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. 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. 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. Our story begins with a mysterious writer by the name of Alan E. The tale of how the words “blade” and “runner” got mixed up with one another and applied to one of the most acclaimed movies of the 20th century is a truly odd one. Burroughs, and tossed into the mix of Ridley Scott’s seminal epic as something of an afterthought. It was coined by a doctor who moonlit as a sci-fi author, fleshed out by none other than William S. That’s to be expected because, as it turns out, the term predates the original movie by eight years and was invented to apply to an entirely separate work of fiction.

The term is impressionistic at best and nonsensical at worst. Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, offers no clues: Deckard and his ilk are just cops, never referred to as Blade Runners. The novel upon which Blade Runner was based, Philip K. Blade Runner 2049 has a few scenes that prominently feature scalpels, but they’re not wielded by a Blade Runner.

“Runner?” Sure, he runs at times, but not more than the average person might. “Blade?” Deckard uses a gun, not a knife or sword. 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. Why the hell is Blade Runner called Blade Runner? Why would replicant manufacturers make their humanoid products so hard to identify? Why is the USSR still around as of 2049? How did Pris’s hair dry off so quickly? But perhaps the biggest incongruity that we take for granted is the title. The Blade Runner franchise operates with a kind of dream logic where questions that might otherwise frustrate a viewer are subsumed by the overall ambience. Photo: Sunset Boulevard/Corbis via Getty Images

PRoblem by Alan E. Nourse