I'd agree with calling Gibson and Scott contemporaries within emerging trends, but I would not say Bladerunner looks anything like Dick's novel. Of course, I read it before seeing the movie, but I had a very different feel. They wore codpieces, walked through streets littered with kibble, lived in buildings mostly abandoned and rotten. Ridley Scott adds the Hong Kong feel intentionally, making things overcrowded and flashy, all commercial and full of kitsch, marketplaces, bazaar-style food vendors, and the like. That was not present in Dick's novel from what I remember. Dick painted a San Fransisco covered in a layer of soot, poison in the very air, where business-as-usual meant wading through "kibble," leftover junk from ages past. Scott has littered streets, but he calls that pollution or garbage. Dick had leftover technology, as though things were changing so fast older technology was just tossed out the window, replaced to the point of perpetual turnover.
I don't mean to criticize. We can all imagine Dick however his writing moves us. I just felt there was less "punk" in his setting and more "junk," less subversive counter-culture hairstyles and more tired daily life, less Tokyo gadgetry and more unusable, outdated technology. And, I feel that tone/mood lends to a great reading of the text's major themes, which come about at the collapse of Mercerism and the character of Phil Resch- both totally left out of Scott's portrayal. Subsequently, I've always treated them as unrelated works of art that might share similarities in character names and basic plot.
