would ever commit mistakes like Deckard, one of which was making love with the android Rachael. If Deckard was a replicant, he would not pursue a romantic and human intercoursal relationship with Rachael despite knowing for a fact that their relationship together would not last long because replicants only lived for four years until their programmed death. Humans are prone to make mistakes in their lifetime, and everyone makes all kinds of mistakes, even Deckard. To be human is to have empathy, especially through suffering and loss, and that was what Deckard had been doing throughout the entire film, and no replicant would be able to express empathy like humans. If Deckard was a replicant, the film would be about a confused replicant hunting other replicants, and Deckard’s arc would only be a straight line with no changes to his character or his emotional empathy whatsoever. Even members of the cast and crew, including Philip K. Dick himself expressed their disagreement with Deckard being a replicant because they felt that the story only works if Deckard was human. The story and theme of Blade Runner was about a man rediscovering what it means to be human again despite his job being to exterminate false humans, the replicants, and through all the suffering and moral confusion during his last job as a blade runner, Deckard finally regained his humanity.

Works Cited

Blade Runner. Directed by Ridley Scott, performances by Harrison Ford, Rutger Hauer, Sean Young, and Edward James Olmos, Warner Brothers, 1982.


Dick, Philip K. Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? 1968. New York, Del Rey Books, 2007.


On The Edge of Blade Runner. Directed by Andrew Abbot, performances by Mark Kermode, Paul M. Sammon, Ridley Scott, and Philip K. Dick (archival footage), Nobles Gate Scotland, and Channel 4 Television Corporation, 2000. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NFAdUuqrlVU.


Paul M. Sammon. Interviews with Philip K. Dick. Rare Blade Runner Interviews with Philip K. Dick, 7 October 2017, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3d7XMnmPgUk. Accessed April 29, 2021.


Sammon, Paul M. Of Blade Runners, PKD, and Electric Sheep. New York, Del Rey Books, 2007

Michelangelo "Mike" Veronese/ The Autolycus concept art