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Tags: Harlan Ellison
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Dangerous Minds is a compendium of the new and strange-new ideas, new art forms, new approaches to social issues and new finds from the outer reaches of pop culture. Our editorial policy, such that it is, reflects the interests, whimsies and peculiarities of the individual writers. We are your favorite distraction.
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In every generation there is a moment when some writer, artist, politician or whatever comes forward to announce that their generation is at the start of a revolution—some seismic shift in culture and society that will change everything for the better—forever. It’s rather like the way each generation appears to think it is the first to discover sex or sexuality and flaunts it through clothes, songs or horrendously written books.
A case in point is this roundtable discussion with a young Harlan Ellison from sometime in 1969-70, when the author declared “We’re in the midst of a revolution.”
It’s a revolution of thought, that is as important and as upending as the industrial revolution was—sociologically speaking. We’re coming into a time now when all the old “-isms” and philosophies are dying. They don’t seem to work any more.
All the things Mommy and Daddy told you and told me were true were only true in the house—the minute you get out in the street, they aren’t true any more. The kids in the ghetto have known that all their lives but now the great white middle class is learning it and it’s coming a little difficult to the older folks—which is always the way it is.
We are no longer Kansas or Los Angeles or New York—it’s the whole planet now. They got smog in the Aleutian Islands now; they got smog in Anchorage, Alaska; they got smog at the polar icecaps—can you believe it, smog at the polar icecaps. There is no place you go to hide anymore. So the day of thinking that the Thames or the English Channel or the Rocky Mountains is going to keep you safe from some ding-dong on the other side doesn’t go anymore. A nitwit in Hanoi can blow us all just as dead as a nitwit in Washington.
We’re beginning to think of ourselves not as just an ethnic animal, or a national animal, or a local or family kind of animal—we are now a planetary animal. It’s all the dreams of early science-fiction coming true.
That Ellison could have made this speech in nineties or the noughties, or indeed any decade, only shows how each generation discovers certain truths that are eternally consistent.
Humans, he continues, are now aware of a bigger picture and that by not taking responsibility for our actions—whether thoughtlessly throwing away a cigarette butt or garbage—is “screwing up the ecology.” Which is apposite considering the news of some scientists claiming Earth is on the brink of its sixth extinction.
But Ellison—in sunglasses looking like a Jordanian revolutionary—is only warming up to his theme—the importance of speculative fiction (or that dreaded word “science-fiction”) in imagining (shaping) the future. He has a very valid point—but again one that is made generation to generation-six years before this the writers of previous generations C. S. Lewis, Kingsley Amis and Brian Aldiss held an informal chat on the same subject where they agreed:
...that some science fiction really does deal with issues far more serious than those realistic fiction deals with; real problems about human destiny and so on.
Harlan Ellison is one of those very rare writers who is always inspirational or thought-provoking in everything he writes or says. Like most people, I came to his work through TV before having the greater pleasure of reading him. His seminal episodes of Outer Limits, “Demon with a Glass Hand” and “Soldier” (which James Cameron later used as a basis for Terminator), or his script for Star Trek or “The Sort of Do-It-Yourself Dreadful Affair” and “The Pieces of Fate Affair” on The Man from U.N.C.L.E. stayed with me long after viewing and were cause for my seeking out his fiction. This interview comes from just after Ellison had edited the classic volume of speculative fiction Dangerous Visions, which he hoped might lead to a revolution in the mind of its readers.
It probably did, but the revolution is always moving, changing, evolving.
The conclusion of Harlan Ellison’s talk, after the jump…
READ ON▸
Harlan Ellison describes himself as “a child of the Disney era,” whose first taste of the magic of cinema was Snow White and the Seven Dwarves. But Disney’s latest movie (made in collaboration with BBC Films) Saving Mr. Banks has so pissed off the already notably cantankerous Mr. Ellison that he has felt it necessary to post a rather disconnected (one might say rambling) video on YouTube calling out the film as “bullshit.”
Saving Mr. Banks stars Tom Hanks as Walt Disney and Emma Thompson as P. L. Travers, the author of the book Mary Poppins, which was first published in 1934. The film concerns Disney’s attempts to convince Travers to allow him to film her famous novel. It took Disney over 20 years to achieve this, and eventually his company filmed Mary Poppins, with Julie Andrews and Dick Van Dyke, in 1964.
Ellison has great praise for Hanks and Thompson in the film, but his main beef with Saving Mr. Banks is not the acting but a pivotal scene at the end of the movie, which he claims is bogus and bullshit. One can surmise what this scene may entail, as Ellison declares how Travers hated the movie, and went to her grave regretting her decision to ever allow Disney near her work.
Ellison gets all fired up about this, which (I suppose) is understandable as Ellison is a writer who is deeply proud of his own work, and sees anything he writes as sacrosanct. However, I (like no doubt millions of others) have known for decades that P.L. Travers hated Disney’s Mary Poppins. It’s not new news.
When musical impresario, Cameron Mackintosh asked Travers, who was then in her nineties, if he could produce a musical version of Mary Poppins, Travers stipulated (confirmed in her will) that this musical must be adapted by English writers and no Americans, or anyone involved with the film or the Disney empire were to be directly involved with the creative process of the musical. Mackintosh adhered to Travers’ wishes, and the musical opened in London’s West End in 2004, where it ran for four years.
Okay, so it’s not news, but what Ellison is really getting at is his disdain for the…
“...refurbishing of Disney’s god-like image, which he spent his entire life creating, and it is so fucking manipulative…”
Particularly when this involves the misuse of a writer’s work, especially when that work is exploited and bastardized for commercial reward, and in this case, to create propaganda to “burnish” the image of Walt Disney. Which probably is something to be pissed-off about.
Have you ever received a letter from a friend you haven’t heard from for a while, or even an email? And then you wanted to respond right away but you wanted to do it right, not just dash something off, so you put it off a day, and the next time you thought of it, eight days had passed, and it became a thing where too much time had passed for you to write the reply straight, and you felt awkward about it, so you put it off some more, and then every day that passed made it harder to respond forthrightly? And then it turned into this odd kind of guilt, and you found yourself actually harboring hostile feelings towards your friend for having put you in that position in the first place?
Has anything like that ever happened to you? Because something quite like that happened to Harlan Ellison on the most colossal scale imaginable. The nightmare was primarily of his own making, and he didn’t handle it at all well.
Before we get into this, Ellison is a tremendously talented and accomplished guy, and nothing I write here is intended to gainsay that premise. He’s also known for being kind of a difficult guy, and well, this story has a bunch of that.
Strangely, this story revolves around a set of books that can be thought of as a kind of precursor to Dangerous Minds—the title of the project was almost identical. In addition to all of the tremendous short stories Ellison penned, one of the most impressive accomplishments on his C.V. was his involvement in publishing two highly influential and successful sci-fi anthologies. The first one was called Dangerous Visions (1967) and the second one was called Again, Dangerous Visions (1972). The debacle came when Ellison attempted to publish the third volume, which was to be called The Last Dangerous Visions. It was supposed to be published by about 1974 or so. At least 100 and maybe as many as 150 prominent and not-so-prominent sci-fi authors submitted stories with the expectation that something like that would happen.
They’re still waiting—the ones who are still alive, anyway. Actually, truth be told, they’re probably not expecting anything to happen. In short, The Last Dangerous Visions became something like the Moby-Dick of science-fiction circles for a decade or two at least.
In the 1960s something special was brewing in the world of sci-fi. After having been a ghetto for dime-store practitioners for a generation or so (with a few exceptions), science fiction was on the verge of crossing over, breaking through, becoming real literature with a grown-up audience to match. The first Dangerous Visions featured talents as notable as Carol Emshwiller and J.G. Ballard and Philip K. Dick and Roger Zelazny and Samuel R. Delany and, of course, Ellison himself. It was a massive critical and commercial success, a true turning point for the genre. Five years later, Again, Dangerous Visions was also a hit, featuring Ursula K. Le Guin and Kurt Vonnegut and Piers Anthony and Ray Bradbury and Andrew J. Offutt and James Sallis and so on. By this time the Dangerous Visions books had entered the culture—they had an authentic audience who was eager to hear the details of the third volume. The literary brouhaha that would ensue wasn’t something that took place among a mere coterie, which gives the whole affair that much more bite.
Dangerous Visions, 1967
The events surrounding the massive and ever-delayed third volume, to be called The Last Dangerous Visions, were described with great vitriol by Christopher Priest, a British sci-fi writer who was just starting his career around the time The Last Dangerous Visions started to be a thing, in a 1987 pamphlet called The Last Deadloss Visions (it was later published by Fantagraphics under the title The Book on the Edge of Forever, an allusion to Ellison’s Star Trek episode “The City on the Edge of Forever”). Priest submitted a story, and then at some point withdrew it from the anthology. For writers whose pay depended on the royalties from anthologies, one of the main undercurrents of the The Last Dangerous Visions affair is that the many stories Ellison collected for it were essentially trapped as long as he had them—the writers couldn’t really shop them around anywhere else, as they grew more dated and less relevant with every passing year.
The Last Deadloss Visions has existed in a couple different forms, but suffice to say that it’s very long and impassioned and well argued (you can read it on the Internet Archive).
Again, Dangerous Visions, 1972
I’ll leave you to read it yourself—it takes an hour or so, and is well worth it—but I’ll divulge a few basic facts about it for those who don’t want to delve. What makes the situation surrounding The Last Dangerous Visions so jaw-dropping was the sheer scale of it—as many as 150 writers submitted stories, and by some calculations the number of words that the third book would have featured swelled as high as 1.3 million—this is twice as many as in War and Peace, or the same as perhaps an armful of regular-sized novels. According to Priest (his documentation is meticulous), Ellison on many occasions released statements to the effect that publication was just around the corner, he had “just dropped it off to the publisher” and so forth—none of which appears to have been true, and all of which had the effect of stringing the contributors along for another agonizing year or two. Ellison seems not to have behaved well in the affair, bullying, haranguing, and generally manipulating people, and even by 1975 or so—just three years—The Last Dangerous Visions had become something of a joke or an object of fascination in the sci-fi community. It’s the science fiction equivalent of Elastica’s second album, if you remember that length of that wait, although at least that album eventually was released. Lastly, I mentioned the death toll—which quickly became an index for the incredible time The Last Dangerous Visions was taking—by now the project is in its fourth decade, and the number of writers involved who have passed on to a different plane (according to Wikipedia) is forty-three.
Remarkably, Ellison, who today is 79 years old, has stated as recently as 2007 that he intends to publish the book.
It still hasn’t happened.
Below, Isaac Asimov, Harlan Ellison and Gene Wolfe discuss science-fiction writing with Studs Terkel and Calvin Trillin on a program called Nightcap: Conversations on the Arts and Letters in 1982:
Previously on Dangerous Minds:
Harlan Ellison: Don’t Fuck With the Quote
Years ago a friend wrote me a story about how we all started talking but in doing so, stopped listening to each other. It was a short and simple story, adapted I believe from its Aboriginal origins, that also explained how our ears developed their peculiar, conch-like shape.
Like all the best tales, it began: Once upon a time, in a land not-so-very-far-away, we were all connected to each other by a long umbilical loop that went ear-to-ear-to-ear-to-ear. This connection meant we could hear what each of us was thinking, and we could share our secrets, hopes and fears together at once
Then one day and for a whole lot of different reasons, these connections were broken, and the long umbilical loops dropped away, withered back, and creased into the folds of our ears. That’s how our ears got their shape. They are the one reminder of how we were once all connected to each other.
It was the idea of connection - only connect, said playwright Dennis Potter, by way of E. M. Forster, when explaining the function of all good television. A difficult enough thing, but we try. It’s what the best art does - tells a story, says something.
It’s what Rod Serling did. He made TV shows that have lived and grown with generations of viewers. Few can not have been moved to a sense of thrilling by the tinkling opening notes of The Twilight Zone. The music still fills me with that excitement I felt as a child, hopeful for thrills, entertainment and something a little stronger to mull upon, long after the credits rolled.
Serling was exceptional, and his writing brought a whole new approach to telling tales on television that connected the audience one-to-the-other. This documentary on Serling, starts like an episode of The Twilight Zone, and goes on to examine Serling’s life through the many series and dramas he wrote for TV and radio, revealing how much of his subject matter came from his own personal experience, views and politics. As Serling once remarked he was able to discuss controversial issues through science-fiction:
“I found that it was all right to have Martians saying things Democrats and Republicans could never say.”
His work influenced other shows (notably Star Trek), and although there were problems, due to the demands of advertisers, Serling kept faith with TV in the hope it could connect with its audience - educate, entertain and help improve the quality of life, through a shared ideals.
As writer Serling slowly “succumbed” to his art:
‘Writing is a demanding profession and a selfish one. And because it is selfish and demanding, because it is compulsive and exacting, I didn’t embrace it, I succumbed to it. In the beginning, there was a period of about 8 months when nothing happened. My diet consisted chiefly of black coffee and fingernails. I collected forty rejection slips in a row. On a writer’s way up, he meets a lot of people and in some rare cases there’s a person along the way, who happens to be around just when they’re needed. Perhaps just a moment of professional advice, or a boost to the ego when it’s been bent, cracked and pushed into the ground. Blanche Gaines was that person for me. I signed with her agency in 1950. Blanche kept me on a year, before I made my first sale. The sale came with trumpets and cheers. I don’t think that feeling will ever come again. The first sale - that’s the one that comes with magic.’
Like Richard Matheson, Philip K Dick, Stephen King, Ray Bradbury, Harlan Ellison, Serling is a hero who offered up the possible, for our consideration.
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GOLDEN AGE SCI-FI: 1934–1963
Scholars of the subject tend to claim that science fiction’s “Golden Age” dates to John W. Campbell’s 1937 assumption of the editorship of the pulp magazine Astounding. By my reckoning, however, Campbell and his cohort first began to develop their literate, analytical, socially conscious science fiction in reaction against the 1934 advent of the campy Flash Gordon comic strip, not to mention Hollywood’s innumerable mid-1930s Bug-Eyed Monster-heavy “sci-fi” blockbusters that sought to ape the success of 1933’s King Kong. (They were also no doubt influenced by the 1932 publication of Aldous Huxley’s literate, analytical, socially conscious Brave New World.) According to my eccentric generational and cultural era schema, 1934 is the first year of the Thirties (1934–1943), so let’s go ahead and semi-arbitrarily call 1934 the Golden Age’s starting point.
I retain the “Golden Age” designation for 1934–63 science fiction out of convenience, since we’re all accustomed to referring to it as such. I dispute the widely, lazily accepted notion that 1934–1963 was science fiction’s greatest era — particularly to the extent that the moniker suggests that the genre’s Radium Age (1904–1933) was a benighted period. (Isaac Asimov, the Golden Age’s premier publicist, once claimed that although it may have possessed an exuberant vigor, the pre-Golden Age science fiction he grew up reading “seems, to anyone who has experienced the Campbell Revolution, to be clumsy, primitive, naive.” Though true of much 1930s pulp sci-fi, this is a gross over-generalization.) On the other hand, just because I dispute the “Golden Age” moniker doesn’t mean I don’t enjoy science fiction published during this period. I do! I’ve read and re-read the books on this list; putting together this Golden Age 75 page has provided me with an excellent excuse to revisit terrific stories that I first devoured as a teenager in the early ’80s.
This page is a work in progress. Please let me know what favorite 1934–1963 sci-fi novels I’ve overlooked. And if you’d like to support the cause, please visit the HiLoBooks homepage; you’ll find purchase links for our series of reissued Radium Age sci-fi paperbacks.
— JOSH GLENN
GOLDEN-AGE SCI-FI at HILOBROW: Golden Age Sci-Fi: 75 Best Novels of 1934–1963 | Robert Heinlein | Karel Capek | William Burroughs | E.E. “Doc” Smith | Clifford D. Simak | H.P. Lovecraft | Olaf Stapledon | Philip K. Dick | Jack Williamson | George Orwell | Boris Vian | Bernard Wolfe | J.G. Ballard | Jorge Luis Borges |Poul Anderson | Walter M. Miller, Jr. | Murray Leinster | Kurt Vonnegut | Stanislaw Lem | Alfred Bester | Isaac Asimov | Ray Bradbury | Madeleine L’Engle | Arthur C. Clarke | PLUS: Jack Kirby’s Golden Age and New Wave science fiction comics.
JOSH GLENN’S *BEST ADVENTURES* LISTS: BEST 250 ADVENTURES OF THE 20TH CENTURY | 100 BEST OUGHTS ADVENTURES | 100 BEST RADIUM AGE (PROTO-)SCI-FI ADVENTURES | 100 BEST TEENS ADVENTURES | 100 BEST TWENTIES ADVENTURES | 100 BEST THIRTIES ADVENTURES | 75 BEST GOLDEN AGE SCI-FI ADVENTURES | 100 BEST FORTIES ADVENTURES | 100 BEST FIFTIES ADVENTURES | 100 BEST SIXTIES ADVENTURES | 75 BEST NEW WAVE SCI FI ADVENTURES | 100 BEST SEVENTIES ADVENTURES | 100 BEST EIGHTIES ADVENTURES | 75 BEST DIAMOND AGE SCI-FI ADVENTURES | 100 BEST NINETIES ADVENTURES | NOTES ON 21st-CENTURY ADVENTURES.
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SOME PRE-GOLDEN AGE TITLES
The following classics from the science fiction genre’s Radium Age (1904–33) era are listed here in order to provide some historical context.
Rudyard Kipling’s With the Night Mail (1905).
Gustave Le Rouge’s Le Prisonnier de la Planète Mars (1908).
E.M. Forster’s The Machine Stops (1909).
J.D. Beresford’s The Hampdenshire Wonder (1911).
Raymond Roussel’s Locus Solus (1914).
Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s Herland (1915, serialized).
H. Rider Haggard’s When the World Shook (serialized 1918–1919).
A. Merritt’s The Moon Pool (1918–1919).
S. Fowler Wright’s The Amphibians (1924–25).
Mikhail Bulgakov’s Heart of a Dog (1925).
Edgar Rice Burroughs’s The Moon Maid (1926)..
Thea von Harbou’s Metropolis (1926).
H.P. Lovecraft’s The Color Out of Space (1927).
E.E. “Doc” Smith’s The Skylark of Space (1928).
Olaf Stapledon’s The Last and First Men (1930).
Philip Gordon Wylie’s Gladiator (1930).
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GOLDEN AGE SF: 1934–1943
Note that the Thirties (1934–1943) are an interregnum between sci-fi’s Radium and Golden Ages. During the decade’s first few years, we find a number of titles published by E.E. “Doc” Smith, Olaf Stapledon, H.P. Lovecraft, Karel Capek, and other Radium Age authors. However, by the end of the Thirties, we can discern the emergence of Golden Age sci-fi.
E.E. “Doc” Smith’s Triplanetary (serialized 1934, in Amazing Stories; as a book, 1948). As two super-races battle for control of the universe, a backward planet in a remote galaxy has become their battleground. One race, the Eddorians, influences Earthlings to fail; but the Arisians influence Earthlings to transcend their limitations. (The battle has been going on for millennia: for example, it led to the sinking of Atlantis. Jack Kirby’s epic concept — in The Eternals — about the genetic experimentations of the alien Celestials, using Earth as a laboratory — owes a large debt to Smith.) After World War III, the Arisian influence begins to predominate; humankind explores space, and forms a Triplanetary League: Venus, Earth, and Mars. Against this cosmic backdrop, we follow the adventures of secret agent Conway Costigan and the beautiful and heroic Clio Marsden, who are captured by amphibian aliens — an advance patrol looking to harvest Earth’s iron ore. We also learn that the Arisians have been supervising two bloodlines, culminating in the superheroic Kim Kinninson and Clarissa MacDougall; their children, we’ll discover in Smith’s Lensman series, become humankind’s protectors. Bespite the pulpiness of the writing, Triplanetary is worth a read. Without it, no Star Wars, no Dune. Fun fact: After the original four novels of the Lensman series (Galactic Patrol, Gray Lensman, Second Stage Lensmen, Children of the Lens) were published (1937–1948), Smith expanded and reworked Triplanetary as a series prequel. While writing these books, Smith worked full-time as a food scientist — for a doughnut company.
Jack Williamson’s The Legion of Space (serialized 1934, in six parts; in book form, 1947) Building on the space opera conventions established by E.E. “Doc” Smith, Williamson gives us more of the same pulp fare — though with better characterizations. His protagonist, Giles “The Ghost” Habibula, is a former master criminal (of mixed English/Arabic descent, one presumes) who joins with two other outer-space adventurers, Jay Kala and Hal Samdu, to battle the Medusae, a Cthulhu-esque alien race which aims to destroy humankind and inhabit our solar system. Habibula, Kala, and Samdu are members of a military/police force who’ve maintained order and peace among the solar system’s inhabited planets ever since the downfall of the tyrannical Purple Hall empire. However, the Medusae have joined forces with Purple Hall pretenders seeking a return to power. Fortunately, one of the Purples, John Ulnar, switches sides — and becomes a D’Artagnan to Habibula, Kala, and Samdu. Silly stuff, but it paved the way for everything from the Green Lantern Corps to Iain M. Banks’s Culture. Fun fact: Other titles in the Legion of Space series: The Cometeers (serialized 1936), One Against the Legion (serialized 1939), and The Queen of the Legion (1983!).
Olaf Stapledon’s Odd John (1935). An extraordinary novel — by a visionary author who helped usher in Radium Age-era sci-fi themes and memes into the genre’s so-called Golden Age — which deserves to be much better known. Led by a teenage mutant “supernormal,” Odd John, a group of evolved misfits form an island colony. There, they experiment with telepathic communication, free love, “intelligent worship,” and “individualistic communism.” The jacket illustration shown here captures Stapledon’s notion of the titular John: half-child and half-philosopher, ruthless but not malicious, “a creature which appeared as urchin but also as sage, as imp but also as infant deity,” a fallen angel with a face that is “half monkey, half gargoyle, yet wholly urchin, with its huge cat’s eyes, its flat little nose, its teasing lips.” Cue David Bowie: “Look at your children/See their faces in golden rays/Don’t kid yourself they belong to you/They’re the start of a coming race.” The novel’s narrator, who has observed John growing up, and who is the only un-evolved human permitted to visit the island, isn’t sure whether to be overjoyed or terrified about what the “wide-awakes” are planning. Fun fact: Matthew De Abaitua’s terrific 2015 sci-fi novel If Then is, in certain key respects, an example of Stapledon fanfic… complete with a WWI-era homo superior known as Omega John.
H.P. Lovecraft’s At the Mountains of Madness (1936; as a book, 1964). A 1930 scientific expedition to Antarctica — from Arkham, Massachusetts’s Miskatonic University — discovers the ruins of a vast, ancient city… and the frozen bodies of some strange creatures, part-plant and part-animal. Part of the expedition is massacred — and it appears as though some of the frozen creatures have come back to life! Exploring the ruins, the surviving explorers determine that it was built by Elder Things, who first came to Earth shortly after the Moon took form, and built their cities with the help of shape-shifting, all-purpose “Shoggoths” (like Al Capp’s Shmoos, but uncannier). The Elder Things battled both the Star-spawn of Cthulhu and the Mi-go; and as the Shogvoths gained independence, their civilization began to decline. (Hello, Planet of the Apes.) Only one explorer escapes with his sanity intact… and he must warn another expedition to stay away from an even worse, unnamed thing which lurks in Antarctica! Fun fact: Originally serialized in the February, March, and April 1936 issues of Astounding Stories. Andrew Hultkrans analyzed At the Mountains of Madness for HILOBROW’s CROM YOUR ENTHUSIASM series.
Karel Čapek’s Válka s mloky (War with the Newts, 1936). The light-hearted first section of the book, which skewers European attitudes towards non-white races, recounts the discovery of an intelligent but child-like breed of large newts, on a small island near Sumatra… and their enslavement and exploitation in the service of pearl farming and other underwater enterprises. The Newts develop speech, and absorb aspects of human culture. In the book’s second section, the Newts began to rebel against their masters — hello, Planet of the Apes. The final section of War with the Newts is darker in tone: It recounts the outbreak of war between the Newts and humans. The British, French and Germans are portrayed as stubborn and nationalistic; and we hear from a German scientist who has determined that the German Newts are actually a superior Nordic race, and who invokes lebensraum to justify their destruction of portions of the world’s continents. The final chapter is a metafictional exercise in which the Author and the Writer discuss what will happen next: The Newts will destroy the world’s landmasses and enslave humanity. Fun fact: Sci-fi scholar Darko Suvin has described War with the Newts as “the pioneer of all anti-fascist and anti-militarist SF.”
H.P. Lovecraft’s The Shadow Over Innsmouth (1936). While on an antiquarian tour of New England, this novella’s unsuspecting narrator visits Innsmouth, Massachusetts — a blighted seaport, near Arkham, which is populated entirely by people who look a bit odd and who tend to shamble. The narrator persuades an old-timer, named Zadok, to tell him about the town’s history… and hears a wild story about fish/frog-like humanoids known as Deep Ones, who helped Innsmouth’s fisherman prosper, in exchange for the occasional human sacrifice! It seems that an Innsmouth merchant, Obed Marsh, had discovered the creatures while on a voyage in the West Indies. (Which is why this is a science fiction horror story, not merely fantasy: it’s about a Lost Race.) Marsh established a church — the Esoteric Order of Dagon — in honor of the Deep Ones’ deity. Over time, the Deep Ones slaughtered some of Innsmouth’s residents, and bred with others; their offspring looked like normal humans, but only for a while. The narrator doesn’t believe Zadok’s story… and yet, Zadok disappears mysteriously. Later, the narrator discovers that he, himself, is descended from Obed Marsh — and that he may become a frog-man. Is he just going mad? Or will he dwell in the sunken city Y’ha-nthlei? Fun fact: This was the only one of Lovecraft’s full-length novels distributed during his lifetime. Lovecraft based the town of Innsmouth on his impressions of Newburyport, Massachusetts. Arkham, of course, is based on Salem. Anthony Miller analyzed The Shadow Over Innsmouth for HILOBROW’s CROM YOUR ENTHUSIASM series.
Olaf Stapledon’s Star Maker (1937). Stapledon’s extraordinary, brilliant (if often difficult) novel describes a history of life in the universe, while exploring the philosophical notion that between different civilizations, no matter how physically and mentally dissimilar they may be, there must exist a progressive unity. Via unexplained means, our narrator is transported from England — and out of his body — into space. He explores alien civilizations on other worlds — and his consciousness merges with that of beings from these worlds, who then join him on his journey around the universe. Like humankind, we discover, alien species evolve in a Darwinian manner, and possess a capacity to value, to be aware, and to be creative. In addition to many imaginative descriptions of species, we encounter far-out technological marvels and sci-fi concepts: the first known instance of what is now called the Dyson sphere; descriptions of the Multiverse; the idea that the stars are intelligent beings; the formation of a networked consciousness spanning planets, galaxies, and even the cosmos; and a Star Maker who creates the universe but views it without any feeling for the suffering of its inhabitants. At last, invested with cosmic consciousness, our narrator returns to Earth at the place and time he left. Fun fact: Stapledon’s novel has been praised by H. G. Wells, Virginia Woolf, Brian Aldiss, Doris Lessing, Stanisław Lem, Jorge Luis Borges, and Arthur C. Clarke.
C.S. Lewis’s Out of the Silent Planet (1938). When Dr. Ransom, a Cambridge professor of philology, prevents physicist Dr. Weston (along with Weston’s accomplice, the cynical and grasping Dick Devine) from forcing a dull-witted young man into a spherical structure in Devine’s back garden, he is drugged by the unscrupulous duo. When he regains consciousness, Ransom finds himself in a spacecraft en route to Malacandra (Mars). Ransom escapes, explores the planet, and is befriended by a tribe of hrossa. Pursued by Weston, who aims to help humankind colonize the universe exploiting its resources, and Devine, who is just trying to get rich, Ransom seeks out Oyarsa, a spirit-like creature who rules Malacandra. She explains that Earth (“Thulcandra,” the silent planet) is ruled by an evil spirit, then permits the three humans to return home — if they can make it there alive! Fun fact: The first installment in Lewis’s Cosmic Trilogy; the sequels are Perelandra (1943) and That Hideous Strength (1945). Lewis claimed that the Radium Age sci-fi novel Arcturus, by David Lindsay, gave him the idea of using planets less as places than as spiritual contexts. (If you ask me, the plot also owes a great debt to Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s Herland.) This novel was written up by Mark Kingwell in HILOBROW’s CROM YOUR ENTHUSIASM series.
Isaac Asimov’s I, Robot (1940–1950; as a book, 1950). In this collection of nine stories, written while the author was working on his master’s and doctoral degrees in chemistry and biochemistry, working at the Philadelphia Navy Yard’s Naval Air Experimental Station during WWII, then teaching at Boston University, a future history of robotics — the manufacture and programming of robots, their interaction with humans — is traced. “Robbie” (1940), for example, makes the case that robots have more to fear from us than vice versa; despite being exiled to a factory, a nursemaid robot proves its devotion to a child. In “Reason” (1941), the recurring roboticist characters Powell and Donovan are trapped on a space station with a robot whose efforts to protect them involves the invention of a new religion. “Evidence” (1946) is about a politician who may or may not be a robot — but how to know for sure? Overall, Asimov plays with the logical possibilities and paradoxes inherent in his Three Laws of Robotics, which are first codified in the 1942 story “Runaround,” and which became famous. Fun fact: Isaac Asimov published a 1974 anthology of (mostly) Radium Age-era sci-fi stories called Before the Golden Age. He was well-qualified to do so; by my reckoning, I, Robot is a landmark work of science fiction — one marking the end of the genre’s Radium Age/Golden Age interregnum period and the beginning of the so-called Golden Age.
A.E. van Vogt’s Slan (serialized 1940; as a book, 1946). A teenage mutant bildungsroman, a jeremiad against racial prejudice and mob psychology, and something of a hot mess — this was Van Vogt’s first completed novel. Nine-year-old Jommy Cross, a telepathic Slan and heir to his father’s brilliant inventions, is orphaned when his mother is killed by anti-Slan human vigilantes. The Slan, a mutant human species that is smarter, faster, and stronger than “normals,” come in two varieties, we discover: those capable of reading other Slan minds, and having their own minds read in turn; and those who can shield their thoughts. In his quest to survive the anti-Slan mania sweeping the nation, Jommy discovers that the leader of his species’ persecutors — Keir Gray — is himself a Slan! A Magneto-like mutant, that is to say, whose ultimate goal is to eradicate all of humankind…. Fun fact: Serialized in Astounding Science Fiction and published in book form by Arkham House. Includes an early conjuring-up of computers: “electric filing cabinets that yielded their information at the touch of a button.”
L. Sprague de Camp’s Lest Darkness Fall (1941). Thanks to a Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court-esque time-travel phenomenon, archeologist Martin Padway ends up in Rome, c. 535. The Gothic War — in which the East Roman Emperor Justinian I sought to recover the provinces of the former Western Roman Empire, which the Romans had lost to invading Ostrogoths in the previous century — is about to begin. Because he knows that this conflict would usher in the Dark Ages, Padway attempts to alter the course of history. There is some Robinsonade action, at first, as Padway begins distilling brandy, expanding his business, and getting involved in politics. He teaches his clerks Arabic numerals and double entry bookkeeping; he develops a printing press, issues newspapers, and builds a long-distance semaphore telegraph system. In the last third of this short novel, he restores senile Ostrogoth emperor Theodahad to the throne (as a puppet ruler), moves the capitol to Ravenna (one of the few cities that was never sacked by the Goths), and leads Rome’s defense against Belisarius, Justinian’s talented general — then enlists Belisarius’s help to command an army against the Franks. Oh, and he emancipates the Italian serfs! Fun fact: A shorter version was first published in Unknown (December 1939). Lest Darkness Fall is considered one of the most influential early alternate-history yarns.
Hergé’s The Shooting Star (serialized, 1941–42; as a color album, 1942). In the opening pages of The Shooting Star, things are literally heating up: Car tires explode, rats flee the sewers, and Tintin’s dog Snowy gets stuck to the melting tarmac. It turns out that the heat is caused by the approach of a meteorite on a collision course with Earth. “Great heavens! But that’ll mean…” Tintin cries. “THE END OF THE WORLD, YES!” agrees an astronomer. Luckily, the experts have miscalculated. A fragment of the meteorite, which Professor Phostle has determined is made of a metal unknown to science, plunges into the Arctic Ocean — so Tintin and a crew of European scientists chase after it in Captain Haddock’s ship, the Aurora. Will they beat the competition (who’ll stop at nothing) to the meteorite? And once they find it, what weird properties will its alien metal reveal? Fun fact: Inspired, exegetes tend to suspect, by the Radium Age-era Jules Verne novel The Chase of the Golden Meteor (1908). Serialized during the German occupation of Belgium; this, and the anti-Semitic portrayal of the villainous financier Bohlwinkel, have made The Shooting Star a controversial installment in the Tintin series.
Isaac Asimov’s Foundation (1942–1950; as a book, 1951). When I published a list of 101 Science Fiction Adventures at io9.com. I did not include a single Isaac Asimov title; and readers were outraged. In my defense, although it has its dramatic moments, Foundation, for example — a collection of interlinked short stories, the premise of which is that 50,000 years from now, an expert in “mathematical sociology” will have predicted the imminent fall of the Galactic Empire, and a dark age for humankind lasting 30,000 years… and that this interregnum can be shortened to a mere 1,000 years if a colony of talented artisans and engineers tasked with preserving and expanding on humanity’s knowledge is established at the extreme end of the galaxy — is not an adventure. It’s a philosophical novel, bursting at the seams with dialogue and telling-not-showing. That said, I like it! It’s a fun think-piece. Fun fact: Originally a series of stories published in Astounding Magazine between May 1942 and January 1950. io9 included the book on its list of “10 Science Fiction Novels You Pretend to Have Read.” After 9/11, there was a pretty compelling theory floating around that Osama bin Laden was influenced by Asimov’s Foundation series when he founded Al Qaeda… whose moniker means “The Foundation.”
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GOLDEN AGE SF: 1944–1953
“At least I have enough energy to read/science-fiction” — from an entry dated 23 July 1952 in Gary Snyder’s Earth House Hold.
Clifford D. Simak’s City (1944–51; as a book, 1952) This Stapleton-Like epic surveys a millennium or so of humankind’s future history — from our abandonment of cities in favor of a peaceful, pastoral way of life, to our increasing reliance on robots, to our singularity-ish abandonment of our human forms for one better suited to a blissful, creaturely life on Jupiter (or, for those who choose to remain on Earth, a virtual reality-like cryogenic hibernation). Along the way, we endow our faithful canine companions with the ability to communicate telepathically, they become the dominant species on Earth… and it is they who narrate the semi-mythical story of human (“webster,” in dog-speak) evolution. There’s so much more, too: ants evolve and threaten to take over the world; dogs develop the ability to perceive alternate dimensions; mutant geniuses who roam the wilderness; not to mention Martian philosophy. Fun fact: The eight interconnected stories that form this “fix-up” novel were published between 1944 and 1951 in the pulp magazines Astounding and Fantastic Adventures.
Murray Leinster’s First Contact (1945). When a human spaceship meets an alien one — both are on exploratory missions, far from their respective homes — neither group knows how to react. It’s the first contact either species has ever had with an alien civilization. The aliens are humanoid bipeds who communicate via microwaves emitted from an organ in their heads; so the first problem to be overcome is one of awkwardly sending and receiving messages, then translating them. The two crews do begin to communicate, and discover that they have much in common; but both sides realize that they may have to try to destroy one another. Neither can leave, that is, without ensuring that the other crew cannot track them to their home planet. The solution to this stalemate is an ingenious one — and the story ends on a hopeful note. The two crews agree to learn more about each other’s cultures, and to meet again. Fun fact: Published by the pulp magazine Astounding, First Contact is now considered one of the most important Golden Age science-fiction stories, the template for innumerable subsequent first-contact stories. In fact, Leinster is credited with having coined the phrase “first contact.”
Jorge Luis Borges’s The Aleph and Other Stories (serialized 1945–1949; as a book, 1949). When Carlos Argentino Daneri, a middling poet, announces his intention to write an epic poem describing every single location on the planet in minute detail, the narrator of “The Aleph” isn’t impressed. However, when an expanding business proposes to tear down the poet’s house, Daneri confesses to our narrator that he can’t write his poem without the aid of the Aleph — a point in space containing all other points, and therefore allowing a viewer to see anything and everything in the universe from every angle simultaneously, without distortion — over which his house was built. The narrator visits Daneri’s basement and views the Aleph for himself; he’s staggered! But, because he despises Daneri, he gaslights him: He doesn’t admit that there’s anything there. Other sf-ish stories in the collection include “The Immortal,” about a character who wishes to stop being immortal; and “The Zahir,” about a phenomenon — currently made manifest as a coin — that causes its possessor to perceive less and less of reality. Fun fact: The story “The Aleph” was first published in the September 1945 issue of the Argentinian literary magazine Sur.
Ray Bradbury’s The Martian Chronicles (serialized 1946–on; as a book, 1950). The first astronauts to land on Mars are killed by the jealous husband of Ylla, a Martian woman whose telepathic abilities allow her to predict their arrival. The second expedition discovers that Martians regard them as insane hallucinations. The third expedition finds an idyllic small American town of the 1920s on Mars… and it’s occupied by their long-lost loved ones! A member of the fourth expedition realizes how wonderful Martian civilization is, and turns against his fellow Earthlings. Back on Earth, a hardware store owner attempts to prevent an African American man who owes him money from emigrating to Mars. A shape-changing Martian can’t help but transform into a lonely couple’s missing child. A settler opens a hot dog stand, even as a devastating atomic war breaks out back on Earth. The Martian Chronicles is a story collection/episodic novel recounting attempts to colonize Mars; it’s also a revisionist western, of sorts, criticizing the destructive and exploitative colonizers. And it’s a work of social philosophy, since the colonizers import Earth’s problems — from racism to commercialism and poor taste — to Mars. The episodes are thrilling and chilling, funny and sad, and always poetic and powerful. Fun fact: “Until the decade of the Fifties,” Robert Silverberg has claimed, “there was essentially no market for science fiction books at all.” The Martian Chronicles is often credited by historians of the genre as a pivotal event in the genre’s growing respectability and mainstream success.
Boris Vian’s L’Écume des jours (1947, trans. as Foam of the Daze, or Froth on the Daydream). Two young couples, Colin and Chloe and Chick and Alise, cavort in a surreal futuristic Paris — one in which the police sport skin-tight, bulletproof black leather and heavy metal boots; the “heartsnatcher” weapon kills by attaching to the torso and ripping out the heart; metal-frog-powered devices crank out a pharmacy’s medications; and Colin’s “pianocktail” concocts fantastical libations inspired by whichever jazz song is played on it. Colin and Chloe, who live with Colin’s Jeeves/Kato-inspired manservant Nicolas, give their poorer friends Chick and Alise enough money to marry… but Chick, a fanatic devotee of the novelist-philosopher Jean-Sol Partre, spends it all on Partre publications and collectibles. (Alise resorts to drastic measures to prevent Partre from publishing anything else.) Tragedy strikes when Chloe develops a water lily in her lung; in the face of her impending death, how will Colin choose to live? Fun fact: Richard Hell put it best, when he described this novel as “a kind of jazzy, cheerful, sexy, sci-fi mid-20th century Huysmans.”
B.F. Skinner’s Walden Two (1948). Our narrator, the psychologist Dr. Burris, brings Dr. Castle, a philosopher colleague, and others to visit Walden Two, an experimental community — founded in the 1930s by T.E. Frazier, a former grad school classmate of Burris’s — where behaviorist principles of reinforcement are experimented with in order to generate a utopian sociocultural system. Human behavior, according to Frazier, is determined not by “free will,” but by environmental variables; therefore, why not alter environmental variables in order to produce optimized behavior? Over four days, the visitors marvel at a community where nobody works more than four hours per day; children are raised by the collective (and incentivized, through a system of rewards and punishments, to behave well); advanced technology has been developed to facilitate domestic chores; and everybody gets along. Burris and Castle debate behavioral modification and free will with Frazier… but in the end, Burris decides to join up. Fun fact: The author was an esteemed behavioral psychologist at Harvard. Despite vociferous criticisms, the novel became a cult hit in the ’60s; in 1967, Kat Kinkade founded the Twin Oaks Community, using Walden Two as a blueprint.
George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949) Winston Smith, a low-ranking functionary at the Ministry of Truth, whose job involves altering old newspaper articles to agree with the officially approved version of history, lives in London, which has become a regional capital of the superstate Oceania. (English Socialism is the state’s ruling doctrine, and its nominal leader — whom the average citizen is encouraged to fear and revere — is known as Big Brother. Oceania is perpetually at war with one of the other two superstates.) The Thought Police ferret out “thoughtcrime”; everyone’s behavior is monitored constantly, via two-way telescreens. Winston starts an illegal affair with Julia, and befriends O’Brien — both of whom are fellow malcontents. Winston and Julia are apprehended by the Thought Police: Will their love, idealism, and critical thinking survive, or will they crack? Fun fact: One of the most famous works of science fiction, and one of the most esteemed novels of the 20th century, Nineteen Eighty-Four was influenced by Yevgeny Zamyatin’s Radium Age sci-fi novel We. It has given us such terms as Big Brother, doublethink, and thoughtcrime; and a real-life or fictional political order characterized by official deception is often described as Orwellian.
George R. Stewart’s Earth Abides (1949). Ish Williams, a student of ecology and geology, survives a plague that wipes out most of America. Making his way home first to Berkeley, Calif., then across the country, he scavenges food and supplies, and discovers small groups of fellow survivors. Back in California, finally, Ish helps found a community… but without the technology on which they’d depended, its members are ill-prepared to do anything like rebuilding civilization. Their children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren are more interested in hunting than learning how to read, much less study science or medicine; the men and women who built the infrastructure which the younger members of the tribe view as marvels are regarded as semi-mythological beings. Meanwhile, nature — weather, animals, plants, viruses — steadily encroach upon and erode their fragile human outpost. By the end, Ish’s hammer, a mining tool he’s carried with him since the plague, has become a totem to his semi-feral descendants. Fun fact: Although character development and storytelling are not exactly Stewart’s strength as an author, this is one of the most popular and influential eco-apocalypses of science fiction’s Golden Age. PS: The title is from Ecclesiastes 1:4: “Men go and come, but earth abides.”
Fredric Brown’s What Mad Universe (1949). In a near-future New York, successful sci-fi magazine director Keith Winton attends a party thrown at his boss’s country home. That evening, while thinking about his magazine and beautiful fellow publishing honcho Betty Hadley, a high-voltage generator carried by an experimental rocket crashes a few yards away… causing a space-time distortion. Winton is transported into a parallel-universe version of Earth, one which already features a Keith and Betty… but which also features interplanetary travel, an ongoing war with the telepaths of Arcturus, zombie-like creatures who stalk the streets of New York at night, and Moon beasts to whom nobody pays any attention. (As far as Winton can determine, the history of this world diverged from the history of his own world in 1903… when knitting machines led to the discovery of space travel.) Soon enough, he gets caught up in a caper — led by a superheroic man of action — to thwart Arcturian plans to blast the Earth with a super-weapon. What irony! Winton, you see, is a science fiction editor in the John Campbell mold — that is, he despises Space Opera, which he considers corny. But like it or not, now he’s in one. Fun fact: The “Arena” episode of Star Trek was based on a Brown story. Brown also wrote the 1949 crime novel The Screaming Mimi, which was adapted in 1958 as a movie starring Anita Ekberg and Gypsy Rose Lee.
Robert Heinlein’s Red Planet (1949). A YA adventure set on Mars. When Jim Marlowe, a teenage colonist (from Earth), discover that his boarding school headmaster is involved in the unscrupulous Martian Corporation’s plan to stop the colonists’ traditional migration to warmer climes during the harsh Martian winter, he and a friend run away to warn their parents… who are thousands of miles away. Along for the ride is Jim’s Martian pet, Willis, an affectionate volleyball-shaped “bouncer” that can communicate in pidgin English. Skating along the planet’s frozen canals — a conceit borrowed, one imagines, from Hans Brinker — the runaways are rescued by Martians, who possess abilities and technologies beyond anything the colonists have suspected. Aided by the Martians, the colonists rebel against the Corporation and proclaim their independence. But what will become of Willis? Fun fact: Here is where we fist meet Heinlein’s Martians — who will make a brief appearance in Stranger in a Strange Land. They inhabit two planes of existence simultaneously; revere freedom; and possess terrible powers.
Leigh Brackett’s The Sword of Rhiannon (serialized 1949; as a book, 1953). This ERB- and REH-influenced planetary romance begins on the dying world of Mars, in the Low-Canal town of Jekkara, where archaeologist-turned-thief Matthew Carse allows himself to be coerced into discovering the locating of Rhiannon’s tomb, and stealing an infamous piece of ancient technology: the Sword of Rhiannon. Inside the tomb he is pushed into a sphere that transports him back millions of years, to a lush Mars where rival species — the evil forces of the Sark and their half-human, half-serpent Dhuvian allies, and the noble barbarian Sea Kings — battle over the artifacts in Rhiannon’s tomb. Carse becomes a galley slave, then leads a mutiny. Arriving at the realm of the Sea-Kings, Carse discovers that his mind has been possessed by Rhiannon himself, who seeks atonement for his ancient crimes. For those who enjoy science fantasy, this is entertaining stuff complete with a reluctant villainess: Ywain, the fierce warrior princess-heir of Sark, who (sorry) longs to be dominated by the manly Carse. Fun fact: Leigh Brackett, “Queen of Space Opera,” was screenwriter for The Big Sleep and Rio Bravo, not to mention The Empire Strikes Back. The Sword of Rhiannon was published as an Ace Double with REH’s Conan the Conqueror.
John Wyndham’s The Day of the Triffids (1951). When a bright “meteor shower” (or did orbiting weapons accidentally detonate?) causes a worldwide epidemic of blindness, one of the handful of sighted survivors in England is Bill Masen, a biologist studying triffids – tall, venomous carnivorous plants capable of locomotion and communication. Navigating a London gone haywire, Masen rescues Josella Playton, a wealthy novelist, from a blind man who has forced her to serve as his guide… and the two of them plan to join a colony of the sighted outside London. Instead, they are kidnapped by a group that chains sighted men and women to groups of the blind, and forces them to scavenge for food and supplies. Masen eventually escapes and helps establish a self-sufficient colony in Sussex… which, unfortunately, is menaced not only by hordes of triffids but by a militarized rival colony! Fun fact: Brian Aldiss singled out The Day of the Triffids as an example of what he called a “cosy catastrophe” — that is, a subgenre of apocalyptic fiction in which a handful of survivors enjoy a relatively comfortable existence.
Robert Heinlein’s The Puppet Masters (1951) In 2007, slug-like creatures arrive in flying saucers and begin to take over. It seems they can take control of their victims’ nervous systems, and manipulate them like puppets. Government officials don’t believe in any of this nonsense, until the Old Man, head of a top-secret government agency, infiltrates the affected area with his top agents: Sam (the Old Man’s son), and the beautiful Mary… whom, we eventually discover, was puppetized by these creatures when she was a child colonist on Venus. Even as the Old Man directs government efforts to combat the invasion of these body-snatchers, Sam is puppetized by a slug! The government’s counter-attack fails, and it’s up to Sam and Mary to work out a desperate last-ditch anti-slug effort. An exciting Cold War-inflected thriller (it’s been described as a “not-too-thinly veiled metaphor for the eternal vigilance needed to keep the Communist menace in check”) which I discovered, as a teen, via the 1980 Science Fiction Book Club edition. Fun fact: Originally serialized in Galaxy (September, October, November 1951). In 1990, Heinlein’s widow gave permission for the publication of an earlier — longer, and more risqué — version of the manuscript.
Bernard Wolfe’s Limbo (1952; in the UK: Limbo ’90). Limbo is: a sometimes tedious, aggravating work of genius; a post-apocalyptic antiwar treatise that is skeptical of pacifism; and a serious novel of ideas written by an inveterate punster. In 1990, after the cataclysm of WWIII has wiped out Paris, London, Rome, and other cities, the diary of a disillusioned brain surgeon is discovered. Dr. Martine’s irreverent, sarcastic notions — e.g., disarmament taken to a literal, amputational extreme — wind up providing an ideological basis for an absurdist worldwide movement. The disarmament movement has split into two factions: one remains helpless; the other replaces the missing limbs with powerful artificial ones. Martine’s peaceful Indian Ocean island home is invaded by cyborgs from the latter movement, who seek a rare metal — one thinks of “vibranium” — to power their limbs. He seeks to preserve the island… but he’s not a sympathetic character, as his lobotomization practice and misogynistic fantasies demonstrate. Fun fact: Limbo is considered one of the first novels about cybernetics, and it’s been described as a precursor of both the New Wave and Cyberpunk sci-fi movements. J.G. Ballard called Limbo “one of the books that encouraged me to write SF.”
Kurt Vonnegut’s Player Piano (1952). During WWIII, while the American (male) workforce was fighting overseas, out of necessity American engineers made tremendous strides in automating most manual labor. Today (in the near future), most Americans are either busy and fulfilled engineers and managers, on the one hand, or discontented idlers, on the other. Paul Proteus, successful and contented manager of the automated Ilium Works, is the son of one of the men who created this new economic and social order; although he’s inherited his father’s reputation, he harbors secret doubts. An anthropologist and Episcopalian minister, Reverend Lasher, persuades Paul that life without meaningful work is boring and inhuman; Paul begins to fantasize about quitting his job and living off the grid. During a retreat for elite engineers, Paul quits his job — at which point Lasher’s secret organization begins to use him as a messianic figurehead for their anti-technology revolution. What will transpire when the revolution begins? Fun fact: Vonnegut’s first novel was inspired by Brave New World, as well as by his own postwar experience working at General Electric. He didn’t want it to be classified as “science fiction.”
Hergé’s Tintin comic On a marché sur la Lune (Explorers on the Moon, 1952–53; as an album, 1954). By the end of the preceding volume (Destination Moon) of this two-part adventure, Tintin, Snowy, and Captain Haddock have ended up crewing an atomic rocket-powered spacecraft that is leaving the Earth bound for the Moon; Professor Calculus, the rocket’s designer, and his assistant, Frank Wolff, are also aboard. (Spoiler alert: So are the detectives Thomson and Thompson, and a spy working for a foreign power!) After a few mishaps along the way — including Haddock’s drunken, impromptu spacewalk — the rocket lands, and Tintin becomes the first man on the Moon. (The rocket-landing artwork is superb.) The team explores the Moon’s surface… but the rocket is hijacked! The rocket heads for home, but they’re short on oxygen. Someone will have to die, if the others are to survive. A thrilling, semi-serious, semi-humorous sci-fi adventure. Fun fact: The 17th volume of The Adventures of Tintin was influenced, in part, by Hergé’s friendly rivalry with Belgian cartoonist Edgar P. Jacobs, who had recently enjoyed success with a sci-fi comic, The Secret of the Swordfish. PS: Elon Musk is a fan.
Theodore Sturgeon’s More Than Human (1952; as a book, 1953). In this far-out updating of Olaf Stapledon’s Odd John, a Radium Age-era Argonaut Folly, tortured mutants with amazing talents — Lone (“the Idiot”) can read and control thoughts; eight-year-old Janie can move objects with her mind; Bonnie and Beanie can teleport; Baby is a super-genius; Gerry is a sociopathic urchin able to bind the others into a unified “gestalt” — threaten the prolonged existence of humankind as we know it. In the final section of the book, Lt. Barrows, a gifted engineer who worked for the US Air Force until he apparently went insane, discovers that he was a victim of the gestalt — who wanted to prevent him from discovering the secret of their antigrav device, not to mention their very existence. Will Hip fight back against the mutants… or join them? Fun fact: More Than Human is a “fix-up” of Sturgeon’s previously published novella Baby is Three; two new sections were written for this version.
Alfred Bester’s The Demolished Man (serialized 1952; as a book, 1953). A cartoonish but gripping police procedural. In the year 2301, telepathic police operatives (“Espers,” or “peepers”) have made premeditated murder impossible; there hasn’t been one in decades… until Ben Reich, a megalomaniac industrialist, decides to murder his business rival, D’Courtney. He enlists the support of a renegade Esper, who not only assists with the plotting and execution of the murder, but teaches Reich a maddening jingle — an earworm — that will prevent anyone from prying into his mind. Enter Lincoln Powell, Esper and police prefect, who uses his network of peepers to help him obtain evidence, while racing to find D’Courtney’s daughter, an eyewitness to the murder, before Reich does. There’s plenty of action and high-tech gadgetry — including flash grenades that destroy the retinas of on-lookers, and “harmonic” guns. If Reich is caught, he’ll be subject to “demolition,” in which the offender’s personality and memories are extracted…. Fun fact: Winner of the first Hugo Award. In 1959, Thomas Pynchon applied for a Ford Foundation Fellowship, proposing to adapt The Demolished Man as an opera. His application was denied.
Frederik Pohl and C.M. Kornbluth’s The Space Merchants (serialized, as Gravy Planet, 1952; in book form, 1953). Because I’m a science fiction fan who works in the esoteric outer reaches of consumer research (semiotic brand analysis), people occasionally wonder whether I was somehow deeply influenced by The Space Merchants, at an impressionable age. Not so. But I do like this proto-Idiocracy, cyberpunk-ish dystopian adventure, in which ace copywriter Mitch Courtenay, whose agency has just landed the plum assignment of persuading inhabitants of the overcrowded and exhausted Earth to voluntarily emigrate to new colonies on Venus, is kidnapped by rebels who want him to articulate their movement’s “functional and emotional benefits” (as marketers put it) instead. Huge, amoral and trans-national corporations have taken the place of governments, in Pohl and Kornbluth’s story, and advertising has become the vehicle by which the masses are deluded into consuming more, more, more. Venus, meanwhile, is a hellhole — it will take generations before colonists can live there in anything but harsh conditions. What will Courtenay do? Fun fact: Originally published in Galaxy (June–August 1952) as a serial (with a better title: Gravy Planet), The Space Merchants helped introduce such marketing and sci-fi neologisms as “R&D,” “Muzak,” and “soyburger.” In 1960, Kingsley Amis suggested that The Space Merchants “has many claims to being the best science-fiction novel so far.”
Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 (1953). In a peaceful, complacent future America, books — along with all other vectors of critical thought — are forbidden. But Guy Montag, a “fireman” whose job involves burning books whenever a cache is located, is beginning to have doubts. His wife, like everybody else, seems content to spend all of her time watching participative soap operas, yet she attempts suicide — perhaps because her couch potato life is so empty. A gentle teenager, who loves to walk everywhere, in a car-dominated culture, and who asks probing questions, is killed senselessly, by a speeding driver. So Montag begins to read some of the books he was supposed to have burned… and soon enough, joins an underground effort to print and distribute books, and to discredit his fellow firemen. Once his own wife betrays him, Montag goes on the run. A powerful polemic about freedom… but also an exciting hunted-man adventure. Who can ever forgot the firemen’s robotic dog, trailing Montag with its super-sensitive yet lethal hypodermic snout? Fun fact: Fahrenheit 451 is often described as the first sci-fi novel to cross over from genre writing to the mainstream of American literature. (It’s too bad that it’s taught in high schools, because that makes people dislike it.) Adapted, in 1966, as an amazing-looking (if a bit stilted) movie by François Truffaut.
Arthur C. Clarke’s Childhood’s End (1953). A Stapledonian epic in which an alien invasion is merely the prelude! In the late 20th century, as the US and USSR continue to jockey for global dominance, the skies above Earth’s principal cities are suddenly filled with vast spaceships. The aliens, who call themselves the Overlords, and who decline to reveal their physical forms, announce that they have arrived to usher in an era of peace and prosperity for all humankind. Fast-forward five decades, and Earth truly is a peaceful and prosperous place. But some curious souls demand to know what the Overlords look like, where they come from, and what their ultimate purpose really is. Astrophysicist Jan Rodricks stows away on an Overlord supply ship; meanwhile, the Overlords take particular interest in a young brother and sister, Jeffrey and Jennifer, in whom may lie the potential for humankind’s self-overcoming — whatever that might mean. Readers beware: When the truth is finally revealed, it’s mind-blowing. Fun fact: Clarke considered Childhood’s End, which began life in 1946 as a short story, “Guardian Angel,” one of his favourite own novels. In 1972, not one but two British prog rock bands — Pink Floyd and Genesis — released (trippy) songs inspired by the book.
Hal Clement’s Mission of Gravity (1953, as a book 1954). Perhaps not one of the best-written or most exciting stories of the period, but Mission of Gravity — whose title is a pretty good pun — is well worth revisiting as an influential midcentury example of “hard” sci-fi world-building. The action takes place on Mesklin, a planet whose shape is an “oblate spheroid,” which results in a situation where gravity’s pull differs between the planet’s poles and its equator. (The planet’s name, FWIW, makes me think of Aldous Huxley’s experiments with mescaline, which coincided exactly with the serialization of Clement’s book; Huxley’s 1954 account, The Doors of Perception, quotes Goethe on the startling “gravity of Nature.”) The planet’s intelligent species are built low to the ground, like centipedes or caterpillars; they are terrified of height, and the concept of flight is unimaginable. Visiting Earthmen lose a valuable scientific probe, somewhere on Mesklin, so Barlennan, an adventurous Mesklinite sea trader, is recruited to go on a dangerous voyage in order to retrieve it; they are guided in their quest by the god-like voice of the Earthmen, orbiting above them. The story is mostly told from Barlennan’s perspective, which adds to the fun. Fun fact: The novel was serialized in Astounding Science Fiction in April–July 1953. As the action proceeds, Clement, a high-school science teacher, rather unsubtly reminds readers of the importance of the scientific method.
James Blish’s A Case of Conscience (1953; as a book, 1958). Father Ruiz-Sanchez, a biologist, doctor, and Jesuit priest, is one of four astronauts sent on a reconnaissance mission to the planet Lithia; the team is tasked with studying the native population and determining whether the planet is suitable for human colonization. It turns out that the Lithians, a race of high intelligent kangaroo-like reptiles, have developed a peaceful, rational society. However, it perturbs Ruiz-Sanchez that the Lithians, though possessed of an innate sense of morality, are incapable of faith — a fact that directly contradicts Catholic dogma. In fact, Ruiz-Sanchez decides that the planet is a snare, set by the Devil, in order to tempt humankind to abandon any religious framework. Despite the planet’s rich mineral deposits, then, he votes for a planetary quarantine. However, he does take a Lithian egg with him back to Earth, where humankind lives in fallout shelters and longs for a political savior…. What a mistake! Fun fact: A Case of Conscience is the first part of the author’s thematic After Such Knowledge trilogy, which includes Doctor Mirabilis, Black Easter, and The Day After Judgment.
Poul Anderson’s Brain Wave (1953; as a book, 1954). Since the Cretaceous period, it seems, the Earth has existed in a neural-dampening field; when it emerges from this field, every person and animal on the planet becomes five times more intelligent. Unintelligent people become geniuses; smart people become super-geniuses (and go bonkers); animals develop the ability to speak. Which sounds great, but it turns out that the hierarchical structures through which society functions is no longer sustainable! In the USA, unskilled workers quit their monotonous jobs; white-collar professionals reject the rat race; and animals refuse to be mastered and used as resources by humankind. Africans rebel against colonial rule; the Chinese populace rises up against the authoritarian Communist government. The book begins with a description of a rabbit, caught in a trap, suddenly developing the ability to reason its way out — a metaphor for the invisible prison within which humankind has been trapped for millennia. But can humankind survive this upheaval? Fun fact: First serialized in Space Science Fiction in 1953.
Isaac Asimov’s The Caves of Steel (1953; as a book, 1954). The protagonist of this detective story, set three thousand years in the future, is New York homicide detective Lije Baley, who has been ordered to Spacetown — just outside New York’s dome — to track down the murderer of a prominent Spaceman. He is hampered, in his efforts, by the contempt that Earthmen (who live in the titular caves of steel — i.e., overpopulated megapolises) and Spacers (who lives of comparative luxury) feel for one another. Baley is also prejudiced against robots, whom Earthmen resent because they have taken away jobs from humans. So it comes as an unpleasant surprise when he is partnered with R. Daneel Olivaw — the first “humaniform” robot, who was constructed in the image of the murder victim. Jehoshaphat! A pretty fun mystery, and exercise in world-building, marred only by Asimov’s love of long-winded exposition at the expense of dramatic action. Fun fact: First serialized in Galaxy, October to December 1953. This is the first outing for Baley and Olivaw, whom Asimov would team up again in The Naked Sun and The Robots of Dawn. Olivaw also appears in the Foundation trilogy’s prequels and sequels.
Poul Anderson‘s Three Hearts and Three Lions (1953; as a book, 1961). Often inadequately classified as a work of fantasy (I’ve classified it this way myself), Three Hearts and Three Lions is that rarest of phenomena: a fun, ingenious blend of science fiction and fantasy alike. When Holger Carlsen, a Danish-born American engineer who during WWII returns to Denmark to join the resistance (in an effort to smuggle out a physicist who alone can end the war), is grazed on the head by a bullet, he is transported to a parallel Earth — a medieval fantasy-land where Charlemagne is king, and trolls and unicorns wander the woods. Stranger still, Holger discovers a knight’s equipment (emblazoned with three hearts and three lions) and horse waiting for him; and he knows how to use the weapons and speak an archaic form of French. Soon, he becomes embroiled in an epic showdown: the forces of Faery are poised to overthrow humankind and their allies who support Law over Chaos. Embarking on a quest for an anti-chaos WMD, the legendary sword Cortana, Holger is joined by a gruff dwarf, a swan-may, and a Saracen knight; he is also aided by his understanding of science and engineering — because “magic,” it turns out, is indistinguishable from advanced technology. Fun fact: A novella version first appeared in the magazine Fantasy & Science Fiction. Anderson’s obsession with Northern European legends, and his admiration for medieval virtues — developed further in The Broken Sword (1954) — directly inspired the game Dungeons & Dragons. His notion of a battle between Law and Chaos, and that of the Eternal Champion, were also directly influential on Michael Moorcock’s creation of Elric of Melniboné.
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GOLDEN AGE SF: 1954–1963
The apex of Cold War paranoia coincided with the apex of the so-called Golden Age of Science Fiction and Fantasy — by 1963, the New Wave era of these genres was visible on the horizon. Poul Anderson’s The Broken Sword, Philip K. Dick’s Time Out of Joint and The Man in the High Castle, Alfred Bester’s The Stars My Destination, Kurt Vonnegut’s The Sirens of Titan and Cat’s Cradle, Anthony Burgess’s A Clockwork Orange, and J.G. Ballard’s The Drowned World already contain New Wave elements. Yet they’re not so self-conscious as New Wave science fiction and fantasy; the pleasure they offer to the reader is less rarified and self-conscious than what was to come. Not that there’s anything wrong with rarified and self-conscious.
Jack Finney’s The Body Snatchers (1954; as a book, 1955). Why, wonders psychologist Miles Bennell, are so many of his patients — in bucolic Mill Valley, California — suddenly convinced that their loved ones aren’t really who they’re supposed to be? These doppelgängers, according to their spouses, relatives, colleagues, and friends, look exactly like the people they’ve replaced; they share their victims’ memories and mannerisms. But they’re not them! A case of mass hysteria, Bennell decides… until he discovers a curiously “blank” body, without features or fingerprints, concealed in a basement cupboard. He and his ex-girlfriend, along with others convinced that something uncanny is going on, begin to wonder whether there is an alien invasion going on. And if so, who can they trust? The aliens — and the science behind how they operate — aren’t particularly believable… but the dramatic tension is incredible. How much evidence of the impossible is required until we see the truth? Fun fact: Serialized in Colliers in 1954. (Philip K. Dick’s pod-people story, “The Father-thing,” was published a few months later.) Memorably adapted as a movie in 1956, by director Don Siegel; and again in 1978, by director Philip Kaufman — with an extraordinary cast that includes Donald Sutherland, Brooke Adams, Veronica Cartwright, Jeff Goldblum, and Leonard Nimoy.
Richard Matheson’s I Am Legend (1954). Though it has inspired more thrilling novels (Stephen King is a Matheson fan) and movies, I Am Legend is less an adventure than it is a novel of ideas (about the psychology of social isolation), a bleak Robinsonade (set in a vampire-infested Los Angeles of 1976, with no hope of rescue), and a scientific mystery (valorizing painstaking inductive reasoning). What action there is largely occurs in flashbacks — as we learn about the devastating spread of a zombie-ism/vampirism-like pandemic. Even our hero, Robert Neville, is less creative and brilliant than he is merely dogged; and he’s a drunk. Still, there is much to enjoy here. Neville stakes vampires by day, and by night — as the vampires howl outside his door — he attempts to unravel the cause of the plague (are the vampires physically, or just psychologically transformed?), and muses about the overlap between legend and history. Then he meets — and pursues, and captures — Ruth, who might be a survivor of the plague. Or is she something else? Are there non-feral vampires? Is he, himself, a legend? Fun fact: The excellent 1971 science-fiction movie The Omega Man, starring Charlton Heston, is loosely based on I Am Legend. Other movie adaptations have been less entertaining.
Leigh Brackett’s The Long Tomorrow (1955). A century after “The Destruction,” petulant juvenile delinquents Len and Esau dwell — as do most Americans — in a rural New Mennonite community which demonizes technology and science. Anyone who attempts to unearth such dangerous knowledge faces punishment — up to and including being stoned to death. (In a sense, The Long Tomorrow is a post-apocalyptic sequel to Cicely Hamilton’s Radium Age apocalypse Theodore Savage; and it seems as though it must have influenced later YA adventures, like Peter Dickinson’s Changes trilogy, and John Christopher’s Sword of the Spirits trilogy.) Len and Esau discover that legends of Bartorstown — a thriving technological utopia — may in fact be true. So they head out, on a long journey, to find it. Traveling down the Ohio River to the Mississippi, our heroes encounter dangers and marvels… but will Bartorstown be everything they hope? Fun fact: Charlie Jane Anders, of io9.com, includes The Long Tomorrow on her list of “10 Science Fiction Novels You Pretend to Have Read.”
Philip K. Dick’s Solar Lottery (1955). Picking up where A.E. van Vogt’s Slan and Alfred Bester’s The Demolished Man left off, Dick’s first published novel imagines an Earth of 2203 in which the planetary leader (the “Quizmaster”) is protected by a telepathic corps constantly scanning minds in search of a potential assassin. The Quizmaster is chosen at random… and in order to offset the chance that the randomly selected leader might be an incompetent one, an assassin is also chosen at random. These proceedings are televised, in an effort to entertain the populace while reassuring them of their leader’s competence. Our protagonist, Ted Benteley, is one of the author’s minor men — not an action hero type, but merely a biochemist who is tricked into swearing fealty to Reese Verrick, a recently deposed planetary leader who plans to assassinate his successor. Benteley joins a team controlling an android killer designed to outwit the Quizmaster’s telepaths… because it’s controlled by 24 alternating minds. Verrick’s replacement, meanwhile, is head of a band of fanatics who take off into deep space in search of a legendary planet. A fast-paced, exciting yarn marred only by the author’s dismissive attitude towards the book’s (bare-breasted) women. Fun fact: Solar Lottery was first published as one half of an Ace Double; the other novel was Leigh Brackett’s The Big Jump.
John Wyndham’s The Chrysalids (1955, US title: Rebirth). Centuries after a nuclear war (known now as “Tribulation”) devastated global civilization, a farming community in what was Labrador — a warmer, more hospitable version of northernmost Atlantic Canada — remains on high alert for any deviation, whether it be mutated crops or humans, from what they regard as the norm of God’s creation. (Their motto: KEEP PURE THE STOCK OF THE LORD; WATCH THOU FOR THE MUTANT.) Though not a YA novel, The Chrysalids is a bildungsroman: We follow 10-year-old David, whose six-toed friend is forced to flee to Labrador’s lawless Fringes, or risk execution… and who discovers in himself telepathic powers that he struggles to keep secret. When the truth about David and his “think-together” friends are discovered, they escape to the Fringes, pursued by a mob. David’s sister, meanwhile, claims to be in contact with telepaths from a utopian society — untouched by the Tribulation, and where telepathy is encouraged — in distant “Sealand” (New Zealand?). It’s unclear, however, whether the Sealandites are morally superior to the non-telepaths they freely kill. Fun fact: The Jefferson Airplane song “Crown of Creation” was inspired by Wyndham’s novel.
Alfred Bester’s The Stars My Destination (also published as Tiger! Tiger!, serialized 1956; in book form, 1957). If Heinlein’s Double Star, also published in 1956, is The Prisoner of Zenda in space, then The Stars My Destination is a proto-psychedelic sci-fi version of The Count of Monte Cristo. In the 25th century, personal teleportation — known as “jaunting” — has thrown the solar system’s social and economic order into chaos. During a war between the inner planets and the outer satellites, the Nomad, a merchant spaceship, is destroyed; the only survivor, a directionless loser named Gully Foyle, is cast adrift. He repairs the Nomad, and returns to Terra, though not before he’s captured by a cargo cult who tattoos his face with a tiger mask. He embarks on a life of violent crime, eventually transforming himself into the elegant Geoffrey Fourmyle — all the while seeking revenge on the captain of another merchant ship, the Vorga, who’d ignored his distress signal when he was marooned. Meanwhile, we learn that the Nomad had been carrying “PyrE”, a telepathy-triggered explosive that could mean the end of humanity. Fun fact: Originally serialized in Galaxy magazine, Bester’s novel — with its dark vision of powerful megacorporations, and the cybernetic enhancement of the body — is a precursor of cyberpunk.
Arthur C. Clarke’s The City and the Stars (1956). Another Stapledonian epic, which illustrates two points: our curiosity about the world/universe is what makes us human; and organized religion retards humankind’s progress. In Diaspar, a billion-year-old, self-sufficient domed city located on Earth, Alvin is a “Unique.” Despite living in a utopian, perfectly regulated social order (run by a super-computer), in which human consciousnesses can be downloaded into new bodies, and are therefore immortal; and despite having been raised in a culture that encourages incuriosity and terror about the outside world, he dreams of exploration. Once he finally escapes Diaspar, Alvin’s curiosity is richly rewarded. Elsewhere on Earth, he finds another city-state — Lys — that is less reliant on technology, and whose citizens are telepaths. He discovers that Earthlings once traveled the stars, only to be forced back to their planet by aliens; and once offworld, Alvin discovers civilizations and entities that beggar belief. Will he keep going? Or return to Diaspar, as a prophet? Fun fact: We’ve seen sci-fi dramatizations of Plato’s Allegory of the Cave before, for example in Gabriel De Tarde’s 1884 novella Underground Man. Clarke’s imagination regarding future technologies, however — which we’d now recognize as, for example, 3D printing, wireless communication and energy transfer, and genetic engineering — is truly far-out.
Robert Heinlein’s Double Star (1956). Lawrence “The Great Lorenzo” Smith is a brilliant mimic… but he’s down on his luck. So when he’s approached by aides to John Joseph Bonforte, one of the most prominent politicians in the solar system, about impersonating Bonforte — who’s been kidnapped by his opponents on the eve of a general election — he agrees, even though he’s a Martianphobe who disagrees with Bonforte’s campaign to enfranchise Mars. Yes, this is The Prisoner of Zenda in space; hokey material, but Heinlein handles it very well. Smith must first fool Martians, during a fraught ceremony via which Bonforte is adopted into a Martian tribe; and that’s the easy part. Once it becomes apparent that Bonforte won’t be able to appear in public for some time, Smith must learn Bonforte’s mannerisms and background story, and fool the solar system’s Emperor. Political conspiracies, diplomatic maneuvers — it’s not Starship Troopers, but it’s just as exciting. Fun fact: Serialized in Astounding Science Fiction and published in hardcover the same year. Double Star was awarded the 1956 Hugo Award for Best Novel — the author’s first.
Philip K. Dick’s The Man Who Japed (1956). Allen Purcell, protagonist of this funny, dark, hastily written novel, is a marketing pro in a Brazil-like future (2114) society, one which has recovered from a devastating 1972 nuclear war by adopting puritanical “Morec” principles. (The Fifties-esque Moral Reclamation ideology was pioneered by General Streiter, a statue of whom stands in Newer York’s public park.) Premarital sex is now taboo, not to mention cursing, drunkenness, even pulp fiction. Insect-like robots pry into citizens’ personal lives, and neighborhood meetings are devoted to chastising one another. Purcell and his smart but deeply bored wife, Janet, are up-and-coming Newer York yuppies; it’s their lucky day when Purcell is offered the top position at Telemedia, the government-run edutainment conglomerate whose pap programming keeps people from rebelling. Unfortunately, Purcell is afflicted with a sardonic sense of humor; he is immune to Morec’s earnest mind-control. One night, without quite realizing what he’s doing, he knocks the head off Streiter’s statue! Fun fact: The Man Who Japed was first published as an Ace Double; it was bound dos-à-dos with E. C. Tubb’s The Space Born.
John Christopher’s The Death of Grass (1956). In this updating of J.J. Connington’s Radium Age eco-catastrophe Nordenholt’s Million, a plant virus infects the staple crops of West Asia and Europe such as wheat and barley — that is, all of the grasses. Which kills off the cattle, as well. At first, England prides itself on how well-disciplined its response to the crisis is, compared with that of Asian nations… but all too soon the British government resorts to martial law and mass executions, and then it’s anarchy. With their families in tow, John Custance and his friend, Roger Buckley, make their way across a brutal, chaotic England. They aim to reach the safety of John’s brother’s potato farm in an isolated northwestern valley — where they hope to survive on potatoes, beetroots and fresh water — and along the way, they gather an entourage of others seeking sanctuary. Day by day, however, the group’s civilized moral code decays. When they reach the heavily defended farm, and John’s brother won’t allow the whole group to stay there, what will they do? Fun fact: John Christopher (Sam Youd)’s second novel; published in the United States the following year as No Blade of Grass. It was adapted, under that title, as a 1970 British-American science fiction movie directed by Cornel Wilde.
Philip K. Dick’s The Cosmic Puppets (1956–1957). On a visit, with his wife, to his hometown — sleepy, isolated Millgate, Virginia — Ted Barton discovers that you can’t go home again. (Because your hometown is different in important particulars than you remember — shops, parks, even people no longer exist — and apparently, it always already was different. Also, a child with your name died in that town, years ago.) What’s going on? Has the town been caught up in an illusion — or are Ted’s memories false ones? Why does the town drunk remember the town the way Ted does? Who are the incorporeal Wanderers haunting the town? And why can’t Ted escape from Millgate? Although he struggles to make sense of these eerie incongruities, before long Ted finds himself in the midst of a cosmic struggle stretching far beyond Virginia or even Earth. SPOILER: The Zoroastrian demigods Ohrmuzd and Ahriman might have something to do with all this. Is Ted… a messiah figure? Stranger things, indeed. Fun fact: The novel is a revision of Dick’s 1956 story “A Glass of Darkness,” which appeared in Satellite Science Fiction. The title refers to a Bible passage (First Corinthians 13:12) which the author would deploy again, for perhaps his best novel: A Scanner Darkly.
Nevil Shute’s On the Beach (1957). In the near future of 1963, nuclear fallout from World War III has eradicated all human and animal life in the Northern Hemisphere, and air currents are steadily carrying the same fate to the Southern Hemisphere. Only South Africa, and the southern parts of South America and Australia are still habitable… our story takes place in Melbourne. One of the last US nuclear submarines, captained by Commander Dwight Towers, is preparing to head from Melbourne to America’s west coast — because an incomprehensible Morse code signal has been received. (Perhaps someone is still alive?) Towers is attracted to a young Australian woman, Moira Davidson, but remains loyal to his family back home… even though they must certainly be dead. Moira, meanwhile, copes by drinking heavily. Peter Holmes, an Australian scientist, cannot persuade his wife to believe in the impending disaster. Another member of the submarine crew, Osborne, spends all of his time driving a racecar. As the radiation reaches Melbourne, how will each character face his or her final moments? Fun fact: Originally serialized in the London weekly periodical Sunday Graphic (April 1957). In 1959, the novel was adapted as a film starring Gregory Peck, Ava Gardner, and Fred Astaire. The novel’s title refers to a beach in Eliot’s poem “The Hollow Men.”
Samuel Beckett’s Fin de partie (Endgame, 1957). Like Nevil Shute’s On the Beach, serialized the same month that Beckett’s second-most famous play was first performed, Endgame begins at the end… of everything. Along with his long-suffering servant Clov, and his legless parents Nagg and Nell, Hamm — a horrid old blind man — is holed up in a room of his home. Outside, there are no signs of life — animal or vegetable. We’re not sure what has happened, but the first line of the play is Clov’s “Finished, it’s finished, nearly finished, it must be nearly finished.” (Hamm, in a later exchange with Clov: “All is… all is… all is what?” [Violently.] “All is what?” Clov: “What all is? In a word? Is that what you want to know? Just a moment.” [He turns the telescope on the without, looks, lowers the telescope, turns towards Hamm.] “Corpsed.”) Periodically, as Hamm mentions various phenomena — bicycle wheels, sugarplums, rugs, painkiller, Nature itself — Clov reminds him that these things no longer exist. The action of this absurdist play, such as it is, consists of the characters’ efforts to simply get through another meaningless day. The implication, being, perhaps, that the true value of humankind’s beliefs and rituals is: zero. Fun fact: Nell, the one character in the play who groks the absurdity of their bleak, endgame-like existence, at one point says, “Nothing is funnier than unhappiness.” Beckett would later tell an interviewer that this is the most important line in the play.
Robert Heinlein’s Have Spacesuit — Will Travel (1958). Having entered an advertising jingle writing contest on a lark, high-schooler Kip Russell wins a functional, but obsolete spacesuit. Although there’s no chance he’ll ever go to space, or even to one of Earth’s Moon colonies, Kip determinedly repairs and refurbishes the suit… and takes it out for a stroll. At which point, a UFO materializes. A young human girl, “Peewee,” who is the daughter of an eminent scientist and a genius herself, and an alien creature, which Peewee calls “the Mother Thing,” are on the run from another alien species. All three are captured by the horrific baddies (Kip dubs their leader “Wormface”) and taken to the aliens’ secret base on the Moon. From there, they travel to Pluto, and then Vega 5, the Mother Thing’s home planet; at every step of the way, Kip does his best to rescue his new friends. As if all this weren’t epic enough, in the end Kip and Peewee must intervene with an intergalactic tribunal on behalf of their planet! Fun fact: During World War II, Heinlein was a civilian aeronautics engineer working at a laboratory where pressure suits were being developed for use at high altitudes. Have Spacesuit — Will Travel is the last of his “juveniles” — sci-fi books for young readers. Serialized in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction.
Brian Aldiss’s Non-Stop (1958; also published as Starship). Upon the death of his wife, Roy Complain, member of a primitive tribe of hunter-gatherers who live in a territory surrounded by jungle-like “ponics” (plant growth) known only as “Quarters,” joins another tribe’s expedition into the heart of darkness… in order to discover more about the world in which they live. This is an apophenic adventure — the protagonists of which seek meaning. Why is their world made of plastic and steel? What lies beyond the jungle? What’s the deal with the intelligent rats? The expedition’s leader, a priest named Marapper, has found ancient documents which seem to suggest that “Quarters,” and other territories, are… a gargantuan spaceship, an interstellar ark, headed from and to unknown destinations, on which two dozen generations have already lived. Marker’s plan is to find the ship’s control room, and to divert the ship to the nearest habitable planet. What lies ahead — in the ship’s control center? Fun fact: This was Brian Aldiss’s first novel — and it reflects his view that entropy will always derail grand human projects.
Fritz Leiber’s The Big Time (serialized 1958; in book form, 1961).The Big Time is a far-out example of what I have elsewhere called the Crackerjack sub-genre of adventure — in which consummate professionals team up for a common purpose. (An immediate predecessor is, for example, The Guns of Navarone [1957].) Here, however, our crackerjacks are ten warriors from various eras of Earth and non-Earth history: e.g., Marcus (ancient Roman), Erich (Nazi), Kaby (female warrior from ancient Crete), Sevensee (satyr from the far future), not to mention Ilhilihis (octopoid extraterrestrial from the Moon’s distant past). Each of these characters was snatched out of his or her own time at the moment of his or her death, and shanghaied into the service of alien factions — known colloquially as the Spiders and the Snakes — who send them into battles across time and space, in an ongoing effort to alter the course of history. The so-called Change War, with its Stapledonian cosmic, era-spanning sweep, is merely a backdrop, however, to Leiber’s Sartrean chamber drama, which is set in a neutral Valhalla-like (it’s removed from the “little time” of history; hence the novella’s title) recuperation station for time warriors. Here, characters fall in and out of love, make speeches, and… deal with a time bomb set ticking by a saboteur! Fun fact: Originally serialized in Galaxy (March–Aril 1958). Winner of the 1958 Hugo Award — though it’s a very controversial Hugo winner. The terrific Hasbro boardgame Heroscape (2004–2010) seems directly influenced by this book.
Philip K. Dick‘s Time Out of Joint (1959). Ragle Gumm lives with his sister and her husband in a quiet suburb; the year is 1959. Gumm earns a living by winning — again and again — a local newspaper contest, “Where Will The Little Green Man Be Next?” When odd things start happening — a soft-drink stand turns into a slip of paper that reads “SOFT-DRINK STAND”; he’s sure that the bathroom has a pull-cord light, even though it has always had a wall switch — Gumm thinks he may be having a nervous breakdown. But his brother-in-law begins to notice reality-discrepancies, too. When the two men try to leave town, there’s always something that traps them there. Still, Gumm stubbornly investigates. Are most aspects of his life staged, in order to keep him focused on the “Where Will The Little Green Man Be Next?” quiz? (Because, say, his answers to the quiz help Earth’s planetary defense forces — in 1998 — predict the movements of rebel lunar colonists?) And if so, is what he’s doing critically important to humankind — or is he helping keep a tyrannical social order in place? A minimally sci-fi novel about false reality; an important turning point in the Philip K. Dick’s oeuvre. Fun fact: Obviously an influence on The Truman Show, The Matrix, and Ender’s Game; and more recently, American Ultra. In a 1981 interview, Dick recounted that the bathroom pull-cord incident “happened to me, and it was what caused me to write the book. It reminded me of the idea that Van Vogt had dealt with, of artificial memory, as occurs in The World of Null-A [1948] where a person has false memories implanted. A lot of what I wrote, which looks like the result of taking acid, is really the result of taking Van Vogt seriously!”
William Burroughs‘s Naked Lunch (1959). Where to begin? Anywhere — Burroughs employed the Dadaist “cut-up” technique — cutting up and rearranging, at random, the elements of a text — in order to produce a productively alienating effect on the reader. In this semi-autobiographical sci-fi detective novel and work of pornography and political satire, William Lee, a drug dealer and addict, flees from the police to Mexico. He is instinctively determined to avoid the normalizing apparatuses of the police, psychiatrists, and government. In Mexico, however, is assigned to the sadistic Dr. Benway, formerly a “Total Demoralizator” from the fictional totalitarian country of Annexia (which has a system of random bureaucracy that keeps its population in fear of arbitrary punishment). As Lee continues to travel south, he encounters fellow homosexuals and drug dealers, whom he calls “agents.” Aliens, imaginary drugs, telepathy, talking objects — the science fiction tropes are legion, although the context isn’t futuristic. Hallucination-like sequences take place in the Interzone, a temporary autonomous zone where nothing is true, and everything — including every kind of violence and sexual act, even involving children, is permitted. Fun fact: First published by Olympia Press, in Paris. The 1962 American edition, from Grove Press, was one of the last books to be banned in Boston. In 1964, it was the first literary work to successfully test the standards of obscenity enunciated by the Supreme Court in the case of Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer.
Kurt Vonnegut’s The Sirens of Titan (1959). What if? A space explorer — Rumford — were to stumble into a chrono-synclastic infundibulum (a spiralling point in space/time “where all the different kinds of truths fit together”), and as a result, became omniscient about past and future happenings throughout the galaxy? If the richest man in the America of that distant future — Malachi Constant — were to cross paths with Rumford on Titan, in the midst of humankind’s preparations for an interplanetary war, what would Rumford tell him about free will, God, and the purpose of human history? (Could humankind’s progress in fact be pointless and pathetic?) If Rumford (and his dog, Kazak) were to materialize on Earth and other planets, at various points in history, would he for some reason instigate a Martian invasion? Would he start a religious movement — the “Church of God the Utterly Indifferent” — in order to unite humankind after the invasion? (Hello, Ozymandias from Watchmen.) And why? A (mostly) bleak and ironic mini-epic, post-Olaf Stapledon and pre-Douglas Adams. Fun fact: Vonnegut sold the Sirens of Titan film rights to Jerry Garcia of the Grateful Dead. The movie was never made.
