DNF The Bladerunner, Alan Nourse
Jul. 1st, 2025 10:05 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
walkitoutOnce upon a time, when the first Bladerunner movie came out and I was obsessed with all things Harrison Ford (I got over it, as I think most of us have), I tracked down the Alan Nourse book as a paperback in a library. I tried reading it then, and was incredibly confused. I somehow learned that the movie was based on PK Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, and tried reading that, and didn’t much care for that either. I’d always known that the relationship of written works to derivative plays / film / TV series was fraught, but wow, this whole thing was Extra.
Recently, I realized I could access The Bladerunner by Nourse via Kindle Unlimited. I selected it, and it sat around until today, when I tried to read it. And I’ll just say straight up: it’s a really bad book. It’s bad science fiction, because there’s all this complicated pay phone stuff while at the same time there are autohelicopters that you can make video calls from. Make it make sense. Don’t tell me no one had imagined mobile phones. Everyone knew all about tricorders and communicators from Star Trek: TOS, and everyone knew about mobile phones. Cellular phones were ever so slightly later, but plans were in the works by the time this thing was published. It’s just bad science fiction.
That would make it problematic, but nothing can save this book from its reprehensible politics. It’s honestly reassuring to learn that Heinlein dedicated Farnham’s Freehold to Nourse, and Friday was based in part on Nourse’s wife. Nourse’s actual career as an actual medical doctor was, shockingly, even shorter than my career as a programmer, which is really saying something. The description of the robots trying to learn from Dr. Long (surely a reference back to Heinlein) and Dr. Long’s efforts to subvert that process are on a par with all the episodes of bad SF TV in which someone logics some piece of alien something or other into exploding because of a paradox or whatever.
While it is nice to have a depiction of disability in SF, when you name the person with the clubfoot Billy Gimp, it’s real hard to have any respect for the author.
But I think the most insane part of all of this is the backstory on how what sounds like Medicare for All broke healthcare and all of society. This is the weirdest fever dream straight from a Republican member of the AMA in the 1950s, complete with an anti-healthcare mob firebombing the doc’s house, killing his wife and baby, as part of his motivation for providing illicit health care. The eugenics component of the story is exceptionally wild, 100% the kind of nonsense that circulated during the debates leading up to the ACA. In this world, you can only get official health care at government clinics if you agree to sterilization if you get treatment more than three times. They don’t do this to kids under 5, but apparently they really are doing tubals prepubescent girls and vasectomies on prepubescent boys. I think if I kept reading, I’d find out they were euthanizing some of the patients, but I’m not inclined to stick around for that. I nearly bailed out when Doc Long starts smoking a pipe _at the hospital_. But what did me in was the explanation how vaccinations campaigns wiped out natural resistance and that’s why everyone kept getting sick.
“A medical triumph [successful childhood vaccinations against diphtheria in the 1940s and 1950s], it had seemed, until sporadic outbreaks of a more virulent, drug-resistant form of diphtheria began striking adults in the 1970s, with antibiotic treatment now ineffective and the death rate rising to over 60 percent of all victims. Within another ten years widespread epidemics were sweeping the country and mass immunization campaigns were needed to damp the flame of a dreadful disease running wildfire through a population left naked of any natural resistance.”
Ok, what the actual fuck. Obviously, none of this actually happened, but what we’re seeing here is someone who almost certainly was run out of medicine in the 1950’s because he was anti-vax then uses science fiction to predict that diphtheria will kill off 60% of its adult victims in waves, during the same time frame that old people are living longer and longer? How does that even work? Also, having diphtheria does not protect that well against getting it again! Worse than vaccination, actually! This is so weird!
“Rupert Heinz had analyzed this pattern and come up with a frightening thesis: that medical intervention in itself had contributed the lion’s share to the massive spread of this virulent infection. Without immunizations earlier in the century, natural resistance would have kept the milder disease under control; now even a massive immunization campaign would be no more than a stop-gap, with horrible future epidemics to be expected as new virulent strains of diphtheria developed in the population.”
Anyway. While this book is of moderate interest as a window into just how long a certain strain of thinking has been kicking around in some corners of our society (Nourse did not make it to 70, and he died in Thorp, so I’m pretty sure we all know what corners I’m referring to), it’s way too painful for me to actually finish reading.
DNF. Ugh.
I haven’t read any James White in years, but I remember really loving the Sector General stories and novels. Having perused the wikipedia entries for White and Nourse, it’s not hard to understand why I loved White, and why I bounced so hard off of Nourse. Now, while experiencing moderate temptation to reread White, mostly I’m remembering enjoying Jenny Schwartz’s book, Doctor Galaxy, and wondering if there’s anything else current in the mashup of doctor / hospital stories and science fiction that I have sometimes enjoyed and sometimes abhorred.
ETA: I’ve never read S.L. Viehl’s Stardoc series, so I’m off to try a sample of that.
ETAYA: Accidentally stayed up late reading Stardoc. This is not great literature, but at least it’s fun!
