Anyone who acts even slightly nonconformist is suspected, and the fear of secret replicants presents a great opportunity for those who want to purge their communities of undesirables, or just get rid of someone they don't like. ![]() Now, several years later, arbitrary arrests are common, and people turn in their neighbors on suspicion of being replicants. But this just panicked the rest who did their best to disappear into the chaos of the streets. After the attack, the blade runners tried to round up the known replicants. Most importantly, the central register that records who is a replicant and who isn't was destroyed in a terrorist attack. It's a few years after the events of Blade Runner, and major events have shaken the artificial life cartels. It's set in a vast urban sprawl, as was the first movie. Ken Liu is the author of The Grace of Kings, to be published on Saga Press on April 7, 2015 Given the viciousness of anonymous Internet comments, I sometimes wonder if any of us would pass it! Maybe we're all replicants already. Of course, I also wouldn't mind seeing an updated version of the Voight-Kampff test. ![]() Will our creations replace us wholesale? Or will they carry on our legacy of humanism in mechanized shells? These questions seem ripe for examination in a new Blade Runner. But now-as we live on the cusp of the Singularity, when artificial intelligence is poised to overtake us and outstrip our understanding, as robots stand ready to replace us not only in manual labor but also in office jobs, the service industry, and even creative endeavors-the cultural anxieties are shifting toward what will happen to us in what is possibly the human race's dotage. This is, of course, an old theme in sci-fi, running in a line of descent from Paradise Lost to Frankenstein to works of the present day.
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