Daniel Keyes’s Flowers for Algernon (1959/1966). 32-year-old Charlie Gordon has an IQ of 68. He does menial work for a living, and attends reading and writing classes at the Beekman College Center for Retarded Adults. Two Beekman researchers have succeeded in dramatically increasing the intelligence of a lab mouse (Algernon), through experimental brain surgery; and Charlie is selected as their first human subject. The novel is epistolary — we’re reading Charlie’s own progress reports. When his IQ dramatically increases to genius level, Charlie realizes how poorly the people in his life have treated him… except for Alice, his beautiful reading teacher, on whom he has an unrequited crush. Charlie’s own research into the intelligence-enhancing procedure he’s undergone suggests that it is flawed… and when Algernon reverts to his previous intelligence, then dies, he’s convinced that he is doomed. How will he choose to live, now? Fun fact: First published, as a story, in the April 1959 issue of The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction; it won the 1960 Hugo. The 1966 novel version was joint winner, with Babel-17, of the Nebula. Cliff Robertson won the Oscar for his portrayal of Charlie in the 1968 film Charly.
Walter M. Miller’s A Canticle for Leibowitz (1960). In the novel’s first section, set in the 26th century, the monks of a Catholic monastery founded in the name of Leibowitz — a Jewish-born engineer and booklegger who’d attempted to preserve humankind’s scientific and technical knowledge during a violent backlash against modern civilization — faithfully, lovingly copy and illuminate documents they cannot understand. The head of the monastery, located somewhere in the post-apocalyptic desert of Arizona, is so consumed with Leibowitz’s canonization that he’s dismayed when Brother Francis, a simple-minded monk, finds a trove of Leibowitz’s lost documents. In the second section, set in 3174, a new Renaissance is beginning: the abbey has developed a treadmill-powered electrical generator, a secular scholar affords the reader insight into what a treasure trove of documents the Order has preserved; and local tribes battle. In the final section, set in 3781, the Leibowitzan Order’s mission has expanded to the preservation of all knowledge — and not a moment too soon, because nuclear apocalypse once again threatens life on Earth. Fun fact: A Canticle for Leibowitz, Miller’s only novel, won the 1961 Hugo Award. The novel’s three sections (“Fiat Homo”, “Fiat Lux”, “Fiat Voluntas Tua”) were first published in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction. One of my favorite science fiction novels of all time.
Poul Anderson’s The High Crusade (1960). Like the author’s Three Hearts and Three Lions, The High Crusade is an ingenious admixture of science fiction and medieval knightly adventure; here, however, there is no fantasy element. In the year 1345, an alien spacecraft lands in a remote Lincolnshire village — where, as it happens, a military force are training to battle the French on behalf of King Edward III. The blue-skinned humanoids (Wersgorix) are scouts from a galaxy-spanning civilization looking for new worlds to subjugate. However, they place too much faith in their forcefield — which is designed to repel photon weapons, not arrows fired by trained archers! Soon enough, the English warriors, led by Sir Roger, have captured the spaceship… at which point it takes off, heading back to a Wersgor colony planet — where the battle of old-fashioned virtues and valor against advanced technology continues. Meanwhile, one of Sir Roger’s knights and his own wife plot against him…. Fun fact: The High Crusade was originally serialized in the July–August–September 1960 issues of Astounding. In 1983, the TSR-published magazine Ares adapted the novel into a wargame: “Players take the sides of either the blossoming power of the English Crusaders, or the star-spanning might of the Wersgorix Empire.”
Stan Lee and Jack Kirby’s The Fantastic Four (Nov. 1961–on). The so-called Marvel Age of comics began with the publication of Marvel’s first superhero team title, The Fantastic Four. Just a few months after Yuri Gagarin’s pioneering spaceflight, Stan Lee and Jack Kirby dreamed up a team of unofficial astronauts — genius scientist Reed Richards, siblings Sue and Johnny Storm, and pilot Ben Grimm — who sneak into space in a rocket of Richards’s own design. Bombarded by cosmic rays, the quarrelsome crew are transformed: Sue can turn invisible, Ben’s body is scaly and powerful, Johnny can burst into flame and fly, Reed can stretch himself into any shape. In their first outing, the Fantastic Four jet to Monster Isle, the source of subterranean attacks on atomic plants around the world. There, they discover that the Mole Man, who seeks revenge on humankind for having ridiculed him, plans to invade the surface world with an army of monsters! Fun fact: Lee and Kirby upended the superhero conventions of previous eras by eschewing secret identities, and allowing their characters to have real-life problems and interpersonal conflicts. In the first few issues of Fantastic Four (the “The” was dropped in July 1963), the team doesn’t even wear uniforms.
William Burroughs’s The Soft Machine (1961; revised, 1966 and 1968). To the extent that The Soft Machine — first installment in the author’s Nova Trilogy — has a plot, it is something along these lines: Using a time travel device, an agent who is able to transform his body (using “U.T.,” undifferentiated tissue) causes the downfall of the ancient Mayan empire. How? He infiltrates the Mayan slave laborers, who are mind-controlled by sounds recorded on magnetic tape — by the priestly caste — and embedded in books (the famous Mayan calendar). The agent replaces the tape with one broadcasting a revolutionary message, “Burn the books, kill the priests.” The theme of Burroughs’s experimentalist novel, which was composed using his notorious “cut-up” technique, is how fascist control mechanisms invade and regulate the body — the titular soft machine. In addition to time travel, The Soft Machine circles around themes of media bombardment, sexuality, and out-of-body travel. According to Burroughs: “I am attempting to create a new mythology for the space age.” Fun fact: The Soft Machine was first published by Olympia Press, in Paris, as part of their infamous, mostly pornographic Traveller’s Companion Series.
Harry Harrison’s The Stainless Steel Rat (serialized 1957 and 1960; as a book, 1961). In this, the first-published Stainless Steel Rat novel, the title character — ingenious and multitalented conman, smuggler, and thief James Bolivar diGriz, who our of sheer boredom refuses to internalize the complacency of the settled, end-of-history galaxy in which he finds himself — is conned into helping a secret government agency unravel a nefarious scheme for manufacturing a galactic-class battleship. The Rat falls in love with the master criminal — a beautiful, but sociopathic woman — and tries to reform her. (If the plot sounds similar to Leslie Charteris’s 1931 Saint adventure, She Was a Lady, perhaps it’s because Harrison was a Saint fan; in fact, in 1964 he ghost-wrote Charteris’s Vendetta for the Saint.) Much like Heinlein’s Stranger In a Strange Land, this novel is progressive and fun — Fifties-type political, cultural, and social norms are for losers! — while also disturbingly retrogressive. The brilliant, independent female character is a sociopath, it turns out, because… she was born unattractive. Yeesh. Still, without Slippery Jim, would we have the charming rogue Han Solo? Fun fact: Harrison was originally a cartoonist for the EC titles Weird Fantasy and Weird Science; the great Wally Wood often inked his layouts. Large sections of The Stainless Steel Rat first appeared in Astounding as novelettes. Chronologically, this is the fourth title in the series.
Stanislaw Lem Powrót z gwiazd (Return from the Stars, 1961). After a 10-year mission exploring a black hole, astronaut Hal Bregg returns to Earth — where nearly 130 years have passed, due to time dilation. He and the other astronauts discover a global utopian social order free not only of violence (thanks to “betrization,” a biochemical procedure that neutralizes aggressive impulses), but even car crashes (thanks to Google Self Driving Car-like tech). Physical risk-taking has been eliminated… but has the cost been too high? Bregg can’t adapt — he’s a monstrous figure, an anachronism. (Hello, Demolition Man.) Space exploration is now seen as youthful adventurism, too dangerous to continue. Earth, to him, is no longer home, but “another, alien planet.” Will Bregg settle down and accept this pacified existence, or join his fellow astronauts on a new space mission? Fun fact: One suspects that Lem was influenced by Vladimir Mayakovsky’s Radium Age sci-fi parable The Bedbug (1929). PS: Return from the Stars predicts e-readers: “No longer was it possible to browse among shelves, to weigh volumes in hand, to feel their heft, the promise of ponderous reading. The bookstore resembled, instead, an electronic laboratory. The books were crystals with recorded contents. They can be read the aid of an opton, which was similar to a book but had only one page between the covers. At a touch, successive pages of the text appeared on it.”
Robert Heinlein’s Stranger in a Strange Land (1961). One of the most famous, and most infuriating science fiction books ever. Its premise is a promising one: Valentine Michael Smith, a human raised by cosmically wise Martians and endowed with psychic and telekinetic powers, is brought back to Earth — whose social, cultural, economic, sexual, and psychological customs he finds bewildering and strange. With the aid of Jubal Harshaw, a Socrates-like philosopher, physician, lawyer, and sybarite, Smith becomes a controversial champion of free love, open-mindedness, and pacifism. He’s a Martian Jesus, and the father of a new race of homo superior types; Jubal — a transparent stand-in for Heinlein himself — is his John the Baptist. The book became a cult hit later in the Sixties, for obvious reasons; however, it is firmly anchored in Fifties culture too. Despite its charms, Stranger in a Strange Land is often tedious (Jubal, taking his Socrates/JtB-like role seriously, pontificates endlessly); and — worse — it is shockingly, pointlessly, outrageously misogynistic and homophobic. That said, even critics tend to like the book’s ending. Fun fact: Stranger in a Strange Land, which in 1962 won science fiction’s Hugo Award for Best Novel, and which was the first sci-fi novel to enter The New York Times Book Review‘s best-seller list, gave us the word grok — meaning, like, “comprehend thoroughly and have empathy with.”
Stanislaw Lem’s Solaris (1961). This is a philosophical novel — at times dramatic and gripping, and at times academic and dry — asking the question, What would happen if we encountered an alien intelligence so exotic that we could in no way at all comprehend it? Psychologist Kris Kelvin arrives aboard a scientific research station hovering near the surface of the ocean-planet Solaris; this “ocean” is a chthonic organism. For decades, a team of scientists has studied Solaris’s complex wave motions and formations, but they haven’t been able to determine what these activities signify. Shortly before Kelvin’s arrival, the scientists have begun bombarding the ocean with high-energy x-rays. Apparently as a result of this experiment, the space station crew’s most painful and repressed thoughts and memories are actualized. Each member of the crew is visited by a lifelike simulacrum; Kelvin, for example, who feels guilty about the suicide of his lover, suddenly meets her again! The horrified scientists can’t bring themselves to discuss what any of this might mean; their instinctive — unscientific — reaction is to destroy the simulacra. Fun fact: Adapted in 1972, by Andrei Tarkovsky, as a gorgeous but slow-moving film — which won the Grand Prix at the 1972 Cannes Film Festival.
Jerome Beatty Jr.’s Matthew Looney’s Voyage to the Earth (1961). With endearing illustrations by Gahan Wilson, this now-forgotten classic of YA sci-fi tells the story of a boy from the Moon who wonders if (scientific consensus to the contrary) there is intelligent life on Earth — and who, despite bullying, political intrigue, and danger, stubbornly sets out to find out the truth. The Moon’s civilization, it seems, is almost exactly like our own, except for that fact that they eat scrambled arks (and burgles with canal juice), measure distance in lunacules and time in moonits, and must be very careful not to jump too high… and go floating off into space. Matthew’s adventure is set against an all-too-Earthlike backdrop of space-race political maneuvering: While scientists like Professor Ploozer stress peaceful and scientific uses for their rockets and missions and probes, the Moonster military and politicians are more interested in developing and testing weapons — which they’d like to use to colonize or destroy the Earth! Fun fact: Subsequent Matthew Looney books include Matthew Looney’s Invasion of the Earth (1965), Matthew Looney in the Outback (1969), and Matthew Looney and the Space Pirates (1974). Matthew’s sister, Maria, is the protagonist of Maria Looney on the Red Planet (1977), Maria Looney and the Cosmic Circus (1978), and Maria Looney and the Remarkable Robot (1978).
Philip K. Dick’s The Man in the High Castle (1962). Fifteen years after World War II ended in a defeat for the Allies, the United States are divided between Imperial Japan, in the west, and Nazi Germany, in the east. Bob Childan runs an Americana shop in San Francisco, selling antiques — many of them counterfeit — to the Japanese colonists. Frank Frink, a secretly Jewish-American veteran, makes hand-crafted jewelry; his ex-wife, Juliana, lives in the neutral Mountain States buffer zone, where she has begun an affair with an Italian trucker. Many of the book’s characters use the I Ching to make decisions; and many are reading The Grasshopper Lies Heavy, an alternate-history sci-fi novel, circulated in samizdat, which imagines a world in which the Allies won World War II. Joseph Goebbels becomes the new German Chancellor, and plots to invade Japan’s Home Islands; Childan sells Frink’s jewelry, which the Japanese admire for its wabi-sabi; and Juliana visits the author of The Grasshopper Lies Heavy — but is her boyfriend secretly a Nazi assassin? Is The Grasshopper Lies Heavy somehow more true than the reality our characters are experiencing? Fun fact: Dick used the I Ching to make decisions crucial to the plot of The Man in the High Castle. Adapted for TV in 2015, The Man in the High Castle was, at the time, Amazon’s most-watched original series.
J.G. Ballard’s The Drowned World (1962). An eco-catastrophe in which the catastrophe is in the past; the mood is contemplative; and the protagonist is looking forward to his devolution. In the year 2154, what’s left of humankind has mostly migrated to the poles — because of global warming and rising sea levels. Along with other members of a survey team, biologist Robert Kerans is sent to London, now an intensely hot and humid swamp, in order to catalog the flora and fauna. Troubled by primitive dreams, Kerans and his colleagues speculate that even as the climate has reverted to that of a much earlier stage in the earth’s evolution, so too are they beginning to revert. (Perhaps, one character suggests, our bodies and subconscious minds retain traces of the “archaeophysic past,” a prehuman era before our brains developed.) Their relationship to nature changes — they become less interested in controlling it and extracting its resources, and more interested in adapting to it. And then, into this bleak scenario sails Strangman, a pirate who aims to drain the swamp… and loot what remains of London’s Leicester Square! Fun fact: First serialized, in novella form, in Science Fiction Adventures in January 1962.
Anthony Burgess’s A Clockwork Orange (1962). Communicating partially in contemporary English (including Cockney rhyming slang), partially in Shakespearean English, and partially in a Russian-influenced argot called “nadsat,” our narrator and protagonist is a sociopathic 15-year-old hoodlum, living in near-future London. “There’s only one veshch I require,” explains Alex, “having my malenky bit of fun with real droogs.” When he’s not enjoying Beethoven, Alex and his droogs indulge in “ultra-violence” including sexual assault. Sent to prison, where neither the state nor the church succeeds in reforming him, Alex volunteers to undergo the Ludovico Technique, a punishing form of aversion therapy that conditions him to be good… or, at least, not bad. But at what cost? Has Alex become, in the words of one character, a “clockwork orange” — that is, a mechanized semblance of nature? In the end, amazingly, we actually feel pity for evil Alex. Fun fact: Written in three weeks, A Clockwork Orange has been named by Modern Library one of the 100 best English-language novels of the 20th century. It was adapted as a brilliant 1971 movie by Stanley Kubrick.
Madeleine L’Engle’s A Wrinkle in Time (1963). Thirteen-year-old Meg Murry’s scientist father has vanished, while researching tesseracts — i.e., fifth-dimensional phenomena in which the fabric of space and time “folds” in upon itself. One night, Meg, her genius 5-year-old brother Charles, and a dreamy high-school junior, Calvin, visit the family’s eccentric new neighbor, Mrs. Whatsit, who seems to know something about tesseracts. Mrs. Whatsit, and her companions Mrs. Who and Mrs. Which, turn out to be extraterrestrial/angelic/unicornic beings — who “tesser” the children to their home world, where they explain that the universe is under attack from an evil being known only as The Black Thing. (The Earth is under attack, too — protected only by great religious figures, philosophers, and artists. Which reminds me of Susan Cooper’s 1965–1977 Dark is Rising sequence.) Meg’s father is being held captive on the dark planet of Camazotz, whose inhabitants operate under the control of a single mind — “IT,” an evil disembodied brain with telepathic abilities. Can Meg, the unlikeliest hero ever, triumph over IT, rescue her father and brother… and the Earth, too? Fun fact: Written in 1959–1960 and turned down by 26 publishers, A Wri
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History of science fiction
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The literary genre of science fiction is diverse and since there is little consensus of definition among scholars or devotees, its origin is an open question. Some offer works like the Sumerian Epic of Gilgamesh as the primal texts of science fiction. Others argue that science fiction began in...
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This article is about science fiction literature. For film, see History of science fiction films.
The literary genre of science fiction is diverse and since there is little consensus of definition among scholars or devotees, its origin is an open question. Some offer works like the Sumerian Epic of Gilgamesh as the primal texts of science fiction. Others argue that science fiction began in the late Middle Ages,[1] or that science fiction became possible only with the Scientific Revolution, notably discoveries by Galileo and Newton in astronomy, physics and mathematics. Some place the origin with the gothic novel, particularly Mary Shelley's Frankenstein.
Science fiction developed and boomed in the 20th century, as the deep penetration of science and inventions into society created an interest in literature that explored technology's influence on people and society. Today, science fiction has significant influence on world culture and thought. It is represented in all varieties of ordinary and advanced media.
Early science fiction[]
Early precursors[]
There have been attempts by various historians to claim an ancient history for the genre of science fiction. This claim is now a minority opinion, with the majority placing these works at best as examples of proto-science fiction.
Lester del Rey has stated that the first work of science fiction was the first recorded work of literature, The Epic of Gilgamesh. Gilgamesh features a flood scene that in some ways resembles work of apocalyptic science fiction; however, it is probably better categorized as fantastic literature, as there is little of science or technology in it.
Greek works with proto-science fiction-like elements include Aristophanes' The Clouds and The Birds, and Plato's descriptions of Atlantis.
Works of fantastic literature from Ovid's Metamorphoses telling of Daedalus and Icarus to Beowulf and the Nibelungenlied to Dante's The Divine Comedy and Shakespeare's The Tempest have also been claimed to contain science fictional elements, with varying degrees of success. The Tempest contains one Renaissance prototype for the mad scientist story (the Faust legend is another), and it was adapted as the science fiction film Forbidden Planet.
Near-Eastern proto-science fiction[]
A very old example of a time travel story can be found in the Talmud, with the story of Honi HaM'agel who went to sleep for 70 years and woke up to a world where his grandchildren were grandparents and where all his friends and family were dead.[2] In the Christian New Testament book of II Peter, Peter states that "With the Lord a day is like a thousand years, and a thousand years are like a day." (2 Peter 3:8)
L. Sprague de Camp and a number of other authors cite the Syrian author Lucian's 2nd century satirical True History about an interplanetary trip as an early, if not the earliest, example of proto-science fiction.[3][4][5][6][7] The position of the English critic Kingsley Amis seems ambivalent. While he wrote that "It is hardly science-fiction, since it deliberately piles extravagance upon extravagance for comic effect",Template:Fact he implicitly acknowledged its SF character by comparing its plot to early 20th century space operas: "I will merely remark that the sprightliness and sophistication of True History make it read like a joke at the expense of nearly all early-modern science fiction, that written between, say, 1910 and 1940."[8] Typical science fiction themes and topoi in True History include:[4] travel to outer space, encounter with alien life-forms, including the experience of a first encounter event, interplanetary warfare and imperialism, colonization of planets, motif of giganticism, creatures as products of human technology (robot theme), worlds working by a set of alternate 'physical' laws and an explicit desire of the protagonist for exploration and adventure.
Indian proto-science fiction[]
Early elements of science fiction are found in ancient Indian epics such as the Ramayana, which had mythical Vimana flying machines that were able to fly within the Earth's atmosphere, and able to travel into space and travel submerged under water.
The ancient Hindu mythological epic, the Mahabharatha, mentions the story of the King Revaita, who travels to heaven to meet the creator Brahma and is shocked to learn that many ages have passed when he returns to Earth, anticipating the concept of time travel.[9][10]
The Buddhist Pāli Canons also mention time moving at different pace, in the Payasi Sutta, one of Buddha's chief disciples Kumara Kassapa explains to the skeptic Payasi that "In the Heaven of the Thirty Three Devas, time passes at a different pace, and people live much longer. In the period of our century, one hundred years, only a single day, twenty four hours would have passed for them".[11]
Arabic science fiction[]
See also: Arabic epic literature
In Islam, there is some reference to time travel. The Quran tells about several individuals who go to sleep in a cave only to wake up after 309 years. There is also a reference about time variation where it states "one day for God (Allah) is one thousand years of what you (human beings) count", with another version in the Qur'an stating that one day for God is equivalent to 50,000 years for humans.
In Arabic literature, several List of stories within One Thousand and One Nights|stories within the One Thousand and One Nights (Arabian Nights) feature science fiction elements. One example is "The Adventures of Bulukiya", where the protagonist Bulukiya's quest for the herb of immortality leads him to explore the seas, journey to the Garden of Eden and to Jahannam, and travel across the cosmos to different worlds much larger than his own world, anticipating elements of galactic science fiction;[12] along the way, he encounters societies of jinns,[13] mermaids, talking serpents, talking trees, and other forms of life.[12] In "Abdullah the Fisherman and Abdullah the Merman", the protagonist gains the ability to breathe underwater and discovers an underwater submarine society that is portrayed as an inverted reflection of society on land, in that the underwater society follows a form of primitive communism where concepts like money and clothing do not exist. Other Arabian Nights tales deal with lost ancient technologies, advanced ancient civilizations that went astray, and catastrophes which overwhelmed them.[14] "The City of Brass" features a group of travellers on an archaeological expedition[15] across the Sahara to find an ancient lost city and attempt to recover a brass vessel that Solomon once used to trap a jinn,[16] and, along the way, encounter a mummified queen, petrified inhabitants,[17] life-like humanoid robots and automata, seductive marionettes dancing without strings,[18] and a brass horseman robot who directs the party towards the ancient city. "The Ebony Horse" features a robot[19] in the form of a flying mechanical horse controlled using keys that could fly into outer space and towards the Sun,[20] while the "Third Qalandar's Tale" also features a robot in the form of an uncanny boatman.[19] "The City of Brass" and "The Ebony Horse" can be considered early examples of science fiction.[21][22]
The Arabic theological novel,[23] Al-Risalah al-Kamiliyyah fil Siera al-Nabawiyyah (The Treatise of Kamil on the Prophet's Biography), also known as Fādil ibn Nātiq or in English as Theologus Autodidactus (which is a phonetic transliteration of the Greek name Θεολόγος Αυτοδίδακτος, meaning self-taught theologian), written by the Syrian Arab polymath, Ibn al-Nafis (1213–1288), is one of the earliest science fiction novels. While also being an early desert island story and coming of age story, the novel deals with various science fiction elements such as spontaneous generation, futurology, apocalyptic themes, the end of the world and doomsday, resurrection and the afterlife. Rather than giving supernatural or mythological explanations for these events, Ibn al-Nafis attempted to explain these plot elements using his own extensive scientific knowledge in anatomy, biology, physiology, astronomy, cosmology and geology. His main purpose behind this science fiction work was to explain Islamic religious teachings in terms of science and philosophy. For example, it was through this novel that Ibn al-Nafis introduces his scientific theory of metabolism,[1] and he makes references to his own scientific discovery of the pulmonary circulation in order to explain bodily resurrection.[24] The novel was later translated into English as Theologus Autodidactus in the early 20th century.
Other examples of early Arabic science fiction include certain Arabian Nights elements such as the flying carpet, Al-Farabi's Opinions of the residents of a splendid city about a utopian society, and Al-Qazwini's futuristic tale of Awaj bin Anfaq (circa 1250) about a man who travelled to Earth from a distant planet.[25] Awaj bin Anfaq was one of the first science fiction novels, "the story of a curious alien who arrives on planet Earth to observe human behaviour and finds himself perplexed by the oddities of this apparently sophisticated species."[26]
One of the most influential science fiction novels of all time, Dune, was heavily inspired by Islamic and Arabic literature. Many words, titles and names (e.g. the Padishah Emperor Shaddam IV, Hawat, Bashar, Harq-al-Ada) in the Dune universe as well as a large number of words in the language of the Fremen people are derived or taken directly from Arabic (e.g. erg, the Arabic word for 'dune', is used frequently throughout the novel). To begin with, Paul's name (Muad'Dib) means in Arabic 'the teacher or maker of politeness or literature'. The Fremen language is also embedded with Islamic terms such as, Jihad, Mahdi, Shaitan, and the personal bodyguard of Paul Muad'Dib Fedaykin is a transliteration of the Arabic Feda'yin.[27] As a foreigner who adopts the ways of a desert-dwelling people and then leads them in a military capacity, Paul Atreides' character bears some similarities to the historical T. E. Lawrence.[28]
Star Wars was in turn heavily inspired by Dune. In addition, according to the BBC's Lydia Green: "George Lucas used spiritual elements of Islam, along with other world religions, to convey the universal understandings of good and evil in Star Wars. "Al-Jeddi" is an Arabic term meaning master of the mystic-warrior way."[26]
Japanese science fiction[]
The early Japanese tale of "Urashima Tarō" involves traveling forwards in time to a distant future,[29] and was first described in the Nihongi (720).[30] It was about a young fisherman named Urashima Taro who visits an undersea palace and stays there for three days. After returning home to his village, he finds himself three hundred years in the future, where he is long forgetten, his house in ruins, and his family long dead.[29] The 10th century Japanese narrative The Tale of the Bamboo Cutter may also be considered proto-science fiction. The protagonist of the story, Kaguya-hime, is a princess from the Moon who is sent to Earth for safety during a celestial war, and is found and raised by a bamboo cutter in Japan. She is later taken back to the Moon by her real extraterrestrial family. A manuscript illustration depicts a round flying machine similar to a flying saucer.[22]
The 10th century Japanese narrative, The Tale of the Bamboo Cutter, may be considered science fiction. The protagonist of the story, Kaguya-hime, is a princess from the Moon who is sent to Earth for safety during a celestial war, and is found and raised by a bamboo cutter in Japan. She is later taken back to the Moon by her real extraterrestrial family. A manuscript illustration depicts a round flying machine similar to to a flying saucer.[22]
The stories of "Urashima Tarō" and The Tale of the Bamboo Cutter continue to be a strong influence on contemporary Japanese science fiction, ranging from literature and film to anime and manga.
European science fiction[]
European literature that resembles science fiction emerged in the 16th century. The discoveries in the sciences and the dawning of the Enlightenment inspired literature informed by these advances.
One of the earliest instances is the superior country imagined in Thomas More's 1515 novel Utopia. More's name for a perfect world would be borrowed by many later science fiction writers, and the Utopia motif is a common one in science fiction. It is notable that More and Francis Bacon, leading humanist and philosopher of science, wrote works of proto-science fiction. Bacon's fantasy The New Atlantis was published in 1627.
The Age of Reason followed scientific developments that gave speculative writers ideas for their stories. Imaginary voyages to the moon in the 17th century, first in Johannes Kepler's Somnium (The Dream, 1634), and then in Cyrano de Bergerac's Comical History of the States and Empires of the Moon (1656).[31] Space travel also figures prominently in Voltaire's Micromégas (1752).
Other early works of significance include the alternate world found in the Arctic by a young noblewoman in Margaret Cavendish's 1666 novel, The Description of a New World, Called the Blazing-World, the account of life in the future in Louis-Sébastien Mercier's l'An 2440, and the descriptions of alien cultures in Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels (1726) and in Ludvig Holberg's Niels Klim's Underground Travels. In 1733, Samuel Madden wrote Memoirs Of the Twentieth Century, in which the narrator in 1728 is given a series of state documents from 1997-1998 by his guardian angel, a plot device which is reminiscent of later time travel novels although the story does not explain how the angel obtained these documents.
Most notable of all is Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, first published in 1818.[32] In his book Billion Year Spree, Brian Aldiss claims Frankenstein represents "the first seminal work to which the label SF can be logically attached". It is also the first of the "mad scientist" subgenre. Although normally associated with the gothic horror genre, the novel introduces science fiction themes such as the use of technology for achievements beyond the scope of science at the time, and the alien as antagonist, furnishing a view of the human condition from an outside perspective. Aldiss argues that science fiction in general derives its conventions from the gothic novel. Mary Shelley's short story "Roger Dodsworth: The Reanimated Englishman" (1826) sees a man frozen in ice revived in the present day, incorporating the now common science fiction theme of cryonics whilst also exemplifying Shelley's use of science as a conceit to drive her stories. Another futuristic Shelley novel, The Last Man, is also often cited as the first true science fiction novel.[32]
In 1835 Edgar Allan Poe published a short story, "The Unparalleled Adventure of One Hans Pfaall" in which a flight to the moon in a balloon is described. It has an account of the launch, the construction of the cabin, descriptions of strata and many more science-like aspects.[33] In addition to Poe's account the story written in 1813 by the Dutch Willem Bilderdijk is remarkable. In his novel Kort verhaal van eene aanmerkelijke luchtreis en nieuwe planeetontdekking (Short account of a remarkable journey into the skies and discovery of a new planet) Bilderdijk tells of a European somewhat stranded in an Arabic country where he boasts he is able to build a balloon that can lift people and let them fly through the air. The gasses used turn out to be far more powerful than expected and after a while he lands on a planet positioned between earth and moon. The writer uses the story to portray an overview of scientific knowledge concerning the moon in all sorts of aspects the traveller to that place would encounter. Quite a few similarities can be found in the story Poe published some twenty years later.
Somehow influenced by the scientific theories of 19th century, but most certainly by the idea of human progress, Victor Hugo wrote in The Legend of the Centuries (1859) a long poem in two part that can be viewed like a dystopia/utopia fiction, called Twentieth century. It shows in a first scene the body of a broken huge ship, the greatest product of the prideful and foolish mankind that called it Leviathan, wandering in a desert world where the winds blow and the anger of the wounded Nature is; humanity, finally reunited and pacified, has gone toward the stars in a starship, to look for and to bring « liberty into the light ».
Also to be mentioned here: H. de Graffigny's Aventures Extraordinaires d’un savant russe (Extraordinary adventures of a Russian man of science) of 1889 in which a fictitious travel to the moon is also used to display an overview of scientific foundings on astronomy and the moon. (Much later, in 1928, the same author wrote a thorough popular scientific book called Irons nous dans la lune (Will we go to the moon)
Indian science fiction[]
Further information: Bangla science fiction
The first science fiction novels from the Indian subcontinent appeared in the 1800s, in the Bengali and Hindi languages, whose authors wrote during the British Raj, before the partition of India (which divided the country into the nations of Bangladesh, India and Pakistan). The first work seems to have been written in 1857. Although India had strong literary traditions dating back thousands of years, some of which could be called part of the fantasy genre, Isaac Asimov’s statement that "true science fiction could not really exist until people understood the rationalism of science and began to use it with respect in their stories" is true for the earliest science fiction written in Indic languages from the 19th century.[34]
The earliest notable Bengali science fiction was Jagadananda Roy's Shukra Bhraman (Travels to Jupiter), written in 1857 and published in 1879. This story is of particular interest to literary historians, as it described an interstellar journey to another planet and its description of the alien creatures that are seen in Uranus used an evolutionary theory similar to the origins of man: "They resembled our apes to a large extent. Their bodies were covered with dense black fur. Their heads were larger in comparison with their bodies, limbs sported long nails and they were completely naked." This story was published a decade before H. G. Wells’ The War of the Worlds (1898) in which Wells describes the aliens from Mars.[34]
Other works of Bengali science fiction included Hemlal Dutta’s Rahashya (The Mystery) in 1882, which revolved around the protagonist Nagendra’s visit to a friend’s house, a mansion completely automated and where technology is deified. Automatic doorbell, burglar alarms, brushes that clean suits mechanically are some of the innovations described in the story, and the tone is of wonder at the rapid automation of human lives. The physicist Jagdish Chandra Bose’s story Palatak Tufan (The Runaway Storm) in 1886 used the rationality of scientific theory to weave a tale of a storm at sea that is controlled by dropping a bottle of hair oil on the waves.[34]
In the early 20th century, Premendra Mitra was one of Bengal’s most famous science fiction writers. Two of his most well known stories are Piprey Puran (The Story of the Ants) and Mangalbairi (The Martian Enemies). In Piprey Puran, the future world is overrun with huge ants who are intelligent and organised, and are technologically more advanced than humans. They defeat the humans in battle, and only a few pockets of humanity survive the onslaught. The story of the battle of the ants and humans is broken into small sub-sections with first-person narrations by various different human characters. In Mangalbairi, the Earth is attacked by Martians who poison its entire ecosystem by planting a new kind of seed that grows into a deadly flora that spreads like wildfire, and where all nations unite to fight this common enemy. In both these stories Mitra hints at a time when the very existence of humans will be endangered, when common flowers and trees will be a thing of the past.[34]
The earliest Hindi science-fiction, appeared in the literary magazine Piyush Pravah in the 1880s, and seems to have been inspired by the words of Jules Verne. These included 'Chandra Lok Ki Yatra' (A Journey to the Moon) and 'Aascharya Vrittant' (A Strange Tale!) by writer Ambika Datt Vyas. Later Hindi antologies such as 'Asthi Pinjar' (1947), 'Apsara Ka Sammoohan' (1967), 'Chakshudan' (1948), Himsundari (1971) were punlished, and followed in the 70s by a boom in prolific writers like Kailash Sah, Maya Prasad Tripathi, Shukdev Prasad, Rajeshwar Gangavar and Devendra Mawadi. Two anthologies 'Bhavisya' (1994) and Kokh (1998) by Devendra Mewadi inspired a new generation of writers into the genre. The quarterly 'Vigyan Katha' has been devoted to sf since 2002 under the main editorship of Dr. R.R. Upadhyaya. In 2005, Kalpana Kulshrestha, became the first woman to publish a Hindi SF anthology of her own selected sf stories named 'Beesavi Sadi Ki Bat'.[4]
In addition to science fiction published in Indian languages, a number of Indian writers, or writers from the Indian diaspora, have published science fiction in the English language. This extends from early works of Indian science fiction during the British Empire, to more recent writers.
Other Bangla science fiction writers include Begum Roquia Sakhawat Hussain, who wrote the earliest known feminist science fiction work, Sultana's Dream. Another early feminist science fiction work at the time was Charlotte Perkins Gilman' Herland.
Verne and Wells[]
See also: Scientific romance
The European brand of science fiction proper began later in the 19th century with the scientific romances of Jules Verne and the science-oriented novels of social criticism of H. G. Wells.[35]
Verne's adventure stories, notably Journey to the Centre of the Earth (1864), From the Earth to the Moon (1865), and Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea (1869) mixed daring romantic adventure with technology that was either up to the minute or logically extrapolated into the future. They were tremendous commercial successes and established that an author could make a career out of such whimsical material. L. Sprague de Camp calls Verne "the world's first full-time science fiction novelist."
Wells's stories, on the other hand, use science fiction devices to make didactic points about his society. In The Time Machine (1895), for example, the technical details of the machine are glossed over quickly so that the Time Traveller can tell a story that criticizes the stratification of English society. On the other hand, Wells demonstrates an awareness of space-time relationships soon to become mainstream with Einstein. The story also uses Darwinian evolution (as would be expected in a former student of Darwin's champion, Huxley), and shows an awareness, and criticism, of Marxism. In The War of the Worlds (1898), the Martians' technology is not explained as it would have been in a Verne story, and the story is resolved by a deus ex machina.
The differences between Verne and Wells highlight a tension that would exist in science fiction throughout its history. The question of whether to present realistic technology or to focus on characters and ideas has been ever-present, as has the question of whether to tell an exciting story or make a didactic point.
Wells and Verne had quite a few rivals in early science fiction. Short stories and novelettes with themes of fantastic imagining appeared in journals throughout the late 19th century and many of these employed scientific ideas as the springboard to the imagination. Erewhon is a novel by Samuel Butler published in 1872 and dealing with the concept that machines could one day become sentient and supplant the human race. Although better known for Sherlock Holmes, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle also wrote early science fiction, as did Rudyard Kipling.
Wells and Verne both had an international readership and influenced writers in America, especially. Soon a home-grown American science fiction was thriving. European writers found more readers by selling to the American market and writing in an Americanised style.
American science fiction[]
In the last decades of the 19th century, works of science fiction for adults and children were numerous in America, though it was not yet given the name "science fiction."
There were science-fiction elements in the stories of Nathaniel Hawthorne and Fitz-James O'Brien. Edgar Allan Poe is often mentioned with Verne and Wells as the founders of science fiction. A number of his short stories, and the novel The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket are science fictional. An 1827 satiric novel by philosopher George Tucker A Voyage to the Moon is sometimes cited as the first American science fiction novel.
One of the most successful works of early American science fiction was the second-best selling novel in the U.S. in the 19th century: Edward Bellamy's Looking Backward (1888), its effects extending far beyond the field of literature. Looking Backward extrapolates a future society based on observation of the current society.
Mark Twain explored themes of science in his novel A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court. By means of "transmigration of souls", "transposition of epochs -- and bodies" Twain's Yankee is transported back in time and his knowledge of 19th century technology with him. Written in 1889, A Connecticut Yankee seems to predict the events of World War I, when Europe's old ideas of chivalry in warfare were shattered by new weapons and tactics.
Jack London wrote several science fiction stories, including The Red One (a story involving extraterrestrials), The Iron Heel (set in the future from London's point of view) and The Unparalleled Invasion (a story involving future germ warfare and ethnic cleansing). He also wrote a story about invisibility and a story about an irresistible energy weapon. These stories began to change the features of science fiction.
Edward Everett Hale wrote The Brick Moon, a Verne-inspired novel notable as the first work to describe an artificial satellite. Written in much the same style as his other work, it employs pseudojournalistic realism to tell an adventure story with little basis in reality.
Edgar Rice Burroughs (1875-1950) began writing science fiction for pulp magazines just before World War I, getting his first story Under the Moons of Mars published in 1912. He continued to publish adventure stories, many of them science fiction, throughout the rest of his life. The pulps published adventure stories of all kinds. Science fiction stories had to fit in alongside murder mysteries, horror, fantasy and Edgar Rice Burroughs' own Tarzan.
Early 20th century[]
The next great science fiction writer after H. G. Wells was Olaf Stapledon (1886 to 1950), whose four major works Last and First Men (1930), Odd John (1935), Star Maker (1937), and Sirius (1940), introduced a myriad of ideas that writers have since adopted. However, the Twenties and Thirties would see the genre represented in a new format.
Birth of the pulps[]
See also: Pulp magazine
The development of American science fiction as a self-conscious genre dates in part from 1926, when Hugo Gernsback founded Amazing Stories magazine, which was devoted exclusively to science fiction stories.[36] Though science fiction magazines had been published in Sweden and Germany before, Amazing Stories was the first English language magazine to solely publish science fiction. Since he is notable for having chosen the variant term scientifiction to describe this incipient genre, the stage in the genre's development, his name and the term "scientifiction" are often thought to be inextricably linked. Though Gernsback encouraged stories featuring scientific realism to educate his readers about scientific principles, such stories shared the pages with exciting stories with little basis in reality. Published in this and other pulp magazines with great and growing success, such scientifiction stories were not viewed as serious literature but as sensationalism. Nevertheless, a magazine devoted entirely to science fiction was a great boost to the public awareness of the scientific speculation story.
Amazing Stories competed with other pulp magazines, including Weird Tales, which primarily published fantasy stories, Astounding Stories, and Wonder throughout the 1930s.
Fritz Lang's movie Metropolis (1927), in which the first cinematic humanoid robot was seen, and the Italian Futurists' love of machines are indicative of both the hopes and fears of the world between the big European wars. Metropolis was an extremely successful film and its art-deco inspired aesthetic became the guiding aesthetic of the science fiction pulps for some time.
Modernist writing[]
Writers attempted to respond to the new world in the post-World War I era. In the 1920s and 30s writers entirely unconnected with science fiction were exploring new ways of telling a story and new ways of treating time, space and experience in the narrative form. The posthumously published works of Franz Kafka (who died in 1924) and the works of modernist writers such as James Joyce, T.S. Eliot, Virginia Woolf and others featured stories in which time and individual identity could be expanded, contracted, looped and otherwise distorted. While this work was unconnected to science fiction as a genre, it did deal with the impact of modernity (technology, science, and change) upon people's lives, and decades later, during the New Wave movement, some modernist literary techniques entered science fiction.
Czech playwright Karel Capek's plays The Makropulos Affair, R.U.R., The Life of the Insects, and the novel War with the Newts were modernist literature which invented important science fiction motifs. R.U.R. in particular is noted for introducing the word robot to the world's vocabulary.
A strong theme in modernist writing was alienation, the making strange of familiar surroundings so that settings and behaviour usually regarded as "normal" are seen as though they were the seemingly bizarre practices of an alien culture. The audience of modernist plays or the readership of modern novels is often led to question everything.
At the same time, a tradition of more literary science fiction novels, treating with a dissonance between perceived Utopian conditions and the full expression of human desires, began to develop: the dystopian novel. For some time, the science fictional elements of these works were ignored by mainstream literary critics, though they owe a much greater debt to the science fiction genre than the modernists do. Sincerely Utopian writing, including much of Wells, has also deeply influenced science fiction, beginning with Hugo Gernsback's Ralph 124C 41+.
Yevgeny Zamyatin's 1920 novel We depicts a totalitarian attempt to create a utopia that results in a dystopic state where free will is lost. Aldous Huxley bridged the gap between the literary establishment and the world of science fiction with Brave New World (1932), an ironic portrait of a stable and ostensibly happy society built by human mastery of genetic manipulation.
In the late 1930s, John W. Campbell became editor of Astounding Science Fiction, and a critical mass of new writers emerged in New York City in a group called the Futurians, including Isaac Asimov, Damon Knight, Donald A. Wollheim, Frederik Pohl, James Blish, Judith Merril, and others.[37] Other important writers during this period included Robert A. Heinlein, Arthur C. Clarke, and A. E. Van Vogt. Campbell's tenure at Astounding is considered to be the beginning of the Golden Age of science fiction, characterized by hard science fiction stories celebrating scientific achievement and progress.[36] This lasted until postwar technological advances, new magazines like Galaxy under Pohl as editor, and a new generation of writers began writing stories outside the Campbell mode.
George Orwell wrote perhaps the most highly regarded of these literary dystopias, Nineteen Eighty-Four, in 1949. He envisions a technologically-governed totalitarian regime that dominates society through total information control. Zamyatin's We is recognized as an influence on both Huxley and Orwell; Orwell published a book review of the We shortly after it was first published in English, several years before writing 1984.
Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451, Ursula LeGuin's The Dispossessed, much of Kurt Vonnegut's writing, and many other works of later science fiction continue this dialogue between utopia and dystopia.
Public mythology[]
Orson Welles' Mercury Theatre produced a radio version of The War of the Worlds which, famously, panicked large numbers of people who believed the programme to be a real newscast.[38] The idea of visitors or invaders from outer space became firmly part of the public mythology.
During World War II pilots speculated on the possible origins of the Foo fighters they saw around them in the air. The German flying bombs, V1s and V2s added to the growing wonder about the future of space travel. Jet planes and the atom bomb were developed. When a story of a flying saucer crash was circulated from Roswell, New Mexico in 1947, science fiction had become folklore.
The Golden Age[]
The period of the 1940s and 1950s is often referred to as the Golden Age of Science Fiction.
Astounding Magazine[]
With the emergence in 1937 of a demanding editor, John W. Campbell, Jr., at Astounding Science Fiction, and with the publication of stories and novels by such writers as Isaac Asimov, Arthur C. Clarke, and Robert A. Heinlein, science fiction began to gain status as serious fiction.
Campbell exercised an extraordinary influence over the work of his stable of writers, thus shaping the direction of science fiction. Asimov wrote, "We were extensions of himself; we were his literary clones." Under Campbell's direction, the years from 1938-1950 would become known as the "Golden Age of science fiction",[36] though Asimov points out that the term Golden Age has been used more loosely to refer to other periods in science fiction's history.
Campbell's guidance to his writers included his famous dictum, "Write me a creature that thinks as well as a man, or better than a man, but not like a man." He emphasized a higher quality of writing than editors before him, giving special attention to developing the group of young writers who attached themselves to him.
Ventures into the genre by writers who were not devoted exclusively to science fiction also added respectability. Magazine covers of bug-eyed monsters and scantily-clad women, however, preserved the image of a sensational genre appealing only to adolescents. There was naturally a public desire for sensation, a desire of people to be taken out of their dull lives to the worlds of space travel and adventure.
An interesting footnote to Campbell's regime is his contribution to the rise of L. Ron Hubbard's religion Scientology. Hubbard was considered a promising science fiction writer and a protege of Campbell, who published Hubbard's first articles about Dianetics and his new religion. As Campbell's reign as editor of Astounding progressed, Campbell gave more attention to ideas like Hubbard's, writing editorials in support of Dianetics. Though Astounding continued to have a loyal fanbase, readers started turning to other magazines to find science fiction stories.
The Golden Age in other media[]
With the new source material provided by the Golden Age writers, advances in special effects, and a public desire for material that treated with the advances in technology of the time, all the elements were in place to create significant works of science fiction film.
As a result, science fiction film came into its own in the 1950s, producing films like Destination Moon, Them!, Invasion of the Body Snatchers, Forbidden Planet, and many others. Many of these movies were based on stories by Campbell's writers. The Thing was adapted from a Campbell story, Them was based on a Jack Finney novel, Destination Moon on a Heinlein novel, and The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms was derived from a Ray Bradbury short story. John Wyndham's cosy catastrophes, including The Day of the Triffids and The Kraken Wakes, provided important source material as well.
At the same time, science fiction began to appear on a new medium- the television. In the 1953 The Quatermass Experiment was shown on British television, the first significant science fiction show.Template:Fact In the United States, science fiction heroes like Captain Video, Flash Gordon and Buck Rogers were shown, programs that more closely resembled pre-Campbellian science fiction.
End of the Golden Age[]
Seeking greater freedom of expression, writers started to publish their articles in other magazines, including The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, If, a resurrected Amazing Stories, and most notably, Galaxy.
Under editors H.L. Gold and then Frederik Pohl, Galaxy stressed a more literary form of science fiction that took cues from more mainstream literature. It was less insistent on scientific plausibility than Campbell's Astounding. The rise of Galaxy signaled the end of Golden Age science fiction, though most of the Golden Age writers were able to adapt to the changes in the genre and keep writing. Some, however, moved to other fields. Isaac Asimov and several others began to write scientific fact almost exclusively.
The New Wave and its aftermath[]
The Beat Generation[]
Samuel Beckett's modernistic writings The Unnamable and Waiting for Godot were influential upon writing in the 1950s. In the former all sense of place and time are dispensed with and all that remains is a voice poised between the urge to continue existing and the urge to find silence and oblivion. In the latter, time and the meaning of cause and effect are played with to great effect. Beckett's influence could be felt on science fiction, which moved toward more serious reflection on being.
William S. Burroughs (1914-1997) was the writer who finally brought science fiction together with the modernist trend in literature. With the help of Jack Kerouac Burroughs published The Naked Lunch, the first of a series of novels employing a semi-dadaistic technique called the Cut-up and modernistic deconstructions of conventional society, pulling away the mask of normality to reveal horrors beneath. Burroughs showed visions of society as a conspiracy of aliens, monsters, police states, drug dealers and alternate levels of reality. The linguistics of science fiction merged with the experiments of modernism in a beat generation nightmare.
The New Wave[]
See also: New Wave (science fiction)
In 1960, British novelist Kingsley Amis published New Maps of Hell, a literary history and examination of the field of science fiction. This serious attention from a mainstream, acceptable writer did a great deal of good, eventually, for the reputation of science fiction.
In 1962, Academy Award winning Indian writer and film-maker Satyajit Ray wrote a story called Bankubabur Bandhu (Banku Babu's Friend), also known as The Alien. What differentiated Bankubabur Bandhu from previous science fiction was the portrayal of an alien from outer space as a kind and playful being, invested with magical powers and capable of interacting with children, in contrast to earlier science fiction works which portrayed aliens as dangerous creatures.[39][40][41]
Another major milestone was the publication, in 1965, of Frank Herbert's Dune, a dense, complex, and detailed work of fiction featuring political intrigue in a future galaxy, strange and mystical religious beliefs, and the eco-system of the desert planet Arrakis. Another was the emergence of the work of Roger Zelazny, whose novels such as Lord of Light and his famous The Chronicles of Amber showed that the lines between science-fiction, fantasy, religion, and social commentary could be very fine.
Also in 1965 French director Jean-Luc Godard's film Alphaville used the medium of dystopian and apocalyptic science fiction to explore language and society.
In Britain, the 1960s generation of writers, dubbed "The New Wave", were experimenting with different forms of science fiction,[31] stretching the genre towards surrealism, psychological drama and mainstream currents. The 60s New Wave was centred around the writing in the magazine New Worlds after Michael Moorcock assumed editorial control in 1963. William Burroughs was a big influence. The writers of the New Wave also believed themselves to be building on the legacy of the French New Wave artistic movement. Though the New Wave was largely a British movement, there were parallel developments taking place in American science fiction at the same time. The relation of the British New Wave to American science fiction was made clear by Harlan Ellison's original anthology Dangerous Visions, which presented science fiction writers, both American and British, writing stories that pushed the boundaries of what was acceptable in a science fiction magazine. Isaac Asimov, writing an introduction to the anthology, labeled it the Second Revolution, after the first revolution that produced the Golden Age.
The New Wave and their contemporaries placed a greater emphasis on style and a more highbrow form of a storytelling. They also sought controversy in subjects older science fiction writers had avoided. For the first time sexuality, which Kingsley Amis had complained was nearly ignored in science fiction, was given serious consideration by writers like Samuel Delany, Norman Spinrad, and Theodore Sturgeon. Contemporary political issues were also given voice, as John Brunner and J.G. Ballard wrote cautionary tales about a ruined environment.
Asimov noted that the Second Revolution was far less clear cut than the first, attributing this to the development of the anthology, which made older stories more prominent. But a number of Golden Age writers changed their style as the New Wave hit. Robert A. Heinlein switched from his Campbellian Future History stories to stylistically adventuresome, sexually open works of fiction, notably Stranger in a Strange Land and The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress. Isaac Asimov wrote the New Wave-ish The Gods Themselves. Many others also continued successfully as styles changed.
Science fiction films took inspiration from the changes in the genre. Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey, Doctor Strangelove, and A Clockwork Orange gave visual form to the genre's new dependence on style.
Ursula LeGuin, working off small modifications to an imagined society, extrapolated science fictional visions that were anthropological rather than technical.[42] Philip K. Dick explored the metaphysics of the mind in a series of novels and stories that rarely seemed dependent on their science fictional content. LeGuin, Dick, and others like them became associated with the concept of soft science fiction more than with the New Wave.
Soft science fiction was contrasted to the notion of hard science fiction. Though scientific plausibility had been a central tenet of the genre since Gernsback, writers like Larry Niven and Poul Anderson gave hard science fiction new life, crafting stories with a more sophisticated writing style and more deeply characterized heroes, while preserving a high level of scientific sophistication.[43]
Science fiction in the 1980s[]
Cyberpunk[]
Main article: Cyberpunk
By the early 1980s, the New Wave had faded out as an important presence in the science fiction landscape. As new personal computing technologies became an integral part of society, science fiction writers felt the urge to make statements about its influence on the cultural and political landscape. Drawing on the work of the New Wave, the Cyberpunk movement developed in the early 80s. Though it placed the same influence on style that the New Wave did, it developed its own unique style, typically focusing on the 'punks' of their imagined future underworld. Cyberpunk authors like William Gibson turned away from the traditional optimism and support for progress of traditional science fiction.[44] William Gibson's Neuromancer, published in 1984 announced the cyberpunk movement to the larger literary world and was a tremendous commercial success. Other key writers in the movement included Bruce Sterling, John Shirley, and later Neal Stephenson. Though Cyberpunk would later be cross-pollinated with other styles of science-fiction, there seemed to be some notion of ideological purity in the beginning. John Shirley compared the Cyberpunk movement to a tribe.[45]
New space opera[]
The trend toward gritty, near-future stories represented the cyberpunks was countered by a revival and renewal of the tradition of space opera: stories set in the medium to far future and featuring interstellar civilizations, exotic technologies, and large-scale conflicts and natural events. Though such stories had never entirely disappeared from the field--Poul Anderson and Gordon R. Dickson, for example, had been writing space adventures consistently since the 1950s and Larry Niven since the 1960s. Star Wars helped spark a new interest in space opera.[46] But in the 1980s the old tradition was given a boost by such series as David Brin's Uplift Saga, C. J. Cherryh's Alliance-Union Universe,[47] and the Ender novels of Orson Scott Card.
Throughout the decade, established writers continued to explore this territory: Greg Benford and Poul Anderson expanded on earlier work, Arthur C. Clarke added to his Rama series, and Isaac Asimov produced more Foundation novels. Emerging writers also offered large-scale interstellar adventures, for example, Greg Bear's Eon (1985), Iain M. Banks's Consider Phlebas (1987), Paul J. McAuley's 400 Billion Stars (1988), Bruce Sterling's Schismatrix (1985), and Michael Swanwick's Vacuum Flowers (1987).
While cyberpunk maintained a high profile through the 1980s, this new-generation space opera received more acclaim from the mainstream science fiction community. Though Gibson won both the Nebula Award and Hugo Award for Neuromancer, the majority of the winners of these awards from the 1980s onward could be classified as space opera (see Hartwell and Cramer, cited below).
The term "New Space Opera" finally emerged as a description of a body of work that had started to appear in the 1990s from UK and Australian writers such as Neal Asher, Stephen Baxter, Peter F. Hamilton, Ken MacLeod, Richard K. Morgan, Alastair Reynolds, Charles Stross, and the team of Sean Williams and Shane Dix. These writers were seen to be pushing the already-large envelope of space opera, integrating the latest science fiction ideas and motifs (nanotechnology, artificial intelligence, personality uploading, radical bodily transformations, cutting-edge physics and cosmology). American writers whose work has followed the same path include Wil McCarthy, Linda Nagata, Robert Reed, Dan Simmons, Vernor Vinge, Scott Westerfeld, Walter Jon Williams, and George Zebrowski.
Locus magazine devoted part its August 2003 issue to old and new space opera, and David G. Hartwell and Kathryn Cramer have outlined a history of space opera that places the new works in context in "How Shit Became Shinola: Definition and Redefinition of Space Opera" (2003).[48]
Contemporary science fiction and its future[]
See also: Postcyberpunk
Contemporary science fiction has been marked by the spread of cyberpunk to other parts of the marketplace of ideas. No longer is cyberpunk a ghettoized tribe within science fiction, but an integral part of the field whose interactions with other parts have been the primary theme of science fiction at the turn of the century.
Notably, cyberpunk has influenced film, in works such as as Johnny Mnemonic and The Matrix series, in anime such as Akira and Ghost in the Shell, and the emerging medium of computer and video games, with the critically acclaimed Deus Ex and Metal Gear series. This entrance of cyberpunk into mainstream culture has led to the introduction of cyberpunk's stylistic motifs to the masses, particularly the cyberpunk fashion style.
Emerging themes in the 1990s included environmental issues, the implications of the global Internet and the expanding information universe, questions about biotechnology and nanotechnology, as well as a post-Cold War interest in post-scarcity societies; Neal Stephenson's The Diamond Age comprehensively explores these themes. Lois McMaster Bujold's Vorkosigan novels brought the character-drive story back into prominence.[49]
The cyberpunk reliance on near-future science fiction has deepened. In William Gibson's 2003 novel, Pattern Recognition, the story is a cyberpunk story told in the present, the ultimate limit of the near-future extrapolation.
Cyberpunk's ideas have spread in other directions, though. Space opera writers have written work featuring cyberpunk motifs, including David Brin's Kiln People and Ken MacLeod's Fall Revolution series. This merging of the two disparate threads of science fiction in the 1980s has produced an extrapolational literature in contrast to those technological stories told in the present.
John Clute writes that science fiction at the turn of the century can be understood in two ways: "a vision of the triumph of science fiction as a genre and as a series of outstanding texts which figured to our gaze the significant futures that, during those years, came to pass... [or]... indecipherable from the world during those years... fatally indistinguishable from the world it attempted to adumbrate, to signify."
The television series Star Trek: The Next Generation began a torrent of new science fiction shows,[50] of which Babylon 5 was among the most highly acclaimed in the decade.[51][52] A general concern about the rapid pace of technological change crystallized around the concept of the technological singularity, popularized by Vernor Vinge's novel Marooned in Realtime and then taken up by other authors. Television shows like Buffy the Vampire Slayer and movies like The Lord of the Rings created new interest in all the speculative genres in films, television, computer games, and books. According to Alan Laughlin, the Harry Potter stories have been wildly popular among young readers, increasing literacy rates worldwide.[53]
Notes[]
References[]
Aldiss, Brian, and David Hargrove. Trillion Year Spree. Atheneum, 1986.
Amis, Kingsley. New Maps of Hell. Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1960.
Asimov, Isaac. Asimov on Science Fiction.Doubleday and Company, Inc., 1981.
Cadigan, Pat. The Ultimate Cyberpunk iBooks, 2002.
de Camp, L. Sprague and Catherine Crook de Camp. Science Fiction Handbook, Revised. Owlswick Press, 1975.
Ellison, Harlan. Dangerous Visions. Signet Books, 1967.
Landon, Brooks. Science Fiction after 1900. Twayne Publishers, 1997.
The Cambridge Companion to Science Fiction. Ed. Edward James and Farah Mendlesohn. Cambridge University Press, 2003.
A Companion to Science Fiction. Ed. David Seed. Blackwell, 2005.
The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction. Ed. John Clute and Peter Nicholls. Second ed. Orbit, 1993.
The Greenwood Encyclopedia of Science Fiction: Themes, Works, and Wonders. Ed. Gary Westfahl. Greenwood Press, 2005.
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https://www.rocknrollburroughs.com/interzone/2018/4/5/nirvana-the-hard-way
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Nirvana the Hard Way — William S. Burroughs & the Cult of Rock 'n' Roll
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[Excerpt Chapter One] “There's something wrong with that boy. He frowns for no good reason.” – William S. Burroughs, following a meeting with Kurt Cobain in 1993 El Hombre Invisible By the dawn of the 1980s, decades abroad and several years holding court among the New York City unde
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William S. Burroughs & the Cult of Rock 'n' Roll
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https://www.rocknrollburroughs.com/interzone/2018/4/5/nirvana-the-hard-way
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[Excerpt Chapter One]
“There's something wrong with that boy. He frowns for no good reason.” – William S. Burroughs, following a meeting with Kurt Cobain in 1993
El Hombre Invisible
By the dawn of the 1980s, decades abroad and several years holding court among the New York City underground had brought William S. Burroughs to a place of exhaustion, and, once again, addiction. He no longer felt the wanderlust that once propelled him through South America, North Africa, and Europe and informed books like Naked Lunch, The Soft Machine, and The Wild Boys. Now in his sixties, it was time for Burroughs to get clean and go home. But where was that, exactly? Surely not St. Louis, where he was born and experienced a childhood of privilege as the favored son of a Midwestern family of diminishing industrial wealth. By now his parents were deceased, along with his own son, William S. Burroughs Jr., who died in 1981 from cirrhosis of the liver at the age of 33. Burroughs’ steadfast literary secretary, business manager, and friend James Grauerholz would be his closest family in his final years. Concerned for Burroughs’ health, Grauerholz encouraged the author to move to his own hometown of Lawrence, Kansas. Burroughs had been to most places worth visiting and plenty that weren’t, and Lawrence seemed nice, if quiet. And that was good. Lawrence was the kind of town where the jackboots wouldn’t storm in if he wanted to shoot guns at, say, a can of spray paint placed before a piece of plywood. This was the formula behind “shotgun painting,” a creative habit Burroughs took up in his later years that also helped pay the bills—he did remarkably well in the fine arts market. Another interest was animals, specifically those of the feline variety. When asked what was attractive about the sleepy college town, Burroughs quipped that Lawrence provided the opportunity to “go shooting and keep cats.”[1]
The 67 year-old Burroughs was freshly signed to a seven-book deal with Viking Press when he arrived in Lawrence in December, 1981. In the preceding years, he’d given numerous public readings of his work around the world, cementing his reputation among a new generation of artists within the rock, punk, and new wave scenes. But at home in his modest red bungalow, he was just William. “Burroughs was very comfortable because the rest of the town just let him be,” said Phillip Heying, a local photographer who befriended the aging author and who would serve among a small but dedicated crew of locals who took turns making Burroughs dinner and assisting with chores and errands.[2]
Many years earlier, while living in abroad, Burroughs earned the nickname El Hombre Invisible from locals who noted his skill at not being noticed—no small feat for a stiff-limbed white guy on the streets of Tangier. Burroughs by then had plenty of practice dodging authorities, which may be why he believed invisibility was a technique one could learn. The magician revealed his secrets—well, this one at least—in the The Adding Machine, a collection of essays first published in 1985. “The original version of this exercise was taught me by an old Mafia Don in Columbus, Ohio: seeing everyone in the street before he sees you,” Burroughs wrote. “I have even managed to get past a whole block of guides and shoeshine boys in Tangier this way, thus earning my Moroccan moniker.”[3]
In 1950s North Africa, Burroughs chased drugs, sex, and literary immortality to the sound of reed pipes and drums played by musical mystics. His best-known work, Naked Lunch, was largely written in in this heady environment. It would be published in Paris in 1959, while Burroughs was staying at the infamous Beat Hotel in the city’s Latin Quarter. He haunted London in the 1960s, rubbing elbows with the Beatles and the Rolling Stones and singing the praises of the “aphomorphine cure” that helped him kick heroin, however briefly. The next stop was New York’s Bowery neighborhood, where he commandeered a converted YMCA locker room affectionately known as “the Bunker” in the mid-to-late 1970s. They were productive years, but Burroughs’ underground celebrity had gone from an entertaining distraction to a sycophantic drag. As Blondie co-founder Chris Stein says, “I think he got to a point at the Bunker where every time he left the house some guy was coming up to him with a manuscript.”[4]
Even if he didn’t leave the house, odds were he’d end up having dinner with the likes of Mick Jagger, Lou Reed, or Joe Strummer, to name a few of the well-known guests who visited Burroughs at the Bunker. But that didn’t pay the soon-to-be-raised rent, which his latest junk habit was already eating into. Given these realities, relocating to Lawrence seemed like the smart choice. Burroughs’ ties to New York remained strong, however, and he would return in later years for social occasions, commendations, and the occasional gig. One major event was his 70th birthday party in 1984, held at a nightclub called Limelight—a former church that now welcomed a congregation of notables looking to rub elbows with the iconic author. Madonna and Lou Reed were there, as well as Philip Glass, Jim Carroll, Lydia Lunch, and rising star Sting, accompanied by then-bandmate Andy Summers. When Burroughs heard that “the police” were at the party, he became concerned, telling a friend, “I don’t know if you’re holding but someone told me those two guys over there are cops.”[5] The fête was fun and the company interesting, but in New York everyone always wanted something.
This was refreshingly not the case in Lawrence. It wasn’t long before Burroughs had established a routine that included writing, target shooting, methadone schedules, and feline feedings. Months stretched into years under the canopy of elm and honey locust trees that decked the city’s wide sidewalks and Gothic Revival architecture. Townsfolk did not view Burroughs as a druggy firebrand, but rather a congenial, if eccentric, old man, which is just what he had become. Lawrence poet Jim McCrary, who befriended Burroughs in his final years, recalled an obliging figure with proper Midwestern manners. “He was a nice guy. You know like, if you came to his house, and you hung around and you left, he would always walk out on the porch and wait until you got into your car. If he drove you home, he would wait until you got into your door.”[6] After years of globetrotting, Burroughs had finally become settled.
Although his social obligations were fewer than in New York, Burroughs maintained a well-populated calendar, with visits from old friends and colleagues, including Allen Ginsberg, Keith Haring, Norman Mailer, Timothy Leary, and Hunter S. Thompson. Admirers from the music world, such as Nirvana's Kurt Cobain, Michael Stipe of R.E.M., Thurston Moore of Sonic Youth, and Al Jourgensen of Ministry also paid their respects. Blondie’s Chris Stein, who spent several weeks in Lawrence in the mid-1980s while recuperating from an illness, first met the old man in 1970s New York. The two remained friends until Burroughs’ death in 1997. “I always thought he was a really sweet guy,” Stein says. “Just a very nice person. I like guns, ya know, so we had that in common.”[7] In the early evenings, Burroughs would go shooting in a nearby cornfield with friends. Later, Stein would head out to a local punk club The Outhouse, on his own. “It was so outlaw and fringe because the club was only accessible at the end of a dirt road and it was literally a cement bunker,” Stein recalls. “I don’t know if they stole the electricity but it was coming off this lamp post or something like that and all these punk bands would come through there and play.”[8] Those bands included the likes of Bad Brains, Circle Jerks, Meat Puppets, and a soon-to-be-massive trio from Seattle called Nirvana. That band’s leader, Kurt Cobain, was a Burroughs obsessive of whom the older writer was genuinely fond.
Teen Spirit and Other Viruses
It is hard to overstate the impact Nirvana’s 1991 breakthrough, Nevermind, had on popular music as well as the lives of the young men who wrote and recorded it. Cobain, bassist Krist Novoselic, and drummer Dave Grohl blew the opening bugle for alternative rock while defining its Seattle-centric sub-genre, grunge. Landing in a music landscape dominated by hair bands and cookie-cutter dance-pop, Nevermind was one of those rare impact objects that are directly responsible for the extinction of an entire species—in this case, hairsprayed and spandexed strutters like Poison, who pranced and pouted their way into the mainstream in the 1980s. Nevermind was responsible for a massive restructuring of the music business, which had previously bet big on glam metal. Now, label execs parachuted into local scenes ready to sign anyone with a goatee and a pawn shop guitar. “Everyone was a little shocked,” said Janet Billig Rich, who once managed 1990s alternative music megastars like Nirvana, Smashing Pumpkins, and Hole. “Everything got really easy because it was this economy — Nirvana became an economy.”[9]
Nirvana’s popularity was epidemic. Nevermind achieved diamond sales status and knocked Michael Jackson from his position at the top of the charts. The band’s videos aired incessantly on MTV, and their backstage brouhaha with Guns N’ Roses at the 1992 Video Music Awards became the stuff of legend.[10] It had been a while since anyone had this kind of culture changing impact, but it had happened before. Elvis Presley’s pelvic thrusts during his 1956 performance on “The Ed Sullivan Show” brought a new carnality to popular music. The Beatles’ 1964 appearance on the same program cemented rock ‘n’ roll as the international language of youth. Since then, music—perhaps more than any other popular media—has matured into a massive, global business.
Commoditized as it may be, no one would argue against music’s power to move the masses, even in today’s so-called distraction economy. In 2014, hip-hop producer Pharrell inspired millions in every corner of the world to make fan videos for his song “Happy.” The track exploded on YouTube, a site whose global reach and influence has come to define “viral.” These days, record labels, movie studios, artists, and political candidates all seek to capitalize on contagion. This is the modern media hustle, where you’re either a pusher or a mark. Burroughs died nearly a decade before YouTube was a glimmer in its developers’ eyes, but he was a lifelong student of influence; specifically how the virus of word and sound can shape the destiny of humankind. As he explained in 1986:
My general theory since 1971 has been that the Word is literally a virus, and that it has not been recognized as such because it has achieved a state of relatively stable symbiosis with its human host; that is to say, the Word Virus (the Other Half) has established itself so firmly as an accepted part of the human organism that it can now sneer at gangster viruses like smallpox and turn them in to the Pasteur Institute. But the Word clearly bears the single identifying feature of virus: it is an organism with no internal function other than to replicate itself. [11]
In the Burroughs worldview, language is a mechanism of what the author called Control with a capital C—an insidious force that limits human freedom and potential. Words produce mental triggers that we can sometimes intuit but never entirely comprehend, making us highly susceptible to influence. But there’s an upside: language can also be used to liberate by short-circuiting pre-programmed ideas and associations. Burroughs believed humanity is held back by constraints imposed by hostile external forces that express themselves in our reality as various aspects of the establishment. Using fragments of word, sound, and image, reordered and weaponized, Burroughs sought to dismantle Control and its systems. His stance inspired other artists across generations and genres to use similar methods to rattle the status quo in ways that even he could not anticipate. You’ll get to know them, and their connections to Burroughs, as our story unfolds.
Burroughs saw reality as hostile, malleable, and possessed of hidden potential that could be actualized through a kind of occult media arts. Though primarily known as the author of such groundbreaking novels as Junkie (1953), Naked Lunch (1959), The Soft Machine (1961), and The Wild Boys (1971), Burroughs was also enthusiastic about audiotape, which he believed could be used to gum up the space-time continuum by playing back pre-recorded sounds in random juxtaposition. Burroughs’ tape experiments have been compiled on such albums as Call Me Burroughs (1965), Nothing Here Now But the Recordings (1981) and Break Through in Grey Room (1986)—all of which have made an impact on the musicians in this book.
In his writing, recordings, films, and paintings, Burroughs sought to subvert habitual thought processes and logic structures. He has few peers in literature, though James Joyce or Thomas Pynchon are similar in that their own authorial feats are both dissociative and evocative. Still, neither of them are as far out as Burroughs, which probably comes down to the purpose behind his writing. Burroughs was convinced that humankind is at the threshold of an evolutionary breakthrough that will allow the species to travel space and time unhindered. In his view, this next and final stage of human development requires a mutation that will only become possible when we overcome the tyranny of Word—that is, language itself, which Burroughs asserted was deeply encoded into our individual biological units. These are the “soft machines” upon which Control’s script is emblazoned; Burroughs’ work was an attempt to circumvent the invisible authority that conditions human experience.
It sounds pretty crazy, but he didn’t come up with it entirely on his own. Burroughs’ “language as virus” premise owes something to metaphysical syllogist Alfred Korzybski, whose theory of General Semantics argues that humans’ central nervous systems have been evolutionarily shaped by language to the extent that it defines our perceptual reality.[12] The only way forward is to expand our scope of comprehension—to stop confusing the map (words) with the territory (perception). Burroughs’ philosophy also has commonalities with William Blake—the English poet, printmaker, and mystic whose proto-psychedelic visions concerned warring gods of liberation and subordination.[13] In Blake’s cosmology, the authoritarian deity Urizen compels conformity through the Book of Brass, the source code of mass influence. This is similar to Burroughs’ own conceptions of Control—that insidious force which limits human freedom and potential through various manipulations, including mass media. The goal of any serious artist, in his view, is to break down the mechanisms of Control by hacking into and disrupting its core programs using the selfsame tools: words, sounds, and images.
Burroughs saw Control as the byproduct of a space-borne mutation that colonized human larynxes millennia ago, and continues to perpetuate itself through language, infecting individuals for no purpose other than viral replication. In which case, Pharrell's “Happy” might have been engineered by Control to produce spasmodic gyrations like the purple-assed baboons frequently referred to in Burroughs’ work. (Exhibit A: “Roosevelt After Inauguration,” a scathing satire of American politics in which the entire Supreme Court is taken over by debased simians.)[14] To Burroughs, all forms of Control are to be rejected. “Authority figures are seen for what they are: dead empty masks manipulated by computers,” he croaks on Seven Souls, a 1989 release by the band Material. “And what is behind the computers? Remote control, of course. Look at the prison you are in—we are all in—this is a penal colony that is now a death camp.”[15]
Radio-Friendly Unit Shifter
For Kurt Cobain, the music business was a particularly grueling prison. Artists with hits as big as “Smells Like Teen Spirit” are expected to criss-cross continents on tours that can last upwards of two, even three years. It’s an exhausting lifestyle to say the least, especially if you’ve got a raging heroin addiction and need to score in order to not feel horribly ill. Even without a junk habit, success—or any form of notoriety, really—can be stressful. Cobain adored Burroughs’ breakthrough work, Naked Lunch, though he may have been unaware of the onslaught its author endured for having written it—including a high-stakes obscenity trial and public misunderstanding regarding its portrayal of addiction. If Cobain did know the story behind the book’s publication, it no doubt deepened the connection he felt. He could also tell that Burroughs wasn’t entirely comfortable in his own skin. Such a condition screamed for self-medication, and for both men that was opiates. It’s possible that Burroughs made junk seem cool enough for Cobain to try; then again, he could easily gotten strung out on his own. In the Pacific Northwest of Cobain’s era, heroin was more prevalent than sunshine.
Before junk, Cobain had music. At times it felt like it was all he had. Music helped Cobain deal with his his parents’ traumatic divorce at age nine; it also helped him through miserable days at school, lessening somewhat his deep feelings of isolation. If music had the power to do that, maybe it could save him from working in a gas station, or worse, in the woods. So, Cobain improbably decided to be a rock star. For his 14th birthday, his uncle gifted him a used electric guitar, which he used to “write his way out,” to borrow a Burroughs phrase.[16] Burroughs himself imagined growing up to be an author who lived in exotic locations and indulged strange vices. He claimed that the purpose for writing is “to make it happen,” and for him, it did. Likewise, Cobain poured his angst and animosities into song, transforming himself from bullied malcontent to the hero of bullied malcontents the world over. And yet it was a case of be careful what you wish for—you might just get it.
Cobain’s rock ‘n’ roll dreams came true, but the reality was more like a waking nightmare. The more people went nuts for Nirvana, the more claustrophobic he felt. His addiction deepened along with his sense of estrangement. Cobain attempted to justify his habit among colleagues and in the media, claiming that he self-medicated to ameliorate an undiagnosed stomach ailment. His pain may have been real, as was the relief that junk temporarily provided. But he was soon profoundly addicted, which only exacerbated his suffering.
Cobain’s personal turmoil was authentically channeled on Nevermind, which served as the soundtrack to a flannel-draped movement that briefly defined 1990s music culture. It only took one shot—the bipolar rave-up “Smells Like Teen Spirit”—and the kids were hooked. Cobain’s status as a depressive martyr has since been maintained by successive waves of young people who ape his look and attitude. At this point, his legend is far taller than the amount of music he left behind; Nirvana t-shirts are worn by everyone from the kid bagging your groceries to Justin Bieber. Trends come and go, but Nirvana still scans as hip and subversive, for the most part due to Cobain’s uncompromising attitude. People continue to be drawn to Burroughs along the same lines. Often, the attraction is superficial—the author’s icon is as at least as compelling as his output (not that the two can be meaningfully separated). A select few, like Cobain, become completely hooked.
Nirvana flipped the music industry on its ear, but there were other pacesetting acts in the late 1980s and ’90s who primed the pump for the alternative revolution. R.E.M., from Athens, Georgia, and Ministry, from Chicago, both rejected the dominant sounds of the day and were rewarded with varying amounts of mainstream success. In 1991, the year that Nevermind was released, R.E.M. issued their second major label album, Out Of Time. Propelled by the hit song and video “Losing My Religion,” the album topped the sales charts in both the United States and the United Kingdom. Singer Michael Stipe also made a trek to Lawrence to visit Burroughs, and the band collaborated with him on a cover of their song “Star Me Kitten” in 1996, one year before the author’s death. Ministry frontman Al Jourgensen became friends with Burroughs in his later years, and even convinced him to appear in the video for Ministry’s 1992 punishing industrial metal track “Just One Fix.” Other artists, like Sonic Youth and U2, also made direct connections with Burroughs in the final decade of his life—their stories will be told in subsequent chapters.
In contrast to his friend Allen Ginsberg, who oftimes embraced popular culture, Burroughs had little interest in the contemporary scene. That didn’t mean he couldn’t appreciate the rock ‘n’ roll lifestyle. “He didn’t know much about music, but he did know about the stage,” James Grauerholz says.[17] “And he knew about backstage. And he knew something about life in the caravan, going down the road to the next theater.” So did the acts on the original Lollapalooza tour in 1991, which brought punk, goth, metal, industrial, and gangster rap together under the new banner of alternative. In its initial run, the traveling festival boasted an anything-goes spirit that was soon exorcised by commercial forces. These days, Lollapalooza is a single-site honeypot for marketers at which bands also happen to play. (Control really should think about investing in a music festival.)
1991 also saw the release of David Cronenberg's film adaptation of Naked Lunch. That movie took considerable liberties with the source material, but nevertheless infected a whole new generation of would-be subversives with the Burroughs bug. The author himself was aware of his growing influence, though he had limited interest in serving it. “He was a mirror in which others would see themselves reflected in his work,” Grauerholz says. “He didn’t create his icon, but he certainly knew how to dress for a photoshoot.”[18] There are numerous pictures of the author with well-known musicians like Patti Smith, Mick Jagger, David Bowie, and Cobain, to name just a few. Despite being old enough to be their grandfather, Burroughs doesn’t look out of place in a single one of them.
Come as You Are
Nirvana’s serrated riffs and pockmarked melodies had little competition in the 1990s singles charts, especially compared to acts like Paula Abdul and Bryan Adams. The band’s songs packed plenty of catchy hooks, but their attitude was punk all the way. Nirvana’s debut, Bleach, made them instant heroes on the underground when it was released by indie kingmakers Sub Pop Records in 1989. Yet the band’s searing club performances and support from college radio failed to move the mainstream needle. Cobain and co. aimed for the fencesmade their play for the big leagues when Nirvana signed to Geffen Records for their next release, Nevermind. The gambit worked, and the remainder of Cobain’s short life would be spent negotiating his sudden and overwhelming success. Everyone now seemed to want something from the art-obsessed kid who never felt wanted.
Like Burroughs, who happily received accolades but spurned expectations, Cobain sought validation even as he bristled at fame. Of course, Burroughs’ experience of success was very different to Cobain’s. For much of his life, the writer was an enigma in exile, El Hombre Invisible. By contrast, Cobain felt the spotlight acutely, with the demands of his audience and handlers resulting in a persistent feeling of walls closing in. Those closest to Cobain did their best to banish thoughts about him not being long for this world, a view he likely shared. Burroughs’ friends felt similarly at certain points in the author’s life. It’s why James Grauerholz brought him to Kansas—to keep him away from temptations that would otherwise do him in.
In the fall of 1993, Cobain saw Burroughs as something more than a dispenser of obscure junkie wisdom. By virtue of the fact that he’d survived, the wan 79 year-old offered a glimmer of hope to the cherubic superstar. Here was someone who had experienced the ravages of addiction and notoriety and come out the other side, integrity intact. “It was, ‘OK, I’m in this situation but I can last, I can get through,’” says Alex MacLeod, Nirvana’s tour manager and Cobain’s close friend.[19] A year before their Kansas meeting, Cobain sought out Burroughs to work on a project that he described in his personal journal. “I’ve collaborated with one of my only Idols William Burroughs and I couldn’t feel cooler,” Cobain wrote.[20] Their collaboration, The Priest, They Called Him, was released in 1993 on a 10-inch vinyl picture disc, which today fetches premium prices in the collector’s market. The two-song set features Cobain’s junk-sick guitar weaving webs of feedback around Burroughs’ laconic croak to arresting affect. Though the pair would later meet in person, their parts were recorded separately: Burroughs at Red House Studios in Lawrence in September 1992; Cobain in November the same year at Laundry Room Studios in Seattle.
The Priest, They Called Him had roots in a previous collaboration with filmmaker Gus Van Sant, called Burroughs: The Elvis of Letters. Released in 1985 on Tim/Kerr Records, the EP features Burroughs’ spoken vignettes backed by Van Sant on guitar, bass, and drum machine. Surprisingly tuneful, it demonstrates, if nothing else, that the director might have made a serious go at indie rock. The label behind the Van Sant record was co-run by the recently departed Thor Lindsay, who played an instigating role in the Cobain-Burroughs project. “Thor was the one who said, ‘maybe we should do something with Kurt,’” Grauerholz recalls. “And he was actually the middleman. That’s how we did the tape swaps before the actual meeting.”[21]
The combination of Cobain’s guitar novas and Burroughs’ tremulous rasp taps a vein of unease. Taken together, the musical mangling of “Silent Night” and the track “Anacreon in Heaven” tell a grim tale of a junkie priest trying to score on Christmas Eve. Burroughs’ spoken parts were taken from Exterminator!—a short story collection originally published in 1973. With its abrasive sound and bleak subject matter, the record failed to light up the Christmas sales charts. Still, it is an enduring testament to Burroughs’ cross-generational appeal. It also highlights the author’s unparalleled ability to convey the the grimness of addiction. “Then it hit him like heavy silent snow,” Burroughs wearily utters. “All the gray junk yesterdays. He sat there and received the immaculate fix. And since he was himself a priest, there was no need to call one.”[22]
Around this time, Cobain was anguishing over Nirvana’s second effort for Geffen Records, the anguished In Utero. The label almost refused to release the album due to concerns over commerciality; this was a serious blow to the songwriter’s confidence. Bright spots were few in Cobain’s world in those days, and Burroughs comprises at least two of them—the trip to Lawrence and their earlier collaboration. Cobain loved The Priest, They Called Him because it was so out there and abrasive—the kind of thing that could only be released on an independent label. There was no way this music would find favor with the jocks he castigated with lyrics like: He’s the one / Who likes all our pretty songs / And he likes to sing along / And he likes to shoot his gun / But he don’t know what it means.[23]
Cobain’s fascination with Burroughs had begun years earlier. The author’s entire universe stood in stark contrast to the everyday world of the banker, the schoolteacher, or the laid-off logger. Burroughs’ exotic escapades in far-flung places like Morocco looked irresistible to a young man on a go-nowhere track. Cobain initially discovered Burroughs as a teenager, furtively reading dog-eared library copies of Naked Lunch and Junkie in between ditching class and experimenting with drugs and alcohol. It wasn’t just a lifestyle crush; he was also taken by Burroughs’ pioneering work with cut-ups. Burroughs developed the technique in collaboration with visual artist Brion Gysin in a Paris hotel in 1958. The method is simple: take some text and slice it into quarters with scissors or a razor blade, then randomly reassemble the pieces. Burroughs believed cut-ups were a more accurate portrayal of reality, if not a byproduct of our very existence. “Consciousness is a cut-up,” he explained in a 1986 collection of essays, The Adding Machine. “As soon as you walk down the street, or look out the window, turn a page, turn on the TV—your awareness is being cut,” he said. “That sign in the shop window, that car passing by, the sound of the radio. . . Life is a cut-up.”[24]
In an interview shortly after “Smells Like Teen Spirit” catapulted Nirvana into the mainstream, Cobain referred to Burroughs as his favorite author and called the cut-up approach “revolutionary.” On the 1991 European tour for Nevermind, Cobain’s sole piece of luggage was a small bag containing Naked Lunch, which he had recently rediscovered at a used bookshop in London.[25] Cobain was such a fan that he asked Burroughs to appear as a crucifixion victim in the video for “Heart Shaped Box.” In a 1993 letter to Burroughs, Cobain came across as sincere and respectful: “I wanted you to know that this request is not based on a desire to exploit you in any way,” he wrote. “I realize that stories in the press regarding my drug use may make you think that this request comes from a desire to parallel our lives. Let me assure you that this is not the case. As a fan and student of your work, I would cherish the opportunity to work directly with you.”[26] In his personal journals, Cobain described his vision for the video:
William and I sitting across from one another at a table (black and white) lots of Blinding Sun from the windows behind us holding hands staring into each others eyes. He gropes me from behind and falls dead on top of me. Medical footage of sperm flowing through penis. A ghost vapor comes out of his chest and groin area and enters my Body.[27]
Burroughs declined the offer—he would not be depicted as dying on film—but he did give Cobain a standing invite to visit him in Lawrence.
On a sunny day in October 1993, Cobain—just three days into the American tour for In Utero—arrived at Burroughs’ Lawrence home on 1927 Learnard Avenue. With a population of nearly 70,000, Lawrence was far larger than the Aberdeen, Washington of Cobain’s youth, where there were more trees than people. Cobain was already familiar with the city, having performed there with his band shortly before they broke in the mainstream. His Lawrence visit offered brief respite from the treadmill-like existence of a superstar who at that time wanted to be anything but. Exhausted, addicted, and struggling with the unasked-for appointment as the “voice of a generation,” Cobain desperately needed the breather.
Tour manager Alex MacLeod drove Cobain to meet the old man following Nirvana’s performance at Memorial Hall in Kansas City. “I called his room and he’s already ready to go,” MacLeod says. “I recognize this is completely different than any other day, because there’s no prodding. There’s no ‘come on, you’re killing me here.”[28] Cobain was not the kind of person to telegraph elation at the best of times; in the depths of narcotic numbness and depression, he was even more remote. But this day was different. “ He was quite excited, and he was nervous,” MacLeod recalls. “He was meeting someone who he had an immense respect for as a writer. Burroughs was this artist who covered so many mediums and it’s what Kurt wanted to be. He saw himself as someone who could create in different mediums as he did with his paintings, drawings, his writing, music and everything else.”
Giddy with anticipation, but trying his best to be cool, Cobain stepped along the narrow walkway leading to the cozy porch of 1927 Learnard. “William opened the door and greeted Kurt,” MacLeod describes. “I mean, he was a real gentleman, we went through and sat down, talked, and tea was made. Then the two of them went off and talked and did the whole tour—ya know, the typewriter, and the rest, the two of them wandering around the house together and then outside.” Their rapport was genuine. “William made him feel at ease very quickly. There was definitely a connection on an artistic level. I think William saw a lot more in him than Kurt even realized.”
