The Dark Fringe was inspired mostly by Fritz Lang's Metropolis.  I saw the Giorgio Moroder version of this film sometime in the mid 1980's.  At the time, it was the best way to see the film as it was available only in various butchered versions.  I was also fascinated with the film noir crime dramas of the 1940's and 50's, so I meshed the two interests into this book.

A few may wonder what impact Blade Runner played on this book.  While Blade Runner was certainly a movie that could boast the same influences, when I wrote The Dark Fringe I was truly not all that inspired by Blade Runner.  This is not to say I dislike the film, only that it didn't influence me at the time.  Frankly, I saw Blade Runner sometime when it came out but I was left indifferent to it.  The same was not the case with Metropolis, which I saw a few years later.