Blade Runner (a movie) is a novella written by famous Beat Generation writer William S. Burroughs that was based on the original novel by Nourse. Both Nourse’s novel and Burroughs’ novella tell the story of a futuristic yet apocalyptic world in which Blade Runners are smugglers of medical equipment such as scalpels.
Despite the brilliance of Philip K. Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? the title of his celebrated novel is arguably too ambiguous for a major film. In the novel, Deckard is referred to plainly as a police officer and a bounty hunter, not a Blade Runner as he’s known in the film. The words ‘Blade Runner’ and ‘Replicant’ don’t appear in the novel at all, making them excellent additions by Scott and screenwriters Hampton Fancher and David Peoples
Having read the book more recently than watched the movie, but isn’t this very obvious?
The electric animals are reduced to a reference in the movie while they are a really important part of the novels world building and the different characters motivation for a higher status…
Having now read the article too I gotta say it’s a really weird take to say the usage of blade runner for the movie and the job deckard does is inherently better is a weird take. They are my least favourite additions from the movie actually.
The name might be easier to market but the job now being percieved as detached from the police department harms the story in my opinion.