Burroughs recognized a deeply troubled soul. “As we were about to leave the room, William said to me, ‘your friend hasn’t learned his limitations and he’s not going to make it if he continues,’” MacLeod remembers. “I think he saw himself at a certain point in his own life maybe, or someone who was very similar in many ways. At a certain point he could have gone in one direction and it all would have been lost. With Kurt, he saw this kid moving in that direction very quickly. It was meaningful the way William interacted with him and how he welcomed Kurt and myself into his home and kind of guided him around his world. I think William understood his position. . . it’s maybe why he voiced his concern.”
Scentless Apprentice
Thirty-five years and two months prior, in July of 1958, Burroughs found himself face-to-face with an older artist he greatly admired, Louis-Ferdinand Céline. Alongside lifelong friend and onetime romantic obsession Allen Ginsberg, Burroughs journeyed to Meudon, a suburb of Paris where Céline and his bevy of dogs resided. Céline’s home, like Burroughs’ later Lawrence spread, was painted red and set back from the road. By this point, Céline, who was also a physician, lived a solitary life, muttering and cursing about whomever had crossed him recently or in the distant past. Burroughs and Ginsberg were greeted by ferocious barking until a lanky and disheveled figure appeared and cajoled the dogs into something resembling calm. Of the animals, Céline remarked, “I just take them with me to the Post Office to protect me from the Jews.” Despite his prejudices, Céline was regarded as a Titan of French letters, whose misanthropic yet blackly humorous prose delighted Burroughs and Ginsberg.
The trio settled in for conversation in a manicured spot of yard outside the house. Céline prattled at length about those who had slighted him, his experiences of prison, and how the neighbors were trying to poison his dogs. When the conversation shifted to his work as a physician, Céline expressed a cynical kind of job satisfaction, saying, “Sick people are less frightening than well ones.” To which Burroughs retorted, “and dead people are less frightening than live ones.”[29] When asked about literary contemporaries, Céline didn’t hesitate to dismiss other writers and countrymen such as Jean Genet, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Henri Michaux as “just another little fish in the literary pond.”[30]
Burroughs and Ginsberg departed with the sense that Céline, while brilliant, had little time for anyone but himself—least of all a pair of young writers from an insurgent American literary movement. Burroughs and Ginsberg nevertheless enjoyed their visit, which they found both amusing and legitimizing. It’s possible that Burroughs’ tolerance for the younger artists who later came to pay their respects was informed by his own experiences with figures like Céline. Then again, it might have just been good manners.
He Likes to Shoot His Guns
Cobain’s meeting with Burroughs lasted a handful of hours, during which the two exchanged presents—Burroughs gave Cobain a painting he’d made, and the musician gifted the author a signed biography of Leadbelly, whom Cobain claimed he discovered from reading an interview with Burroughs. He also presented a large, decorative knife that was more art piece than weapon, which Burroughs later gave to his Lawrence friend Wayne Propst.[31] Cobain gamely explored Burroughs’ orgone accumulator—a coffin-like box built from a design by Austrian psychoanalyst Wilhelm Reich that was meant to capture a potent yet elusive energy called orgone. Inside this unhandsome plywood apparatus, Burroughs would bathe in the “universal life force” first posited by Reich in 1939. A pariah of the medical establishment, Reich died in prison in 1957, sent there by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration for committing “fraud of first magnitude,” which included claims that the device cured cancer.[32] For his part, Burroughs often said that the orgone accumulator was a substitute for orgasms (which might make sense given that the junkie libido is next to nonexistent). Still, the box was not without its risks. “Warning—misuse of the Orgone Accumulator may lead to symptoms of orgone overdose. Leave the vicinity of the accumulator and call the Doctor immediately,” read the label posted on Reich’s personal contraption.[33]
Cobain entered the box and posed for a photo with a rare grin breaking across his face. Maybe it was the orgone. MacLeod has another theory. “The focus wasn’t him,” he says. “He was obviously happy. He was invigorated; he’s smiling. And ya know, that didn’t happen too often at that point.” On the ride back to meet the tour, Cobain was chattier than usual, even effusive. “He was talking about the pieces of art he’d seen, the orgone accumulator and the rest,” MacLeod remembers. Cobain was deeply touched that Burroughs had accepted him as a fellow artist. “I think he was kinda in awe that he was treated as an equal by this person he had perceived as being ya know. . . elevated,” MacLeod recalls.
Burroughs’ impressions of Cobain were touchingly earnest. As he later recalled: “Cobain was very shy, very polite, and obviously enjoyed the fact that I wasn’t awestruck at meeting him. There was something about him, fragile and engagingly lost. He smoked cigarettes but didn’t drink. There were no drugs. I never showed him my gun collection.”[34]
Burroughs was a lifelong firearms enthusiast who felt stymied by handgun restrictions in New York City, where he lived from 1974 to 1981. In Lawrence, he was able to build a small arsenal that included several shotguns, a Colt .45 and a .38 Special. Thurston Moore, then-vocalist and guitarist for New York City noise-rock heroes Sonic Youth, who met Burroughs in the early ’90s, described the scene: “I recall sitting in his living room and he had a number of Guns and Ammo magazines laying about and he was only very interested in talking about shooting and knifing. . . I asked him if he had a Beretta and he said: ‘Ah, that’s a ladies’ pocket-purse gun. I like guns that shoot and knives that cut.’”[35]
Burroughs’ only real competition in the literary legend/firearms freak department was Hunter S. Thompson, who in the mid-1990s drove down from his Woody Creek, Colorado compound—his candy-apple red 1971 Chevy Impala loaded with drugs, guns, and ammo—for two days of blasting at targets with Burroughs. In between sessions, the famously gonzo Thompson raised hell throughout Lawrence, but he dialed it back considerably in the presence of the older author. As Jim McCrary later said, “We managed the final few blocks to William’s house. And then something amazing happened. Dr. Thompson switched gears. The minute he walked into the house his demeanor, his energy, his self became as quiet and attentive as a student before the master.”[36] Thompson gave Burroughs a one-of-a-kind 454-caliber pistol. “It did back him up at least five feet,” McCrary said. “When the smoke cleared there was a rivulet of blood trickling down William’s thumb and wrist. ‘Son of a bitch bit me,’ he giggled.”
Burroughs’ relationship to guns—he was an avid shooter, but never hunted—was greatly complicated by the tragic killing of his wife. Though the incident was ruled an accident, the rest of the author’s life was spent privately interrogating his role in her death. Joan Vollmer, a poet and fellow drug user, was Burroughs’ constant companion in the years leading up to his emergence as a writer. She was also a key player in the early Beat movement, albeit behind-the-scenes. Her flat on 100th and Broadway in New York was a gathering place for the emerging heroes of the new literature, including Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, and Neal Cassady. The Beat movement was very much a boys’ club, but Vollmer was respected for her razor-sharp wit, which intertwined with Burroughs’ dyspeptic asides to such an extent that outsiders had a hard time keeping up with their repartee. The poet and street hustler Herbert Huncke, who gave Burroughs his first heroin fix and coined the term Beat, claimed the pair was, “very witty with a terrific bite, almost vitriolic with their sarcasm. They could carry on these extremely witty conversations. . . I couldn’t always understand them, and it used to make me feel sort of humiliated because I obviously did not know what they were talking about.”[37] As Kerouac, author of On the Road, Dharma Bums and Desolation Angels, put it, “She loved that man madly, but in a delirious way of some kind.”[38]
On the evening of September 6, 1951, William S. Burroughs, 37, and Vollmer, 27, were three sheets to the wind at friend John Healey’s apartment on 122 Monterrey in Mexico City, above a bar popular with Burroughs and the coterie of expats at Mexico City College where he studied Mayan archeology. The late summer heat was oppressive, as was the sour mood that had settled over the festivities. Vollmer was nearly as drunk her husband; the Benzedrine she’d been popping for years was difficult to obtain south of the border, so she relied on swigs of tequila for the majority of her waking hours.
As daytime bled into a thick and humid evening, Joan compulsively rolled an empty glass tumbler between her palms while making the occasional snide remark about Burroughs’ recent “honeymoon” in the South American jungle with his then-romantic obsession Lewis Marker, a 21 year-old American boy from Jacksonville, Florida. His attempted fling with Marker wasn’t the only reason for the trip. Burroughs was in pursuit of a botanical hallucinogen called yage, which he describes in the novel Queer, written between 1951 and 1953, but not published until 1985. “He had these different properties in East Texas and South Texas, and it is immediately concurrent with the sale of these properties that he turns to Lewis and said, ‘hey, let’s go on a trip to South America and take this yage stuff,” James Grauerholz says. “Because he had money. He said, ‘I’ll stash the old lady and the kids and you and me will go, and we’ll find it.’ Well, they didn’t, as you can see at the end of Queer.”[39]
The romantic part of the trip didn’t go very well, either. Marker was a reluctant sexual partner, being by and large heterosexual. Nevertheless, Burroughs wouldn’t drop the idea of taking the family—Marker included—to Ecuador, where they’d live off the land. On the night of her death, Vollmer, having endured Burroughs’ failed farming efforts in Texas and legal troubles in New Orleans, verbally dismissed the plan in front of Marker and his school pal from Jacksonville, Eddie Woods, the only other witness. “I think it’s about time for our William Tell routine,” Burroughs is said to have replied. According to witness accounts, Vollmer then positioned the shot glass atop her unkempt hair, which was thinning due to a combination of stress, a recent bout with polio, and the long-term effects of alcohol and amphetamine addiction. Burroughs, known to friends as a crack marksman, steadied his aim and fired. Vollmer slunk to the floor, a single bullet hole in the left side of her forehead.
Something In the Way
The story of how Burroughs, Vollmer, her daughter from a previous marriage and their infant son, William S. Burroughs, Jr., ended up in Mexico City is one of desperation, criminality, and plain bad luck. In November 1946, the family ditched New York City for south Texas, where Burroughs made what would turn out to be an ill-fated foray into vegetable and marijuana farming. Burroughs had recently kicked a heroin habit that precipitated the family’s flight from New York under a cloud of legal hassles and psychological strain—Burroughs had been pegged for prescription forgery and Vollmer had recently been released from Bellevue Hospital, where she had been placed under observation for erratic behavior. Burroughs’ escape to Texas was in some ways an attempt to prove to his parents that he could provide for his family without their monthly allowance of around two hundred dollars (a tidy sum that he continued to accept until age 50). For their part, the long-suffering Laura and Mortimer (“Mote”) Burroughs were thrilled to see their son turn his back on hard drugs and petty crime.
The family settled into the ramshackle spread along with their fast-talking hustler of a “farmhand,” Herbert Huncke, who also played the role of nanny and drug courier. Biographer Ted Morgan wrote of Burroughs and Vollmer’s relationship following extensive interviews with Huncke in the 1980s:
They slept in separate rooms, and there seemed to be no physical contact between them. One night when [Huncke] was trying to sleep he heard Joan knock on Burroughs' door. When the door opened, Huncke heard her say, "All I want is to lie in your arms a little while." [...] Once they were walking in the woods and Joan was tiring from carrying Julie and Huncke said "Why don't you fuckin' help her," and Burroughs responded that the Spartans knew how to deal with the excess baggage of female infants by throwing them off cliffs. [...] [Huncke felt] that kind of sardonic humor was Burroughs' way of coping with emotions, but [he] never got used to it. On the other hand, if anyone criticized Joan, Burroughs came to her defense. When Huncke said that she was a little extravagant in her shopping, Burroughs said, "Well, after all, she wants to see that we're fed properly." He never said anything about her benzedrine habit.
By October, the marijuana yield was ready. This was to be Burroughs’ big financial windfall. He persuaded the family—including Huncke and the two tots—to head back to New York City, where they could find buyers for the pot that Burroughs, Huncke, and Vollmer stuffed into mason jars and loaded into duffel bags. With the trusty jeep packed with what Burroughs assumed was primo tea, he and Huncke drove straight through to New York, with Vollmer and the kids traveling separately by train. But Burroughs had forgotten an essential step in the cultivation of marijuana: the curing process. Turns out all that pot had next to no value as an intoxicant, a fact that Burroughs discovered when he tried to find his first buyer. Making matters worse, Burroughs and Huncke arrived in New York to find Joan and the kids had been picked up by police at Grand Central Station, on suspicion that she was about to abandon them. Vollmer was once again held at Bellevue mental hospital for observation; Burroughs sprung her by showing off his Harvard Club membership and making vague intimations of social standing.[40]
Unable to find buyers for the botched crop, Burroughs kicked around the city for a few weeks, picking up another junk habit and trying to avoid the cops. His time in New York—originally as one of the criminals, oddballs, and dropouts hovering around Vollmer’s apartment, and now as a desperate addict with two kids—would come to be chronicled in Junkie, a terse, reportorial novel that would later captivate artists from Lou Reed to Hüsker Dü. Burroughs was always drawn to the seedier side of life. As a young man, he was smitten with the switchblade slang of You Can’t Win, the autobiography of 1920s hobo burglar Jack Black. The book’s drug depictions mirror Burroughs’ own accounts of addiction. “It was the small, still hours of the night that got me,” Black wrote. “Opium, the Judas of drugs, that kisses and betrays, had a good grip on me, and I prepared to break it.”[41]
In addition to the killing of Vollmer, Burroughs’ criminal history included prescription forgery, petty theft, possession of narcotics, and simply being a gay man in America in the days before Lawrence v. Texas. In some ways, his behavior can be seen as an attempt to transform himself into something other than an upper middle class nobody, even if the attention received was negative. Many of his hijinks were harmless. Burroughs liked to rope his friends into “routines”—a form of play-acting that often featured characters and situations that would later turn up in his work. He was obsessed with capturing these routines, which he saw as a potent means of making things happen in the real world. They were a way to record his fantasies, obsessions and animosities—the cornerstones of his work—when no other means were available. Also, they were great fun. Regular participants included Columbia University freshman Ginsberg and the the ruggedly handsome Kerouac, former college football star and onetime Merchant Marine. Burroughs, Ginsberg, and Kerouac form the triumvirate that would go on to transform American literature and inspire a revolution in youth culture. But even before a single book or poem was published, there was trouble.
It was 1944, the final stretch of World War II—a tense time in America, given that Allied victory was hardly guaranteed. Nevertheless, life went on, especially in New York. The city was aflame with passion and plight. There was jazz in the clubs, junk in the streets, and G.I.s looking for a good time before they shipped out. Lucien Carr, the precocious Puck of Burroughs’ social set, was a nineteen year-old college student in an intense friendship with David Kammerer—a teacher from St. Louis who had earlier grown infatuated with the young man, going as far as to follow him to New York. The two were close friends, but Carr had become increasingly put off by Kammerer’s persistent sexual advances. On August 13, their dynamic turned deadly. Stumbling drunkenly along the shores of Riverside Park in the early morning hours, Carr fatally stabbed Kammerer, hastily dumping the body in the Hudson. Panicked, the young man then turned to his closest friends: Kerouac and Burroughs. Kerouac stood watch as Carr buried the murder weapon, and was later arrested as a material witness to the crime. Burroughs, too, was picked up after Carr went to his apartment and handed him a pack of Kammerer’s bloody cigarettes. Burroughs promptly flushed them down the toilet, advising Carr to find a good lawyer and turn himself in. Carr eventually went to the District Attorney and made a confession. He served two years for second-degree murder, and largely kept his nose clean upon release.
Many years later, in 2013, the Carr-Kammerer affair was made into a not-very-good movie, Kill Your Darlings, the best part of which is Ben Foster’s low-key portrayal of Burroughs. Overall, the tale reminds of the 1990s Norwegian black metal scene in which a member of the group Mayhem murdered a bandmate in an impulse killing with homophobic overtones—an ugly incident that is also being made into a movie. For whatever reason, people are fascinated by the violent shared histories of small cliques whose leaders have artistic ambitions. At the very least, it explains the ongoing fascination with Charles Manson.
By January 1948, Burroughs had more than a few reasons to want to leave the traps and temptations of New York City. The killing of Kammerer weighed heavy on everyone in their social circle. And Burroughs had picked up a a raging junk habit that he desperately wanted to kick. Rehab clinics were few and far between, and most were brutal. The junkie’s choice for recovery at the time was the notorious “federal narcotics farm” in Lexington, Kentucky, where patients could get their fill of opiates in exchange for signing on to an experimental drug program run by the U.S. government. Burroughs first attempted to wean himself off heroin while driving to Texas, where he intended to get back to the farm life. He had previously attempted a self-administered cure, but that didn’t take, so Burroughs made made a beeline for Kentucky and the strangest rehab facility in North America.
The Clinical Research Center of the U.S. Public Health Service Hospital in Lexington opened its doors to neuropsychiatric patients in 1935, after which it became a top-secret CIA facility where drugs like LSD were tested on hapless patients.[42] Junkies were provided whatever they wanted so long as they consented to be dosed with industrial-grade psychostimulants, which the spooks believed held the key to programmable assassins and the flipping of enemy agents.[43] Burroughs did not take part in this program, choosing instead the regular ten-day regimen of dose reduction. Lexington was a popular rehab facility for musicians, as well—jazz musicians Chet Baker and Sonny Rollins also cleaned up at the facility. Burroughs’ time at Lexington is matter-of-factly chronicled in Junkie, where he describes the effects of heroin addiction and recovery:
Junk turns the user into a plant. Plants do not feel pain since pain has no function in a stationary organism. Junk is a pain killer. A plant has no libido in the human or animal sense. Junk replaces the sex drive. Seeding is the sex of the plant and the function of opium is to delay seeding.
Perhaps the intense discomfort of withdrawal is the transition from plant back to animal, from a painless, sexless, timeless state back to sex and pain and time, from death back to life.
Having broken free from the grip of junk, Burroughs and his family next put down stakes in New Orleans. He was rid of the Texas farm by June 23, 1948, at which point, he’d already been living with Vollmer and the kids at a rooming house on 111 Transcontinental Drive in New Orleans. Shortly thereafter, they settled across the river in Algiers, in a house at 509 Wagner Street purchased with financial assistance from his parents. Burroughs’ time was largely spent drinking and chasing young men. He managed to keep off heroin however, mostly because he wasn’t able to decode the rules of the New Orleans junk scene. Sex was easier to come by. “In the French Quarter there are several queer bars so full every night the fags spill out onto the sidewalk,” he said.[44]
Eventually, he managed to get himself strung out with the help of local addict Joe Ricks (referred to as “Pat” in Junkie). Early in the New Year, Jack Kerouac visited and found Burroughs in such a state of disarray that he split after about a week, having had his fill of the household’s slovenliness. He was also put off by Vollmer’s woebegone appearance—sallow eyes, puffy face, and beset with a limp from her polio bout. By April 1949, Burroughs found himself in trouble with the law yet again, getting arrested when his strung-out associates were busted driving his car, prompting a search of the Wagner St. house, where cops found contraband and a few handguns. Burroughs’ parents once again bailed him out, but he’d already grown tired of what he perceived to be draconian law enforcement in America. Vollmer described the situation in a letter to Kerouac, dated April 13, 1949:
I don't know where we'll go—probably either a cruise somewhere or a trip to Texas to begin with— After that, providing Bill beats the case, it's harder to say. New Orleans seems pretty much out of the question, as a second similar offense, by Louisiana law, would constitute a second felony and automatically draw 7 years in the State pen. Texas is almost as bad, as a second drunken driving conviction there would add up to about the same deal. N.Y. is almost certainly out—largely because of family objections. . . It makes things rather difficult for Bill; as for me, I don't care where I live, so long as it's with him.
Vollmer and the kids ended up following Burroughs to Mexico. In the months before her death, she slipped further into alcoholism, her once alluring face aged well beyond her 27 years. Burroughs initiated his ill-fated romance with Lewis Marker and raised hell at area watering holes. His troubled wife tended to their children to the best of her ability in between gulps of tequila.
By spring of 1951, Burroughs had taken his loco schtick too far on more than one occasion, even having his firearm taken away by a Mexican cop for brandishing it drunkenly at bar patrons. It seems that Burroughs was more out-of-control on booze than junk. Could it be that the William Tell incident would not have happened had he been strung out? There were ominous clouds on the horizon well before the fatal evening. Lucien Carr showed up with Allen Ginsberg in August; some believe that Vollmer filed for divorce after a brief fling with Carr. Burroughs and Vollmer quickly reconciled, and he stuck to the claim that he and Joan suffered no real marital strife. That is, besides the fact that he was a homosexual drug addict and she an alcoholic with lingering health problems as a result of benzedrine abuse. Still, whatever connection they had at the outset of their relationship—that telepathy Vollmer so affectionately noted—remained intact right up to her death.
Carr’s visit, which took place while Burroughs was on his jungle adventure with Marker, was as much a provocation as a reunion. The behavior he describes in Howard Brookner’s Burroughs: The Movie (1983) is as irresponsible as any involving rock ‘n’ roll animals like Lou Reed or Jim Morrison. “Joan and I were drinking and driving so heavily that at one point we could only make the car go if I lay on the floor and pushed on the gas pedal, while she used her one good leg to work the brake and clutch,” Carr said. “It was a pretty hairy trip, but Joan and I thought it was great fun. Allen I don't think did, and surely the kids didn't.” Ginsberg recalled, “He [Carr] was going around these hairpin turns and she was urging him on saying, ‘How fast can this heap go?’—while me and the kids were cowering in the back.”
It is tempting to see Vollmer’s behavior with Carr as a death wish; one of a finite series that ended with a shot from her husband’s pistol. It is a view that Ginsberg advanced as a way of making sense of the killing. “I always thought that she had kind of challenged [Burroughs] into it. . . that she was, in a sense, using him to get her off the earth, because I think she was in a great deal of pain,” he said.[45] Burroughs did not accept Ginsberg’s rationalization, telling biographer Morgan in the 1980s, “I’ll never quite understand what happened. Allen was always making it out as a suicide on her part, that she was taunting me to do this, and I do not accept that cop-out. Not at all. Not at all.”
Loss can drive people to embrace all kinds of questionable ideas. Look no further than obsessive Kurt Cobain fans who truly believe Courtney Love hired someone to kill him. It is perhaps unsurprising that Burroughs’ friends, lovers, colleagues, biographers, and readers would attempt to divine meaning from a cruelly senseless act. And yet, for all the speculation, we are no closer to truly understanding the underlying motivation—if any—behind Burroughs’ shooting of a woman whom by all accounts was an ally and partner.
In 1953, Burroughs wrote to Ginsberg, addressing an odd moment with his childhood friend Kells Elvins, who was also kicking around Mexico City around the time of the tragedy. “Did I tell you Kells' dream the night of Joan's death?” Burroughs wrote. “This was before he knew, of course. I was cooking something in a pot, and he asked what I was cooking and I said ‘Brains!’ and opened the pot, showing what looked like ‘a lot of white worms.’” The extent of Burroughs’ culpability eluded the man him. As he said to Ginsberg in the same letter: “One more point. The idea of shooting a glass off her head had never entered my mind consciously, until—out of the blue, as far as I can recall—(I was very drunk, of course), I said: ‘It's about time for our William Tell act. Put a glass on your head, Joan.’ Note all those precautions, as though I had to do it, like the original William Tell. Why, instead of being so careful, not give up on the idea? Why indeed? In my present state of mind, I am afraid to go too deep into the matter. I aimed carefully at six feet for the very top of the glass.”
All Apologies
Chaos and confusion greeted the aftermath. Burroughs changed his story at least four times, and the newspapers had a field day. Burroughs’ brother Mort Jr. came down and irritated all his friends. The slick lawyer representing his case, Bernabé Jurado, was well suited to Mexico City’s culture of bribery and graft. Did Burroughs’ parents pay to get him off the hook? James Grauerholz concludes that, while Burroughs’ parents likely spent considerable cash to influence everyone from ballistics experts to arraignment officials, it didn’t necessarily impact the verdict.[46] Burroughs’ sentencing falls within a range common not only in Mexico, but also in many parts of the United States. Still, a two-year suspended sentence seems light given the severity of the crime. That doesn’t mean Burroughs didn’t suffer for his actions. In fact, he continued to be haunted by Joan’s death right up until his own. On July 27, 1997, he referenced Joan in his journal, just five days before his passing. His regrets are plain: “Why who where when can I say—Tears are worthless unless genuine, tears from the soul and the guts, tears that ache and wrench and hurt and tear. Tears for what was—”[47]
In being charged with manslaughter in absentia, William S. Burroughs dodged serious punishment that might have deprived the world of a powerful literary voice. And yet his complicity in Vollmer’s death is inescapable even if the act was unintentional. But what if intention doesn’t matter? Burroughs was still guilty of committing the action. “In the magical universe there are no coincidences and there are no accidents,” he said.[48] A bullet leaves the chamber and narrowly misses its target. The tape machine replays the loop: forward, backward; backward, forward. The bullet re-enters the chamber from the barrel end. A gaunt man cocks his eye and takes aim. Again, the reel clatters, the scene unfolds. Backwards. Forwards. The gun is steadied. The woman turns her head. A shot rings out.
Kurt Cobain’s life was punctuated by shots—a procession of needles then a single blast from a hastily obtained firearm. In a grim foreshadowing of his own end, Cobain’s last photo session in Paris depicted him with a handgun to his mouth, which was apparently his own idea. The pictures, captured in February 1994, sit uncomfortably with those from a few weeks later, when the world glimpsed Cobain’s sneakered foot peeking out from the greenhouse of his Lake Washington home, his life cut short by what investigators concluded was a self-inflicted shotgun wound to the head.
Would Cobain have made different choices had he not encountered Burroughs? Junkie—originally published in 1953 under the pseudonym William Lee—remains the gold standard heroin reportage. The book and its author have been accused of glamorizing addiction, a charge Burroughs consistently rejected. As friend and collaborator Victor Bockris says, “He imagined a way of living that he tried to pass on in his books, and he tried to live it as closely as he could.”[49] Cobain cops to Burroughs being among his inspirations for trying heroin. “Maybe when I was a kid, when I was reading some of his books, I may have got the wrong impression,” Cobain said. “I might have thought at that time that it might be kind of cool to do drugs. I can’t put the blame on that influence but it’s a mixture of rock ’n’ roll in general—you know, the Keith Richards thing and Iggy Pop and all these other people who did drugs.”[50]
In an attempt to fathom his own motivations for using, Burroughs explored “the algebra of addiction,” his term for the myriad equations of dependency. “The questions, of course, could be asked: Why did you ever try narcotics?” he wrote in Junkie. “Why did you continue using it long enough to become an addict? You become a narcotics addict because you do not have strong motivations in the other direction.”
Cobain had “motivations in the other direction,” his wife and infant daughter among them, but for whatever reason they weren’t enough. It’s easy to blame childhood trauma, addiction, and the pressures of fame for his decision, which isn’t entirely spelled out in the sweet and rambling suicide note he left. There is little use wondering where his talents might have taken him had he remained above ground. We will never know. Burroughs managed to survive, producing a mountain of work that has captured the imaginations of artists well before and well after Cobain. But who is the man behind the icon? Does the character that Kurt Cobain, Patti Smith, David Bowie, Lou Reed, Thurston Moore, and many more admired have anything in common with the real William S. Burroughs? That’s what we’ll find out.
Burroughs’ relationship to music was like a centipede trapped in amber, that is to say frozen in time. When compiling the soundtrack for Burroughs: The Movie, Grauerholz wanted to feature songs that Burroughs knew and enjoyed. He worked with Hank O’ Neal, an accomplished music producer, author, photographer and onetime CIA agent, to assemble the material. O’Neal ended up making a couple of cassette tapes for Burroughs for his own use. “We used to listen to them on the trip to the methadone clinic,” Grauerholz says. The cassettes featured popular artists of yesteryear, including Wendall Hall and Max Morath. “These cold, grey mornings. . . he’s just woken up and sniffling. We’d listen to these tapes, and it would come up to something from the 1920s, like, ‘please don’t be angry, ’cause I was only teasing yooooou.’ And that was originally a 78. He had a Victrola. He really was a creature of the 19th century.”[51]
With tastes like these, Burroughs was not Nirvana’s target demographic. Still, he maintained a soft spot for the band’s leader. For Cobain’s 27th birthday on February 20, 1994, Burroughs sent a photo of Kurt inside the orgone accumulator affixed to a painting he had made himself. A note in cramped handwriting read: “For Kurt, all best on 27th birthday and many, many more. From William S. Burroughs.” Less than two months later, the young star was dead. In the wake of the tragedy, Burroughs reflected on their meeting and Cobain’s choice to end his life. “The thing I remember about him is the deathly grey complexion of his cheeks,” he remarked. “It wasn’t an act of will for Kurt to kill himself. As far as I was concerned, he was dead already.” [52]As Christopher Sandford describes in the biography Kurt Cobain, Burroughs, troubled by the musician’s violent end, attempted to find meaning in Kurt’s lyrics: “There was surely poignancy in the sight of the 80 year-old author, himself no stranger to tragedy, scouring Cobain’s songs for clues to his suicide. In the event he found only the ‘general despair’ he had already noted during their one meeting.” Cobain’s suicide note demonstrates his intense feelings of empathy: “There’s good in all of us and I think I simply love people too much, so much that it makes me feel too fucking sad.”
Burroughs’ own exit would not come for several more years. He made his final journal entry on July 30, 1997—just three days before he died from complications following a heart attack. His final testament bears some similarities to Cobain’s: “There is no final enough of wisdom, experience—any fucking thing. No Holy Grail, No Final Satori, no solution. Just conflict. Only thing that can resolve conflict is love, like I felt for Fletch and Ruski, Spooner, and Calico. Pure love. What I feel for my cats past and present. Love? What is it? Most natural painkiller what there is. LOVE.”
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[1] Miles, Barry. Call Me Burroughs: A Life. New York: Twelve, 2015.
[2] Morris, Frank. "William S. Burroughs And Lawrence, Kansas: Linked Inexorably." KCUR. Accessed April 12, 2018. http://kcur.org/post/william-s-burroughs-and-lawrence-kansas-linked-inexorably.
[3] Burroughs, William S. The Adding Machine: Selected Essays. New York: Grove Press, 2013.
[4] Telephone interview by author. February 5, 2017.
[5] Miles, Barry. Call Me Burroughs: A Life. New York: Twelve, 2015.
[6] Morris, Frank. "William S. Burroughs And Lawrence, Kansas: Linked Inexorably." KCUR. Accessed April 12, 2018. http://kcur.org/post/william-s-burroughs-and-lawrence-kansas-linked-inexorably.
[7] Telephone interview by author. February 5, 2017.
[8] Ibid.
[9] Knopper, Steve. "The Grunge Gold Rush." NPR. January 12, 2018. Accessed April 12, 2018. https://www.npr.org/sections/therecord/2018/01/12/577063077/the-grunge-gold-rush.
[10] In 1992, Cobain told a Singapore publication, “Rebellion is standing up to people like Guns N’ Roses”; the same year, Axl Rose called Cobain “a fucking junkie with a junkie wife” during a Guns N’ Roses performance. Things came to a head with a testy scene backstage at that year’s MTV Video Music Awards, where Axl threatened physical violence against Cobain, though no blows were exchanged. https://www.rollingstone.com/music/news/guns-n-roses-vs-nirvana-a-beef-history-20160411
[11] Burroughs, William S. The Adding Machine: Selected Essays. New York: Grove Press, 2013.
[12] Burroughs attended one of Korzybski’s seminars in 1939, and in 1974, recalled being “very impressed by what [Korzybski] had to say. I still am. I think that everyone, everyone, particularly all students should read Korzybski. [It would] save them an awful lot of time.” "William Burroughs Press Conference at Berkeley Museum of Art on November 12, 1974 : William Burroughs : Free Streaming." Internet Archive. November 12, 1974. Accessed April 12, 2018. http://www.archive.org/details/BurroughsPressConf.
[13] Blake was also a noted influence on Ginsberg, who mentions him in “Howl.”
[14] “Hoodlums and riff-raff of the lowest caliber filled the highest offices of the land. When the Supreme Court overruled some of the legislation perpetrated by this vile route, Roosevelt forced that honest body, one after the other on threat of immediate reduction to the rank of congressional lavatory attendants, to submit to intercourse with a purple-assed baboon so that venerable honored men surrendered themselves to the embraces of a lecherous, snarling simian while Roosevelt and his strumpet wife and veteran brown-nose Harry Hopkins, smoking a communal hookah of hashish, watched the immutable spectacle with cackles of obscene laughter.” “Roosevelt After Inauguration,” Burroughs, William S., James Grauerholz, and Ira Silverberg. Word Virus: The William S. Burroughs Reader. New York: Grove Press, 1998.
[15] Burroughs, William Seward. The Western Lands. London: Penguin Classics, 2010.
[16] In his introduction to Queer, written in the 1950s, but not published until 1985, Burroughs opined on the death of his wife Joan Vollmer, killed by a bullet fired from Burroughs’ pistol during a drunken game of William Tell: “I am forced to the appalling conclusion that I would never have become a writer but for Joan’s death, and to a realization of the extent to which this event has motivated and formulated my writing. I live with the constant threat of possession, from Control. So the death of Joan brought me in contact with the invader, the Ugly Spirit, and manoeuvred me into a lifelong struggle, in which I have had no choice except to write my way out.” [Emphasis added.]
[17] Telephone interview by author. October 28, 2017.
[18] Ibid.
[19] Telephone interview by author. February 3, 2017.
[20] Reporter, Matthew Gilbert -. "The Life and times of William S. Burroughs - The Boston Globe." BostonGlobe.com. January 25, 2014. Accessed April 12, 2018. https://www.bostonglobe.com/arts/books/2014/01/25/the-life-and-times-william-burroughs/NdXpBePErha2VEwsdnzUmN/story.html.
[21] Telephone interview by author. October 28, 2017.
[22] "William S. Burroughs & Kurt Cobain – The Priest They Called Him." Genius. Accessed April 12, 2018. https://genius.com/William-s-burroughs-and-kurt-cobain-the-priest-they-called-him-lyrics.
[23] "Nirvana – In Bloom." Genius. November 30, 1992. Accessed April 12, 2018. https://genius.com/Nirvana-in-bloom-lyrics.
[24] William S. Burroughs, The Adding Machine
[25] "William S. Burroughs and Kurt Cobain — A Dossier." RealityStudio. Accessed April 12, 2018. http://realitystudio.org/biography/william-s-burroughs-and-kurt-cobain-a-dossier/.
[26] Ibid.
[27] Smarsh, Sarah. It Happened in Kansas: Remarkable Events That Shaped History. Guilford, CT: Globe Pequot, 2010.
[28] Telephone interview by author. February 3, 2017.
[29] Morgan, Ted. Literary Outlaw: The Life and times of William S. Burroughs. New York: W.W. Norton &, 2012.
[30] Ibid.
[31] Wayne Propst offers a touching and humorous account in the 2010 documentary Words of Advice: William S. Burroughs on the Road.
[32] Louv, Jason. "The Scientific Assassination of a Sexual Revolutionary: How America Interrupted Wilhelm Reichs Orgasmic Utopia." Motherboard. July 15, 2013. Accessed April 12, 2018. https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/mggzpn/the-american-quest-to-kill-wilhelm-reich-and-orgonomy.
[33] Bellis, Mary. "Why Did the U.S. Government Want This Device Destroyed?" ThoughtCo. Accessed April 12, 2018. https://www.thoughtco.com/wilhelm-reich-and-orgone-accumulator-1992351.
[34] "William S. Burroughs and Kurt Cobain — A Dossier." RealityStudio. Accessed April 12, 2018. http://realitystudio.org/biography/william-s-burroughs-and-kurt-cobain-a-dossier/.
[35] "Noise Poetry: An Interview with Thurston Moore." Beatdom. August 08, 2016. Accessed April 12, 2018. http://www.beatdom.com/noise-poetry-an-interview-with-thurston-moore/.
[36] McCrary, Jim. "When Hunter S. Thompson Visited William S. Burroughs." WILLIAM S. BURROUGHS. May 21, 2014. Accessed April 12, 2018. http://www.williamsburroughs.org/features/category/guns.
[37] Knight, Brenda. Women of the Beat Generation: The Writers, Artists and Muses at the Heart of a Revolution. Berkeley, CA: Conari, 2010.
[38] Kerouac, Jack. On the Road. London: Penguin, 2000.
[39] Telephone interview by author. October 28, 2017.
[40] Grauerholz, James. ""The Death of Joan Vollmer: What Really Happened?"" Fifth Congress of the Americas, 2012. Accessed April 12, 2018. http://traumawien.at/stuff/theory/burroughs/deathofjoan-full.pdf.
[41] Black, Jack. You Can't Win. Nabat Books, 2001.
[42] In addition to Burroughs, musicians Sonny Rollins, Chet Baker, and Elvin Jones submitted too the heroin treatment program at Lexington.
[43] The CIA’s notorious MKUltra project was a sprawling covert research operation that, among other things, engaged in dosing Americans—often unwitting—with experimental mind altering substances. Among its goals was to “render the induction of hypnosis easier” and “enhance the ability of individuals to withstand privation, torture and coercion.” Eschner, Kat. "What We Know About the CIAs Midcentury Mind-Control Project." Smithsonian.com. April 13, 2017. Accessed April 12, 2018. https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/what-we-know-about-cias-midcentury-mind-control-project-180962836/.
[44] Grauerholz, James. ""The Death of Joan Vollmer: What Really Happened?"" Fifth Congress of the Americas, 2012. Accessed April 12, 2018. http://traumawien.at/stuff/theory/burroughs/deathofjoan-full.pdf.
[45] Burroughs: The Movie. Directed by Howard Brookner. Performed by William S. Burroughs, Allen Ginsberg, Lucien Carr, John Giorno. United Kingdom: Criterion, 1983. DVD.
[46] Grauerholz, James. ""The Death of Joan Vollmer: What Really Happened?"" Fifth Congress of the Americas, 2012. Accessed April 12, 2018. http://traumawien.at/stuff/theory/burroughs/deathofjoan-full.pdf.
[47] Burroughs, William S., and James Grauerholz. Last Words: The Final Journals of William S. Burroughs. New York: Grove Press, 2001.
[48] Stevens, Matthew Levi. Magical Universe of William S Burroughs. Place of Publication Not Identified: Mandrake Of Oxford, 2014.
[49] Bockris, Victor. "King of the Underground." Gadfly Online. August 1999. Accessed April 12, 2018. http://www.gadflyonline.com/home/archive/August99/archive-burroughs.html.
[50] "William S. Burroughs and Kurt Cobain — A Dossier." RealityStudio. Accessed April 12, 2018. http://realitystudio.org/biography/william-s-burroughs-and-kurt-cobain-a-dossier/.
[51] Telephone interview by author. October 28, 2017.
|
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wrong_mix_random_publicationDate_00046
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FactBench
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0
| 8
|
https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/cambridge-history-of-science-fiction/riding-the-new-wave/8D791DF00BDF46D92494A1374DD4CE83
|
en
|
The Cambridge History of Science Fiction
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[
"Gerry Canavan",
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"Eric Carl Link",
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The Cambridge History of Science Fiction - January 2019
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/core/cambridge-core/public/images/favicon.ico
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Cambridge Core
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https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/cambridge-history-of-science-fiction/riding-the-new-wave/8D791DF00BDF46D92494A1374DD4CE83
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To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure coreplatform@cambridge.org is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.
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wrong_mix_random_publicationDate_00046
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FactBench
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1
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|
https://ask.metafilter.com/54110/Books-that-are-easy-to-read-for-those-with-attention-problems
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en
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Books that are easy to read for those with attention problems?
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What are some good books for people with mild ADD? By this I do not mean, books about attention deficit disorder, I mean books that are short, or easy to read.
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en
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/apple-touch-icon.png
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https://ask.metafilter.com/54110/Books-that-are-easy-to-read-for-those-with-attention-problems
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About Ask MetaFilter
Ask MetaFilter is a question and answer site that covers nearly any question on earth, where members help each other solve problems. Ask MetaFilter is where thousands of life's little questions are answered.
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wrong_mix_random_publicationDate_00046
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FactBench
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0
| 58
|
https://semiose.com/en/exhibition/william-s-burroughs-group-black-light-secretive-traditions-in-the-arts-since-the-1950s-2018/
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en
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Semiose
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Exhibition , ,
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This exhibition is about the influence that various secret traditions have had on contemporary art from the nineteen-fifties to the present day. It presents some 350 works by such artists as Antoni Tàpies, Agnes Martin, Henri Michaux, Joseph Beuys, Ulla von Brandenburg, William S. Burroughs, Joan Jonas, Jordan Belson, Goshka Macuga, Kenneth Anger, Rudolf Steiner, Alejandro Jodorowsky, Francesco Clemente and Zush.
“Black light” brings together, in more or less chronological order, paintings, drawings, audiovisuals, sculptures, photographs, installations, books, music, engravings and documents by artists largely from North America, where secret traditions have historically enjoyed greater acceptance.
There are works by creators who are considered fundamental to the history of art, such as Antoni Tàpies, Barnett Newman and Agnes Martin, alongside less-known figures of the counterculture of the sixties and seventies. The show also presents young artists to reflect the renewed interest in these traditions.
The work of all of them goes to show the relevance and continuity of these habitually overlooked trends, in many cases regarding art as a possible means to a higher cognitive level, as an instrument of connection with a more profound reality, or as a form of knowledge in itself. These ideas are contrary, for example, to a purely formalistic understanding of abstraction.
Specifically, the exhibition also explores the influence of esoteric ideas on areas of popular culture, such as comics, jazz, cinema and alternative rock.
An approach without prejudice to art and esoteric beliefs
Esoteric traditions can be traced back to the very origins of civilization, having served at different times to structure philosophical, linguistic, scientific or spiritual ideas. Despite their importance for the development of twentieth-century art, they tend to be ignored or disparaged these days due to the dominance of rationalistic thinking and the difficulty of talking about these subjects in clear, direct language.
In recent years, however, many artists have taken a renewed interest in subjects such as alchemy, secret societies, theosophy and anthroposophy, the esoteric strands in major religions, oriental philosophies, magic, psychedelia and drug-use, universal symbols and myths, the Fourth Way formulated by the Armenian mystic Georges Gurdjieff, etc., generating an interest in these fields that had not existed since the counterculture of the sixties and seventies.
According to the writer Enrique Juncosa, curator of this exhibition, this interest “may be due to the fact that we are, once again, living in a restless and unsatisfied world, worried about new colonial wars, fundamentalist terrorism, serious ecological crisis and nationalist populism, just as in the sixties and seventies people feared an imminent and devastating nuclear catastrophe. Furthermore, much of today’s mainstream art is actually rather boring due to its complete lack of mystery and negation of any kind of poetization or interpretation of our experience of it”.
The origin of the title "Black Light"
The title “Black light” refers to a concept of Sufism, the esoteric branch of Islam that teaches a path of connection with divinity leading via inner vision and mystic experience. Sufism, which regards reality as light in differing degrees of intensity, speaks of a whole system of inner visions of colours that mark the spiritual progress of initiates until they become “men and women of light”. The intention is to achieve a state of supra-consciousness that is announced symbolically by this black light.
Artists: Carlos Amorales / Kenneth Anger / Antony Balch / Jordan Belson / Wallace Berman / Forrest Bess / Joseph Beuys / William S. Burroughs / Marjorie Cameron / Francesco Clemente / Bruce Conner / Aleister Crowley / René Daumal / Gino de Dominicis / Louise Despont / Nicolás Echevarría / Robert Frank / João Maria Gusmão + Pedro Paiva / Brion Gysin / Jonathan Hammer / Frieda Harris / Derek Jarman / Jess / Alejandro Jodorowsky / Joan Jonas / Carl Gustav Jung / Matías Krahn / Wolfgang Laib / LeonKa / Goshka Macuga / Agnes Martin / Chris Martin / Henri Michaux / Grant Morrison / Tania Mouraud / Barnett Newman / Joan Ponç / Genesis P-Orridge / Sun Ra / Harry Smith / Rudolf Steiner / Philip Taaffe / Antoni Tàpies / Fred Tomaselli / Suzanne Treister / Vaccaro - Brookner / Ulla von Brandenburg / Terry Winters / Zush
|
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wrong_mix_random_publicationDate_00046
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FactBench
|
0
| 19
|
https://www.popmatters.com/191025-barry-miles-call-me-burroughs-a-life-2495556787.html
|
en
|
William S. Burroughs’ Ugly Spirit, Resurrected
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[
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When I was 16-years-old my parents took me on a road trip into Mexico over the winter holidays.
|
en
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PopMatters
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https://www.popmatters.com/191025-barry-miles-call-me-burroughs-a-life-2495556787.html
|
When I was 16-years-old my parents took me on a road trip into Mexico over the winter holidays. We drove from our home in Northern California down into Arizona, across the blasted, gorgeous deserts of Sonora, south to the coastal city of Mazatlan, and finally to Puerto Vallarta, where we planned on spending several weeks. My older brother was away at college and he flew to Puerto Vallarta to meet us.
When the time came for us to start the long trip home I had run out of reading material, so I asked my older brother if he had any good books that he could lend to me. He looked at me appraisingly for a moment before rummaging around in his bag and producing a bright yellow book. He handed it to me without comment. The cover of the book read Naked Lunch by William S. Burroughs.
During the long drive across Northern Mexico I was swallowed up by visions of hanging, sadism, and desires so virulent that they consumed their subjects. I ate of the black meat and frolicked in Hassan’s Rumpus Room. There were creatures so foul and contorted that I could not help but recognize them as the agents of control I saw all around me, but did not have the words or the maturity to name. This obscene, haunting, beautiful fever dream of a novel got inside my head in a way no book had done before, and very few have done since. Burroughs infected me with his Word Virus and I was never the same again.
I tried to describe this book to my friends, this book that was like a grimoire from an H.P. Lovecraft story that, once it has been read, cannot be unread. But what can one say about Naked Lunch? I have read everything Burroughs wrote since, sometimes many times over, but I still don’t have the words to describe to someone who has never delved into Burroughs’ word horde the sheer hallucinatory power of his imagery and the disturbing insight of his ideas.
In his new biography of Burroughs, Barry Miles has the formidable task of telling the tale of Burroughs’ long, strange, and often sad life. Call Me Burroughs: A Life is a detailed, comprehensive biography. Miles digs deeply into Burroughs’ Saint Louis childhood in the teens and ’20s, offering numerous corrections and/or corroborations on Burroughs’ own accounts of this period. The pre-War Midwest haunts Burroughs’ later work and it’s particularly satisfying for those of us familiar with Burroughs work to obtain a clear picture of a time in Burroughs’ life that continues as a thread of nostalgia in his writing.
A few weeks before Call Me Burroughs: A Life showed up on my doorstep, the NPR radio program, This American Life, rebroadcast an earlier BBC documentary about Burroughs. In his introduction to the BBC broadcast, host Ira Glass explained that he has never been a fan of William Burroughs; that he found his image and the mythology that surrounded his back-story off-putting. Glass doesn’t say whether or not he has actually read one of Burroughs books; rather, his complaint focuses on his public image and personal reputation as the high priest of the junkies.
Somewhat perplexingly, the documentary then goes on to focus almost entirely on Burroughs’ image and personal reputation. In one sense I agree with Glass; Burroughs’ public image has often obscured his work and to some, given an impression that opiate addiction is somehow glamorized in Burroughs’ novels. However, Burroughs was one of the most gifted and iconoclastic American writers of the 20th century. His works can be difficult, experiential, and they do not offer comforting answers about the human condition.
So with this in mind, do we really need another Burroughs biography? Hasn’t Burroughs’ life story distracted from his work enough? Is Call Me Burroughs: A Life a good place to start for those readers unfamiliar with Burroughs’ work? If you have not read any of Burroughs novels yet, I recommend that you find a quiet, solitary place to read and immerse yourself in Naked Lunch, or The Wild Boys, or Cities of the Red Night, before you turn to this fascinating biography which humanizes this widely misunderstood writer.
Miles presents us with a problematic, contradictory, eccentric subject who made many very serious mistakes in his life. Most famously, Burroughs killed his wife in a drunken stunt gone awry. His relationships with the young men he slept with often seem exploitative. His attitudes towards women throughout much of his life were often crassly misogynistic. I will not waste any further time listing Burroughs’ many character flaws and personal shortcomings; his detractors have too often used these aspects of his biography to dismiss his work. Do great artists have to be good people? Can someone who has made truly dreadful mistakes in their life ever be considered a good person? Does great writing need to be nice?
Burroughs’ work is often not nice at all. It’s frequently hilarious, fun, and sometimes deeply humane, but at other times it’s deeply pessimistic and even misanthropic. Burroughs saw in himself an entity he called The Ugly Spirit. He described this entity as an external force; a possessing demon of some kind that provoked cruelty and self-destruction. To what extent Burroughs literally believed that he was possessed by the Ugly Spirit is not very important; the idea of the Ugly Spirit is a metaphor that runs throughout Burroughs’ work and his perceptions of human behavior.
Michele Foucault (whose thinking shows many striking parallels with Burroughs’) articulated perhaps more succinctly than Burroughs ever did the meaning behind the metaphor of the Ugly Spirit in his introduction to Deleuze and Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus : “The strategic adversary is fascism… the fascism in us all, in our heads and in our everyday behavior, the fascism that causes us to love power, to desire the very thing that dominates and exploits us.” Burroughs’ work calls out that inner fascism and exposes it in all its grotesque obscenity.
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FactBench
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0
| 81
|
https://allenginsberg.org/2015/02/feb-5-2015-burroughs-reading-continues/
|
en
|
(July 1985 reading at Naropa
|
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[
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2015-02-05T19:41:32+00:00
|
William Burroughs’ July 1985 reading at Naropa continues from here WSB: I’ve been reading a lot of these doctor books lately (and) my Doctor Benway really shines forth as a model of responsibility and competence by comparison! Perhaps the most distasteful book of this genre is called A Pride of Healers. It needs to be remembered […]
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en
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/favicons/apple-icon-57x57.png
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The Allen Ginsberg Project
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https://allenginsberg.org/2015/02/feb-5-2015-burroughs-reading-continues/
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William Burroughs’ July 1985 reading at Naropa continues from here
WSB: I’ve been reading a lot of these doctor books lately (and) my Doctor Benway really shines forth as a model of responsibility and competence by comparison! Perhaps the most distasteful book of this genre is called A Pride of Healers. It needs to be remembered there’s a pathology of who decides if a patient’s got cancer or don’t got it. The doctors open her up and anything suspicious they send a hunk down to pathology and then they stand around, twiddle their scalpals and wait for the green light – its malignant boys, let’s go . So in this pride of prowling healers the runty, ugly, half-impotent pathologist finds a big surgeon humping his old lady. So he carefully frames the adulterous surgeon for a prostate cancer, falsifying the results and everybody knows there is only one answer to that. The surgeon is castrated and his nuts sent down >to Pathology. Holding the nuts of his enemy in his hand gets him aroused and he surprises his wife by a real pimp fuck. She’s got another surprise from him – as she comes, he shoves the severed nuts down her throat. As the Germans say, unappetitlich,unappetizing.
Well most of them aren’t as lurid as that, just ordinary, no-good, greedy, callous, bigoted humans, with a grossly inflated self-image.
Here is my sense from final diagnosis: Attractive, red-haired, empty as an empty waiting-room. Well, how can anyone believe in God or ESP or anything like that, in the face of these vast medical complexes, monuments to progress and science and rationality and healing?
This wretched specemin has fallen for a nineteen-year-old nurse. He fucked her in a broom-closet that reeked of Mr Clean. He has proposed. She has accepted. Then she comes down with a bone cancer. They have to take off her left legs (her left leg, stat, scalpels crossed, it hasn’t spread). Does he still want her? She tells him to take five days and think it over. He does. With bleak clarity he sees the years to come. Oh yes, he can see where his own interests are involved. He is striding towards surgery. “It takes guts to practice surgery he says (it sure does, what would we do without them?) Striding toward surgery, tho’ the patient is clearly terminal (he would operate on a mummy) and she’s scrambling along on her prosthetic. “Will you shake the lead out?” “I’m doing the best I can, darling”, “Why don’t you go back to your crutches, he thinks, irritably. Aloud he says, “Why don’t you jet-propel on your stinking farts?” – Admittedly his words were somewhat unkind. But cancer does stink. . Of course it’s not her fault that she’s in this loathsome condition, or is it? His mother always said: “Son, in this life, everybody gets exactly what they want and exactly what they deserve”. People who think they are getting what they deserve tend to believe it.
Another flash -‘Incongrously, Mike thinks of an old joke. The eternally travelling salesman protaganist of the eternal dirty joke. Salesman spots an attractive woman in the club car.As fate would have it, she is in the lower berth just opposite his upper birth. And he is eye-balling her. She pops out a glass eye. She takes off her wig. She spits out her false teeth. She unhooks her wooden legs, looks up at him pertly and says, “Anything you want?” “You know what I want. Take it off and throw it up here.” He starts laughing. She demands why and finally he tells her. She hits him with her prosthetic, requiring five stitches. “Look, darling, I’ve been thinking it over, and..” She throws an ashtray at him.”
The Medical Riots of 1999. It is estimated that ten thousand doctors, medical bureaucrats, directors of pharmaceutical companies, were massacred in the week of the Long Scalpels. The killings were not by any means random. The rioters had lists: “There’s the bastard that let me pass a kidney stone in the emergency room.” It stacked up and up. Unnecessary operations, patients dying in the emergency room. “We cannot accept medical admissions from emergency”. Ambulance calls disregarded. “I can’t send an ambulance unless I know what’s wrong with her”, “She’s having a HEART-ATTACK!” “I can’t send an ambulance unless I know what’s wrong with her”. SHE’S HAVING A CORONARY!” “I can’t send an ambulance…”. Potentially beneficial and harmless products kept off the market… lethal products kept on the market. A recent example is the.. are the.. so-called non-steroidal, anti-inflammatory drugs for arthritis. Don’t ever let any doctor talk you into using them. I took one pill (and) I’ve never been as sick in my life. In England, eight people died of liver failure caused by this shit and still they won’t withdraw it – just change the trade-name.
I saw a tv show where the company representative, the lies just oozing and slithering out of him, tried to tell a woman her hepatitis must have come from some other cause. “I know it was that medicine”, and I know a nurse who got hepatitis from this stuff.
>Well, it was a Burn Unit walk-out that set off the riots. I have this from nurses who have worked in burn units – absolutely no morphine or other pain-killers are ordered for the patients, otherwise there could be a danger of addiction for patients who may be in treatment for months. Even the dying are denied morphine if they have the misfortune to die in the Burn Unit. “But, doctor”, my nurse-informant protests, “the patient will be dead in twelve hours”. “Don’t you think I know that? This is the Burn Unit and we are under Burn Unit rules. These hands are securely tied by two-hundred-thousand-a-year. Every day Burn Unit patients have the raw cavaties scrubbed out with a stiff brush to clear away dead skin and flesh. The patients scream with agony and very few nurses can take it. Well, a team of amateur astronauts who call themselves the Spacers landed in the Burn Unit when their home-made space rocket exploded. After the first scrub-out, they issued an ultimatum – “Morphine every four hours as long as we need it or we walk out”. “What is this nonsense, there will be no more morphine and you are not going anywhere”.”Meet my brother the lawyer, doctor”. “Do you propose to hold these people against their will?” “It’s for their own good. If they leave the hospital they will be dead in a few days from infections”. They set up a private clinic in a loft . Clashes with police raiders searching for narcotics, three patients shot to death, the walk-out spread like a toppling forest-fire – “MORPHINE OR WALK!” “MOW! MOW! MOW!” The doctors paw the ground uneasily, like cattle smelling danger. In seventeenth-century London everybody got fed up to the mouth with the lawyers and the cry went up “Kill all the bloody lawyers!” Whereupon even the most elderly or infirm scrambled off with the agility of rats or evil spirits. Hampered by inflated self-image the healers did not acquit themselves as well. “What are we waiting for, a hospital bed?” ” Kill all the fucking croakers!”. Security steps nimbly aside and the crowds rush in.. “Got a hotshot cutting doc here. You think he needs an operation?” – “Hell, yes, a Gut-ectomy” Paging Doctor Doctor Streusschnitt (that’s Sloppy-cut). Enter Doctor Streuschnitt accompanied by his scapel-bearers carrying two-foot knives and saws. “You is filled up with unnecessitated parts, two kidneys?, Sure upon is a Jew. Heraus mit!. The inner parts should not be so close in together, crowded – they needlebensraum – der Vaterland!”
[At approximately forty-three minutes in, Burroughs shifts gears] – Well, I will turn now to the cat book – The title is The Cat Inside – “May 4th 1985. I am packing for a short trip to New York to discuss the cat book with Brion Gysin who is going to do the illustrations . In the front room, where the kittens are kept, Calico Jane is nursing one black kitten” (it’s a little calico cat, she had five kittens) – “I pick up my Tourister. It seems heavy, I look inside and there are four kittens…”Take care of my babies. Take them with you wherever you go”” – “I’m selecting cat food at the pet shop in Dillon’s (supermarket) and I meet an old woman. Seems her cats won’t eat any cat food with fish in it. Well, I tell her, mine are just the opposite. They prefer their fishy foods like Salmon Dinner and Seafood Supper. “Well”, she says, “they certainly are company”. And what can she do for her company when there is no Dillon’s and no pet shop? What can I do? I simply could not stand to see my cats hungry.”
“Well, of course, there are many wild cats, some of them that could be tamed, cats that weigh only three pounds. However, they’ll be fewer and fewer exotic beautiful animals. The rain forests of Borneo and South America are going…to make way for what?. At Los Alamos Ranch School, where they later made the Atom Bomb and couldn’t wait to drop it on the evil East, the Yellow Peril, the boys are sitting on logs and rocks eating some sort of food. There is a stream at the end of a slope. The counselor was a Southerner with a politician look about him. Like many Southerners, he was a natural orator, just naturally full of bullshit. He told us stories by the camp-fire, culled from the racist garbage of the insidious Sax Rohmer (you remember Sax Rohmer, who created The Insidious Dr. Fu Manchu? Hearst Yellow Peril? – and Fu Manchu went on and on like Tarzan, you thought he was dead and then he’d pop up again. He also wrote books about evil Egyptians, The Green Eyes of Bast, (and) the unspeakable Bazarada, “who was told that he looked more like a beautiful evil woman than a man, up to his crotch in unspeakable rites and depraved practices and secrets so foul no decent man may learn them and live. Basic postulate – East is cruel, depraved, devious and immoral, anti-Christ, anti-American, and, in a word, evil. West is humane, decent, wholesome, straightforward, moral, sincere, and god-fearing – in a word, good. Good for what exactly?) – “Suddenly a badger erupts among the boys – don’t know why he did it just playful, friendly and inexperienced, like the Indians who brought fruit down to the Spanish and got their hands cut off. So the counselor rushes for his saddlebag and gets out his1912 Colt 45 auto and starts blasting at the badger, missing him with every shot from six feet. Finally, he pus his gun three inches from the badger’s side and shoots. This time the badger rolls down a slope into the stream. I can see the stricken animal, the sad, shrinking face, rolling down the slope, bleeding, dying. “You see an animal and you kill it, don’t you. It might have bitten one of the boys””
“This book [The Cat Inside] is about inter-species contact, not interspecies communication. There is a basic difference between communication and contact. Communication is designed to avoid contact, maintain a distance across which communication can take place. Contact involves identification with the creature you contact, and this can be very painful. Communication can be forced. Contact cannot. You cannot force anyone to feel. This cat book recounts my own experiences with inter-species contact. You know when it happens. It can’t be faked. And, in this case, of course, contacting the badger is very painful indeed – he just wanted to romp and play and got shot with a 45 – Identify with that. Feel that. Contact that.
I don’t know how many of you saw the tv short on Bigfoot – “Tracks and sightings in the Norhtwest mountain areas. Interviews with local inhabitants. Here is a three-hundred-pound female slob: “What in your opinion should be done about these creatures if they exist ?” A dark shadow crosses her ugly face and her eyes shine with conviction “Kill them! They might hurt somebody”” – “A specemin of homo-sapiens green, with a longer-range rifle with telescopic sights, close-cropped beard, trying to look like an adventurer and looking like a marginal freelance journalist who writes for survival. He is quite sure Big Feet are out there in those hills and proposes to kill a specemin. If I lived in the area I would be more worried about this jerk with his rifle than about Bigfoot. But I suspect Bigfoot to be a fake like the Barnum & Bailey Unicorn. Well, a camera team just happens on Bigfoot with their cameras all set up and ready to go – Lights! Action! Camera! – There he is about a hundred yards away, walking with a strange slow gait, taking six feet in a stride, like a moonwalk. Scientific stride experts say this is not a human stride. Well, certainly not at twenty-four-frames-per-second. I suspect it to be a man in a gorilla suit projected in slow-motion.”
‘When I was four year old I saw a vision in Forest Park, St Louis. My brother was ahead of me with an air rifle, I was lagging behind and I saw a little green reindeer about the size of a cat. Clear and precise in the late afternoon sunlight as if seen through a telescope.” – Well, can those images,those visions, be photographed? Certainly, anything that can be seen can be photographed. And anything that can be photographed can be faked. “The magical medium is being bulldozed away. No more green reindeer in Forest Park, angels are leaving all the alcoves everywhere. The medium in which Unicorns, Bigfoot, Green Deer exist, always thinner, like the rain forests and the creatures that live and breathe in them, as the forests fall to make way for motels and Hiltons, the whole magical universe is dying.”
“Well, life such as it is, goes on. Dillon’s is still open. I am the cat who walks alone. To me all super-markets are alike.”
This is the end – “We are the cats inside. We are the cats who cannot walk alone, and for us there is only one place. Walk alone for us” – Thank you [Burroughs acknowledges enthusiastic applause – and offers an encore] –
Well, “Political Program” – “Every man a god. And how can this be accomplished? Well, to put it country-simple, by doing your job and doing it well – because there are many gods – a god of whores and thieves and pushers, a god of cheaters and plagues who rides on a whispering south wind, god of the long chance the horse that comes from last to win, the punch-drunk fighter who comes off the floor to win by a knockout, a god of anti-heros and outrage, the ships captain who put on women’s clothes and rushed into the first life-boat,the pilot who bailed out of a burning plane leaving his passengers to crash, a god of future space-travellers who are ready to leave the whole human context behind and take a step into the unknown. Every man a god, that is, if he can qualify. You can’t be a god of anything unless you can do it.”
[The reading ends at approximately fifty-four-and-a-half minutes in. Anne Waldman announces that audio tapes of the reading are available (at five dollars (sic)!) and more announcements are made (“a lot of very interesting poetry activity” at Naropa, not forgetting an upcoming visit by Eido Roshi, Zen master)
[At approximately fifty-six-and-a-half minutes in, the tape continues with Burroughs reading several further sections from The Cat Inside]
“An English cat-hater of the upper classes (he became a Lord in the course time so I hear), well this limey sunovabitch confided to me that he had trained a dog to break a cat’s back with one shake. And I remember he caught sight of a cat at a party and snarled out through the long yellow horse teeth that crowded out of his mouth, “Nasty stinking little beast!” Well I didn’t know anything about cats at the time. Now I would get up from my chair and say,”Pawdon me, old thing, if I toddle along, but there’s a nasty stinking big beast here.
” I will take this occasion to denounce the vile English practice of riding to hounds. So the sodden huntsman can watch a beautiful delicate fox torn to pieces by their stinking dogs. Heartened by this loutish spectacle, they repair to the manor house to get drunker than they already are. No better than their filthy, fawning, shit-eating, carrion-rolling, baby-killing beasts.”
Warning to all young couples who are expecting a blessed event – get rid of that family dog! – “What! Our Fluffy harm a child? Why, that’s ridiculous” Long may your child live to think so, little mother… fondly dandling their child and drooling baby-talk when Fluffy, in a jealous rage, rushes on the baby, bites through its skull and kills it.” – (that’s an actual case, and there are many, I read one quite recent one – “Jealousy Caused Dog to Kill My Child”, a small dog too, it was a Scottish terrier.) – “Dogs are the only animals other than Man with a knowledge of right and wrong. So Fluffy knows what to expect when he is dragged whimpering from under the bed where he cowers. He realizes the full extent of his trespass. No other animal would make the connection . Dogs are the only self-righteous animal.”
And another horrible practice – walking to hogs – Hear Clem and Cash, down in the Everglades of Florida get their jollies killing wild hogs with knives “Jump on the hog’s back and cut its throat” But they couldn’t indulge their loutish pastime without a pack of thirty yipping, yelping hounds to distract and immobilize the pigs. When your hounds stand and bay at pigs, you got to get there fast because a hog’s tusk can open up a dog like a surgeon’s scapal. And sometimes you arrive too late. It brings tears to the eye to see a courageous dog half gutted-out, coming back for more. To whose eyes does this bring tears, you bestial redneck. Pigs out there minding their own business, living on roots and berries, and out-charges Clem and Cash and their horrible hounds.
I have eulogized thefennec fox, a creature so delicate and timorous in the wild state that he dies of fright if touched by human hands . The red fox, the silver fox, the bat-eared fox of Africa…all beautiful animals. Wolves and coyotes in the wild condition are quite acceptable. What went so hideously wrong with the domstic dog? Man molded the domestic dog in his own worst image…self-righteous as a lynch-mob, servile and vicious, complete with the vilest coprophagic perversions… and what other animal tries to fuck your leg?”
“I am not a dog-hater. I do hate what man has made of his best friend. The snarl of a panther is certainly more dangerous than the snarl of a dog, but it isn’t ugly, because a cat’s rage is his own, beautiful, all its hair standing up and crackling with blue sparks, eyes blazing and sputtering . (But a) Dog’s snarl is ugly, a redneck lynch-mob Paki-basher snarl, the snarl of somebody who’s got a “Kill A Queer For Christ” sticker on his heap, a self-righteous occupied snarl. When you see that snarl, you are looking at something that has no face of its own. A dog’s rage is not his. It’s dictated by his trainer. And the lynch-mob is dictated by their horrible conditioning.
Cats were held in veneration by the ancient Egyptians. To harm a cat was a capital crime.
Here’s a newspaper article – a man in Warwick, Rhode Island was fined $200 for killing a stray cat in his microwave (a case that screams for Egyptian justice).
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https://www.bookseriesinorder.com/nick-mamatas/
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Book Series In Order
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2020-02-29T01:51:34+00:00
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Complete order of Nick Mamatas books in Publication Order and Chronological Order.
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Book Series in Order
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https://www.bookseriesinorder.com/nick-mamatas/
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Nick Mamatas Books In Order
Book links take you to Amazon. As an Amazon Associate I earn money from qualifying purchases.
Publication Order of Standalone Novels
Publication Order of Short Stories/Novellas
Publication Order of Collections
Publication Order of Non-Fiction Books
Publication Order of All You Need Is Kill: Official Graphic Novel Adaptation Books
with Hiroshi Sakurazaka
Publication Order of PM's Outspoken Authors Books
Publication Order of Whispers from the Abyss Books
Publication Order of Anthologies
Nick Mamatas
Nick Mamatas was born on Long Island, New York on February 20, 1972, and went to the State University of New York at Stony Brook, Western Connecticut State University, and New School University. At Western Connecticut State University, he graduated from the MFA program in professional and creative writing, which he attended after he published many short stories, articles, and books.
Nick funded his writing career early on by writing non-fiction and by producing term papers for college students, which later got him some notoriety. This is after he described this experience in an essay he wrote for The Smart Set, Drexel University’s online magazine, called “The Term Paper Artist”.
Nick’s work has appeared places such as: In These Times, Razor, Village Voice, Clamor, Spex, and Polyphony. His work has also appeared in many Ben Bella Books and Disinformation anthologies, as well as books like Before & After: Stories from New York, Corpse Blossoms, Short and Sweet, and Poe’s Lighthouse.
Nick’s debut novel, called “Move Under Ground”, was released in the year 2004. His work is from the genres of mystery, fantasy, science fiction, and horror.
“Move Under Ground” was nominated for a Bram Stoker Award for Best First Novel in the year 2004 and is one of five Stoker Award nominations his work has gotten. Nick has been nominated for two Hugo Awards, a Shirley Jackson Award, and two World Fantasy Awards.
“Move Under Ground” is the first stand alone novel and was released in the year 2004. The year is nineteen-sixty-something-or-other, and after interminable millennia of watery sleep, all the stars are right, finally. Old R’lyeh rises from the Pacific, ready to cast its damn shadow right over the primitive human world. The first to see these peaks is a paranoid, alcoholic, and frightened Jack Kerouac, who was drinking away a nervous breakdown in Big Sur.
Jack has to get back on the road in order to locate Neal Cassady, the holy fool whose ranting letters hint about a world that was brought to its knees in its worship to the Elder God Cthulhu. Jack and Neal, with pistol-totin junkie William S. Burroughs, make their way from one side of the continent to the other to confront the murderous Lovecraftian cult which spread its darkness to the core of the American Dream. Is Neal really along to help save the world, or is he looking to destroy it in order to have an ending for his book?
Nick is able to capture the often disjointed yet rhythmic way Kerouac wrote at the top of his game, and makes the Cthulhu apocalypse feel disorienting and wild. Readers found this to be really fun, clever, and a great homage to a pair of great writers.
“Under My Roof” is the second stand alone novel and was released in the year 2007. Herbert Weinberg’s dad is striking a blow for freedom. He has declared independence from the United States, after he implanted a nuclear device inside of a garden gnome in the front yard of their home in Long Island. The household is quite understandably in an uproar because of it. Mother has gone, Herbert (twelve years old) is both a hostage as well as the Minister of Information, and the local weatherman’s moved in.
One daring raid removes the lad out of his ancestral home, but even as troops surround the belligerent house-state that has become Weinbergia, the sounds of freedom has just been sounded. The house quickly fills with American refuseniks. Will the fridge hold out? Is Herbert’s telepathic powers going to reunite him with his dad and defeat imperialism?
The book raises a rather interesting question about exactly what will happen when enough people don’t want to play the same game any longer. Nick delivers a book that is rather ambitious with some of the things he tries tackling in the novel. Readers enjoyed all the fast paced laughter, yet is not just a simple and easy read.
“Bullettime” is a stand alone novel and was released in the year 2012. David Holbrook is a victim of bullies and a scrawny child, and the neglected son of two insane parents. He is the Kallis Episkipos, a brutal killer turned captive leader of a death cult that is dedicated to the Hellenic goddess of discord, Eris. David has never killed anybody, and lives a luckless and lonely existence in a tumbledown New Jersey town.
Caught between trigger and finger, David gets three opportunities to choose his fate like he is compelled to live and relive every potential existence. The whole time, he is only guided by some dark wisdom he found in a cough syrup bottle.
Readers found this twisted tale to be a gratifying non-linear experience because of how the sequences are scattered in some different places. The novel is both hilarious yet has quite a few disturbing parts, and leaves a strong impact on you. It pays a lot of attention to the little nuances of life and the tale and has truths that are looked over easily. All of these characters, are also magnificent.
“Sabbath” is a stand alone novel and was released in the year 2019. Hexen Sabbath, the infamous eleventh century warrior, is pulled from death and certain damnation by some being claiming to be an angel of the Lord. He then finds himself dumped right into contemporary Manhattan without weapons, without clothes, and without resources, with a single mission to hunt down and murder the living personifications of the Seven Deadly Sins before they bring on Armageddon.
With time starting to run out and his one ally a destitute art gallery owner, Sabbath has to fight his way through New York’s elite. Then challenge the world’s most powerful guy, or suffer through an eternity is going to be his, as well as our, sole reward.
Readers found this to be a very enjoyable novel, with some fantastic writing. There is some funny dialogue, a magnificent cast of characters, and is filled with tons of action. Hexen Sabbath is just a treat and readers had a lot of fun following him around as he did pretty much whatever he wanted.
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RE/Search’s Vale and JG Ballard on William Burroughs
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This is a guest post from Graham Rae.
In 2007, I interviewed Val Vale, of RE/Search Publications, and the late futurologist novelist JG Ballard, about a writer whom they were both very favorably predisposed to, William S. Burroughs. I talked to the amiable Val by phone, and sent JGB a few questions by mail, sending him a copy of an expensive science book I had received for review, An Evolutionary Psychology of Sleep and Dreams, to sweeten the pot. The answers are below.
These interviews originally appeared on the now-defunct website of the fine Scottish writer Laura Hird, and...
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DangerousMinds
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https://dangerousminds.net/comments/re_searchs_vale_and_jg_ballard_on_william_burroughs1
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This is a guest post from Graham Rae.
In 2007, I interviewed Val Vale, of RE/Search Publications, and the late futurologist novelist JG Ballard, about a writer whom they were both very favorably predisposed to, William S. Burroughs. I talked to the amiable Val by phone, and sent JGB a few questions by mail, sending him a copy of an expensive science book I had received for review, An Evolutionary Psychology of Sleep and Dreams, to sweeten the pot. The answers are below.
These interviews originally appeared on the now-defunct website of the fine Scottish writer Laura Hird, and do not appear anywhere else online; have not done for years. Thus the references are somewhat dated, but at lot of the material, sadly, remains very much in vogue. I had only been in America for two years in 2007, and my views here seem somewhat naïve to me now, but, well, them’s the learning-immigrant breaks. So without further ado…
Foreword: Noted San Francisco underground publisher V Vale has been publishing since 1977, when, with $200 he was given by Beat poet Allen Ginsberg and poet/ City Lights bookstore owner Lawrence Ferlinghetti ($100 from each), he put out 11 issues of the Search And Destroy punk zine. In 1980 he started RE/Search, an imprint which still puts out infrequent volumes on subjects like schlock therapy trash movies, JG Ballard, punk, modern primitives, supermasochists, torture gardens, pranks, angry women, bodily fluids.anything and everything taboo and alternative and unreported was and is fair grist to Vale’s subversive ever-churning wordmill.
In 1982 he put out RE/Search #4/5, a three-section volume including William S. Burroughs, with the other two sections being about Throbbing Gristle and the artist Brion Gysin, WSB’s friend and collaborator who’d introduced the writer to the ‘cut-up’ method of rearranging his texts to show what they really mean.
The Burroughs section of the book include an interview with Burroughs by Vale (who is mentioned in Burroughs’ Last Words), an unpublished chapter from Cities of The Red Night, two excerpts from The Place of Dead Roads, two “Early Routines,” an article on “The Cut-Up Method of Brion Gysin” and ‘The Revised Boy Scout Manual’ which is a piece in which Burroughs muses revealingly on armed revolution and weapons-related revelation.
I talked to the amiable publisher about this interesting volume, but only about Burroughs, because he was the reason I wanted to read the thing in the first place; neither of the other two subjects much interest me, to be perfectly honest. It’s an interesting volume that any Burroughs enthusiast would definitely enjoy. So join us as we (me with occasionally incomprehensible-to-American-ears Scottish accent) take a trip down memory lane and talk about snakebite serum, dark-skinned young boys, the City Lights bookstore, independent publishing, aphorisms, Fox News’s hateful right-wing Christian conservative pop-agitprop, the madness of Tony Blair and avoiding mad drunks with guns.
And after the interview with Vale you will find the answers to a few questions JG Ballard was kind enough to answer me by mail about his own relationship with El Hombre Invisible.
V Vale Questions
Graham Rae: First off, how did you first encounter Burroughs’ work?
Vale: Oh, jeez. Well, I encountered Naked Lunch at college in the late ‘60s. He was like the cat’s meow. Burroughs and Kenneth Anger’s Hollywood Babylon—books like these. And it was obvious that Burroughs was this un-sane, slightly science-fictiony visionary, but he wasn’t really science fiction, he was extremely sardonic, that was his main appeal, with Dr. Benway and all that. And since I was more-or-less hetero oriented I think I more or less ignored all the references to young boys with blue gills and fluorescent appendages and whatever. That sort of went right by me like water off a duck’s back. It was only later that I realized that the imagery was kind of . . . how it was oriented. But what really turned me on to Burroughs was an article in a 1970 or ‘71 Atlantic Monthly magazine that came out with a huge excerpt in it from The Job, which is Burroughs’—I think it’s his signature book of interviews, it’s kind of the equivalent of The Philosophy of Andy Warhol (From A to B and Back Again). And so I took this magazine and underlined it and kept reading it over and over, making lists and trying to get all the books that he talked about. And then The Job came out and that became my Bible
Yeah?
Vale: Oh yeah, it’s totally important. Still important; it’s got so many ideas in it.
Well that’s the thing about Burroughs, isn’t it? It’s like this sort of surreal mercurial Braille, it’s very strange. I mean you read it, you go back to it and then you go back to it and then you get something different from it because you’ve got a completely different level of understanding of it, y’know, I think, personally.
Vale: Well yeah, that definitely can happen with any great book. And I spent so much time with ‘The Job’ and with that ‘Atlantic Monthly’ article. It was obvious that this was sort of like a philosophy of life. I mean, instead of saying you’re right wing or left wing politically, you could just say, Well, I’m a Burroughsian. There should be almost a Burroughsian political party making fun of authoritarianism all across the entire political spectrum.
I’ve got that party in my head that goes on 24 fucking 7, man. Right. When and how did you first contact Burroughs?
Vale: Well I was already working at City Lights Bookstore and one of the perks of working there was that you got to meet all the so-called Beatniks and you were already in the in-group.
Did you meet like Ginsberg and that then, I take it?
Vale: Oh yeah, sure. The legend is that Ginsberg gave me my first $100 to start publishing. It’s certainly true, but I wish I had made a Xerox of the check, and I wish I had made a Xerox of the check that Ferlinghetti gave me, too. But you know, back in those days you didn’t have a home Xerox machine, you had to go to a corner facility and spend ten cens on a Xerox. Believe it or not, ten cents for a Xerox was a lot of money in 1976 or so.
Especially when you don’t have much money.
Vale: Especially when you’re living on minimum wage from City Lights, but you know you would parlay that, you’d stretch that out by: you’d get such a low income you’d qualify for food stamps, for example. They still give out food stamps—I see these old Chinese people using them still, but I hear they’re really hard to get now. But they used to be easy to get.
Just as well for you. So did Burroughs come into the shop one time, or what?
Vale: Yeah, well, he came through on a reading tour like authors tend to do and y’know I had to kind of figure out an angle on how to kind of stand out, because everybody wants to meet Burroughs. But you know he probably likes—him being this pale blondish Midwestern background, I found out later that he tends to like darker-skinned young boys, of which I qualified. But, being hetero of course—I didn’t know these things at the time, and I knew the point of intersection would be firearms, because I grew up in a very small desert town and for a certain several years of my life, until I got arrested by the police, I spent a great deal of time by myself walking in the desert with my .22 rifle and pistol, sort of shooting at anything that moved. But actually I didn’t—after I killed my first rabbit I was utterly horrified because it took about 20 shots pumped into the little quivering body before it finally stopped moving. It was kind of a gross experience. The .22 long rifle cartridge just isn’t that powerful, I guess, even for a 12 or 14 lbs rabbit.
Did you talk to Burroughs about guns, then?
Vale: Oh yeah, and I also knew a lot about guns, because someone just gave me all these gun magazines and I just devoured them and memorized them and then I sent away for free catalogues and I sort of fantasized going away to South America and being kind of an explorer. And, you know, I’d have all these certain state-of-the-art firearms and gear and all that. And so I did know quite a bit about the history of firearms. And so it was very easy to talk to Burroughs about that. He was up-to-the-minute; up to the day he died he was up-to-the-minute on state-of-the-art firearms and. He knew a lot more about knives than I did. He taught me how to throw knives, but I don’t think I’m as good as him. He’s quite good. I mean, have you ever tried to throw a knife?
Not really, no.
Vale: Oh. Well, there’s an art to it. First of all, the knife has to have some balance. Then you grab it by the point, more or less, and then you do a little flick of the wrist and elbow at a spot on a side of a barn, for example. And under Burroughs’ help I got so I could stick a blade in most of the time. But it’s not my preferred choice of weaponry, by any means.
Why was Burroughs so gun-obsessed?
Vale: Why was he? Because he believed in the right to bear arms, he believed in, y’know, the foundation of this country is the right to have a gun in your household and rise up against the government if the government should turn fascist—which of course—which of course it has. But of course everyone’s so brain-dead and stupid and dumbed-down now they’ve forgotten all this. He also believed that—or let’s say he respected—that little aphorism which you probably haven’t heard, which is: ‘God made man, but Samuel Colt made them all equal.’
I’ve heard that aphorism because it’s in a Manic Street Preachers song.
Vale: Wait a minute, say that again?
I have heard that saying because it’s in a song by the band the Manic Street Preachers. The lyric goes “Fuck the Brady Bill / fuck the Brady Bill / if God made man they say / Sam Colt made them equal.”
Vale: He’s right. (laughs)
I know all sorts of strange things you would not credit me with knowing being Scottish, Mr. Vale.
Vale: That’s right. I shouldn’t, I mean I wouldn’t doubt it. And I’ll tell you why. I’ve said this before: you Scots and you Brits and you Welshmen and whoever in the UK, you’ve all gotten, even in the worst country parish, you’ve gotten a far superior education to us Americans. I’d say it’s ten times as good as the average.
I don’t really have much of a frame of reference for that, but I’ll take your word for it. How close was your friendship with Burroughs? Did you meet him over the years at certain points, or….
Vale: Oh, I wouldn’t claim it was deep. Let’s see . . . I talked to him several times in San Francisco. I spent a whopping ten days with him in 1988 because James Grauerholz (executor of Burroughs’ literary estate) was going out of town and I somehow timed it so I was there in his place and running all the errands that James ran for him. And then James came back I think a day before I left, and we went to a big dinner some woman made, so there were like, y’know, fifteen people there or something. And then after that I went and visited him just before he died in 1997 for several hours. And so, I don’t know, but I think the early conversations must have been a little refreshing for him. I have the feeling that I was the first young person that he’d met who knew a lot about firearms and had a passion for it more or less just like he did. And so he could tell I was real. (Laughs)
You weren’t like a dilettante starfucker, y’know, ‘Mr. Burroughs I’ve read all your books,’ you were like ‘tell me about the Magnum .45’ or something.
Vale: (Chuckling) Well, there is no such thing as a Magnum .45, but there is a .44 Magnum.
Ah well, you see my extensive knowledge of firearms. I have fired guns once with a friend of mine from San Francisco, but apart from that they’re not something I’ve ever really been interested in.
Vale: Ah no, you don’t need to, and I haven’t been interested in at least 25 years or something like that. I went through about three intensive years from around age 14-16 until I got arrested, then I…
What did you get arrested for?
Vale: I just . . . me and this other person got arrested for being on private property, with a firearm, which was frowned upon.
Yeah.
Vale: Well, we were just going on this property to see if we could just—like, we were in a car and we were going onto this property to see if we could maybe shoot some rabbits. Because they tend to freeze in the glare of the headlights of the car, they make easy targets. But before we could do it some policeman came out of nowhere—he must have been bored and started following us, and he hauled us to the station. I wasn’t even sixteen then, the other person was sixteen .cos he had just gotten his car driver’s license. His parents got very angry with me and forbade him to associate with me anymore. I was considered a bad influence, apparently.
Teenage boys with guns, man…
Vale: Well no, I was the only one who had guns.
You sound like a Burroughs wet dream there, a teenage boy with a gun.
Vale: (Laughing) I dunno, I don’t think that’s the only qualifier. See, I like to read, I always liked to read, and so I just devoured this huge pile of gun magazines. I can tell you the titles: they were ‘American Rifleman,’ ‘Outdoor Life,’ ‘Sports Afield,’ and ‘Field And Stream.’ I like memorized all the articles and then I started sending for all these free gun catalogues you could get then, and catalogs of outdoor wear and gear, trying to become sort of an armchair expert on all these things. You know, like snakebite—what to do if you have a snakebite. I think I mail ordered a snakebite kit, for example.
That sounds like a kind of Burroughsian random autodidact trajectory, you just go where your obsessions take you.
Vale: Yeah, I don’t even remember who gave me these magazines, but these magazines changed my life (chuckling) for a few years.
How was Burroughs when you lived with him for ten days, how did you find the man? I mean was he crazy, or was he quite placid, or did he try and shoot you, or…
Vale: He’s like this Harvard country gentleman, completely civilized and well-mannered and full of puns and always quoting Shakespeare—things like that. He must have memorized a lot of Shakespeare in his day. How can I say it—he’s both. I mean, he did go to Harvard, you know, which is the best college or university in America. But he also had a lot of street experience, having been a junkie and also an exterminator. “Got any bugs lady?”—you’ve read that. And I think he was a farmer, too; tried to be a farmer in Texas. And then he of course went through that whole gay underground scene in New York City and Mexico City and Tangier and all that. And so he’s kind of been exposed to a full spectrum of humanity. High and low culture, completely. And so his conversations can go all over the map, depending on your interests.
And your intelligence level as well, eh?
Vale: Well, I guess. But you know what I’ve found is that there are so many levels of intelligence—I never judge anybody that way, because someone who may be—let’s say their culture doesn’t overlap with your very much—you can still learn a lot about something you knew nothing about. Then you realize this person knows a lot more than you. Especially in a city, or I suppose in the country, too. Even, you might say, the dimmest lightbulb can be surprising; you just have to tap it.
The dimmest lightbulb still gives out an illuminating flicker or two.
Vale: Well, sometimes a flash of an illumination! (Laughs) You’d be surprised, in fact surprise is what life is all about.
Back to your William S Burroughs volume. Why did you put it out and how did you choose the pieces that went into the book?
