Unappreciated: Alan E. Nourse

In My Humble Opinion
1

Why has science fiction author Alan E. Nourse received so little acclaim, and his books all gone out of print? (except his nonfiction medical advisories and non-science-fiction medical thrillers The Practice and The Fourth Horseman, which, incidentally, are not bad)

I cannot be the only one who as a child sailed past Bradbury and Clarke and Heinlein to the N’s and poked impatiently past the inevitably enormous Andre Norton section to see if the library had any Nourse that I hadn’t read yet!??

Some of them were clearly for children, not adult readers: Raiders from the Rings, Scavengers in Space, Star Surgeon, Trouble on Titan…but still readworthy nonetheless.

Then there were the young adult / adult classics, among the best science fiction ever written: Rocket to Limbo, Psi High, The Universe Between, The Mercy Men, Bladerunner*; and his short story collections: The Counterfeit Man, Tiger By the Tail, Rx for Tomorrow.

I don’t have the fortune of owning very many of these. I was re-reading The Counterfeit Man for the thousandth time and had an itch to re-read one of the others I haven’t read in years and went to the NY Public Library console and found that the entire NY Public Library system has only a few of these :frowning:

If you like science fiction and are not familiar with…if the phrase “Hoffman Medical Center” does not instantly conjure up an eerie future with an ethically questionable medical-governmental complex, you owe yourself a read or two, assuming you can track down some of the above.

I really hate it when good books and good authors just fall off the map!

  • The answer is no. Or if there was any connection, it was on the order of how “The Lawnmower Man” was(n’t) based on Stephen King’s short story of the same name. Nourse’s Bladerunner was the guy who brings the illegal surgeon’s tools to perform illegal surgery on the uninsured in an evil future that has a nasty resemblance to the HMO-driven system of today.
2

I’ve already written a post on Alan E. Nourse on this Message Board, and about Bladerunner in particular. I think it a greatly underappreciated book (Ridley scott put an acknowledgement to Alan E. Nourse in the end credits to Bladerunner, thanking him for permission to use the title. I think Scott just liked he sound of it. You can’t really read the credit on your TV screen, though – it’s too small.)I’ve also read much of his short fictiojn.

3

Here’s an explanation of why the movie is named the same as the novel, despite the fact that they have no connection in plot:

> The movie’s title comes from Alan E. Nourse, who wrote a
> story called The Bladerunner. William S. Burroughs took
> the book and wrote Bladerunner (A Movie) in 1979. Rights
> to the title only (“in perpetuity”) were sold to Ridley
> Scott. Similarities between Nourse’s The Bladerunner and
> Scott’s Blade Runner are in name only. Nourse’s title
> refers to people who deliver medical instruments to
> outlaw doctors who can’t obtain them legally. Scott
> thought the title made a good codename for Deckard.

This is taken from the Bladerunner FAQ at this URL:

http://www.bit.net.au/~muzzle/bladerunner/

I think I recall that Nourse was paid to keep The Bladerunner out of print for several years to avoid confusion.

4

thanks :). I had forgotten his books! Better look for some now. I used to love his stuff as a kid.

I also loved Andre Norton