The Bladerunner

Alan E. Nourse The Bladerunner (1974)
Nope, not that one. This is the original novel from which Ridley Scott pinched the name for his movie about how robots have feelings too. He thought Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? sounded a bit gay or something. This is why the term bladerunner doesn't actually appear anywhere in the Ridley's high-tech Hovis commercial, and nor does the movie feature anything to which it might apply, unless you regard Han Solo's job as sort of like running along the blade of a massive knife. Here the bladerunner is one Billy Gimp, and his job is to literally run scalpels and associated medical paraphernalia to a medical professional operating outside the law; and so the title makes some fucking sense, Ridley.

Anyway, griping aside, Nourse's novel seems unusually prescient - and keeping in mind that the science-fiction novel has historically been fairly lousy at predicting the future once you get past Arthur C. Clarke and Murray Leinster. Here we find a world for which 2007 was about a decade ago, so it's more or less the present, and although it's a present which approximately resembles 1974, technologically speaking, we have huge sections of the American populace turning its back on the medical establishment, refusing vaccines and so facilitating a massive pandemic. The social furniture is otherwise mostly different, and thankfully Nourse was wrong about the medical establishment pursuing a eugenic agenda, but as a doctor, his predictions regarding the treatment of illness in modern America - or the disease industry as Jello Biafra has called it - were unfortunately well informed in many respects. At least you can see how William Burroughs found potential in this material when it came to writing his treatment for the movie which was never made.

The Bladerunner is approximately a high-tech thriller, or at least high-tech as of 1974, and it's interesting that its urban landscape seems somewhat closer to what we saw in the unrelated movie than anything from Dick's novel; but it's probably not an overlooked classic. The prose does its job, but had the movie option been taken up beyond just a cool title, it's hard to shake the feeling that it probably would have been a Lorimar production featuring Roddy McDowell and Patrick Duffy. Also, the happy ending feels a little weird given the somewhat darker build up.

Yet it's still fucking better than Robots Have Feelings Too.