Vale: Well I didn’t choose them. First I got to do the interview and then I simply asked James Grauerholz for some unpublished pieces that I could use. And it was as simple as that: he sent me them and I used what he sent me. But of course the reason why I liked Burroughs can be summed up in one word: either “anti-authoritarian” or the words “Control Process.” I mean he is all about trying to decipher and uncover the workings of the Control Process, as he named it, by which we’re all controlled in ways in which we don’t even realize, which is the scariest thing.
That’s very true. Did you see the documentary Outfoxed?
Vale: No.
I was watching that the other night. It’s about Fox News. They asked all these questions like ‘do you believe Iraq had weapons of mass destruction’ and ‘do you believe Iraq has an Al Queda connection?’ The numbers were consistently… let’s just say if you did not watch Fox then 17% of you believed that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction or, you know, had an Al Qaeda connection. And if you watched Fox News the numbers were up in the 70-75% range because it’s just pure bullshit disinformation.
Vale: Oh, it’s lies.
It’s pure lies, it’s bizarre. That’s one thing that’s fascinated me since I came to this country is attack dog politics, these fucking idiots like Ann Coulter and Bill O’Reilly and Rush Limbaugh and all these fucking muppets, you know?
Vale: Well, they’re just propagandists. There seems to be some sort of weird conspiracy to bamboozle most of the American populace and (sighs) it’s working. I mean, I printed a statistic in one of my newsletters awhile back which is that these right-wing conservative Republicans, I don’t know how many of them, raised $3 billion and over the course of the last ten years funded 45 think-tanks and all these think-tanks worked on just how to take control of the country. And they darn near worked. Now, of course, as we just saw this shift in Congress where the House and the Senate are now back to being under Democratic control despite all the dirty tricks and think-tanking of the Republicans and all their illegal phone-calling campaigns, impersonating Democrats, and all the dirty tricks they did. And I’m surprised this thing happened because I was sure that the Republicans had total control of all the voting machines. And so I was amazed that this happened at all, this Democratic shift, but of course today this bill got passed making it illegal to—you can be thrown in jail if you demonstrate in front of a store, because the basis is that the store can sort of easily sort of prove that you damaged their business and they got less income because you were standing in front with a picket sign or something, or a boycott sign. And the bill made it easier for you to be thrown in jail now for doing this.
I think they did this in Britain as well, y’know, it was just basically to stop people demonstrating, if you’ve got more than a few people in one group you’re obviously anarchist rabble-rousers and we’re going disband your group because you’re obviously up to no good. The fact that demonstrating has nothing to do with it, you’re just scum.
Vale: In London they used to have Hyde Park and there used to be all kinds of political rabble-rousers talking there and that was permitted. What happened to that?
Britain is America Lite. Tony Blair is a madman. He is finally going to be going, but it’s just gone just as bad as the spin culture in America, it really has, and it’s worse because it’s even more stupid, it’s not as well-financed or thought through, it’s just a pale irritating imitative shadow of the American surreal experience with politics. It really is a sick joke. And Tony Blair’s just a deeply corrupt man, but of course he’s got that whole sort of ‘God’s on my side’ pathological nonsense as well, you know. I’ll tell you something, one of the best expressions I ever heard used was “Time to look beyond this rundown radioactive cop-ridden planet.” It’s just perfect.
Was Burroughs pleased with the way your book turned out?
Vale: Oh yeah, he loved it. He was happy because it was like the first time he was ever shown holding a firearm. No one had ever dared print photos like that.
Too scared of the controversial aspects with the Joan Vollmer incident (Burroughs shot and killed his wife in a drunken game of ‘William Tell’)?
Vale: I think people just weren’t interested; no one had ever thought (to do it). And then of course later on someone brought out a book by Burroughs called Painting And Guns, a little tiny Hanuman Press book in which someone interviewed him, I guess, on painting and guns. (Laughs) I sort of paved the way for it to be okay.
The whole Burroughs thing with guns, I mean… bearing in mind that I come from a country that doesn’t really have a gun culture, and around nine years ago there was a primary school - which is a school for kids from four or five until eleven - it was in Dunblane and there was a shooting, so they basically disarmed the country after that. So American and British gun cultures are vastly, vastly different things. I dunno, it’s just something that some people like and some people don’t. I think in Britain it’s regarded as a kind of Republican right-wing, NASCAR-watching, beer-guzzling kind of thing to do, go and shoot your guns in the house.
Vale: I couldn’t say about England. See, here we’ve got the whole myth about the Wild West, and the taming of the West, and the guns that tamed the West kind of thing, y’know, the Winchester repeating rifle - Winchester .73 they call it, the Colt Peacemaker they call it, the six-shooter single action pistol—you can’t just pull the trigger, you have to pull the hammer back first. And of course they’re not talking about who was killed: all the original populace, all the original inhabitants of America. Someone was telling me about a very interesting-sounding book which I have to find called 1491 which is all about America before Columbus got here. And they’re trying to do a scientific and anthropological - or rather archaeological, too - analysis of, like, Indian mounds.
You printed an edition of The Atrocity Exhibition by JG Ballard with an introduction by Burroughs, right?
Vale: That’s correct.
Did Burroughs rate Ballard’s work as much as Ballard rates Burroughs’? Do you have any idea what his opinion on Mr. Ballard’s work is?
Vale: That is difficult to ascertain because Burroughs was more, how can I say—he was actually quite generous to people who wanted recommendations or blurbs or whatever you call them for their books. And I don’t think he would have written that piece on Ballard if he hadn’t meant what he said. So that’s all I can go by. And they did meet once, very briefly, in England I think. I think it’s talked about in one of the books, the Quotes book or the Conversations.
Do you have any favourite piece of Burroughs memorabilia that you own?
Vale: Oh, that I own? Gee, I guess I had a target that he shot. I took him out shooting and I asked him if I could keep the target he shot, and he autographed it. And he had a spray can in his studio in Kansas—it was a used spray can, used in making his artwork. He’d sprayed it a bunch of different rainbow colors. I asked him if he would autograph it and he did and I kept it.
Did you rate him as an artist? Did you like him as an artist, a painter, as opposed to a writer?
Vale: (Misunderstanding) Well, he’s come up with the genius quotes to live by, and he’s invented these sardonic characters, Dr. Benway or whoever they are. For all that alone he deserves to go down in history.
Yeah, that’s true, but…
Vale: And he and Ballard are my favourite two writers of the 21st century.
Um what I mean is, did you like Burroughs’ paintings and stuff as opposed to his writing?
Vale: Oh, that’s the question!
It’s the accent, pal, it’s the accent.
Vale: (Chuckling) Yes! Well, you know, the way I always consider a writer is that everything they write and everything they say is all part of one big work and that includes the diaries and the journals and the paintings and the collages and the jokes and the whole nine yards. And sure, I don’t mind his paintings at all, but you’re talking to a man whose gold standard for paintings is Hieronymus Bosch triptychs. And they’re so complex there really isn’t much that can stand up to that. It sort of blows out of the water, say, most of Andy Warhol’s single paintings, for example. I mean, there’s just so much narrative, or just so much you can read into the Bosch triptychs, that there’s very little that can stand up against that, if you’re running a competition.
You know the artist Joe Coleman?
Vale: Of course!
There’s a strange kind of Hieronymus Bosch-like—there’s so much detail in the paintings he does. They’re very beautiful, but they’re quite disturbing.
Vale: Yeah, he’s one of my favourite living painters, there’s no doubt about that.
He’s a character all right.
Vale: He was in the first Pranks book.
That’s right, he was. I’ll tell you what, we’ll have one last question about Burroughs. What do you think Burroughs’ major literary legacy contribution was, or will be? What do you think his major contribution to the literary world will be?
Vale: (Pause) Little aphorisms, y’know—that’s the way that somebody like Schopenhauer and Nietzsche will probably be remembered. I mean I kind of consider Burroughs to be more of a philosopher than a writer, for me, but there are people who consider him a writer too. He’s definitely captured a lot of great memorable, funny lines and dialogues and things like that. For me, of course, it’s the interviews in the books like The Job and The Burroughs Files and—what’s that other one, The Adding Machine, as well as The Complete Interviews which aren’t complete, of course. Every book that says ‘complete’ never is, I’ve found. And just the general persona, being like a, how can I say—he’s extremely libertarian in all of his thinking and very fair-minded, but he also liked to shoot and own guns and knives and he was quite concerned with the problem of self-defense (chuckles and puts on sarcastic tone) as any red-blooded American oughta be.
I read that Interviews and I saw that in Burroughs: The Movie where he as going on about attacking people , if people attacked you, you could cut their throats or shoot them and it was like (dubious voice) “okay.” There’s a man you wouldn’t want to be around when he was drunk with a gun in his hand, y’know?
Vale: But he hardly ever got drunk and when he did he didn’t play around with guns. He was properly trained, he didn’t—there’s actually rules about the handling of firearms. And most people nowadays don’t learn them, but you really, truly, never point a gun at anyone, even if you think it’s unloaded. You just don’t play with guns and you don’t really mix guns with alcohol. I mean there’s, like, basic rules.
Ones that Burroughs could have learned a lot from had he learned them earlier in his life.
JG Ballard Questions
Graham Rae: When and how did you first encounter Burroughs’ writing?
Ballard: I first read Naked Lunch, Soft Machine + Ticket T(hat) E(exploded) in about 1960 or so, in the green Olympia Press editions given to me by Michael Moorcock.
What did you think when you read his work, and what was it about it that stood out?
Ballard: I was absolutely overwhelmed - my faith in the novel, which had been fading for years, was instantly restored - what stood out? Sheer originality, humour, the unique eye, the coherence of his apocalyptic vision.
When and how did you first meet Burroughs?
Ballard: I met WSB in about 1965 - in London, through Bill Butler, an American poet, now sadly dead, who ran a little publishing house in Brighton.
How many times did you meet him over the years, where did you meet him, and were any of the conversations about literature?
Ballard: I met him at various places over the next 30 years - at his St. James Street flat, at a rock concert near Brighton, at various parties - I remember that he cooked a tasty roast chicken at the St James flat, + then demonstrated with the carving knife where best to inflict a fatal stab wound - he kept away from the windows, claiming that the CIA/Time magazine were watching him from a disguised laundry van - in some 20 meetings we never discussed anything literary.
What is your favourite Burroughs book?
Ballard: Naked Lunch.
How did you get Burroughs to write the introduction to The Atrocity Exhibition?
Ballard: Grove Press arranged his superb introduction.
What do you think Burroughs’s major literary legacy will be?
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https://legsville.com/william-burroughs-target-practice/
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en
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WILLIAM BURROUGHS TARGET PRACTICE
|
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2023-12-18T01:59:49+00:00
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(Originally published on PleaseKillMe.com) For more than any other man, dead or alive, William S. Burroughs is the one responsible for introducing deviancy into the mainstream of American culture. As author of Junky, Naked Lunch, Nova Express, The Wild Boys, and Cities of the Red Night, to name a few, this is the man who is grandfather to the hippies and godfather to the punks, the guy who inspired Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, and Neal Cassady to push it to the limit, the homosexual and avowed misogynist who accidentally shot and killed his wife in a drunken game of William Tell, the writer who became a member of the American Academy of Art and Letters, the lifelong junkie who shot up in squalid hotel rooms around the world and in the process managed to snag a Commander de l’Ordre Arts et Lettres from the French government for writing about it.
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en
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Legsville
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https://legsville.com/william-burroughs-target-practice/
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“Do you remember the alien abductions of Betty and Barney Hill?” William S. Burroughs asked me as we sat in the living room of his small suburban ranch house in Lawrence, Kansas.
Burroughs was sitting at the table by the wall, legs crossed, hunched over in his chair. His long, bony fingers played with a box of stick matches as he puffed on a Players Navy Cut nonfilter cigarette and nursed a tall glass of Coca-Cola and vodka. I sat in a chair across from him, not really concentrating on the conversation, but listening, watching, and soaking up the atmosphere of being with the man who started it all.
Burroughs looked up from the box of stick matches, his face pale and gaunt, like a mortician with a hangover, and his eyes asked if we remembered those alien abductions? I quickly nodded back, and he continued.
“The most interesting thing to me was that the aliens found out Barney had false teeth. They said to Betty, ‘Well, how come his teeth come out if yours don’t?’ And she tried to explain to them that people break down with time and age. They had never heard of this…” Burroughs paused, then snorted to himself, his thin lips turning up a slight wicked grin.
Even though I had known Burroughs since 1975, I still found being in his presence unnerving. No, it wasn’t that sneer of his that made you feel like you were sharing a laugh with the Grim Reaper himself. No, it wasn’t his ghostly looks or his piercing intensity. No, it wasn’t any of that stuff, but The Voice!
It’s a deep crackly thing that enunciates every syllable with an evil distinction. And after all this time, I’ve still never heard anything like it. It’s a kind of Midwestern drawl, mixed with equal parts professorial rattle, sarcastic howl, and agonizing moan. It’s the type of voice that, even when it’s making small talk, is so filled with the gravel of hard roads traveled that I always expect everything that comes out of it to be of monumental importance. Like the voice of God. Or the Devil.
“Time,” Burroughs finally revealed, “is a human invention!” Then he snickered again, satisfied by figuring it all out. But as I sat across from the 77-year old Master of Human Depravity, I kept thinking, How bizarre! How totally fucking weird!
Not because of what Burroughs was saying. Talking to him was always out there, around the next corner. But since he always based his arguments on the weirdest sources, even if you weren’t focusing on the point, there was always plenty of fascinating shit to go off on, to drift beyond the parameters of reason.
So it wasn’t his talk of alien abduction that sounded the alarm. It wasn’t what he was saying, but where he was saying it.
Outside you could hear the lawn mower engines wailing from distant lawns. Across the street, in the driveway of one of the ranch houses, elderly women with white frosted hair and extra-large J.C. Penney outfits were unloading dishes of macaroni salad and Jell-O molds from the tailgate of a red and white and blue striped jeep. And just beyond these ranch houses lay the massive fields – “amber waves of grain.” Ah yes, the heartland. The entire place was just throbbing with normalcy.
And I couldn’t help but wonder if the good, churchgoing, red-blooded, normal Americans just beyond the front porch knew they were living next door to the Devil himself.
For more than any other man, dead or alive, William S. Burroughs is the one responsible for introducing deviancy into the mainstream of American culture. As author of Junky, Naked Lunch, Nova Express, The Wild Boys, and Cities of the Red Night, to name a few, this is the man who is grandfather to the hippies and godfather to the punks, the guy who inspired Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, and Neal Cassady to push it to the limit, the homosexual and avowed misogynist who accidentally shot and killed his wife in a drunken game of William Tell, the writer who became a member of the American Academy of Art and Letters, the lifelong junkie who shot up in squalid hotel rooms around the world and in the process managed to snag a Commander de l’Ordre Arts et Lettres from the French government for writing about it.
And you just knew that if the good citizens in the neighborhood had any idea of who was living next door, they would run for the hills. If, that is, the good neighbors ever found a moment to steal away from Wheel of Fortune to pick up one of his books. But since Americans have forgotten how to read, that wasn’t going to happen; Burroughs remains safe from the God-fearing folks. But maybe not his fans. The previous evening two radical gay bikers, members of Homocorp, showed up on psychedelic motorcycles and black leather jackets to have a word with their idol.
“I had just come back from shooting (targets),” Burroughs laughed. “I was out shooting, and I pulled in the driveway and there were these psychedelic motorcycles there. I looked around, and there were these two guys sitting across the road. They were wearing all sorts of handcuffs on their black leather jackets. And I said, ‘Are you waiting for me?’
“They said yes. They wanted an interview. It was just like a page out of The Wild Boys.”
James Grauerholz, a lanky blond-haired man in his late 30’s, came out of the kitchen and nodded as he heard the story. “There is a slight problem with that sort of thing though.”
As Burroughs’s personal adjutant for 18 years, Grauerholz has seen Burroughs grow from obscure legend to movie star since taking on Burroughs’s business affairs in 1974. Today he runs William Burroughs Communications, located in downtown Lawrence, where he keeps track of Burroughs’s paintings (his abstract expressionist works, complete with shotgun blasts, are shown throughout Europe), new releases of Burroughs’s latest spoken-word records (Dead City Radio, produced by Hal Willner and Nelson Kyon, featuring Donald Fagen, and the Material album Seven Souls produced by Bill Laswell for Virgin Records), film offers, and the 20 books that have been published in 14 languages.
“William can’t just jump on the back of psychedelic motorcycles and cruise the streets. These kids always say, ‘Hey come on, let’s go party!’ and William has to say, ‘Hey, I just got home, I’m about to have dinner with my cats.’”
Burroughs and I erupted with laughter. Then he took the opportunity to slip into his bedroom and returned clutching a handgun from his large collection.
“It’s a derringer!” he beamed with all the pride of a kid with his first BB gun. Only the gun was so small it looked like an ornament off a charm bracelet or a key chain.
“It’s a derringer in the sense that it’s got five shots in there. And it shoots the bullets that killed Bobby Kennedy. It’s a deadly weapon. Look at it! Isn’t it cute?”
“Ah yeah, sure Bill…”
“And it’s real conceivable. Five shots. Shoots the bullets that killed Bobby Kennedy. It can go through a two-by-four and keep on going. Costs about a hundred and forty-five…”
“Nice, real nice. So how was it working and being in Drugstore Cowboy?” I asked, changing the subject. Burroughs’s Hollywood debut at 75, as the junkie priest opposite Matt Dillon and Kelly Lynch in the film about a drug-addict couple in the 60’s, was a smash success. As Roger Ebert said, “With his skull shining through his eyes and his dry voice and his laugh like a smoker’s cough, Burroughs creates a perfect moment.” After 76 years, William S. Burroughs was finally a bankable Hollywood commodity.
“Well, the way they had it written, I said, ‘This is completely inaccurate.’ So my good friend Gus Van Sant, the director, said, ‘Well, go ahead and rewrite the part.’ So James changed the whole thing, and I put a polish on it. We really rewrote the part, and Gus accepted our rewrite. But it was much longer than what you see in the film. I had a story in there that they deleted. It was about some junkies in a jail cell that conceal some junk and some needles, and they start cooking up in a tin cup.”
“We’re you surprised with all your good reviews?”
“Well, I wouldn’t say that I stole the show. It was just a part that I felt I could do, that’s all. That’s the first thing, can I do it? Can I do a good job? If I can’t, I don’t want to do it.”
“Yeah, well, as a result I heard they asked you to be on Twin Peaks?”
“But they never called back. I said, find out what they want me to do, but they never called back, so what the hell? But what I really enjoyed was my collaboration with Tom Waits and Robert Wilson. They came to me with the opera The Black Rider, based on an old German folk legend, and I said immediately that this was the Devil’s bargain! The story is about this guy who wants to marry the forester’s daughter, but he has to prove he can shoot first before the forester will let him marry his daughter. And of course this guy can’t hit anything so the Devil tells him, ‘I got these magic bullets that always hit.’ Well, the more you use the magic bullets the less you can get along without them. It’s just like heroin. That comparison worked very well. Step right up, hell under the shell! Tom Waits picked right up on that. Yeah, the first one’s always free!
“Tom wrote the songs; I wrote the libretto, which is the text of the story, which had to be translated into German. And Robert Wilson, the director who did Einstein on the Beach, directed it.”
“Would you like to collaborate with Waits and Wilson again?”
“Yes,” Burroughs stated very definitely. “Yes, I even sent Bob a possible script that I’d like to try. It’s Paradise Lost by Milton. And if you remember Paradise Lost, all the devils are thrown down into hell, which I equated with Hiroshima. I wanted to put up Hiroshima footage and have these devils slowly rise up out of Hiroshima, and then they become aliens, the flying-saucer people. It’s just a sketch. Bob is interested in it, but I don’t know. I’d certainly like to work on the idea.”
His eyes were alive with the thoughts of the damned transcending into their rightful place – UFOs. The psychic paradise.
“Remember Lucifer’s big scene in Paradise Lost? ‘Wake! Arise or be forever fallen!’ And slow-ow-ow-ly the demons pick themselves up and rise out of Hiroshima and become the aliens!” I didn’t know if we were going to get to it, but the purpose of my visit was to talk to Burroughs about David Cronenberg’s screen adaptation of his 20th-centruy nightmare masterpiece, Naked Lunch, the last book ever to be banned in the United States, the book of which Norman Mailer said, testifying before the Supreme Court of Massachusetts in 1965, “There is a sense in Naked Lunch of the destruction of soul, which is more intense than any I have encountered in any other modern novel. It is a vision of how mankind would act if man was totally divorced from eternity…Nowhere, as in Naked Lunch’s collection of monsters, bald-mad geniuses, cripples, mountebanks, criminals, perverts, and putrefying beasts is there such a modern panoply of the vanities of the human will, of the excesses of evil which occur when the idea of personal or intellectual power reigns superior to the compassions of the flesh.”
Yeah, I was here to talk about that modern panoply, and how Cronenberg was going about translating it into Hollywood’s megabucks. But Burroughs wasn’t cooperating, preferring to dance from subject to subject, landing on whatever interested him. But what did I expect?
This was the guy after all who had written a few of his books – Nova Express, The Ticket That Exploded, as well as Naked Lunch – using his infamous “cut-up method,” a process whereby Burroughs would take a pair of scissors to his original manuscripts, newspaper headlines, forged prescriptions, whatever was lying around, chop them up, mix ‘em around, and paste them down in some conscious poetic truth.
It was like that faded lettering on the window of that abandoned storefront church I had passed just over the Kansas-Missouri border that blurred together to read, CHURCH OF THE LIVING GOD: THE PILLAR GROUND OF PURCHASED BLOOD.
You knew what it meant even when it made no sense. And that’s what William S. Burroughs has dedicated his life to – putting himself so far out there over the edge that the only voices out there are the howls of madness. The hideous monsters of the human psyche. A place that few men or women have dared to travel.
William S. Burroughs was born on February 5, 1914, into the upper-middle-class home of Mortimer and Laura Lee Burroughs, where he should have had “forty million reasons not to write.” His paternal grandfather, William S. Burroughs I, for whom he had been named, was the inventor of the first adding machine, a partner in the Burroughs Adding Machine Company. But William, Sr., proved a better inventor than a businessman, and at the time of his death in 1898 left Mortimer only 485 shares of the company compared to his partners 16,380. By 1920, the company had grown to assets worth $430 million, and the Burroughs family trust convinced Mortimer to sell his shares back to the company until nothing was left.
If the invention of the adding machine weren’t enough of a legacy to ensure that the Burroughs name would live forever in the annals of modern corporate America, William, Jr., had an uncle on his mother’s side, a Mr. Ivy Ledbetter Lee, who also made a contribution that revolutionized the way America does business. Only this tool was far more sinister than an adding machine, and one that William, Jr., would spend his entire life, consciously or unconsciously, trying to rectify.
“Ivy Lee started the idea of press releases; he invented modern corporate public relations.” Burroughs sat over his customary afternoon vodka and soda, happy and relaxed and ready to remember the past. We had just returned from a morning of target practice at the Stoneyard, a weathered old gray barn outside Lawrence where weekly Burroughs fulfills his need to drill holes in things with big guns. “Ivy Lee said, ‘They’ll come to us, and we’ll control the information.’ He turned the tables on the press. He was a real evil genius, there’s no doubt about that.”
Hired by John D. Rockefeller to improve the family name after the infamous Ludlow massacre, where Rockefeller sent in the troops to quell his striking Colorado coal miners, Ivy Lee came up with the idea of sending Rockefeller into the mines to talk to his miners, hang out with them looking like he cared. It was Ivy’s idea that as long as you looked like you were caring, you could get away with murder.
It was also Ivy’s idea for John D. Rockefeller, Sr., to hand out dimes to the poor, and the whole concept of the Rockefeller Foundation. But then Ivy Lee fell on the public relations disaster of the century. He was hired by the Nazis just before World War II to make their image “acceptable.”
“Ivy Lee was dying of a brain tumor at the time he was working for the Nazis. The last time I saw him, he said to me, ‘I just saw Hitler and he told me, “I have nothing against the Jews!”’”
Burroughs sipped on his drink, grimacing at the thought of one of his relatives helping to invent the Big Lie.
“Ivy Lee hated me on sight,” Burroughs snickered, “He was part of that whole class of people that I was brought up with in St. Louis. And they all took one look at me and said, no!”
As a teenager in the uptight hypocritical world of 1920’s St. Louis, Burroughs, already aware of his homosexuality, felt like the ultimate outsider. He discovered the book You Can’t Win: The Autobiography of Jack Black about the thieving world of a turn-of-the-century western criminal family and decided the life of a criminal was his calling. Writing in the introduction to the reprint of Jack Black’s autobiography, Burroughs said, “I first read You Can’t Win in 1926, in an edition bound in red cardboard. Stultified and confined by middle-class St. Louis mores, I was fascinated by this glimpse of an underworld of seedy rooming houses, pool parlors, cat houses, and opium dens; of bull pens and cat burglars and hobo jungles. I learned about the Johnson family of good bums and thieves, with a code of conduct that made more sense to me than the arbitrary, hypocritical rules that were being taken for granted as being right by my peers…”
After a stint at a boys school in Los Alamos, New Mexico, which was later appropriated by the Army, which built the first atomic bomb on the same site, Burroughs bummed around the country trying to make his mark in the underworld before becoming a fence for stolen goods in New York City. And it was there he discovered morphine Syrettes; his drug addiction was off and running.
It was in 1943 that Burroughs made friends with two former Columbia University students who were also looking to break out of the confines of America’s “numbing dizziness”: Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg.
“We couldn’t figure out what his secret mystery was,” Ginsberg has said of his and Kerouac’s first meeting with Burroughs. “From Burroughs we got our whole conception of some spiritual crisis in the West and the possibility of decline instead of infinite American Progress – the idea of an apocalyptical historical change.”
As Kerouac, Ginsberg, and Burroughs were poised to change American literature forever, Burroughs took to the task of psychoanalyzing his charges to free them of their inhibitions. Free them to conquer American literature with their genius.
“It was a joke,” Burroughs said, making a face. “I think psychoanalysis is nonsense at this point. At the time, I thought there was something to it. But as time went on, I saw less and less. I think people are only too anxious to talk about their me, their individuality. What comes in from the outside is much more interesting. The whole dichotomy of inner and outer reality is a basic error of western thinking. It’s not inner reality or out reality, it’s one continuum of the whole organism in relationship to its total environment.”
But as “explorers of the night,” Kerouac, Ginsberg, and Burroughs were courting the darkness of the soul as well as the brilliance, and they soon encountered the realities of what that meant when disaster struck within their intimate circle.
Lucien Carr and David Kammerer had been friends of Burroughs from St. Louis and, at Columbia, introduced Kerouac, Ginsberg, and Burroughs to one another. Though Carr and Kammerer were not lovers, Kammerer was obsessed with Carr, forever trying to get the younger boy into his bed. After a night of drinking in the West End Café, a hipster’s hangout across the street from Columbia University, David Kammerer again professed his love to Lucien Carr in Riverside Park, attempting to seduce Carr. An argument ensued and Carr stabbed Kammerer to death, dumping his body in the Hudson River.
Since Carr had come first to Burroughs, then to Kerouac, for advice immediately after the killing, the two were picked up by the police as accomplices to murder after Carr finally turned himself in.
Mortimer bailed Burroughs out of jail, but Kerouac wasn’t so lucky. He had to marry his girlfriend in order to get her family to come up with the bail money.
Once the two were safely out of jail, Kerouac and Burroughs collaborated on an unpublished novel about Kammerer’s murder, writing alternate chapters and titling the book And the Hippos Were Boiled in Their Tanks, a line Burroughs stole from a radio announcer reporting on a fire at a traveling circus.
But besides fueling their creativity, the murder unleashed a Pandora’s box of vices on the trio. Burroughs began rolling drunks to pay for his junk habit, Kerouac discovered Benzedrene and became a speed freak, and Ginsberg made headlines after being a passenger in a stolen car smashup. Allen got away from the scene okay but the police discovered his notebooks in the stolen vehicle, and were more horrified with his odes to homosexual love than his involvement in grand theft.
Though Burroughs was also a homosexual, Allen Ginsberg was the one who thought Burroughs might get along with Kerouac’s Benzedrene buddy, Joan Vollmer, and arranged a meeting. Indeed, Burroughs found a kindred soul in Vollmer, hitting it off so well that they became lovers and moved in together.
Vollmer was devoted to Burroughs, who, though he cared for her, became incapable of showing her any affection, preferring to spend his days pursuing heroin until he was arrested for possession and sent back to St. Louis.
From there Burroughs moved to Texas, bought some land, and tried his hand of farming until he discovered that back in New York Vollmer’s Benzedrene addiction had gotten so serious that she was locked up in the psycho ward at Bellevue after the cops had found her wandering around Times Square in a fit of paranoid delusions.
Burroughs returned to New York and rescued Vollmer, bringing her back to the farm in Texas with him where she became his common-law wife and bore him a son, Billy, Jr. After Burroughs’s marijuana crop proved unsmokable, the family moved to just outside New Orleans. There it was the same as Texas, both of them drifting deeper and deeper into their addictions, hers to speed, his to junk, while struggling to survive. Burroughs was arrested again for heroin possession, and they fled to Mexico to wait out the five-year statute of limitations on the crime of heroin possession.
In Mexico, Burroughs took to spending his days copping junk and his nights buying boy prostitutes, while Vollmer, unable to find her Benzedrene, went through a painful speed withdrawal and turned to alcohol. On the night of September 6, 1951, Burroughs turned to Vollmer at a party and said, “Well, I guess it’s time for our William Tell act!” She played right along with him, though they had never played the William Tell act before, and placed her empty glass on top of her head. Burroughs whipped out a .380-caliber automatic pistol and fired one shot. The gun shot low and the bullet hit her on the side of the head, killing her instantly.
After spending only 13 days in a Mexican jail for Joan’s accidental death, Burroughs pleaded guilty to criminal imprudence and was released on bail until his sentencing the following year. His son, Billy, Jr., was taken by Joan’s parents to live with Mortimer and Laura Lee, who moved to Palm Beach, Florida, and opened a gift shop. Alone and addicted, Burroughs decided to resume his search for the mysterious drug yage (pronounced YA-hay), which he had heard came from the jungles of South America.
“It’s an interesting drug, yage,” Burroughs said from the table as he lit another Players, exhaling a long blast of smoke that drifted close to him, bathing him in a ghostly shroud.
“It’s a blue drug; you take it only at night. Every medicine man has his own recipe. It was quite an experience. The first time I had a bad trip. I took too much.”
Writing to Allen Ginsberg in 1953, Burroughs detailed what happened when he finally located the mythical drug in the jungles of Colombia.
“I sat there waiting for results and almost immediately had the impulse to say, ‘That wasn’t enough, I need more.’ In two minutes a wave of dizziness swept over me, and the hut had began spinning. It was like going under ether, or when you are very drunk and lie down and the bed spins. Blue flashes passed in front of my eyes. The hut took on an archaic far-Pacific look with Easter Island heads carved into the support posts. The assistant was lurking outside with the obvious intent to kill me. I was hit by violent, sudden nausea and rushed for the door…I could hardly walk. No coordination. My feet were like blocks of wood. I vomited violently leaning against a tree and fell down on the ground in helpless misery. I felt numb as if I were covered in layers of cotton. I kept trying to break out of this numb dizziness. I was saying over and over, “All I want is out of here.”
Drawing on his Players, Burroughs states matter-of-factly, “The stuff is quite toxic. If I hadn’t puked my guts out, I would have been dead.”
Burroughs found yage the most powerful mind-bending drug he had ever taken, and after his experiences with it and the accidental shooting of his wife, he felt he had gone beyond the limits; the seeds of Naked Lunch were sown, and it was time to write it down.
Upon returning to New York, Burroughs learned that Ace Books had decided to publish his first effort, a You Can’t Win-styled manuscript of his continuing exploits as a heroin addict; the book was titled Junky and written under the pseudonym William Lee so as not to embarrass his family, who was still supporting him with a monthly stipend of two hundred dollars.
Taking up again with Ginsberg, Burroughs decided, much to the anguish of Ginsberg, that they were going to become lovers. At first Ginsberg accommodated Burroughs, loving him as a mentor and close friend, and not wanting to hurt Burroughs already severely damaged feelings. But Burroughs’s obsession and neediness were too much for Allen, and he finally exploded, rejecting Burroughs, who fled to Tangier and resumed his routine of scoring junk and paying boys for sex.
“Could you have written Naked Lunch on junk?” I asked him as we sat there smoking cigarettes.
“No, I don’t think so. I was coming off junk.”
“Was that the main reason you stopped, to write the book?”
“No. Not really,” Burroughs thought about it hard and long. “No. I had gotten to the point where I had a fairly heavy habit, and I had to stop.”
It was a two-year-long- process of cure and relapse involving sleep cures in Morocco and apomorphine treatments in London before Burroughs finally finished Naked Lunch in Tangier. Not long after, in February 1957, Jack Kerouac visited Burroughs, bringing with him the exciting news that Allen Ginsberg was becoming the rage with disenchanted college students across America through readings of his poem Howl, and Kerouac himself had signed a deal with Viking to publish a novel on one of his crazy cross-country road trips with Neal Cassady, to be titled On the Road.
It was all coming together. Hip had been born through the desperation of this wacky trinity of William Burroughs, Jack Kerouac, and Allen Ginsberg, and the world was waiting to embrace it. But unlike On the Road, published in late 1957, when it soared up the best-seller list making Jack Kerouac a hipster celebrity, Naked Lunch took nine years to find a publisher brave enough to put it out. And if On the Road was a celebration of the new existential hero and his quest for God, Naked Lunch was a descent into hell and a hard fuck in the ass for the Devil himself.
It only took Hollywood 29 years to start production.
“Are you pleased with David Cronenberg’s vision of Naked Lunch?” I asked him; the film had just gone into production in Toronto.
“I like it, yes,” Burroughs said thoughtfully. “I’ve read the script, but I can’t tell much from reading the script what it’s going to look like on the screen. Scripts aren’t meant to be read, after all; they’re meant to be put on the screen. But obviously it’s going to be a Cronenberg film.”
“Are you a fan of Cronenberg’s?”
“Yes, very much so. I didn’t want to write the script. I don’t find myself really confident to write movie scripts. Writers can write scripts that read beautifully but might not be worth putting on the screen because they’re too impractical; writers tend to write the script – rather than write it as a manual of instructions, which is what a script is. And in my case, I just don’t know enough about films to do that.
“The film project of Naked Lunch has a long, long history. Brion Gysin tried for years to get backing for the film. They thought they had backing at one point; then the next day they couldn’t get past the secretary. That’s the way it went. Nothing happens until it happens.”
It was time to go. But I still hadn’t found what I came looking for. Sure, the official version of why we were here was to get the lowdown on the film of Naked Lunch, but that wasn’t why I had come. I had come to find out if living so close to the madness, if being on a first-name basis with all your personal demons, if a life of hanging out over the abyss, had been, well, okay? Or was it just as damaging as trying to do it the normal way?
And since William Burroughs had led the way in every aspect of fucking your life up and getting through it, even triumphing, I thought he might have the answer.
Burroughs got up from the table and fed the cats in the kitchen while I packed up my gear. I went into the kitchen to thank him for being such a gracious host and he asked me if I wanted to see the garden.
I followed him down the back steps, past the orange box, past the garage filled with his canvases, and across the lawn to where the cherry tomatoes were ready for picking.
“Taste that. Isn’t it sweet?” he said picking one from the vine and handing it to me. We stood silent for a long while.
“Norman Mailer said I might be possessed by genius,” he started, catching me off guard. “Well, that’s the point. You don’t possess it. You aren’t a genius, but you’re lucky when you’re possessed by it. The more you’re thinking about your individuality, or your me, the less you’re going to be contacting anything of the slightest bit of interest.
“You become the tool. Exactly. Henry Miller said, “Who writes the great books? Not we who have our names on the covers.’ The writer is simply someone who has an antenna of which he tunes into certain currents. Of times, when he is lucky. A medium, as it were.
“You see, when I paint my self-will is not involved at all in the process. But in writing, you can’t help but see what’s in front of you. So you have to know what you’re doing, but your sense and characters come from God knows where!”
“How do you get out of your own way?” I asked as we stood looking over the garden, staring at the sunset. Burroughs was leaning on his cane, enjoying the serenity of it all.
“Well,” he started slowly, “It’s a matter of emptying yourself.”
I stood respectively in silence, waiting for Burroughs to collect his thoughts, knowing he usually traveled to some pretty far places to find them.
“Norman Mailer said I might be possessed by genius. Well, that’s the point. You don’t possess it. You aren’t a genius, but you’re lucky when you’re possessed by it. The more you’re thinking about your individuality, or your me, the less you’re going to be contacting anything of the slightest bit of interest.”
“You know,” he started again, “Some of my dreams are so real, they are realer than my so-called waking life. Much realer. They have no connection with my waking life at all. The idea of waking up here never occurs to me. I have one recurring dream, which I call the Land of the Dead dream, where I’m in the Land of the Dead and everyone I see is dead. The only thing that bothers me about the Land of the Dead dream is that I can never get any breakfast. I try to get breakfast and the restaurant is closed. That’s typical of the Land of the Dead, no breakfast. And then just the other night I had a dream, a complicated dream where I was in a strange city that I had never seen before. And I found that I could levitate. I’ve had flying dreams and jumping off dreams, but in this one I was lighter than air. I could levitate and control speed and direction. But here’s the point, in this dream I was afraid I would wake up and find out this was just a dream and I couldn’t levitate. But not that I would wake up here, but in that city I’d never seen before, I was so very far away, from the very entire idea of Kansas…”
And as the sun set, I realized that the madness does take its toll, that facing the void and living to tell the tales of that horror leaves you forever altered. Yeah, going that far over the edge leaves you in a lonely, sad place where you are doomed to spend your time of dreaming of the next place, the next challenge, forever wanting more.
But very rarely ever being here now.
Then the sun was gone, and it was time to say goodbye.
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New Wave (science fiction)
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Wave_(science_fiction)
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Movement in science fiction
The New Wave was a science fiction style of the 1960s and 1970s, characterized by a great degree of experimentation with the form and content of stories, greater imitation of the styles of non-science fiction literature, and an emphasis on the psychological and social sciences as opposed to the physical sciences. New Wave authors often considered themselves as part of the modernist tradition of fiction, and the New Wave was conceived as a deliberate change from the traditions of the science fiction characteristic of pulp magazines, which many of the writers involved considered irrelevant or unambitious.
The most prominent source of New Wave science fiction was the British magazine New Worlds, edited by Michael Moorcock, who became editor during 1964. In the United States, Harlan Ellison's 1967 anthology Dangerous Visions is often considered as the best early representation of the genre. Ursula K. Le Guin, J. G. Ballard, Samuel R. Delany, Roger Zelazny, Joanna Russ, James Tiptree Jr. (a pseudonym of Alice Bradley Sheldon), Thomas M. Disch and Brian Aldiss were also major writers associated with the style.
The New Wave was influenced by postmodernism, Surrealism, the politics of the 1960s, such as the controversy concerning the Vietnam War, and by social trends such as the drug subculture, sexual liberation, and environmentalism. Although the New Wave was critiqued for the self-absorption of some of its writers, it was influential in the development of subsequent genres, primarily cyberpunk and slipstream. [citation needed]
Origins and use of the term
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Origins
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The phrase "New Wave" was used generally for new artistic fashions during the 1960s, imitating the term nouvelle vague used for certain French cinematic styles.[1] P. Schuyler Miller, the regular book reviewer of Analog Science Fiction and Fact, first used it in the November 1961 issue to describe a new generation of British authors: "It's a moot question whether Carnell discovered the ‘big names’ of British science fiction—Wyndham, Clarke, Russell, Christopher—or whether they discovered him. Whatever the answer, there is no question at all about the ‘new wave’: Tubb, Aldiss, and to get to my point, Kenneth Bulmer and John Brunner".[2][1][3]
Subsequent usage
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The term 'New Wave' has been incorporated into the concept of New Wave Fabulism, a form of magic realism "which often blend a realist or postmodern aesthetic with nonrealistic interruptions, in which alternative technologies, ontologies, social structures, or biological forms make their way in to otherwise realistic plots".[4]:76 New Wave Fabulism itself has been related to the slipstream literary genre, an interface between mainstream or postmodern fiction and science fiction.[5]
The concept of a 'new wave' has been applied to science fiction in other countries, including for some Arabic science fiction, with Ahmed Khaled Tawfik's best-selling novel Utopia being considered a prominent example,[6] and Chinese science fiction, where it has been applied to some of the work of Wang Jinkang and Liu Cixin, including Liu's Remembrance of Earth's Past trilogy (2006-2010),[7] works that emphasize China's increase of power, the development myth, and posthumanity.[8]
Description
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The early proponents of New Wave considered it as a major change from with the genre's past, and it was so experienced by many readers during the late 1960s and early 1970s.[9] New Wave writers often considered themselves as part of the modernist and then postmodernist traditions and sometimes mocked the traditions of older science fiction, which many of them regarded as stodgy, adolescent and badly written.[10][11] Many also rejected the content of the Golden Age of Science Fiction, emphasizing not on outer space but human psychology, that is, subjectivity, dreams, and the unconscious.[11] Nonetheless, during the New Wave period, traditional types of science fiction continued to appear, and in Rob Latham's opinion, the broader genre had absorbed the New Wave's agenda and mostly neutralized it by the conclusion of the 1970s.[9]
Format
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The New Wave coincided with a major change in the production and distribution of science fiction, as the pulp magazine era was replaced by the book market;[9] it was in a sense also a reaction against typical pulp magazine styles.[12]
Topics
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The New Wave interacted with a number of themes during the 1960s and 1970s, including sexuality;[13] drug culture, especially the work of William S. Burroughs and the use of psychedelic drugs;[11] and the popularity of environmentalism.[14] J. G. Ballard's themes included alienation, social isolation, class discrimination, and the end of civilization, in settings ranging from a single apartment block (High Rise) to entire worlds.[15][16] Rob Latham noted that several of J. G. Ballard's works of the 1960s (e.g., the quartet begun by The Wind from Nowhere [1960]), engaged with the concept of eco-catastrophe, as did Disch's The Genocides and Ursula K. Le Guin's short novel The Word for World Is Forest. The latter, with its description of the use of napalm on indigenous people, was also influenced by Le Guin's perceptions of the Vietnam War, and both emphasized anti-technocratic fatalism instead of imperial hegemony via technology, with the New Wave later interacting with feminism, ecological activism and postcolonial rhetoric.[14][clarification needed] A major concern of the New Wave was a fascination with entropy, i.e., that the world (and the universe) must tend to disorder, eventually resulting in "heat death".[11] The New Wave also engaged with utopia, a common theme of science fiction, offering more nuanced interpretations.[11]:74-80
Style
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Transformation of style was part of the basis of the New Wave fashion.[17]:286 Combined with controversial topics, it introduced innovations of form, style, and aesthetics, involving more literary ambitions and experimental use of language, with significantly less emphasis on physical science or technological themes in its content.[18] For example, in the story "A Rose for Ecclesiastes" (1963), Roger Zelazny introduces numerous literary allusions, complex onomastic patterns, multiple meanings, and innovative themes, and other Zelazny works, such as "The Doors of His Face, the Lamps of His Mouth" (1965) and He Who Shapes (1966) involve literary self-reflexivity, playful collocations, and neologisms. In stories like "Repent, Harlequin!" Said the Ticktockman, Harlan Ellison is considered as using gonzo-style syntax. Many New Wave authors used obscenity and vulgarity intensely or frequently.[19] Concerning visual aspects, some scenes of J. G. Ballard's novels reference the surrealist paintings of Max Ernst and Salvador Dalí.[11]
Differences between American and British New Waves
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The British and American New Wave trends overlapped but were somewhat different. Judith Merril noted that New Wave SF was being called "the New Thing". In a 1967 article for The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction she contrasted the SF New Wave of England and the United States, writing:
They call it the New Thing. The people who call it that mostly don't like it, and the only general agreements they seem to have are that Ballard is its Demon and I am its prophetess—and that it is what is wrong with Tom Disch, and with British s-f in general... The American counterpart is less cohesive as a "school" or "movement": it has had no single publication in which to concentrate its development, and was, in fact, till recently, all but excluded from the regular s-f magazines. But for the same reasons, it is more diffuse and perhaps more widespread.[20]:105
The science fiction academic Edward James also discussed differences between the British and American SF New Wave. He believed that the former was, due to J. G. Ballard and Michael Moorcock, associated mainly with a specific magazine with a set programme that had little subsequent influence. James noted additionally that even the London-based American writers of the time, such as Samuel R. Delany, Thomas M. Disch, and John Sladek, had their own agendas. James asserted the American New Wave did not reach the status of a "movement" but was rather a concordance of talent that introduced new ideas and better standards to the authoring of science fiction, including through the first three seasons of Star Trek. In his opinion, "...the American New Wave ushered in a great expansion of the field and of its readership... it is clear that the rise in literary and imaginative standards associated with the late 1960s contributed a great deal to some of the most original writers of the 1970s, including John Crowley, Joe Haldeman, Ursula K. Le Guin, James Tiptree, Jr., and John Varley."[21]: 176
History
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Influences and predecessors
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Though the New Wave began during the 1960s, some of its tenets can be found in H. L. Gold's editorship of Galaxy, which began publication in 1950. James Gunn described Gold's emphasis as being "not on the adventurer, the inventor, the engineer, or the scientist, but on the average citizen,"[22] and according to SF historian David Kyle, Gold's work would result in the New Wave.[23]:119-120
The New Wave was partly a rejection of the Golden Age of Science Fiction. Algis Budrys in 1965 wrote of the "recurrent strain in 'Golden Age' science fiction of the 1940s—- the implication that sheer technological accomplishment would solve all the problems, hooray, and that all the problems were what they seemed to be on the surface".[24] The New Wave was not defined as a development from the science fiction which came before it, but initially reacted against it. New Wave writers did not operate as an organized group, but some of them felt the tropes of the pulp magazine and Golden Age periods had become over-used, and should be abandoned: J. G. Ballard stated in 1962 that "science fiction should turn its back on space, on interstellar travel, extra-terrestrial life forms, (and) galactic wars",[25] and Brian Aldiss said in Trillion Year Spree: The History of Science Fiction that "the props of SF are few: rocket ships, telepathy, robots, time travel...like coins, they become debased by over-circulation."[26] Harry Harrison summarised the period by saying "old barriers were coming down, pulp taboos were being forgotten, new themes and new manners of writing were being explored".[27]
New Wave writers began to use non-science fiction literary themes, such as the example of beat writer William S. Burroughs—New Wave authors Philip José Farmer and Barrington J. Bayley wrote pastiches of his work (The Jungle Rot Kid on the Nod and The Four Colour Problem, respectively), while J. G. Ballard published an admiring essay in an issue of New Worlds.[28] Burroughs' use of experimentation such as the cut-up technique and his use of science fiction tropes in new manners proved the extent to which prose fiction could seem revolutionary, and some New Wave writers sought to emulate this style.
Ursula K. Le Guin, one of the newer writers to be published during the 1960s, describes the transition to the New Wave era thus:
Without in the least dismissing or belittling earlier writers and work, I think it is fair to say that science fiction changed around 1960, and that the change tended toward an increase in the number of writers and readers, the breadth of subject, the depth of treatment, the sophistication of language and technique, and the political and literary consciousness of the writing. The sixties in science fiction were an exciting period for both established and new writers and readers. All the doors seemed to be opening.[29]: 18
Other writers and works seen as preluding or transitioning to the New Wave include Ray Bradbury's The Martian Chronicles, Walter M. Miller's 1959 A Canticle for Leibowitz, Cyril M. Kornbluth and Frederik Pohl's anti-hyper-consumerist The Space Merchants (1952), Kurt Vonnegut's mocking Player Piano (1952) and The Sirens of Titan (1959), Theodore Sturgeon's humanist More Than Human (1953) and the hermaphrodite society of Venus Plus X (1960), and Philip José Farmer's human-extraterrestrial sexual encounters in The Lovers (1952) and Strange Relations (1960).[11]
Beginnings
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There is not any consensus about a precise beginning for the New Wave—British author Adam Roberts refers to Alfred Bester as having single-handedly invented the genre,[16] and in the introduction to a collection of Leigh Brackett's short fiction, Michael Moorcock referred to her as one of the genre's "true godmothers".[30] Algis Budrys said that in New Wave writers "there are echoes... of Philip K. Dick, Walter Miller, Jr. and, by all odds, Fritz Leiber".[31] However, it is accepted by many critics that the New Wave began in England with the magazine New Worlds and Michael Moorcock. who was appointed editor in 1964 (first issue number 142, May and June[12][32]: 251 );[note 1] Moorcock was editor until 1973.[11] While the American magazines Amazing Stories and The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction had from the start printed unusually literary stories, Moorcock made that into a more definite policy, and he sought to use the magazine to "define a new avant-garde role" for science fiction[33] by the use of "new literary techniques and modes of expression".[34]:251-252 No other science fiction magazine was made to differ as consistently from traditional science fiction as much as New Worlds. By the time it ceased regular publication it had rejected identification with the genre of science fiction itself, styling itself as an experimental literary journal. In the United States, the best known representation of the genre is probably the 1967 anthology Dangerous Visions, edited by Harlan Ellison.[35][36][11]
During Moorcock's editorship of New Worlds, "galactic wars went out; drugs came in; there were fewer encounters with aliens, more in the bedroom. Experimentation in prose styles became one of the orders of the day, and the baleful influence of William Burroughs often threatened to gain the upper hand."[37]: 27 Judith Merril observed, "...this magazine [''New Worlds''] was the publishing thermometer of the trend that was dubbed "the New Wave". In the United States the trend created an intense, incredible controversy. In Britain people either found it of interest or they didn't, but in the States it was heresy on the one hand and wonderful revolution on the other."[38]: 162–163
Brooks Landon, professor of English at the University of Iowa, says of Dangerous Visions that it
was innovative and influential before it had any readers simply because it was the first big original anthology of SF, offering prices to its writers that were competitive with the magazines. The readers soon followed, however, attracted by 33 stories by SF writers both well-established and relatively unheard of. These writers responded to editor Harlan Ellison's call for stories that could not be published elsewhere or had never been written in the face of almost certain censorship by SF editors... [T]o SF readers, especially in the United States, Dangerous Visions certainly felt like a revolution... Dangerous Visions marks an emblematic turning point for American SF.[39]: 157
As an anthologist and speaker Merril with other authors advocated a reestablishment of science fiction within the literary mainstream and better literary standards. Her "incredible controversy" is characterized by David Hartwell in the opening sentence of a book chapter entitled "New Wave: The Great War of the 1960s": "Conflict and argument are an enduring presence in the SF world, but literary politics has yielded to open warfare on the largest scale only once."[40]: 141 The changes were more than the experimental and explicitly provocative as inspired by Burroughs; in coherence with the literary nouvelle vague, although not in close association to it, and addressing a less restricted pool of readers, the New Wave was reversing the standard hero's attitude toward action and science. It illustrated egotism—often by depriving the plot of motivation toward a rational explanation.[41]:87
In 1962 Ballard wrote:
I've often wondered why s-f shows so little of the experimental enthusiasm which has characterized painting, music and the cinema during the last four or five decades, particularly as these have become wholeheartedly speculative, more and more concerned with the creation of new states of mind, constructing fresh symbols and languages where the old cease to be valid... The biggest developments of the immediate future will take place, not on the Moon or Mars, but on Earth, and it is inner space, not outer, that need to be explored. The only truly alien planet is Earth. In the past the scientific bias of s-f has been towards the physical sciences—rocketry, electronics, cybernetics—and the emphasis should switch to the biological sciences. Accuracy, that last refuge of the unimaginative, doesn't matter a hoot... It is that inner space-suit which is still needed, and it is up to science fiction to build it![42]: 197
In 1963 Moorcock wrote,
"Let's have a quick look at what a lot of science fiction lacks. Briefly, these are some of the qualities I miss on the whole—passion, subtlety, irony, original characterization, original and good style, a sense of involvement in human affairs, colour, density, depth, and, on the whole, real feeling from the writer..."[10]
Roger Luckhurst pointed out that J. G. Ballard's 1962 essay, Which Way to Inner Space?[42] "showed the influence of media theorist Marshall McLuhan and the 'anti-psychiatry' of R. D. Laing."[43]: 148 Luckhurst traces the influence of both these thinkers in Ballard's fiction, in particular The Atrocity Exhibition (1970).[43]: 152
After Ellison's Dangerous Visions, Judith Merril contributed to this fiction in the United States by editing the anthology England Swings SF: Stories of Speculative Fiction (Doubleday 1968).
The New Wave also had political associations:
Most of the 'classic' writers had begun writing before the Second World War, and were reaching middle age by the early 1960s; the writers of the so-called New Wave were mostly born during or after the war, and were not only reacting against the sf writers of the past, but playing their part in the general youth revolution of the 1960s which had such profound effects upon Western culture. It is no accident that the New Wave began in Britain at the time of the Beatles, and took off in the United States at the time of the hippies—both, therefore at a time of cultural innovation and generational shake-up...[21]: 167
Eric S. Raymond observed:
The New Wave's inventors (notably Michael Moorcock, J. G. Ballard and Brian Aldiss) were British socialists and Marxists who rejected individualism, linear exposition, happy endings, scientific rigor and the U.S.'s cultural hegemony over the SF field in one fell swoop. The New Wave's later American exponents were strongly associated with the New Left and opposition to the Vietnam War, leading to some rancorous public disputes in which politics was tangled together with definitional questions about the nature of SF and the direction of the field.[44]
For example, Judith Merril, "one of the most visible—and voluble—apostles of the New Wave in 1960s sf"[45]:251 remembers her return from England to the United States: "So I went home ardently looking for a revolution. I kept searching until the Chicago Democratic Convention in 1968. I went to Chicago partly to seek out a revolution, if there was one happening, and partly because my seventeen-year-old daughter... wanted to go."[38]: 167 Merril said later, "At the end of the Convention week, the taste of America was sour in all our mouths";[38]: 169 she soon became a political refugee living in Canada.[40]: 142
Roger Luckhurst disagreed with critics who perceived the New Wave mainly in terms of difference (he gives the example of Thomas Clareson), suggesting that such a model "doesn't quite seem to map onto the American scene, even though the wider conflicts of the 1960s liberalization in universities, the civil rights movement and the cultural contradictions inherent in consumer society were starker and certainly more violent than in Britain."[43]: 160 [46] In particular, he noted:
The young turks within SF also had an ossified 'ancient regime' to topple: John Campbell's intolerant right-wing editorials for Astounding Science Fiction (which he renamed Analog in 1960) teetered on the self parody. In 1970, when the campus revolt against American involvement in Vietnam reached its height and resulted in the National Guard shooting four students dead in Kent State University, Campbell editorialized that the 'punishment was due', and rioters should expect to be met with lethal force. Vietnam famously divided the SF community to the extent that, in 1968, 'Galaxy' magazine carried two adverts, one signed by writers in favour and one by those against the war.[43]: 160 [46] Caution is needed when assessing any literary movement, particularly regarding transitions. Science fiction writer Bruce Sterling, reacting to his association with another SF movement in the 1980s, remarked, "When did the New Wave SF end? Who was the last New Wave SF writer? You can't be a New Wave SF writer today. You can recite the numbers of them: Ballard, Ellison, Spinrad, Delaney, blah, blah, blah. What about a transitional figure like Zelazny? A literary movement isn't an army. You don't wear a uniform and swear allegiance. It's just a group of people trying to develop a sensibility."[47]
Similarly, Rob Latham observed:
...indeed, one of the central ways the New Wave was experienced, in the US and Britain, was as a "liberated" outburst of erotic expression, often counterpoised, by advocates of the "New Thing" (as Merril called it), with the priggish Puritanism of the Golden Age. Yet this stark contrast, while not unreasonable, tends ultimately, as do most of the historical distinctions drawn between the New Wave and its predecessors, to overemphasize rupture at the expense of continuity, effectively "disappearing" some of the pioneering trends in 1950s sf that paved the way for the New Wave's innovations.[45]: 252
However, Darren Harris-Fain of Shawnee State University emphasized New Wave in terms of difference:
The split between the New Wave and everyone else in American SF during the late 1960s was nearly as dramatic as the division at the same time between young protesters and what they called "the establishment," and in fact, the political views of the younger writers, often prominent in their work, reflect many contemporary concerns. New Wave accused what became de facto the old wave of being old-fashioned, patriarchal, imperialistic, and obsessed with technology; many of the more established writers thought the New Wave shallow, said that its literary innovations were not innovations at all (which in fact, outside of SF, they were not), and accused it of betraying SF's grand view of humanity's role in the universe. Both assertions were largely exaggerations, of course, and in the next decade both trends would merge into a synthesis of styles and concerns. However, in 1970 the issue was far from settled and would remain a source of contention for the next few years.[48]: 13–14
Decline
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In the August 1970 issue of the SFWA Forum, a publication for Science Fiction Writers of America members, Harlan Ellison stated that the New Wave furore, which had flourished during the late 1960s, appeared to have been "blissfully laid to rest". He also claimed that there was no real conflict between writers:
It was all a manufactured controversy, staged by fans to hype their own participation in the genre. Their total misunderstanding of what was happening (not unusual for fans, as history... shows us) managed to stir up a great deal of pointless animosity and if it had any real effect I suspect it was in the unfortunate area of causing certain writers to feel they were unable to keep up and consequently they slowed their writing output.[49]
Latham however remarks that Ellison's analysis "obscures Ellison's own prominent role—and that of other professional authors and editors such as Judith Merril, Michael Moorcock, Lester Del Rey, Frederik Pohl, and Donald A. Wollheim—in fomenting the conflict..."[50]: 296
For Roger Luckhurst, the closing of New Worlds magazine in 1970 (one of many years it closed) "marked the containment of New Wave experiment with the rest of the counter-culture. The various limping manifestations of New World across the 1970s... demonstrated the posthumous nature of its avant-gardism."[43]: 168
By the early 1970s, a number of writers and readers were commenting about the differences between the winners of the Nebula Awards, which had been created in 1965 by the SFWA and were awarded by professional writers, and winners of the Hugo Awards, awarded by fans at the annual World Science Fiction Convention, with some arguing that this indicated that many authors were alienated from the sentiments of their readers: "While some writers and fans continued to argue about the New Wave until the end of the 1970s—in The World of Science Fiction, 1926–1976: The History of a Subculture, for instance, Lester Del Ray devotes several pages to castigating the movement—for the most part the controversy died down as the decade wore on."[48]: 20
Impact
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In a 1979 essay, Professor Patrick Parrinder, commenting on the nature of science fiction, noted that "any meaningful act of defamiliarization can only be relative, since it is not possible for man to imagine what is utterly alien to him; the utterly alien would also be meaningless."[51]: 48 He also states, "Within SF, however, it is not necessary to break with the wider conventions of prose narrative in order to produce work that is validly experimental. The 'New Wave' writing of the 1960s, with its fragmented and surrealistic forms, has not made a lasting impact, because it cast its net too wide. To reform SF one must challenge the conventions of the genre on their own terms."[51]: 55–56
Others ascribe a more important, though still limited, effect. Veteran science fiction writer Jack Williamson (1908–2006) when asked in 1991: "Did the [New] Wave's emphasis on experimentalism and its conscious efforts to make SF more 'literary' have any kind of permanent effects on the field?" replied:
After it subsided—it's old hat now—it probably left us with a sharpened awareness of language and a keener interest in literary experiment. It did wash up occasional bits of beauty and power. For example, it helped launch the careers of such writers as [Samuel R.] Chip Delany, Brian Aldiss, and Harlan Ellison, all of whom seem to have gone on their own highly individualistic directions. But the key point here is that New Wave SF failed to move people. I'm not sure if this failure was due to its pessimistic themes or to people feeling the stuff was too pretentious. But it never really grabbed hold of people's imaginations.[52]
Hartwell observed that "there is something efficacious in sf's marginality and always tenuous self-identity—its ambiguous generic distinction from other literary categories—and, perhaps more importantly, in its distinction from what has variously been called realist, mainstream, or mundane fiction."[53]: 289 Hartwell maintained that after the New Wave, science fiction had still managed to retain this "marginality and tenuous self-identity":
The British and American New Wave in common would have denied the genre status of SF entirely and ended the continual development of new specialized words and phrases common to the body of SF, without which SF would be indistinguishable from mundane fiction in its entirety (rather than only out on the borders of experimental SF, which is properly indistinguishable from any other experimental literature). The denial of special or genre status is ultimately the cause of the failure of the New Wave to achieve popularity, which, if it had become truly dominant, would have destroyed SF as a separate field.[54]: 153
Scientific and technological themes were more important than literary trends to Campbell, and some major Astounding contributors Isaac Asimov, Robert A. Heinlein, and L. Sprague de Camp had scientific or engineering educations.[55] Asimov said in 1967 "I hope that when the New Wave has deposited its froth and receded, the vast and solid shore of science fiction will appear once more".[56][57]: 388 Yet, Asimov himself was to illustrate just how that "SF shore" did indeed re-emerge—- but changed. A biographer noted that during the 1960s:
...stories and novels that Asimov must not have liked and must have felt were not part of the science fiction he had helped to shape were winning acclaim and awards. He also must have felt that science fiction no longer needed him. His science fiction writing... became even more desultory and casual.
Asimov's return to serious writing in 1972 with The Gods Themselves (when much of the debate about the New Wave had dissipated) was an act of courage...[58]: 105
Darren Harris-Fain observed on this resumption of writing SF by Asimov that
...the novel [The Gods Themselves] is noteworthy for how it both shows that Asimov was indeed the same writer in the 1970s that he had been in the 1950s and that he nonetheless had been affected by the New Wave even if he was never part of it. His depiction of an alien ménage a trois, complete with homoerotic scenes between the two males, marks an interesting departure from his earlier fiction, in which sex of any sort is conspicuously absent. Also there is some minor experimentation with structure.[48]: 43
Other themes dealt with in the novel are concerns for the environment and "human stupidity and the delusional belief in human superiority", both frequent topics in New Wave SF.[48]: 44
Still other commentators ascribe a much greater effect to the New Wave. Commenting in 2002 on the publication of the 35th Anniversary edition of Ellison's Dangerous Visions anthology, the critic Greg L. Johnson remarked that
...if the New Wave did not entirely revolutionize the way SF was written, (the exploration of an invented world through the use of an adventure plot remains the prototypical SF story outline), they did succeed in pushing the boundaries of what could be considered SF, and their use of stylistic innovations from outside SF helped raise standards. It became less easy for writers to get away with stock characters spouting wooden dialogue laced with technical jargon. Such stories still exist, and are still published, but are no longer typical of the field.[35]
Asimov agreed that "on the whole, the New Wave was a good thing".[59]: 137 He described several "interesting side effects" of the New Wave. Non-American SF became more prominent and the genre became an international phenomenon. Other changes noted were that "the New Wave encouraged more and more women to begin reading and writing science fiction... The broadening of science fiction meant that it was approaching the 'mainstream'... in style and content. It also meant that increasing numbers of mainstream novelists were recognizing the importance of changing technology and the popularity of science fiction, and were incorporating science fiction motifs into their own novels."[59]: 138–139
Critic Rob Latham identifies three trends that associated New Wave with the emergence of cyberpunk during the 1980s. He said that changes of technology as well as an economic recession constricted the market for science fiction, generating a "widespread" malaise among fans, while established writers were forced to reduce their output (or, like Isaac Asimov, shifted their emphasis to other subjects); finally, editors encouraged new methods that earlier ones tended to discourage.[60]
Criticisms
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Moorcock, Ballard, and others engendered some animosity to their writings. When reviewing 2001: A Space Odyssey, Lester del Rey described it as "the first of the New Wave-Thing movies, with the usual empty symbolism".[61] When reviewing World's Best Science Fiction: 1966, Algis Budrys mocked Ellison's " 'Repent, Harlequin!' Said the Ticktockman" and two other stories as "rudimentary social consciousness... deep stuff" and insufficient for "an outstanding science-fiction story".[62] Hartwell noted Budrys's "ringing scorn and righteous indignation" that year in "one of the classic diatribes against Ballard and the new mode of SF then emergent":[40]: 146
A story by J. G. Ballard, as you know, calls for people who don't think. One begins with characters who regard the physical universe as a mysterious and arbitrary place, and who would not dream of trying to understand its actual laws. Furthermore, in order to be the protagonist of a J. G. Ballard novel, or anything more than a very minor character therein, you must have cut yourself off from the entire body of scientific education. In this way, when the world disaster—be it wind or water—comes upon you, you are under absolutely no obligation to do anything about it but sit and worship it. Even more further, some force has acted to remove from the face of the world all people who might impose good sense or rational behavior on you...[63]
Budrys in Galaxy, when reviewing a collection of recent stories from the magazine, said in 1965 that "There is this sense in this book... that modern science fiction reflects a dissatisfaction with things as they are, sometimes to the verge of indignation, but also retains optimism about the eventual outcome".[24] Despite his criticism of Ballard and Aldiss ("the least talented" of the four), Budrys called them, Roger Zelazny, and Samuel R. Delany "an earthshaking new kind" of writers.[31] Asimov said in 1967 of the New Wave, "I want science fiction. I think science fiction isn't really science fiction if it lacks science. And I think the better and truer the science, the better and truer the science fiction",[56] but Budrys that year warned that the four would soon leave those "still reading everything from the viewpoint of the 1944 Astounding... nothing but a complete collection of yellowed, crumble-edged bewilderment".[31]
While acknowledging the New Wave's "energy, high talent and dedication", and stating that it "may in fact be the shape of tomorrow's science fiction generally — hell, it may be the shape of today's science fiction", as examples of the fashion Budrys much preferred Zelazny's This Immortal to Thomas Disch's The Genocides. Predicting that Zelazny's career would be more important and lasting than Disch's, he described the latter's book as "unflaggingly derivative of" the New Wave and filled with "dumb, resigned victims" who "run, hide, slither, grope and die", like Ballard's The Drowned World but unlike The Moon is a Harsh Mistress ("about people who do something about their troubles").[63] Writing in The Dreams Our Stuff Is Made Of, Disch observed that "Literary movements tend to be compounded, in various proportions, of the genius of two or three genuinely original talents, some few other capable or established writers who have been co-opted or gone along for the ride, the apprentice work of epigones and wannabes, and a great deal of hype. My sense of the New Wave, with twenty-five years of hindsight, is that its irreducible nucleus was the dyad of J. G. Ballard and Michael Moorcock..."[64]: 105
Authors and works
[edit]
The New Wave was not a formal organization with a fixed membership. Thomas M. Disch, for instance, rejected his association with some other New Wave authors.[65]:425 Nonetheless, it is possible to associate specific authors and works, especially anthologies, with the fashion. Michael Moorcock, J. G. Ballard, and Brian Aldiss are considered principal writers of the New Wave.[11] Judith Merril's annual anthologies (1957–1968[66]) "were the first heralds of the coming of the [New Wave] cult,"[20]:105 and Damon Knight's Orbit series and Harlan Ellison's Dangerous Visions featured American writers inspired by British writers as well as British authors.[39] Among the stories Ellison printed in Dangerous Visions were Philip José Farmer's Riders of the Purple Wage, Norman Spinrad's "Carcinoma Angels", Samuel R. Delany's "Aye, and Gomorrah" and stories by Brian Aldiss, J. G. Ballard, John Brunner, David R. Bunch, Philip K. Dick, Sonya Dorman, Carol Emshwiller, John Sladek, Theodore Sturgeon, and Roger Zelazny.[39]
Alfred Bester was championed by New Wave writers and is seen as a major influence.[16][67] Thomas M. Disch's work is associated with the New Wave, and The Genocides has been seen as emblematic of the genre, as has the 1971 Disch anthology of eco-catastrophe stories The Ruins of Earth.[14] Critic John Clute wrote of M. John Harrison's early writing that it "...reveals its New-Wave provenance in narrative discontinuities and subheads after the fashion of J. G. Ballard".[68]
Brian Aldiss's Barefoot in the Head (1969) and Norman Spinrad's No Direction Home (1971) are seen as illustrative of the effect of the drug culture, especially psychedelics, on New Wave.[11] On the topic of entropy, Ballard provided "an explicitly cosmological vision of entropic decline of the universe" in "The Voices of Time", which provided a typology of ideas that subsequent New Wave writers developed in different contexts, with one of the best instances being Pamela Zoline's "The Heat Death of the Universe".[42]: 158 Like other writers for New Worlds, Zoline used "science-fictional and scientific language and imagery to describe perfectly 'ordinary' scenes of life", and by doing so produced "altered perceptions of reality in the reader".[21] New Wave works engaging with utopia, gender, and sexuality include Ursula K. Le Guin's The Left Hand of Darkness (1969), Joanna Russ's The Female Man (1975), and Marge Piercy's Woman on the Edge of Time (1976).[11]:82-85 In Robert Silverberg's story The Man in the Maze, in a reversal typical of the New Wave, Silverberg portrays a disabled man using an alien labyrinthine city to reject abled society.[69] Samuel R. Delany's Babel-17 (1966) provides an example of a New Wave work engaging with Sapir-Whorfian linguistic relativity, as does Ian Watson's The Embedding (1973).[11]:86-87
Two examples of New Wave writers using utopia as a theme are Ursula K. Le Guin's The Dispossessed: An Ambiguous Utopia (1974) and Samuel R. Delany's Trouble on Triton: An Ambiguous Heterotopia (1976),[11]:74-80 while John Brunner is a primary exponent of dystopian New Wave science fiction.[70]
Examples of modernism in New Wave include Philip José Farmer's Joycean Riders of the Purple Wage (1967), John Brunner's Stand on Zanzibar (1968), which is written in the style of John Don Passos's U.S.A. trilogy (1930–1936), and Thomas Disch's Camp Concentration, which includes a stream of literary references, including to Thomas Mann.[11]:61-62 The influence of postmodernism in New Wave can be seen in Brian Aldiss's Report on Probability A, Philip K. Dick's Ubik, J. G. Ballard's collection The Atrocity Exhibition, and Samuel R. Delany's Dhalgren and Triton.[11]:66-67
The majority of stories in Ben Bova's The Best of the Nebulas, such as Roger Zelazny's "A Rose for Ecclesiastes", are considered as being by New Wave writers or as involving New Wave techniques.[19] The Martian Time-Slip (1964) and other works by Philip K. Dick are viewed as New Wave.[11]
Brian Aldiss, Harlan Ellison, Robert Silverberg, Norman Spinrad, and Roger Zelazny are writers whose work, though not necessarily considered New Wave at the time of publication, later became associated with the term.[71][page needed] Of later authors, some of the work of Joanna Russ is considered to bear stylistic resemblance to New Wave.[72][73]
See also
[edit]
Avant-Pop
Cyberpunk
Feminist science fiction
The Golden Age of Science Fiction
Interstitial Fiction
Mundane science fiction
Pulp fiction
Slipstream
Transrealism
Explanatory notes
[edit]
References
[edit]
Clute, John; Nicholls, Peter (1999). The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction (2nd ed.). Orbit. ISBN 1-85723-897-4.
Further reading
[edit]
|
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wrong_mix_random_publicationDate_00046
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FactBench
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3
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https://crimereads.com/wild-in-the-streets/
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en
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Rock & Roll Apocalypse: 'Wild in the Streets'
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2022-10-14T09:09:52+00:00
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As a boy growing-up in the 1960s and ‘70s, my idea of science fiction usually revolved around alien invaders, fire breathing monsters destroying major cities or friendly Earth men exploring the gal…
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en
|
CrimeReads
|
https://crimereads.com/wild-in-the-streets/
|
As a boy growing-up in the 1960s and ‘70s, my idea of science fiction usually revolved around alien invaders, fire breathing monsters destroying major cities or friendly Earth men exploring the galaxy before losing contact with home and crash-landing on some strange planet. My imagination was fueled by doses of DC comics, reruns of Flash Gordon/Buck Rogers serials on PBS and Godzilla Week on the 4:30 Movie. While I was an avid reader, my sci-fi/fantasy foundation was the many TV programs and films I devoured years before discovering the fictions of Robert A. Heinlein or Ray Bradbury.
Article continues below
It was during one of my Saturday night movie marathons that I first saw the politically charged sci-fi satire Wild in the Streets (1968), a flick about a bugged-out alternative America guided by an insane pop star named Max Frost, his band mates The Troops and the millions of fans. Twenty-two-year-old Max despised anyone over 30, and throughout the film worked hard to get rid of mature adults who were “stiff with age.” Played with crazed charisma by method actor Christopher Jones, a southern mumbler who critics compared to James Dean, Max Frost began his mission by partnering with a youngish (thirty-seven years old) congressman who helped him by getting the voting age lowered to fourteen.
With the impressionable youth of the country already in Frost’s fat pockets (it’s established from the beginning that he’s a multi-millionaire who first made loot making and selling acid), he soon went power mad and preached that American kids “never trust anyone over 30.” Though Frost had zero experience as politician, his wealth and fame made him believable to the masses.
Using the powerful medium of television that had become a political tool a few years before when pretty boy John F. Kennedy debated ugly Richard Nixon in 1960, Frost’s message was basically “the younger, the better,” reasoning that older elected officials had lost touch with the real needs of the country. Without irony he declared, “I have nothing against our current President…that’s like running against my own grandfather. I mean, what do you ask a 60-year-old man? You ask him if he wants his wheelchair FACING the sun, or facing AWAY from the sun. But running the country? FORGET IT, babies!”
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Later, he and the Troops spiked the water supply with LSD, held mass demonstrations on Sunset Boulevard, and encouraged his followers to storm the White House. Police fired on civilians, which created martyrs for Max’s corrupt cause. He’s helped by his acid head girlfriend Sally LeRoy (Diane Varsi), who believes Frost’s far-out philosophies. “America’s greatest contribution has been to teach the world that getting old is such a drag,” she says. “Youth is America’s secret weapon.”
At twenty-four she was elected to congress, worked to amend the laws of the land and paved the way for Frost to become president. Eventually, Max, who gave a few passionate speeches, but spent most of his time lounging in his mansion, became the youngest president ever elected.
Released in 1968, Wild in the Streets was directed by the underrated Barry Shear, who four years later made the neo-noir classic Across 110th Street. Wild didn’t take place in the past or future, but in crazed present day of the election year of 1968, mere months after the so-called “Summer of Love.” That same year America dealt with Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy’s assassinations, civil unrest in major cities, Nixon winning the Presidential election and a raging war in Vietnam that drove many young men mad and sent them home damaged.
“When I saw this movie, it changed my societal perspective completely,” recalled writer Bonz Malone. “Wild in the Streets is one of a kind. It’s even out of its own mind, but in a very smart way.”
A few years after its initial release, Wild in the Streets was shown on the ABC Saturday night movie which aired weekly at 11:30 pm. As a ten year old lying on the Banana Splits bed sheets staring at a black and white television set, I was completely fascinated by the film as I watched a once nice little boy (played with sweet innocence by pre-Brady Bunch Barry Williams) whose last name was Flatow, grew into a teen terror drug dealer, ran away from a shrill mother (played with annoying pizzazz by Shelly Winters) and a passive poppa who had no control over his family, changed his last name to Frost and became a pop star (he bought his first guitar from selling acid) before taking over the country.
Article continues below
Co-star Hal Holbrook played Congressman Johnny Fergus, who is running for the Senate with a campaign based on the promise of giving the vote to 18-year-olds. It was after inviting Frost to perform at a rally that the rock star decided to try politics. His lust for power, that included lowering the voting age to 14, opened the door for Frost’s ageist extremism that led to putting people over thirty-five into concentration camps and dosing them daily with LSD.
From the beginning, the real enemy was age; there was no such concept as “too young.” As Max proudly stated, “I don’t want to live to be 30…30 is death, baby.”
***
Actor Christopher Jones, who played the wealthy pop president, was born into poverty in 1941. A native of Jackson, Tennessee he’d had his share of hard times since childhood. His mother was institutionalized when Jones was a boy, and he spent time living at Boy’s Town with his younger brother. He ran away and enlisted in the Army when he was 16, went A.W.O.L. days later and soon fell in with an artsy crowd that guided him towards New York City and acting.
World Cinema Paradise contributor Peter Winkler wrote a brilliant essay on Jones in 2014 and cited a Quentin Tarantino interview from a 1999 episode of E! True Hollywood Story where the director said, “He (Jones) had excitement. He was a movie star. He looked like James Dean, but Chris Jones didn’t take himself seriously like James Dean. He had the same exact sensuality and appeal as Jim Morrison. He was a big comer at that point, as big as anybody!” The actor as Max Frost channeled a charming, yet disturbing persona that became scarier as the film progressed.
During my first viewing, the only actor I recognized was the boyish Richard Pryor in his first film role playing Stanley X. Despite the militant name and credentials (twenty-one, Black Muslim, anthropologist, drummer, author of Aborigine Cookbook), Stanley was just another cog in machine of Frost’s fame factory that led to eventual takeover of the country. For a Black Muslim, he doesn’t talk much, and, one of the few times he does, he encourages Frost to become a Republican and run on their ticket. No self-respecting Black Power rebel would’ve done that, which made me think Stanley X might’ve been a former Jack and Jill kid from the Midwest.
Late comedian Paul Mooney, who was Pryor’s best friend (he also wrote material with and for him) and hung out with him on set, claimed the comic got the role with help from Shelly Winters. In Mooney’s autobiography Black is the New White (2009) he wrote that Winters was allegedly, “one of the most cock hungry actresses in Hollywood… Richard is happy to pay the price of admission…they get wild in the sheets.” Co-star Larry Bishop (The Hook) told an interviewer that Pryor once appeared on set naked and freaked Winters out. Pryor also met his second wife Shelley R. Bonus, who was an extra in the movie.
Winters was also a friend of Christopher Jones’ and helped him with his career. Their closeness began with their association with the famed Actors Studio, where they both studied. Winters also, against her better judgment, introduced Jones to his first wife Susan Strasberg, daughter of their famed acting coach Lee Strasberg. She was also an actress and they were married for three years (1965–1968); their daughter Jennifer Robin was born in 1966.
Although Winters won an Oscar three years before, Wild in the Streets was the beginning of her long relationship with B-movie makers American International Pictures (AIP). The B-movie studio specialized in grindhouse/drive-in beach party, horror, science fiction and teen-exploitation flicks. Wild in the Streets fit in nicely beside their other crazed youth movies including The Wild Angels and Riot on Sunset Strip. Her later films with the company included Bloody Mama, Who Slew Auntie Roo and Cleopatra Jones.
In Wild, she played Daphne Flatow, the worst mother and wife on the planet. Though the character never wanted a baby and scolded Max often when he was a boy, she did become overly excited after seeing her him on television years after he deserted the family. “I’m somebody. I’m the mother of a famous man. I’m a celebrity!” she screamed. So desperate was she to be in her son’s limelight, after their reunion, it’s as though she’d forgotten that her precious baby boy had killed the dog and blown-up his father’s car before leaving home.
Daphne too started wilding out and even ran over an innocent kid while speeding in Max’s car. Of course, there were no repercussions and her behavior only became worse. “Ever since the accident, I’ve been under care of an LSD therapist and I understand my son now. I understand him completely.” None of this stops the age police from coming for her too. “No, no, no, I’m young! I’m young! I’m VERY young! I’m VERY YOUNG!” she screamed as they dragged her away.
***
Wild in the Streets was based on the Esquire short story “The Day It All Happened, Baby!” by Robert Thom, who also wrote the script. “Cool was on its way out,” the story began, swiftly moving on to Max’s “doomed parents” and the havoc he caused as a youngster. Thom, like Max, once had the surname Flatow, which he changed in college. Published in 1966, “The Day It All Happened, Baby!” was released at the beginning of the “new wave science fiction” movement when some younger authors began writing tales that featured issues that took place on Earth.
As noted in the award-winning Dangerous Visions and New Worlds: Radical Science Fiction, 1950-1985, “This shift in focus was as much aesthetic as political. Influenced by modernist prose and poetry, William S. Burroughs and the Beats, New Journalism, psychedelics, and the quest for consciousness expansion became modes of expression more disjointed and experimental and topics shifted to the state of inner rather than outer space.”
Yale graduate, poet, playwright (The Minotaur, Bicycle Ride to Nevada) and screenwriter Robert Thom wasn’t as prolific in the short fiction department as J.G. Ballard, Barry Malzberg, Michael Moorcock or Harlan Ellison (who was a friend). Style wise, Thom was no match for those literary word slingers. “The Day It All Happened, Baby!”reads like a cross between a news piece for an underground newspaper and a movie treatment, but dude’s prophetic ideas in that single speculative story, as well as his screenplay for Death Race 2000 (1975), should be enough to gain him admission into the canon.
While Esquire didn’t publish much science fiction, editor Robert Brown, himself an alumnus of Yale, took a chance on Thom’s story. “We weren’t locked into any structure,” Brown recalled It Wasn’t Pretty, Folks, but Didn’t We Have Fun?: Esquire in the Sixties by Carol Polsgrove. “Mostly any magazine then and now, if you came up with some great idea, the editor would say, ‘That’s an interesting idea, but it’s not the sort of thing we do.’ At Esquire, there was no sort of thing we do.”
“The Day It All Happened, Baby!” was featured in the December, 1966 issue and predicted the soon come youth riots (1968 Democratic National Convention), musical mayhem (Altamont) and end of decade discord. Optioned a few months later by (AIP), Thom, who had written screenplays previously for young adult angst films All the Fine Young Cannibals and The Subterraneans (both released in 1960), was hired to do the script.
According to The History of Hollywood by Stephen Tropiano, the film was budgeted at $700,000, which for the penny pinching AIP was a kingly sum, and shot in 20 days. Apparently the studio had had another feature in production called Wild in the Streets that was shelved, so they changed the name of “The Day It All Happened, Baby!” so they could use the marketing artwork they’d already commissioned.
Originally the studio wanted to cast folk singer Phil Ochs to portray Max Frost, but the singer’s manager turned it down. “Arthur Gorson had disapproved of the movie’s right-wing message, and had discouraged Phil from accepting the part,” Michael Schumacher reported in There But for Fortune: The Life of Phil Ochs. “Twenty-five years after the fact, Michael Ochs still stewed about his brother’s rejecting the opportunity to star in the film.”
The role instead went to relative newcomer Jones, who had done theater in New York City and starred in the ABC western series The Legend of Jesse James (1965-1966), produced by Don Siegel. When the show was cancelled after one year, Jones made a smooth transition to the big screen. Jones’ evolution from funky folklore outlaw to smooth criminal rock star was seamless, with a few scenes highlighting the persuasive power of pop with the folksy “Fourteen Or Fight” and the more psychedelic “The Shape of Things to Come.” The lyrics for the latter were the perfect theme for a revolution: “There are changes lyin’ ahead in every road/And there are new thoughts ready and waitin’ to explode.”
Both songs, as well as others on the soundtrack, were written by Brill Building pioneers (wife & husband songwriting team) Cynthia Weil and Barry Mann, who had penned tracks for many artists including The Animals (“We Gotta Get Out of This Place”) and The Righteous Brothers (“You’ve Lost That Lovin’ Feelin'”). Though the work of Weil and Mann was later used in many movies including An American Tale and A.I., Wild in the Streets was their first.
“The Shape of Things to Come” was released on Tower Records (not to be confused with the record store chain, the label was a subsidiary of Capitol Records) and credited to the 13th Floor aka Max Frost & The Troopers. Former Tower Records executive Mike Curb said in a 2010 interview with Forgotten Hits, “The reason we changed the name of The 13th Power to Max Frost & The Troopers was because the lead actor Christopher Jones played the role of Max Frost and we felt that we would have a better chance of breaking the record under the name of Max Frost & The Troopers. The record was a big hit and actually reached the 20s of the Billboard Hot 100 chart.”
Jones’ first three films-Chubasco, Wild in the Streets, and Three in the Attic—were all released in 1968. He later became known as a troubled actor who allegedly beat-up his first wife, raped his actress girlfriend Olivia Hussey and claimed to be having an affair with her friend Sharon Tate when she was murdered in 1969. That same year, he went overseas to make three European projects, with starring roles in Una breve stagione (1969), The Looking Glass War (1970), based on a John le Carré novel, and director David Lean’s film Ryan’s Daughter (1970). On the set of Ryan’s Daughter, Jones got a rep for being difficult to work with and was bad mouthed by the director and his co-stars, including Robert Mitchum and Sarah Miles.
Jones stepped away from acting and disappeared from the screen for thirty-six years. Some speculated that he had a nervous breakdown and became a drug addict after Sharon Tate’s brutal murder. Mental issues did run in his Jones’ family, with his mother being institutionalized when he was a boy. Quentin Tarantino wanted to cast him in Reservoir Dogs (1992) and Pulp Fiction (1994), but Jones never replied to his queries.
“I didn’t return Quentin’s calls because I didn’t know who he was,” Jones told the Chicago Tribune in the 2000 article Life After Fame, “and I wasn’t interested. When he did find me with the ‘Pulp Fiction’ script, I had no interest in acting or in the part he was offering.” “My girlfriend at the time read it and said: ‘You’re not doing this––it’s disgusting,’” he told another interviewer. Tarantino wanted him to play Zed. “So I didn’t.”
