Tech Noir
subgenreScience fiction filtered through the shadows of film noir.
Blade Runner
Los Angeles, 2019: perpetual rain, perpetual night, perpetual advertising. Burned-out cop Rick Deckard is forced back to work hunting four escaped replicants — bioengineered humans with four-year lifespans who have come to Earth to meet their maker and demand more life.
The Terminator
In 2029, the machines that exterminated most of humanity lose the war — so they send an unstoppable cyborg assassin back to 1984 to kill Sarah Connor, the mother of the resistance leader who beat them. The resistance sends one soldier to protect her. He has a photograph, a sawed-off shotgun, and no way home.
Strange Days
Los Angeles, the last two days of 1999. Lenny Nero, ex-cop turned black-market dealer, sells SQUID recordings — full sensory captures of other people's experiences, straight from their cerebral cortex to yours. Addicted to replaying tapes of his own lost relationship, Lenny is dragged out of his loop when a snuff recording lands in his hands: evidence of a murder that connects to his ex, a music-industry conspiracy, and a police killing that could set the burning city off entirely.
Dark City
John Murdoch wakes in a hotel bathtub with no memory, a dead woman in the next room, and detectives closing in for murders he can't remember committing. As he runs through a city where it is always midnight, he begins noticing what no one else does: at 12:00 exactly, the entire population falls asleep, the buildings physically rearrange themselves — and pale men in long coats move among the sleepers, injecting new memories into new lives.
Blade Runner 2049
Thirty years after the original, K is a new-model replicant working as a blade runner for the LAPD, retiring older rogue models without complaint — until a routine job unearths a buried secret: evidence that a replicant once gave birth. The discovery could break the wall between the born and the built, and it sends K hunting for a child hidden decades ago, for a vanished blade runner named Deckard, and for an answer about himself he wants too badly to trust.