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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.
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.
Damnit Jim, I'm a doctor, not a transporter!
No! Damnit Jim, not that kind of transporter!
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Because a blade runner runs around, looking for lost replicants, and then literally or figuratively stabs them until they stop moving.
No, Blade Runner does not occur in the original book. I think Ridley Scott or whoever titled the movie got it from a completely unrelated book and used it just because they liked the name. Ok, found it. Author of unrelated book is William S. Burroughs.
Here:- https://scifi.stackexchange.co...
The Blade Runner sequel is just a money grab, like Prometheus. It is used to setup multiple sequels for the franchise. People who are saying it was an amazing movie are delusional.
I'm baffled that Alan Nourse is refered to as "a mysterious writer by the name of Alan E. Nourse"-- mysterious? Nourse?
There's nothing mysterious about Alan Nourse, who is pretty well documented. He was a quite popular writer mostly of juveniles (*) back in the 50s and 60s.
The only mysterious thing was how his name was pronounced: "nurse." Which was apparently amusing, since he interned with a doctor whose family name was "doctor", leading to paging over the intercom of "Paging Doctor Doctor, Doctor Nurse."
--
footnote: a classification that no longer exists. "Juveniles" has now become either "young adult" or "middle grade".
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
Originally it was "Braid Runner" after Deckard's fabulous locks but Hollywood kept it after the old Asian guy's stereotyped mispronunciation. :P I kid, I kid!
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
That is actually a screenplay version of the earlier novel. In any event, "blade runner" refers to smugglers of medical supplies (like, scalpels). I have to admit, it is a cool name.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
Is the author of the article A. Idiot? What's "mysterious" about Nourse? Don't think I ever met him at a con, but... oh, right, maybe what's "mysterious" is that the author doesn't actually know diddly-squat about SF, and hasn't actually read anything that doesn't tie to a movie or tv show.
Blade runner is a noun and a verb.
No. Both are nouns.
Because heâ(TM)s a killer like Oscar Pistarius
Ah. You read the write-up.
Or not.
deleting the extra space after periods so i can stay relevant, yeah.
In the book, they are referred to as bounty hunters throughout. I guess 'Do androids dream of electric sheep?' was too long for a film poster and 'bounty hunter' didn't sound very science fictiony.
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And backups.
deleting the extra space after periods so i can stay relevant, yeah.
I just read this bit (http://www.cbr.com/marvel-solved-blade-runner-title/) on CBR. The comic book tried to put in an explanation for the phrase (and did a pretty good job of it), but of course that doesn't make it canon.
"Information wants to be expensive" - Stewart Brand, the same guy who said "Information wants to be free"
Technically, the latter is a noun phrase.
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"Yes, I know about the nurse, but who's the doctor?"
"Doctor Nourse"
"He can't be a doctor and a nurse at the same time."
"No, he's the doctor. Doctor Nourse."
"That doesn't make any sense!"
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.
Care killed the cat, but satisfaction brought it back.
"[Hampton] Fancher found a cinema treatment by William S. Burroughs for Alan E. Nourse's novel The Bladerunner (1974), titled Blade Runner (a movie).[nb 2] Scott liked the name, so Deeley obtained the rights to the titles."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
In other words, no logical reason. They just liked the way it sounded.
No, Blade Runner does not occur in the original book. I think Ridley Scott or whoever titled the movie got it from a completely unrelated book and used it just because they liked the name. Ok, found it. Author of unrelated book is William S. Burroughs.
Uh, why are you repeating information that is in the summary, instead of just scrolling up to read it (or better yet, actually reading TFA)?
Summarizing the summary: The title came from the book The Bladerunner by Alan Nourse, as adapted into an unproduced screenplay by William S. Burroughs.
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
Comment removed based on user account deletion
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.)
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The concept of a "bladerunner", bootlegging vital medical supplies to those who can't afford them, showed up in another movie based on a different Philip K. Dick story: "Impostor". While it occupies a few characters and a fair amount of screen time in that movie, it has nothing whatsoever to do with the print story.
Philip K Dick was a certifiable genius, but he was also certifiably insane.
