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.

Blade Runner, a Movie

William S. Burroughs Blade Runner, a Movie (1979)
When Ridley Scott made a film based on certain plot details of Philip K. Dick's novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? there was a problem with the title, which Ridley believed would mislead members of the public into believing they were watching a film about robotic shepherds on the space farms of the future. He felt it didn't seem sufficiently exciting to sell the tale of a man who catches naughty robots from space in the future only to discover that robots have feelings too. Ridley had just been to see The Great Gatsby, and was discussing it with a film man who told him that the name had come from a famous book. This seemed very clever, Ridley decided, and so gave his project a title chosen by this ingenious method of giving something a name. It was to be The Grapes of Wrath. Unfortunately the problem with this new title was, so Ridley realised, that it would mislead members of the public into assuming they were watching a film about genetic mutants with giant grape-crushing robo-feet in the space vineyards of the future. The name was changed again to The Caves of Steel, and then The Time Machine before finally settling on Robots Have Feelings Too; which is how it all came to be.

I had assumed this slim volume to be the source of the title, but oddly it turns out to be a film treatment written by Burroughs and based on a 1974 novel of the same name by Alan E. Nourse, and from what I gather of the original version, there's neither connection nor even any theme in common with Han Solo punching women to the romantic sounds of a distant saxophone before realising that robots are sort of like people when you really think about it. I'm not sure I've ever read a film treatment before, so I couldn't say whether this is typical of its kind, although I suspect possibly not because it's certainly typical Burroughs. It's more or less as though one of his novels has been forced to keep going in a straight line for a hundred or so pages, with dystopian material from The Blade Runner intercut with Burroughs' customary descriptions of men's bottoms, boys on rollerskates, and those conspiracy theories which chime with the medical theme of Nourse's novel. The themes in question equate to Jello Biafra's more recent observation that America doesn't have a health industry so much as a disease industry, with corporations effectively holding us all to ransom, all exaggerated into a traditional dystopian narrative; so you can sort of see how Burroughs might have warmed to this undertaking. Typically he brings his fair share of preposterous horseshit to the party, the usual cures for cancer which they don't want us to know about and so on; but Burroughs usually manages to say something interesting even when he's talking out of his arse.

Blade Runner, a Movie is probably too short, and too much of a novelty to quite rank as life-changing, but its message - that authority figures are inherently untrustworthy - is always worth repeating, particularly now that western capitalist society can no longer even be bothered to lie about its agenda; and it features Doctor Benway, albeit with the serial numbers filed off, meaning that the novella is at least funnier than the more famous special effects showreel with which it shares a title and nothing else. I can see why this version maybe wouldn't have worked so well as a film, as was someone's original intention, or at least not as a mainstream film, but, you know, not everything has to be a movie.