Why Is 'Blade Runner' the Title of 'Blade Runner'? (vulture.com)

Why is Blade Runner called Blade Runner? Though the viewer is told in the opening text of Ridley Scott's 1982 original that "special Blade Runner units" hunt renegade replicants -- and though the term "Blade Runner" is applied to Harrison Ford's Rick Deckard a few times in the film -- we're never given an explanation of where the proper noun comes from. The novel upon which Blade Runner was based, Philip K. Dick's Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, offers no clues either.
Readers share a report: Our story begins with a mysterious writer by the name of Alan E. Nourse. According to the Des Moines Register, he was born in that city in 1928 to Bell Telephone Company engineer Benjamin Nourse and a woman named Grace Ogg. Young Alan moved to Long Island with his family at age 15, attended Rutgers, served for a couple of years in the Navy as a hospital corpsman, and was awarded a medical degree from the University of Pennsylvania in 1955 before moving to Washington state to practice medicine. Whatever Nourse's skills as a doctor may have been, they were outweighed in the scales of history by his other passion: writing about the medical profession and fantastical worlds of the future. Before he was even done with medical school, he was publishing sci-fi on the side: first came short pieces in anthology magazines like Astounding Science Fiction and Galaxy Science Fiction, then he started publishing novels with titles like Trouble on Titan (1954), Rocket to Limbo (1957), and Scavengers in Space (1959). In 1963, he retired from medicine to focus on his writing, but wrote about learning the healing arts in a 1965 nonfiction book called Intern, published under the intimidating pseudonym "Dr. X." Sci-fi author-editor Robert Silverberg, who knew Nourse, tells me the latter book "brought him much repute and fortune," but in general, he just "wrote a lot of very good science fiction that no one seemed to notice." That changed on October 28, 1974. Sort of. On that day, publishing house David McKay released a Nourse novel that combined the author's two areas of expertise into a single magnum opus: The Bladerunner. It follows the adventures of a young man known as Billy Gimp and his partner in crime, Doc, as they navigate a health-care dystopia. It's the near future, and eugenics has become a guiding American philosophy. Universal health care has been enacted, but in order to cull the herd of the weak, the "Health Control laws" -- enforced by the office of a draconian "Secretary of Health Control" -- dictate that anyone who wants medical care must undergo sterilization first. As a result, a system of black-market health care has emerged in which suppliers obtain medical equipment, doctors use it to illegally heal those who don't want to be sterilized, and there are people who covertly transport the equipment to the doctors. Since that equipment often includes scalpels and other instruments of incision, the transporters are known as "bladerunners." Et voila, the origin of a term that went on to change sci-fi.

Comments

Based on old saying?

[magusxxx]

I always thought it was an updated term for 'walking on a razor's edge.' - Someone who is precariously balanced between safety and danger. And between being human or a replicant.

And Nourse's _Blade Runer_ was excellent.

[Ungrounded Lightning]

The author was actually Alan E. Nourse, and Burroughs wrote a film adaptation from it.

And Nourse's _Blade Runer_ was excellent.

Setting: Dystopia with eugenics gone wrong: If you want to get medical treatment (from the official sources) you have to get sterilized, too. So there's an underground of illegal doctors, surgeons, etc. (A "Blade runner" is a courier for a supplier of loaner surgical kits.)

Along comes a really nasty flu - with essentially 100% lethaltity if you don't get an immunization. Oops! Complications ensue.

(This is becoming topical again, with the government taking control of medical care and both parties using it for social policy implementation. Though the original Eugenics craze went away when the NAZIs ran it into the ground, some of its ideas are resurfacing.)

Re: And Nourse's _Blade Runer_ was excellent.

[ScentCone]

Last spring my 80-something mom came back from a doctor's appointment mentioning that the nurse who checked her in and asked the usual questions about her daily health also, clipboard in hand, asked her if there were guns in the house, how they were stored, and who (including names and relationships) had access to them. Even my mom, who normally has a completely deferential reaction to authority figures ("the doctor" or "the guy directing traffic around the pothole crew" or "the assistant manager at the grocery store") was (as a girl raised in a household where everybody hunted, and guns were a normal tool found in everyday life) was so surprised at the questions that she actually pushed back and said, "Why are you asking that?"

She said she was expecting some remark about older people and suicide prevention or something, but the nurse said, "It's something we have to ask now. It's part of all the public health reporting we have to do." Considering how often some activists talk about trying to get around the Bill of Rights by treating gun ownership as a disease, I'd say that there were indeed policy fingerprints all over that one.

Hollywood titles

[Anonymous Coward]

The work that goes into a title is huge. They engineer it like an OCD tweeker re-arranges toothpicks, or a rocket scientist tests his system for failure.

They have to be poetic. They have to have no less than 3 meanings relevant to different takes on the plot. It has to work in with key-phrases in the dialog, and imaging. They have to sell, and appeal to the right demographic. There are copyright and marketing issues.

A blade runner runs on the edge of a blade. Madness and genius. The razors edge. What is that blade? Life and death? Madness and genius? Love and hate?
The blade cuts. Who is cut? The victim. The runner. Who is the real runner?
Is the runner running along as in to run a race, or as in to carry something? In this case both. What are the running after? What are they bringing as they run?

There is probably more legal wrangling over the title of a movie, than the legal wrangling it takes to get congress to pass a new law. Seriously, and in terms of person hours.

-EngrStudent

Wait, this is a question?

[Derec01]

I had always assumed (I suppose without justification) that this was a direct reference to all of the sci-fi/horror (e.g. the Thing) in which the humans run a blade across their hand or body to show that they have flesh and bleed, and are thus truly human and not a robot.

This was probably a reasonable tactic for early replicants that may have used more artificial components or a blood-like substance that was less like blood. Later replicants were "more human than human", but the name would stick for the group that was meant to ferret out replicants amongst the human population.

I always liked that origin as it implied some very interesting, untold replicant horror stories.