Recently, I realized I could access The Bladerunner by Nourse via Kindle Unlimited. I selected it, and it sat around until today, when I tried to read it. And I’ll just say straight up: it’s a really bad book. It’s bad science fiction, because there’s all this complicated pay phone stuff while at the same time there are autohelicopters that you can make video calls from. Make it make sense. Don’t tell me no one had imagined mobile phones. Everyone knew all about tricorders and communicators from Star Trek: TOS, and everyone knew about mobile phones. Cellular phones were ever so slightly later, but plans were in the works by the time this thing was published. It’s just bad science fiction.
That would make it problematic, but nothing can save this book from its reprehensible politics. It’s honestly reassuring to learn that Heinlein dedicated Farnham’s Freehold to Nourse, and Friday was based in part on Nourse’s wife. Nourse’s actual career as an actual medical doctor was, shockingly, even shorter than my career as a programmer, which is really saying something. The description of the robots trying to learn from Dr. Long (surely a reference back to Heinlein) and Dr. Long’s efforts to subvert that process are on a par with all the episodes of bad SF TV in which someone logics some piece of alien something or other into exploding because of a paradox or whatever.
While it is nice to have a depiction of disability in SF, when you name the person with the clubfoot Billy Gimp, it’s real hard to have any respect for the author.
But I think the most insane part of all of this is the backstory on how what sounds like Medicare for All broke healthcare and all of society. This is the weirdest fever dream straight from a Republican member of the AMA in the 1950s, complete with an anti-healthcare mob firebombing the doc’s house, killing his wife and baby, as part of his motivation for providing illicit health care. The eugenics component of the story is exceptionally wild, 100% the kind of nonsense that circulated during the debates leading up to the ACA. In this world, you can only get official health care at government clinics if you agree to sterilization if you get treatment more than three times. They don’t do this to kids under 5, but apparently they really are doing tubals prepubescent girls and vasectomies on prepubescent boys. I think if I kept reading, I’d find out they were euthanizing some of the patients, but I’m not inclined to stick around for that. I nearly bailed out when Doc Long starts smoking a pipe _at the hospital_. But what did me in was the explanation how vaccinations campaigns wiped out natural resistance and that’s why everyone kept getting sick.
“A medical triumph [successful childhood vaccinations against diphtheria in the 1940s and 1950s], it had seemed, until sporadic outbreaks of a more virulent, drug-resistant form of diphtheria began striking adults in the 1970s, with antibiotic treatment now ineffective and the death rate rising to over 60 percent of all victims. Within another ten years widespread epidemics were sweeping the country and mass immunization campaigns were needed to damp the flame of a dreadful disease running wildfire through a population left naked of any natural resistance.”
Ok, what the actual fuck. Obviously, none of this actually happened, but what we’re seeing here is someone who almost certainly was run out of medicine in the 1950’s because he was anti-vax then uses science fiction to predict that diphtheria will kill off 60% of its adult victims in waves, during the same time frame that old people are living longer and longer? How does that even work? Also, having diphtheria does not protect that well against getting it again! Worse than vaccination, actually! This is so weird!
“Rupert Heinz had analyzed this pattern and come up with a frightening thesis: that medical intervention in itself had contributed the lion’s share to the massive spread of this virulent infection. Without immunizations earlier in the century, natural resistance would have kept the milder disease under control; now even a massive immunization campaign would be no more than a stop-gap, with horrible future epidemics to be expected as new virulent strains of diphtheria developed in the population.”
Anyway. While this book is of moderate interest as a window into just how long a certain strain of thinking has been kicking around in some corners of our society (Nourse did not make it to 70, and he died in Thorp, so I’m pretty sure we all know what corners I’m referring to), it’s way too painful for me to actually finish reading.
DNF. Ugh.
I haven’t read any James White in years, but I remember really loving the Sector General stories and novels. Having perused the wikipedia entries for White and Nourse, it’s not hard to understand why I loved White, and why I bounced so hard off of Nourse. Now, while experiencing moderate temptation to reread White, mostly I’m remembering enjoying Jenny Schwartz’s book, Doctor Galaxy, and wondering if there’s anything else current in the mashup of doctor / hospital stories and science fiction that I have sometimes enjoyed and sometimes abhorred.
ETA: I’ve never read S.L. Viehl’s Stardoc series, so I’m off to try a sample of that.
ETAYA: Accidentally stayed up late reading Stardoc. This is not great literature, but at least it’s fun!
no subject
Date: 2025-07-01 09:44 pm (UTC)I recall being interested/appalled by his fictionalized memoir about Virginia Mason, Intern, by Doctor X. Apparently the pseudonyms were quite obvious if you knew the people, e.g., Dr. Pilloe became Dr. Case, or perhaps vice versa, I forget. I don't remember anything specifically anti-vax, but it was a long time ago. (My mother never worked there but I expect she knew some of the people who did. Two of my sisters worked in the ER as secretaries in the 1970s, when a lot of the same people were still there.)
Small world!
Date: 2025-07-02 11:45 am (UTC)Thanks for the story! I think I’m glad he was a writer, because I feel like a bad writer does less damage than a bad doctor, but honestly, you could convince me of the contrary relatively easily.
Re: Small world!
Date: 2025-07-02 03:40 pm (UTC)