The Original Blade Runners

1974 dystopian novel about state eugenics program and the underground doctors who oppose it.

By JOHN LEAKE

I’ve long thought Ridley Scott’s 1982 film, Blade Runner to be the most hauntingly vivid and strange of all time. Rick Deckard, played by Harrison Ford, is a reluctant “Blade Runner”—i.e., a police state assassin tasked with “retiring” a group of androids (Replicants) who have escaped their off-planet colony and made their way to earth. The film is set in a dystopian Los Angeles of 2019 in which the state is controlled by the Tyrell Corporation to whose tune everyone dances.

The great poignancy of the film lies in the fact that—though the Replicants possess exceptional strength and ability—they too are vulnerable and mortal, and they know it. Two are beautiful women, and it’s surely one of the most shocking scenes in all of cinema when Deckard shoots one of them in the back as she tries to flee from him.

Zhora is “retired.” Blade Runner, 1982.

Yesterday I found myself wondering about the creative origin of the Tyrell Corporation—a Fascist Corporatist entity that controls the police and apparently the military as well. I did a little research and stumbled across a report about the origin of the film’s fascinating title that seems to have no literal meaning but sounds so poetically cool. To quote the article:

The original blade runners were actually “bladerunners,” created by Alan Nourse, a physician and science fiction author who often channeled his professional experience into his stories. Published in 1974 and set in the distant future of 2009, The Bladerunner was one of Nourse’s last novels. In it, a confluence of overpopulation, advanced surveillance, and computerized records has ushered in a totalitarian eugenics experiment: anyone who needs medical treatment must submit to sterilization, since the government has concluded that a sick or injured person is by definition unfit to reproduce.

In The Bladerunner’s future New York, underground doctors have set up a parallel hospital system, threatened by police on one hand and anti-medicine rioters on the other. With medical supply sales strictly controlled, every practitioner needs a good bladerunner: a scrappy youth who fences pills, syringes, and scalpels. It’s a stable system, until an epidemic of deadly meningitis hits the city — and because it starts as a mild flu, nobody’s willing to get treated until it’s too late. It’s up to bladerunners to spread the word and save the city, at the potential cost of their freedom and their lives.

It’s notable how many science fiction authors in the sixties, seventies, and eighties envisioned variations of the scenario in which we now find ourselves. They all seemed to have recognized that immensely powerful organizations are ALWAYS inclined to tyranny, even if their leaders assure us (with extravagant virtue signaling) that their ambitious programs are for our own good.