Jones later appeared in Mad Dog Time (1996) directed by Larry Bishop, a Wild in the Streets co-star who played one-handed horn player The Hook. The film opened to terrible reviews including Roger Ebert’s brilliant bombing: “’Mad Dog Time’ is the first movie I have seen that does not improve on the sight of a blank screen viewed for the same length of time. Oh, I’ve seen bad movies before. But they usually made me care about how bad they were. Watching ‘Mad Dog Time’ is like waiting for the bus in a city where you’re not sure they have a bus line.”
Granted, Ebert didn’t much care much for Wild in the Streets either, giving it two stars, but in that case he was in the minority.
As a contrast, New York Times reviewer Renata Adler wrote, “By far the best American film of the year so far––and this has been the worst year in a long time for, among other things, movies––is ‘Wild in the Streets.’ It is a very blunt, bitter, head-on but live and funny attack on the problem of the generations. And it is more straight and thorough about the times than any science fiction or horror movie in a while…It is a brutally witty and intelligent film.” Meanwhile, Pauline Kael liked it more than she did 2001: A Space Odyssey, which came out the same year. She called Wild in the Streets, “smart in a lot of ways that better made pictures aren’t.” Those sorts of reviews were rare for a studio like AIP as was the “blockbuster” status the film eventually achieved.
Decades later, critic John Greco from “Twenty Four Frames: Notes on Film” compared Max Frost, minus the ageism, to Donald Trump. In a 2016 essay, Greco wrote, “Wild in the Streets and its egotistical rock star are like our egotistical reality star of today, a frightening horror show all being played out with the potential to turn the country from the greatest democracy in the world into a totalitarian state filled with hate and fear.”
***
While some might view Wild in the Streets as silly, for others it was as powerful as It Can’t Happen Here, 1984 or Animal Farm. Though written as a cautionary tale, the ultimate message of Wild in the Streets wasn’t that “power corrupts,” but a democracy built on lies and bullshit shoveled to the gullible masses, whose blind faith keeps them from questioning The Truth, will eventually collapse into chaos. Thinking back to my ten year old self watching Wild in the Streets, I was riveted by the sheer daring of the entire film’s premise that, while being absurd, felt as though it could really happen.
In 1969, a sequel starring Christopher Jones and written by Robert Thom was supposed to go into production at AIP bearing the name The Day of the Micro-Boppers, which changed to “The Day It All Happened, Baby,” the title of the original Esquire story, and finally “We Outnumber You.” Unfortunately, the project never happened.
Thom later wrote a 15,800 word novella “Son of Wild in the Streets,” that was originally to be included in the infamous Harlan Ellison science fiction collection The Last Dangerous Visions. Though announced in the 1979, but the anthology was never published. J. Michael Straczynski, executor of the Harlan Ellison estate has taken over the project, but “Son of Wild in the Streets” is no longer included.
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https://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/4424/the-art-of-fiction-no-36-william-s-burroughs
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The Art of Fiction No. 36
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2020-02-20T13:02:35-05:00
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Firecrackers and whistles sounded the advent of the New Year of 1965 in St. Louis. Stripteasers ran from the bars in Gaslight Square to dance in the street when midnight came. Burroughs, who had watched television alone that night, was asleep in his room at the Chase Park Plaza Hotel, St....
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en
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The Paris Review
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https://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/4424/the-art-of-fiction-no-36-william-s-burroughs
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In 1970 a novel by an unknown Albanian writer took literary Paris by storm. The General of the Dead Army was the story of an Italian general who goes back to Albania after the Second World War to find the bodies of the Italian soldiers killed there and take them back to Italy for burial. It was hailed as a masterpiece and its author was invited to France, where he was welcomed by French intellectuals as an original and powerful voice from behind the Iron Curtain. The General was translated into a dozen languages and inspired two films: one under the same title starring Michel Piccoli, the other Bernard Tavernier’s outstanding Life and Nothing Else (La Vie et rien d’autre).
Since then over a dozen of his novels and several collections of his poetry and essays have been translated into French, English, and other languages. He is considered one of the world’s major writers and has been suggested for the Nobel Prize several times. His French publishers are currently publishing his complete works in six volumes, in both French and the original Albanian. The first three have already appeared.
Ismail Kadaré was born and raised in the town of Gjinokastër in Albania. He read literature at the University of Tiranë and spent three years doing postgraduate work at the Gorky Institute in Moscow. The General was his first novel, published on his return to Albania in 1962, when he was twenty-six.
Kadaré has been compared to Kafka and Orwell, but his is an original voice, at once universal and deeply rooted in his own soil. For over forty years Albania lived under the Communist dictatorship of Enver Hoxha, whose particularly vicious brand of Stalinism lasted longer than in any other Eastern European country. Kadaré used a variety of literary genres and devices—allegory, satire, historical distancing, mythology—to escape Hoxha’s ruthless censorship and deadly reprisals against any form of dissent. His work is a chronicle of those terrible decades though the stories are often situated in the distant past and in different countries. Two of his most famous novels, The Palace of Dreams and The Pyramid, take place respectively during the Ottoman Empire and in ancient Egypt, while The Great Winter and The Concert clearly refer to Hoxha’s break with Russia under Khrushchev and with China after Mao’s death.
Ismail Kadaré left Albania in 1990 and settled in Paris. In 1996 he was elected an associate member of the French Academy of Moral and Political Sciences (L’Académie des Sciences Morales et Politiques), replacing Austrian-born British philosopher Karl Popper, who died that year.
He lives with his wife and daughter in the Latin Quarter, in a spacious and bright apartment overlooking Luxembourg Gardens; he often travels to Albania. This interview took place at his home in February and October of 1997, with telephone conversations in between.
Kadaré has the reputation of not suffering fools gladly, but I found him gentle, courteous, and rather patient with someone who does not know his country and its literature, both of which he cares about passionately. He speaks French fluently with a distinct accent in a quiet measured voice.
INTERVIEWER
You are the first contemporary Albanian writer to achieve international fame. For the majority of people, Albania is a tiny country of three and a half million inhabitants on the edge of Europe. So my first question concerns the Albanian language. What is it?
ISMAIL KADARÉ
Half of the Albanian population lives next door in Yugoslavia, in the region of Kosovo. In all, ten million people in the world speak Albanian, which is one of the basic European languages. I’m not saying this out of national pride—it is a fact. Linguistically speaking, there are six or seven fundamental families of languages in Europe: Latin, Germanic, Slavic, Baltic (spoken in Latvia and Estonia), and three languages without families, so to speak—Greek, Armenian, and Albanian. Therefore the Albanian language is more considerable than the little country where it is spoken, since it occupies an important place in Europe’s linguistic cartography. Hungarian and Finnish are not Indo-European languages.
Albanian is also important for being the only descendant of the ancient Ilyrians’ language. In antiquity there were three regions in southern Europe: Greece, Rome, and Ilyria. Albanian is the only survivor of the Ilyrian languages. That is why it has always intrigued the great linguists of the past. The first person to make a serious study of Albanian was the German philosopher Gottfried Leibnitz in 1695.
INTERVIEWER
The one Voltaire parodied in Candide as Dr. Pangloss, who said, “All is well in this the best possible of worlds.”
KADARÉ
Exactly. Yet Albania did not exist at that time as a separate entity; it was part of the Ottoman Empire like the rest of the Balkans, including Greece. But this German genius found the language interesting. After him, other German scholars produced long studies of Albanian—Franz Bopp for example, whose book is very detailed.
INTERVIEWER
What about Albanian literature? What is its origin? Is there an Albanian Dante, Shakespeare, or Goethe?
KADARÉ
Its sources are essentially oral. The first literary book in Albanian was published in the sixteenth century, and it was a translation of the Bible. The country was then Catholic. After that there were writers. The founding father of Albanian literature is the nineteenth-century writer Naim Frasheri. Without having the greatness of Dante or Shakespeare, he is nonetheless the founder, the emblematic character. He wrote long epic poems, as well as lyrical poetry, to awaken the national consciousness of Albania. After him came Gjergj Fishta. We can say that these two are the giants of Albanian literature, the ones that children study at school. Later came other poets and writers who produced perhaps better works than those two, but they don’t occupy the same place in the nation’s memory.
INTERVIEWER
The Turks took Constantinople in 1454, and then the rest of the Balkans and Greece. What was the impact of Turkish on Albanian?
KADARÉ
Hardly any. Except in the administrative vocabulary or in cooking—words like kebab, café, bazaar. But it had no influence on the structure of the language for the simple reason that they are two totally different machines, and one can’t use the spare parts of one for the other. The Turkish language was not known anywhere outside Turkey. Modern Turkish has been constructed by Turkish writers of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, while the dry, administrative Turkish was not a living language and therefore could not have any influence on the other languages of the Ottoman Empire. I have met Turkish writers who have told me that they have problems with their language.
INTERVIEWER
On the other hand, a great deal of foreign vocabulary has entered Turkish—Persian, Arabic, French, among others. Before modern times, Turkish authors wrote in Persian, or in Arabic if the subject was theology.
KADARÉ
For me as a writer, Albanian is simply an extraordinary means of expression—rich, malleable, adaptable. As I have said in my latest novel, Spiritus, it has modalities that exist only in classical Greek, which puts one in touch with the mentality of antiquity. For example, there are Albanian verbs that can have both a beneficent or a malevolent meaning, just as in ancient Greek, and this facilitates the translation of Greek tragedies, as well as of Shakespeare, the latter being the closest European author to the Greek tragedians. When Nietzsche says that Greek tragedy committed suicide young because it only lived one hundred years, he is right. But in a global vision it has endured up to Shakespeare and continues to this day. On the other hand, I believe that the era of epic poetry is over. As for the novel, it is still very young. It has hardly begun.
INTERVIEWER
Yet the death of the novel has been foretold for fifty years!
KADARÉ
There are always people who talk a lot of nonsense! But in a universal perspective, if the novel is to replace the two important genres of epic poetry—which has disappeared— and of tragedy—which continues—then it has barely begun and still has two thousand years of life left.
INTERVIEWER
It seems to me that in your oeuvre you have tried to incorporate Greek tragedy into the modern novel.
KADARÉ
Exactly. I have tried to make a sort of synthesis of the grand tragedy and the grotesque, of which the supreme example is Don Quixote—one of the greatest works of world literature.
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https://sciencefictionruminations.com/2022/07/25/updates-recent-science-fiction-purchases-no-ccciii-william-s-burroughs-chester-anderson-pat-cadigan-donald-kingsbury/
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en
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Updates: Recent Science Fiction Purchases No. CCCIII (William S. Burroughs, Chester Anderson, Pat Cadigan, Donald Kingsbury)
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"Joachim Boaz"
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2022-07-25T00:00:00
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Which books/covers/authors intrigue you? Which have you read? Disliked? Enjoyed? 1. Courtship Rite, Donald Kingsbury (1982) Rowena Morrill's cover art for the 1st edition From the inside flap: "Gaet, Hoemei and Joesai are three clone brothers, survivors of the rigorous and deadly process of nurture and weeding that produces people of high kalothi, people worthy…
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en
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Science Fiction and Other Suspect Ruminations
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https://sciencefictionruminations.com/2022/07/25/updates-recent-science-fiction-purchases-no-ccciii-william-s-burroughs-chester-anderson-pat-cadigan-donald-kingsbury/
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Which books/covers/authors intrigue you? Which have you read? Disliked? Enjoyed?
1. Courtship Rite, Donald Kingsbury (1982)
From the inside flap: “Gaet, Hoemei and Joesai are three clone brothers, survivors of the rigorous and deadly process of nurture and weeding that produces people of high kalothi, people worthy of surviving on the inhospitable planet of Geta. Geta was settled many thousands of years ago by human starships, but only legends of the people’s origins remain, memories that have become myths.
Geta is not a friendly place for humanity, but mankind, true to its immemorial instincts, has adapted. There is almost no metal, so technology remains primitive, but bioengineering has developed incredibly. The natural vegetation is poisonous to man, and the hot climate and recurring droughts lead to crop failure for the Earth grains that are the staff of life. In times of famine the people turn to the only other available crop: themselves. The religion and the social institutions are based on a belief that species survival is more important than the individual, and ritual cannibalism based on a form of directed natural selection dictates that the weak and less worthy must feed the strong so that life will continue.
The three brothers joined forces as children and have saved one another’s lives and become a powerful influence in their city-state of Clan Kaiel. Their union has been strengthened by joint marriage to two wives, Now and Teenae, but they seek to form a Six by courting Kathein, an important biologist. Prime Predictor Aesoe is also attracted to her, however, and instead orders the brothers to court and wet Oelita the Heretic. Oelita lives in a neighboring province, preaches against the accepted practices of human sacrifice, and works ceaselessly to find ways of making the practices unnecessary by developing native foods that will not poison the eater.
Joesai, the warrior brother, is dispatched to commence the courting but peremptorily commences a mating ritual, the Courtship Rite, which consists of an increasingly difficult series of seven deadly trials. If Oelita survives all the trials, then the final result will be either marriage of the death of the brothers.
The story of courtship is worked out against the detailed creation of a world that will rival Frank Herbert’s Dune, Niven and Pournelle’s Mote world and the planet of Joan Vinge’s The Snow Queen. A vast alien landscape and a human culture based on our own yet evolved in strange and wondrous ways by the forces of an inimical nature provide a panoramic backdrop for the romantic adventures of a large cast of memorable and attractive characters.”
Initial Thoughts: Donald Kingsbury (1929-) is not an author I’ve read. His first SF work appeared in Astounding in June 1952—and his next in 1978! Courtship Rite (1982) was nominated for the 1983 Hugo Award for Best Novel. From the blurb it sounds dense and vast. SF Encyclopedia praises the novel’s worldbuilding.
2. Patterns, Pat Cadigan (1989)
From the back cover: “‘Cardigan knows the difference between what’s real and what matters. Crank it up, and play it loud.” Michael Swanwick
‘When you read Pat Cadigan’s stories, you’ll swear she’s been a 1) a psychopath, 2) a pimp, 3) a junkie, 4) to Mars, because she can write so well of places you don’t ever want to visit and people you nevereverever want to meet. She hasn’t been any of those things; what she is is another typical beautiful genius Supermom from K. C. whose works cause me to bite holes in my desk every time I read a new one.’ Howard Waldrop
‘I can’t think of another writer who makes such exacting work look so easy. She is the master of the arched eyebrow, the hoarse whisper, the cut that takes a very long time to bleed.’ Lewis Shiner”
Contents: “Patterns” (1987), “Eenie, Meenie, Ipsateenie” (1983), “Vengeance Is Yours” (1983), “The Day the Martels Got the Cable” (1982), “Roadside Rescue” (1985), “Rock On” (1984), “Heal” (1988), “Another One Hits the Road” (1984), “My Brother’s Keeper” (1988), “Pretty Boy Crossover” (1986), “Two” (1988), “Angel” (1987), “It was the Heat” (1988), “The Powers and the Passion” (1989).
Initial Thoughts: I’d previously read and enjoyed Cadigan’s “Rock On” (1984) for my media in SF series and thought I might as well track down more of her early short fiction.
3. The Butterfly Kid, Chester Anderson (1969)
From the back cover: “IT WAS NOTHING-SPECIAL GREENWICH VILLAGE DAY…
And good ole Chester Anderson—sometime poet, rock’n’roll singer and self-proclaimed king of the Village—strolled along, content.
Content, that is, until he saw a kind make butterflies.
Real butterflies. The kind with pretty wings that flutter.
What at first seemed amusing, if a little strange, quickly changed. Chester and his ragtag pack of singers, groupies and street-wise prophets had stumbled onto a mind-blowing phenomenon that threatened the whole world.
And only Chester and his ragamuffin crew could save it.
From what? The six-foot, blue lobsters from outer space.
How? With a horrifying plan that hinged on the innocence of… The Butterfly Kid.”
Initial Thoughts: Chester Anderson (1932-1991) sounds like a fascinating individual. He was a beatinik, science fiction author, and founded “Communications Company (ComCo), the ‘publishing arm’ of the anarchist guerrilla street theater group The Diggers” (Wikipedia). The Butterfly Kid is the first in shared world trilogy of recursive SF novels: “The trilogy stars all three authors who become involved in the attempts of a pop group to fight off a more than merely psychedelic Alien invasion menace: Greenwich Village is being threatened by the distribution of a “Reality Pill” which actualizes people’s fantasies. Anderson’s contribution, with its jokey, slightly gonzo melancholy, was probably the most memorable of the three” (SF Encyclopedia).
4. The Soft Machine, William S. Burroughs (1961)
“The Interstellar War of the Sexes
In The Soft Machine, William S. Burroughs, author of Naked Lunch, turns the sexy, “scientifically” controlled mass-media society inside out. With biting use of the American vernacular, Burroughs makes a devastating attack on the power structure, violence and hypocrisy in contemporary society.”
Initial Thoughts: I am eager to read William S. Burroughs’ The Soft Machine (1961) due to its experimental “cut-up” techniques that influenced authors in the SF New Wave movement.
For book reviews consult the INDEX
For cover art posts consult the INDEX
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0
| 15
|
https://www.hilobrow.com/new-wave-sci-fi/
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en
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Fi: 75 Best Novels of 1964–1983 – HILOBROW
|
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https://www.hilobrow.com/new-wave-sci-fi/
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New Wave Sci-Fi: 75 Best Novels of 1964–1983
Science fiction’s so-called New Wave era began in approximately 1964. Writing in 2003 about that “cusp” year, Michael Moorcock noted: “It will [soon] be 40 years since JG Ballard published The Terminal Beach, Brian Aldiss published Greybeard, William Burroughs published Naked Lunch in the UK, I took over New Worlds magazine and Philip K Dick published The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch.” The era lasted through approximately 1983 — giving way to the cyberpunk era, the kickoff of which we might as well date to the 1984 publication of William Gibson’s Neuromancer.
What is New Wave science fiction? Moorcock describes it as the era during which the genre “rediscovered its visionary roots and began creating new conventions which rejected both modernism and American pulp traditions.” Right! The best sf adventures published during the Sixties (1964–1973) and Seventies (1974–1983) — my 75 favorites are listed on this page, but this is by no means an exhaustive list — are characterized by an ambitious, self-consciously artistic sensibility; they often concern themselves, at the level of content and form, with the nature of perception itself; and they will blow your mind.
This page is a work in progress, subject to revision.
— JOSH GLENN
*
NEW WAVE SCI-FI at HILOBROW: 75 Best New Wave (1964–1983) Sci-Fi Novels | Back to Utopia: Fredric Jameson’s theorizing about New Wave sci-fi | Douglas Adams | Poul Anderson | J.G. Ballard | John Brunner | William Burroughs | Octavia E. Butler | Samuel R. Delany | Philip K. Dick | Frank Herbert | Ursula K. Le Guin | Barry N. Malzberg | Moebius (Jean Giraud) | Michael Moorcock | Alan Moore | Gary Panter | Walker Percy | Thomas Pynchon | Joanna Russ | James Tiptree Jr. (Alice Sheldon) | Kurt Vonnegut | PLUS: Jack Kirby’s Golden Age and New Wave science fiction comics.
JOSH GLENN’S *BEST ADVENTURES* LISTS: BEST 250 ADVENTURES OF THE 20TH CENTURY | 100 BEST OUGHTS ADVENTURES | 100 BEST RADIUM AGE (PROTO-)SCI-FI ADVENTURES | 100 BEST TEENS ADVENTURES | 100 BEST TWENTIES ADVENTURES | 100 BEST THIRTIES ADVENTURES | 75 BEST GOLDEN AGE SCI-FI ADVENTURES | 100 BEST FORTIES ADVENTURES | 100 BEST FIFTIES ADVENTURES | 100 BEST SIXTIES ADVENTURES | 75 BEST NEW WAVE SCI FI ADVENTURES | 100 BEST SEVENTIES ADVENTURES | 100 BEST EIGHTIES ADVENTURES | 75 BEST DIAMOND AGE SCI-FI ADVENTURES | 100 BEST NINETIES ADVENTURES | NOTES ON 21st-CENTURY ADVENTURES.
*** SOME GOLDEN AGE SCI-FI TITLES
The following titles from science fiction’s so-called Golden Age (1934–1963) are listed here in order to provide historical context.
Isaac Asimov’s I, Robot (1940–on; as a book, 1950)
Ray Bradbury’s Martian Chronicles (1946–on; as a book, 1950)
Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 (1953)
Alfred Bester’s The Stars My Destination (1956)
Kurt Vonnegut’s The Sirens of Titan (1959)
Walter M. Miller, Jr.’s A Canticle for Leibowitz (1959)
Robert Heinlein’s Stranger in a Strange Land (1961)
Philip K. Dick’s The Man in the High Castle (1962)
* NEW WAVE SF: 1964–1973
Philip K. Dick’s Martian Time-Slip (1964). One of my top favorite PKD novels, Martian Time-Slip is set in an arid Martian colony where Establishment-approved information is crammed into youthful heads by teaching machines. Forget the plot, which involves time travel… or a vision/hallucination of time travel, anyway. Dick presents the book’s action through flash-forwards and from the perspectives of the three main characters. At the level of form, we’re confronted with the question: What is reality? Ten-year-old Manfred Steiner, is labeled autistic because he doesn’t properly respond to the machines; in fact, he has precognition abilities. Jack Bohlen, a repairman, is hired to develop a device for communicating with Manfred; Bohlen, too, is disturbed by the teaching machines — because his schizophrenia reveals to him the machine-like quality of normal, well-adjusted people; and because he, like Manfred, perceives the passage of time in an unconventional way. A third character, union leader Arnie Kott, wants to use Manfred’s abilities to get the edge on a business deal. Meanwhile, the oppressed native Martians recognize the malleability of time — and therefore understand the value of Manfred’s gifts. Fun fact: The novel was first published under the title All We Marsmen, serialized in the August, October and December 1963 issues of Worlds of Tomorrow magazine.
William Burroughs’s Nova Express (1964). Beginning in 1961, William Burroughs and Brion Gysin experimented with a “dreamachine” producing complex patterns of color behind one’s eyelids. As the user entered something like a hypnagogic state, the patterns would “read” as intensely meaningful — even if that meaning was inarticulable. The effect of Burroughs’s Nova Trilogy (1961’s The Soft Machine, 1962’s The Ticket That Exploded, and Nova Express) on readers is dreamachine-like; you don’t read it so much as soak in it. Even if you could un-do the “fold-in” technique that Burroughs employed, you wouldn’t discover a coherent plot: Instead, there are characters (Sammy The Butcher, The Brown Artist, Izzy The Push, and other members of the viral Nova Mob; Inspector Lee of the Nova Police), comedy bits, drug-induced hallucinations, and language experiments. All wired together by an overarching paranoia regarding the cultural, social, biological, and neurological mechanisms via which the many are conditioned and controlled by the few. The Nova Mob are “control addicts”; can Inspector Lee — who sees conspiracies everywhere — dismantle their diabolical word-and-imagery machine, aka culture itself? Fun fact: Together with The Soft Machine (1961) and The Ticket That Exploded (1962), this novel is part of The Nova Trilogy. Luc Sante sums up the message of the trilogy like so: “You are the host of a virus; the virus is life; you are fucked.”
Jack Kirby’s pre-Fourth World sci-fi comics (1964–1970). Kirby’s proto-psychedelic photo collages were first seen in ’64; so we’ll date his pioneering contributions to New Wave science fiction to that year. Of course, Kirby was also a pioneering Golden Age science fiction artist — in the early ’40s he drew The Blue Beetle and Captain America; and he drew Challengers of the Unknown for DC, before co-ushering in (with Stan Lee) Marvel Comics’ Silver Age with, e.g., The Fantastic Four (1961), The Incredible Hulk (1962), Iron Man (1963), and The X-Men (1963). Beginning in 1964, Kirby introduced an ambitious, self-consciously artistic sensibility to his Marvel Comics work; he began to blow readers’ minds through his formal experimentation. Kirby’s proto-psychedelic energy fields, known to fans as the “Kirby Krackle,” which were first seen in ’66, are a signifier of his boundless, cosmic imagination. Kirby would end up writing, in addition to drawing, some terrific Marvel titles before leaving in 1970 for DC — who would publish his era-defining, multiple-series Fourth World epic. A prolific New Wave sci-fi genius!
Brian Aldiss’s Greybeard (1964). At age 56, Algy Timberlane — our titular greybeard, is one of the world’s youngest men. At the beginning of this story, he and his wife, Martha, are living in an isolated community, in fairly primitive conditions, somewhere in southern England; a violent incident sends them fleeing along the Thames towards London — which they never reach. Along the way, Algy and Martha and their companions pass through the ruins of twentieth-century civilization, encounter various cults and communes populated by elderly survivors, and struggle — intellectually, emotionally — to comprehend the end of humanity. Via flashbacks, we discover that a nuclear-testing accident, a half century earlier, in 1981, has sterilized most higher mammals on the planet. Stoats have become a menace! Aldiss, who coined the term “cosy catastrophe” to describe post-apocalyptic novels in which the survivors are contented with their lot, because there are abundant resources for the taking, and the mechanized, organized, deodorized modern world has given way to a rural, human-scale one, has his characters debate whether or not they should mourn their fate. Algy broods over his bitter memories of civilization’s rapid decline, after the Accident — martial law, famine and disease, anarchy — but ultimately hopes that humankind will not die off. Fun facts: Michael Moorcock has described Greybeard as one of the first British New Wave sci-fi novels. When P.D. James’s novel The Children of Men was published in 1992, many sci-fi fans noted that the points of similarity between the novels are astonishing.
J.G. Ballard‘s The Burning World (1964). A difficult book to read, in many respects — with the saving grace that it is not a Golden Age sci-fi “cozy catastrophe,” i.e., in which the apocalypse proves to be a kind of wish fulfillment for an alienated male protagonist. As the story begins, a British suburb begins to grapple with the fact that an unending drought — brought on by human pollution — will result in rivers running dry, crops failing, and humankind succumbing to famine and disease. Some years later, a small band of survivors from that suburb traverses vast salt plains in search of potable water. As in Beckett’s Endgame, our post-apocalyptic protagonist, the resigned and taciturn Dr. Ransom, and his companions — including a deranged architect who takes to wearing jeweled robes; and a crippled man who walks on stilts — discover that everything they’ve ever believed is meaningless. Fun fact: An expanded version, retitled The Drought, was published in 1965. Ballard’s other early catastrophe novels include The Wind from Nowhere (1961), The Drowned World (1962), and The Crystal World (1966).
Frank Herbert’s Dune (1965). In the far future, interstellar travel is made possible thanks to the spice melange — the psychoactive properties of which allow pilots to safely route faster-than-light travel. Melange is also responsible for the witchy powers of the Bene Gesserit, an ancient sisterhood that has carried out a breeding program designed to produce the Kwisatz Haderach (a messiah-like figure). Dune, the first in a series of six best-selling novels, recounts how young Paul Atreides arrives on Arrakis, the only planet where spice is mined, only to see his father — the new governor of the planet — killed and his family’s (awesome) retainers scattered. With the help of his Bene Gesserit mother, not to mention the Fremen, the planet’s giant-worm-riding natives, Paul seeks revenge against the evil Baron Harkonnen… while discovering the truth about the Kwisatz Haderach. Dune is: a potboiler about a family’s declining empire, a fantasy about the founding of a new social order, a band-of-brothers yarn, and a criticism of humankind’s despoliation of nature. Wow! Fun fact: One of science fiction’s all-time best-selling titles; parts of it were first serialized in Analog. Dune was adapted into David Lynch’s cult 1984 movie of the same title. It won the inaugural Nebula Award for Best Novel.
Philip K. Dick’s The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch (1965). The Earth is badly over-heated, and the UN — the global governing body — is conscripting settlers to colonize unpleasant nearby planets. Mars’s settlers have become addicted to Can-D, a drug that allows them to escape into a collective Barbie-and-Ken-esque hallucination, the contours of which are shaped by figures and “layouts” they purchase… from Perky Pat, a corporate empire run by the ruthless Leo Bulero (who also secretly manufactures Can-D). Bulero’s hired telepaths discover that merchant adventurer Palmer Eldritch has returned from a crash on Pluto with Chew-Z, a superior drug, one which can put Perky Pat out of business. However, when Bulero attempts to assassinate Eldritch, he is plunged into a nightmarish odyssey of nested hallucations… which causes him to question the very nature of reality itself. What’s up with Eldritch’s three “stigmata” — and where did he get Chew-Z? Plus: double agents, time travel, devolution, alien possession, and Gnostic musings about the notion of an evil demiurge! Fun fact: A freaky classic of psychedelic literature. Considered one of Dick’s most important books.
Samuel R. Delany’s Babel-17 (1966). This short, psychedelic, linguistics-inspired space opera describes a distant future in which humanity has spread itself — for better and worse — throughout the galaxy. An alien culture called The Invaders is up to something that could prove potentially catastrophic to the (human) Alliance… but what? Starship captain, codebreaker and telepath Rydra Wong discovers that a software code used by the Invaders’ hackers is actually a language… one which alters perception and thought, enhancing your abilities but turning you into a traitor! Wong is assisted by a kick-ass crew of genetically modified adventurers — including some who are essentially ghosts in the machine. Babel-17 is an adventure yarn — including everything from hand-to-hand combat to full-scale spaceship battles — but at the same time it’s a philosophical novel challenging the reader to imagine what kind of culture might speak a language lacking a pronoun for “I.” Fun fact: Babel-17 was joint winner of the Nebula Award in 1966 — along with Flowers for Algernon.
Philip K. Dick’s The Unteleported Man (1966). War between the US and the Soviet Union has led to UN rule of the planet, renamed Terra. Theodoric Ferry, a capitalist mogul, is teleporting millions to Whale’s Mouth, the universe’s only other inhabitable planet, a Garden of Eden where Terrans can start over. Freya Holm, an agent with the private police agency Listening Instructional Educational Services (LIES), Inc., speculates that Ferry may be an alien… and that Whale’s Mouth may not be all that it seems. (See: Edgar Rice Burroughs’s The Gods of Mars.) Rachmael Ben Applebaum, owner of an outer-space freighter company that has been disintermediated by teleportation technology, decides to travel to Whale’s Mouth the old-fashioned way… i.e., he will be the only unteleported man. The UN, meanwhile, attempts to defeat Ferry via a mind-control device of their own: a pulp sci-fi novel! Fun fact: Originally published as a novella, in 1964, by Fantastic. I’ve written more about this novel in my essay “The Black Iron Prison” (n+1, July 2004).
J.G. Ballard’s The Crystal World (1966). Some readers find this novel too “action-adventurey” for their liking, others find it too surgical and psychological; I think it strikes a provocative balance between these tendencies. In an African colony, Sanders, a British doctor, discovers that entrance to the forest is being discouraged. Seeking his friends, who run a leper colony (to which he is strangely attracted), he travels upriver — echoes of Heart of Darkness are intentional — and discovers that trees, grass, water, animals and men are slowly being encased in glittering crystals. The universe, its myriad of possibilities, is crystallizing into sameness! Which, in a way, is just a literalization of a process already underway — the separation of alienated individuals from one another, industrial capitalism forcing everything and everyone to become the same. If leprosy is about entropy and decay, this crystallization is a kind of antidote… right? Ballard’s descriptions are eerily beautiful. Fun fact: Serialized in the first Moorcock-edited issue of New Worlds. This is Ballard’s third psychedelic-apocalyptic work, the first two being The Drowned World (1962) and The Burning World (1964).
Philip K. Dick’s Now Wait for Last Year (1966). In the near future, Terra — a unified Earth, the elected dictator of which is UN Secretary General Gino “the Mole” Molinari — has become entangled in a war between an insect race (the reegs) and a humanoid race (the ’Starmen, from the planet Lilistar). Terra is on the wrong side of the war; their allies, the fascistic ’Starmen, may be out to exploit Terra’s natural resources. Dr. Eric Sweetscent, an organ-transplant surgeon asked to secretly tend to Molanari, who has developed a psychosomatic ailment in which he suffers along with anyone near who him who is in any kind of pain, gets involved in Terra-Lilistar politics. His wife Kathy, meanwhile, becomes addicted to JJ-180, a new hallucinogen (which may have been invented by the reegs as a chemical weapon) that causes her to move forwards, backwards, and sideways through time… and she is forced to spy on Sweetscent — by the ’Starmen. Sweetscent and Molinari time-travel, as well… leading them to wonder how valuable the intel they’re picking up from alternative past and present histories is for their current situation. Fun fact: Dick was very fond of his Molinari character, whom he described as a blend of Christ, Lincoln, and… Mussolini, for whom he harbored a certain (non-fascist) sympathy.
Ursula K. Le Guin’s Rocannon’s World (1966). When ethnologist Gaveral Rocannon visits the primitive planet Fomalhaut II, his ship is destroyed by agents of Faraday, an upstart planet threatening the peaceful galaxy. Rocannon sets out to find the enemy’s secret base on the planet — so he can infiltrate it, and use their “ansible” to communicate with galactic authorities. As he journeys across the planet, he encounters various Tolkien-esque species, including the dwarfish Gdemiar, the elven Fiia, and the nightmarish Winged Ones; his advanced technology makes him a Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court-type wizard. As he travels, and engages in various battles, Rocannon becomes a figure of legend. However, when he reaches the enemy base he must revert to a sophisticated interstellar op. Fans of Iain M. Banks: the Culture begins here. A fun foray into Three Hearts and Three Lions-esque science-fantasy, for Le Guin. Fun fact: This is the debut installment in Le Guin’s Hainish Cycle. Other authors, including Orson Scott Card, Vernor Vinge, and Kim Stanley Robinson, would borrow the “ansible” tech from this book.
Samuel R. Delany’s The Einstein Intersection (1967). Love it or hate it (Delany’s eighth novel has zealous fans and detractors), The Einstein Intersection is fascinating. Forty thousand years in the future, Lobey, a village herder and musician, goes on an Orpheus-like quest into the underworld — in search of his slain lover, Friza. As it turns out, this is a puppet-show of sorts: Lobey is a member of a (three-gendered) alien race who’ve taken on (two-gendered) human forms, and inherited human cultural myths as well. Of the latter, the aliens have made a hodge-podge: the stories of Orpheus, the Minotaur, Billy the Kid, Jean Harlow, Ringo Starr, Jesus Christ — these and other traditions of all dead generations weigh like a nightmare on the brains of the living. This conceit alone might have made for a terrific mythopoetic sci-fi novel; however, Delaney introduces myriad other issues: genetics, radiation, identity and difference, rural and urban ways of life, perception and reality, life and death, dragons… too much, perhaps, for a relatively short novel. Delany’s prose style, too, confounds: sometimes improvisational and snappy, sometimes ham-fisted pulp fiction. The Einstein Intersection is pretentious — but in the best possible way. Don’t give up on it! Once you encounter Kid Death, you’ll be hooked. Fun fact: Winner of the 1967 Nebula Award for Best Science Fiction Book.
Roger Zelazny’s Lord of Light (1967). On a planet colonized long ago by the South Asian crew and passengers of the spaceship Star of India (hailing from “vanished Urath”), some of the humans artificially evolve themselves into immortal, godlike beings — who conquer the planet’s indigenous races (characterized as “demons”) and force the descendants of the un-evolved crew and colonists into a Hindu-like caste system. All of this occurs over a vast span of time; the book is epic in scope — in fact, two of the chapters were first published as stand-alone novellas in the Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. Eventually, the crew members assume the powers and names of Hindu deities; their main concern is preventing enlightenment, and scientific or technological advancement among their human subjects. However, one of the crewman rejects godhood, and — again, over time — introduces Buddhism to the masses as a liberatory wake-up call. Fun fact: Winner of the 1968 Hugo Award for Best Novel. Gordon Dahlquist describes Lord of Light as “dedicated to dragging all wizards out from behind their curtains.”
Harlan Ellison’s (ed.) Dangerous Visions (1967). This is not a novel, but a collection of original science fiction stories by 30+ contributors. I include it on this list because it was influential on the genre’s New Wave movement; however, by the time I read it, in the mid-1980s, what was most shocking about these stories was the sexism and racism. Still, Philip K. Dick’s “Faith of Our Fathers” is a fascinating mashup about Chinese communism, psychedelics, and the truth of religion; Robert Silverberg’s graphic “Flies,” in which aliens experiment on a spaceman in order to learn about what makes humanity tick — and get it wrong, is a fun thriller; Samuel R. Delany’s “Aye, and Gomorrah…” conjures up a new sexual perversion involving a neutered astronaut; and Ellison’s own “The Prowler in the City at the Edge of the World” is something of a tour de force — about Jack the Ripper’s disappointment when he escapes to the 31st century. Fritz Leiber’s “Gonna Roll the Bones” is a chilling, funny fable… but Leiber wasn’t a New Wave writer, nor were some of the collection’s other contributors (Pohl, Anderson). I should also mention John T. Sladek’s “The Happy Breed,” which presciently describes our emotional dependence on apps. Fun facts: “Gonna Roll the Bones” won both a Hugo Award and a Nebula Award for Best Novelette; and “Aye, and Gomorrah…” won the Nebula for Best Short Story. Ellison published a sequel, Again, Dangerous Visions, in 1972; a third, as yet unpublished sequel, is now infamous.
Anna Kavan’s Ice (1967). Brian Aldiss writes, of Kafka’s oeuvre: “the baffling atmosphere, the paranoid complexities, the alien motives of others, make the novels a sort of haute sf.” Anna Kavan’s cult classic, Ice, closes the gap in that equation. As a new Ice Age dawns (sparked by a nuclear holocaust?), western civilization finds itself hemmed in by advancing ice-scapes. War and revolution break out everywhere. Against this apocalyptic backdrop, an unnamed narrator — a globe-trotting, Indiana Jones-esque anthropologist-explorer-soldier, as far as we can make out — pursues an unnamed woman with whom he has long been obsessed. He intends to rescue her, first from her brutal husband, then from a Ruritanian-ish despot who is on his way to becoming one of the world’s new tyrants; however, the “girl” doesn’t want to be rescued — and seems terrified of the narrator. Plot possibilities unfurl, only to furl back up again; is the narrator insane? A hallucinatory, image-rich adventure that doesn’t omit guns and car chases. Fun fact: “The book’s nearest cousins,” writes Jonathan Lethem in his introduction to the Penguin Classics reissue of Ice, “are Crash, Ballard’s most narratively discontinuous and imagistic book, or cinematic contemporaries like Alain Resnais’s Last Year at Marienbad.”
Chester Anderson’s The Butterfly Kid (1967). In this metafictional cult classic, set in the near future, not long after the Bicentennial, when video phones and personal hovercraft are common, a ragtag group of Greenwich Village hippies discover that their acid trips are beginning to come true. In fact, everyone in New York is hallucinating, and all of their hallucinations are made manifest — it’s chaos! Chester Anderson, who shares the author’s name, and Michael Kurland, who shares the name of another hippie sci-fi author, discover that New York’s water supply has been laced with a drug — brought to Earth by giant blue lobster-esque aliens — designed to make Earthlings easy to conquer. Can these drug-addled pacifists thwart the alien invasion? Fun fact: The blog io9.com listed The Butterfly Kid as No. 1 on the list of “weirdest science fiction novels that you’ve never read.” Its sequels are The Unicorn Girl, by Michael Kurland, and The Probability Pad, by T.A. Waters. Anderson later moved to San Francisco, invested his royalties from this novel in a mimeograph machine, and founded The Diggers’ publishing outfit, Communications Company.
Samuel R. Delany’s Nova (1968). In the year 3172, interstellar human society is divided into three constellations — each of which was originally colonized by different Earth socio-economic classes. Draco, which includes Earth and other wealthy planets, is an aristocratic constellation ruled by the (caucasian) Red family, whose Red-Shift Limited is the sole manufacturer of faster-than-light drives; the Pleiades Federation, a middle-class constellation, is the home of operations for the rival (mixed-race) Von Rays. The Outer Colonies, settled by working-class Earthlings, are the source of the important energy source illyrion, a superheavy element essential to starship travel and terraforming planets. Our protagonist is Lorq Von Ray, a playboy who — years earlier — was attacked and scarred by Prince Red. Now a nihilistic, revenge-obsessed adventurer, Lorq puts together an Argonauts-inflected squad of hippie-ish misfits — the Mouse, Lynceos, Idas, Tyÿ, Sebastian, Katin — and takes them on a demented voyage to the heart of an imploding star… in order to capture an enormous amount of illyrion, and in so doing destroy Draco’s control of the Outer Colonies. Though the plot is only intermittently thrilling (in a space-opera way), the language is gorgeous, the meta-textual references (to Moby Dick, Arthurian mythos, and more) are pretty fun, and there’s a whole Tarot-really-works conceit that’s almost persuasive. If Delany weren’t an experimentalist, this could have been a Dune; I’m glad it isn’t. Fun facts: There’s a cyberpunk tech aspect to the book that I can’t get into, here; William Gibson’s Neuromancer alludes to Nova. After this book, Delany didn’t publish again until Dhalgren appeared in 1975.
John Brunner’s Stand on Zanzibar (1968). Borrowing the kaleidoscopic narrative technique of John Dos Passos’ U.S.A., Brunner paints a comprehensive portrait of the over-populated America of 2010. There is a central story line, with recurring characters (including Shalmaneser, a super-computer). For example, Norman Niblock House, an African-American VP of General Technics, is negotiating for his company to assume management of an African country; his roommate is a spy. Meanwhile, a Southeast Asian country has achieved a breakthrough in genetic engineering. We briefly meet many other characters, via fragmented, information-rich chapters devoted solely to world-building. Political slogans, advertising, song lyrics, journalism, and slang (recorded in a glossary titled The Hipcrime Vocab, by sociologist Chad C. Mulligan), help us experience the social, economic, and cultural consequences of unchecked population growth. Social programming, interactive TV, genetically modified microorganisms… many of Brunner’s predictions are disturbingly prescient. Fun fact: Winner of the 1969 Hugo Award for Best Novel. In 1968, the prolific Brunner also published Bedlam Planet, Catch a Falling Star, Father of Lies, and Into the Slave Nebula, as well as a story collection.
Philip K. Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (1968). In a post-apocalyptic San Francisco, bounty hunter Rick Deckard is charged with “retiring” six escaped androids — one of whom, named Pris, moved into a derelict apartment building inhabited only by John Isidore, an intellectually challenged man who attempts to befriend her. Although there are plenty of thrills and chills here (for example, Deckard is seduced by an android whose mission it is to make it impossible for him to kill Pris), this is as much a philosophical novel about empathy as it as an adventure. The androids have no emotions — the only way that Deckard can tell them apart from humans is by giving them empathy tests. The androids, meanwhile, are on a mission to disprove a popular pseudo-religion called “Mercerism,” in which grasping the handles of an electronic Empathy Box allows you to “encompass every other living thing.” (“Mercerism is a swindle,” the androids insist. “The whole experience of empathy is a swindle.”) Deckard must prove them wrong… though he begins to wonder whether he, too, is an android. Fun facts: The theatrical-release version of Blade Runner, Ridley Scott’s souped-up adaptation of Dick’s novel, doesn’t lead viewers to question Deckard’s humanity (or does it). And the 2017 sequel, Blade Runner 2049, further muddies the waters.
Richard Brautigan’s In Watermelon Sugar (1968). Our unnamed narrator, a writer, lives outside an unnamed town, on the fringes of a commune called iDEATH. The commune features a trout hatchery (which produces oil used to light their lamps) and a watermelon works (which produces multicolored sugars used to fashion every sort of commodity), not to mention huge statues of vegetables, and shacks to which those who want to spend time alone can retreat. The setting is idyllic, but also somehow post-apocalyptic. The sun shines a different color each day; reference is made to talking, singing, yet violent “tigers” who used to inhabit the area; and there is a vast junkyard — the Forgotten Works — of objects manufactured before… whatever happened. There isn’t much of a plot: a drunkard named inBOIL leads a short-lived rebellion against iDEATH (Is he right about everything?, this reader wonders); the narrator falls in love with Pauline, the commune’s cook, which may or may not cause his former lover, Margaret, to go off the rails. The mood is elegiac, light-hearted, sad, and critical all at the same time. Fun facts: In Watermelon Sugar is an important reference in Ray Mungo’s 1970 back-to-the-land chronicle Total Loss Farm; it’s also the inspiration for Neko Case’s 2006 song “Margaret versus Pauline.”
Thomas M. Disch’s Camp Concentration (1968). In an authoritarian near-future America, President Robert McNamara — Secretary of Defense, at the time Disch was writing — has embroiled the country in an illegal war… against the world. We are reading the diary of an imprisoned conscientious objector, the poet Louis Sacchetti, who has been sent to Camp Archimedes, the inmates of which are dosed (unwittingly) with a strain of syphilis as part of a military experiment. (With Ignatius J. Reilly, Sacchetti is one of the great obese fictional characters.) The treatment increases the patients’ intelligence, while shortening their lives. Does God exist? Does alchemy work? Do we humans create Hell for ourselves? If genius is a matter of breaking down the mind’s rigid categories, then are all geniuses insane? Sacchetti, an erudite wordsmith and deep thinker, has much to say on these and other topics… particularly as his own mind’s rigid categories begin to break down. Fun fact: Serialized in New Worlds in 1967. In 1972, Philip K. Dick wrote a paranoid letter to the FBI suggesting that there were coded messages in Camp Concentration.
Anne McCaffrey’s The Ship Who Sang (1969). Before Iain M. Banks’s (or Becky Chambers’ or Ann Leckie’s) independent AI starships there was The Ship Who Sang. Our protagonist is Helva, who was born with an exceptional brain and severe physical disabilities… so she was raised as an indentured servant destined to be a starship brain. One with a lamentable tendency to fall in love with her human co-pilot (known as the “brawn” to her “brain”) as they travel the galaxy on various missions of mercy. What happens if the brawn loves her back… and wants to have sex with her? Helva’s feelings of love and loss are poignant; however, the whole set-up is also a bit creepy and offensive! If you think about the sex scenes in McCaffrey’s Dragonriders of Pern series, you’ll begin to see why. Fun fact: The book’s first five chapters were originally published as “The Ship Who Sang” (1961; McCaffrey’s own favorite story), “The Ship Who Mourned” (1966), “The Ship Who Killed” (1966), “Dramatic Mission” (1969), and “The Ship Who Disappeared” (1969); the sixth chapter is original to the novel. In the 1990s, McCaffrey and co-authors produced six sequels.
Vladimir Nabokov’s Ada, or Ardor (1969). When he is fourteen, Van Veen, who will grow up to be a psychologist and renegade scholar, falls in love with his eleven-year-old cousin, Ada; they begin a life-long sexual affair, despite later discovering that they are half-siblings. The story begins in the early 19th century, though characters discuss airplanes, motion pictures, and other anachronistic technologies; everything is powered by water, and it is forbidden to mention electricity. Reference is made to an historical catastrophe referred to as “the L disaster,” which has somehow “everted” (I borrow the term from a 1975 essay about this novel in Science Fiction Studies) time, earth, and sexual gender. Van and Ada — who are maybe somehow, respectively, Eve and Adam — live on a planet known as Antiterra, which is geographically similar to Earth, although politically England has conquered most of it, and American culture is influenced by Russia. Nineteen-Sixties culture is, somehow, a myth from the past. Trippy! Fun facts: Ted Gioia has compared Ada to Philip K. Dick’s The Man in the High Castle and other alternate-history works of science fiction. I might include works by Samuel R. Delany and Michael Moorcock in which the Beatles become mythical figures.
Philip K. Dick’s Ubik (1969). Joe Chip works for Runciter Associates, which employs “inertials” — telepaths and precogs with the ability to block the powers of other, less scrupulous telepaths and precogs — to protect the privacy of their clients. He’s one of Dick’s “minor men,” unable to manage his own life; in fact, he owes money to his own front door! Joe has a thing for his new colleague, Pat, who can change the past in such a way that people don’t realize it. Sent to Luna in search of criminal telepaths, Joe and Pat and the rest of their team is caught in an explosion… after which nothing is ever the same again. Are they moving backwards in time? Are they in some other reality? Are they caught up in a cosmic battle between the forces of light and the forces of darkness — and if so, what is the ultimate source of these forces? Every interpretation that they posit is frustrated; meaning remains elusive. Each chapter is prefaced with an advertisement for Ubik, salvation in a spray can. This is, perhaps, the ultimate example of one of Dick’s apophenic sci-fi potboilers. Fun fact: Ubik inspired France’s Alfred Jarry-inspired Collège du Pataphysique to elect Dick as an honorary member. John Lennon, at one point, was interested in adapting the film version.
Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five, or The Children’s Crusade: A Duty-Dance with Death (1969). Much like the bumbling protagonist of Jaroslav Hašek’s pioneering antiwar novel The Good Soldier Švejk (1921–1923), Billy Pilgrim is an ill-trained, disoriented, cowardly chaplain’s assistant. During the Battle of the Bulge in 1944, he is captured and transported to Dresden. In 1945, as British and American bombers dropped several thousand tons of high-explosive bombs and incendiary devices on the city, Pilgrim and his fellow prisoners and their guards take refuge in a cellar beneath Schlachthof-fünf, the titular “slaughterhouse five”; they are among the only survivors of the (still-controversial) attack. We experience all of this in flash-backs or flash-forwards, because Billy has become “unstuck in time,” not to mention in space. At one point, years later, on his daughter’s wedding night, Billy is captured by aliens and transported to Tralfamadore, the fatalistic residents of which can observe all points in the space-time continuum simultaneously. Like them, Billy becomes a philosophical ironist because — thanks to his time-traveling — the entire human experience strikes him as absurd. Is he crazy, or a visionary? Fun facts: As a prisoner of war in 1945, Vonnegut experienced the Dresden firebombing; the narrator of Slaughterhouse-Five is the author, speaking in his own voice. The 1972 film adaptation, directed by George Roy Hill (in between directing Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid and The Sting), won the Prix du Jury at the 1972 Cannes Film Festival.
Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Left Hand of Darkness (1969). This is the second of the author’s so-called Hainish Cycle, set in a galaxy whose human population evolved on Hain, then spread outwards to many other planets (including Earth) before, at some distant point in the past, losing contact. Efforts have been mounted to re-establish a galactic civilization; some eighty planets have organized themselves into a union called the Ekumen. In this novel, Genly Ai, an agent of The Ekumen, has spent a frustrating couple of years as an envoy to the frozen planet Gethen. Ai’s efforts to recruit Gethen into the Ekumen have failed… because his supposedly enlightened worldview is structured by binary oppositions. Gethenians, because they are ambisexual — they only adopt sexual attributes once a month, during a period of sexual receptiveness and high fertility — see the world in an entirely different way. Ai only begins to empathize with the Gethenian worldview once he escapes from prison with Estraven, an exiled Gethenian politician, who not only helps Ai survive a trek across the planet’s wintry wilderness, but helps him understand his own deep-seated prejudices and assumptions about gender and gender roles. Fun facts: The Left Hand of Darkness is one of the first feminist sci-fi novels, though some feminists have argued that it does not go far enough in critiquing gender stereotypes. Harold Bloom said, of this book, which won both the Hugo and Nebula Awards: “Le Guin, more than Tolkien, has raised fantasy into high literature, for our time.”
Jane Gaskell’s A Sweet, Sweet Summer (1969). Enormous alien spacecrafts are hovering over London, Birmingham, and Manchester, sealing Britain off from the outside world; one of the aliens’ first demonstrations of power was the public execution of Ringo Starr. It’s a weird scene: “People rush under [the alien craft] when the rain starts so municipal authorities have erected seats and slot-machine arcades under them and charge you for using them.” The country descends into anarchy, as communist and fascist militias battle in the streets, and hoodlums terrorize the defenseless. Our narrator, Rat, is an unpleasant, misogynistic character who runs a tiny London boarding house and brothel. The alien invasion is the best thing that ever happened to him, so when his charismatic, gender-ambiguous, proto-punk cousin, Frijja, shows up and attempts to free London from alien oppression, Rat does what he can to thwart her — while also strugling to defend his turf from a marauding gang… with whose thuggish leader he is disturbingly fascinated. Fun fact: An exceedingly difficult book to find! China Miéville says that A Sweet, Sweet Summer “perfectly combines psychological perspicacity and social critique in an unusual dystopian future London.” Gaskell also wrote a seminal YA vampire novel: 1964’s freaky The Shiny Narrow Grin.
Brian Aldiss’s Barefoot in the Head (1969). A far-out, experimentalist novel — many readers find it too much so — set in a future Europe devastated by Acid Warfare. Muslims, it seems, have released “psycho-chemical aerosols” into the environment, and now tens of thousands of Europeans (except the neutral French) are tripping constantly, veering between extreme joy and abject terror… and talking in gorgeous, Finnegans Wake-esque word salads (see also: Disch’s Camp Concentration). Social norms have collapsed. Colin Charteris, a young Serbian who has been working in UN refugee camps in Italy, travels to England… where he falls under the influence of the hallucinogenics and finds himself hailed as a prophet by the pharmaceuticalized populace. Preaching a trippy Gurdjieffian gospel, Charteris could usher in a utopian social order… or perhaps his movement will help European civilization utterly devolve. Peppered with poems and song lyrics from the characters, it’s reminiscent of the excellent 1968 youthsploitation movie Wild in the Streets, as well as Richard Fariña’s Been Down So Long It Looks Like Up to Me (1966), though more world-historical than these. Fun facts: The novel was assembled from Aldiss’s stories in New Worlds and elsewhere. One of the inside jokes, here, is running meta-commentary on the works of Aldiss’s fellow sci-fi writers.
Josephine Saxton’s The Hieros Gamos of Sam and An Smith (1969). In this experimentalist, poetic work, a 14-year-old boy rescues a baby girl when her mother dies in childbirth. He raises her in a world devoid of other humans. What has happened? Buildings remain, food dispensers dispense food, store shelves are replete with supplies… but Sam and An are, more or less, this Eden-like post-apocalyptic space’s only inhabitants. (The few individuals who make an appearance inhabit the outskirts of town, and they are phantom-like figures — are they hallucinations? Are Sam and An being studied by them? Who is leaving them messages — and what do the messages mean?) This is, in some respects, a Bildungsroman; we watch Sam mature, as he cares for his charge, and we’re interested to discover what books — Nietzsche, Jung, Blake, science fiction — he reads. As An grows older, sexuality introduces itself to this strange idyll. Anachronistically, it could be described as The Truman Show and Lost mashed up with Blue Lagoon. Fun fact: The first novel by Saxton, who is also remembered for Vector for Seven: The Weltanschaung of Mrs Amelia Mortimer and Friends (1970), Group Feast (1971), and the super-unsettling Queen of the States (1986).
Philip K. Dick’s A Maze of Death (1970). “My books (& stories) are intellectual (conceptual) mazes,” Dick would later reflect in his Exegesis, “& I am in an intellectual maze in trying to figure out our situation (who we are & how we look into the world, & world as illusion, etc.) because the situation is a maze.” This proto-gnostic apophenic thriller, written in 1968 and inspired in part by the author’s only LSD trip, is perhaps Dick’s maze-iest. One by one, fourteen human colonists, none of whom understands their collective mission, are transferred to the planet Delmak-O — which is populated by gelatinous cubes who offer advice in the form of I Ching-like anagrams. A naturalist, a linguist, a geologist, a theologian, a physician, a pyschologist, and so forth: They are each eccentric and disgruntled, particularly once they begin to die off. What is the factory-like building towards which they are drawn? Are they trapped in a maze — being observed and experimented upon? Or are they perhaps dead — or in some kind of limbo state? Lost fans, read this one. Fun fact: Except for Ubik, this is the book Dick most frequently references in his Exegesis.
John Sladek’s The Müller-Fokker Effect (1970). In the near future Bob Shairp, writer and dreamer and government worker, agrees to be a guinea-pig in a military experiment — to determine whether a human being can be reconstituted like orange juice. However, as his persona is being uploaded to computer tapes in the form of data, his body is accidentally destroyed. Shairp’s persona-data then becomes a computer virus, which leads to a series of absurd, paranoia-inducing scenarios. Sladek’s novel satirizes right-wing military, evangelical, militantly anticommunist forces in late-Sixties America — where Ronald Reagan, of all people, is president! — who seek to control the tapes. The book, which doesn’t have much of a plot, abounds with racists, conspiracy theorists, and eccentric millionaires, so yeah… it all too accurately predicts today’s America. Fun fact: The book’s title is an obscene pun. When asked, in 1982, whether he’d considered what trouble he caused young people asking librarians for the book, Sladek replied, tongue-in-cheek: “Young persons have no business reading such a book, which contains sex, violence and anagrams.”
J.G. Ballard’s The Atrocity Exhibition (written 1967, published 1970). Less a novel than a collection of linked stories or novellas, The Atrocity Exhibition confronts us with surreal fantasies, absurdities, and grotesqueries — “Plans for the Assassination of Jacqueline Kennedy,” “Love and Napalm: Export USA,” “Why I Want to Fuck Ronald Reagan” — recounted by an unstable narrator, a mental-hospital psychiatrist whose name keeps changing (Talbert, Traven, Travis, Talbot, etc.). Like the French philosopher and theorist Jean Baudrillard, who started publishing in the late Sixties, and who can himself be considered a New Wave sci-fi author manqué, in The Atrocity Exhibition we find Ballard writing proleptically. That is to say, the book represents future social and cultural developments — for instance, the death of affect (because of prolonged exposure to sex and violence via pop culture and advertising); the triumph of kitsch culture; the banalization of celebrity; disaster porn; endless movies about the Vietnam War — as if they’ve happening now (in the late Sixties). The protagonist’s ultimate goal? To start a World War III… of the mind! Fun fact: The pieces collected here had appeared elsewhere, in various forms, previously. William Burroughs, a writer whom Ballard admired and emulated, wrote the book’s introduction. The first US edition was published in 1972 by Grove Press, after an earlier edition was cancelled because the publisher feared lawsuits. The book inspired the Joy Division song of the same name from their 1980 album Closer.
Stanislaw Lem’s’s Ze wspomnien Ijona Tichego Kongres futurologiczny (The Futurological Congress, 1971). A tall tale in which the space explorer Ijon Tichy, whose previous exploits Lem chronicled in The Star Diaries (1957), attends a shambolic World Futurological Congress held at an absurdly luxurious hotel in San Jose, Costa Rica. As riots break out in the streets, the government introduces psychoactive drugs into the drinking water; Tichy escapes to the sewers beneath the hotel, only to be evacuated several times — each of which turns out to be a hallucination — and then shot, and placed by doctors into a cryogenic coma. He wakes up in a transformed world; Lem is affectionately parodying H.G. Wells’s 1899 technocratic utopian novel When the Sleeper Wakes, here. Tichy is introduced to this brave new world — in which most people take a drug that instills a strong work-ethic, not to mention drugs that mask the true nature of reality; and the inhabitants of which speak a language he can’t understand — in stages. Has the world become an overpopulated hellscape threatened by a new Ice Age? Or is this, too, all one of Tichy’s hallucinations? Fun facts: First published along with a collection of short stories (shown above). Ari Folman’s 2013 live-action/animated movie The Congress, starring Robin Wright, was a pretty great adaptation.
Ursula K. LeGuin’s The Lathe of Heaven (1971). Operating under the influence of Philip K. Dick, LeGuin wrote an uncanny, thought-provoking novella about George Orr, a Portland, Oregon man who has begun self-medicating in an attempt to prevent himself from dreaming. Why? Because some of his dreams have been altering reality — and George is the only one who notices. (For everyone else, things have always been the way they are now.) Visiting the well-meaning psychologist and sleep researcher Dr. Huber, George is persuaded to embark on a program of “effective dreaming” aimed at improving the state of the world. Unforeseen consequences ensue. (This will not surprise fans of LeGuin’s fantasy and science fiction, which stresses the ambiguity of every utopian ideal, and the dark forces at work within even the noblest soul.) For example, in an effort to dream about peace on Earth, Orr conjures up a fleet of invading alien spacecraft… which does unite humankind, but at what cost? Also — does the “real world” exist at all, or did Orr dream it up after a 1998 nuclear war? Fun fact: First serialized in Amazing Science Fiction Stories, March 1971 and May 1971. The book has sci-fi elements — it’s set in 2002, Dr. Huber employs a device called the Augmentor — but it’s fantastical. The 1980 PBS production of The Lathe of Heaven was well-regarded; LeGuin was closely involved.
Walker Percy’s Love in the Ruins (1971). The protagonist of this proto-postmodernist philosophical novel, Dr. Tom More, a hard-drinking psychiatrist in the affluent town of Paradise, Louisiana, has diagnosed his fellow Americans with the malady of “angelism/bestialism” — an extremist tendency towards either spirit-like abstraction or animal appetite, brought on by contemporary America’s sociocultural placidity and flacidity. In the near future of the 1990s, politics have become fragmented to the point of neo-tribalism, mainline churches have become secularized to the point of banality or else overly dogmatic, and liberals and conservatives alike are prone to shocking acts of (what they imagine to be justified) violence. In an effort to restore a sense of moderation, More invents the Ontological Lapsometer, a handheld device that can not only diagnose precisely how spiritually screwed-up you are… but also, with the twist of a dial, treat you for it. Meanwhile, African Americans stage an armed uprising, and college-educated young whites gather in swamp communes. When chaos engulfs Paradise, More retreats to an abandoned motel… with three beautiful women. Fun fact: “Beware Episcopal women who take up with Ayn Rand and the Buddha. A certain type of Episcopal girl has a weakness that comes on them just past youth…. They fall prey to Gnostic pride, commence buying antiques, and develop a yearning for esoteric doctrine.”
Jack Kirby‘s Fourth World comics (1971–1974). When Jack Kirby left Marvel Comics for DC in 1970, he launched a science-fictional epic revolving around aliens with superhuman abilities arriving on Earth. Hailing from the planets Apokolips and New Genesis, the ontogeny of the so-called New Gods — their fantastic powers, even their names — recapitulated Kirby’s imaginative billion-year phylogeny, during which three previous eras (“worlds”) had seen the rise and fall of the Old Gods, legends of whom live on in humankind’s mythologies. So sweeping was Kirby’s weltanschauung that it couldn’t be contained in the New Gods comic (#1–11 written and illustrated by Kirby, 1971–72). So he also wrote and illustrated Forever People (#1–11, 1971–72) and Mister Miracle (#1–18, 1971–74), not to mention a reimagined Superman’s Pal Jimmy Olsen. These proto-postmodernist comics are a volatile admixture of religion (the character Izaya evokes the biblical Isaiah), ancient-astronaut theories, sci-fi technology (the Boom Tube, the Mobius Chair, the Mother Box), and 1960s culture (the Forever People are cosmic hippies). Kirby’s 1940s-era teen characters, the Newsboy Legion, were resurrected; and Don Rickles made a cameo appearance. Truly awesome. Fun fact: The Fourth World storyline was intended to be a finite series, which would end with the deaths of the characters Darkseid and Orion.
M. John Harrison’s The Pastel City (1971). In the distant future, a medieval-style way of life has risen from the ashes of civilization. There is a barbarian Queen of the North; and, ruling over Viriconium, the ever-changing Pastel City, a beautiful Queen of the South. Scavengers scour the ruins for power blades, energy cannons, and airboats. When news comes that the North plans to deploy scavenged alien automata against the South, a brooding poet-warrior, Lord tergeus-Cormis, travels with a mercenary, Birkin Grif, in search of a mad dwarf who is expert in ancient weaponry. The adventurers encounter mechanical birds, brain eaters, and a wizard of sorts; and they discover that a complex, lethal technology from the past lives on. This is an affectionate, but also sardonic reimagining of the fantasy genre — nothing is resolved, things get murkier instead of more clear, heroes are unheroic. Fun fact: Harrison’s Viriconium series — it includes A Storm of Wings (1980), In Viriconium (also known as The Floating Gods, 1982), and the story collection Viriconium Nights (1985) — has been aptly described as “fantasy without the magic and science fiction without the ‘future’.”
Arkady and Boris Strugatsky’s Пикник на обочине (1972; Piknik na obochine; translated as A Roadside Picnic). Near the (fictitious) Canadian town of Harmont, a five-square-kilometer “Zone” has been off-limits ever since unexplained phenomena occurred there some years earlier. After the incidents, universally assumed to have been an alien visitation, bizarre artifacts have been discovered. The novel’s title comes from an analogy proposed, by one of the characters, that the extraterrestrials may have just been on a “picnic,” and left trash behind. The United Nations has attempted to keep the Zone sealed off, but Red Schuhart and other “stalkers” sneak in to steal whatever they can find, for profit… despite the risk that they may pass mutated genetic material on to their children. Red smuggles “hell slime” out of the Zone, and sells it to arms dealers, because he needs money to care for his daughter, “Monkey,” a devolved humanoid. Once he gets out of prison, Red discovers that the bodies of those buried within the Zone — including his father’s — have become reanimated! So he embarks on one last mission, a quixotic effort to make everything come out right. Fun facts: Roadside Picnic was refused publication in book form in the Soviet Union for eight years due to government censorship. The 1979 Soviet sci-fi art film Сталкер (Stalker), directed by Andrei Tarkovsky, is loosely based on the novella; the screenplay was written by Arkady and Boris Strugatsky.
Gene Wolfe’s The Fifth Head of Cerberus (1972). Three subtly interlinked stories set on Ste. Anne and Ste. Croix — twin Earth-colony planets circling one another. The first tale is a memoir narrated unreliably by “Number 5,” the son of an insane genius, who recounts how he and his brother were raised in a brothel by a robot teacher, and how he was eventually forced to reckon with his own identity — and challenge his father. The second story, written by a visiting anthropologist from Earth studying the planets’ supposedly extinct race of shapeshifters, is narrated in the style of an aboriginal folktale about estranged brothers; the protagonist embarks on a quest, traveling between real world and dreamworld… though the reader can’t always tell them apart. The third story also concerns the anthropologist, who runs afoul of local authorities and is imprisoned for years — we learn the bizarre details through snippets from his increasingly unhinged (or truthful) journals — and from interrogation tapes being revised by a bored police agent. Fun fact: The first story, “The Fifth Head of Cerberus,” was included in the 1973 anthology Nebula Award Stories Eight. Though not his first novel, Wolfe considered it his first good one.
John Brunner’s The Sheep Look Up (1972). Brunner wrote a lot of forgettable pot-boilers, and a couple of terrific books — this proto-cyberpunk eco-catastrophe is one of the latter. Raw materials are running out, and insects and micro-organisms have become resistant to efforts to eradicate them. Disaster could be averted if world governments and the wealthy were willing to make sacrifices; instead, the rich live obliviously in gated communities while the right-wing US administration, headed by an idiot president, is in thrall to corporations seeking only to maximize shareholder value. The media, meanwhile, focuses on entertainment and delivers fake news. Environmental and social-justice activists are dismissed as un-American hippies. (Yes, it’s almost too prescient.) We learn all of this through fractured vignettes about multiple characters, headlines, reports. As both government and corporate services break down, and as food is poisoned, rioting and civil unrest sweep the United States. Fun fact: The novel’s title is a quotation from Milton’s “Lycidas.” “The hungry sheep look up, and are not fed,/But swollen with wind and the rank mist they draw,/Rot inwardly, and foul contagion spread…”
Michael Moorcock’s The English Assassin (1972). The third of Moorcock’s four novels featuring dandy, scientist, rock star, and adventurer (Buckaroo Banzai, eat your heart out) Jerry Cornelius is subtitled A Romance of Entropy. This is true in two senses: Cornelius is an agent of the cosmic force that opposes culture, civilisation, empire, religion, and other manifestations of order; and the book itself is entropic — a pastiche of stories working at cross-purposes. Cause and effect are out of whack, here; ambiguity is the whole point. Unlike running, jumping, shooting action heroes, Jerry Cornelius is an idler; at the beginning of The English Assassin, he is fished out of the ocean — dead (eat your heart out, Jason Bourne) — and he can barely be bothered to get out of bed, despite such goings-on as a nuclear attack on India and a Scottish war of independence fought with zeppelins… each apocalyptic scenario set on a different version of the Earth. He does stop a peace conference — violently — though. We spend a lot of time with Cornelius’s coterie, including the titular assassin (IMHO) Una Persson. The book’s message, if any, is delivered by Catherine: “Goodbye, England.” Fun fact: The Cornelius Quartet includes The Final Programme (1968), A Cure for Cancer (1971), and The Condition of Muzak (1977). There are other Cornelius stories, too.
Robert Silverberg’s Dying Inside (1972). This brilliantly written sci-fi yarn/bildungsroman set in (then-)present-day New York concerns David Selig, a middle-aged telepath who has squandered his abilities. He’s spent his life prying into other people’s hearts and minds, probing their secrets for his own pleasure; and also for (minor) profit: he reads the minds of college students so that he can ghost-write reports on their behalf. Now, Selig’s power is beginning to fade. Silverberg imaginatively depicts what the lived experience of telepathy might be like, for better or worse; in the tradition of Radium Age sci-fi telepath stories, it’s mostly worse. Selig has failed to develop meaningful relationships, or to carve a purposeful place for himself in society. The novel’s plot is beside the point; and Selig is a loser — not only neurotic and directionless, but prejudiced. Stick around for wild scenarios, including a telepath’s vicarious experience of: his girlfriend’s acid trip, a young couple having sex, a hen laying an egg… and a very spiritual farmer. Fun facts: Silverberg is perhaps most famous today for his science-fantasy Majipoor series, beginning with Lord Valentine’s Castle (1980). But I’m more a fan of his New Wave sci-fi, including Thorns (1967), To Open the Sky (1967), The Masks of Time (1968), To Live Again (1969), Downward to the Earth (1970), and The World Inside (1971).
Barry N. Malzberg’s Beyond Apollo (1972). A two-man mission to Venus fails, and its captain is killed; NASA inters Harry M. Evans, the surviving astronaut, in an insane asylum — and interrogates him. What went wrong? We’ll never know: Evans’s story shifts constantly. He killed the Captain; the Captain tried to kill him; Venusians killed the Captain; there are no Venusians; he is the Captain, disguised as Evans. (Was there a Captain, in the first place)? Humankind, the reader begins to infer, isn’t mentally equipped to cope with the claustrophobia and dislocation of space exploration. Evans, or “Evans,” who confesses to wanting to write a novel, has become a story-generating machine, recounting memories (or fabricated memories), dream conversations, possible explanations and endings, sexual fantasies (or realities), and cryptograms. Is Evans’s approach to truth/reality — playful, evasive, inconclusive, a thousand flashes of illumination rather than a reliable source of light — a step forward in human evolution? Or is he just insane? Don’t read this book for the plot; read it for the exercise. Fun facts: Beyond Apollo won the inaugural John W. Campbell Memorial Award for Best Science Fiction Novel. Detractors claimed that this was an insult to the memory of Campbell, the Golden Age sci-fi author and editor whose name was synonymous with the wonder of space exploration.
David Bowie‘s The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars (1972). Bowie’s fifth studio effort wasn’t originally intended to be a concept album, but over the course of its recording the idea of “Ziggy Stardust” — an androgynous rock star who may or may not be an extraterrestrial — metastasized from a single song into first a publicity stunt and then, ultimately, an enduring mythos. The album’s tremendous first track, “Five Years,” announces the imminent destruction of Earth; “Moonage Daydream” introduces a “space invader” who preaches a cosmo-religious message of sex, love, and rock’n’roll; and the “Over the Rainbow”-ish “Starman” describes a teenager’s discovery — via late-night radio — that a starman waiting in the sky approves of youthful rebellion and pleasure-seeking. On side two, we meet Ziggy Stardust himself: Is this kabuki cat truly “the Naz” (Lenny Bruce’s hipster slang for Jesus), or merely a Vince Taylor-esque teen idol who (in his band’s estimation, anyway) has developed delusions of grandeur? The album’s bricolage mythography encourages us to actively participate in parsing the Ziggy myth for ourselves. Philip K. Dick, whose 1981 novel VALIS features a Ziggy-inspired character, took Bowie up on the challenge; so did the inspired prankster who’s recently pointed out that Kanye West, whose name seems to float above Bowie’s head on the cover of Ziggy Stardust, was born five years after the release of “Five Years.” Yes! Fun facts: The album features contributions from the Spiders from Mars, Bowie’s backing band: Mick Ronson, Trevor Bolder, and Mick Woodmansey. A “Ziggy Stardust” concert film, directed by D. A. Pennebaker, was recorded in 1973; it’s well worth viewing.
J.G. Ballard’s Crash (1973). If Ballard’s early novels — 1964’s The Burning World, for example — were sardonic inversions of survivalist cozy catastrophes, then Crash might be read as a sardonic inversion of another Adventure genre: the picaresque. In fact, the episodic, shambolic plot of Crash, in which the protagonist falls under the influence of a charismatic, wildly unconventional kook, and immerses himself in an automobile-centric world of transgressive kicks, feels to this reader like a pessimistic, avant-garde response to the all-American optimism of Kerouac’s On the Road. (Ballard himself described Crash as a “warning against that brutal, erotic, and overlit realm that beckons more and more persuasively to us from the margins of the technological landscape.”) In this anti-optimistic morality play, “James Ballard” is maimed in a car crash, which leaves the other driver dead; he is subsequently drawn into the orbit of Dr. Vaughan, a car-wreck enthusiast who heads up a kind of sex cult of fellow fetishists. Vaughan, Ballard, and others — Seagrave, a crossdressing stuntman; Gabrielle, a lesbian opium-addict and amputee; Helen, the widow of Ballard’s victim — engage in Sadean sex rites in crashed and about-to-be-crashed cars. If Ballard’s earlier novels are cataclysms set in the future; Crash takes place in a cataclysmic present, i.e., one in which catastrophe has become normalized. Fun facts: The Normal’s 1978 song “Warm Leatherette” was inspired by Crash; Gary Numan’s 1979 song “Cars” may have been, as well. In 1996, Crash was adapted as a film of the same name by David Cronenberg; it stars James Spader, Deborah Kara Unger, Elias Koteas, Holly Hunter, and Rosanna Arquette.
Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow (1973). Set during the waning days of WWII, Pynchon’s infamous masterpiece — considered by some to be one of the greatest American novels; considered by others to be unreadable — is an apophenic espionage adventure revolving around the quest to uncover the secret of a mysterious device, or MacGuffin, which is to be installed in a German V-2 rocket. (The book’s title refers to the parabolic trajectory of a V-2, as well as to the introduction of randomness into physics via quantum mechanics.) Gravity’s Rainbow is also a picaresque adventure, featuring over 400 characters, which follows Tyrone Slothrop, a naive Allied Intelligence operative, as he wanders — under covert surveillance, by his own comrades, who are interested in his sexual activities — around London, then a casino on the recently liberated French Riviera, and then in “The Zone,” which is to say, Europe’s post-war wasteland. What does Margherita Erdmann, former star of a traveling sado-masochistic sex show, know about the device? Why do the Schwarzkommando, African rocket technicians brought to Europe by German colonials, worship the V-2? Why is Slothrop being tailed by Major Duane Marvy, a sadistic American, and Vaslav Tchitcherine, a drug-addled Soviet intelligence officer? Slothrop discovers that he may have been experimented on, as an infant; does this have something to do with German occult warfare shenanigans? Plus: silly songs, 1940s pop culture references, kazoos. Here’s the key: “If there is something comforting — religious, if you want — about paranoia,” we read, “there is still also anti-paranoia, where nothing is connected to anything, a condition not many of us can bear for long.” Fun facts: Winner of the National Book Award for 1974, and nominated for both a Pulitzer Prize and a Nebula Award.
NEW WAVE SF: 1974–1983
If adventure novels in the Sixties troubled their readers’ faith in fixed, universal categories, and in certainty, Seventies adventure replaced these relics with difference, process, anomaly. The science fiction of the era — Ursula K. LeGuin’s The Dispossessed, Samuel R. Delany’s Trouble on Triton, Philip K. Dick’s A Scanner Darkly, Christopher Priest’s Inverted World, Olivia E. Butler’s Wild Seed — was as far-out as it gets, the final flourish of New Wave before the advent of cyberpunk. All binary oppositions (past/present, liberal/conservative, innocent/guilty, utopian/anti-utopian) are overthrown. Ambivalence, indeterminacy, and undecidability of things: In Seventies adventures, these are the anti-anti-utopian new normal.
Philip K. Dick’s Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said (1974). A typically dystopian, disorienting, and dashed-off Philip K. Dick joint — but one which is more emotionally resonant than his Fifties and Sixties oeuvre; in this sense, Flow My Tears points the way forward to Dick’s late masterpieces, A Scanner Darkly (1977) and VALIS (1981). The year is 1988; in the aftermath of a Civil War, the USA has become a police state; African-Americans have been all but exterminated; college students have become underground guerrillas; people use their smartphones to seek hook-ups (via the Phone-Grid Transex Network) and advice (via Cheerful Charlie, an app); and recreational drug use has been normalized. When a crazed ex-lover sics a “gelatinlike Callisto cuddle sponge” on Jason Taverner, the famous pop star (“Nowhere Nuthin’ Fuck-up” is his latest hit) and TV host wakes up in a motel to discover that… no one knows who he is. Taverner takes drugs, seeks assistance from a series of women — an unstable old flame; a leather-clad lesbian; a sweet-tempered potter — and desperately attempts to figure out what might have caused him to become a non-person. The titular policeman? He’s the twin brother and lover of the leather-clad lesbian, and a powerful authority figure who learns an important lesson in humility and empathy for others. Fun fact: Winner of the John W. Campbell Memorial Award for Best Science Fiction Novel in 1975. Dick would later paordy this novel, in VALIS, as The Android Cried Me a River.
Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Dispossessed (1974). Shevek, a brilliant young physicist, lives on the peaceful anarchistic planet Anarres, whose inhabitants value voluntary cooperation, local control, and mutual tolerance. This is a richly imagined world — with a language, for example, that cannot readily express “propertarian” or “egoist” concepts. The downside of this utopia is an entrenched bureaucracy that stifles innovation, particularly if it seems to challenge the prevailing political and social ethos. Shevek’s new temporal theory, and the resulting “Ansible” that he hopes to develop (which will allow instantaneous communication between any two points, no matter how many light-years apart; and which will therefore make possible a galactic network of civilizations), may never see the light of day. So he relocates to Urras, a nearby world (Annares is its moon) where disruptive new theories and technologies are welcomed. Once there, however, Shevek is dismayed and disgusted by Urras’s two largest states: the USA-like A-Io, which is capitalist, sexist, wasteful, exploitative, and tumultuous — forever on the verge of revolution or war; and the authoritarian, USSR-like Thu. While the author is clearly sympathetic to the ideals of Annares, The Dispossessed is a pointed critique of typical utopian narratives; the dichotomies that Le Guin describes are not readily surmounted — it’s a negative-dialectical romance. Fun fact: Although this was the fifth novel published in Le Guin’s Hainish Cycle, chronologically it is the first. The Dispossessed won the Nebula and Hugo Awards for Best Novel. Later editions of the book are subtitled “An Ambiguous Utopia.”
Christopher Priest’s Inverted World (1974). Having reached the mature age of “650 miles,” Helward Mann becomes an apprentice Future Surveyor — which means that he must help choose the best route for his city, “Earth,” which appears to be an Earth colony on an alien world. The city is winched along, at about eight miles per day, along tracks that are then picked up and re-used; the city’s goal is a perhaps nonexistent “optimum” destination somewhere to the north. Many of the city’s citizens (including Helward’s wife, Victoria) are unaware that the city is mobile; a decrease in the birthrate obliges the city to capture native women from the villages they pass en route. When Helward leaves the city, he discovers how truly strange the outside world is; time itself works differently, within the city vs. outside, and to the north vs. the south. Also, he finds himself pulled southward by a mysterious, ever-increasing force. Eventually, he meets a woman who claims to have come from England recently; in fact, she claims that they’re on Earth! What is actually going on? Fun fact: Expanded from a short story by the same title included in New Writings in SF 22 (1973). The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction calls Inverted World “one of the two or three most impressive pure-sf novels produced in the United Kingdom since World War II.”
John Crowley’s The Deep (1975). A checkerboard-like medieval kingdom is housed on a circular plane balanced atop a pillar that emerges from The Deep, an abyss inhabited by an entity known as The Leviathan. Although Crowley’s first novel is not a particularly long one, its scope is truly epic. Through the eyes of a strange visitor from off-world, a genderless android who immediately loses its memory, we witness a complex War of the Roses-esque struggle between “Red” and “Black” factions, not to mention musket-wielding rebels (The Just) and a fractured nobility (The Protectors); there are many characters, each of whom will interact with every other character before all is said and done. The Visitor is a kind of recording angel; was it sent here by Leviathan (God)? If not, what is its purpose? What’s outside this world? Is this all some kind of puppet show or game? One is reminded not only of George R.R. Martin’s Westeros series, but of the recent Westworld remake. Crowley’s writing is lyrical, and there are thrills and chills galore: swords and sorcery, a rooftop escape, a journey through a marsh, a climb towards the edge of the world! Fun fact: Crowley is best known for his amazing 1981 novel Little, Big, which has been called “a neglected masterpiece” by Harold Bloom, and other works of fantasy. His earliest novels, however, including Beasts (1976) and Engine Summer (1979), were science fictions.
Cordwainer Smith‘s Norstrilia (1975, in complete form). In the far future, as we know from Smith’s other stories (collected in the volume The Rediscovery of Man), once all of humankind’s needs have been met — thanks to advanced technology, peace and prosperity, and the use of animal-derived “underpeople” for the few remaining physical jobs — a galaxy-wide administrative body known as the Instrumentality will intervene, in order to make life worth living again. How? By reintroducing cultural and language differences, for example, or even by encouraging the underpeople to revolt. Rod McBan the 151st, a young farmer on the planet Norstrilia — which had long ago been colonized by Australians, and which alone produces the immortality drug stroon — comes to the attention of the Instrumentality because of his unusually powerful, yet difficult-to-control psionic abilities. They help save him from a Norstrilian rite of passage that could otherwise have proven fatal, and when Rod uses an ancient, illegal computer to corner the galactic market for stroon, they help smuggle him back to Earth, humankind’s homeworld, before he can be assassinated or kidnapped. Rod is disguised as an underperson — a cat-man — and C’mell, Earth’s most beautiful cat-woman, becomes his protector. Sympathizing with the underpeople, Rod sacrifices his fortune for them. Fun facts: Norstrilia is the only novel published by Paul Linebarger, a scholar and diplomat expert in psychological warfare, as “Cordwainer Smith.” Its two parts were published, separately, in Galaxy in 1964; both were then published as novellas. They weren’t combined into one volume until 1975.
Samuel R. Delany’s Dhalgren (1975). Dhalgren is set in Bellona, somewhere in the American Midwest (Kansas?) — where a very local, very strange catastrophe has happened. A city block burns down, but a week later it’s intact again; time passes differently for different people; there seem to be two moons in the night sky. Although most of Bellona’s inhabitants have abandoned the bewildering, surreal city, various marginalized Americans — including the Kid, a multiracial, bisexual, possibly schizophrenic drifter — find themselves drawn to it. Some readers (including Philip K. Dick, who threw it away) have found Dhalgren‘s meandering, apophenic, and epic plot boring or maddening; if you hated Richard Linklater’s 2001 movie Waking Life, in which a man discusses the meaning of the universe as he shuffles through a hallucinatory landscape, then you’ll hate this book. Other readers have enjoyed the text’s postmodernist twists and turns, its digressions on the nature of poetry and art, and its pursuit of wonder and beauty in the face of disaster, even if they find the foul language and explicit sex scenes distasteful or (at this point) dated. Note that the Kid — an Orpheus-like figure, whose only hope of making sense of his experiences is to become an author of the book we’re reading, or at least a version of it — would most likely agree with both sorts of readers. Fun fact: Dhalgren is Delany’s most popular book. William Gibson has referred to it as “A riddle that was never meant to be solved”; other commentators have noted the book’s debt — cf., mythological resonances, Moebius-strip plot form — to James Joyce’s Ulysses. Someone should make a movie!
J.G. Ballard’s High-Rise (1975). Philip K. Dick’s notion of a “conapt” — a densely populated, self-sufficient human habitat, isolated and isolating — was already a dystopian one, when he introduced it in The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch in 1965. Here, Ballard offers a kind of blood-spattered parable built around a pun: When the social order of his high-rise London apartment complex becomes violently dysfunctional, Richard Wilder, a documentary film-maker who lives on one of the building’s lower floors, literally becomes a social climber — scaling his way upward, to the luxurious penthouse suite. Anthony Royal, the building’s architect, perches there, awaiting his fate with a certain oblivious detachment. Our protagonist, Robert Laing, lives in-between these two characters; although he aspires to be as coolly uninvolved as Royal, Laing gets caught up in and enjoys the regressive mayhem: fighting in gangs, raiding and vandalizing other floors, killing pets, taking women. (It’s all straight out of David Bowie’s 1974 song “Diamond Dogs.”) As in Crash (1973) and Concrete Island (1974), Ballard is concerned about the deleterious effects of our advanced mode of life; note that life outside the titular high-rise goes on as usual. Fun fact: High-Rise was one of Joy Division singer Ian Curtis’s favorite books. It was adapted into a 2015 film of the same name, starring Tom Hiddleston, Jeremy Irons, and Sienna Miller, by director Ben Wheatley.
