Blade runner is ahead of its time. Its exploring themes like post humanism that Ghost in The Shell and The Matrix picked up on almost 20 some odd years ago. It asks the question "what is it to be human?" Does it matter that Rachael isnt organic? But it seems she has more soul than the human characters occupying the film. The line between humans and machines is so small that they have to give empathy tests to determine who is who. That film is about the world we are going to inherit where people slowly lose there humanity and become machines. The social allegory is potent too. Are we simply just social constructs? Is the social machine turning people into machines? But in defense of Star Wars this is the symbolic signifigance of darth vader. he loses his humanity and becomes a cripple bionic man when he chooses to serve the empire or the bureacratic machine.

yeah but one thing that blade runner does that none of those other films do is propose a synthesis between the two which is completely contemporary and is not part of any other era. The relationship between rachael and deckard proposes a solution to the post human question. it shows a symbiotic relationship between not only man and machine but man and man based on compassion and understanding. they show the characters finding menaing and value in their existence even in the post apocalyptic world of the film. All those other films tend to do is stay within the parameters of technophobia. In fact you could argue that the finale of the matrix trilogy is totally cribbed from blade runner.

Metropolis is certainly an influence on blade runner. but blade runner is certainly the first film of its kind.

I wanna be Rutger Hauer.
How did you know???

/flippant

While Lucas has expressed admiration for 2001, and its influence is apparent in some of Star Wars's visuals and the way its characters relate to technology, there's plenty of evidence in the films and in Lucas's interviews that he has much more love for the serials (THX 1138 begins with a trailer for Buck Rogers) and Edgar Rice Burroughs's Barsoom. I suspect he was also inspired at least partly by Silent Running - not just the robots, but also the budget :-)

Maybe they're not so much bitter as bored. Lord knows I get sick of hearing about Star Trek whenever I mention that I write 'spec fic'.

Yeah, because they keep being *asked* all the time. That's gotta be tedious...

I do think Blade Runner was a much more influential movie than Star Wars on written sf, but at least as much of that is in its aesthetic as in its content. Of course it's based on a Phil Dick novel, and has hints of Bester and others in it - but has any media sf, whether film or TV, really been really innovative? (Maybe radio: see HHGTTG)
But huge amounts of cyberpunk and post-cyberpunk is pervaded by that drenched, dark, part-Japanese cityscape of Blade Runner. Even Neuromancer came out two years later! Although some of the short stories are from 1981 (Blade Runner's '82) and "Fragments of a Hologram Rose" is from 1977)...

And I think you're misunderstanding Blade Runner and most probably Morgan (whose quote was no doubt culled from something about 10 times as long) when you reduce it to "Wow, I'm wanting to be someone else". That's not it at all: more like, what makes someone really Other? Is there such a thing? It can be interpreted as a dramatisation of the Turing Test (she behaves like a human, so isn't that enough?) - although it's arty and maybe not as deep as we fans impute to it, it's unusual in that it takes questions about AI seriously, but (yes, in the voiceover-less version) does it in a way that doesn't infodump or preach. I think what Blade Runner's about, more than anything else, is "What is artificial? What is real?" (certainly a Dickian question) and "What is human?" (in a broad sense)

Star Wars, on the other hand, really is backwards-looking. Its politics and morality are as simplistic as '30s-'50s US space opera, the story is archetypal high fantasy, inherited from all the myths and legends, there's no interest in anthropological concerns (all the aliens are basically human, and the robots are either basically human or basically pets), nor any kind of hard science.
That said, I enjoy the original Star Wars trilogy immensely, no small amount due to the nostalgia. But as Morgan says in the NY Times article, biotech, nanotech, the influence of technology (in a more nuanced way than just '80s technofear) and so on are central themes in today's sf, as well as post-humanity, post-scarcity and such concepts.
The closest the new Star Wars gets to biotech is fucking midi-chlorians, Lucas's inane scientific basis for the Force. I mean, please.

Sure, Star Wars is to sf what The Lord of Rings is to fantasy, sortof. "Please, that's not what I write". But fair enough - when something's the most popularly recognized example of a form, and is in so many ways not representative of what certain proponents of that form do, they're not gonna be happy. In that sense, cyberpunks and post-cyberpunks, anthopological sf writers and so on are going to say "Well, if you want to think of an example of media sf, Blade Runner is much closer to what I do than Star Wars is". I would say it's also a better film, not just because I like its aesthetic, but because I think it's more honest about people and society, and it's forward-looking because it's of its time, whereas Star Wars is backwards-looking because it's of an earlier time, indeed represents a nostalgia for a simple archetypal view of the universe, with Good and Evil, big battles, sword fights, and magic! Compare Blade Runner's sardonic background use of advertising, for instance, and its dogged refusal to make any characters Good or Evil.

Nevertheless, I got the impression that your diatribe there was sparked by what you interpreted Morgan as saying, which was "unlike Star Wars, Blade Runner is ahead of its time, not Star Wars, because X", and you felt X = "like, man, I wanna be someone else".
I don't think you're just giving your own reading here, just one of many, oh let's be all po-mo. I think you're lambasting Morgan for thinking Blade Runner's got something to it - "No it doesn't, it's just..." But as you admit, that's just you reducing it to one simple premise. You can do that, sure, but you can't then attribute it to someone else, who is (perhaps) building an argument out of a different set of premises regarding that work.

Admittedly, my own defense of Blade Runner is based on premises that are probably not the same as those specifically referred to by Morgan in his "but the movie is very much about internal factors, like robots yearning to be humans" quote. Still, "robots yearning to be humans" = "I wanna be someone else", sortof.
Maybe it's because I know Morgan's work, so knowing that his work is at least as much influenced by Blade Runner's aesthetic, and questions of personal identity in a more nuanced way than escapism, that I'm more willing to attribute more to him. Whatever.

Thanks for, as usual, sparking interesting debate.

I meant to say, by the way, that although the NY Times article's not actually too bad, the blanket use of the term "science fiction writers", especially with only two actually quoted (and two very different writers!) is a bit disingenuous... How about Sean Williams, who writes Star Wars tie-ins? etc...