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Blade Runner, a movie. By William S. Burroughs.

To avoid any possible confusion: it's not the movie. It's not even a movie. It's a short book-length discussion of a hypothetical movie, and its plot bears no resemblance whatsoever to the plot of the 1982 film with Harrison Ford.

Burroughs projects a terrifying urban dystopia, a national human catastrophe brought on by a dysfunctional health system. Exorbitantly-priced medical care is denied to the working middle class, while politicians buy votes and peace with extravagant giveaway programs to drug addicts and people on welfare. Gargantuan, cash-spouting medical and pharmaceutical lobbies repeatedly block legislative proposals that threaten their profitable strangleholds on the population. Demagogues use the resulting inequities to feed racist hatred and spark bloody riots. Overpopulation and a proliferation of genetic disorders lead to government edicts making sterilization a precondition of health care. Doctors are forbidden from providing medical services outside the official health care system. Some of them, predictably, go underground. The government hunts them down. And the wheel keeps turning.

The plot, such as it is, is secondary to the setting and the backstory. I found myself disappointed when Burroughs turned, about halfway thorugh the book, from backstory to story.

In the meanwhile, we find out what a "blade runner" is. The phrase makes perfect sense in context and has nothing to do with replicants.

The most interesting parts of this book are Burrough's nightmarish vision of dystopia, and his prediction, in 1979, that the availability of health care to the middle class would become an explosive political issue. It's unclear what influence the book may have had on the movie, beyond the title phrase and the overwhelming sense of a filthy, overcrowded urban hell ruled by oppressive government and business entities.