Trying to comprehend his world is a lot of fun, but trying to understand his naming convention is to a certain extent an exercise in futility.
excitingthingstodo.blogspot.com
You and https://slashdot.org/~Tale+Sur... may both be right from different points of view. It seems you may have intended a different context from the actual context of the person to whom you replied.
"Bladerunner" is a noun.
"Blade runner" is a noun phrase.
However, the grandparent post to yours was saying that "blade" is a noun and "runner" is a verb. Tale Surovi quoted that and said "No. Both are nouns.".
Both "blade" and "runner" are in fact nouns. The root "run" would commonly be a verb (although it can be a noun in "going for a run"). The form "runner", being defined as "one who runs" is a noun.
I know this is "THE INTERNET" and people don't like to take the time to be thorough. However, if you're taking enough time to be pedantic in the comments try to take enough time to read two whole comments consisting of a total of four short lines of text before correcting someone who is already correct.
HTH. HAND.
it was much more loosely based. The big scandal in the book was that replicants were treated differently, but one of their big radio Icons was revealed to be a replicant and it was part of an underground movement for acceptance. What happened in Blade Runner is basically a story that takes place during the universe created by Philip K Dick. The protagonist ends up sleeping with one of the replicants (they used relationships and sex as tools to gain equal status). The 'electric sheep' actually appears in the story, as the protagonist had allowed their sheep to get sick and die and to spare them the scrutiny and loss of status, they replaced it with an android/replicant. In the book, the earth is a dying world and the evolving religion is based around caring for the animals. This is touched on briefly in the first movie where Harrison Ford is searching for a replicant in a marketplace and you see Ostrich and other animals being sold. It's also touched on with the mention of the Off World Colonies advertisements and the reference to the replicant snake the dancer used in her performance when the scales were being analyzed.
This question is straight from the Captain Obvious department IMHO.
Besides, the "Blade Runners" are mentioned in a dialog in the opening scene.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
purely a guess, but perhaps Ridley Scott drew a parallel between this dystopia of a dying world painted by Philip K Dick, and its off world colonies, and the dying world in the book about universal healthcare where everyone is being culled via sterilization?
The protagonist ends up sleeping with one of the replicants (they used relationships and sex as tools to gain equal status)
This event happens in both, but in the book it makes more sense because Rachel and Pris are the same model of replicant. Rachel sleeps with Deckard to try to make him feel empathy towards Pris, so that he'll hesitate before shooting her.
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I think the cop retiring androids was merely a sub plot for android acceptance and people have really screwed our planet up to the point the animals are all dying
The short version of the explanation:
From the movie "True Lies"
Faisil: [in a conference room in their counter terrorism sector] They call him the Sand Spider.
Spencer Trilby: Why?
Faisil: Probably because it sounds scary.
i.e. because it sounds cool.
Seriously, not everything has to have a detailed backstory.
with only a couple exceptions, damn near _every_ Philip K Dick story has been renamed and often changed to only be loosely based in the real story.
Some exceptions:
A scanner darkly - damn near the exact same story. Also a really fucked up thing to do to a cop just to figure out where the drug was being grown.
Imposter - very close to the same, then again it was a pretty short story
Radio Free Albemuth - I didnt get to see this one but the summary sounds nearly the same as my memory of the book
Im still waiting for The Man in High Castle to eventually getting around to its conclusion. Theyved added a ton of other shit to fill up a tv series. The trade minister medatating his way into our version of the 1960s SF was a good indication that they may, eventually, delve more deeply into the parallel universes.
In any event, "blade runner" refers to smugglers of medical supplies (like, scalpels). I have to admit, it is a cool name.
Or, now, people who smuggle servers (computers, not waiters).
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
(computers, not waiters).
Hey, when I tell a waiter that "this knife is dirty, I want another", I sure as heck expect him to be snappy in getting me a clean one. That makes him a blade runner, too.
You didn't even READ the summary!!!
The founders of NARAL and Planned Parenthood were big supports of Eugenics. They wanted to ensure that there were fewer 'minority babies' and didn't think you could expect minorities to use proper birth control. Of coarse population control is Eugenics more pleasant younger brother, but if you are going to reduce the population, you have to ask ( of what group? and who gets to pick?) because unless you can somehow enforce unilateral fertility drops across all demographic groups you natural create 'selection pressure' that favors specific characteristics.
