To promote EARTH MAN, my first science fiction novel, I’ll be posting a new woman of science fiction every day for the next ten days. EARTH MAN will be released April 1st.
#10 PRIS
Daryl Hannah gave us an outstanding performance as the artificial life form PRIS in the film Blade Runner. Naive and innocent while at the same time extremely dangerous, Pris was the science fiction equivalent of the archetype “whore with a heart of gold”.
Pris is a “basic pleasure model” (incepted on St. Valentine’s Day). She meets with and becomes friends with J.F. Sebastian. Pris is also the girlfriend of fellow replicant Roy Batty. At an A Physical Level, she is shown to have superhuman endurance (as in the scene where she grabs a boiling egg with her bare hand without harm).
She clearly had great compassion for her fellow Replicants, but we were never quite sure how much she liked humans. With the bizarre make-up, fishnet stockings and dog collar, it was hard not to see her as a doll, a plaything, but when she faces Harrison Ford, we realize how dangerous she really is.
In the novel BLADE RUNNER 2: THE EDGE OF HUMAN, Deckard is on the run for murdering Pris. The novel puts forth the idea that she was a human all along, a prostitute who came to Earth with her replicant lover. Whether or not that is ‘canon’ I don’t know, but it adds a sense of mystery to the character. Could she just have been a really crazy human?
“I think, Sebastian, therefore I am.”
Richard Evans - Raven Heisenberg 