Samuel R. Delany‘s Trouble on Triton: An Ambiguous Heterotopia (1976). Part novel, part treatise, Triton brilliantly (if sometimes maddeningly) deploys post-structuralist theory in order to both illuminate and subvert the story of an unpleasant protagonist’s struggle to acculturate himself to life in a utopian colony on Triton, Neptune’s largest moon. Bron Helstrom, who had previously worked on Mars as a male prostitute, should be happy on Triton — where no one goes hungry, and where one can change one’s physical appearance, gender, sexual orientation, and even specific patterns of likes and dislikes. Helstrom’s problem is that he is an unregenerate individual, an asshole even, in a culture that deprioritizes the notion of the individual. (Shades of Stanislaw Lem’s Return from the Stars.) But Triton is less about Bron, in the end, than it is a critique of utopia, an exploration of the Foucauldian notion of heterotopia, and a semiotic intervention into science fiction’s unexamined ideologies. Should we feel sympathy for Bron, and reject Triton’s social order; or the other way around? Yes and no. PS: Almost forgot to mention that there is a destructive interplanetary war, between Triton and Earth, too. Fun fact: Originally published under the title Triton, the novel’s themes and formal devices are also explored in Delany’s 1977 essay collection, The Jewel-Hinged Jaw.
Joanna Russ’s We Who Are About To… (serialized 1976; in book form, 1977).. A brutal, nihilistic — but beautifully written — novella that might perhaps best be categorized as an anti-Robinsonade. When a spaceship crash-lands on an uninhabitable and uncharted planet, the crash survivors rally and begin to make plans for starting an impromptu colony; even if they aren’t rescued, perhaps their descendants will be. Our unnamed protagonist, however, refuses to buy into this nonsense. Not only will the group not survive, she realizes, but — as a fertile woman — she will essentially become a breeding slave. In fact, the others do beat her, tie her up, and make plans to forcibly impregnate her via rape if she doesn’t come around to their way of thinking. What the would-be colonists fail to realize is that our protagonist is a bad-ass who cannot be controlled. She escapes — taking less than her fair share of rations and supplies with her, because she doesn’t intend to prolong the agony of her own inevitable death by starvation. When the others pursue her, she opens up a can of whoop-ass. Finally, she records recollections of her life — and feminist musings on the nature of subjectivity — among other things, as she wastes away. Fun fact: Samuel R. Delany has described this novella as “a damningly fine analysis of the mechanics of political and social decay,” and a refutation of the notion that reproduction — as opposed to the quality of your life — is the point of living.
Moebius‘s Le Garage Hermétique (The Airtight Garage, 1976–1979). Le Garage Hermétique is one of the two great capricious comic strips of the Seventies (1974–1983); Gary Panter’s Dal Tokyo, which first appeared in 1983, is the other. Over a four year period, Moebius cranked out two to four pages per month; each month, he challenged himself to solve continuity problems that he’d playfully introduced previously, while also creating new problems. The main plot, to the extent that there is one, concerns the efforts of Major Grubert to prevent outside entities from invading the Garage Hermétique — an asteroid housing a pocket universe, which features, e.g., desert and forest biomes, a city, and a world made of machines. One of these invaders is Jerry Cornelius, a trickster figure whom Moebius lifted from Michael Moorcock’s sci-fi novels; Grubert and Cornelius join forces, eventually, to face a threat to the Airtight Garage. Each installment of the strip, many of which focus on Grubert and Cornelius’s hapless allies, is its own self-contained epic; they don’t necessarily add up to anything larger. Fun fact: Le Garage Hermétique first appeared, from 1976–1979, in issues 6 through 41 of the Franco-Belgian comics magazine Métal Hurlant; Americans first read it in the magazine Heavy Metal, starting in 1977.
Philip K. Dick’s A Scanner Darkly (1977). Set in a barely futuristic Los Angeles of 1994, Scanner tells the story of “Fred,” an undercover narc who gets a kick out of the counter-cultural addicts with whom — as “Bob” — he dwells. Fred’s abuse of Substance D (street name: “Death”) contributes to a brain psychosis complicated by his latest assignment… spying on Bob! Whose motivations Fred finds opaque. Dick mines humor and pathos out of the druggies’ lifestyle: paranoid conversations among low-lifes who actually are being spied on; crack-ups that feel like break-throughs. Also, this is a neo-noir crime novel — one in which we sympathize with the criminals, who are spirited free-thinkers, and despise the manipulative, cold-hearted cops. When Fred is sent to a detox facility, he cracks the secret of Substance D… too late? The book ends with a dramatic dedication to Dick’s many friends who’d been killed or permanently damaged by drug abuse; the author’s own name is on the list. Fun facts: In 2006, I wrote a Slate essay about the novel and Richard Linklater’s adaptation. Which I still haven’t seen.
Gary Panter’s comic Jimbo (serialized 1977–present). Panter’s “ratty line” illustrations helped define the style of L.A. punk. But the appeal of Jimbo — an all-American, snub-nosed, freckle-faced punkoid wandering through Dal Tokyo, a planet-wide sprawl of a city founded on Mars by Japanese and Texans — is timeless. Jimbo is a high-lowbrow antihero, equally at home in the pages of the L.A. music zine Slash, where he first appeared, and in the artsy RAW. The early post-apocalyptic/surrealist comics (has Jimbo’s girlfriend been kidnapped by giant cockroaches?) have since given way to elaborate graphic novels that employ the character as an Everyman puzzling his way through religious/pop culture allegorical landscapes. But don’t try to understand the plot of Panter’s stories; the medium is the message. Panter’s protean style — which changes from page to page, sometimes exploding into sheer abstraction — demands that the reader participate actively in making sense of Jimbo’s… mission? Fun facts: Jimbo comics have been collected in Jimbo (1982), Invasion of the Elvis Zombies (1984), Jimbo: Adventures in Paradise (1988), and Jimbo’s Inferno (2006). Panter is now working on a collection of his Jimbo mini-comics.
John Varley’s The Ophiuchi Hotline (1977). Before William Gibson, Iain M. Banks, and the Cornershop album When I Was Born for the 7th Time, there was… this oddball achievement. In the year 2618, four hundred years after the human race was displaced from the Earth by alien invaders (who consider aquatic mammals more advanced), humankind scrabbles for survival on the Moon and other off-world colonies. Thanks to the Hotline, a stream of data from a distant star system, the human survivors have mastered bioengineering techniques such as cloning, memory recording, adding and subtracting body parts, changing one’s sex whenever one chooses, and forming new life forms with intelligent symbiotes. Lilo, a rebel geneticist, faces execution for violating laws of humankind’s Eight Worlds; she escapes — or does she commit suicide, while a clone with her memories downloaded take her place? Lilo and her clones are soon embroiled in a plot to battle the invaders… using a black hole! Meanwhile, whoever has been sending information via the Hotline suddenly demands payment. Fun facts: This is the author’s first book, and the first (novel-length) installment in his Eight Worlds series.
Vonda N. McIntyre’s Dreamsnake (1978). In the far future, many years after a devastating nuclear war, genetic manipulation of plants and animals is routine, and humankind has reverted (evolved) into a neo-tribalist social order. Snake, a healer immune to snakebites, carries with her three snakes — Grass, Sand, and Mist — whose venom she uses in her potions. When fearful nomads cripple Grass, a small and rare “dreamsnake” from off-world, whose venom is capable of inducing heroin-like torpor and LSD-like hallucinations, Snake embarks, across a desert of black sand on a quest. Along with a patient who is suffering from radiation sickness — there are pockets of radiation left here and there — Snake heads to the city of Center, in hopes of persuading the Otherworlders who visit there to sell her a new dreamsnake. Hers is a picaresque journey involving a desert-dwelling dreamsnake-venom addict, a handsome young lover, an abused 12-year-old girl, a giant bandit, a character whose sex is never specified, and many hallucinations. Fun facts: Dreamsnake started as a story called “Of Mist, and Grass, and Sand,” which won a Nebula Award. The novel version won the 1979 Hugo Award.
James Tiptree Jr.‘s Up the Walls of the World (1978). Where to begin? Here on Earth, a group of troubled men and women with telepathic abilities are being studied like lab rats by the (paranoid, drug-addicted) Dr. Dann, as part of a US Navy experiment; Dr. Omaili, with whom Dr. Dann falls in love, is a computer scientist of African descent who has been unable to make meaningful connections since her teens, due to a ritual cliterodectomy administered by her stepfather. Meanwhile, Tivonel, a manta ray-like young female on a far-off planet (Tyree), resents the males of her powerfully psionic species — who are charged with the all-important task of parenting, while the females freely sail the air currents; she is more concerned, however, when Tyree’s scientists report that a wave of death is spreading across the galaxy and headed their way. And then there’s The Destroyer, a solar system-sized, network-structured, sentient inhabitant of deep space, which muses sadly (IN ALL CAPS) on its solitude and inability to fulfill its mysterious duty… while absent-mindedly destroying the galaxy. In an effort to save her species, Tivonel “invades” Earth — telepathically. The minds of Dr. Dann, Dr. Omaili, and their test subjects are transported into the bodies of Tivonel’s inhabitants… where they are uniquely able to flourish. But what can they do to stop the Destroyer? Fun facts: “James Tiptree Jr.” was the pen name of pioneering female sci-fi author Alice Sheldon. In the 1940s, she was an officer in the Air Force’s photo-intelligence group; in the ’50s and ’60s, she earned a doctorate in Experimental Psychology. Already well-known for her sci-fi stories, Up the Walls of the World was her first novel.
John Crowley’s Engine Summer (1979). A beautifully written, trippy novella set in a post-apocalyptic America, where relics of the past confound and amaze our protagonist, young Rush That Speaks. He’s grown up in Little Belaire, an idyllic, tribalist community of “true speakers” who fled society’s collapse (specifically, they appear to have fled Bel Air, California) in the distant past. This reader could have happily explored Little Belaire and its traditions along with Rush That Speaks for a longer stretch, but when Once a Day, the girl he loves, absconds to live with a cat-like society called Dr. Boots’s List, Little Rush heads out after her. First, however, he spends time living with Blink, a “saint,” in a treehouse, gathering more intel about the high-tech, unhappy prelapsarian world of the vanished “angels.” Once he’s taken in by Dr. Boots’s List, Rush That Speaks undergoes a mind-meld with Dr. Boots — from which he will never fully recover. At which point, an “angel” drops from the sky, and much is made clear to us. As with Riddley Walker, published the following year, Engine Summer is among other things a riddle, requiring readers to puzzle out secrets of the past (our near-future, perhaps) that the book’s characters themselves will never truly understand. The book’s ending is a deeply poignant one. Fun facts: Crowley is best known as the author of Little, Big (1981), a much-admired fantasy novel, and for his Ægypt series of novels (1987–2007). I like these books, too, but strongly urge science fiction fans to revisit his early work.
Octavia E. Butler‘s Kindred (1979). In this realistic (visceral, even) sci-fi/fantasy hybrid yarn, which Butler modeled on grim North American slave narratives by the likes of Harriet Tubman, Dana, a young, educated African-American woman in contemporary Los Angeles, finds herself shunted back in time to an antebellum Maryland plantation. (Unless she’s just hallucinating?) Dana, who is married to a white man in the present, discovers in the past her own ancestors — a white planter and a black freewoman who has been forced into slavery. Her ontogeny — as a black woman fully conscious of slavery’s legacy in contemporary America — recapitulates the phylogeny of her ancestor, who loses her innocence, faces harsh punishment, develops strategies of resistance, and ultimately develops the ability to escape from a repressive, racist white society. Kindred unflinchingly interrogates the intersection of power, gender, and race, but the narrative is far from simple: Dana’s ancestors, Rufus and Alice, were childhood friends, and Dana ends up developing sympathy for Rufus, despite the fact that he grows up to be a monster. She also encounters Sarah, an angry slave who only appears to be a submissive “mammie,” and other characters who fail to conform to previous depictions of slavery, from Gone with the Wind to Roots. The time travel narrative is also complex, as Dana — and, sometimes, her husband — ricochets back and forth from the present to various points in Alice and Rufus’s life stories. Fun facts: Kindred was a bestseller, and remains popular today; it is often chosen as a text for community-wide reading programs and high school and college courses. It was adapted as a 2017 graphic novel by Damian Duffy and John Jennings.
Alejandro Jodorowsky and Jean Giraud (Moebius)’s graphic novel The Incal (1980–1988). In the capital city of a planet within a galactic empire dominated by humans (and humanoid aliens known as Bergs), a mercurial private investigator, John DiFool, is nearly murdered by masked assassins. They’re seeking a crystal of enormous power, the Light Incal, which has gone missing; and so is: Animah, the keeper of the Light Incal; Tanatah, leader of a rebel group (and Animah’s sister); the city’s corrupt government; the Bergs; and the Technopriests, a cult that worships a different crystal, the Dark Incal. Jodorowsky’s space opera — drawn brilliantly by Giraud — is a satirical, dystopian admixture of intergalactic travel, political conspiracy, sex, drugs, and messianism. (If this description reminds you of Dune, it should: in 1975, Giraud provided concept art for Jodorowsky’s never-made film adaption of Frank Herbert’s novel.) Accompanied by Deepo, his loyal “concrete seagull,” and the Metabaron, a mercenary super-warrior, DiFool embarks on a quest to prevent the Technopriests from launching a sun-eating Dark Egg. It’s also a recursive mystic parable, of sorts. Fun facts: Originally published in installments in Métal Hurlant (1980–1988); The Incal was followed by Before the Incal (1988–1995, with Zoran Janjetov), After the Incal (2000, with Jean Giraud), and Final Incal (2008–2014, with José Ladrönn).
Octavia E. Butler’s Wild Seed (1980). In this prequel to Butler’s Patternist epic, a 1976–1984 series of novels recounting the rise of a mutant species of networked telepaths who will — in the far future — come to enslave “mute” humankind (while struggling against the Clayarks, a species of extraterrestrial plague-mutated humanoids), our protagonist is Anyanwu, a 350-year-old shapeshifter living peacefully in Africa… until she meets Doro, a telepathic spirit so powerful that he can possess any body. Doro, who was born in Egypt during the reign of the Pharaohs, intends to breed a race of telepaths under his control; he has been collecting people with unusual abilities and breeding them, and Anyanwu is his next target. Although she vehemently disagrees with Doro’s contemptuous, utilitarian treatment of his experimental subjects, Anyanwu is persuaded to leave her home for America… where she will struggle to rebel against Doro’s manipulative coercion. The book’s timeline begins in the late 17th century and ends in the early 19th century, and Anyanwu and Doro take the Middle Passage to the New World aboard a slave ship… yet Butler complicates this quasi-slave narrative by showing how Doro protects his “seeds” from Indian attacks and White racism alike. In the end, it’s a book about a woman who fights to protect her family from a cruel, paternalistic man — using love and self-sacrifice, not violence. Fun facts: The other Patternist books, in order of publication, are Patternmaster (1976), Mind of My Mind (1977), Survivor (1978), and Clay’s Ark (1984).
Russell Hoban’s Riddley Walker (1980). “Our woal life is a idear we dint think of nor we dont know what it is.” Although its degraded dialect is not to every reader’s taste, and although it’s not particularly action-packed, Riddley Walker is one of the greatest of all post-apocalyptic adventures — and a brilliant, deep, mysterious, tragicomic piece of writing that amply rewards re-reading. When twelve-year-old Riddley’s father dies, he becomes his community’s “connexion man” — tasked with teasing out the social, religious, and political implications of the ever-evolving puppet shows staged — in primitive towns across “Inland” (England) — by church/government propagandists. A cataclysm happened, a couple of thousand years ago, reducing the world to an Iron Age level of technology — leaving nothing but myths, turns of phrase (“hes getting his serkits jus that little bit over loadit”), and artifacts to be puzzled over by inquisitive types. A power struggle is going on, we discover — one whose outcome may lead to humankind’s progress forward out of the ashes, or to utter ruin. The chance finding of an ancient relic gets Riddley involved in this momentous struggle… and sends him on the run! Though it’s often compared to A Clockwork Orange and A Canticle for Leibowitz, I’d describe Riddley Walker as a sequel to Cicely Hamilton’s Theodore Savage, and a companion-piece to John Crowley’s Engine Summer. Fun facts: Harold Bloom included this book in his list of works comprising the Western Canon; and George Miller’s 1985 movie Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome pays homage to Riddley Walker. Hoban is best known as the author of Bedtime for Frances (1960, ill. Garth Williams) and sequels, as well as for the older children’s novel The Mouse and His Child (1967).
Philip K. Dick’s VALIS (1981). Our narrator, Phil, a brilliant, self-reflexive sci-fi author who may be crazy, explores his own ideas… as well as those of the book’s protagonist, Horselover Fat, a brilliant, self-reflexive sci-fi author who may be crazy. Fat, it seems, has received a beam of pure reason from “God” — perhaps an alien satellite orbiting Earth — which has allowed him to see that 1970s California is an illusion; actually, we’re all slaves blindly toiling in a Black Iron Prison. So… the ancient Gnostics were right! (Right?) The true nature of the universe is a Vast Active Living Intelligence System. Superhumans living anonymously among us use pop culture to stay in touch with one another; the pulp novels of Philip K. Dick may be on to something; the writings of Heraclitus, Schopenhauer, Freud and Jung must now be recontextualized. (Right?) Fat sets off, with a few friends, to find answers: about God, suffering, art, the mind, the secret history of humankind, and — naturally — about David Bowie, particularly his 1976 movie The Man Who Fell to Earth. Fun fact: VALIS is the first installment in a never-completed trilogy of novels fictionalizing the philosophical explorations Dick made into this experience via a rambling treatise, The Exegesis. It isn’t necessary, in order to enjoy VALIS, to know this, but: in 1974 Dick experienced a series of hallucinations which presented themselves as encounters with a gnostic version of the divine.
John Wagner, Alan Grant, and Carlos Ezquerra’s Judge Dredd adventures “Block Mania” (serialized 10/31/1981 to 12/26/81) and “The Apocalypse War” (1/2/82 to 6/26/82). In 1977, writer John Wagner and artist Carlos Ezquerra created Judge Dredd — a violent sci-fi comic strip spoofing American action movies (military, cop, western, vigilante) of the Seventies — for British readers of the weekly magazine 2000 AD. In the 22nd century, the titular judge-jury-and-executioner character and his colleagues police Mega-City One, which is subdivided into gigantic towers known as City Blocks stretching from Boston to Key West. In “The Apocalypse War,” Russkies from East Meg One, a Soviet citystate, invade Mega-City One. Hundreds of millions of Mega-City One citizens are killed, and ninety percent of the city is captured — while Dredd tries to organize a guerrilla resistance movement. Failing that, he must consider the option of completely obliterating East Meg One! “Block Mania,” the prologue to “The Apocalypse War,” demonstrates how Mega-City One was softened up for invasion: a massive conflict between City Blocks is engineered by an East Meg One agent, Orlok, who infects the water supply with a psychotropic drug. Orlok also kills Dredd’s sidekick, Judge Giant, in an almost casual way — which was shocking to even the shock-proof readers of 2000 AD. Fun fact: Via his excellent Dredd Reckoning blog, Douglas Wolk notes just how dark the humor of this storyline is: “It’s a story about genocide with comedy relief interludes — the Walter-and-Maria slapstick routines, the Country Joe-type folksinger getting splattered by a missile.” In 1987, Games Workshop produced a board game, set in the Judge Dredd universe, called Block Mania; players take on the role of rival City Blocks — and use spray paint, guns, flamethrowers and heavy lasers to vandalize and destroy neighboring blocks.
Alan Moore’s dystopian graphic novel V for Vendetta (serialized 1982–1989). Illustrated by David Lloyd. In the near future, following a nuclear war, the United Kingdom has become a fascist state run by the Norsefire Party. V, a flamboyant anarchist terrorist and vigilante whose face is never seen — he wears a Guy Fawkes mask — begins a campaign to bring down the government (and all governments); it’s like Nineteen Eighty-Four with a happy ending. V, we discover ov
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Movement in science fiction
The New Wave was a science fiction style of the 1960s and 1970s, characterized by a great degree of experimentation with the form and content of stories, greater imitation of the styles of non-science fiction literature, and an emphasis on the psychological and social sciences as opposed to the physical sciences. New Wave authors often considered themselves as part of the modernist tradition of fiction, and the New Wave was conceived as a deliberate change from the traditions of the science fiction characteristic of pulp magazines, which many of the writers involved considered irrelevant or unambitious.
The most prominent source of New Wave science fiction was the British magazine New Worlds, edited by Michael Moorcock, who became editor during 1964. In the United States, Harlan Ellison's 1967 anthology Dangerous Visions is often considered as the best early representation of the genre. Ursula K. Le Guin, J. G. Ballard, Samuel R. Delany, Roger Zelazny, Joanna Russ, James Tiptree Jr. (a pseudonym of Alice Bradley Sheldon), Thomas M. Disch and Brian Aldiss were also major writers associated with the style.
The New Wave was influenced by postmodernism, Surrealism, the politics of the 1960s, such as the controversy concerning the Vietnam War, and by social trends such as the drug subculture, sexual liberation, and environmentalism. Although the New Wave was critiqued for the self-absorption of some of its writers, it was influential in the development of subsequent genres, primarily cyberpunk and slipstream. [citation needed]
Origins and use of the term
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Origins
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The phrase "New Wave" was used generally for new artistic fashions during the 1960s, imitating the term nouvelle vague used for certain French cinematic styles.[1] P. Schuyler Miller, the regular book reviewer of Analog Science Fiction and Fact, first used it in the November 1961 issue to describe a new generation of British authors: "It's a moot question whether Carnell discovered the ‘big names’ of British science fiction—Wyndham, Clarke, Russell, Christopher—or whether they discovered him. Whatever the answer, there is no question at all about the ‘new wave’: Tubb, Aldiss, and to get to my point, Kenneth Bulmer and John Brunner".[2][1][3]
Subsequent usage
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The term 'New Wave' has been incorporated into the concept of New Wave Fabulism, a form of magic realism "which often blend a realist or postmodern aesthetic with nonrealistic interruptions, in which alternative technologies, ontologies, social structures, or biological forms make their way in to otherwise realistic plots".[4]:76 New Wave Fabulism itself has been related to the slipstream literary genre, an interface between mainstream or postmodern fiction and science fiction.[5]
The concept of a 'new wave' has been applied to science fiction in other countries, including for some Arabic science fiction, with Ahmed Khaled Tawfik's best-selling novel Utopia being considered a prominent example,[6] and Chinese science fiction, where it has been applied to some of the work of Wang Jinkang and Liu Cixin, including Liu's Remembrance of Earth's Past trilogy (2006-2010),[7] works that emphasize China's increase of power, the development myth, and posthumanity.[8]
Description
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The early proponents of New Wave considered it as a major change from with the genre's past, and it was so experienced by many readers during the late 1960s and early 1970s.[9] New Wave writers often considered themselves as part of the modernist and then postmodernist traditions and sometimes mocked the traditions of older science fiction, which many of them regarded as stodgy, adolescent and badly written.[10][11] Many also rejected the content of the Golden Age of Science Fiction, emphasizing not on outer space but human psychology, that is, subjectivity, dreams, and the unconscious.[11] Nonetheless, during the New Wave period, traditional types of science fiction continued to appear, and in Rob Latham's opinion, the broader genre had absorbed the New Wave's agenda and mostly neutralized it by the conclusion of the 1970s.[9]
Format
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The New Wave coincided with a major change in the production and distribution of science fiction, as the pulp magazine era was replaced by the book market;[9] it was in a sense also a reaction against typical pulp magazine styles.[12]
Topics
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The New Wave interacted with a number of themes during the 1960s and 1970s, including sexuality;[13] drug culture, especially the work of William S. Burroughs and the use of psychedelic drugs;[11] and the popularity of environmentalism.[14] J. G. Ballard's themes included alienation, social isolation, class discrimination, and the end of civilization, in settings ranging from a single apartment block (High Rise) to entire worlds.[15][16] Rob Latham noted that several of J. G. Ballard's works of the 1960s (e.g., the quartet begun by The Wind from Nowhere [1960]), engaged with the concept of eco-catastrophe, as did Disch's The Genocides and Ursula K. Le Guin's short novel The Word for World Is Forest. The latter, with its description of the use of napalm on indigenous people, was also influenced by Le Guin's perceptions of the Vietnam War, and both emphasized anti-technocratic fatalism instead of imperial hegemony via technology, with the New Wave later interacting with feminism, ecological activism and postcolonial rhetoric.[14][clarification needed] A major concern of the New Wave was a fascination with entropy, i.e., that the world (and the universe) must tend to disorder, eventually resulting in "heat death".[11] The New Wave also engaged with utopia, a common theme of science fiction, offering more nuanced interpretations.[11]:74-80
Style
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Transformation of style was part of the basis of the New Wave fashion.[17]:286 Combined with controversial topics, it introduced innovations of form, style, and aesthetics, involving more literary ambitions and experimental use of language, with significantly less emphasis on physical science or technological themes in its content.[18] For example, in the story "A Rose for Ecclesiastes" (1963), Roger Zelazny introduces numerous literary allusions, complex onomastic patterns, multiple meanings, and innovative themes, and other Zelazny works, such as "The Doors of His Face, the Lamps of His Mouth" (1965) and He Who Shapes (1966) involve literary self-reflexivity, playful collocations, and neologisms. In stories like "Repent, Harlequin!" Said the Ticktockman, Harlan Ellison is considered as using gonzo-style syntax. Many New Wave authors used obscenity and vulgarity intensely or frequently.[19] Concerning visual aspects, some scenes of J. G. Ballard's novels reference the surrealist paintings of Max Ernst and Salvador Dalí.[11]
Differences between American and British New Waves
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The British and American New Wave trends overlapped but were somewhat different. Judith Merril noted that New Wave SF was being called "the New Thing". In a 1967 article for The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction she contrasted the SF New Wave of England and the United States, writing:
They call it the New Thing. The people who call it that mostly don't like it, and the only general agreements they seem to have are that Ballard is its Demon and I am its prophetess—and that it is what is wrong with Tom Disch, and with British s-f in general... The American counterpart is less cohesive as a "school" or "movement": it has had no single publication in which to concentrate its development, and was, in fact, till recently, all but excluded from the regular s-f magazines. But for the same reasons, it is more diffuse and perhaps more widespread.[20]:105
The science fiction academic Edward James also discussed differences between the British and American SF New Wave. He believed that the former was, due to J. G. Ballard and Michael Moorcock, associated mainly with a specific magazine with a set programme that had little subsequent influence. James noted additionally that even the London-based American writers of the time, such as Samuel R. Delany, Thomas M. Disch, and John Sladek, had their own agendas. James asserted the American New Wave did not reach the status of a "movement" but was rather a concordance of talent that introduced new ideas and better standards to the authoring of science fiction, including through the first three seasons of Star Trek. In his opinion, "...the American New Wave ushered in a great expansion of the field and of its readership... it is clear that the rise in literary and imaginative standards associated with the late 1960s contributed a great deal to some of the most original writers of the 1970s, including John Crowley, Joe Haldeman, Ursula K. Le Guin, James Tiptree, Jr., and John Varley."[21]: 176
History
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Influences and predecessors
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Though the New Wave began during the 1960s, some of its tenets can be found in H. L. Gold's editorship of Galaxy, which began publication in 1950. James Gunn described Gold's emphasis as being "not on the adventurer, the inventor, the engineer, or the scientist, but on the average citizen,"[22] and according to SF historian David Kyle, Gold's work would result in the New Wave.[23]:119-120
The New Wave was partly a rejection of the Golden Age of Science Fiction. Algis Budrys in 1965 wrote of the "recurrent strain in 'Golden Age' science fiction of the 1940s—- the implication that sheer technological accomplishment would solve all the problems, hooray, and that all the problems were what they seemed to be on the surface".[24] The New Wave was not defined as a development from the science fiction which came before it, but initially reacted against it. New Wave writers did not operate as an organized group, but some of them felt the tropes of the pulp magazine and Golden Age periods had become over-used, and should be abandoned: J. G. Ballard stated in 1962 that "science fiction should turn its back on space, on interstellar travel, extra-terrestrial life forms, (and) galactic wars",[25] and Brian Aldiss said in Trillion Year Spree: The History of Science Fiction that "the props of SF are few: rocket ships, telepathy, robots, time travel...like coins, they become debased by over-circulation."[26] Harry Harrison summarised the period by saying "old barriers were coming down, pulp taboos were being forgotten, new themes and new manners of writing were being explored".[27]
New Wave writers began to use non-science fiction literary themes, such as the example of beat writer William S. Burroughs—New Wave authors Philip José Farmer and Barrington J. Bayley wrote pastiches of his work (The Jungle Rot Kid on the Nod and The Four Colour Problem, respectively), while J. G. Ballard published an admiring essay in an issue of New Worlds.[28] Burroughs' use of experimentation such as the cut-up technique and his use of science fiction tropes in new manners proved the extent to which prose fiction could seem revolutionary, and some New Wave writers sought to emulate this style.
Ursula K. Le Guin, one of the newer writers to be published during the 1960s, describes the transition to the New Wave era thus:
Without in the least dismissing or belittling earlier writers and work, I think it is fair to say that science fiction changed around 1960, and that the change tended toward an increase in the number of writers and readers, the breadth of subject, the depth of treatment, the sophistication of language and technique, and the political and literary consciousness of the writing. The sixties in science fiction were an exciting period for both established and new writers and readers. All the doors seemed to be opening.[29]: 18
Other writers and works seen as preluding or transitioning to the New Wave include Ray Bradbury's The Martian Chronicles, Walter M. Miller's 1959 A Canticle for Leibowitz, Cyril M. Kornbluth and Frederik Pohl's anti-hyper-consumerist The Space Merchants (1952), Kurt Vonnegut's mocking Player Piano (1952) and The Sirens of Titan (1959), Theodore Sturgeon's humanist More Than Human (1953) and the hermaphrodite society of Venus Plus X (1960), and Philip José Farmer's human-extraterrestrial sexual encounters in The Lovers (1952) and Strange Relations (1960).[11]
Beginnings
[edit]
There is not any consensus about a precise beginning for the New Wave—British author Adam Roberts refers to Alfred Bester as having single-handedly invented the genre,[16] and in the introduction to a collection of Leigh Brackett's short fiction, Michael Moorcock referred to her as one of the genre's "true godmothers".[30] Algis Budrys said that in New Wave writers "there are echoes... of Philip K. Dick, Walter Miller, Jr. and, by all odds, Fritz Leiber".[31] However, it is accepted by many critics that the New Wave began in England with the magazine New Worlds and Michael Moorcock. who was appointed editor in 1964 (first issue number 142, May and June[12][32]: 251 );[note 1] Moorcock was editor until 1973.[11] While the American magazines Amazing Stories and The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction had from the start printed unusually literary stories, Moorcock made that into a more definite policy, and he sought to use the magazine to "define a new avant-garde role" for science fiction[33] by the use of "new literary techniques and modes of expression".[34]:251-252 No other science fiction magazine was made to differ as consistently from traditional science fiction as much as New Worlds. By the time it ceased regular publication it had rejected identification with the genre of science fiction itself, styling itself as an experimental literary journal. In the United States, the best known representation of the genre is probably the 1967 anthology Dangerous Visions, edited by Harlan Ellison.[35][36][11]
During Moorcock's editorship of New Worlds, "galactic wars went out; drugs came in; there were fewer encounters with aliens, more in the bedroom. Experimentation in prose styles became one of the orders of the day, and the baleful influence of William Burroughs often threatened to gain the upper hand."[37]: 27 Judith Merril observed, "...this magazine [''New Worlds''] was the publishing thermometer of the trend that was dubbed "the New Wave". In the United States the trend created an intense, incredible controversy. In Britain people either found it of interest or they didn't, but in the States it was heresy on the one hand and wonderful revolution on the other."[38]: 162–163
Brooks Landon, professor of English at the University of Iowa, says of Dangerous Visions that it
was innovative and influential before it had any readers simply because it was the first big original anthology of SF, offering prices to its writers that were competitive with the magazines. The readers soon followed, however, attracted by 33 stories by SF writers both well-established and relatively unheard of. These writers responded to editor Harlan Ellison's call for stories that could not be published elsewhere or had never been written in the face of almost certain censorship by SF editors... [T]o SF readers, especially in the United States, Dangerous Visions certainly felt like a revolution... Dangerous Visions marks an emblematic turning point for American SF.[39]: 157
As an anthologist and speaker Merril with other authors advocated a reestablishment of science fiction within the literary mainstream and better literary standards. Her "incredible controversy" is characterized by David Hartwell in the opening sentence of a book chapter entitled "New Wave: The Great War of the 1960s": "Conflict and argument are an enduring presence in the SF world, but literary politics has yielded to open warfare on the largest scale only once."[40]: 141 The changes were more than the experimental and explicitly provocative as inspired by Burroughs; in coherence with the literary nouvelle vague, although not in close association to it, and addressing a less restricted pool of readers, the New Wave was reversing the standard hero's attitude toward action and science. It illustrated egotism—often by depriving the plot of motivation toward a rational explanation.[41]:87
In 1962 Ballard wrote:
I've often wondered why s-f shows so little of the experimental enthusiasm which has characterized painting, music and the cinema during the last four or five decades, particularly as these have become wholeheartedly speculative, more and more concerned with the creation of new states of mind, constructing fresh symbols and languages where the old cease to be valid... The biggest developments of the immediate future will take place, not on the Moon or Mars, but on Earth, and it is inner space, not outer, that need to be explored. The only truly alien planet is Earth. In the past the scientific bias of s-f has been towards the physical sciences—rocketry, electronics, cybernetics—and the emphasis should switch to the biological sciences. Accuracy, that last refuge of the unimaginative, doesn't matter a hoot... It is that inner space-suit which is still needed, and it is up to science fiction to build it![42]: 197
In 1963 Moorcock wrote,
"Let's have a quick look at what a lot of science fiction lacks. Briefly, these are some of the qualities I miss on the whole—passion, subtlety, irony, original characterization, original and good style, a sense of involvement in human affairs, colour, density, depth, and, on the whole, real feeling from the writer..."[10]
Roger Luckhurst pointed out that J. G. Ballard's 1962 essay, Which Way to Inner Space?[42] "showed the influence of media theorist Marshall McLuhan and the 'anti-psychiatry' of R. D. Laing."[43]: 148 Luckhurst traces the influence of both these thinkers in Ballard's fiction, in particular The Atrocity Exhibition (1970).[43]: 152
After Ellison's Dangerous Visions, Judith Merril contributed to this fiction in the United States by editing the anthology England Swings SF: Stories of Speculative Fiction (Doubleday 1968).
The New Wave also had political associations:
Most of the 'classic' writers had begun writing before the Second World War, and were reaching middle age by the early 1960s; the writers of the so-called New Wave were mostly born during or after the war, and were not only reacting against the sf writers of the past, but playing their part in the general youth revolution of the 1960s which had such profound effects upon Western culture. It is no accident that the New Wave began in Britain at the time of the Beatles, and took off in the United States at the time of the hippies—both, therefore at a time of cultural innovation and generational shake-up...[21]: 167
Eric S. Raymond observed:
The New Wave's inventors (notably Michael Moorcock, J. G. Ballard and Brian Aldiss) were British socialists and Marxists who rejected individualism, linear exposition, happy endings, scientific rigor and the U.S.'s cultural hegemony over the SF field in one fell swoop. The New Wave's later American exponents were strongly associated with the New Left and opposition to the Vietnam War, leading to some rancorous public disputes in which politics was tangled together with definitional questions about the nature of SF and the direction of the field.[44]
For example, Judith Merril, "one of the most visible—and voluble—apostles of the New Wave in 1960s sf"[45]:251 remembers her return from England to the United States: "So I went home ardently looking for a revolution. I kept searching until the Chicago Democratic Convention in 1968. I went to Chicago partly to seek out a revolution, if there was one happening, and partly because my seventeen-year-old daughter... wanted to go."[38]: 167 Merril said later, "At the end of the Convention week, the taste of America was sour in all our mouths";[38]: 169 she soon became a political refugee living in Canada.[40]: 142
Roger Luckhurst disagreed with critics who perceived the New Wave mainly in terms of difference (he gives the example of Thomas Clareson), suggesting that such a model "doesn't quite seem to map onto the American scene, even though the wider conflicts of the 1960s liberalization in universities, the civil rights movement and the cultural contradictions inherent in consumer society were starker and certainly more violent than in Britain."[43]: 160 [46] In particular, he noted:
The young turks within SF also had an ossified 'ancient regime' to topple: John Campbell's intolerant right-wing editorials for Astounding Science Fiction (which he renamed Analog in 1960) teetered on the self parody. In 1970, when the campus revolt against American involvement in Vietnam reached its height and resulted in the National Guard shooting four students dead in Kent State University, Campbell editorialized that the 'punishment was due', and rioters should expect to be met with lethal force. Vietnam famously divided the SF community to the extent that, in 1968, 'Galaxy' magazine carried two adverts, one signed by writers in favour and one by those against the war.[43]: 160 [46] Caution is needed when assessing any literary movement, particularly regarding transitions. Science fiction writer Bruce Sterling, reacting to his association with another SF movement in the 1980s, remarked, "When did the New Wave SF end? Who was the last New Wave SF writer? You can't be a New Wave SF writer today. You can recite the numbers of them: Ballard, Ellison, Spinrad, Delaney, blah, blah, blah. What about a transitional figure like Zelazny? A literary movement isn't an army. You don't wear a uniform and swear allegiance. It's just a group of people trying to develop a sensibility."[47]
Similarly, Rob Latham observed:
...indeed, one of the central ways the New Wave was experienced, in the US and Britain, was as a "liberated" outburst of erotic expression, often counterpoised, by advocates of the "New Thing" (as Merril called it), with the priggish Puritanism of the Golden Age. Yet this stark contrast, while not unreasonable, tends ultimately, as do most of the historical distinctions drawn between the New Wave and its predecessors, to overemphasize rupture at the expense of continuity, effectively "disappearing" some of the pioneering trends in 1950s sf that paved the way for the New Wave's innovations.[45]: 252
However, Darren Harris-Fain of Shawnee State University emphasized New Wave in terms of difference:
The split between the New Wave and everyone else in American SF during the late 1960s was nearly as dramatic as the division at the same time between young protesters and what they called "the establishment," and in fact, the political views of the younger writers, often prominent in their work, reflect many contemporary concerns. New Wave accused what became de facto the old wave of being old-fashioned, patriarchal, imperialistic, and obsessed with technology; many of the more established writers thought the New Wave shallow, said that its literary innovations were not innovations at all (which in fact, outside of SF, they were not), and accused it of betraying SF's grand view of humanity's role in the universe. Both assertions were largely exaggerations, of course, and in the next decade both trends would merge into a synthesis of styles and concerns. However, in 1970 the issue was far from settled and would remain a source of contention for the next few years.[48]: 13–14
Decline
[edit]
In the August 1970 issue of the SFWA Forum, a publication for Science Fiction Writers of America members, Harlan Ellison stated that the New Wave furore, which had flourished during the late 1960s, appeared to have been "blissfully laid to rest". He also claimed that there was no real conflict between writers:
It was all a manufactured controversy, staged by fans to hype their own participation in the genre. Their total misunderstanding of what was happening (not unusual for fans, as history... shows us) managed to stir up a great deal of pointless animosity and if it had any real effect I suspect it was in the unfortunate area of causing certain writers to feel they were unable to keep up and consequently they slowed their writing output.[49]
Latham however remarks that Ellison's analysis "obscures Ellison's own prominent role—and that of other professional authors and editors such as Judith Merril, Michael Moorcock, Lester Del Rey, Frederik Pohl, and Donald A. Wollheim—in fomenting the conflict..."[50]: 296
For Roger Luckhurst, the closing of New Worlds magazine in 1970 (one of many years it closed) "marked the containment of New Wave experiment with the rest of the counter-culture. The various limping manifestations of New World across the 1970s... demonstrated the posthumous nature of its avant-gardism."[43]: 168
By the early 1970s, a number of writers and readers were commenting about the differences between the winners of the Nebula Awards, which had been created in 1965 by the SFWA and were awarded by professional writers, and winners of the Hugo Awards, awarded by fans at the annual World Science Fiction Convention, with some arguing that this indicated that many authors were alienated from the sentiments of their readers: "While some writers and fans continued to argue about the New Wave until the end of the 1970s—in The World of Science Fiction, 1926–1976: The History of a Subculture, for instance, Lester Del Ray devotes several pages to castigating the movement—for the most part the controversy died down as the decade wore on."[48]: 20
Impact
[edit]
In a 1979 essay, Professor Patrick Parrinder, commenting on the nature of science fiction, noted that "any meaningful act of defamiliarization can only be relative, since it is not possible for man to imagine what is utterly alien to him; the utterly alien would also be meaningless."[51]: 48 He also states, "Within SF, however, it is not necessary to break with the wider conventions of prose narrative in order to produce work that is validly experimental. The 'New Wave' writing of the 1960s, with its fragmented and surrealistic forms, has not made a lasting impact, because it cast its net too wide. To reform SF one must challenge the conventions of the genre on their own terms."[51]: 55–56
Others ascribe a more important, though still limited, effect. Veteran science fiction writer Jack Williamson (1908–2006) when asked in 1991: "Did the [New] Wave's emphasis on experimentalism and its conscious efforts to make SF more 'literary' have any kind of permanent effects on the field?" replied:
After it subsided—it's old hat now—it probably left us with a sharpened awareness of language and a keener interest in literary experiment. It did wash up occasional bits of beauty and power. For example, it helped launch the careers of such writers as [Samuel R.] Chip Delany, Brian Aldiss, and Harlan Ellison, all of whom seem to have gone on their own highly individualistic directions. But the key point here is that New Wave SF failed to move people. I'm not sure if this failure was due to its pessimistic themes or to people feeling the stuff was too pretentious. But it never really grabbed hold of people's imaginations.[52]
Hartwell observed that "there is something efficacious in sf's marginality and always tenuous self-identity—its ambiguous generic distinction from other literary categories—and, perhaps more importantly, in its distinction from what has variously been called realist, mainstream, or mundane fiction."[53]: 289 Hartwell maintained that after the New Wave, science fiction had still managed to retain this "marginality and tenuous self-identity":
The British and American New Wave in common would have denied the genre status of SF entirely and ended the continual development of new specialized words and phrases common to the body of SF, without which SF would be indistinguishable from mundane fiction in its entirety (rather than only out on the borders of experimental SF, which is properly indistinguishable from any other experimental literature). The denial of special or genre status is ultimately the cause of the failure of the New Wave to achieve popularity, which, if it had become truly dominant, would have destroyed SF as a separate field.[54]: 153
Scientific and technological themes were more important than literary trends to Campbell, and some major Astounding contributors Isaac Asimov, Robert A. Heinlein, and L. Sprague de Camp had scientific or engineering educations.[55] Asimov said in 1967 "I hope that when the New Wave has deposited its froth and receded, the vast and solid shore of science fiction will appear once more".[56][57]: 388 Yet, Asimov himself was to illustrate just how that "SF shore" did indeed re-emerge—- but changed. A biographer noted that during the 1960s:
...stories and novels that Asimov must not have liked and must have felt were not part of the science fiction he had helped to shape were winning acclaim and awards. He also must have felt that science fiction no longer needed him. His science fiction writing... became even more desultory and casual.
Asimov's return to serious writing in 1972 with The Gods Themselves (when much of the debate about the New Wave had dissipated) was an act of courage...[58]: 105
Darren Harris-Fain observed on this resumption of writing SF by Asimov that
...the novel [The Gods Themselves] is noteworthy for how it both shows that Asimov was indeed the same writer in the 1970s that he had been in the 1950s and that he nonetheless had been affected by the New Wave even if he was never part of it. His depiction of an alien ménage a trois, complete with homoerotic scenes between the two males, marks an interesting departure from his earlier fiction, in which sex of any sort is conspicuously absent. Also there is some minor experimentation with structure.[48]: 43
Other themes dealt with in the novel are concerns for the environment and "human stupidity and the delusional belief in human superiority", both frequent topics in New Wave SF.[48]: 44
Still other commentators ascribe a much greater effect to the New Wave. Commenting in 2002 on the publication of the 35th Anniversary edition of Ellison's Dangerous Visions anthology, the critic Greg L. Johnson remarked that
...if the New Wave did not entirely revolutionize the way SF was written, (the exploration of an invented world through the use of an adventure plot remains the prototypical SF story outline), they did succeed in pushing the boundaries of what could be considered SF, and their use of stylistic innovations from outside SF helped raise standards. It became less easy for writers to get away with stock characters spouting wooden dialogue laced with technical jargon. Such stories still exist, and are still published, but are no longer typical of the field.[35]
Asimov agreed that "on the whole, the New Wave was a good thing".[59]: 137 He described several "interesting side effects" of the New Wave. Non-American SF became more prominent and the genre became an international phenomenon. Other changes noted were that "the New Wave encouraged more and more women to begin reading and writing science fiction... The broadening of science fiction meant that it was approaching the 'mainstream'... in style and content. It also meant that increasing numbers of mainstream novelists were recognizing the importance of changing technology and the popularity of science fiction, and were incorporating science fiction motifs into their own novels."[59]: 138–139
Critic Rob Latham identifies three trends that associated New Wave with the emergence of cyberpunk during the 1980s. He said that changes of technology as well as an economic recession constricted the market for science fiction, generating a "widespread" malaise among fans, while established writers were forced to reduce their output (or, like Isaac Asimov, shifted their emphasis to other subjects); finally, editors encouraged new methods that earlier ones tended to discourage.[60]
Criticisms
[edit]
Moorcock, Ballard, and others engendered some animosity to their writings. When reviewing 2001: A Space Odyssey, Lester del Rey described it as "the first of the New Wave-Thing movies, with the usual empty symbolism".[61] When reviewing World's Best Science Fiction: 1966, Algis Budrys mocked Ellison's " 'Repent, Harlequin!' Said the Ticktockman" and two other stories as "rudimentary social consciousness... deep stuff" and insufficient for "an outstanding science-fiction story".[62] Hartwell noted Budrys's "ringing scorn and righteous indignation" that year in "one of the classic diatribes against Ballard and the new mode of SF then emergent":[40]: 146
A story by J. G. Ballard, as you know, calls for people who don't think. One begins with characters who regard the physical universe as a mysterious and arbitrary place, and who would not dream of trying to understand its actual laws. Furthermore, in order to be the protagonist of a J. G. Ballard novel, or anything more than a very minor character therein, you must have cut yourself off from the entire body of scientific education. In this way, when the world disaster—be it wind or water—comes upon you, you are under absolutely no obligation to do anything about it but sit and worship it. Even more further, some force has acted to remove from the face of the world all people who might impose good sense or rational behavior on you...[63]
Budrys in Galaxy, when reviewing a collection of recent stories from the magazine, said in 1965 that "There is this sense in this book... that modern science fiction reflects a dissatisfaction with things as they are, sometimes to the verge of indignation, but also retains optimism about the eventual outcome".[24] Despite his criticism of Ballard and Aldiss ("the least talented" of the four), Budrys called them, Roger Zelazny, and Samuel R. Delany "an earthshaking new kind" of writers.[31] Asimov said in 1967 of the New Wave, "I want science fiction. I think science fiction isn't really science fiction if it lacks science. And I think the better and truer the science, the better and truer the science fiction",[56] but Budrys that year warned that the four would soon leave those "still reading everything from the viewpoint of the 1944 Astounding... nothing but a complete collection of yellowed, crumble-edged bewilderment".[31]
While acknowledging the New Wave's "energy, high talent and dedication", and stating that it "may in fact be the shape of tomorrow's science fiction generally — hell, it may be the shape of today's science fiction", as examples of the fashion Budrys much preferred Zelazny's This Immortal to Thomas Disch's The Genocides. Predicting that Zelazny's career would be more important and lasting than Disch's, he described the latter's book as "unflaggingly derivative of" the New Wave and filled with "dumb, resigned victims" who "run, hide, slither, grope and die", like Ballard's The Drowned World but unlike The Moon is a Harsh Mistress ("about people who do something about their troubles").[63] Writing in The Dreams Our Stuff Is Made Of, Disch observed that "Literary movements tend to be compounded, in various proportions, of the genius of two or three genuinely original talents, some few other capable or established writers who have been co-opted or gone along for the ride, the apprentice work of epigones and wannabes, and a great deal of hype. My sense of the New Wave, with twenty-five years of hindsight, is that its irreducible nucleus was the dyad of J. G. Ballard and Michael Moorcock..."[64]: 105
Authors and works
[edit]
The New Wave was not a formal organization with a fixed membership. Thomas M. Disch, for instance, rejected his association with some other New Wave authors.[65]:425 Nonetheless, it is possible to associate specific authors and works, especially anthologies, with the fashion. Michael Moorcock, J. G. Ballard, and Brian Aldiss are considered principal writers of the New Wave.[11] Judith Merril's annual anthologies (1957–1968[66]) "were the first heralds of the coming of the [New Wave] cult,"[20]:105 and Damon Knight's Orbit series and Harlan Ellison's Dangerous Visions featured American writers inspired by British writers as well as British authors.[39] Among the stories Ellison printed in Dangerous Visions were Philip José Farmer's Riders of the Purple Wage, Norman Spinrad's "Carcinoma Angels", Samuel R. Delany's "Aye, and Gomorrah" and stories by Brian Aldiss, J. G. Ballard, John Brunner, David R. Bunch, Philip K. Dick, Sonya Dorman, Carol Emshwiller, John Sladek, Theodore Sturgeon, and Roger Zelazny.[39]
Alfred Bester was championed by New Wave writers and is seen as a major influence.[16][67] Thomas M. Disch's work is associated with the New Wave, and The Genocides has been seen as emblematic of the genre, as has the 1971 Disch anthology of eco-catastrophe stories The Ruins of Earth.[14] Critic John Clute wrote of M. John Harrison's early writing that it "...reveals its New-Wave provenance in narrative discontinuities and subheads after the fashion of J. G. Ballard".[68]
Brian Aldiss's Barefoot in the Head (1969) and Norman Spinrad's No Direction Home (1971) are seen as illustrative of the effect of the drug culture, especially psychedelics, on New Wave.[11] On the topic of entropy, Ballard provided "an explicitly cosmological vision of entropic decline of the universe" in "The Voices of Time", which provided a typology of ideas that subsequent New Wave writers developed in different contexts, with one of the best instances being Pamela Zoline's "The Heat Death of the Universe".[42]: 158 Like other writers for New Worlds, Zoline used "science-fictional and scientific language and imagery to describe perfectly 'ordinary' scenes of life", and by doing so produced "altered perceptions of reality in the reader".[21] New Wave works engaging with utopia, gender, and sexuality include Ursula K. Le Guin's The Left Hand of Darkness (1969), Joanna Russ's The Female Man (1975), and Marge Piercy's Woman on the Edge of Time (1976).[11]:82-85 In Robert Silverberg's story The Man in the Maze, in a reversal typical of the New Wave, Silverberg portrays a disabled man using an alien labyrinthine city to reject abled society.[69] Samuel R. Delany's Babel-17 (1966) provides an example of a New Wave work engaging with Sapir-Whorfian linguistic relativity, as does Ian Watson's The Embedding (1973).[11]:86-87
Two examples of New Wave writers using utopia as a theme are Ursula K. Le Guin's The Dispossessed: An Ambiguous Utopia (1974) and Samuel R. Delany's Trouble on Triton: An Ambiguous Heterotopia (1976),[11]:74-80 while John Brunner is a primary exponent of dystopian New Wave science fiction.[70]
Examples of modernism in New Wave include Philip José Farmer's Joycean Riders of the Purple Wage (1967), John Brunner's Stand on Zanzibar (1968), which is written in the style of John Don Passos's U.S.A. trilogy (1930–1936), and Thomas Disch's Camp Concentration, which includes a stream of literary references, including to Thomas Mann.[11]:61-62 The influence of postmodernism in New Wave can be seen in Brian Aldiss's Report on Probability A, Philip K. Dick's Ubik, J. G. Ballard's collection The Atrocity Exhibition, and Samuel R. Delany's Dhalgren and Triton.[11]:66-67
The majority of stories in Ben Bova's The Best of the Nebulas, such as Roger Zelazny's "A Rose for Ecclesiastes", are considered as being by New Wave writers or as involving New Wave techniques.[19] The Martian Time-Slip (1964) and other works by Philip K. Dick are viewed as New Wave.[11]
Brian Aldiss, Harlan Ellison, Robert Silverberg, Norman Spinrad, and Roger Zelazny are writers whose work, though not necessarily considered New Wave at the time of publication, later became associated with the term.[71][page needed] Of later authors, some of the work of Joanna Russ is considered to bear stylistic resemblance to New Wave.[72][73]
See also
[edit]
Avant-Pop
Cyberpunk
Feminist science fiction
The Golden Age of Science Fiction
Interstitial Fiction
Mundane science fiction
Pulp fiction
Slipstream
Transrealism
Explanatory notes
[edit]
References
[edit]
Clute, John; Nicholls, Peter (1999). The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction (2nd ed.). Orbit. ISBN 1-85723-897-4.
Further reading
[edit]
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Dangerous Minds is a compendium of the new and strange-new ideas, new art forms, new approaches to social issues and new finds from the outer reaches of pop culture. Our editorial policy, such that it is, reflects the interests, whimsies and peculiarities of the individual writers. We are your favorite distraction.
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First of all, let’s face it, there is no way to overestimate Ministry’s influence on rock ‘n’ roll. For one brief moment in time (let’s say 1988), they were the heaviest band on the planet, and they are clearly the greatest industrial-rock band of all time (unless you include fire tricks, then obviously Rammstein). And probably the best part about it is that they’ve been shepherded for the past thirty-something years by a complete maniac.
“God, I hate that guy. And he owes me an ass-fuck.”
- Al Jourgensen on Robert Plant
Frontman/chief-strategist/visionary Al Jourgensen started Ministry in Chicago in 1981. Originally they were a soppy synth-pop band (see 1983’s With Sympathy album, still a dancefloor fave among less sociopathic new-wavers), but as the 80s wore on, the drugs and the guitars and the psychiatric disorders took hold and by 1987’s Land of Rape and Honey album, the sound and vision had evolved into an ear-bleeding digital acid-metal nightmare. Shows became war zones. The band ushered in the 90s with hardcore sex and violence and enough Marshall stacks to topple the New World Order. Throughout it all, Jourgensen crawled through the muck of his own tortured psyche, drowning his psychosis with more psychosis in an endless orgy of sex, drugs and debauchery. And in 2013, he spilled the beans in a tell-all autobio, The Lost Gospels According to Al Jourgensen, that would swear even the most hardened drug enthusiast into a life of quiet sobriety. I mean, this is how the goddamn book starts:
“All that came out of me was blood, and there was so much pouring out of my dick and asshole that I started to panic. I didn’t want the toilet to overflow, so I took off the helmet, held it to my ass, and let the blood pour in there. I fell off the toilet and I tried to put the helmet back on, and about twelve ounces of blood matted down my hair and ran down my face, pooling with the blood that was dribbling out of my face and nose.”
A Young Al Jourgensen (with Stephen “Stevo” George) in his pre-pissing blood pretty boy days
Given that audacious opener, you may be expecting a redemption story. Well, he eventually gets his teeth fixed, but that’s about it. Mostly it’s just full-tilt gonzo, all the time. Just ask Butthole Surfers’ megaphone abuser Gibby Haynes, who is no stranger to bad craziness himself. Touring with Ministry was heavy even for him.
“I had never really done that, where it was girls, hotel rooms, girls, blowjobs. There were so many girls and so many drugs, so much nudity. I was lying on the floor, and Al glanced over at me and went, ‘Nice cock, Haynes.’ I was like, ‘Aw man, no one’s ever told me that before.’ That’s so sweet. It might not be true, but it’s nice to hear.”
Hayne is not exaggerating, either. There’s an incredible amount of really weird, gross group sex on display in this book, most of it involving Jourgensen, it being his autobiography and all.
“One night I fucked a paraplegic chick in a wheelchair. I think she had Parkinson’s. So she’s blowing a guy in our crew and I’m fucking her. She’s wearing a colostomy bag, and I was naturally curious. I stopped fucking her for a second and I started squeezing the bag back into her.”
And as soon as the fucking is over, the drugs, booze, paranoia and craziness starts back up. And it’s not just Jourgensen. Most of his cohorts are just as nuts. Here’s a snapshot from the book of life with Pigface/Ministry singer Chris Connolly:
“One day Chris comes running over, sweating and all freaked out, saying skinheads attacked him. I grabbed some pepper spray and a baseball bat; I didn’t have a gun back then. I go running outside to confront these skinheads who harassed my new vocalist. It was two ten-year-olds on their bikes. I asked him, ‘is that what harassed you?’ And he said yeah. I was like, “They’re ten-year-olds with tennis rackets. I don’t waste pepper spray on ten-year-olds.”
El Duce, only just slightly more epically fucked than the guy from Ministry
He also spent more time with Mentors’ frontman El Duce than anybody in their right mind would.
“A couple of times he passed out in the aisle of the drugstore after stealing mouthwash. They’d arrest him and then we’d have to bail him out for being drunk in Walgreens. You can’t tell me that’s not cool, man.”
S’pose not!
What does this man have in common with Al Jourgensen? It might not be the first thing that comes to mind…
More after the jump…
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If you’re at all aware of comic books history, Jack Kirby needs no introduction. As one of the founding visionaries at Marvel in the 1960s, Kirby’s vital storytelling skills and phenomenal visual energy helped make the X-Men, the Hulk, and the Fantastic Four household names.
A few months ago we drew your attention to a never-published project of Kirby’s, his adaptation of The Prisoner, the dystopic British TV series starring and co-created by Patrick McGoohan. Today we have a similar treat, one of the very few fully realized stories by Kirby that has never been collected in book form—his mid-1970s adaptation of 2001: A Space Odyssey, originally a short story by Arthur C. Clarke called “The Sentinel” and later a movie directed by Stanley Kubrick.
The movie came out in 1968, but Kirby’s adaptation had to wait until 1976. We can regard that gap as a kind of marker for Kirby’s strong desire to adapt the story even though there may have been little commercial interest in it. Kirby first adapted the movie as a standalone book of 70 pages, and then proceeded to recapitulate the movie’s plot and themes over and over again across 10 issues—except this time with scary aliens with tentacles that have nothing to do with Kubrick’s movie. The resolution of that 10-issue run is a character who is actually oddly resonant with our own times, a human-A.I. hybrid called Machine Man, whose own comic book line, which picked up where 2001: A Space Odyssey left off, lasted for a few months. The character would be fitfully resurrected every ten years or so (1984, 1999).
Remarkably, Machine Man was eventually made a part of the Avengers, so it’s an accurate statement to say that the Avengers has the DNA of Kubrick and Clarke in it—and for that matter Friedrich Nietzsche, who is never far from my thoughts whenever I watch Kubrick’s masterpiece.
Kirby’s adaptation of the movie was wildly rethought for the medium of comics. His palette is all over the place, departing vastly from Kubrick’s more stately blacks, whites, and reds. And the action of course is tuned to the entertainment value of a typical 10-year-old rather than a stoned college student—this is echoed in the cover promise that “The Ultimate Trip” would become “The Ultimate Illustrated Adventure!” Kirby dispenses with the three (highly Nietzschean) sections of the movie (“The Dawn of Man,” “Mission to Jupiter,” and “Jupiter and Beyond the Infinite”) with four more hyperbolic sections of his own, which are replete with exclamation points:
Part I: The Saga of Moonwatcher the Man-Ape!
Part II: Year 2001: The Thing on the Moon!
Part III: Ahead Lie the Planets
Part IV: The Dimension Trip!
Kirby’s fans are said not to be fond of his 2001: A Space Odyssey, but I must say I like it. It’s got not that much to do with Kubrick but that just makes it all the more interesting.
In Kirby’s telling, the so-called “Starchild” infant of the movie’s finale is reconcieved as “The New Seed.” In the feature hilariously called “Monolith Mail” reserved for reader correspondence, Kirby noted of this element:
The New Seed is the conquering hero in this latest Marvel drama. Why? Because he has staying power, that’s why. He will always be there in the story’s final moments to taunt us with the question we shall never answer. The little shaver is, perhaps, the embodiment of our own hopes in a world which daily makes us more than a bit uneasy about the future ... in the meager space devoted to his appearance, he brightens our hopes considerably. He is a comforting visual, almost tangible reminder that the future is not yet up for grabs. And wherever his journey takes him matters not one whit to this writer. The mere fact that the chances of his making it are still good is the comforting thought.
Some sample images from Kirby’s 2001: A Space Odyssey:
More images from Kirby’s 2001: A Space Odyssey after the jump:
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There’s always been a tension between the childlike DayGlo images of Keith Haring and the artist’s transgressive, libido-friendly, street-art-scrawling queer politics. Is Haring’s art meant for children or adults? Well, both, really—depending. As the politically charged 1980s recede from memory, the specific political stakes of his art likewise fade; in our post-Internet age it might be the case that your tween niece or nephew isn’t all that discomfited by the cartoonish image of a spurting penis anyway. It’s emblematic of Haring’s art (and marketing savvy) that the most famous image of the era’s most famous gay artist depicts an adorable crawling infant (actual title: “Radiant Baby”).
In any case, in most of his catalogue the two sides, the innocent and the profane, operate together. As a world-famous artist, Haring had an acute understanding of context, and he knew perfectly well when to retract his scarier tendencies and when to let them frolic, as in the decidedly NSFW images he used in his public work at the LGBT Center on 13th Street in New York’s Greenwich Village, as an example. And in some venues, Haring also knew how to keep it clean and even—egad—kid-friendly.
Haring’s coloring books are a case in point. Any one of us can go to Amazon and purchase The Keith Haring Coloring Book and we’d still have enough left over from a $10 bill left over for a slice and a soda (if you happen to live in Haring’s hometown, that is). I haven’t seen the inside of that product, but based on the cover it’s very likely that that book started out as a private project, self-published in small batches in 1986.
Today, exemplars from the original run are rather difficult to come by. When they do pop up at auction houses under its more formal name 20 Lithographs (Coloring Book), you’d end up paying $800-$1200 for one of them.
Most of us would be happier with the slice of pizza and the one you can feel safe actually defacing with crayons, amirite?
Here are a few images from 20 Lithographs, including the cover, which is slightly different from the retail product available on Amazon. Interestingly, the book is also a counting book—every image features one of the numbers from 1 to 19, with some element (legs, eyes, stars, etc.) featured in the stated amount. You can see the entire set of images here.
More after the jump…
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Unless you’re a fan of Barbra Streisand movies, then the name Billy Rose probably won’t mean much. Billy Rose was a legendary Broadway impresario and songwriter—now best known for such show tunes as “Paper Moon” and “Me and My Shadow.” If you like la Streisand then you’ll know James Caan played Billy Rose to Barbra’s star comedian Fanny Brice in the hit movie Funny Lady. Billy Rose and Fanny Brice were for a time married. They were a celebrity couple like Brangelina or Beyonce and Jay Z.
That Billy Rose isn’t so well known today just goes to show how being a celebrity don’t mean shit in the long run. We might remember his songs, maybe even read about his stage shows, but we don’t care about the man. What is remembered are those people of exceptional talents who change everything.
Salvador Dali was such a talent.
Dali was talented and prolific. So prolific that he produced posters for the Communist Party the same decade he designed the window displays for Bonwit Teller in New York. Everything was open to the Dali treatment.
However, some possibly more green-eyed individuals thought Dali was only after one thing. His fellow Surrealist André Breton gave Dali the nickname “Avida Dollars.” The name was an anagram of Salvador Dali and was intended as a damning insult. The Surrealists thought Dali was only interested in money. Avida Dollars was a phonetic rendering of the French phrase “avide à dollars” which means “eager for dollars.”
It was Billy Rose who helped the Dali stage his “Dream of Venus” exhibit at the World’s Fair in 1939. This started an unlikely friendship between Dali and the showman known as the “Basement Belasco” and the “Bantam Barnum.”
Dali was so enamored with his new Broadway buddy he gave Billy a series of paintings titled “The Seven Lively Arts.” When these were later lost in a fire at Billy’s home, Dali replaced the work with a new painting called “Rock ‘n’ Roll” in 1956. That’s how tight these two were at one point.
Of course, Dali was shrewd enough to know giving paintings to a big impresario like Billy Rose would establish his name among the celebrity and monied social circuit and bring himeven more fame and success.
In 1948, Dali supplied a series of beautiful ink illustrations for Rose’s autobiography Wine, Women & Words. Rose was like a character out of a Damon Runyon story written by Raymond Chandler. Here’s how Rose opens his autobiography:
I was born the night President McKinley was shot, and a lot of fellows around Broadway will tell you they shot the wrong man.
The coming-out party took place on a kitchen table in a tenement on the lower East Side. When my mother first saw me, she prophesied, “Some day he’ll be President.” My father looked at me and said, “He’s all right, I guess, but what we really needed was an icebox.”
Yet this mix of showbiz wiseguy and Surrealist genius actually worked.
Each chapter in the book had its own illustration—with one (“Poor Eleanor Knows Them by Heart”) having two. Each focussing on some key moment or anecdote from Rose’s career. There was also quite a lot on his relationship with his then wife Eleanor Holm—the woman he left Fanny Brice for—who had been a star of his swimming extravaganza Aquacade at the World’s Fair of 1939.
Billy Rose.
“Look, Ma, I’m Writing.”
More after the jump…
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“Fainting.”
Volumes of vintage erotica are wasted on academics. Just think how many beautiful books filled with lusty, erotic engravings are moldering away under lock and key in some dark, dusty archive. They’re not for our eyes of course but rather for those of a disinterested professor or an ambitious Ph.D. student looking to reinterpret ancient sex manuals from a post-feminist, non-binary, neo-hermetic viewpoint.
Knowledge is power. Having access to knowledge makes us powerful. In the same way, memory can help define who we are, ye olde books can help us understand who we were. That’s probably why I sometimes begrudge all those wonderful books being kept from our grubby little paws—though in truth admit we must have our gatekeepers.
However, thankfully, there are those good people at the Wellcome Library who understand knowledge of the past helps us navigate the present. The Wellcome Library is one of my favorite websites. It is crammed with the most delightful and mind-expanding books, documents and artworks—which these good people have scanned and put online for our edification.
One day browsing through diseases and alike, I chanced upon a fine volume entitled Invocation à l’amour. Chant philosophique published in France in 1825. This is a “rare” and beautiful book containing a long poem celebrating sex and all the various sexual positions. The poem is a literal invocation calling on God the “Father of the human race and of pleasure, Love, come fill me with your divinity. So that from your transports I may render the ecstasies…”
It then goes on to “invoke the nine sisters of Apollo” to ensure everything “follows the supreme law” of well… I guess you’d call it S.E.X. Jane Austen was never like this. But it’s fascinating to find such an early paean to sex and sexuality—which also gives the lie to that hoary old chestnut sex was invented in the swinging sixties by the baby boomers….
It’s a strange and fiery poem which could do with a more nuanced translation than the one offered by Google. But if so inclined, you can read the original text by “A virtuoso of the good fashion” here.
Aside from the sex magick poetry, this slim red-leathered volume has some stunning illustrations. We don’t know who the artist was of these highly explicit engravings but we can at least admire their artistry, imagination and humor.
“The happy calculation.”
“The charms of masturbation.”
More illustrations from ‘Invocation à l’amour,’ after the jump…
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Taking Tiger Mountain is a strange film with an even stranger back story. It all began in 1974 when thirtysomething filmmaker Kent Smith saved up enough dough from making educational shorts to go off and produce his dream first feature. The folly of many first-time directors is knowing when to curb their ambitions. Smith was certainly ambitious—maybe overly so. He had an idea to make a kinda art house movie set in Tangiers—something inspired by Albert Camus’ novella The Stranger. There was no script, just a poem Smith had written on the kidnapping in 1973 of sixteen-year-old John Paul Getty—heir to the Getty oil fortune. Smith thought of his poem as the film’s framework. Add in a touch of Jean-Luc Godard and hint of Fellini and his debut feature was gonna be just peachy.
So, Smith had ambition—check. A basic storyline—check. And a nineteen-year-old actor by the name of Bill Paxton. Check.
Paxton was a hunk. A pin-up. The type of young actor who had I’m gonna be a big movie star pumping out of his pores. He had the looks, the demeanor and the talent. He was also fearless—as anyone would have to be if they were going to hook-up with Smith on a madcap movie-making adventure.
They packed their bags, leased some Arriflex Techniscope equipment and headed off to France. On arrival at Charles de Gaulle airport in Paris, they discovered that their equipment had been lost in transit. It was the first of several small obstacles that eventually turned the film onto a different course. When the pair were eventually reunited with their equipment, they hired a car and headed for Spain. But the roads were like parking lots—gridlocked with holidaymakers on their way south to the coast. Eventually after a long, slow, infuriating drive, they made it to the ferry terminal and waited for the first ferry to take them across the waters to Tangiers.
As Paxton told Variety in 2015:
We got to Tangiers around midnight, and all of our equipment was impounded because we hadn’t paid the baksheesh. We got out in about 48 hours, and my attitude was “What the f–k?” I remembered I knew someone in South Wales when I was a foreign exchange student, so we drove there, and that’s where we shot the film.
A young Bill Paxton as seen in the film.
Paxton and Smith traveled back up through Spain and France to England and then to Wales where things got “even crazier.”
We had purchased black-and-white short ends (film stock) from the film Lenny, and we sort of shot things as we came across them.
One guy had a Kenyan vulture, so we used that for a scene of eating my entrails. We met some girls and talked them into doing some nude scenes with us.
Basically it was a bunch of hippies running around naked. It was all silent, black-and-white footage.
They shot ten hours of footage—but what the hell to do with it all? They returned to the States. Paxton began making inroads into big screen movies, while Smith sat with his rushes wondering how to make a movie out of it.
In 1975, Smith showed the footage to a student at the University of Texas called Tom Huckabee. Nothing happened until Smith relinquished the rushes over to Huckabee in 1979. That’s when Huckabee started logging and assembling the ten hour’s worth of material together as he explained to Beatdom:
I started building scenes using the script they had which was loosely based on the J. Paul Getty kidnapping. There was no sci-fi element, no assassination, no prostitution, no feminism, or brainwashing. It was a dream film about a young American waking up on a train – with amnesia, maybe – who wanders into a Welsh town, meets a lot of people, has adventures, bad dreams, and then gets killed on the beach, or does he?
Once I had assembled all their footage into what seemed like a narrative flow, I started thinking about what the story could be. I didn’t like their story much, it was too languid for me, disconnected, but mostly they had only shot half of it and I knew I couldn’t go back to Wales. I’d been reading Burroughs and a lot of other avant-garde, transgressive, and erotic literature. Story of the Eye was a big influence. I started reading The Job. I got the idea that he was an assassin… and maybe the idea to set it in the future.
Huckabee’s friends were all chucking in their two cents’ worth. A “mysterious guy named Ray Layton” had “the idea to make it about feminist terrorists brainwashing Billy…. and the prostitution camps.” Then Huckabee read William Burroughs’ novella Blade Runner (a movie) and the whole thing began to take shape in his mind.
I lucked into finding a backer who promised $30,000, and that’s when it got real. I remembered seeing another short film that Kent and Bill had made; a thinly veiled homoerotic portrait of Bill, called D’Artagnan. I thought it could be used to represent Billy’s brainwashing. By then I’d acquired the MKUltra transcripts and was heavily into The Job.
Huckabee approached Burroughs and obtained his permission to adapt Blade Runner into his movie. This was now the early 1980s, Ridley Scott was making a movie version of Philip K. Dick’s cult sci-fi book Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? Scott had also approached Burroughs to buy his title Blade Runner for his movie.
It took at least a year to write the script to conform to the footage, which by the way was 60 minutes. I knew I needed 75 min. minimum for it to be a feature. So I built five minutes of dream sequences out of outtakes, including one where I threw the film in the air and put it together as it came down – cheating a lot.
I should mention that I was fairly regularly during this time, maybe once every one or two months, on acid, mushrooms, and baby woodrose seeds… this, added with all the experimental film I was seeing, and avant-garde and erotic and left wing and feminist political literature I was reading, kept my mind open to outré thematic and formal tropes… so, say, if a scene wasn’t working I could always run it upside down and backwards… Also by then I was thoroughly versed in MKUltra brainwashing, psychic warfare, so in that respect I think I was getting a lot of that independently from Burroughs, maybe from the same source he was getting it.
Then I wrote the opening scene and shot it… and started dubbing in dialogue. I forgot to mention Woody Allen’s Tiger Lilly as an influence. First I hired a lip reader to tell me what the characters were saying and many of them were speaking Welsh.
Huckabee finished his film. Now called Taking Tiger Mountain—the title lifted from a Chinese opera—it was released in 1983. The film was described as a “unique sensory experience.” Set the near future Taking Tiger Mountain follows Paxton as:
Billy Hampton, a Texan who [has] fled from occupied America to British island in order to avoid compulsory military service. Once there, he [is] abducted by a group of sophisticated feminist terrorists, who have been opposing the oldest profession [prostitution] legalization, creating assassins by brainwashing and then setting them on the prostitution camps leaders. (They also specialize in redirecting sexual orientation and sex change operations.)
At the start of the film:
[A] quartet of middle-aged women analyze Billy and persuade him to believe that an aging major is actually a tiger sent by God to kill him. That prologue is a combination of sequences with Huckabee’s signature and those from a short film that Smith and Paxton had been working on prior to their arrival to Wales. What follows could be described as a sporadically wet psychotropic nightmare, with hypnotic soundtrack composed of gloomy drones, overdubbed dialogues, confusing monologues and omnipresent radio announcements about the war [and its] aftermath and the use of thermonuclear weapons on the United States…
More ‘Taking Tiger Mountain’ after the jump…
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Shirley Jackson’s short story, “The Lottery,” appeared in the June 26, 1948, issue of The New Yorker. The response to the fictional piece, which concerns a small-town tradition that ends in horrific violence, was profoundly negative. While many were dumbfounded by Jackson’s story, others were deeply disturbed. Here’s one such response: “I read it while soaking in the tub…and was tempted to put my head underwater and end it all.” Readers were shaken and outraged by it—even Jackson’s own parents let her know they didn’t like the piece. In all, the author received over 300 letters about “The Lottery”; only thirteen were positive. But what was the moral of the story? Thoughtless conformity can lead to cold-blooded killing? Ordinary people are capable of committing unspeakable atrocities? Cruelty is random? In July 1948, Jackson explained what she was trying to convey.
I suppose I hoped, by setting a particularly brutal ancient rite in the present and in my own village, to shock the story’s readers with a graphic dramatization of the pointless violence and general inhumanity in their own lives.
Two decades later, a film adaption of “The Lottery” was produced by the Encyclopedia Britannica Educational Corporation. The 1969 short went on to become one of the bestselling educational films of all time.
I first saw The Lottery in a middle school English class, and was around twelve years old. I was wholly unfamiliar with Shirley Jackson’s story, and as my teacher didn’t introduce the film, I was completely unprepared for what I was about to see. During the final moments, the matter of fact nature of the violence was so shocking…I mean, I was stunned. STUNNED. When the film ended, so did class, and I have no memory of talking to anyone about the film. What I do remember is that I had gym next, and vividly recall sitting on a bench in the boy’s locker room, dazed and shell-shocked, trying to make sense of it all. The Lottery scared the shit out of me, and I’ve never forgotten that moment. Thanks to the Internet, I know now I wasn’t the only one so strongly affected by it.
I never read the short story, so watching this short film was a true shocker for me. Like many other people, I saw this in my English class a long time ago, and since then, I still haven’t seen it. But I still remember that time; it really stays with you. I remember everyone in my class with their jaws dropping, we couldn’t believe it. (IMDb user review)
More after the jump…
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The revolution started on February 17, 1913, when four thousand members of the American public were confronted by the work of a group of European artists exhibited at the 69th Regiment Armory on Lexington Avenue, New York. The shock of this cultural invasion, called the Armory Show, claimed many. Some laughed. Some fumed. Some had an attack of the vapors. There were even those who felt their senses had (somehow) been physically assaulted by the canvases painted by artists like Vincent Van Gogh, Paul Cezanne, Henri Matisse, Pablo Picasso and in particular Marcel Duchamp whose Nude Descending a Staircase No. 2 proved to be the most sensational exhibit on display. This, many critics and members of the public claimed, was not art, it was mere childlike daubing. It was anarchy.
When the exhibition arrived in Chicago, the Illinois Legislative Investigators probed “the Moral Tone of the Much Touted Art” over its “many indecent canvasses and sculptures.” When a third city Boston capitulated to the exhibition later that year, Modernism had arrived in America and nothing would ever be the same.
Press respond to the Armory Show from 1913.
While some welcomed this cultural shift, there were many who clung to the security of the old order of classical art. In 1913, writer Mary Chase Mills Lyall (1879-1963) and illustrator Earl Harvey Lyall (1877-1932) produced an ABC book—intended for both adults and children—which poked fun at this strange new art. Their book The Cubies featured three ultra-modern, triangular figures of indeterminate sex who “moon over anything Cubist and scorn objectivity.” They owed their “incubation” to the Association of American Painters and Sculptors who had organized the Armory Show. Together these three characters lead the reader through their modernist manifesto of art:
A is for Art in the Cubies’ domain–
(Not the Art of the Ancients, brand-new are the Cubies.)
Archipenko’s their guide, Anatomics their bane;
They’re the joy of the mad, the despair of the sane,
(With their emerald hair and their eyes red as rubies.)
—A is for Art in the Cubies’ domain.
B is for beauty as Brancusi viewed it. C is for “Color Cubistic” where artists are advised to throw paint on a canvas and then exhibit it. D is for Duchamp “the Deep-Dyed Deceiver.” And so on and so on.
Their intention was to belittle and to deride the pernicious influence of this “shock of the new.” What happened next to this husband and wife team is unimportant. It was how America’s artists responded to the challenge set by the Armory Show that mattered. Artists responded not with a hankering for the past but with radical imagination and innovation which placed the United States at the center of Modern Art for the next sixty years.
Read the rest of ‘The Cubies,’ after the jump…
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J.G. Ballard Books In Order
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[
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] | null |
[
"Editorial"
] |
2022-03-24T20:23:12-07:00
|
The fascinating, and largely autobiographical, sequel to J G Ballard's prize winning 'Empire of the Sun', that follows Jim to post war England. 'The Kindness
|
en
|
Books In Order
|
https://www.addall.com/books-in-order/j-g-ballard/
|
Empire Of The Sun Books In Publication Order
Standalone Novels In Publication Order
Short Stories/Novellas In Publication Order
Collections In Publication Order
Non-Fiction Books In Publication Order
Mervyn Peake Collections In Publication Order
Anthologies In Publication Order
Empire Of The Sun Book Covers
Standalone Novels Book Covers
Short Stories/Novellas Book Covers
Collections Book Covers
Non-Fiction Book Covers
Mervyn Peake Collections Book Covers
Anthologies Book Covers
J.G. Ballard Books Overview
Related Authors
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wrong_mix_random_publicationDate_00046
|
FactBench
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1
| 13
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https://internationaltimes.it/william-s-burroughs-the-art-of-fiction/
|
en
|
William S. Burroughs, The Art of Fiction
|
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[] |
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[
""
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[] | null |
en
|
/favicon.ico
|
https://internationaltimes.it/william-s-burroughs-the-art-of-fiction/
|
Firecrackers and whistles sounded the advent of the New Year of 1965 in St. Louis. Stripteasers ran from the bars in Gaslight Square to dance in the street when midnight came. Burroughs, who had watched television alone that night, was asleep in his room at the Chase Park Plaza Hotel, St. Louis’s most elegant.
At noon the next day he was ready for the interview. He wore a gray lightweight Brooks Brothers suit with a vest, a blue-striped shirt from Gibraltar cut in the English style, and a deep-blue tie with small white polka dots. His manner was not so much pedagogic as didactic or forensic. He might have been a senior partner in a private bank, charting the course of huge but anonymous fortunes. A friend of the interviewer, spotting Burroughs across the lobby, thought he was a British diplomat. At the age of fifty, he is trim; he performs a complex abdominal exercise daily and walks a good deal. His face carries no excess flesh. His expression is taut, and his features are intense and chiseled. He did not smile during the interview and laughed only once, but he gives the impression of being capable of much dry laughter under other circumstances. His voice is sonorous, its tone reasonable and patient; his accent is mid-Atlantic, the kind of regionless inflection Americans acquire after many years abroad. He speaks elliptically, in short, clear bursts.
On the dresser of his room sat a European transistor radio; several science fiction paperbacks; Romance, by Joseph Conrad and Ford Madox Ford; The Day Lincoln Was Shot, by Jim Bishop; and Ghosts in American Houses, by James Reynolds. A Zeiss Ikon camera in a scuffed leather case lay on one of the twin beds beside a copy of Field & Stream. On the other bed were a pair of long shears, clippings from newspaper society pages, photographs, and a scrapbook. A Facit portable typewriter sat on the desk, and gradually one became aware that the room, although neat, contained a great deal of paper.
Burroughs smoked incessantly, alternating between a box of English Ovals and a box of Benson & Hedges. As the interview progressed, the room filled with smoke. He opened the window. The temperature outside was seventy degrees, the warmest New Year’s Day in St. Louis’s history; a yellow jacket flew in and settled on the pane. The bright afternoon deepened. The faint cries of children rose up from the broad brick alleys in which Burroughs had played as a boy.
INTERVIEWER
You grew up here?
WILLIAM S. BURROUGHS
Yes. I went to John Burroughs School and the Taylor School, and was out West for a bit, and then went to Harvard.
INTERVIEWER
Any relation to the adding-machine firm?
BURROUGHS
My grandfather. You see, he didn’t exactly invent the adding machine, but he invented the gimmick that made it work, namely, a cylinder full of oil and a perforated piston that will always move up and down at the same rate of speed. Very simple principle, like most inventions. And it gave me a little money, not much, but a little.
INTERVIEWER
What did you do at Harvard?
BURROUGHS
Studied English lit. John Livingston Lowes. Whiting. I sat in on Kittredge’s course. Those are the main people I recall. I lived in Adams House and then I got fed up with the food and I moved to Claverly Hall, where I lived the last two years. I didn’t do any writing in college.
INTERVIEWER
When and why did you start to write?
BURROUGHS
I started to write in about 1950; I was thirty-five at the time; there didn’t seem to be any strong motivation. I simply was endeavoring to put down in a more or less straightforward journalistic style something about my experiences with addiction and addicts.
INTERVIEWER
Why did you feel compelled to record these experiences?
BURROUGHS
I didn’t feel compelled. I had nothing else to do. Writing gave me something to do every day. I don’t feel the results were at all spectacular. Junky is not much of a book, actually. I knew very little about writing at that time.
INTERVIEWER
Where was this?
BURROUGHS
In Mexico City. I was living near Sears, Roebuck, right around the corner from the University of Mexico. I had been in the army four or five months and I was there on the GI Bill, studying native dialects. I went to Mexico partly because things were becoming so difficult with the drug situation in America. Getting drugs in Mexico was quite easy, so I didn’t have to rush around, and there wasn’t any pressure from the law.
INTERVIEWER
Why did you start taking drugs?
BURROUGHS
Well, I was just bored. I didn’t seem to have much interest in becoming a successful advertising executive or whatever, or living the kind of life Harvard designs for you. After I became addicted in New York in 1944, things began to happen. I got in some trouble with the law, got married, moved to New Orleans, and then went to Mexico.
INTERVIEWER
There seems to be a great deal of middle-class voyeurism in this country concerning addiction, and in the literary world, downright reverence for the addict. You apparently don’t share these points of view.
BURROUGHS
No, most of it is nonsense. I think drugs are interesting principally as chemical means of altering metabolism and thereby altering what we call reality, which I would define as a more or less constant scanning pattern.
INTERVIEWER
What do you think of the hallucinogens and the new psychedelic drugs—LSD-25?
BURROUGHS
I think they’re extremely dangerous, much more dangerous than heroin. They can produce overwhelming anxiety states. I’ve seen people try to throw themselves out of windows; whereas the heroin addict is mainly interested in staring at his own toe. Other than deprivation of the drug, the main threat to him is an overdose. I’ve tried most of the hallucinogens without an anxiety reaction, fortunately. LSD-25 produced results for me similar to mescaline. Like all hallucinogens, LSD gave me an increased awareness, more a hallucinated viewpoint than any actual hallucination. You might look at a doorknob and it will appear to revolve, although you are conscious that this is the result of the drug. Also, van Goghish colors, with all those swirls, and the crackle of the universe.
INTERVIEWER
Have you read Henri Michaux’s book on mescaline?
BURROUGHS
His idea was to go into his room and close the door and hold in the experiences. I had my most interesting experiences with mescaline when I got outdoors and walked around—colors, sunsets, gardens. It produces a terrible hangover, though, nasty stuff. It makes one ill and interferes with coordination. I’ve had all the interesting effects I need, and I don’t want any repetition of those extremely unpleasant physical reactions.
INTERVIEWER
The visions of drugs and the visions of art don’t mix?