The founders of NARAL and Planned Parenthood were big supports of Eugenics. They wanted to ensure that there were fewer 'minority babies' and didn't think you could expect minorities to use proper birth control. Of coarse population control is Eugenics more pleasant younger brother, but if you are going to reduce the population, you have to ask ( of what group? and who gets to pick?) because unless you can somehow enforce unilateral fertility drops across all demographic groups you natural create 'selection pressure' that favors specific characteristics.
You don't really have to - the best way to reduce population is make sure people are educated and relatively well off. Population growth drops off rapidly once people don't need large families to look after them in their old age, or run the farm, and once they have access to reliable contraceptives.
No. I'm happy with my non-blade legs and feet. Is he really better off than you?
Only I can judge you.
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
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.
Seems pretty obvious to me. Replecants are "slaves" and try running to avoid the blade or oppression.
Also, and likely more importantly: "Blade Runner" sounds cool
I always assumed that name as a synonym of 'assassin'. (blade runner = making the blade to run on someone's skin)
Newsflash: It's a remake!
Still waiting for a "eugenics gone right" story..
It'd probably take place 20 years after a Gattaca-like scenario, once the patent on editing deleterious alleles out of germline chromosomes has expired, and the procedure becomes affordable to the working class.
I'd assumed "blade runner" was a reference to that act, trying to run along a sharp edge, being extremely difficult and dangerous, as was identifying and terminating replications.
Hey, when I tell a waiter that "this knife is dirty, I want another", I sure as heck expect him to be snappy in getting me a clean one. That makes him a blade runner
In that case Podrick Payne is a blade runner too...
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
The answer is simple - global warming. In the future we are in an ice age thanks to global warming and everyone gets around on ice skates. Calling them ice skates just sounded "lame" so that's where the term "blade runner" came in. Unfortunately this gets little attention in the movie. In fact, during shooting, it was the actors' lack of skating skills that led to the decision to film everyone from the knees up as the constant slipping around and falling was a little too slapstick for what the director wanted.
But Nourse wrote an entirely different story. Why would the title of Nouse's story be used in the movie?
Alcohol in the US kills 88,000 people a year. Guns kill 30,000 and half of those are suicides. The FBI has reported that about 40% of violent crime includes alcohol in some way. The problem is far worse in Europe where around 290,000 people per year die due to alcohol. And that doesn't even begin to see the true cost in human suffering due to miscarriages, fetal alcohol syndrome, and the people that die earlier through indirect health problems.
If you really care about human life, push for at-the-register background checks, ability-to-purchase licenses, waiting periods, greatly heightened taxes, and volume restrictions on the purchase or ownership of alcohol. Far more lives will be saved.
I remember Alan E. Nourse's medicine-centric science fiction as uniformly excellent. The man could write, and, being an M.D., he knew medicine, too. His novel The Bladefunner was first published as a series of short stories and novelettes in Analog that were later reworked into a novel.
I also read his non-fiction book The Intern (although, because it was published under a pseudonym, I had no idea it was by Alan Nourse). As I recall it was something of a bestseller. I found it engrossing. It was really the first work to expose the reading public to the brutal working conditions that medical interns (and, to an only slightly lesser extent, residents) must endure - in particular, the 48-hour shifts that somehow have become a sacrosanct centerpiece of the interning experience.
That practice - of forcing interns to work 48 consecutive hours at a time - has always seemed to me to be directly contrary to the best interests of both the interns themselves and the patients for whom they care. YMMV, of course, but even as a 20-something, being awake for two full days just burned me to the ground, physically and mentally. It's terrible for a young doctor's health and much, much worse for the standard of care he or she is physically capable of providing to patients. My judgement, memory, and attention all suffer markedly after just 24 hours without sleep. After 48, I wouldn't trust myself with a butter knife, much less a scalpel ...
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I've never read the book. From the book title I assumed the androids were mechanical robots with rubbery skins. In the film, Deckard refers to them as "skin jobs", and this reinforced my original assumption.
Hence, running a blade meaning to (obviously metaphorically) slice off their skins, and thus reveal their true nature.
Interestingly, in "The Terminator II", Arnold slices open his organic skin with a large knife, to prove that he's a robot underneath.
