You are so right. Bizarre. I thought that was Phillip K. Dick for all of my life I think. Even worse because Johnny Mnemonic is one of my favorite movies! I’ve got the Black Shakes worse than I thought.
I was shocked to read this comment because I interpreted your original comment as meaning a Philip K Dick novel would be optimistic compared to the cyberpunk dystopia in which we find ourselves now. lol
Anyway it's pretty fair to confuse the two I think, there can't be any way Johnny Mnemonic wasn't influenced by Blade Runner (I'm guessing it's true of both the movies and of the books). Very similar themes and protagonists at a certain level of abstraction.
Johnny Mnemonic was dead tree published in 1981. (I have the issue of OMNI)
Blade Runner, the movie, was released in 1982.
And PKD's DADoES was published in 1968.
Honestly, IMHO, Blade Runner in movie form shares more DNA with Alien than proto-cyberpunk. They're both character studies rather than world-building exercises, albeit with massive credit to Ridley Scott and the design team that their "background" world is more lifelike than many world-centric films.
But Blade Runner fundamentally lacks the multi-level cutthroat competitive aspect of cyberpunk. Oddly enough, a quirk that frequently recurs in British scifi, in contrast to the more free market American themes.