BURROUGHS
Never. The hallucinogens produce visionary states, sort of, but morphine and its derivatives decrease awareness of inner processes, thoughts, and feelings. They are painkillers, pure and simple. They are absolutely contraindicated for creative work, and I include in the lot alcohol, morphine, barbiturates, tranquilizers—the whole spectrum of sedative drugs. As for visions and heroin, I had a hallucinatory period at the very beginning of addiction, for instance, a sense of moving at high speed through space. But as soon as addiction was established, I had no visions—vision—at all and very few dreams.
INTERVIEWER
Why did you stop taking drugs?
BURROUGHS
I was living in Tangier in 1957, and I had spent a month in a tiny room in the Casbah staring at the toe of my foot. The room had filled up with empty Eukodol cartons; I suddenly realized I was not doing anything. I was dying. I was just apt to be finished. So I flew to London and turned myself over to Dr. John Yerbury Dent for treatment. I’d heard of his success with the apomorphine treatment. Apomorphine is simply morphine boiled in hydrochloric acid; it’s nonaddictive. What the apomorphine did was to regulate my metabolism. It’s a metabolic regulator. It cured me physiologically. I’d already taken the cure once at Lexington, and although I was off drugs when I got out, there was a physiological residue. Apomorphine eliminated that. I’ve been trying to get people in this country interested in it, but without much luck. The vast majority—social workers, doctors—have the cop’s mentality toward addiction. A probation officer in California wrote me recently to inquire about the apomorphine treatment. I’ll answer him at length. I always answer letters like that.
INTERVIEWER
Have you had any relapses?
BURROUGHS
Yes, a couple. Short. Both were straightened out with apomorphine, and now heroin is no temptation for me. I’m just not interested. I’ve seen a lot of it around. I know people who are addicts. I don’t have to use any willpower. Dr. Dent always said there is no such thing as willpower. You’ve got to reach a state of mind in which you don’t want it or need it.
INTERVIEWER
You regard addiction as an illness but also a central human fact, a drama?
BURROUGHS
Both, absolutely. It’s as simple as the way in which anyone happens to become an alcoholic. They start drinking, that’s all. They like it, and they drink, and then they become alcoholic. I was exposed to heroin in New York—that is, I was going around with people who were using it; I took it; the effects were pleasant. I went on using it and became addicted. Remember that if it can be readily obtained, you will have any number of addicts. The idea that addiction is somehow a psychological illness is, I think, totally ridiculous. It’s as psychological as malaria. It’s a matter of exposure. People, generally speaking, will take any intoxicant or any drug that gives them a pleasant effect if it is available to them. In Iran, for instance, opium was sold in shops until quite recently, and they had three million addicts in a population of twenty million. There are also all forms of spiritual addiction. Anything that can be done chemically can be done in other ways, that is, if we have sufficient knowledge of the processes involved. Many policemen and narcotics agents are precisely addicted to power, to exercising a certain nasty kind of power over people who are helpless. The nasty sort of power: white junk, I call it—rightness; they’re right, right, right—and if they lost that power, they would suffer excruciating withdrawal symptoms. The picture we get of the whole Russian bureaucracy, people who are exclusively preoccupied with power and advantage, this must be an addiction. Suppose they lose it? Well, it’s been their whole life.
INTERVIEWER
Can you amplify your idea of junk as image?
BURROUGHS
It’s only a theory and, I feel, an inadequate one. I don’t think anyone really understands what a narcotic is or how it works, how it kills pain. My idea is sort of a stab in the dark. As I see it, what has been damaged in pain is, of course, the image, and morphine must in some sense replace this. We know it blankets the cells and that addicts are practically immune to certain viruses, to influenza and respiratory complaints. This is simple because the influenza virus has to make a hole in the cell receptors. When those are covered, as they are in morphine addiction, the virus can’t get in. As soon as morphine is withdrawn, addicts will immediately come down with colds and often with influenza.
INTERVIEWER
Certain schizophrenics also resist respiratory disease.
BURROUGHS
A long time ago I suggested there were similarities in terminal addiction and terminal schizophrenia. That was why I made the suggestion that they addict these people to heroin, then withdraw it and see if they could be motivated; in other words, find out whether they’d walk across the room and pick up a syringe. Needless to say, I didn’t get very far, but I think it would be interesting.
INTERVIEWER
Narcotics, then, disturb normal perception—
BURROUGHS
And set up instead a random craving for images. If drugs weren’t forbidden in America, they would be the perfect middle-class vice. Addicts would do their work and come home to consume the huge dose of images awaiting them in the mass media. Junkies love to look at television. Billie Holiday said she knew she was going off drugs when she didn’t like to watch TV. Or they’ll sit and read a newspaper or magazine, and by God, read it all. I knew this old junkie in New York, and he’d go out and get a lot of newspapers and magazines and some candy bars and several packages of cigarettes and then he’d sit in his room and he’d read those newspapers and magazines right straight through. Indiscriminately. Every word.
INTERVIEWER
You seem primarily interested in bypassing the conscious rational apparatus to which most writers direct their efforts.
BURROUGHS
I don’t know about where fiction ordinarily directs itself, but I am quite deliberately addressing myself to the whole area of what we call dreams. Precisely what is a dream? A certain juxtaposition of word and image. I’ve recently done a lot of experiments with scrapbooks. I’ll read in the newspaper something that reminds me of or has relation to something I’ve written. I’ll cut out the picture or article and paste it in a scrapbook beside the words from my book. Or, I’ll be walking down the street and I’ll suddenly see a scene from my book and I’ll photograph it and put it in a scrapbook. I’ll show you some of those. I’ve found that when preparing a page, I’ll almost invariably dream that night something relating to this juxtaposition of word and image. In other words, I’ve been interested in precisely how word and image get around on very, very complex association lines. I do a lot of exercises in what I call time travel, in taking coordinates, such as what I photographed on the train, what I was thinking about at the time, what I was reading, and what I wrote; all of this to see how completely I can project myself back to that one point in time.
INTERVIEWER
In Nova Express, you indicate that silence is a desirable state.
BURROUGHS
The most desirable state. In one sense a special use of words and pictures can conduce silence. The scrapbooks and time travel are exercises to expand consciousness, to teach me to think in association blocks rather than words. I’ve recently spent a little time studying hieroglyph systems, both the Egyptian and the Mayan. A whole block of associations—boonf!—like that! Words, at least the way we use them, can stand in the way of what I call nonbody experience. It’s time we thought about leaving the body behind.
INTERVIEWER
Marshall McLuhan said that you believed heroin was needed to turn the human body into an environment that includes the universe. But from what you’ve told me, you’re not at all interested in turning the body into an environment.
BURROUGHS
No, junk narrows consciousness. The only benefit to me as a writer (aside from putting me into contact with the whole carny world) came to me after I went off it. What I want to do is to learn to see more of what’s out there, to look outside, to achieve as far as possible a complete awareness of surroundings. Beckett wants to go inward. First he was in a bottle and now he is in the mud. I am aimed in the other direction—outward.
INTERVIEWER
Have you been able to think for any length of time in images, with the inner voice silent?
BURROUGHS
I’m becoming more proficient at it, partly through my work with scrapbooks and translating the connections between words and images. Try this. Carefully memorize the meaning of a passage, then read it; you’ll find you can actually read it without the words making any sound whatever in the mind’s ear. Extraordinary experience, and one that will carry over into dreams. When you start thinking in images, without words, you’re well on the way.
INTERVIEWER
Why is the wordless state so desirable?
BURROUGHS
I think it’s the evolutionary trend. I think that words are an around-the-world, oxcart way of doing things, awkward instruments, and they will be laid aside eventually, probably sooner than we think. This is something that will happen in the space age. Most serious writers refuse to make themselves available to the things that technology is doing. I’ve never been able to understand this sort of fear. Many of them are afraid of tape recorders and the idea of using any mechanical means for literary purposes seems to them some sort of a sacrilege. This is one objection to the cut-ups. There’s been a lot of that, a sort of a superstitious reverence for the word. My God, they say, you can’t cut up these words. Why can’t I? I find it much easier to get interest in the cut-ups from people who are not writers—doctors, lawyers, or engineers, any open-minded, fairly intelligent person—than from those who are.
INTERVIEWER
How did you become interested in the cut-up technique?
BURROUGHS
A friend, Brion Gysin, an American poet and painter, who has lived in Europe for thirty years, was, as far as I know, the first to create cut-ups. His cut-up poem, “Minutes to Go,” was broadcast by the BBC and later published in a pamphlet. I was in Paris in the summer of 1960; this was after the publication there of Naked Lunch. I became interested in the possibilities of this technique, and I began experimenting myself. Of course, when you think of it, The Waste Land was the first great cut-up collage, and Tristan Tzara had done a bit along the same lines. Dos Passos used the same idea in “The Camera Eye” sequences in U.S.A. I felt I had been working toward the same goal; thus it was a major revelation to me when I actually saw it being done.
INTERVIEWER
What do cut-ups offer the reader that conventional narrative doesn’t?
BURROUGHS
Any narrative passage or any passage, say, of poetic images is subject to any number of variations, all of which may be interesting and valid in their own right. A page of Rimbaud cut up and rearranged will give you quite new images. Rimbaud images—real Rimbaud images—but new ones.
INTERVIEWER
You deplore the accumulation of images and at the same time you seem to be looking for new ones.
BURROUGHS
Yes, it’s part of the paradox of anyone who is working with word and image, and after all, that is what a writer is still doing. Painter too. Cut-ups establish new connections between images, and one’s range of vision consequently expands.
INTERVIEWER
Instead of going to the trouble of working with scissors and all those pieces of paper, couldn’t you obtain the same effect by simply free-associating at the typewriter?
BURROUGHS
One’s mind can’t cover it that way. Now, for example, if I wanted to make a cut-up of this [picking up a copy of The Nation], there are many ways I could do it. I could read cross-column; I could say, “Today’s men’s nerves surround us. Each technological extension gone outside is electrical involves an act of collective environment. The human nervous environment system itself can be reprogrammed with all its private and social values because it is content. He programs logically as readily as any radio net is swallowed by the new environment. The sensory order.” You find it often makes quite as much sense as the original. You learn to leave out words and to make connections. [Gesturing] Suppose I should cut this down the middle here, and put this up here. Your mind simply could not manage it. It’s like trying to keep so many chess moves in mind, you just couldn’t do it. The mental mechanisms of repression and selection are also operating against you.
INTERVIEWER
You believe that an audience can be eventually trained to respond to cut-ups?
BURROUGHS
Of course, because cut-ups make explicit a psychosensory process that is going on all the time anyway. Somebody is reading a newspaper, and his eye follows the column in the proper Aristotelian manner, one idea and sentence at a time. But subliminally he is reading the columns on either side and is aware of the person sitting next to him. That’s a cut-up. I was sitting in a lunchroom in New York having my doughnuts and coffee. I was thinking that one does feel a little boxed in New York, like living in a series of boxes. I looked out the window and there was a great big Yale truck. That’s cut-up—a juxtaposition of what’s happening outside and what you’re thinking of. I make this a practice when I walk down the street. I’ll say, when I got to here I saw that sign; I was thinking this, and when I return to the house I’ll type these up. Some of this material I use and some I don’t. I have literally thousands of pages of notes here, raw, and I keep a diary as well. In a sense it’s traveling in time.
Most people don’t see what’s going on around them. That’s my principal message to writers: for God’s sake, keep your eyes open. Notice what’s going on around you. I mean, I walk down the street with friends. I ask, “Did you see him, that person who just walked by?” No, they didn’t notice him. I had a very pleasant time on the train coming out here. I haven’t traveled on trains in years. I found there were no drawing rooms. I got a bedroom so I could set up my typewriter and look out the window. I was taking photos, too. I also noticed all the signs and what I was thinking at the time, you see. And I got some extraordinary juxtapositions. For example, a friend of mine has a loft apartment in New York. He said, “Every time we go out of the house and come back, if we leave the bathroom door open, there’s a rat in the house.” I look out the window, there’s Able Pest Control.
INTERVIEWER
The one flaw in the cut-up argument seems to lie in the linguistic base on which we operate, the straight declarative sentence. It’s going to take a great deal to change that.
BURROUGHS
Yes, it is unfortunately one of the great errors of Western thought, the whole either/or proposition. You remember Korzybski and his idea of non-Aristotelian logic. Either/or thinking just is not accurate thinking. That’s not the way things occur, and I feel the Aristotelian construct is one of the great shackles of Western civilization. Cut-ups are a movement toward breaking this down. I should imagine it would be much easier to find acceptance of the cut-ups from, possibly, the Chinese, because you see already there are many ways that they can read any given ideograph. It’s already cut up.
INTERVIEWER
What will happen to the straight plot in fiction?
BURROUGHS
Plot has always had the definite function of stage direction, of getting the characters from here to there, and that will continue, but the new techniques such as cut-up will involve much more of the total capacity of the observer. It enriches the whole aesthetic experience, extends it.
INTERVIEWER
Nova Express is a cut-up of many writers?
BURROUGHS
Joyce is in there. Shakespeare, Rimbaud, some writers that people haven’t heard about, someone named Jack Stern. There’s Kerouac. I don’t know, when you start making these fold-ins (instead of cutting, you fold) and cut-ups you lose track. Genet, of course, is someone I admire very much. But what he’s doing is classical French prose. He’s not a verbal innovator. Also Kafka, Eliot, and one of my favorites is Joseph Conrad. My story, “They Just Fade Away,” is a fold-in from Lord Jim. In fact, it’s almost a retelling of the Lord Jim story. My Stein is the same Stein as in Lord Jim. Richard Hughes is another favorite of mine. And Graham Greene. For exercise, when I make a trip, such as from Tangier to Gibraltar, I will record this in three columns in a notebook I always take with me. One column will contain simply an account of the trip, what happened. I arrived at the air terminal, what was said by the clerks, what I overheard on the plane, what hotel I checked into. The next column presents my memories; that is, what I was thinking of at the time, the memories that were activated by my encounters; and the third column, which I call my reading column, gives quotations from any book that I take with me. I have practically a whole novel alone on my trips to Gibraltar. Besides Graham Greene, I’ve used other books. I used The Wonderful Country by Tom Lea on one trip. Let’s see, and Eliot’s The Cocktail Party; In Hazard by Richard Hughes. For example, I’m reading The Wonderful Country and the hero is just crossing the frontier into Mexico. Well, just at this point I come to the Spanish frontier, so I note that down in the margin. Or I’m on a boat or a train, and I’m reading The Quiet American. I look around and see if there’s a quiet American aboard. Sure enough, there’s a quiet sort of young American with a crew cut drinking a bottle of beer. It’s extraordinary, if you really keep your eyes open. I was reading Raymond Chandler, and one of his characters was an albino gunman. My God, if there wasn’t an albino in the room. He wasn’t a gunman.
Who else? Wait a minute, I’ll just check my coordinate books to see if there’s anyone I’ve forgotten—Conrad, Richard Hughes, science fiction, quite a bit of science fiction. Eric Frank Russell has written some very, very interesting books. Here’s one, The Star Virus; I doubt if you’ve heard of it. He develops a concept here of what he calls “Deadliners,” who have this strange sort of seedy look. I read this when I was in Gibraltar, and I began to find Deadliners all over the place. The story has a fishpond in it, and quite a flower garden. My father was always very interested in gardening.
INTERVIEWER
In view of all this, what will happen to fiction in the next twenty-five years?
BURROUGHS
In the first place, I think there’s going to be more and more merging of art and science. Scientists are already studying the creative process, and I think the whole line between art and science will break down and that scientists, I hope, will become more creative and writers more scientific. And I see no reason why the artistic world can’t absolutely merge with Madison Avenue. Pop art is a move in that direction. Why can’t we have advertisements with beautiful words and beautiful images? Already some of the very beautiful color photography appears in whiskey ads, I notice. Science will also discover for us how association blocks actually form.
INTERVIEWER
Do you think this will destroy the magic?
BURROUGHS
Not at all. I would say it would enhance it.
INTERVIEWER
Have you done anything with computers?
BURROUGHS
I’ve not done anything, but I’ve seen some of the computer poetry. I can take one of those computer poems and then try to find correlatives of it, that is, pictures to go with it. It’s quite possible.
INTERVIEWER
Does the fact that it comes from a machine diminish its value to you?
BURROUGHS
I think that any artistic product must stand or fall on what’s there.
INTERVIEWER
Therefore, you’re not upset by the fact that a chimpanzee can do an abstract painting?
BURROUGHS
If he does a good one, no. People say to me, “Oh, this is all very good, but you got it by cutting up.” I say that has nothing to do with it, how I got it. What is any writing but a cut-up? Somebody has to program the machine; somebody has to do the cutting up. Remember that I first made selections. Out of hundreds of possible sentences that I might have used, I chose one.
INTERVIEWER
Incidentally, one image in Nova Express keeps coming back to me and I don’t quite understand it: the gray room, “breaking through to the gray room.”
BURROUGHS
I see that as very much like the photographic darkroom where the reality photographs are actually produced. Implicit in Nova Express is a theory that what we call reality is actually a movie. It’s a film, what I call a biologic film. What has happened is that the underground and also the nova police have made a breakthrough past the guards and gotten into the darkroom where the films are processed, where they’re in a position to expose negatives and prevent events from occurring. They’re like police anywhere. All right, you’ve got a bad situation here in which the nova mob is about to blow up the planet. So The Heavy Metal Kid calls in the nova police. Once you get them in there, by God, they begin acting like any police. They’re always an ambivalent agency. I recall once in South America that I complained to the police that a camera had been stolen and they ended up arresting me. I hadn’t registered or something. In other words, once you get them on the scene they really start nosing around. Once the law starts asking questions, there’s no end to it. For nova police, read technology, if you wish.
INTERVIEWER
Mary McCarthy has commented on the carnival origins of your characters in Naked Lunch. What are their other derivations?
BURROUGHS
The carny world was the one I exactly intended to create—a kind of midwestern, small-town, cracker-barrel, pratfall type of folklore, very much my own background. That world was an integral part of America and existed nowhere else, at least not in the same form. My family was southern on my mother’s side. My grandfather was a circuit-riding Methodist minister with thirteen children. Most of them went up to New York and became quite successful in advertising and public relations. One of them, an uncle, was a master image maker, Ivy Lee, Rockefeller’s publicity manager.
INTERVIEWER
Is it true that you did a great deal of acting out to create your characters when you were finishing Naked Lunch?
BURROUGHS
Excuse me, there is no accurate description of the creation of a book, or an event. Read Durrell’s Alexandria novels for four different ways of looking at the same thing. Gysin saw me pasting pictures on the wall of a Paris hotel room and using a tape recorder to act out several voices. Actually, it was written mainly in Tangier, after I had taken the cure with Dr. Dent in London in 1957. I came back to Tangier and I started working on a lot of notes that I had made over a period of years. Most of the book was written at that time. I went to Paris about 1959, and I had a great pile of manuscripts. Girodias was interested and he asked if I could get the book ready in two weeks. This is the period that Brion is referring to when, from manuscripts collected over a period of years, I assembled what became the book from some thousand pages, something like that.
INTERVIEWER
But did you actually leap up and act out, say, Dr. Benway?
BURROUGHS
Yes, I have. Dr. Benway dates back to a story I wrote in 1938 with a friend of mine, Kells Elvins, who is now dead. That’s about the only piece of writing I did prior to Junky. And we did definitely act the thing out. We decided that was the way to write. Now here’s this guy, what does he say, what does he do? Dr. Benway sort of emerged quite spontaneously while we were composing this piece. Something I’ve been meaning to do with my scrapbooks is to have files on every character, almost like police files: habits, idiosyncrasies, where born, pictures. That is, if I ever see anyone in a magazine or newspaper who looks like Dr. Benway (and several people have played Dr. Benway, sort of amateur actors), I take their photographs. Many of my characters first come through strongly to me as voices. That’s why I use a tape recorder. They also carry over from one book to another.
INTERVIEWER
Do any have their origins in actual persons?
BURROUGHS
Hamburger Mary is one. There was a place in New York called Hamburger Mary’s. I was in Hamburger Mary’s when a friend gave me a batch of morphine syrettes. That was my first experience with morphine and then I built up a whole picture of Hamburger Mary. She is also an actual person. I don’t like to give her name for fear of being sued for libel, but she was a Scientologist who started out in a hamburger joint in Portland, Oregon, and now has eleven million dollars.
INTERVIEWER
What about The Heavy Metal Kid?
BURROUGHS
There again, quite complicated origins, partly based on my own experience. I felt that heavy metal was sort of the ultimate expression of addiction, that there’s something actually metallic in addiction, that the final stage reached is not so much vegetable as mineral. It’s increasingly inanimate, in any case. You see, as Dr. Benway said, I’ve now decided that junk is not green, but blue. Some of my characters come to me in dreams, Daddy Long Legs, for instance. Once, in a clinic, I had a dream in which I saw a man in this rundown clinic and his name in the dream was Daddy Long Legs. Many characters have come to me like that in a dream, and then I’ll elaborate from there. I always write down all my dreams. That’s why I’ve got that notebook beside the bed there.
INTERVIEWER
Earlier you mentioned that if junk had done nothing else, it at least put you in contact with the carny world.
BURROUGHS
Yes, the underworld, the old-time thieves, pickpockets, and people like that. They’re a dying race; very few of those old-timers left. Yeah, well, they were show business.
INTERVIEWER
What’s the difference between the modern junkie versus the 1944 junkie?
BURROUGHS
For one thing, all these young addicts; that was quite unknown in 1944. Most of the ones I knew were middle-aged men or old. I knew some of the old-time pickpockets and sneak thieves and shortchange artists. They had something called The Bill, a shortchange deal. I’ve never been able to figure out how it works. One man I knew beat all the cashiers in Grand Central with this thing. It starts with a twenty-dollar bill. You give them a twenty-dollar bill and then when you get the change you say, “Well, wait a minute, I must have been dreaming, I’ve got the change after all.” First thing you know, the cashier’s short ten dollars. One day this shortchange artist went to Grand Central, even though he knew it was burned down, but he wanted to change twenty dollars. Well, a guy got on the buzzer and they arrested him. When they got up in court and tried to explain what had happened, none of them could do it. I keep stories like this in my files.
INTERVIEWER
In your apartment in Tangier?
BURROUGHS
No, all of it is right here in this room.
INTERVIEWER
In case Tangier is blown up, it’s all safe?
BURROUGHS
Well, more than that. I need it all. I brought everything. That’s why I have to travel by boat and by train, because, well, just to give you an idea, that’s a photographic file [thud]. Those are all photographs and photographs. When I sit down to write, I may suddenly think of something I wrote three years ago which should be in this file over here. It may not be. I’m always looking through these files. That’s why I need a place where I can really spread them out, to see what’s what. I’m looking for one particular paper, it often takes me a long time and sometimes I don’t find it. Those dresser drawers are full of files. All those drawers in the closets are full of files. It’s pretty well organized. Here’s a file, “The 1920 Movie,” which partly contains some motion picture ideas. Here’s “All the Sad Old Showmen”; has some business about bank robbers in it. Here’s “The Nova Police Gazette.” This is “Analog,” which contains science fiction material. This is “The Captain’s Logbook.” I’ve been interested in sea stories, but I know so little about the sea, I hesitate to do much. I collect sea disasters such as the Mary Celeste. Here’s a file on Mr. Luce.
INTERVIEWER
Do you admire Mr. Luce?
BURROUGHS
I don’t admire him at all. He has set up one of the greatest word and image banks in the world. I mean, there are thousands of photos, thousands of words about anything and everything, all in his files. All the best pictures go into the files. Of course, they’re reduced to microphotos now. I’ve been interested in the Mayan system, which was a control calendar. You see, their calendar postulated really how everyone should feel at a given time, with lucky days, unlucky days, et cetera. And I feel that Luce’s system is comparable to that. It is a control system. It has nothing to do with reporting. Time, Life, Fortune is some sort of a police organization.
INTERVIEWER
You’ve said your next book will be about the American West and a gunfighter.
BURROUGHS
Yes, I’ve thought about this for years and I have hundreds of pages of notes on the whole concept of the gunfighter. The gun duel was a sort of Zen contest, a real spiritual contest like Zen swordsmanship.
INTERVIEWER
Would this be cut-up, or more a conventional narrative?
BURROUGHS
I’d use cut-ups extensively in the preparation, because they would give me all sorts of facets of character and place, but the final version would be straight narrative. I wouldn’t want to get bogged down in too much factual detail, but I’d like to do research in New Mexico or Arizona, even though the actual towns out there have become synthetic tourist attractions. Occasionally I have the sensation that I’m repeating myself in my work, and I would like to do something different—almost a deliberate change of style. I’m not sure if it’s possible, but I want to try. I’ve been thinking about the Western for years. As a boy I was sent to school in New Mexico, and during the war I was stationed in Coldspring, Texas, near Conroe. That’s genuine backwoods country, and I picked up some real characters there. For instance, a fellow who actually lived in East Texas. He was always having trouble with his neighbors, who suspected him of rustling their cattle, I think with good reason. But he was competent with a gun and there wasn’t anyone who would go up against him. He finally was killed. He got drunk and went to sleep under a tree by a campfire. The fire set fire to the tree, and it fell on him. I’m interested in extending newspaper and magazine formats to so-called literary materials. Here, this is one of my attempts. This is going to be published in a little magazine, The Sparrow.
INTERVIEWER
[Reading] “The Coldspring News, All the News That Fits We Print, Sunday, September 17, 1899, William Burroughs, Editor.” Here’s Bradly Martin again.
BURROUGHS
Yes, he’s the gunfighter. I’m not sure yet what’s going to happen after Clem accuses him of rustling cattle. I guess Clem goes into Coldspring and there’s gunplay between him and the gunfighter. He’s going to kill Clem, obviously. Clem is practically a dead man. Clem is going to get likkered up and think he can tangle with Bradly Martin, and Bradly Martin is going to kill him, that’s for sure.
INTERVIEWER
Will your other characters reappear? Dr. Benway?
BURROUGHS
He’d be the local doctor. That’s what I’d like to do, you see, use all these characters in a straight Western story. There would be Mr. Bradly, Mr. Martin, whose name is Bradly Martin; there would be Dr. Benway; and we’d have the various traveling carny and medicine shows that come through with the Subliminal Kid and all of the con men. That was the heyday for those old joes.
INTERVIEWER
Do you think of the artist at all as being a con man?
BURROUGHS
In a sense. You see, a real con man is a creator. He creates a set. No, a con man is more a movie director than a writer. The Yellow Kid created a whole set, a whole cast of characters, a whole brokerage house, a whole bank. It was just like a movie studio.
INTERVIEWER
What about addicts?
BURROUGHS
Well, there will be a lot of morphine addiction. Remember that there were a great many addicts at that time. Jesse James was an addict. He started using morphine for a wound in his lung, and I don’t know whether he was permanently addicted, but he tried to kill himself. He took sixteen grains of morphine and it didn’t kill him, which indicates a terrific tolerance. So he must have been fairly heavily addicted. A dumb, brutal hick; that’s what he was, like Dillinger. And there were so many genteel old ladies who didn’t feel right unless they had their Dr. Jones mixture every day.
INTERVIEWER
What about the Green Boy, Izzy the Push, Green Tony, Sammy the Butcher, and Willy the Fink?
BURROUGHS
See, all of them could be Western characters except lzzy the Push. The buildings weren’t high enough in those days. Defenestration, incidentally, is a very interesting phenomenon. Some people who are prone to it will not live in high buildings. They get near a window, someone in the next room hears a cry, and they’re gone. “Fell or jumped” is the phrase. I would add, “or was pushed.”
INTERVIEWER
What other character types interest you?
BURROUGHS
Not the people in advertising and television, nor the American postman or middle-class housewife; not the young man setting forth. The whole world of high finance interests me, the men such as Rockefeller who were specialized types of organisms that could exist in a certain environment. He was really a moneymaking machine, but I doubt that he could have made a dime today because he required the old laissez-faire capitalism. He was a specialized monopolistic organism. My uncle Ivy created images for him. I fail to understand why people like J. Paul Getty have to come on with such a stuffy, uninteresting image. He decides to write his life history. I’ve never read anything so dull, so absolutely devoid of any spark. Well, after all, he was quite a playboy in his youth. There must have been something going on. None of it’s in the book. Here he is, the only man of enormous wealth who operates alone, but there’s nobody to present the image. Well, yes, I wouldn’t mind doing that sort of job myself. I’d like to take somebody like Getty and try to find an image for him that would be of some interest. If Getty wants to build an image, why doesn’t he hire a first-class writer to write his story? For that matter, advertising has a long way to go. I’d like to see a story by Norman Mailer or John O’Hara which just makes some mention of a product, say, Southern Comfort. I can see the O’Hara story. It would be about someone who went into a bar and asked for Southern Comfort; they didn’t have it, and he gets into a long, stupid argument with the bartender. It shouldn’t be obtrusive; the story must be interesting in itself so that people read this just as they read any story in Playboy, and Southern Comfort would be guaranteed that people will look at that advertisement for a certain number of minutes. You see what I mean? They’ll read the story. Now, there are many other ideas; you could have serialized comic strips, serial stories. Well, all we have to do is have James Bond smoking a certain brand of cigarettes.
INTERVIEWER
Didn’t you once work for an advertising agency?
BURROUGHS
Yes, after I got out of Harvard in 1936. I had done some graduate work in anthropology. I got a glimpse of academic life and I didn’t like it at all. It looked like there was too much faculty intrigue, faculty teas, cultivating the head of the department, so on and so forth. Then I spent a year as a copywriter in this small advertising agency, since defunct, in New York. We had a lot of rather weird accounts. There was some device called the Cascade for giving high colonics, and something called Endocreme. It was supposed to make women look younger, because it contained some female sex hormones. The Interstate Commerce Commission was never far behind. As you can see, I’ve recently thought a great deal about advertising. After all, they’re doing the same sort of thing. They are concerned with the precise manipulation of word and image. Anyway, after the ad game I was in the army for a bit. Honorably discharged and then the usual strange wartime jobs—bartender, exterminator, reporter, and factory and office jobs. Then Mexico, a sinister place.
INTERVIEWER
Why sinister?
BURROUGHS
I was there during the Alemán regime. If you walked into a bar, there would be at least fifteen people in there who were carrying guns. Everybody was carrying guns. They got drunk and they were a menace to any living creature. I mean, sitting in a cocktail lounge, you always had to be ready to hit the deck. I had a friend who was shot, killed. But he asked for it. He was waving his little .25 automatic around in a bar and some Mexican blasted him with a .45. They listed the death as natural causes, because the killer was a political big shot. There was no scandal, but it was really as much as your life was worth to go into a cocktail lounge. And I had that terrible accident with Joan Vollmer, my wife. I had a revolver that I was planning to sell to a friend. I was checking it over and it went off—killed her. A rumor started that I was trying to shoot a glass of champagne from her head William Tell-style. Absurd and false. Then they had a big depistolization. Mexico City had one of the highest per capita homicide rates in the world. Another thing, every time you turned around there was some Mexican cop with his hand out, finding some fault with your papers or something, just anything he could latch on to. “Papers very bad, señor.” It really was a bit much, the Alemán regime.
INTERVIEWER
From Mexico?
BURROUGHS
I went to Colombia, Peru, and Ecuador, just looking around. I was particularly interested in the Amazon region of Peru, where I took a drug called yage, Bannisteria caapi, a hallucinogen as powerful as mescaline, I believe. The whole trip gave me an awful lot of copy. A lot of these experiences went into The Ticket That Exploded, which is sort of midway between Naked Lunch and The Soft Machine. It’s not a book I’m satisfied with in its present form. If it’s published in the United States, I would have to rewrite it. The Soft Machine, which will come out here in due time, is an expansion of my South American experiences, with surreal extensions. When I rewrote it recently, I included about sixty-five pages of straight narrative concerning Dr. Benway, and the Sailor, and various characters from Naked Lunch. These people pop up everywhere.
INTERVIEWER
Then from South America you went to Europe. Is the geographic switch as important as it once was to American writing?
BURROUGHS
Well, if I hadn’t covered a lot of ground, I wouldn’t have encountered the extra dimensions of character and extremity that make the difference. But I think the day of the expatriate is definitely over. It’s becoming more and more uncomfortable, more and more expensive, and less and less rewarding to live abroad, as far as I’m concerned. Now I’m particularly concerned with quiet writing conditions—being able to concentrate—and not so much interested in the place where I am. To me, Paris is now one of the most disagreeable cities in the world. I just hate it. The food is uneatable. It’s either very expensive, or you just can’t eat it. In order to get a good sandwich at three o’clock in the afternoon, I have to get into a taxi and go all the way over to the Right Bank. Here all I have to do is pick up the phone. They send me up a club sandwich and a glass of buttermilk, which is all I want for lunch anyway. The French have gotten so nasty and they’re getting nastier and nastier. The Algerian war and then all those millions of people dumped back into France and all of them thoroughly dissatisfied. I don’t know, I think the atmosphere there is unpleasant and not conducive to anything. You can’t get an apartment. You can’t get a quiet place to work. Best you can do is a dinky hotel room somewhere. If I want to get something like this, it costs me thirty dollars a day. The main thing I’ve found after twenty years away from St. Louis is that the standard of service is much better than New York. These are Claridge’s or Ritz accommodations. If I could afford it, keep it, this would be an ideal place for me. There’s not a sound in here. It’s been very conducive to work. I’ve got a lot of room here to spread out all my papers in all these drawers and shelves. It’s quiet. When I want something to eat, I pick up the phone. I can work right straight through. Get up in the morning, pick up the phone about two o’clock and have a sandwich, and work through till dinnertime. Also, it’s interesting to turn on the TV set every now and then.
INTERVIEWER
What do you find on it?
BURROUGHS
That’s a real cut-up. It flickers, just like the old movies used to. When talkies came in and they perfected the image, the movies became as dull as looking out the window. A bunch of Italians in Rabat have a television station and we could get the signal in Tangier. I just sat there open mouthed looking at it. What with blurring and contractions and visual static, some of their Westerns became very, very odd. Gysin has been experimenting with the flicker principle in a gadget he calls a “Dream Machine.” There used to be one in the window of The English Bookshop on the rue de Seine. Helena Rubenstein was so fascinated she bought a couple, and Harold Matson, the agent, thinks it’s a million-dollar idea.
INTERVIEWER
Describe a typical day’s work.
BURROUGHS
I get up about nine o’clock and order breakfast; I hate to go out for breakfast. I work usually until about two o’clock or two-thirty, when I like to have a sandwich and a glass of milk, which takes about ten minutes. I’ll work through until six or seven o’clock. Then if I’m seeing people or going out, I’ll go out, have a few drinks, come back, and maybe do a little reading and go to bed. I go to bed pretty early. I don’t make myself work. It’s just the thing I want to do. To be completely alone in a room, to know that there’ll be no interruptions and I’ve got eight hours is just exactly what I want—yeah, just paradise.
INTERVIEWER
Do you compose on the typewriter?
BURROUGHS
I use the typewriter and I use scissors. I can sit down with scissors and old manuscripts and paste in photographs for hours; I have hundreds of photographs. I usually take a walk every day. Here in St. Louis I’ve been trying to take 1920s photographs, alleys and whatnot. This [pointing] is a ghostly photograph of the house in which I grew up, seen back through forty-five years. Here’s a photo of an old ash pit. It was great fun for children to get out there in the alley after Christmas and build a fire in the ash pit with all the excelsior and wrappings. Here, these are stories and pictures from the society columns. I’ve been doing a cut-up of society coverage. I had a lot of fun piling up these names; you get some improbable names in the society columns.
INTERVIEWER
You recently said you would like to settle in the Ozarks. Were you serious?
BURROUGHS
I would like to have a place there. It’s a very beautiful area in the fall, and I’d like to spend periods of time, say every month or every two months, in complete solitude, just working, which requires an isolated situation. Of course, I’d have to buy a car, for one thing, and you run into considerable expense. I just have to think in terms of an apartment. I thought possibly an apartment here, but most likely I’ll get one in New York. I’m not returning to Tangier. I just don’t like it anymore. It’s become just a small town. There’s no life there, and the place has no novelty for me at all. I was sitting there, and I thought, my God, I might as well be in Columbus, Ohio, as here, for all the interest that the town has for me. I was just sitting in my apartment working. I could have a better apartment and better working conditions somewhere else. After ten o’clock at night, there’s no one on the streets. The old settlers like Paul Bowles and those people who have been there for years and years are sort of hanging on desperately, asking, “Where could we go if we left Tangier?” I don’t know, it just depresses me now. It’s not even cheap there. If I travel anywhere, it will be to the Far East, but only for a visit. I’ve never been east of Athens.
INTERVIEWER
That reminds me, I meant to ask you what’s behind your interest in the more exotic systems such as Zen, or Dr. Reich’s orgone theories?
BURROUGHS
Well, these nonconventional theories frequently touch on something going on that Harvard and MIT can’t explain. I don’t mean that I endorse them wholeheartedly, but I am interested in any attempt along those lines. I’ve used these orgone accumulators and I’m convinced that something occurs there, I don’t know quite what. Of course, Reich himself went around the bend, no question of that.
INTERVIEWER
You mentioned Scientology earlier. Do you have a system for getting on, or are you looking for one?
BURROUGHS
I’m not very interested in such a crudely three-dimensional manipulative schema as L. Ron Hubbard’s, although it’s got its points. I’ve studied it and I’ve seen how it works. It’s a series of manipulative gimmicks. They tell you to look around and see what you would have. The results are much more subtle and more successful than Dale Carnegie’s. But as far as my living by a system, no. At the same time, I don’t think anything happens in this universe except by some power—or individual—making it happen. Nothing happens of itself. I believe all events are produced by will.
INTERVIEWER
Then do you believe in the existence of God?
BURROUGHS
God? I wouldn’t say. I think there are innumerable gods. What we on Earth call God is a little tribal god who has made an awful mess. Certainly forces operating through human consciousness control events. A Luce writer may be an agent of God-knows-what power, a force with an insatiable appetite for word and image. What does this force propose to do with such a tremendous mound of image garbage? They’ve got a regular casting office. To interview Mary McCarthy, they’ll send a shy Vassar girl who’s just trying to get along. They had several carny people for me. “Shucks, Bill, you got a reefer?” Reefer? My God! “Certainly not,” I told them. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.” Then they go back and write a nasty article for the files.
INTERVIEWER
In some respects, Nova Express seems to be a prescription for social ailments. Do you see the need, for instance, of biologic courts in the future?
BURROUGHS
Certainly. Science eventually will be forced to establish courts of biologic mediation, because life-forms are going to become more incompatible with the conditions of existence as man penetrates further into space. Mankind will have to undergo biologic alterations ultimately, if we are to survive at all. This will require biologic law to decide what changes to make. We will simply have to use our intelligence to plan mutations, rather than letting them occur at random. Because many such mutations—look at the saber-toothed tiger—are bound to be very poor engineering designs. The future, decidedly, yes. I think there are innumerable possibilities, literally innumerable. The hope lies in the development of nonbody experience and eventually getting away from the body itself, away from three-dimensional coordinates and concomitant animal reactions of fear and flight, which lead inevitably to tribal feuds and dissension.
INTERVIEWER
Why did you choose an interplanetary war as the conflict in Nova Express, rather than discord between nations? You seem fascinated with the idea that a superterrestrial power is exercising an apparatus of control, such as the death dwarfs—
BURROUGHS
They’re parasitic organisms occupying a human host, rather like a radio transmitter, which direct and control it. The people who work with encephalograms and brain waves point out that technically it will someday be possible to install at birth a radio antenna in the brain which will control thought, feeling, and sensory perceptions, actually not only control thought, but make certain thoughts impossible. The death dwarfs are weapons of the nova mob, which in turn is calling the shots in the cold war. The nova mob is using that conflict in an attempt to blow up the planet, because when you get right down to it, what are America and Russia really arguing about? The Soviet Union and the United States will eventually consist of interchangeable social parts and neither nation is morally “right.” The idea that anyone can run his own factory in America is ridiculous. The government and the unions—which both amount to the same thing: control systems—tell him who he can hire, how much he can pay them, and how he can sell his goods. What difference does it make if the state owns the plant and retains him as manager? Regardless of how it’s done, the same kind of people will be in charge. One’s ally today is an enemy tomorrow. I have postulated this power—the nova mob—which forces us to play musical chairs.
INTERVIEWER
You see hope for the human race, but at the same time you are alarmed as the instruments of control become more sophisticated.
BURROUGHS
Well, whereas they become more sophisticated they also become more vulnerable. Time, Life, Fortune applies a more complex, effective control system than the Mayan calendar, but it also is much more vulnerable because it is so vast and mechanized. Not even Henry Luce understands what’s going on in the system now. Well, a machine can be redirected. One technical sergeant can fuck up the whole works. Nobody can control the whole operation. It’s too complex. The captain comes in and says, “All right, boys, we’re moving up.” Now, who knows what buttons to push? Who knows how to get the cases of Spam up to where they’re going, and how to fill out the forms? The sergeant does. The captain doesn’t know. As long as there’re sergeants around, the machine can be dismantled, and we may get out of all this alive yet.
INTERVIEWER
Sex seems equated with death frequently in your work.
BURROUGHS
That is an extension of the idea of sex as a biologic weapon. I feel that sex, like practically every other human manifestation, has been degraded for control purposes, or really for antihuman purposes. This whole Puritanism. How are we ever going to find out anything about sex scientifically, when a priori the subject cannot even be investigated? It can’t even be thought about or written about. That was one of the interesting things about Reich. He was one of the few people who ever tried to investigate sex—sexual phenomena, from a scientific point of view. There’s this prurience and this fear of sex. We know nothing about sex. What is it? Why is it pleasurable? What is pleasure? Relief from tension? Well, possibly.
INTERVIEWER
Are you irreconcilably hostile to the twentieth century?
BURROUGHS
Not at all, although I can imagine myself as having been born under many different circumstances. For example, I had a dream recently in which I returned to the family home and I found a different father and a different house from any I’d ever seen before. Yet in a dream sense, the father and the house were quite familiar.
INTERVIEWER
Mary McCarthy has characterized you as a soured utopian. Is that accurate?
BURROUGHS
I do definitely mean what I say to be taken literally, yes, to make people aware of the true criminality of our times, to wise up the marks. All of my work is directed against those who are bent, through stupidity or design, on blowing up the planet or rendering it uninhabitable. Like the advertising people we talked about, I’m concerned with the precise manipulation of word and image to create an action, not to go out and buy a Coca-Cola, but to create an alteration in the reader’s consciousness. You know, they ask me if I were on a desert island and knew nobody would ever see what I wrote, would I go on writing. My answer is most emphatically yes. I would go on writing for company. Because I’m creating an imaginary—it’s always imaginary—world in which I would like to live.
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William Burroughs
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Arranged according to its own ground-breaking taxonomy, the AMOK Dispatch takes you through the extremes of information: from Control (analyses of power structures from the Trilateral Commission to the American Psychiatric Assn.) to Mayhem (true crime, disasters, forensic medicine) to Neuropolitics (psychedelia, parapsychology, brain chemistry) to Scratch 'n' Sniff (pop culture and kitsch) to Orgone (sexuality, the body, and the life-force) and more…
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https://www.amokdispatch.net/neuropolitics/william-burroughs.html
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I would suggest that academies be established where young people will learn to get really high . . . high as the Zen master is high when his arrow hits a target in the dark . . . high as the karate master is high when he smashes a brick with his fist . . . high . . . weightless . . . in space. This is the space age. Time to look beyond this rundown radioactive cop-ridden planet. Time to look beyond the animal body. Remember anything that can be done chemically can be done in other ways. You don’t need drugs to get high but drugs do serve as a shortcut at certain stages of this training. The students would receive a basic course of training in the non-chemical discipline of yoga, karate, prolonged sense withdrawal, stroboscopic lights, the constant use of tape recorders to break down verbal association lines. Techniques now being used for control of thought could be used instead for liberation. — William S. Burroughs, from The Job
A collection of 43 short essays that range in topic from autobiography to social commentary to ruminations on science to literary criticism. Discursive and linear, these reflections offer a rare glimpse into the sensibility of a novelist whose style is largely defined by allegory and the now-famous cut-up method. While the expository presentation may be unique (though Burroughs, it seems, is either incapable or unwilling to disengage from allegory altogether), the disposition isn't; his singular brand of indigenously American Libertarianism—caustic, scatological, hilarious, wistful—is evident throughout: “Most of the trouble in this world has been caused by folks who can't mind their own business, because they have no business of their own to mind, anymore than a smallpox virus has.” There's a commonsense approach that informs his assessments of fellow writers as well. Of Beckett, he states: “If the role of a novelist is to create characters and the sets in which his characters live and breathe, then Beckett is not a novelist at all. There is no Beckett; it is all taking place in some grey limbo, and there is also no set.” Highlights include “Bugger the Queen,” a scathing attack on British royalty; “My Experiences With Wilhelm Reich's Orgone Box”; and “The Limits of Control.” MDG
Publisher: Little, Brown
Paperback: 216 pages
A collection of short works published by small presses both foreign and domestic, focusing on Burroughs' experiments in language cut-up and photomontage drawn largely from the 1960s. Also includes The Retreat Diaries (1976), a day-by-day assemblage of “bits of dreams and poetry and associations cut in together” recorded on a Buddhist retreat in Vermont; and Cobble Stone Gardens (1976), an alternately bizarre and tender reminiscence of the author's childhood dedicated to the memory of his mother and father. Enhanced by the inclusion of “Burroughs in Tangier” by Paul Bowles (1959) and Alan Ansen's affectionate appreciation “Whoever Can Pick Up a Frying Pan Owns Death” (1959), The Burroughs File is an excellent compilation that provides the reader with Burroughs' principal literary output prior to his return to full-length fiction with The Wild Boys (1970). Writing to Ansen, Burroughs states: “Unless writing has the danger and immediacy, the urgency of bullfighting, it is nowhere near my way of thinking… I am tired of sitting behind the lines with an imperfect recording device receiving inaccurate bulletins… I must reach the Front.” MDG
Publisher: City Lights
Paperback: 230 pages
Illustrated
Important explanations of the experiments, techniques and theories which are usually encoded in Burroughs's fiction are provided in the form of interviews and essays intercut as “a film with fade-outs and flashback illustrating the answers.” The possibilities for drug-free liberation of consciousness are explored through sound cut-ups, porno film loops, subliminals, infrasonic frequencies, riot TV, speech scramblers and the Dreamachine. Burroughs also takes the opportunity to editorialize in plain English about the Family; the pernicious influence of the gentler sex; the CIA; Watergate; love, the word and other viruses; Wilhelm Reich; Korzybski; L. Ron Hubbard; mutation; and Death. SS
Publisher: Penguin
Paperback: 224 pages
A dream journal that reads more like a memoir than some random collection of subconscious misadventures, My Education is Burroughs at his most vivid, impacted and vulnerable. Characters include everyone from friends (living and dead) to historical figures to extraterrestrials to his beloved cats. There's an elegiac, wistful tone throughout; the reflections and recollections of a man who, in his long life, has tasted (and endured) the extremes of love and suffering. Inherent in the very activity of dream—being outside of one's own body—is the element of transcendence, and this, too, emerges as a signature theme. While Burroughs has always questioned the limitations of language as they apply to meaning, here he repeatedly focuses that question on how those limits apply to loss. Tragically consistent with its overall mood, the book is dedicated to one Michael Emerton, a 26-year-old suicide; Burroughs writes: “An experience most deeply felt is the most difficult to put into words. Remembering brings the emptiness, the acutely painful awareness of irreparable loss.” Gone is the raging diagnostician of Naked Lunch and Nova Express; it's a kinder, gentler Burroughs within these pages—a long time in coming but well worth the wait. A must-read for anyone interested in the development of Burroughs' ongoing vision; an excellent introduction for the uninitiated. MDG
Publisher: Viking
Hardback: 193 pages
Illustrated
A bilingual (German/English) chronicle of Burroughs' experiences with and critique of Scientology culled from articles originally printed in the L.A. Free Press, East Village Other and Rolling Stone. “No body of knowledge needs an organizational policy”, writes Burroughs, “Organizational policy can only impede the advancement of knowledge. There is a basic incompatibility between any organization and freedom of thought.” Also includes a letter to the editor of Rolling Stone from R. Sorrell, a representative of the Church of Scientology along with Burroughs' caustically arch response. The volume concludes with Ali's Smile, a satirical allegory on the nature of control with Scientology as its target. What the book makes unmistakably clear is Burroughs' rabid contempt for the lapdog follower, the submissive idiot ever ready and willing to obey the voice of authority. MDG
Publisher: Expanded Media
Paperback: 106 pages
A short collection of correspondence (commencing in 1953) between Burroughs and Ginsberg focusing on Burroughs' travels through the Peruvian jungles in search of yage, an hallucinogenic plant used by Amazon Indian doctors for the purpose of locating lost bodies and souls. Most exciting, perhaps, is encountering Burroughs in an epistolary mode; his arch observations and bitchy wit bereft of the allegorical/nonlinear trappings of his celebrated novels (though many of the images in Naked Lunch are in fact taken from notes on the hallucinations caused by yage). Seven years later Ginsberg is in Peru and writes Burroughs an account of his own terrors with the drug, appealing to his mentor for counsel; a request Burroughs responds to somewhat cryptically: “There is no thing to fear. Vaya adelante. Look. Listen. Hear. Your AYUASKA consciousness is more valid than 'Normal Consciousness'? Whose 'Normal Consciousness'? Why return to?” The volume concludes with an epilogue (1963) containing a brief reflective missive from Ginsberg as well as “I AM DYING, MEESTER?,” a disturbingly elegiac cut-up by Burroughs provoked, presumably, by memories of his search for the drug: “Flashes in front of my eyes naked and sullen—Rotten dawn wind in sleep—Death rot on Panama photo where the awning flaps.” For all students of Burroughs as well as those interested in the literature of drug-induced altered states. MDG
Publisher: City Lights
Paperback: 72 pages
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https://www.depauw.edu/sfs/birs/bir136.html
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Books in Review: 136
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"N. Katherine Hayles",
"Nick Hubble",
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"Joseph Norman",
"Amitav Ghosh",
"Kenneth R. James",
"Teresa López-Pellisa",
"Nat Segaloff",
"J.P. Telotte",
"Jon Towlson"
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BOOKS IN REVIEW
The Principle of Hope in the Anthropocene.
Lisa Garforth. Green Utopias: Environmental Hope Before and After Nature. Cambridge, UK: Polity, 2018. 196 pp. $62.95 hc, $22.95 pbk, $18.99 ebk.
Bringing together sf texts with nonfiction works in ecological science and environmentalist politics from the 1970s to the present, Lisa Garforth’s Green Utopias provides an invaluable handbook for interdisciplinary scholars working on the various intersections of these discourses. While the book may not contain novel theoretical paradigms that push through the existing limits of any of the fields it discusses—and in any event does not really aspire to—it ably lays out the contours of eco-utopian thought in the current conjuncture and brings into dialogue texts and authors too rarely thought through together. Indeed, because of its focused progression through the decades and its smart but readable presentation of complex theoretical issues, I believe Green Utopias would provide a very useful spine for a class in the ecological humanities focusing on green futurity, especially one with an emphasis on works of ecological sf.
After an introduction that lays out a theoretical history of the connotations and contradictions of its two key terms, “green” and “utopia,” and that makes a persuasive case for the usefulness of thinking with utopias even in an era overly preoccupied with a supposedly pragmatic liberal realism, the book is divided into five chapters covering the development (or devolution) of utopian ecological thought over the latter half of the twentieth century. First, Garforth discusses the idea of the future of nature in the 1970s through the 1990s (chapters two and four)—in which we see utopian possibility skimming off the emergence of more and more dire warnings about the environment—before turning to the bleaker, even more fundamentally pessimistic 2000s and 2010s (chapters five and six)—a time in which the crisis seems to have finally metastasized beyond any capacity to manage or ameliorate. In the latter half of the book we thus see the “after nature” of the title rise to the fore: with the explosive effects of climate change and related ecological crises increasingly impossible to ignore, the contemporary moment (the moment in which we have become aware we are living in the Anthropocene) produces an increasingly beleaguered, terrified human subject who finds it difficult to imagine anything like an positive future, much less a green utopia. The downward trajectory from texts such as Ursula K. Le Guin’s Always Coming Home (1986) and Kim Stanley Robinson’s Pacific Edge (1990), discussed in chapter four, to works such as Paolo Bacigalupi’s The Windup Girl (2010) and The Water Knife (2015) and Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake (2003), discussed in chapters five and six, seems hard to deny; is there any doubt that more and more the future seems utterly without hope (even before Brexit and the Trump election)? A brief conclusion in chapter seven aims to pull us out of this depressive tailspin, attempting to imagine, if not quite a “good” Anthropocene, then at least a survivable one. Indeed, the conclusion intriguingly chooses not to choose between the various ecotopian possibilities that have been sketched out in the monograph, not even between the “before” and “after” nature of the title; instead, Garforth argues, we must “greet the Anthropocene” with a multitude of strategies ranging from hope and fear to apocalypse and adaptation:
If we have learned nothing else about our environmental predicament since the limits to growth, it is that it is huge in physical and conceptual scale, it is diverse in content, and it is thoroughly … wicked: multi-dimensional and essentially irresolvable. (162)
In such dire times, the thinking goes, we should welcome any sort of utopian hope we can muster.
Specialist readers of SFS, while likely appreciating the book’s politics and its ruthlessly materialist perspective, may be somewhat frustrated by some of Garforth’s textual selections; as the above list indicates, the books selected for discussion are fairly well-known classics of ecological science fiction, with few unexpected or provocative surprises to be found herein. A number of the readings of these books are also strongly couched in other critics’ readings and indeed are sometimes little more than extended summaries of other critics’ arguments (such as Timothy Morton on Avatar [2009], or Adam Trexler on Robinson’s Science in the Capital trilogy [2004-2007], or for that matter me on WALL-E [2008], to name just a few). In any event, Green Utopias is not especially interested in literary criticism per se at all; rather, the texts it discusses tend to stand as registrations of the larger social and material forces that are driving cultural production in that moment. (It should perhaps be noted that the author is a sociologist, and thus the book’s form and citational norms both derive from that discipline rather than from English or comparative literature.) To me, the book’s originality is not to be found in its establishment of an ecological sf canon or in its readings of that canon, but rather in its unapologetic combination of nonfiction texts such as The Limits to Growth report (1972) or Bill McKibben’s The End of Nature (1989) alongside eco-sf, understanding these texts all to be doing more or less the same urgent work in different registers and aimed at different audiences.
The consequence of this union is an argument for the privileging of utopian hermeneutics (as advanced by such key thinkers as Fredric Jameson, Darko Suvin, Ernst Bloch, and Marius de Geus) as a cognitive framework able to read both fictional and nonfictional texts and unite them within a single interpretive totality that offers a line of flight out of despair. While such an understanding of the utopian potentiality implicit in such nonfictional works unquestionably has a long history, dating back at least to the utopian readings of Karl Marx that have been so influential in the western Marxist tradition, it is too often disparaged and overlooked, especially with regard to ecological science, which is typically cast as relying on stark, bloodless matters of fact, not any sort of principle of hope. That science is itself a discourse of hope, as is politics, puts them into circuit with science fiction as versions of one and the same utopian drive for a better tomorrow—an important thing for us to remember in a moment in the academy that asks us as scholars to think constantly about, and constantly produce defenses of, the value of the work we do. In a dark time—both inside and outside the academy, and seemingly growing ever darker—works such as Garforth’s Green Utopias ultimately offer a vision for why science fiction matters, indeed perhaps why it matters more now than it ever has before.
—Gerry Canavan, Marquette University
“A Problem of Our Desires.”
Amitav Ghosh. The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2016. 196 pp. $15 pbk.
Donald Trump’s early departure from the G7 summit in June 2018, which included skipping a discussion focusing specifically on climate change, neatly reflects Amitav Ghosh’s observation, in a September 2016 interview with Steve Paulson for The Los Angeles Review of Books, that the climate crisis is rooted in “a problem of our desires.” In the United States, public and political discourse regarding climate change has long been marked by a tension between two polarities—“widespread denialism [and] vigorous activist movements” (136)—but more than that, as Ghosh notes in The Great Derangement, attempts meaningfully to address climate change at a political level are hampered, if not completely obstructed, by the “biopolitical mission and the practices of governance that are associated with it” within the Anglosphere (160).The nation-state is just one manifestation of those “desires,” desires Ghosh weaves into a complex tapestry that includes myopic and widespread conspicuous consumption, an unresponsive literary landscape, the machinations of empire, and an overall reluctance to acknowledge that “the climate events of this era … express the entirety of our being” (115). More than just a call for action, Ghosh’s book is a plea for accountability and a sharp, if somewhat jagged, investigation into what he calls “the Great Derangement,” a time that will be remembered for its paradoxical self-awareness and inaction regarding the climate crisis. The book is organized into three sections: “Stories,” which constitutes half of the text, “History,” and “Politics.”
Ghosh’s work in the first section is striking in its efforts to answer a question that is elegant in its simplicity—why does “serious fiction” not talk about climate change?—and complex in its response. In the fall of 2015, Ghosh delivered a set of four lectures at the University of Chicago as a part of the Berlin Family Lecture series, later adapting them for his exploration of climate change in the Anthropocene and the striking failure of the literary imagination to account for “the unthinkable.” This is Ghosh’s metaphoric shorthand for describing not just climate change and its profound ecological impact, but also humanity’s difficulty in effectively coming to terms with its presence. Where this difficulty presents itself especially curiously is in the pages of the modern novel, which has been caught short with regard to climate change, due in large part to a notable shift in the nineteenth century that saw “the banishing of the improbable and the insertion of the everyday” (17). This is Ghosh’s largest but by no means only compelling argument. Each section of The Great Derangement pivots on a key problem and for a writer like Ghosh, the perceived failure of fiction to account for the climate crisis is of obvious interest. Thus he returns to this concern throughout the text. What is missing in this otherwise thorough chapter is a clearer demonstration of Ghosh’s contention that twentieth-century fiction—outside of the realms of science fiction and fantasy—has proven so unequal to the task of representation and investigation with respect to climate change. Put more plainly, his argument lacks evidence; but then again, that is precisely his point, which renders his argument a bit circular. In fact, he appears to be haunted by this problem, returning to it again in the third section to note that even if the list of writers who address climate change could be “expanded a hundredfold or more,” the fact remains that the literary mainstream “remain[s] just as unaware of the crisis on our doorstep as the population at large” (125).
In his first chapter, Ghosh does draw a fairly convincing genealogy that traces the collapse of fiction in relation to Nature, the fantastic, and the improbable. The initial narrowing of the literary imagination in the nineteenth century—the era of the Industrial Revolution—corresponds with the “victory of gradualist views in science” and, by implication, within culture itself, that had little room for the distinct and especially for the improbable (22). He admits that there are still some texts from that period, such as Wordsworth’s “The World is Too Much with Us” (1807) and Melville’s Moby Dick (1851), that demonstrate an active engagement with the natural world that does not eschew the fantastic, but as the nonhuman increasingly became excluded, even negated in favor of a general centering of the human, the literary imagination consequently diminished. Thus the modern novel became ill-equipped, even resistant, to entertaining the strange, the exceptional, and the unlikely, and therefore it most certainly could not address something especially improbable such as climate change, particularly if it wished to be treated seriously. Otherwise, it risked being evicted from the “mansion” to the “humbler dwellings” of science fiction and fantasy (24).
Ghosh’s statement has a bit of the ring of resentment—particularly when he refers to the two genres as “outhouses” (66)—that is often found in pieces defending these genres against intellectual and aesthetic dismissal. Though The Great Derangement is not overly preoccupied with the marginalization of science fiction, Ghosh does offer a compelling theory for its cultural disenfranchisement, linking it to what he calls the “partitioning” of “the imaginative and the scientific” in the early days of modernity (71). Any “hybrids” such as science fiction were separated from the literary mainstream, a fate eventually experienced by Frankenstein (1818), which over time was relegated to the “outhouse” of science fiction, despite being hailed by the literary mainstream when it was first published. Another change in the novelistic tradition that further impoverished fiction is “the turn away from the collective”; this, Ghosh argues, is an effect of modernity’s insistence on seeing progress as “an irreversible forward movement” (79). Consequently, Ghosh ultimately places his faith in the hybrids and the visual arts to do what serious fiction cannot (or will not) do.
In the book’s shortest chapter, “History,” Ghosh’s most intriguing observation links the climate crisis to the history of empire. Indeed, one of the book’s especially striking statements can be found in his suggestion that imperialism “may have actually retarded the onset of the climate crisis” (110; emphasis in original). Ghosh begins this chapter by emphasizing the centrality of Asia in the conversation regarding climate change: the sheer numbers of humans inhabiting this vast area, which spreads from India to China, means that the largest numbers of agents and victims of climate change are concentrated in the most densely populated areas of the planet. As such, Ghosh argues that “no strategy can work globally unless it works in Asia and is adopted by large numbers of Asians” (90). As with “Stories,” this section hinges on a central problem, in this case the reason for Asia’s delayed industrialization until the twentieth century. Ghosh argues that it was not until the advent of modern technologies that were carbon dependent that technological and economic gaps between populations that had for millennia been roughly equal started to grow. For example, the ship-building wars between India and Britain in the nineteenth century which led to the Registry Act of 1815 heavily restricted Indian ships and sailors, is evidence of Ghosh’s convincing argument that “the emerging fossil-fuel economies of the West required that people elsewhere be prevented from developing coal-based energy systems of their own” (107). And yet it is countries such as China and India that are now being blamed for climate change, Ghosh points out, and that viewpoint overlooks the role all of humanity has played in bringing the planet to its current climate crisis.
Asia has helped further to reveal, Ghosh observes, “that the patterns of life that modernity engenders can only be practiced by a small minority of the world’s population” (92). This truth lays bare another truth tied to the climate crisis, that action has been deferred in order to maintain the status quo in favor of the rich and the West. This point is at the heart of the third section, “Politics,” and naturally extends the arguments about capitalism and empire that he outlines in “History.” In short, “the distribution of power in the world therefore lies at the core of the climate crisis,” and even if the mechanisms of capitalism, so often seen as “the principal fault line” with respect to the climate crisis, were to change, Ghosh argues that the true obstacles to effective change—“political and military dominance”—will still be in play (146).
At this point, Ghosh’s focus takes a turn to a comparative examination of the Paris Agreement and Pope Francis’s encyclical letter Laudato Sí, both of which were published in 2015. Ghosh finds especially striking the encyclical’s “sober clarity” (155) contrasted to the Agreement’s “highly stylized” and complex structure (153). Where the Paris Agreement appears to engage in acts of concealment and occlusion, the encyclical is open and not bogged down with circular rhetoric and heavy-handed terminology. Clearly Ghosh intended this reading to link back to his larger statements about the status quo (something the encyclical is clearly contesting), power distribution, and political inertia with respect to climate change, but like much of The Great Derangement, the sharpness of Ghosh’s arguments is dulled by the text’s tendency to jump around or go back to points which it appears he cannot quite resolve.
This has much to do with the text’s origins as a small group of lectures. There is no denying that much of Ghosh’s overall argument is thought-provoking, and his ability to weave so many disparate texts—literary, scientific, political, and religious—together is a testament to his vision of a problem that extends beyond the narrow or the immediate, stretching backward and forward in time, across all facets of human existence. Ghosh’s eye is firmly fixed on the present, and he has read the present moment of the climate crisis accurately. It is more than just “deranged”: it is schizophrenic. Yet the timeliness and astuteness of Ghosh’s argument cannot undo a principal problem of his text, and that is one of readership. Ghosh’s observations are invaluable but also rather esoteric, suggesting that the readers of this text are limited to academic circles that are already likely to agree with his assessments. This highlights not so much a failure of the literary imagination as it reminds us of the limitations of climate change discourse to engage with the cultural mainstream in ways that speak more directly to a broader audience, especially outside the boundaries of the sf novel, where climate change can easily be relegated to something fantastical and, yes, improbable and therefore dismissible. In that sense, only half of The Great Derangement, “History” and “Politics,” appears to have any purchase beyond the academic and, even then, only just so. If nothing else, Ghosh’s text itself often demonstrates his argument regarding the failure of language to fully account for and conceptualize “the unthinkable” that is the climate crisis in ways that bring all of humanity into the conversation, leaving him to hope for “a transformed and renewed art and literature” that “transcend[s] the isolation in which humanity” is currently entrapped (162). The Great Derangement is just such an attempt.
—Ericka Hoagland, Stephen F. Austin State University
Imagining Future Change Now.
Shelley Streeby. Imagining the Future of Climate Change: World-Making through Science Fiction and Activism. Oakland, CA: U of California P, 2018. 167 pp. $18.95 pbk.
Energizing, timely, and resonant with the social flashpoints that extend beyond literature and give heft to its production and value, Shelley Streeby’s Imagining the Future of Climate Change (2018) immerses its readers in the possibilities that sf holds for resisting fossil capital’s incessant push to streamline profit over cultural and ecological security. As Streeby reminds us through Octavia E. Butler’s work and ideas, sf is rooted in the now rather than focused on predictions of the future, because it is in this manner that we imagine and thus help shape what is to come (25). Examining how “writers, artists, and organizers of color” employ terms related to the “speculative” (26), Streeby lists Mark Dery’s “Afrofuturism,” Grace Dillon’s “Indigenous futurisms,” and Chicanx and Latinx futurisms as keys to unlocking already-existing, active bodies of works resistant to the drivers of climate change. Her argument is that such fiction and related artistic work are necessary contributors to imagining the future, for culture and creative production are unique voices not bent to the service of science and technology; they can expand the scope of those limiting categories and thus envision modes and means of transformative change.
Streeby’s book takes the important step not only of reading this creative work for its potential, but also of including it in the same conversation as activism critical of the ostensible dominance of social organizations such as “nation-states and corporations” (31) with their disaster-capitalist responses to human-caused environmental catastrophes. Both activism and cultural imagining since the 1990s, she argues, place “Indigenous people and people of color” on the front lines of labor that rethinks the climate crisis from cultural perspectives (33). To investigate such phenomena, she begins her discussion by looking first at the #NoDAPL movement and its historical-cultural roots, Indigenous ways of knowing as resistance to settler-invader colonialism, Indigenous slipstream fiction (featuring Gerald Vizenor’s and Leslie Marmon Silko’s works), the Indigenous environmental justice movement, and Indigenous survivance seen through creative work portraying a climate-changed future (the Aotearoan web series Anamata Future News (2015). Streeby then transitions to a discussion of climate refugees as imagined by Octavia Butler in Parable of the Sower (1993) and Parable of the Talents (1998), with a particular focus on Butler’s research on climate events and on sociopolitical and economic policies at the time of writing. This research is held in the Huntington Library in San Marino, California: it encapsulates Butler’s approaches to race and environment as she archived material documenting neoliberal responses to emerging scientific warnings about global warming and climate change, and then crafted what Streeby and others label her critical dystopias. From this, Streeby moves to a necessary development in this climate-shifting world, presenting “a theory of shaping change” (101) through the lens of sf writer and activist adrienne maree brown’s responses to Butler’s Parable of the Sower. brown embraces a “leadership model” central to her own “facilitation and organizational development work,” much of which tackles climate change (102).
Here Streeby’s motif of molding the future emerges to refute the possibility that “nation-states or captains of industry will save the day” (105). She pinpoints a vital disconnect between the beneficiaries of and dependents on fossil fuel capitalism on the one hand, and the proponents of climate justice on the other. Instead—and this is an essential argument—she maintains that the present and future problems of climate change belong to the entire world. Streeby returns here to the “unwillingness of states and the fossil fuel industry to change” (112), despite the fact that social movements and creative work by Indigenous people and people of color have worked in many instances to reframe climate change issues as global ones. The crucial path forward, Streeby concludes, following brown, is one of “making different worlds through direct action and social movement-building, and creating transformative change through visionary speculative fiction” (113). The greatest hope for tomorrow, its people, and the planet, she offers, will unfold most productively from “networked local strategies, direct actions, and collective envisionings of the future” (126).
Incredibly well-researched and notably conversant with the intricacies of both key sf writing and activism from the inception of environmentalism movements and their related speculative contemplations to those in the present day, Streeby’s Imagining the Future of Climate Change is an indispensable text in working to turn the dystopian now toward more positive and inclusive means of fostering world community-building as we labor together to engage with the climate future we have wrought.
—Conrad Scott, University of Alberta
To the Barricades!
Mike Ashley. Science Fiction Rebels: The Story of the Science Fiction Magazines from 1981 to 1990. Liverpool: Liverpool UP, 2018. 473 pp. £75 hc.
“Rebels,” Mike Ashley rather pedantically tells us at the start of his new book, could be either a noun or a verb, and therefore the title of his book is ambiguous. Well, up to a point. I am not altogether sure that there is that much difference between sf as a whole rebelling (against what?) and certain people or groups within sf being rebellious. And neither, it would seem, is Ashley. His book promises high drama, with chapters called “The First Revolution,” “The Second Revolution,” and “The Third Rebellion” (again one wonders about the implied difference here between a revolution and a rebellion), but the drama does not come. The first revolution, he tells us, is cyberpunk, but then immediately explains that cyberpunk “was simply part of the continual growth in science fiction that by the 1980s was being influenced by the new age of computers” (52). This sort of contradiction crops up several times: for instance, when he implies that Rudy Rucker’s first two stories for Analog were symptomatic of a sea change that Stanley Schmidt was bringing about in that magazine, then describes the stories as “typical Analog stories” (61). On Ashley’s evidence, cyberpunk would seem to have carried out its revolution by conforming exactly to type in the various magazines where it appeared. So, less revolution and more evolution, perhaps?
Ashley’s perception of the history of sf is curious, to say the least. It is fair enough to trace that history through the magazines, which played a significant part in the shaping of genre sf, particularly during the early and middle years of the last century. But Ashley’s history becomes more extravagantly detailed, more exhaustive, the more the influence of the magazines as a whole declined. The first two volumes in Ashley’s ongoing history of sf magazines, The Time Machines (2000) and Transformations (2005), cover the entire period of what might be considered the glory days of the sf magazine, from the launch of Amazing in 1926 to the collapse of the New Wave in 1970. Between these dates, it is fair to say, all the most significant developments in Anglo-American science fiction could be linked to some degree or other to the magazines of the time.
But Ashley’s third volume, Gateways to Forever (2007), a thicker volume than either of its predecessors, covers a mere ten years, from 1970 to 1980: years, moreover, during which, if the short story remained central to the history of sf, that centrality was focused not on the magazines but upon original anthologies and series such as Orbit (edited by Damon Knight), Universe (edited by Terry Carr), and New Dimensions (edited by Robert Silverberg).
Now, after an unexpectedly long wait, there is a fourth volume, and again it limits its attention to just ten years, 1980 to 1990. These, if anything, were years in which the magazines began their long decline—late in the book, Ashley concedes that the circulation of practically all of the leading sf magazines fell during this period—and in which the novel (and, perhaps even more, the film) took over decisively from the short story as the characteristic form of sf. Not that you would necessarily glean this from the book. If an author’s first publication was a novel, it is mentioned in passing, but one gets the distinct impression that only when they debuted in a magazine are authors considered worthy of attention, and only if a novel was originally serialized in a magazine is it really interesting.
This is symptomatic of a blinkered attitude that runs through the book. Yes, this is a history of sf magazines, but it is written in a way that suggests that only the magazines have shaped the history of sf. Context is something that is noticeably absent from all of these books. For instance, the biggest event in science fiction during the period covered by the previous volume, Gateways to Forever, was the release of Star Wars (1977), but it is noticed in the book only because of a subsequent increase in the number of magazines devoted to sf film. The current volume covers the period of Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher, whose neoliberal policies had a profound effect upon the sf being published at the time (and presumably also upon the economics of the magazines themselves), but they are never mentioned anywhere in the book. In Britain, particularly, it was also a period during which a decade of “Troubles” in Northern Ireland spilled over into terrorism and repressive policies in mainland Britain. Ashley notices this only in his discussion of two stories in an Irish magazine when he says “there were also expressions of violence and control which may reflect the political problems in Éire and Northern Ireland at the time” (151). That “may,” suggesting an idea without committing to it or exploring it further, is typical, as is the fact that beyond this oblique reference there is no comment on what those “political problems” might be or how they might be reflected in the stories under discussion.
In discussing cyberpunk, Ashley notes in passing that it was part of “a debate about the generic boundary between science fiction and postmodernist literature” (54), without giving any attention to postmodernist literature or asking what those generic boundaries might be, presumably because postmodernist literature as such was not a part of the sf magazines and so has no part to play in this history. Throughout the volume one gets a distinct impression that the sf magazine is hermetically sealed off not just from the wider world, but from the rest of sf. For instance, the reference to “the new age of computers” that I quoted above is as close as he comes to providing any outside context for cyberpunk, but that context comes about only because he is discussing Omni, a magazine largely devoted to that computer technology.
The revolutionary story of cyberpunk is here presented as being the story of Asimov’s and F&SF and Analog and Amazing and Omni, five less-than- revolutionary magazines that, with individual variations in style, occupied the middle ground of American sf. Rabble-rousing fanzines, such Bruce Sterling’s Cheap Truth (1983-86), are quoted in footnotes but not discussed, nor is the role of the Mirrorshades anthology (1986). The magazines in question were only tangentially interested in cyberpunk and were not at all interested in revolution. The most controversial story to appear in any of these venues during the period was probably “Her Furry Face” (1983) by Leigh Kennedy, because it dealt with the subject most likely to disturb the conservative calm of the American sf readership at the time: sex. Cyberpunk was not having anything like as revolutionary an effect, certainly not in the magazines where an ever-rotating cast of editors had an eye permanently on the circulation figures. So Ashley’s first revolution comes across as a story of conforming, with minor variations. (Interestingly, the “humanist” sf of writers such as Kim Stanley Robinson and Karen Joy Fowler, widely considered at the time as a contrast to cyberpunk, gets no mention here at all.)
Much the same is true of Ashley’s second revolution, which he calls the “British Hard-SF Renaissance.” This he correctly identifies as being closely connected with the magazine Interzone, but that is not the whole story. What became known as the British Boom was largely a phenomenon of the 1990s, though it had its roots in the 1980s. The most significant individual in this story was probably Iain M. Banks, whose huge commercial and critical success paved the way for others to follow. But Banks was primarily a novelist; his bare handful of short stories had all been written and put aside years before his first novel appeared, and so he hardly features in this history. Interzone’s role in the British Boom was not as straightforward as Ashley suggests. Its ideas can certainly be traced back to the Interzone editorial that called for “radical hard sf”, but at the time that call was met with more mystification than energy. Nobody knew what the term meant, and it was generally assumed that it probably referred to cyberpunk because, at the time and for some years after, Interzone was changing from being a reinvention of New Worlds into a venue for American cyberpunk writers and some often astonishingly weak British copies. It would be years after that editorial before the re-imagining of hard sf really got under way, even within the pages of Interzone. And even then the most acclaimed and probably the most revolutionary fiction featured in Interzone was by Geoff Ryman, notably “The Unconquered Country” (1986, which is discussed here) and “Love Sickness” (1987, which, curiously, is not), neither of which, by any stretch of the imagination, is hard sf. Ashley also extends the “British Hard-SF Renaissance” to cover his discussion of other British magazines at the time, most of them short lived except for Back Brain Recluse (1984-2002). And none of these magazines, most particularly not Back Brain Recluse, published, supported, or encouraged hard sf. This is a history painted with a very broad brush in which much of the fine detail is necessarily obscured.
Having spent many pages telling us how revolutionary magazines such as Asimov’s and Omni and Interzone were, Ashley then introduces us to his “third rebellion,” in which a string of small literary magazines spring up specifically in contrast to the commercial conventionality of magazines such as Asimov’s and Omni and Interzone. Hard though it may be to think of magazines such as Pulphouse and New Pathways as revolutionary, their very existence is testimony to how little the major genre magazines were prepared to trust experimental writing and unconventional ideas. Not that Ashley himself seems that comfortable with anything that challenges the smooth familiarity of the mainstream sf magazines. At one point he asks: “if Pulphouse was so highly regarded, why was not a single story from it nominated for an award?” (187). Given that he is careful to note every award when discussing a magazine, this is clearly the one objective standard for quality he has managed to light upon. He treats these magazines in exactly the same way he does all the others, with a one-sentence précis of what he considers representative stories and an emphasis on big name writers who have already cropped up repeatedly elsewhere in the book: Bruce Sterling, Paul Di Filippo, Rudy Rucker, Greg Egan, Brian Aldiss, Jack McDevitt, Thomas F. Monteleone. Hardly a list to inspire notions of radical iconoclasm: these are exactly the same authors filling the magazines against which these journals are supposedly reacting. What Ashley is actually suggesting with all this talk of revolution and rebellion is a history of abiding conservatism.
But then, this is a very conservative history. The body of the volume is filled out with countless one-sentence précis of stories, but the real interest lies in gossip about the relationship between editors and publishers, details of page sizes and page counts, type of paper, use of illustrations, circulation figures, newsstand sales compared to subscriptions, dates of publication, and other such minutiae. The actual history of the magazines takes just a half of this volume, while the rest is taken up with a series of appendices. The longest of these, over 100 pages, is devoted to a survey of non-English-language magazines that is predictably thorough but, other than revealing that there are sf magazines in seemingly every country in the world, often featuring the same writers we are familiar with from Anglo-American science fiction, this is rather less detailed than the body of the history. Other than that, there are tables and lists and even corrections to the three previous volumes. Ashley is not an engaging writer, but he is thorough, and what is important about this book, as with its predecessors, is that it provides an awful lot of the facts and figures that other historians will be able to draw on.
—Paul Kincaid, independent scholar
Reconciling Victor and the Monster.
Gregory Benford, Gary Westfahl, Howard V. Hendrix, and Joseph D. Miller, eds. Bridges to Science Fiction and Fantasy: Outstanding Essays from the J. Lloyd Eaton Conferences. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2018. viii+263 pp. $49.95 pbk.
There were twenty official J. Lloyd Eaton Conferences on sf and fantasy held at the University of California, Riverside, between 1979 and 1999, each of which generated its own conference volume. The current anthology, which combines the titles of the first two conference volumes that appeared in 1979 and 1980, is, with a couple of exceptions, a “greatest hits” of the twenty volumes. The editors have chosen 22 of what they considered to be the most outstanding papers and published them in chronological order of first appearance and with minimal editing.
Most papers have the addition of an afterword of varying length in which the authors discuss their contributions from the hindsight of the present. As an appendix, there is an Eaton Roll of Honor, naming everyone who participated in some way at the 25 official and unofficial Eaton conferences. In their introduction, the editors offer special tributes to the conference founder, the late George Edgar Slusser (who was also the first curator of the famous Eaton Collection of Science Fiction and Fantasy at Riverside), and to the late Frank McConnell, a conference stalwart whose wit enlivened the annual proceedings.
I have to say that this volume was a pleasure to read. Close to half of the papers are indeed outstanding and most of the rest are better than interesting. The device of the newly appended afterword works very well. It allows the authors to express mature second thoughts, while suggesting that sf criticism has changed over the course of the past forty years, not always for the better. For these papers are, almost without exception, lucid, unafraid to engage with the big picture, and refreshingly free of jargon. It is the professional academic critics rather than the creative writers who really shine here. And those who shine most are witty without straining for humor.
For me, the paradigmatic essay in the collection is Vivian Sobchack’s “The Virginity of Astronauts: Sex and the Science Fiction Film” (1982). In the relatively confined space of a conference paper Sobchack takes on a vast topic: how gender functions in the post-World War II American sf film. She uses psychoanalytic concepts (each of which she carefully defines) to show how the biological female is repressed in these films, returning in displaced and condensed forms. Her range of reference is broad, from The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms (1953) through Alien (1979). She explains how the mechanism of repression works: e.g., erotic or fertile women are subjected to an alien embrace. More importantly, she explains why such repression exists at all: the sf genre is male-dominated and anxious; the female body mocks male desire for separation from the mother and the male scientist’s hankering for autonomous creation.
Sobchack’s argument is strengthened by reference to the occasional exception that proves the rule, e.g., the figure of Becky in Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956). She does not mince words in laying out the significance of her conclusion: the return of the repressed indicates that male human endeavor is “puny and imitative” (41) compared to natural reproduction whose burden, or privilege, is chiefly borne by the female. But she concedes that she finds these films fascinating and important. (Why else would anyone spend time on a subject so low in cultural prestige?) The films, consciously or otherwise, pose fundamental questions about human origin and identity. And Sobchack is genuinely witty: the male heroes in sf films are “as libidinally interesting as a Ken doll: like Barbie’s companion, they are all jaw and no genitals” (40).
Sobchack’s lengthy afterword, subtitled “After Ripley, After 9/11” is as outstanding in its way as her original essay. Now using the (again carefully defined) concept of abjection as elaborated by Julia Kristeva, she notes that the cultural trauma of 9/11 was a watershed moment in American sf film, as it was in American culture. Having the effect of a “low-tech ‘alien’ castration of a monumentally phallic American erection,” it produced “a more general detumescence of confidence in the exceptionalism and potency of American masculinity” (48). The result is that, to counter this male abjection, sf films after 9/11 “increasingly put their faith in women to produce both a familial and collective future while traumatized men try to undo the past” (50). Sobchack implies that the genre is healthier as a result, though whether such films as Elysium (2013), Interstellar (2014), and The Martian (2015) are as aesthetically successful as, say, Forbidden Planet (1956), 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), and The Stepford Wives (1975) remains moot.
Let me summarize more briefly the other essays that I found to be outstanding. Stephen W. Potts’s “Dialogues Concerning Human Understanding” (1979) is excellent on Stanislaw Lem and the philosophical tradition in sf, pinpointing in particular the way that scientific positivism leads to anthropomorphism. Potts confesses disarmingly in his brief afterword that he was unnerved to find that this, perhaps his best work, was done while he was still a PhD student. Eric S. Rabkin’s “The Descent of Fantasy” (1981) was a pioneering exercise in evolutionary aesthetics, affirming the utility of fantastic narratives such as fairy tales. Rabkin explains with admirable concision why such tales are so long-lasting and important: “Fantasies are special narratives made of unfalsifiable events in part so that the reports of these events can be exchanged long after particular reality changes” (34).
Robert Crossley’s “In the Palace of Green Porcelain” (1989) argues, counterintuitively but effectively, for the complementary functions of museums and sf. Taking H.G. Wells’s Time Traveler’s account of his exploration of the titular Palace as paradigmatic, Crossley affirms the role of the museum in sf as a place that “collapses distances of time and space, disorients and displaces the observer, and ultimately requires us to put ourselves right again” (95). Fredric R. Jameson’s “Longevity as Class Struggle” (1992) eloquently argues that individual longevity in sf is always “a figure and a disguise” (144) for something much larger, namely historical change. He goes on to affirm that “It is indeed one of the grand and dramatic merits of sf as a form that it can ... win back from the sheerly psychological or subjective such expressive powers of pathology ... and place this material in the service of collective drama” (147).
Approaching a similar topic from a different angle, N. Katherine Hayles’s “How Cyberspace Signifies: Taking Immortality Literally” (1992) deals with cyberspatial reality as a function of information rather than molecular materiality, with the interesting result that character and point of view in cyberpunk fiction become synonymous. In her afterword, Hayles reminds us that the 1993Eaton Conference took place only a few months before the introduction of Mosaic, the first popular Web browser. She notes that today the interaction between narrative (an ancient way of human understanding deriving from evolutionary adaptations) and the database (a much more recent, exteriorized means to aid cognition) is the fundamental dynamic in developed societies. The chief insight in Tom Shippey’s “Literary Gatekeepers and the Fabril Tradition” (1994) is that sf defers to a body of authority outside the text, namely natural science. This puts it at odds with the gatekeepers of the humanities (embodied by the MLA), for whom, according to the once fashionable post-structuralist value system, “il n’y a pas de hors-texte” [there is no outside-text]. Shippey’s afterword notes the recent serious decline of credibility, prestige, and enrolment in the academic humanities, and expresses the hope that sf might help bridge the enormous gap that has opened up between the humanities and sciences.
H. Bruce Franklin’s “The Science Fiction of Medicine” (1996) is a meditation, at the height of the AIDS epidemic, on the ways in which sf writers, in the Frankensteinian vein, have imagined how human scientists have attempted to escape mortality. His afterword deals with more recent “post-mortal” scenarios in sf, affirming that the dialectic between life and death is likely to remain fundamental, at least to those of us who seek to retain our humanity. Finally, Carl Freedman’s “Science Fiction and the Two Cultures: Reflections after the Snow-Leavis Controversy” (1999) deals with sf as a potential means to bridge the ever-gaping divide between the humanities and sciences. In his afterword, Freedman reminds us that it is F.R. Leavis, for all his flaws, whose position remains defensible and whose critical legacy is significant, while C.P. Snow, supposedly promoting the sciences, is all but forgotten.
