"I've seen things you people wouldn't believe...attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion...I watched C-beams glittering in the dark at Tannhauser Gate...All those moments will be lost...in time...like...tears...in rain. Time to die."

"Roy Batty", Replicant (Rutger Hauer), Blade Runner About ten minutes into Blade Runner, I reeled out of the theater in complete despair over its visual brilliance and its similarity to the "look" of Neuromancer, my [then] largely unwritten first novel. Not only had I been beaten to the semiotic punch, but this damned movie looked better than the images in my head! With time, as I got over that, I started to take a certain delight in the way the film began to affect the way the world looked. Club fashions, at first, then rock videos, finally even architecture. Amazing! A science fiction movie affecting reality! Years later, I was having lunch with Ridley, and when the conversation turned to inspiration, we were both very clear about our debt to the Metal Hurlant [the original Heavy Metal magazine] school of the '70s—Moebius and the others. But it was also obvious that Scott understood the importance of information density to perceptual overload. When Blade Runner works best, it induces a lyrical sort of information sickness, that quintessentially postmodern cocktail of ecstasy and dread. It was cyberpunk was supposed to be all about.

William Gibson, Details magazine interview, 1992.

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