Strange images from William S. Burroughs' Blade Runner (A Movie) (a sci-fi novella written in 1979, very loosely adapting Alan Nourse's 1974 novel The Bladerunner, both of which are nominally about teenage smugglers of medical supplies in a post-collapsarian American dystopia and neither of which have anything to do with Ridley Scott's later adaptation, Blade Runner [1982], of Philip K. Dick's novel, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? [1968]): (1) crates of leprous armadillos weaponized and released by mad, subterranean lepers as a self-defense strategy; (2) "The essence of cancer is repetition - a cell repeating itself like an old joke. I'm a liver a liver a liver a liver..."; (3) New York City, for some reason, is drowned: alligators and sharks swim up and down the murky, sewage-contaminated avenues; (4) "Mad vigilantes with hangman's nooses and shotguns in canoes and rafts stalk the underground tunnels, the swamps and canals. There are also the dreaded tunnel pirates, the warring delco gangs, and all the underground scavengers. Some of these can only crawl, but they will hamstring you with wirecutters set in their radioactive glowing stumps..."; (5) "Virus B-23, the virus of biologic mutation, after lying dormant for 23,000 years in two crystal skulls, is rediscovered"; (6) "FREEDOM TO MUTATE"; (7) a recurrent fixation on John Mulvany's painting Custer's Last Rally (1881); (8) the treatment involves a kind of medical apocalypse (in every sense of the word) following the collapse, in which rightwing religious gangs and queer libertarian mutants fight it out in the ruins...; (9) "Violet lagoons where fishes of emerald dive for the moon. And here is a stunning young leper in Cleopatra drag on her barge with a dishy Marc Antony...; (10) "The story that we have been following up to this point becomes increasingly bizarre, dreamlike, and episodic. The other story, played out in linear future set, is real and logical within the limited framework. (This is taken from the book, The Bladerunner)."

Why the film based on the P. K. Dick story bore this title has always mystified me. This is one of Burroughs' simpler bks but I'll always love it for one scene: a group of freaks are walking down the street minding their own business when some intolerant bullies start bearing down on them in their car, harrassing them. The freaks see that if the car keeps speeding toward them it'll intersect w/ an oncoming truck that the car-driver can't see. It does & the car's annihilated. How many hundreds (or thousands) of times have I been harrassed on the street where having some poetic justice like this wd've come in handy? ( )

Burroughs treatment for a never-made film of Alan E Nourse's novel of almost the same name is surreal, dark and gritty. As with all Burroughs' work, unreadable in the linear sense, but when seen through Postmodern lenses, predictive of a lot of literary flourishes that came after. Excellent and recommended if you're already a Burroughs fan. ( )