The Cultural Heritage of Blade Runner

Blade Runner has left an indelible mark on popular culture. Adapted from Philip K. Dick’s novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, it anticipated with remarkable prescience the world in which we have lived for the past four decades. Ridley Scott’s breathtaking vision of a futuristic and cosmopolitan metropolis created an aesthetic and cognitive shock that continues to resonate to this day, not only in cinema but in multiple artistic and even scientific domains. The film is often cited in debates related to robotics, biopolitics, posthumanism, urban planning and critical theory. Denis Villeneuve's sequel, Blade Runner 2049, continues to explore these themes while introducing issues related to artificial intelligence, transhumanism and climate change. Blade Runner is often credited with having spawned several aesthetic trends, such as retrofuturism, techno-noir or future-noir and, most significantly, cyberpunk. To explore the origins and legacies of this monumental work, this essay collection brings together specialists from fields as diverse as film and media studies, comparative literature and mythology, photography, architecture, fashion studies, psychology, sociology and biopolitics.