William Burroughs, Blade Runner: A Movie

Brodie Beales (Flinders University)

Ed. by Christopher Hugh Gair, University of Glasgow
The Literary Encyclopedia. Volume 3.2.4: American (US) Writing and Culture: Postwar and Contemporary, 1945-present.
Vol. editors: Sofia Ahlberg (Uppsala University), Patrick Chura (University of Akron), Emory Elliott (University of California, Riverside), Dale Enggass (University of Utah), Christopher Hugh Gair (University of Glasgow), Matthew Hofer (University of New Mexico), Stephen E. Meats (Pittsburg State University), Kerry Myler (Birmingham Newman University), Justin Parks (UiT - The Arctic University of Norway), Nick Selby (University of East Anglia)

Dates

First circulation or publication 1979

Places

United States (Country of Origin)

Genres and Modes

Novel

Resources

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First published in 1979, William S. Burroughs’

Blade Runner: A Movie

draws both the outline of its plot and its name from the 1974 sci-fi title

The Bladerunner

by Alan E. Nourse. Burroughs was approached to adapt for film Nourse’s vision of a world in which medicine is pushed underground by the US government and surgical and medical supplies are trafficked by bladerunners, misfit teens, supporting heroic doctors who fight to save the lives of those who fall beyond the government’s scope of care, with scant regard for their own longevity. The film was never made and Burroughs’ treatment of Nourse’s novel was published in 1979 by Blue Wind Press, Berkeley, as a novella.

Whilst Nourse consciously paints medical practitioners in a heroic light (it is perhaps unsurprising to note that

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1577 words

Citation: Beales, Brodie. "Blade Runner: A Movie". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 09 March 2011 [https://www.litencyc.com/php/sworks.php?rec=true&UID=6291, accessed 25 April 2024.]

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