Search Worlds Without End

Blade Runner, the ingenious movie version of Philip K. Dick's Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, has been widely acclaimed as one of the best sf films. With Dick long gone, Jeter undertakes the further adventures of twenty-first-century L.A. detective Deckard, whose recent narrow victory over a violent android "replicant" prompted a retreat to the wilderness with his replicant lover Rachel. But there is at least one more vendetta-minded replicant still on the loose. Sarah Tyrell, sole surviving heir to the powerful replicant-manufacturing Tyrell Corporation and the human model for Rachel, pulls Deckard out of retirement and into a no-win predicament. Not only are there more replicants than anyone guessed, but Deckard is now wanted for the murder of Pris, who was not, as he had assumed, a replicant but fully human.

Is it real or is it a replicant? Doubt is cast on the idenity of just about every character who appeared in either the film or the previous sequel, The Edge of Human (1995). The action opens in the orbital studio Outer Hollywood, where a video is being made of Rick Deckard's original pursuit of the rogue replicants, with Deckard acting as technical advisor. After both a replicant and Deckard's former partner are murdered, Deckard storms off the set to head back to Mars, where he lives in squalor with Sarah Tyrell, former heir to the defunct Tyrell company, the original creators of all replicants. Sarah, however, out of her mind with bitterness and boredom, plans to murder Deckard upon his return. Fortunately for Deckard, she is whisked back to Earth by two disciples of her dead uncle, the evil genius Eldon Tyrell. There, she is convinced to reenter the time-warping derelict starship on which she was born, in search of information about her past. If this sounds confusing, it is. Reality could not be trusted in either Scott's film or the Dick novel, and matters have gotten only more complex since Jeter took over the franchise.

Iris, a female blade runner, gets the puzzling assignment to find Eldon Tyrell's owl. Her investigations lead her to loose her job and set her on a quest for answers all over futuristic LA and deep down into the bowels of the defunct and ruined Tyrell corporation. Unbeknown to her, she is being filmed (in order to create a movie!) and all her actions are being pushed towards a final conclusion in which she realises the truth about the replicant program - what its real purpose was (not to serve the off-world colonies), and the truth about herself - why she is such a good blade-runner and why she looks like Tyrell's niece, Rachel...