I figure that the idea was so compelling that Scott kept the jargon, even though the replicants in the film were genetically-engineered organisms, and not robots.
-- Mike Greaves
Marvel Comics solved this question in their adaptation: http://www.cbr.com/marvel-solv...
So Mungo was a blade runner too? “Mungo! Never kill a customer!”
‘Dog Runner’---mashup of Marathon Man and Reservoir Dogs?
It has a very nice forerunner to Star Trek vibe to it. The symbiote to the protagonist was like an intelligent Tribble that nestled on his arm, and the starship he served on could have been a medical relief oriented one in Star Fleet. Oh sure, it had its cheesy elements, but the story holds up. It reminds me that Star Trek also flat out adapted an older SF story for use with Kirk and the Enterprise. The one where Kirk has to battle the lizard like captain (a Gorn?) of another ship on the surface of a planet is immediately recognizable if you read the short story it credits. Boy I enjoyed reading SF during the golden age! :) lol
P.S. The sex scene in Do Androids ... is painfully, realistically, awkward. These weren't "humlons", these were robots with human skin, and not really made to have sex, with all its inherent fluids. PKD compares the androids to those suffering from a mental illness that diminishes empathy. They were literally cutting the legs off a spider because, wtf, let's see what happens. But they aspired to more, which made them sometimes better than the humans who willingly closed themselves off. Pris (in all three iterations) is an interesting case. In We Can Build You PKD names a major character Pris, and she's very bright, manipulative, and damaged. She's representative for some of the women he knew.
https://www.shmoop.com/do-andr...
http://www.warpcoresf.co.uk/we...
"Federal Mental Health Clinics are busy, with screening for mental health disorders for everyone, and compulsory attendance for anyone found to be mentally ill. One in four people spend some time in one of these institutions.
Pris Frauenzimmer is one such person. Diagnosed with schizophrenia, she is on release and in remission when she helps to build one of the first simulacra, based on a historical person. The simulacra has all of the personality, appearance and memories of Edwin Stanton, a civil war era politician. Lifelike and able to hold a conversation, the artificial humans open up a lot of possibilities for the ailing company.
One of these possibilities is the opportunity to work with the millionaire Sam Barrows. But Barrows' plans for the simulacra are altogether less straightforward, and less ethical, than those of MASA Associates. Louis and his partner, Maury Rock, are thrown into disarray over which course they should take in order to stay in business. Barrows is a risk-taker, and in spite of his wealth he isn't the kind of man Louis or Maury had expected him to be.
To complicate matters further Louis develops a strange relationship with Pris, who also happens to be Maury's daughter. Pris is barely grown up, and she is an acid-tongued beauty with a complete disregard for anyone else's feelings. She is creative but detached from other people, and possibly as crazy as an ice fireplace."
It has a clear connection to Do Androids, though it has a different feel, and dissimilar plot.
Being damaged, but not giving up, is a hallmark of PKD, imo. Whether machine or human PKD sees within the connection to a higher power, and he was a very spiritual man.
Sorry for rambling in a disconnected fashion, but hey, we're all nerds, right? :) Just making with the SF chatter.
"this knife is dirty, I want another"
I will not buy this record, it is scratched. Do you want to come back to my place, bouncy bouncy?
the solution is to just say 'nope - never seen a gun in my life'.
And in the gun culture it's considered moral to lie in that way to such an improper question, even by people who consider lying to be improper in essentially every other context. (If somebody is asking that, the assumption is the information may be used for is to enable confiscating the gun(s), leaving the family defenceless. So telling the truth is enabling crime and/or tyranny.)
This, by the way, is why Kellerman's Seattle-Vancouver study was so thoroughly debunked that even Kellerman retracted it. (That's the source of many of the pithy, but utterly bogus, statistical soundbites, such as "A gun kept in the house is 21 times more likely to kill a family member ...")
Guess what: If you ask people in the emergency room whether there's a gun in the house, you're only likely to get a "yes" when they're in the E-room because somebody was shot by it, so "no" is obviously false. That's the most extreme case of "selection bias" you're ever likely to see.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
You mean it wasn't about Mercerism and the propensity for people to blindly accept religion?
Only if you clean out your hovercraft first.