The following is a response to our first compare and contrast assignment:

Compare and Contrast the movie Blade Runner and Melissa Scott's Trouble and Her Friends

Blade Runner (I'll call it "BR" from here forward) and Trouble and Her Friends ("TAHF") are both classic examples of cyberpunk literature and film.  Both are thematically concerned with technology and biology, and the central characters in each live on the fringe of society.  Both also appear to be set in a dystopic future. I will be discussing similarities and differences in environment, time, character, and thematic concerns in the two works. 

Environment

 BR tells us from the very beginning that it is set in a future that is distant from the year it was released.  It takes place in Los Angeles in the year 2019 (the movie was released in 1982).  The dark, dirty, media saturated city is the backdrop for a very dystopic view of the future.  TAHF does not explicitly tell us what year it is set in, but gives one clue in the mention of a "New Century Square," that was "new 80 years ago."  I took this to mean that the year is meant to be in the ballpark of 2080.  Scott goes into great detail describing the advanced technology available to the characters of Cerise, Trouble, and their hacker friends.  Still, from the way she described the city, I got the impression that the landscape didn't look too different from an inner-city scene today.  For me, this made it a little easier to imagine the everyday lives of the characters than I did with Blade Runner's world of hover-cars and huge buildings (this being said, I did find Blade Runner's landscapes to be very cool, especially the Tyrell Corporation's temple-like fortress of skyscrapers).  Both urban settings have a dark and grungy feel to them, which supports dystopic worldviews that include corporate power, inequality and danger.  In TAHF we are also introduced to the parallel environment of cyberspace and the communities that reside in it, if only part-time.  Besides the calendar years that these stories are set in, different ideas about "time" pop up again and again.

Time

In Trouble and Her Friends, we tag along with Cerise on one of her journeys into cyberspace.  We learn that the perceived passage of time on the web is different from the passing of "real time."  For instance, 20 minutes in cyberspace is really several hours in the "real world."  I thought this was a really intriguing concept.  As Melissa Scott asks us to question our concept of what "time" is, she is also forcing us to the inevitable question, "Which time is the REAL time, and therefore which world is REAL?"  The experience Cerise has in cyberspace, thanks to the technology of the brainworm, is hyper-realistic.  This calls upon a major thematic element in cyberpunk: "What happens if we succeed in replicating reality?"  This concern is addressed in a slightly different way in Blade Runner.  The beings that have been created, the replicants, are "more real than real" in a way.  The question here is not about altering time and space but about altering and re-creating human (and animal) bodies too perfectly.  Another time-related concern in both works is death.  In Blade Runner, the replicants are given short 4-year life-spans as a "fail-safe" to ensure that they will not develop emotional responses or the desire for independence.  This "fail-safe" does not work, and several of them fight to extend their lives before it's too late.  This plot questions the ethics of re-creating too-perfect humans, and also highlights the preciousness of life and how time supposedly cannot be beaten.  

Character

As is true of most cyberpunk, many of the main characters in BR and TAHF are outsiders on the fringe of society.  Cerise and Trouble in TAHF are crackers, computer hackers who use cyberspace to steal information.  They live outside the realm of true law-abiding citizens, but yet we sympathize with them much more than we do the policy-makers and law-abiding citizens who criticize their community.  They are torn apart by the passing of the Evans-Tisdale law that places cyberspace under strict legal jurisdiction.  As a devastated Cerise meets her friends at a bar, they are criticized by ordinary citizens and other crackers alike.  When one woman says in disgust, "Technies...if they can't have their toys..," I hear myself scoff out loud and think, "She clearly doesn't know anything..." But how easily could we hear ourselves say something like that?  I think it's interesting how this story has the power to shift our sympathies.  This sort of protagonist/antagonist blur is also a part of Blade Runner.  It seemed natural to me at the beginning of the film that I would sympathize with Harrison Ford's character rather than the allegedly evil replicants.  However, the character of Rachel is positioned to make us question whose actions are correct: the replicants who are fighting for their freedom and lives, or the humans that created the replicants who must now "retire" them to maintain order and peace (or uphold a law).  Also, I was surprised by the peaceful and heartfelt death of Roy, the combat-model replicant whom I  hoped Deckhard (H. Ford)  would kill throughout the whole movie.  He had been driven to his actions by a very human fear of death and by his love for fellow "skin-job" Pris.  On the same token, Deckard is also a complicated character, and doesn't seem to be all-good.  The complexity of the characters in the film and the book made the plots engaging. 

Thematic Concern(s)

BR and TAHF encompass many complex themes, including some touchstones of cyberpunk.  They have it all! Posthuman beings, the proliferation of technology, dystopic futuristic communities, questions about mind/body, and so on.  I want to elaborate on a few that I found particularly interesting.  First off is the modification of the body and posthuman beings.  In TAHF, most everyone who can afford it has received a surgical implant to allow them to "jack-in" to the cyberspace virtual community.  These people are borderline posthuman or cyborgs, but they are still mostly human.  In BR, a slightly different process is going on.  Instead of modifying living humans, scientists have developed the replicants, which are more or less replacements for humans.  They were created by humans rather than being biologically "born."  This phenomenon really calls into question the ethics and dangers of the human obsession of recreating nature too perfectly.  I thought it interesting that replicant animals were also produced.  When Deckhard asks Zhora if her snake is "real," she tells him that of course it isn't, and that she couldn't afford a real one.  I just wondered, what are these things being made for, other than entertainment? Can a replicant animal be eaten? Would it have any nutritional value? Or is it just a really good robot?  As I was pondering this, I was once again aware of a subtle trick to get me thinking about the plot.  Of course I naturally turned my attention back to the question of the replicant human.  If they have feelings and independent minds, what is it about them that isn't human? Also, what is a human?  Related to feelings, I was also struck by the different ways that love played out in BR and TAHF.  TAHF's main characters Cerise and Trouble are human lesbian lovers.  In fact, almost all of the supporting characters were also gay.  Their position on the fringe of society perhaps speaks to a reality for many gays and lesbians today, nevermind hackers and cyberspace.  I would argue that a parallel love affair in Blade Runner is the relationship of Deckhard and Rachel.  Theirs is also a "non-conventional" affair by the standards of the society they live in.  Namely, he is a human and she is a replicant.  I found the development of this relationship to be cold, if not a unconvincing.  It felt hard for me to believe that either one of them loved each other...they didn't exactly act like it beyond saying the words...but then, it just adds to the dark layers of the film.  A love affair that seemed at times either cold or violent I suppose makes more sense in dystopia than a passionate one.  Although they did get some help from the earnest saxophone.   

...So that's it! For now..I am going to stop before I go on and on.  But in case you're wondering, the conclusion I've drawn is this: 

These two fine pieces of cyberpunk have succeeded in doing just what cyberpunk does: they force us to question just about everything, from the characters to time and space.