I have insufficient space to deal with fine pieces by Patrick Parrinder, Gregory Benford, Frank McConnell, and several others. They and most of the other critics in this exemplary collection were not afraid to engage with major humanistic issues in their Eaton papers, with sf’s bridging potential a recurrent theme. Of course, sf criticism has itself become institutionalized in the past twenty years, so that graduate students who seek to specialize in sf have to conform to the often anti-humanistic and sometimes stultifying values of the academic gatekeepers. Still, with such potent role models as can be found in this volume, it is to be hoped that future sf critics will rise to the implied challenge: namely, to negotiate (in the late Brian Aldiss’s terms) between the two apparently opposed hemispheres of the human brain, or, to put it another way, to reconcile Victor and the Monster.
—Nicholas Ruddick, University of Regina
Voices Prophesying Progress (or Crying Beware! Beware!).
Peter J. Bowler. A History of the Future: Prophets of Progress from H.G. Wells to Isaac Asimov. New York: Cambridge UP, 2017. x+287 pp. $74.99 hc, $24.99 pbk.
Despite the apparent implications of its subtitle, A History of the Future is not primarily a study of futuristic sf or even of future fiction generally. There are numerous references to Wells, Asimov, and Arthur C. Clarke, and significant (but fewer) references to other sf writers (e.g., Robert A. Heinlein and Olaf Stapledon), as well as to well-known “mainstream” futuristic writers (Aldous Huxley and George Orwell), but no extended readings of their works. Instead, the subject of this book is futurology in all its forms, with brief mentions of literary futures introduced as needed. Even more than literary texts, Peter Bowler relies on popular science writing, both in books and in magazines. The books include two that are likely to be familiar to anyone interested in early British sf, J.B.S. Haldane’s Daedalus: Or Science and the Future (1924) and J.D. Bernal’s The World, the Flesh and the Devil (1929), as well as a range of others less well known. Examples of the latter are The World in 2030 (1930) by the Earl of Birkenhead (less grandly named F.E. Smith), The Birth of the Future (1934) by Peter Ritchie Calder, and several books by “Professor” A.M. Low, especially The Future (1925) and Our Wonderful World of Tomorrow (1934). The magazines most frequently cited include the long-defunct British periodicals Armchair Science, Conquest, Harmsworth Popular Science, Meccano Magazine, and Practical Mechanics, as well as the still viable American publication Popular Mechanics. Bowler’s other sources include newspaper articles, advertisements, government projects, corporate statements, World Fairs—anything that would reflect trends in the attitudes toward progress, by which Bowler primarily means technological innovation.
Those attitudes may be divided into two broad tendencies: to embrace new technologies, often without giving much thought to possible drawbacks, or to resist them reflexively out of a fear of change. Drawing both on Wells’s lecture “The Discovery of the Future” (1902) and C.P. Snow’s “The Two Cultures” (1959), Bowler argues that studies of the future that focus on literary works tend to portray technology in negative terms that reflect the biases of the literary culture, whereas scientists and popular science writers, by and large, are more interested in the potential of new technology to improve human life. He returns at the end to this distinction between technophiles and technophobes, whom Nigel Calder (son of Peter Ritchie Calder) has called zealots and mugs, observing that “both sides are always present, and it is a mistake to focus on one or the other exclusively if we wish to gain a balanced picture of what was going on.” Bowler adds that as “a technophile for much of [his] life” who is “now increasingly resistant to the expanding world of the internet and social media,” he has changed from a zealot to “a confirmed mug,” which has helped him to see both sides of the arguments (209).
One more point to which Bowler returns at several stages is that we should judge arguments for or against technological innovations not by emphasizing what later came to be known but by concentrating on what might reasonably have seemed possible at the time. He gives examples of the problem that arises when later developments lead us to forget that debates over emerging technologies were carried out without knowledge of what now, in hindsight, might seem obvious. As an example he notes that in 1929 Bernard Ackworth, a former Royal Navy Commander, contended that airplanes were unreliable because there was no way for pilots to allow for cross-winds. This argument, Bowler observes, “sounds ludicrous today, but it seemed more plausible at a time when airspeeds were less than 100 mph, and it certainly had some validity for flights in poor visibility when it was impossible to check movement over the ground” (124-25). Again and again there were similar arguments about the merits of emerging technologies: in the field of aviation, for example, the greater possibilities of airplanes when compared to airships seem obvious today, but they are in large part the result of technologies that were developed during the Second World War for use in designing bombers and other military aircraft. A related point is that those who envision major changes in one area might well overlook others that now seem more important: as he notes several times, “no one predicted the huge impact of the personal computer in the real world” (14). When he turns to the way futuristic technologies are represented in early sf stories, Bowler cites Gary Westfahl’s observation that we often find “an incongruous mix of advanced technologies … functioning alongside older systems that we know were soon to be swept away.” Thus, in E.E. “Doc” Smith’s Skylark series, “the hero develops space travel on an interstellar scale while still measuring equipment with calipers and doing calculations with a slide rule” (82).
Although Bowler turns to sf and other futuristic fiction only sporadically, his survey of other sources provides contexts that should interest any reader of this journal. A History of the Future is also well documented and largely free from errors, although two dubious statements virtually leaped off the page at me. First, the claim that Heinlein “worked with Asimov in the Navy” (28) is probably based on a misunderstanding of their positions during World War II, when they were civilian employees at the Philadelphia Navy Yard. Second, I seriously doubt that “in the 1960s … Paul Niehans of Geneva offered rejuvenation based on thyroid extracts to the rich and famous, including Pope Pius XII” (192). Since Pius died in October 1958, it would have taken more than thyroid extracts to rejuvenate him in the 1960s. A little fact-checking by Cambridge University Press might have caught these errors, perhaps along with a few others, such as the misspelling of Leslie Fiedler’s surname as “Fielder” (213 n.18; also in the bibliography). The index, while ambitious in its coverage, has some odd omissions: Benito Mussolini is quoted on the importance of reserving flying for the aristocracy (112), William Butler Yeats is mentioned for having “claimed to have benefitted from the Steinach operation” (191), and “the leading British eugenist C.P. Blacker” is credited with having made a point that was later made in Brave New World (201), but not one of them is listed in the index. There are also some literary texts that I wish Bowler had mentioned, one example being George S. Schuyler’s satiric portrayal of attitudes toward race in the United States, Black No More: Being an Account of the Strange and Wonderful Workings of Science in the Land of the Free, A.D. 1933-1940 (1931). But these problems are small and in no way diminish the importance of this wide-ranging study.
—Patrick A. McCarthy, University of Miami
Transcendence on the Path to Self-Salvation.
James Burton. The Philosophy of Science Fiction: Henri Bergson and the Fabulations of Philip K. Dick. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2017. 256 pp. $29.95 pbk.
James Burton’s monograph reads the work Philip K. Dick alongside that of French philosopher Henri Bergson. Burton acknowledges that while there are cursory surface connections, there is little direct connection between the two authors. For Burton, the relationship between Dick and Bergson is in thematic parallels, specifically in how each attempts to find salvation from a modern life marked by mechanization through the Bergsonian concept of fabulation. Both are engaged in what Burton terms “Immanent soteriology—that is, the search for a form of salvation that would be adequate for a post-industrialized, globalized society” (3). Thus Burton sees an important connection between the two thinkers: for both Dick and Bergson, appeals to the transcendent were always rooted in immanent materialism.
Burton notes that despite a revival in academic interest in Bergson, led by Deleuze’s monograph Bergsonism (1991), little renewed interested has been paid to Bergson’s final work, The Two Sources of Religion and Morality (1932). He attributes this to the metaphysical, spiritual, and, at times, mystical themes of this work that stand in contrast to the immanent materialism of Bergson’s earlier oeuvre. Burton argues that reasons for this scholarly dismissal of Bergson’s later work are similar to the dismissals of Dick’s later work. Dick famously experienced a number of visions and revelations during the months of February and March 1974. These quasi-religious events would color his later novels such as VALIS (1981), as well as the posthumous notebooks that comprise The Exegesis of Philip K. Dick (2011). Most of the scholarship on Dick, Burton notes, does not engage specifically with the spiritual aspect of Dick’s later works. Burton thus situates his analysis as paying close attention to the spiritualism and mysticism of Dick’s later work, acknowledging Gabriel Mckee’s Pink Beams of Light from the God in the Gutter (2003) and Erik Davis’s TechGnosis (2015) as earlier investigations into similar aspects of Dick’s work. Burton also understands Dick as attempting actively to change his reality, not simply to diagnose it. He contends that the widespread scholarly dismissal of parts of their oeuvres fails to acknowledge that Bergson and Dick engaged with transcendent salvation specifically as a response to resolving the crisis of their material realities—what they saw as the increased mechanization of humanity.
Chapter 1 begins with a sustained enquiry into Bergson’s philosophy, focusing particularly on The Two Sources of Morality and Religion. Burton disagrees with the common critique of Bergson by scholars such as Bertrand Russell and Alain Badiou that Bergson’s vitalism involves an “irreducibly transcendent dimension” (52). Burton views Bergson’s use of transcendence as marking “the difference between two notions of possibility or ability” (51). For Bergson, intelligence and instinct evolved independently in different species, and while they may be held in different ratios, every species is marked by both. Bergson asserts that intelligence threatens sociality due to its propensity to reinforce individualism. For Bergson, instinct, working underneath intellect, presents alternative representations to intellect in order to reconcile the tension between intellect and instinct in apprehending the world. Bergson terms this process fabulation: “Fabulation’s function is thus to restore the balance, or circularity, originally a simple biological or ecological reality, that was threatened by the individualism of intellect” (42). For Bergson, fabulation often facilitates a closed morality in which groups are created, defined, and marked by opposition to other groups, but fabulation also crucially allows for an open morality that would resist the impulse to revert to closure.
In chapter 2, Burton briefly surveys four of Dick’s earliest books—Solar Lottery (1955), The World Jones Made (1956), Vulcan’s Hammer (1960), and Time Out of Joint (1959)—to establish a general framework of Dick’s most common themes and tropes. He notes that Dick’s work has often been identified as subversive of traditional sf conventions and tropes. Burton argues that this is a manifestation of Dick’s impulse to open up what has been “closed” by a creative process that has ceased to evolve. This impulse would later “evolve into a more fully soteriological mode of open or dynamic fabulation” (62). Burton’s aim in this chapter is to point out that Dick’s earliest works were already moving subtly toward the spiritual and the importance of salvation.
In chapter 3 Burton returns to Bergson and begins to flesh out a close comparison between his work and Dick’s. To do so, he engages with Alain Badiou’s and Giorgio Agamben’s scholarship on St. Paul, suggesting that St. Paul is one of the first immanent soteriologists and identifying Bergson and Dick as his “spiritual heirs” (86). Soteriology is the field of study concerned with salvation, and Burton defines Dick and Bergson as immanent soteriologists because their philosophies seek salvation in the material world rather than from an external transcendent force. Burton then spends the bulk of the chapter explicating both Agamben’s and Badiou’s accounts of St. Paul’s to further develop an understanding of “the role of dynamic fabulation in challenging the closed society” (87). Through this, he challenges the notion that Bergson’s work—and Dick’s by proxy—was not sufficiently materialist.
In the final three chapters, Burton turns to an in-depth reading of Dick’s work in order to illustrate Dick’s process of fabulation as an aspect of his immanent soteriology. Chapter 4 tackles The Man In The High Castle (1962) and Burton suggests that Dick’s presentation of an alternate reality where the Axis powers win WWII does not create a binary of real and alternative timelines but instead destabilizes both through dynamic fabulation that renders “visible or [re-animates] the evidence suppressed within each of [the timelines] that worlds and their histories are continually in the process of being made, and as such always open to transformation” (116; emphasis in original). Here Burton starts to unpack Dick’s specific fabulative practices, noting the importance of small quotidian objects within Dick’s narratives. These objects often serve as a site of deferral of agency for Dick’s characters when they are placed in seemingly inescapable situations. These objects index humanity’s lack of agency due to mechanization while simultaneously holding the possibility of salvation. Burton’s reading is compelling and draws a direct link between the ordinary and the transcendent in Dick’s work. Yet he notes that Dick’s novels remain deeply skeptical of any external salvic force as truly capable of bringing salvation. Both the transcendent and quotidian in Dick’s novels provide the capacity to realize and accept one’s own potential for self-salvation. This then is a key part of Dick’s immanent soteriology, which Burton elucidates to prove that while Dick’s late works have been read as mystical or transcendent, they are in fact immanent. The path to salvation for Dick always lies within self-salvation, but it is only through the fabulative process, transcendent or otherwise, that one is capable of generating belief in potential self-salvation.
In chapter 5, Burton turns to Dick’s use of a god-like alien in Galactic Pot Healer (1969)and androids in Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (1968). In the former, Burton identifies Dick’s propensity to undercut his transcendent figures with the mundane as representative of the immanence in his soteriology. Similar to Dick’s use of mundane objects in High Castle, the transcendent in his novels is juxtaposed with the quotidian in a move that Burton suggests signals the immanentization of the transcendent. These figures are never allowed to remain wholly transcendent, emphasizing a skepticism about any potential of absolute external salvation. Similarly, Burton sees Dick’s frequent use of androids as a way to refigure tropes not just from sf but also from the earliest mythological stories of human creation, in which humans are initially instrumental and subservient to the gods but are later able to resist this divine power in establishing a modicum of their autonomy. By reinscribing this trope through the human as creator/god and the android as slave, and then destabilizing it, he negates the relationship as one between “creators and their creations” and turns it into one of “creators and more creators” (161), thus opening up the closed hierarchy of fixed identity.
In the final chapter Burton finally turns his attention to VALIS and explicates how Dick navigates the difficult contradictions inherent in his immanent soteriology and the process of dynamic fabulation. One of the key contradictions is the necessity that the “logic of salvation be fabulated by the one in need of salvation” (171) and that, simultaneously, this salvation must be seen as coming from a savior that is external. In Burton’s reading of VALIS, the dichotomy and distinction between Horselover Fat and the narrator is not merely a reinscription of Dick’s own break from reality but, rather, a deliberately staged separation that facilitates the process of immanent soteriology by simultaneously allowing for both the transcendent and immanent in order that both can be reconciled without “either undermining themselves or cancelling one another out” (178). This is also apparent in Dick’s exegesis where he critically understands that his vision and hallucinations are not transcendent, yet he cannot reconcile them with his understanding of material reality.
Thus Burton concludes that inherent in Dick’s process of fabulation is the need to continually forget the very process of this fabulation. Burton suggests that this is not as difficult as it may seem. Returning to Bergson, he asserts that fabulation, as stemming from instinct, “is produced and elicits a response more quickly than the intellect is able to fully process it. Thus, in a sense … the saving figure, or whatever it is that is fabulated, really does come from outside” (172). This is potentially the most difficult part of the entire process with which to grapple. If it is to be a useful tool on the path toward any sort of salvation, this contradictory tension suggests that it cannot be held or manipulated consciously. Burton suggests that Dick’s work in VALIS showcases “this ongoing struggle to maintain a dynamic mode of fabulation against the constant risk of reverting to mechanization and closure” and that any immanent savior or notion of salvation “must therefore be constantly attended to, reformed, re-imagined—subject to, if not identical with, a dynamic fabulating activity, rather than ossifying into a static, fabulated form” (186). In this there still remains the question of praxis; the suggestion here seems to be that self-salvation is an ontology without telos.
Burton accepts that a complete rejection of any fabulations that have become ossified and delineate our apprehension of reality is impossible or at least limited to “some form of mystical enlightenment or the equivalent of a psychotic break” (206). Nevertheless, he contends that various attempts to destabilize or delegitimize the hegemonic elements of society—whatever those may be—are attempts to develop a mode of engagement that would allow for an opening of the closed fabulations of society. The importance of cognitive estrangement to sf suggests that sf has the capacity to perform the type of dynamic fabulation necessary to challenge ossified systems of closed morality.
Despite unpacking the works of both Dick and Bergson in detail, Burton’s cogent and detailed explication of both authors ensures that the book remains accessible to readers unfamiliar with these authors, while also remaining critical and nuanced enough to provide familiar readers with novel insights. Readers of SFS may be more interested in Burton’s take on Philip K. Dick, but Burton makes an excellent case for the value of considering Bergsonian philosophy when approaching Dick’s work—in particular Dick’s later oeuvre. The potential importance of Dick’s and Bergson’s immanent soteriology to sf lies in the genre’s capacity and propensity to imagine otherwise, to engage in dynamic fabulations. Fabulation’s capacity to challenge hegemonic structures allows sf to be understood as both theory and praxis, as both diagnosing the issues of society and engaging with challenges to hegemonic structures and ideology. Burton’s monograph masterfully recuperates the forgotten or maligned aspects of both Dick’s and Bergson’s works and raises genuinely interesting questions about sf’s capacity to affect, influence, and foster positive change in the world.
—Leslie J. Fernandez, University of California, Riverside
A Rich Repository.
Shawn Edri and Danielle Gurevitch, eds. Science Fiction beyond Borders. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars, 2016. ix+182 pp. $86.95 hc.
Science Fiction beyond Borders is a collection of essays that promises to show how sf crosses, subverts, transgresses, and transcends a wide range of border practices. In some measure, the essays fulfil that promise, each, separately, mapping out new territories and terms, exposing boundaries of sf criticism. Where the volume disappoints is in its existence as a volume: i.e., as a collection of essays that benefit not only from the opportunity for publication but from their actual relationship to the other essays. To be fair, the editors state clearly that “this book collects papers presented at the 2014 and 2015 Science Fiction Symposium, an annual event held at Tel Aviv University” (vii). The symposium has clearly presented a chance for some top-notch scholarship, much of which is reflected here. Read as conference proceedings it then becomes a much more productive venue for some of the work being produced in Israeli academia today.
The collection leaves the gate running with Elana Gomel’s theoretical account of posthuman narratology. Focusing specifically on the possibilities of characterization, her framework feels long overdue in sf literary studies, making the argument that “the most important question raised by posthumanism is the nature of subjectivity beyond the human. The representation of non- or post-human characters in SF can help to answer this question” (1). Where the “round character is a hallmark of psychological realism that has given us the fullest expression of the humanist ethos, the flat character is a harbinger of posthumanism” (4). Her analysis, full of convincing close readings, opens exciting and fresh new theoretical possibilities while remaining readable, accessible, and enjoyable.
The play between roundness and flatness and their relationship to subjectivity, language, and materiality is picked up in Naomi Michaelowicz’s sophisticated and rich analysis of China Miéville’s Embassytown (2011) in Chapter Three, “The Importance of Telling Lies: SF Ethics and the Story of the Fall in China Miéville’s Embassytown.” Theorizing the spatiality and verticality of the Fall as a framework for reading the novel, Michaelowicz ups the game for readers of Miéville here but, regrettably, only hints at how her model may be expanded. She concludes somewhat limply that the use of the story of the Fall “affirms the worth of both SF texts and myth ‘as a story’”(42). Her more fruitful suggestion lies in her discussion of language as emulating the “creative power of God.” “In order to create fictional worlds,” she continues, “including the ethically-determined world of religious mythology, there had to occur a fall; from innocence to mortality, from pure language to signification, from literality to imagination” (42-43).
Aside from these, Chapters Four on science and modernity, Six on ethics in cloning, and Seven on transhumanism and paganism offer more critically inclined discussions, building an analytical vocabulary with which familiar sf tropes and figures can be read. In Chapter Four, “Fictionalising the Failure of Science: Zombies, Ambivalence and Modernity,” for instance, Moriel Ram suggests that the zombie is effectively an embodiment of the failure of science and thus functions “as both a threat and a consequence of modernity. This ambivalence is connected to the way in which the zombie presents a post-secular critique that challenges modernity and human achievements” (48). Ram pursues this argument across several canonical zombie texts, including Matheson’s I am Legend (1954) and its adaptations, the Romero trilogy (1968-1985), and Brooks’s World War Z (2006), nicely grounding her premise in documented research from a variety of disciplines and offering a satisfying, if modest, intervention into zombie scholarship. Ulrike Goldenblatt, in Chapter Six, “Facing Your Dolly,” goes in the other direction, looking not at how the fiction represents the science but rather at how “science fiction involving clones has aided an informed discussion on the societal effects of bio- or gene-technological developments and their ethical implications, while also paving the way for a greater acceptance of transhumanism and its new technological means” (86). Goldenblatt focuses primarily on Le Guin’s “Nine Lives” (1998) and the Orphan Black series (2013-2017), though she touches on a plethora of additional clones in fiction, to remind us that “behind each of these clones lurks the powerful image of Dolly, an ethical challenge incarnate” (94). Vyatcheslav Bart’s Chapter Seven, “Futurist, Decadent, and Pagan Influences in Transhumanism: the Dangers of Godlike Creativity,” is an interesting attempt to link transhumanism to an aesthetics of violence that is traced back through performance art to Futurism and Decadence and then back to paganism. Although the links might have been more elaborately demonstrated, Bart does make a convincing argument, alluding to some lesser known works to make the provocative suggestion that “it is preferable to maintain those boundaries that transhumanism seeks to destroy, while transposing its creative impulses from the realm of the physical to the realm of subjective consciousness” (111). In this way, Bart claims, an inevitable self-destructiveness inherent to the merging of the material with the immaterial within creative processes may be forestalled.
Asaph Wagner’s Chapter Ten, “Genre Hybridity in Tabletop Roleplaying Games: When You Want to Play It, and You Can,” on role-playing games (RPGs) and gene hybridity, is in many ways a stand-alone chapter, primarily because of its subject matter, but in its critical approach it follows naturally from the preceding group. Wagner turns to the narrative hybrids within tabletop RPGs. In what is nearly a survey of the kinds of RPGs being described, the author convincingly shows how this medium is uniquely suited to incorporate elements of fantasy in sf narrative and vice versa. Students thinking about tabletop RPGs and the ways in which genre fiction figures so prominently in them will benefit from Wagner’s discussion.
]Most of the remaining chapters in the volume are based much more on analyses of specific texts and, as such, are arguably more limited but also more accessible and may appeal to a different type of reader. In Chapter Two, “Androgynous Aliens and Gender Migrants: Experiments in Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Left Hand of Darkness and Greg Egan’s Distress,” Anat Karolin’s discussion is both smart and useful. In particular, Karolin’s concise insights into the Egan text and her gestures towards a comparison with Le Guin make a case for a continuity that may be less than self-evident. This sense of a teleology in literature is taken up by Rami Zeidan in Chapter Five, “Human Degeneration in Early Science Fiction Literature,” where he offers an astute reminder that Darwin’s theory of evolution does not necessarily promise improvement and progress. To make his claims, Zeidan unsurprisingly concentrates on Wells and Huxley, two early masters concerned with the possibilities of progress and decline. Although his discussion is utterly convincing, making it a solid, rigorous, and recommended aid for early-stage students, a more provocative or clearly stated argument and/or slightly less familiar examples would have more firmly secured his contribution to the field.
Chapters Eight and Nine are a welcome shift in perspective, reminding readers of the occasion for this publication, that it is a regional symposium of sf scholarship. Avital Pilpel’s “Why are There No Israeli Utopias in Israeli Science Fiction?” is, first and foremost, a very useful survey of Israeli sf; it is not the first nor the only such endeavor but one that is still valuable. In what is clearly the most political of all the essays in the collection, Pilpel offers a convincing analysis of what he identifies as a propensity to dystopian imagination in Israel, given the political climate, though this is occasionally weakened by reasonable but broad claims (e.g., sf is more likely to be written in times of hope). Moreover, some omissions—I am thinking particularly of Lavie Tidhar, one of the more prominent contemporary Israeli-born sf writers—are surprising; given the survey-like nature of the chapter, however, it is clear that there is no attempt (nor way) to be comprehensive. Instead, Pilpel elucidates an evident pattern in speculative fiction in Israel. Ultimately, Pilpel adopts a thoroughly readable and graceful tone to crystalize what is unique about the precarious stabilities of the State of Israel and of its sf and to offer insights into an increasingly rich geopolitical arena for the genre. Danielle Gurevitch’s Chapter Nine, “Angels on Katzenelson Street: The Israeli Reader’s Attitude Towards Fantastic Literature,” also pursues the local perspective but through its reception rather than its manifestation in the fiction. “Selling fantasy literature to the Israeli reader is like trying to sell ice to an Eskimo” (127), she begins, going on to demonstrate that the very practicalities of daily routine in Israeli life are the stuff of fantasy. Gurevitch travels through a nice array of early and contemporary Israeli writers, from Haim Hazaz, through David Grossman, to Etgar Keret, to establish links between the national experience and the personal and literary. It is perhaps for this reason that I regret the lack of dialogue between the two chapters on Israel. Where Gurevitch glosses over some of the interpretive differences and political complexities within the national narrative she represents, Pilpel seems to claim that Israeli reality is almost anathema to the utopian optimism of a speculative imagination. Reading these side by side gives a glimpse into the kinds of dilemmas pervasive in Israeli scholarship and public discourse.
Hila Peleg’s Chapter Eleven, “Smashing Expectations for Fun and Profit: Untertextuality and ‘Rip-off’ in the Novels of John Scalzi,” brings readers back to the beginning and ends the volume on a high note. By bringing us back to literary theory, Peleg manages beautifully and simply to condense the tenets of narrative theory, mapping the relationship of implied author, narrator, and implied reader in order to offer insight into some of the basic structures of the genre. Using Scalzi as her case study, Peleg shows how so much of sf literature relies on both genre convention and intertextuality and also how this reliance allows writers such as Scalzi to play with reader expectations, ensuring a freshness to the form and pleasure in the experience.
Without question, this volume showcases some truly valuable insights into the field, form, and media of sf. Having said that, an opportunity has been missed. The evocative title, Beyond Borders, so loaded coming out of this particular locale, hints at the unique possibility of reflecting on the locality of the scholarship. This is certainly not to say that all the essays should have been about Israel or Israeli sf but perhaps some introductory or concluding chapter to present a rationale for the anthology as an anthology would have added both an innovative and a timely dimension to the volume. This lament aside, the collection is a rich repository of perspectives, methodologies, forms, and subject matters, and a worthy contribution to the field.
—Keren Omry, University of Haifa
Sunshine Superman.
Ian S. Garlington. The Adventures of Acidman: Psychedelics and the Evolution of Consciousness in Science Fiction and Superhero Comics from the 1960s Onward. Tokyo: Eihosha, 2016. 134 pp. $32 pbk.
In this slim monograph from Eihosha Press, Ian Garlington argues that comics, and especially a particular breed of superhero comics of the 1980s and 1990s, are the most appropriate expression of an LSD-infused psychedelic aesthetic pioneered by sf writers of the 1960s and 1970s. In order to illustrate this premise, Garlington begins with a brief account of Aldous Huxley’s The Doors of Perception (1954), “irrefutably the most influential book on Americans’ widespread acceptance of psychedelics” (13), before moving on to more detailed readings of Thomas Disch’s Camp Concentration (1968) and Robert Shea and Robert Anton Wilson’s The Illuminatus! Trilogy(1975). Using Disch’s and Shea and Wilson’s work to establish the formal and thematic characteristics of “psychedelic fiction” and particularly its “evolutionary consciousness,” Garlington then spends a chapter exploring some of the formal characteristics of psychedelic underground comix, indicating the ways in which the comics form has a particular affinity with psychedelia. In the final two chapters, Garlington explains the ways in which the 1980s and 1990s comics of Alan Moore and Grant Morrison combine the thematic and narrative characteristics of Disch and Shea and Wilson with the visual/formal elements of psychedelic comix in order to create the storytelling form most suited to psychedelic ideas. Ultimately, while Garlington does a nice job of tracing similarities and lines of influence among psychedelic sf, underground comix, and British Invasion superhero comics, he is less convincing in his argument that somehow the last of these is the apotheosis of the former two. In addition, while Garlington succeeds in drawing together what might initially seem to be three separate traditions, he also leaves many connections out of his narrative and underplays some of the more obvious connections among some of the authors he chooses to discuss and the traditions of which he claims they are a part.
In his introduction, Garlington outlines some of the ways in which LSD was promoted as a replacement for poetry, which was meant to estrange the everyday world but had ultimately run out of formal resources to do so. For this reason, people such as ethnobotanist Terrence McKenna and Huxley promoted the use of psychedelic drugs to expand human beings’ consciousness and therefore their language use as well. For McKenna, Huxley, Allen Ginsberg, Timothy Leary, et al., LSD and other psychedelics were supposed to reveal a hidden layer of unity in the universe and to open a next evolutionary path for humanity to pursue, a purpose also achieved by at least some kinds of sf. As Wilson argued, “The function of science fiction is to break mental sets. Science fiction is liberation” (qtd. in Garlington 17). Garlington, then, claims that sf, and particularly New Wave sf, is designed to free the mind and to open it up to a more universal “cosmic consciousness” that will allow human beings to evolve to a more advanced state of existence. In particular, Garlington focuses on the ways in which LSD (and psychedelic sf and comics) can break down our limited understanding of time and space, moving from a linear view to a more comprehensive understanding of the interconnectedness of spacetime. This insight, he argues, is best seen in comics, wherein the passage of time is literally represented by shifts in space on a comics page.
In chapter one, Garlington recounts the ways in which Disch’s novel details the forced dissemination of an acid-like “drug” as part of a widespread consciousness-raising effort, linked by Garlington to the Faustian bargain made by Adrian Leverkühn in Thomas Mann’s novel Doctor Faustus (1947). Leverkühn allows himself to contract syphilis in an effort to expand his mind and his musical/compositional creativity in ways similar to the (unwilling) test subjects of Disch’s novel.
The second chapter on The Illuminatus! Trilogyfocuses on the importance of conspiracy thinking and theorizing to psychedelic consciousness-raising. Conspiracy theorizing, like acid-influenced thought, sees patterns and unity where “ordinary” thought would be more likely simply to see random events. In comparing Illuminatus!to William Burroughs’s Nova trilogy (1961-1964), Garlington explains how both posit the possibility that “higher dimensional alien life forms are pulling the strings of mankind to produce the puppet show of history” (41). The idea of “higher dimensions” dovetails with the previously mentioned idea that space and time are not separate dimensions at all but can only be fully understood from a position “outside” the fourth dimension of time (that is, from a higher dimension). Within this notion, then, linear narration is a restricted/limited way of viewing time and of telling a story, and a more unified, higher order consciousness would rely upon anti-narrative devices, circular storytelling, and a variety of other techniques linked by Garlington to the James Joyce of Finnegans Wake (1939) and to Burroughs’s cut-up and fold-in techniques. For Garlington, Shea and Wilson’s trilogy is characterized by its “accepting both contradictory models of reality” (52), a model wherein conspiracies are real and everything happens for a higher-dimensional, pre-planned, conspiratorial reason and a model wherein there can only be skepticism and mockery of such unifying theories.
Following his discussion of these novels, Garlington looks at some of the characteristics of underground comix by such artists as Robert Crumb, Kent Perry, and Claude Bawls. In these comics, acid trips are explicitly depicted in visual form and, in so doing, the lines dividing panels (and thus the lines dividing space and time) are eliminated, blurred, or melted. Likewise, images shift between conscious, “objective,” or “material” reality and unconscious, free-associative, and/or surreal imagery. Typical panel transitions are abandoned in favor of dramatic leaps through space or time or simply a series of inexplicable non sequiturs.
In the final two chapters, Garlington turns to two much-discussed British comics writers, Alan Moore, and Grant Morrison, and particularly their contributions to the corporate world of mainstream American superhero comics. In the case of Moore, Garlington focuses on his engagement with utopian/dystopian themes in Miracleman (1982-1989), Watchmen (1986-1987), and V for Vendetta (1982-1989), in which the possibility of moving beyond current human concerns is explored by deploying the concept of the superhero in unconventional ways. In most mainstream superhero comics, as Garlington explains, a relative status quo is preserved in order to maintain some kind of connection to the “real world” and in order to continue superhero serials indefinitely for the purposes of making a profit. That is, where mainstream superhero comics are conservative in a number of ways, in all three of the Moore comics discussed by Garlington the stories’ commitment to a beginning, middle, and end allow the introduction of a superhero whose abilities not only transcend those of normal humans, but whose powers also open up the possibility of changing the world and establishing a utopian next stage in human evolution. It is this evolutionary consciousness in Moore’s work that Garlington links to psychedelic sf.
Morrison’s Animal Man (1988-90), then,includes higher-dimensional beings and a peyote trip that gives its protagonist his first opportunity to see beyond his two-dimensional world into our three-dimensional one, explicitly linking acid-trips to evolutionary higher consciousness and to the texts previously discussed by Garlington. Garlington’s longer reading of Morrison’s The Invisibles includes discussions of “folded-in” spacetime (à la Burroughs), encounters with higher-dimensional beings, acid trips, conspiracy theorizing, secret societies, utopian evolution, and the formal tricks associated with underground comix, particularly those “used to signify a perspective exterior to time” (115). That is, for Garlington The Invisibles provides the logical combination, evolution, and progression of all of the texts he discusses, and of acid-trips themselves, ultimately “find[ing] the thing that only comics can reveal” (110).
This claim that somehow comics in general, and The Invisibles in particular, provide something that prose (or visual art) alone cannot determines the chronology of Garlington’s book; but it is ultimately dubious. Certainly, comics present time as space, a formal quality that can be used to represent a “higher-dimensional cosmic consciousness,” but it is also true that modes of visual art (like Dada and Futurism) have similar qualities, while prose has also proven resourceful in expressing similar ideas. That is to say, the argument that a particular aesthetic form has an advantage in expressing particular ideas is not a particularly convincing one and certainly it is not one that is proven anywhere in Adventures of Acidman. For all the talk of non-linear temporalities, Garlington’s book is governed by a kind of linear teleology that never fully convinces. Without that argument, however, Garlington’s book reads simply as a narrative of affiliation and influence, one that is accurate as far as it goes and that includes some convincing close readings, but that leaves out a variety of other coordinates (such as psychedelic music, or LSD-inspired gallery art, or, simply, the wide variety of other psychedelic texts and contexts).
The question of “why these texts?” is never fully or sufficiently answered, given the wide range of acid-influenced New Wave sf (why not Michael Moorcock’s Cornelius Chronicles [1977], for instance?) and/or psychedelic comics, underground or superhero. While Garlington focuses on Moore’s early superhero work of the 1980s, he leaves out Moore’s early self-drawn underground/alternative comix, published in Sounds and elsewhere, which are frequently psychedelic in nature, as well as the 1980s work that is perhaps the most overtly drug-inspired, his multi-year run of Swamp Thing (1983-1987). Swamp Thing includes two issues in which characters ingest tubers grown on the protagonist’s body, allowing them an altered psychedelic vision depicted in visuals reminiscent of the underground comix Garlington describes and reprints. Likewise, Garlington never mentions Moore’s overt manipulation of spacetime, particularly in Watchmen’sDr. Manhattan, a superhero who experiences all time simultaneously and thus is a higher-dimensional consciousness (though one obtained through a scientific accident rather than a drug trip), nor does he discuss Moore’s overt references to Burroughs. In addition, Moore’s later work (particularly Promethea [1999-2005]) is often more psychedelic in its form than the material Garlington analyzes in this book, includes elaborate conspiracy theories (From Hell [1989-1998]), and is nearly obsessive about higher-dimensional perspective and insight (particularly in From Hell, Promethea, and Jerusalem [2016],but also throughout his later oeuvre). Garlington also neglects a large body of Moore criticism that addresses these issues more fully and an excellent monograph on Morrison’s work by Marc Singer that would have been a useful springboard for his own ideas.
Similarly, while Garlington jumps forward in time from self-published underground psychedelic comix to 1980s-1990s superhero fare, he neglects earlier psychedelic superhero comics such as Jack Kirby’s Forever People (1971) and other “fourth world” titles, that could just as easily be read in the context of acid trips, heightened consciousness, and evolutionary utopias.
All of the above is to say that, while Garlington pulls together a variety of disparate texts and contexts in order to trace the origins and development of psychedelic sf, the brevity of the book works against him. The progressive narrative he draws is not inaccurate, but it neglects so much material, both primary and critical, that this reader walked away disappointed, wanting a more fully realized history and analysis of psychedelic sf and its interactions with the parallel and interpenetrating history of psychedelic comics, superhero or otherwise.
—Eric Berlatsky, Florida Atlantic University
Thinking Outside Thought.
N. Katherine Hayles. Unthought: The Power of the Cognitive Nonconsious. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2017. xii+250 pp. $72 hc, $24 pbk.
On 17 November 2017, Duke University hosted a symposium called “The Futures of Literature, Science, and Media” in honor of N. Katherine Hayles. It was a marvelous event, recognizing the tremendous contributions that Hayles has made to our collective understanding of the feedback loops among literary narratives, media technologies, and scientific discourses. As one of the speakers at the symposium, I noted how frequently the discussions circled around the insights of Hayles’s latest book, Unthought: The Power of the Cognitive Nonconscious (2017). There seemed to be consensus that, while Unthought brilliantly extends some topics and themes that Hayles has addressed across a number of other pathbreaking volumes, picking up threads from Chaos Bound (1990), How We Became Posthuman (1999), Writing Machines (2002), My Mother Was a Computer (2005), and How We Think (2012), it also represents an important new twist in her scholarship, grappling with the conditions of thought, the costs of consciousness, and ethical modes of living with other organisms and advanced technologies on an ecologically threatened planet. It is a book about neurobiology and cognitive science, yes; but it is also a profound questioning of what we should do with our thoughts, of how we ought to think—and unthink—as we rediscover ourselves embedded in a vast web of biotic and technical cognition.
Consolidating and critically reviewing an ample array of research from the front lines of cognitive science, Hayles exposes the secret workings of the cognitive nonconscious, the deep mechanisms of information processing, pattern recognition, stimulus response and anticipation, and meaning making that not only subtend human consciousness but also characterize innumerable other forms of life. To be sure, processes of nonconscious cognition can be observed in all organisms, from bacteria to whales, anemones to zorillas. Hayles therefore expansively defines cognition in a manner that aligns with research in neuroscience (a field that, strictly speaking, studies neurons and nervous systems), as well as research in fields such as cognitive biology, which makes more inclusive claims about the information-processing capacities of organisms at various scales without privileging the evolution of neural differentiation. As Hayles writes, “Cognition is a process that interprets information within contexts that connect it with meaning” (22). This formulation invites a rapprochement between neurocentric perspectives that foreground the evolutionary feats of chordates and other nervy organisms, on the one hand, and the intricate sorting and problem-solving processes performed by all organisms, on the other, the full range of which must properly be seen as cognition.
From this vantage, Hayles presents a tripartite pyramid model of cognition, depicting consciousness and other modes of awareness as a tiny peak at the top, supported by a much more substantive stratum of nonconscious cognitive operations below, itself supported by a deeper, foundational level of material and chemical processes from which the conditions of cognition arise. Hayles’s main concern is the middle layer of this pyramid. Although humans have been quite fixated on their own relation to consciousness and its affordances, such as self-awareness, language, and rational thought—to say nothing of its reflections in the psychoanalytic unconscious—consciousness itself depends fundamentally on a thick layer of nonconscious cognition, which works much faster than consciousness, engages and filters the informational flux of the world more elaborately, recognizes complex patterns that escape direct perception, creates coherency among various streams of sensory input, and carries out a bewildering array of basic operations necessary for organismal persistence and survival, while only feeding a small portion of processed information forward to consciousness.
In this accounting, consciousness turns out to be somewhat less of a pure asset than we may like to imagine. As Hayles writes, “Higher consciousness is not, of course, the whole or indeed even the main part of the story: enhancing and supporting it are the ways in which the embodied subject is embedded and immersed in environments that function as distributed cognitive systems” (2). Even while she emphasizes the immense agency of humans in the world, she also considers the costs of consciousness, both for individual organisms endowed with this feature and for the planetary conditions it has helped to produce. By attending to nonconscious cognition, according to Hayles, we come to see the tremendous flourishing of cognition all around us, within us, and through us: the ways in which organisms intersect with their environments and other organisms through a panoply of meanings and interpretations, the engines of worldness. Indeed, this view opens up alternative models of ecology based on planetary networks of cognizers navigating, responding, and transforming through embodied processes of knowing.
Yet once the functions of nonconscious cognition are recognized in living organisms, it then becomes clear that many technical systems also perform these functions, especially modern computational devices and digital infrastructures. For Hayles, this is one of the most significant implications of the cognitive nonconscious. She shows how medical robots, sensing and actuating traffic-control systems, autonomous vehicles, and high-frequency trading algorithms are sophisticated cognitive entities whose intellective activities far exceed the speed and capacity of human consciousness. Insofar as human thoughts, bodies, societies, and economies are increasingly dependent on such technical systems, impacted in ever more complicated and inscrutable ways, Hayles argues that we must develop new models for apprehending the entanglements of human and nonhuman cognizers, conscious and nonconscious cognitions, and the processes of making meaningful interpretations in technological and biological systems. She proposes the important concept of a “cognitive assemblage” to address such issues, showing how a “cognitive assemblage emphasizes the flow of information through a system and the choices and decisions that create, modify, and interpret the flow” (116). In other words, it describes the dynamics of information among shifting constellations of human actors, technological affordances, algorithmic operations, and material agencies—the infrastructures of our modern high-tech world—requiring new considerations for governance, ethical practices, and policy decisions.
The book compellingly suggests that many domains of science and society can be better understood—and more effectively engaged—by attending to the distributed systems of cognition that are already right there but not yet fully in the line of sight. The book plays with recurring motifs of gap filling and bridge building, describing how a focus on nonconscious cognition would help to patch up fissures and lacunae in other areas of scholarly research. The benefits would be tangible for certain zones of neurobiology and cognitive science, for example, in which the cognitive operations of plants, amoebae, or networked computational systems have sometimes been overlooked, because it allows for “building bridges across different phyla to construct a comparative view of cognition” (15). It would also benefit the humanities and social sciences, which, despite various nonhuman and posthuman turns, have often failed to appreciate how a theory of cognitive assemblages could resolve some stubborn problems, whether in the philosophy of mind (whose longstanding debates could be “challenged and energized by including nonconscious cognition in its purview” [69]) or in the discourses of new materialisms (insofar as “nonconscious cognition can supply essential components presently absent from most new materialist analyses” [84]). Literary readings, as well, would profit from sensitivity to cognitive assemblages, shoring up holes in otherwise superlative literary analyses, such as Lauren Berlant’s crucial essay “Intuitionists: History and the Affective Event” (because this perspective “provides precisely the kind of connections and links that Berlant’s essay is missing” [197]). But more than just filling in what has been omitted, Hayles proposes a reorientation or re-cognition, a revitalized outlook on what has so far been unthought in these fields. While scientific research goes a long way to revealing such unthinkable things and bringing them to light, it is ultimately the literary in Hayles’s assessment that has significant potential to render visible, intuitive, and re-cognizable the cognitive assemblages that intersect and embed our merely human consciousness.
While Unthought is rather less concerned with cultural narratives and literary texts than much of Hayles’s earlier work, literary analysis nevertheless plays a substantial role here. Hayles discusses a number of novels, films, and “neurofictions,” offering extended analyses of Tom McCarthy’s Remainder (2007), Peter Watts’s Blindsight (2006), and Colson Whitehead’s The Intuitionist (1999), as well as shorter commentaries on Daniel Suarez’s Kill Decision (2013), Ursula Le Guin’s The Left Hand of Darkness (1969), Spike Jonze’s Her (2013), and others. Notably, she indicates how these speculative narratives help to shape and propagate a
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William S Burroughs – alexanderadamsart
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Posts about William S Burroughs written by Alexander Adams
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S.E. Gontarski (ed.), Burroughs Unbound: William Burroughs and the Performance of Writing, Bloomsbury Academic, 2022, hardback, 456pp, mono illus., £95, ISBN 978 1 5013 6218 7 (paperback available)
Professor S.E. Gontarski writes in the introduction to Burroughs Unbound, how a massive archive of WIlliam Burroughs (1914-1997) almost came to Florida. François C. Bucher, an art-history professor, collection and Burroughs fan, negotiated for Florida State University to acquire the Vaduz Archive twice but was stymied by a lack of finances and appreciation by authorities. Bucher was in correspondence with Burroughs and set up a foundation, which invited him to Florida to lecture.
Gontarski’s chapter proper is a discussion of Burroughs through the Post-Structuralist lens of Deleuze and Guattari. Allen Hibbard discusses the fluidity of Burroughs’s text(s) and provides a very clear summary of the issue that has preoccupied scholars in recent years. Alex Werner-Colan writes about digitisation, as an analogue to the author’s famed word hoard. The scrapbooks (many in the Berg archive at New York Public Library) require digitisation or more extensive publication to make them more widely accessible. Recent attention to Burroughs’s art and his collages as visual material have expanded interest and scholarly engagement.
Nick Sturm’s article explains Burroughs’s antipathy towards Time magazine. Burroughs took umbrage at a derogatory review of Naked Lunch in an issue of Time in 1962. He drew up a battle plan with Brion Gysin to discredit the magazine – an experimental anti-Time collage publication called TIME, featuring cut-ups, new text, images and subversions. It was printed in black and white in an edition of 1,000 copies in 1965. (Read it here.) Sturm argues that Ted Berrigan, New York poet and publisher of TIME, has been unfairly neglected, particularly by Barry Miles, who was dismissive. Sturm shows that Berrigan’s collaboration with Burroughs and interaction with his writing. Tomasz Stompor and Rona Cran also write about Burroughs’s appropriation of Time, the former in relation to illustrations from the cut-up pages and latter in relation to food. Blake Stricklin refers to the Luce publishing empire of Time, Life and Fortune, but centres his chapter on the 1978 Nova Convention.
Barry J. Faulk’s essay on Burroughs and Bowie sets the author firmly in the counter-culture of London in the early 1970s, mentioning a visit Burroughs made to Bowie’s flat in Beckenham. That meeting (in October 1973) was arranged by Rolling Stone magazine. Burroughs tactic of recording ambient noise and speech, then playing it back covertly from portable tape recorders was a way of disrupting and disturbing the status quo by spreading confusion and disquiet. Nathan Moore’s piece compares the paranoia we find Burroughs ideas to the notion of systems of control, which Burroughs developed explicitly from the early 1960s onwards. Burrough’s way of seeing hidden coercion and manipulative deception is equivalent to a method of deconstruction that we can find in some Post-Modernism.
Ash Connell-Gonzalez approaches Ah Pook is Here, explaining the story of the ill-starred collaboration between Burrough and illustrator Malcolm McNeill. The story was an adventure set in the Mexican jungle featuring the Mayan Codices and a virus. Produced at a time when the late 1960s boom in counter-culture comics had opened new possibilities, the book was planned to have been a comic or graphic novel but owing to financial restrictions and myriad complications and changes of plan, the work was never finished. Published in text-only form in 1979 and cannot be published in full, as it had never been finished and some completed artwork had been damaged in storage. A substantial sequence of McNeill’s art was published in 2012 without text in a large book.
The disdain with which the novel Dead Fingers Talk (1963) has been treated betrays a certain snobbery that Burroughsians generally claim to eschew. It is formed of texts from Naked Lunch (1959), Soft Machine (1961) and The Ticket That Exploded (1962). For followers who entertain notions of a single body of text and present the important Post-Modern innovation of the author rewriting himself in subsequent iterations, the neglect of the book seems revealing of rather more conventional outlooks on the part of Burroughsians. I have previously reviewed the new edition of Dead Fingers Talk with editor Oliver Harris’s introduction which is reproduced here complete with its numerous illustrations and concordance of textual sources for Harris’s new edition. The essay is fascinating, informative, witty and passionate, as Harris’s writing always is. Rather than summarise that review, I link it here.
Jed Birmingham investigates the disappearance of the footnotes from the 1959 Olympia Press first edition of Naked Lunch. These footnotes were incorporated in the main body of later editions, sometimes as parenthetical text.
Overall, Burroughs Unbound gives a cross-section of current Burroughsian scholarship, extensively sourced and footnoted. The inclusion of the original archival materials and transcripts makes the volume of extra interest to Burroughs fans and researchers. Like Burroughs’s expansive and heterogenous published material, spreading out like a riotous and startling rhizome, is now mirrored by this expanding network of secondary scholarship, editorial commentary and publication of transcripts. This is both fitting and necessary and this volume takes a primary place in that profusion.
To read the full version of this review (including a discussion of Burroughs’ theories of virus, language and cut-ups) become a paid subscriber on Substack here: https://alexanderadamsart.substack.com/
Source of disappointment and confusion for two generations of fans of Ridley Scott’s eponymous sci-fi movie, William Burroughs’s unrelated book Blade Runner: A Movie is republished by Tangerine Press. The short text – which is comprised of a series of prose scenes or routines – was originally published in 1979. It appears here in a new edition, with a frontispiece photograph of the author and an introduction written by Burroughs expert Professor Oliver Harris.
In the introduction, Harris explains the indirect, accretion-evolution of Blade Runner. Burroughs read Alan E. Nourse’s novel The Bladerunner (1974) soon after its publication and by 1976 (newly arrived in New York, roughly three decades since his departure) had embarked on writing his version. It was nominally a movie treatment, nothing close to a conventional script. Burroughs had been stimulated by the lifting of many restrictions on pornographic cinema in the early 1970s, which he had seen on visits to New York prior to his move there in 1974. Completed in 1977, Burroughs realistically accepted that his text was not suitable for even the most outré of independent cinéastes of the era. Burroughs then repurposed the treatment as a novella-length book.
It was Nourse’s novel about medical smuggling in a sci-fi future that provided the name for Burroughs. It was from Burroughs that Hampton Fancher took the title for his film script adaptation of Philip K. Dicks’s novel Do Androids Dreams of Electric Sheep?, that would become Scott’s 1982 film. As it happened, neither Burroughs or Nourse’s books influenced the content of that script, beyond the title.
So, what of Blade Runner itself? It bears little resemblance to Nourse’s novel. Burroughs gives us the rollicking foul-mouthed satire of the excesses of the politico-medical complex in the near future. Burroughs’s text is both Modernist and Post-Modernist. It is Modernist in that it is deliberately dense, self-aware, assertively artificial, alienating and politically provocative; it is Post-Modernist in that is ironical, destabilising, self-negating.
It opens with an unnamed narrator pitching the Blade Runner film to a studio executive. “Now B.J. you are asking me to tell you in one sentence what this film is about? I’m telling you it is too big for one sentence – even a life sentence. For starters it’s about the National Health Insurance we don’t got.” The film will be a satire of the crippling medical insurance/services racket in the USA and the social collapse resulting from a system of exploitation growing to epic levels. The critique could appeal to both the big-state socialist and low-tax conservative through its depiction of a dysfunctional system that fails to provide adequately to the average-income man while taxing him exorbitantly. “This film is about overpopulation and the growth of vast service bureaucracies. The FDA and AMA and the big drug companies are like an octopus on the citizen.”
In reaction to the insane costs and bureaucratic resistance, the population of Manhattan has turned to underground medicine – the smuggling of medical supplies – a rare direct link to Nourse’s novel in Burroughs’ narrative. Societal collapse gives rise to a nightmare New York. The subway is reduced to a sluggish partial service. “Hand-propelled and steam-driven cars transport produce, the stations have been converted into markets. The lower tunnels are flooded, giving rise to an underground Venice. The upper reaches of derelict skyscrapers, without elevator service since the riots […] Buildings are joined by suspension bridges, a maze of platforms, catwalks, slides, lifts.”
Protagonist Billy will save humanity from a deadly virus. His story is told in a series of impressionistic scenarios described in Burroughsian poetic-satirical eroticism, generating a flickering delirium of a montage of scratched silent footage or jumbled phantograms.
In many ways, Blade Runner is a recapitulation of Burroughs’ greatest hits. The comic routines here are from Burroughs’s pre-existing roster of scientifically-shrewd dystopian medical science and anarchic exploits in doctoring – half prophecy, half silent comedy. There are glimpses of a failing metropolis that resembles strike-ridden impoverished London and riot-scarred New York on the verge of bankruptcy. Both were cities with which Burroughs had deep familiarity. Touches of archaic technology being used to replace broken modern systems will remind some readers of steampunk. Escape from New York (1981), Robocop (1987) and the Deathwish vigilante films are also handy comparators for this failed and feral metropolis.
Burroughs presents us the racial conflicts of tribalisation in Balkanised city, the dream of post-racialism impossibly distant. Considering the race riots in the USA of the late 1960s and early 1970s, Burroughs was as much re-presenting a pre-existing reality to his readers, as he was using his powers of imagination. It is difficult to tell if the legalisation of heroin is satire, considering the methadone programs of various local and national public health systems. In another scene, a taxpayer complains of being forced to fund “Queer sex orgies and injections of marijuana”.
The people work to combat the forces of the medico-military complex, using their ingenuity and improvised weapons. Life-lengthening drugs have caused dysgenic deterioration of the population in a manner predicted by social Darwinists. Bacterial resistance to antibiotics has rendered the population of Western cities as vulnerable as “the Indians and South Sea Islanders on first contact with the whites.” An ancient virus is released by a scientist to combat an accelerated form of cancer. All the while, the population is deprived of basic medication and access to Wilhelm Reich’s orgone treatment. (Burroughs was a supporter of fringe medical figure Reich, who was hounded for his quasi-spiritual theories and whose writings were destroyed by the American government. This also comes up in the original manuscript of his first published novel, Junkie (1953).)
Blade Runner includes scenes of homosexual sex and gun action, as well as social commentary and comedy, making it typical of Burroughs’s writing. With Burroughs, we cannot be sure he is not relishing depravities even as he mocks them. Burroughs is the most complex of all writers because of the interleaving levels of ethical and artistic contradiction present in his life and writing. Burroughs can be legitimately interpreted as Stoic, Buddhist, moral patriarch, Modernist, Post-Modernist, decadent, individualist, communitarian, post-humanist, conservationist, reactionary and libertarian.
Burroughs advocates for affordable healthcare as he delights in describing scenes of mayhem, wherein elaborate boobytraps are deployed against soldiers. Not that these points are necessarily in contradiction – and Burroughs should not be read as anything less than primarily a writer of the freewheeling imagination and comic paradox – but it makes constructing a settled, coherent, moral narrative from Burroughs’s fiction nearly impossible. One might draw absolutely multiple opposing interpretations from a Burroughs text and all be valid.
Overall, Blade Runner is a short, accessible romp, lacking involved plot and differentiated characters. For fans of Naked Lunch (1959) and Interzone (1989), this book is an ideal addition, with its own tone and content. Although Burroughs is in the habit of recycling material, collaging and overlayering it in hectic fashion, the distinct setting and common threads make Blade Runner more memorable than some of the other Burroughs books of the 1970s. Recommended for enthusiasts and those wishing to sample classic Burroughs for the first time.
William S. Burroughs, Oliver Harris (intro.), Blade Runner: A Movie, Tangerine Press, (second printing) 2022, paperback, 96pp, 1 mono illus., £9, ISBN 978 1 910 69 1908
(c) 2022 Alexander Adams
To see my books and art visit www.alexanderadams.art
The ever-expanding field of Beat studies extends our knowledge and understanding of writers within the Beat Generation movement. I have previously reviewed the Routledge Handbook of International Beat Literature here. Beat Feminisms: Aesthetics, Literature, Gender, Activism, a new book from Beat scholar Dr Polina Mackay (University of Nicosia) in the Routledge Transnational Perspectives on American Literature series, examines the role played by women within the Beat Movement. Mackay adopts a division of women which splits up them into waves. Firstly, are the women (born in the 1910s and 1920s) close to the original generation of Beat writers William Burroughs, Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac; secondly, those born in the 1930s who joined (or were associated with the Beats as they reached a public stage; and thirdly, those who were born in the 1930s and were inspired by the Beats but not necessarily personally close to the original Beat Generation. Mackay takes one female writer from each wave and examines them in detail in relation to feminist ideas and practice.
Mackay starts by acknowledging that participation in the Beat Movement – certainly for those individuals not personally connected to original members – was a matter of affinity and allegiance rather than one of conformity of style, theme or content. As Mackay notes, many of the Beat women were isolated from one another, some not meeting until the 1990s. Whether such seclusion was primarily driven by external or internal factors (or both), the point is that male editors and publishers were being exposed to female Beat writings less often and it is therefore unsurprising that little of that material was reaching publication in the 1950s-1980s period. The female absence (in terms of early-era publishing) that could be attributed to male hostility could just as easily be assigned to lack of access to material, no doubt exacerbated by ignorance and indifference. Seeing hostility towards women and absence of interest in women writers as equivalent would be an unhelpful conflation.
There is a thoughtful discussion of the literary place of Joan Vollmer Adams’s death at the hands of her husband William Burroughs in Mexico City. Burroughs, drunk, accidentally shot his wife with his pistol during a game at a party. Mackay outlines the various treatments of the incident. These include a few references in Burroughs’s writings and interviews (he did not present a fictionalised version in his novels), those written by associates and the writings of later authors. It is true but not informative to state that Vollmer’s life is written in her absence, as this is always the case when a subject does not leave any substantial written legacy. The author analyses how Burroughs, Ginsberg and Kerouac used their memories and fantasies regarding Vollmer’s life and death in their writings. Mackay concludes, “A common thread in Burroughs, Ginsberg and Kerouac is the intertwining of female presence in Beat textuality with autobiographical discourses, such as the development of the writer as a process of freeing from the biographical past (Burroughs), the conflation of poetic topic and the author’s poetic self-consciousness (Ginsberg), or the reconstruction of the past in writerly terms (Kerouac).”[i]
The core of the book is a discussion of Diane di Prima, Ruth Weiss and Anne Waldman as key women writers within the Beat movement, whose work exemplifies issues highlighted as feminist and female-specific within literature of the time. In her book Recollections of my Life as a Woman (2001), Diane di Prima wrote of her relationship to the poetry and letters of John Keats, seeing her work as a writer in relation to the ground-breaking output of the Romantic poet. Mackay draws the obvious parallel between di Prima’s inspiration from Keats with the famous incident when Ginsberg had a vision of William Blake, in 1948. Mackay analyses di Prima’s poetics in Recollections and This Kind of Bird Flies Backwards (1958) and Dinners and Nightmares (1961) in terms of a response, extension and revision of Keats’s verse, writing both about him and through him, in a process of intertextuality. “Di Prima’s repurposing of Keatsian poetics [accentuates] Keatsian-like contemplative pieces with the Beat vernacular not only modernizes the meditative poem as a genre but also brings into it a new discourse created by the unique time and space of the work’s production, which was the New York countercultural scene of the 1950s.”[ii]
Ruth Weiss’s Desert Journal (1977) represents two Biblical narratives – of the journeys through the wilderness by Moses and Christ – in a book of 40 poems, symbolising the traditional length of the journeys of 40 days and 40 nights. A reinterpretation of theological stories provided Weiss with a space to explore her journey of spiritual self-understanding. The use of English, German and Hebrew adds to the multi-level sequence, which mirrors the double narrative of the journeys through the wilderness made by the fathers of two religions.
Diane di Prima’s Loba (1998) is a later book, which Mackay uses as a starting point for a discussion of de Prima’s knowledge of early Modernist verse and her responses to mid-century writers, such as Black Mountain poet Charles Olson. This complex book-length poem includes a cast of well-known women from history and, according to critics, contains contradictory attitudes that put forth a complex idea of femininity, not one wholly laudatory. Mackay’s chapter indicates how dense the levels of mythology are in Loba and, more than the other chapters, makes one wish to read the original.
There is a chapter on female performances at Nova Convention in November-December 1978, New York, held to celebrate the work of William Burroughs. These included Laurie Anderson, Julia Heyward, Patti Smith and Anne Waldman. The event marked a widespread acknowledgement of the influence of the Beats on the New Wave and punk movements and advanced a younger generation of creators to be seen as peers of Burroughs and Ginsberg. The performance of Anderson was a key step from being a performance artist known only to afficionados of the New York art scene of the 1970s to a widely known musician and storyteller, world famous by the 1980s. Tangentially related are Kathy Acker’s cut-ups (as found in her novel Don Quixote (1986)), which were expressly parodic in character and considerably less respectful toward Burroughs than were Anderson and Waldman’s performances.
Waldman’s poetry is considered as a form of activism, mainly through the light of her collection Fast Speaking Woman (1975, expanded 2nd edition 1996) and Iovis Trilogy (2011). Aside from generalised statements in support of women lacking power, Waldman makes explicit statements against war. She has been an outspoken opponent of the Vietnam War and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Waldman’s Iovis Trilogy is a 1,000-page long Post-Modern, post-Beat “cultural intervention into public space”. Although this book is held up as a “clear link between writing as a woman and being an activist against various forms of oppression”[iii], this argument seems slightly light here. At least, we could do with more concrete examples that display how Waldman enacts activism through text, as opposed to simply displaying socio-political engagement. Is Waldman’s activism more explicit or direct here? Are there some distinct literary devices that support Mackay’s thesis or is it simply the prominence and urgency of Waldman’s politics that make Iovis Trilogy a landmark work?
The avoidance of jargon and clarity of argument makes Beat Feminisms a pleasing read, in a field that can become opaque with theory and advocacy. The extensive bibliography and a full index contribute to the book’s use as a study resource. Mackay’s book will prompt renewed consideration of the way prominent female Beats have viewed themselves as writers and is recommended for students of the Beat Generation and the wider movement, as well as for those researching feminist literature.
Polina Mackay, Beat Feminisms: Aesthetics, Literature, Gender, Activism, Routledge, hardback, 172pp + xiv, £120, ISBN 978 0 415 8927 1 1
© 2022 Alexander Adams
To see my books and art, visit www.alexanderadams.art
Dead Fingers Talk (1963) is a bibliographic oddity in Burroughs’s output. It was a composite text composed extracts from the novels Naked Lunch (1959), Soft Machine (1961), The Ticket That Exploded (1962). Dead Fingers Talk was the brainchild of John Calder. Calder was the Scottish London-based publisher of Calder Books, which specialised in avant-garde literature. This restored version gives us the text as it was intended to be.
The publication history of Burroughs’s texts in the 1960s is fiendishly complex. Myriad publications in various countries issued by different publishers in forms that ranged from partial, censored, jumbled, poorly proofed and corrected, not to mention revised, expanded and partially re-written forms. At the time Dead Fingers Talk was composed, Naked Lunch had been published twice in two versions, Soft Machine was in its first edition form and Burroughs was finishing the manuscript for The Ticket That Exploded for Grove Press. Dead Fingers Talk was produced as an introduction to Burroughs’s work for British readers, preceding Calder’s publication of Naked Lunch in 1964. Calder had brought Burroughs to the Edinburgh Festival in 1962, where his description of his cut-up technique in a literary panel captured the imagination of consumers of experimental culture and newspaper journalists.
When it appeared, Dead Fingers Talk disappointed those who had already heard responses to the imported Girodias’s Naked Lunch and deemed Dead Fingers Talk “merely pragmatic means to more important ends”, i.e. British publication of Naked Lunch. The book was a curiosity that went out of print and was not published outside of Great Britain. Dr Oliver Harris is the leading Burroughs textual expert. He has produced restored editions of classic early books – discovering missing parts and correcting errors – and now turns his attention to Dead Fingers Talk. His comprehensive and fascinating introduction discusses the initial reception of the book and its absence from critical literature since. “By ignoring Dead Fingers Talk completely, the consensus of the critics is that there’s simply nothing to say for or about it […]” Harris has provided full textual notes, explaining changes, for those wishing to understand what has changed. Of course, given the limited readership of the original book and its reprints, most readers will be encountering this book for the first time.
The book includes parts of the three novels of 1959-62, omitting the most sexually explicit and profane passages. There was also a small amount of new material. The texts were reshaped and re-ordered, forming a new semi-narrative. Notoriously, there is no linear narrative to any of the novels, so chopping up the material did not make the text less comprehensible, simply comprehensible in a new way. Dead Fingers Talks is a collage of recognisable materials; it is a famous symphony played by a chamber orchestra. There are absurd horror, mordant satire and memorable characters. There are passages of exquisite prose poetry in tangled streams of consciousness. “Hands empty of hunger on the stale breakfast table – Winds of sickness through his face – Pain of the long slot burning flesh film – Cancelled eyes, old photo fading – Violet brown souvenir of Panama City –” There are paragraphs of Conradian description. “Aching lungs in dust and pain wind – Mountain lakes blue and cold as liquid air –” There are cowboy-style gunfights. There are sections of science-fiction. The chapters are short. However dense a section, it does not last. Thus there is no grind or page after page of unindented word collage, which renders The Soft Machine and The Ticket That Exploded tedious reads.
Describing the text in any conventional manner would be absurd. We meet again familiar characters such as narcotics agents, junkies, dealers and confidence tricksters. Dr Benway, the maniac physician of dubious means and morals, reappears as a part raconteur, part press agent, part Dr Mengele. Burroughs’s scepticism about authority leads him to treat religion as the long con – a giant experiment in control. His blasphemy is an expression moral outrage at manipulation. For Burroughs, restrictions on sexual activity are intolerable impositions on natural rights. This would become a core part of his libertarian fantasies of autonomous colonies in Wild Boys (1971), Port of Saints (1973) and The Red Night trilogy (1981-7).
A key element in Burroughs’s writing is discussion of drugs as a means of control and consciousness expansion. He invents fantastic drugs and also describes the reality of addiction. Sometimes fact and fantasy blur. “Shooting Eukodol every two hours. I have a place where I can slip my needle right into a vein, it stays open like a red, festering mouth, swollen and obscene, gathers a slow drop of blood and pus after the shot. […]” Burroughs is no way a hedonistic promoter of drug usage and is unflinching about the danger and squalor of drug taking. “Look down at my filthy trousers, haven’t been changed in months – The days glide by strung on a syringe with a long thread of blood – I am forgetting sex and all sharp pleasures of the body – a grey, junk-bound ghost.”
There is also plangent beauty throughout Burroughs’s writing, all the more striking when contrasted with the high comedy, street slang and horror. There is a persistent melancholy in Burroughs’s imagination. Sooner or later, the atrophying of the heroin high induces sadness. “There is no rich mother load, but vitiate dust, second run cottons trace the bones of a fix.” “Inactive oil wells and mine shafts, strata of abandoned machinery and gutted boats, garbage of stranded operations and expeditions that died at this point of dead land where sting-rays bask in brown water and grey crabs walk up from the mud flats to the silent temple of high jungle streams of clear water cut deep clefts in yellow clay and falling orchids endanger the traveller.”
Pleasure is plentiful in reading such free language and playful ideas, especially in a time when speech is policed so arbitrarily and tactically. That makes Dead Fingers Talk recommended reading for dissidents, critics, free-thinkers and lovers of imagination. Remarkably, for a compromise stop-gap measure meant to sustain notoriety with an eye to commercial considerations, Dead Fingers Talk is perhaps the best entry point for a reader who has never encountered Burroughs’s writings.
William S. Burroughs, Oliver Harris (ed., introduction), Dead Fingers Talk: The Restored Text, Calder Books, September 2020, paperback, 269pp + XLIII, £9.99, ISBN 978 0 7145 50015
To see my art and books visit www.alexanderadams.art
© 2020 Alexander Adams
Published by Indiana University Press, this book is a platform for the latest expert scholarship on William S. Burroughs, William S. Burroughs: Cutting Up the Century collects essays and interviews by a number of Burroughs experts on various aspects of his contributions to the arts. The book includes unseen texts by Burroughs from the Berg Collection, New York Public Library.
There are transcripts and facsimiles of previously unpublished texts by Burroughs. They are as follows: various short letters, “Metamorphosis” (William Burroughs Junior poem, 1963), “Adios Saturn” (cut-up poem, 1963), “Cut-Ups of Critics” (cut-ups, 1960-4; including the memorable line “he is se [sic] serving dead clinets [sic] by the hour”), “The Permissive Society” (essay, 1971), collage of news cuttings (1960s), “On China” (essay, 1969), “P.S. to ACADEMY 23” (text collage, 1967), “On Addiction” (text, 1957-9/1970), “Opium” (text collage, 1970), “la chute de l’art une poeme moderne” (text, collage and photographs, 1970), “Thinking in Colors” (cut-ups, c. 1961), “On the Cut-Up” (cut-ups, 1960-1), “Watergate” (text collage, 1973), “Cutting Up Scientology” (cut-ups, 1963-5), “Dream Note on Indictment for Murdering Joan” (note, 1970) and “Cut-Ups of Last Words” (cut-ups, 1960-1). The most substantial piece is the 1972 Wild Boys Screenplay (actually a treatment or proposal rather than a script) for a pornographic film. Stimulated by the experience of seeing explicit homosexual pornography in cinemas in New York City in 1972, Burroughs decided to get into the erotic-movie business. The treatment opens with “We intend to make a beautiful film that will make some beautiful money.” Burroughs himself concluded with regret that “I finally decided the whole idea was impractical both from a financial standpoint and from the stand point of making a good film within our budget.”
The extensive illustrations present Burroughs’s complex collage/montages and cut-up creations in a form that makes them comprehensible. The opening up of the Burroughs archive acquired by the New York Public Library in 2009 has allowed scholars access to a treasure trove of material both published and published, alongside rare publications and various biographical materials. Burroughs is a particularly complex and multi-layered creator, whose huge output contains many contradictions, dead-ends and unexplored detours. There is no lack of Burroughsian material which seems to presage current cengagement regarding ecological thought, queer aesthetics, anti-corporate activism, globalisation, multi-culturalism and post-modern deconstructionism.
Oliver Harris explores Burroughs’s battle with publisher Henry Luce over a libellous article about the writer, published in LIFE (30 November 1959). Luce was publisher of TIME, LIFE and Fortune magazines. Burroughs brought a civil suit against the magazine. He won the case but the damages were paltry. Burroughs worked off his aggression in a series of cut-ups that were part venting and part an attempt to curse LIFE. (Burroughs had an abiding fascination with magic and superstition and later cursed a milk bar where he had a particularly bad meal. He attributed its later closure to his acts of psychic sabotage.) Harris excavates the Luce-owned material that was incorporated into Burroughs’s cut-ups and into his transcribed texts.
Kathelin Gray covers Burroughs’s ecological awareness, concern about species extinction and eco-activism in his later American years. The illustrations of paintings link Burroughs apocalyptic cosmology with his concern about environmental exploitation and degradation. He took an interest in the Biosphere 2 project in the early 1990s. Katharine Streips writes about Burroughs in relation to “transcendent porn”, especially relating to The Ticket That Exploded (1962).
Burroughs writing of Tangiers interzone as a paradigm of globalisation is the topic of Timothy S. Murphy. Genre in the Naked Lunch novel and film is the subject of Joshua Vasquez’s essay. Kristen Galvin documents the 1978 Nova Convention in Downtown Manhattan. A table lists events and speakers over the weekend 1-3 December 1978. Burroughs, Ginsberg, Cage, Gysin, Calder, Girodias, Seaver and others spoke or read at the event and a stellar cast of musicians and artists contributed performances. She briefly summarises the 1996 Kansas Nova Convention Revisited. The commendable essay (by Eric Sandweiss) on Burroughs in St Louis is particularly well researched and informative. The writer had deep roots in the city but was ambivalent about the class and racial situation of his youth. In 1964-5 he made a rare return to write an article about the city.
Biographer Barry Miles is interviewed by Oliver Harris. They discuss Miles’s approach to his two biographies of Burroughs and the problems that subject posed. Harris is interviewed by Davis Schneiderman about the satisfaction and quandaries of editing Burroughs. A transcript of a panel discussion by Ann Douglas, Anne Waldman and Regina Weinreich covers the contentious matter of Burroughs’s treatment of women. They remember their personal interactions with him and characterise him as courtly and accommodating towards women, notwithstanding his negative comments in his writing – and the near uniform exclusion of women in his fictional worlds. Anne Waldman writes of Burroughs the visionary.
Alex Wermer-Colan uses Burroughs’s early novels as a starting point to present Burroughs as an anti-imperialist and satirist. Aaron Nyerges puts the case for Burroughs as a regionalist, a Mexican Beat regionalist specifically. He relates Burroughs’ killing of his wife Joan to the resistance of feminist Beat scholars towards Burroughs. (Kathelin Gray recounts that Burroughs raised the subject of the killing of his wife and was overcome by deep grief. It is an incident – however fleeting – of Burroughs feelings towards women, which is a live-wire issue for feminists due especially to the misogynist sentiments of many of his texts in the 1960s.) Blake Stricklin writes on the word as written image. Landon Palmer’s discusses Burroughs’s voice and the Burroughsian voice. In an unusually clear and informed essay Véronique Lane explores Burroughs responses to Rimbaud and Genet. Chad Weidner – an expert on the links between Burroughs and ecological thought – returns to his eco-literary analysis by examining early cut-ups.
Kurt Hemmer’s essay on Burroughs’s search for outlaw role models is a satisfying read. The source of Jack Black’s You Can’t Win is a cornerstone of the Burroughs’s thoughts on the subject and it shaped his responses to other models, such as Captain Mission’s utopian pirate colony. The use of outlaw argot, private codes of honour and a system of signs form a community ethos for Burroughs, which he sees as a method resisting the social mores of the day and the arbitrary authority of cops, courts and corporations. Combined with the stories of Western cowboys, robbers and pioneers, Burroughs invented an imagined community and canon – effectively a lineage of resistance. This is encountered in The Wild Boys (1971), Port of Saints (1973) and The Western Lands trilogy (1981-7).
Allen Hibbard examines some of Burroughs’s collaborations – with Kerouac, Ginsberg, Gysin and Kurt Cobain. He omits the work with filmmaker Anthony Balch and technical wizard Ian Sommerville. The latter was perhaps his closest and most fruitful direct collaboration. However, the non-textual character of the Burroughs-Sommerville creations (photographs, tape recordings and the Dream Machine) makes the partnership complicated to discuss verbally. The loss of the Burroughs letters to Sommerville (destroyed by his family after his death) has further obscured his importance in Burroughs studies. If there is one line of Burroughsian scholarship which has not been exhausted – which has hardly been adequately outlined – it is the life, work and relationship of Sommerville vis-à-vis Burroughs.
The tone, depth of reading, insight and importance of the texts is necessarily heterogeneous, as it must be in such collections. The content of the texts is of variable quality and utility but is never less than engaging and thoughtful. By and large, the academic abstruseness is at a minimum. All texts provide source texts though not detailed footnotes. The original Burroughs texts range from the beautiful (“Thinking in Colors”) to the expected. It is good to have them – especially the facsimiles – but they are undeniably minor pieces. Overall, this is book for those already knowledgable about Burroughs and keen to follow recent developments in the crowded and industrious field of Burroughs Studies.
Joan Hawkins, Alex Wermer-Colan (eds.), William S. Burroughs: Cutting Up the Century, Indiana University Press, 2019, paperback, 434pp, fully col. and mono illus., $35 (hardback $85), ISBN 978 0 253 041333
© 2019 Alexander Adams
To view my art and books visit http://www.alexanderadams.art
Writer, teacher, artist, publisher, musician and agitator for the counter culture, Jeff Nuttall (1933-2004) was a large figure in the British pop culture landscape during the 1960s and 1970s. He knew most of the leading figures in the underground scene of the era and acted as a link in the form of organiser, publisher, promoter and communicator. As someone with a high profile, Nuttall was in the ideal position to promote the counter culture – though what he put forward was his own version of the counter culture. Nuttall had his own preoccupations and blind spots and the underground culture he promulgated was very much in his own image. Bomb Culture – first published in 1968 – became the handbook for British readers in search of an explanation of the ideas driving the radical Sixties led by the post-Hiroshima generation. Widely reviewed and popular, Bomb Culture was seen at the time as representative of the zeitgeist. The new edition contains a foreword by Iain Sinclair and an introduction by Douglas Field and Jay Jeff Jones. Biographical notes allow younger readers to orientate themselves with less familiar names from 1968. There are also some added photographs.
Nuttall covers the well-established link between the origins of jazz as brothel music from New Orleans and the power of jazz music as a potent expression of political liberation and sexual defiance. Nuttall mentions the liberation movements of the period but is clearly less engaged by these movements. Sexual liberation is viewed in terms of accessibility to sexual gratification rather than to the widening of the social horizons for women. Consciousness liberation took the form of consumption of psychedelic and hallucinogenic drugs. Rock music (especially acid rock) is considered as an extension of the psychoactive effects of drugs. Nuttall is knowledgeable about pop music and writes with confidence about the counter culture credentials of rock and roll. Bomb Culture’s perspective is of particular interest because it was written from 1967 to 1968 and was published in 1968, placing its creation right at the centre of activity it describes.
While Nuttall’s perspective was British – laced with references to the Second World War and post-war austerity – his view of the scene was refracted through the lens of American culture – jazz, film, poetry, and underground activist journalism. Nuttall sees the cultural upheaval in Britain as a response to the failure of the CND and Aldermaston Marches of the late 1950s and early 1960s. He condemns much British Socialist writing as a compromise, seeking to ingratiate writers with the existing structure of the Labour Party as the main leftist opposition to the establishment. His claims are scattershot and his pragmatic counter-position is not forthcoming. For Nuttall the more underground, the freer from compromise production becomes. The International Times and his own fanzine (or “little magazine”, according to your definition) My Own Mag are freer. The manifest failure of the mass youth-led protests against the Cold War bomb culture led to the wider, more pervasive social movement of the counter culture. While British protesters took their lead from anti-Vietnam War protests and American pop culture, Nuttall sees a direct line from the anti-Cold War culture of the 1950s and early 1960s.
Nuttall took a more militant – even violent – position than the hippy outlook headed by Allen Ginsberg and the San Francisco scene. He is decidedly opposed to the pacifism of the hippies. He sees the violence of protestors in London’s Grosvenor Square against the American Embassy at the height of the Vietnam War as an enervating corrective to the violence being perpetrated against the Vietnamese. Likewise, there is adulation for student bomb makers and narcotic manufacturers. Yet how much of this is not simply the petulant anger of malcontents directed against the status quo? Is not the violent response the extension of violence the responders seeks to curtail? For Nuttall, bomb culture has a double meaning – the hegemony of the military-industrial complex that the nuclear bomb created and the bomb culture of youthful resistance to that system. Nuttall sees violence as an explicable and inevitable response to potential violence of a military system. He discusses the aimless violence of the teenage thrill kill and the gang fights of the Mods and Rockers. (The Teddy boys appropriated the upper-class fashion revival by the Edwardian age that Savile Row tailors, who had planned to market it to the middle class. Instead of the style becoming a profitable product for tailors to reach the middle classes, the working class adopted it as a badge of decadent defiance.)
Another line is the pseudo-Nietzschean amoralism of the Moors murderers as an example of libertinism. The defiance of sexual and social mores logically leads to the defiance of the ethical principles of the sanctity of life. In one startling observation, Nuttall talked of the crowd at the trial witnessing the process less in indignation than in envy.
Nuttall puts forward the psychoanalytic theory of the day, cribbed from popular publications.
Schizophrenia was ill-defined. At best it meant, means, someone who was isolated and therefore not adjusted to the patterns of society.
This conformed to the social-repressive view of R.D. Laing and others, who saw schizophrenia and serious conditions not as a problem of an individual being unable to map reality on to the mental landscape of the subject but of society stigmatising the non-conformist individual. In this view society and family (and the medical profession which sought to apply the principles of those institutions) were systems of repression. Any system that restrains (no matter how it also nurtures, supports and protects) is an artificial development which seeks to divert the potentially disruptive force of individualism. The psychoanalytic profession – rather than seeking to actualise the potential of people – was attempting to neuter people in the service of the pharmaceutical industry, educational system and social structures that were themselves beholden to insane priorities and values. In short, the insane were responding to the insanity of their alienated social reality rather than to any internal deficiency. In this respect Nuttall puts the counterculture case in its clearest form, associating Laing’s ideas with Ginsberg’s Howl – a poem noting the madness of great minds faced by the painful reality of society.
Nuttall diverts into Surrealism and Dadaism as attempts at liberation of art. His art history is unconventional – more Norman Mailer than Ernst Gombrich. Yet, even when he is elaborating ideas that would not find a place in any conventional study, he remains thought provoking.
The destination, as far as art is concerned, is the journey itself. Art keeps the thing moving. The only true disaster is the end of the journey, the end of man and his development.
Nuttall knew many of the Beat Generation, particularly William Burroughs. They lived in London at the same time and Nuttall published Burroughs’s writings. The British Beats are described in a series of amusing anecdotes.
Nuttall does not weave his observations into an integrated thesis. His observations form a torrent of history, pop culture criticism, fashion and music. (Television and radio hardly comes up and American movies are referenced in passing and in terms of iconic actors rather than any discussion of particular films.) Political theory, philosophy and revolutionary activism concepts are almost entirely omitted. The book includes many lengthy quotes – poems, newspaper extracts and popular science papers. Nuttall has limitations as a creative writer and a populariser of other people’s ideas. He was a reckless writer: casual with facts, lazy in style and clumsy with logic. Yet he was by no means a cynical blagger. He had an original and wayward mind; his Bomb Culture remains not only a personal view of a tumultuous period but also an enjoyable record of the era seen from the inside.
Jeff Nuttall, Bomb Culture, Strange Attractor Press (MIT distr.), 2019, paperback, 306pp., £14.99, ISBN 978 190 7222702
© 2019 Alexander Adams
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Maarten van Gageldonk, Transatlantic Mediators: Grove Press, Evergreen Review and Postwar European Literature, 2016, 319pp, unpublished doctoral thesis
Transatlantic Mediators is the result of Maarten van Gageldonk’s research in the archives of Grove Press/Evergreen Review held at Syracuse University, New York, supplemented by wide-ranging reading and new interviews. This study is of Grove/Evergreen Review’s publication of foreign prose, poetry and drama from 1954 to 1973.
In 1951 American publisher Barney Rosset (1922-2012) took over the small, New York-based publishing house Grove Press and began to publish what would become a stream of highly influential literary, critical, sociological and biographical books. Rosset is widely considered the most important independent publisher of the post-war period. Van Gageldonk explains how the activities of Rosset, Grove Press and Evergreen Review were distinct yet often overlapping and in many respects inseparable. During the 1954-73 period Grove Press was on the cutting edge of avant-garde literature, publishing key texts by the Beats, French nouveau roman writers, European dramatists and other experimental and historically important writers
Van Gageldonk’s expertise in researching and evaluating periodical publications comes to the fore in his appreciation of Evergreen Review. Evergreen Review was founded in 1957 by Rosset to showcase Grove Press authors, as well as publish verse, prose and articles covering literary, artistic, social and political topics by non-house authors. It published excerpts of Grove volumes and introduced new writers in order to test reception. “Partly because of [its] eclecticism, the magazine was able to cater to a large and coherent group of young Americans, interested not only in cultural developments within the U.S., but also abroad. Evergreen Review’s ideal reader would have been in his or her early twenties, with a college education and left-leaning political views.”
Van Gageldonk uses statistical analysis to present a picture of how Evergreen Review changed over the years. He presents Evergreen Review’s sales and distribution figures to demonstrate its rise to the position of America’s most influential literary periodical and how it eventually lost its way. Once the censorship battles of the 1950s and 1960s were won, Evergreen Review was no longer the gatekeeper to clandestine avant-garde literature; it was just another counter-cultural publication. Evergreen Review changed format a number of times. When printing technology evolved, it became economic to publish on coated paper which allowed reproduction of photographs, first in half-tone then, later, in colour. The larger format, proliferation of advertisements and increased photographic illustration marked a gradual change in direction, highlighted by its retitling as Evergreen. When the journal largely dropped poetry and translations of foreign-language texts – choosing instead to feature a mix of erotic stories, nude photography, radical social commentary and polemic – it came into competition with Playboy, a match it was unequal to. Evergreen ceased print publication in 1973.
Van Gageldonk considers Grove Press’s battles with various American censoring bodies over Lady Chatterley’s Lover, Tropic of Cancer and Naked Lunch, driven partly by idealism, partly by commercialism. Controversy over freedom-of-speech issues increased sales as well as earning Grove cultural cachet. In purely financial terms, Grove’s position on banned books was not quite justified by the costs of defending them against charges of obscenity – especially in the case of Lady Chatterley’s Lover, where pirated editions by rival publishers would compete for sales once the ban was lifted. Works deemed illegal were not covered by American copyright law, so competing houses eyed the breaking of fresh ground with the intention of launching their own editions as soon as new markets opened.
The author discusses aspects of Grove/Evergreen Review’s output in terms of Pierre Bourdieu’s theories of cultural production and Ulf Hannerz’s conception of creolization of culture through adaptation and interpretation of cultural material. A good example of the latter is Van Gageldonk’s discussion of the publication of texts by Alfred Jarry in a 1960 issue of Evergreen Review dedicated to ‘Pataphysics. At the time, Jarry was a writer obscure to English readers, known mostly by reputation, and little of his work had been translated. The presentation of Jarry was in a highly mediated form: a small selection of his texts in translation with works by others connected to the ‘Pataphysics movement. The editing was highly influenced by figures active in the Collège de ‘Pataphysique, Paris. In this example of creolization, Jarry’s texts was detached from their historical and cultural context and presented as harbingers of Surrealism and Absurdism. The presentation of Jarry as a forerunner of the counter-culture resistance to social conformity and as a debunker of scientific rationalism made him attractive to Grove American readers familiar with the Beats. Thus a relatively underappreciated historical author became pressed into service of a publisher keen to buttress its artistic credibility.
Grove’s stake in the success of the Theatre of the Absurd is clear if one studies its publishing list. In 1954 Grove published the English translation of Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot, a gamble on an author little-known to Anglophones. Despite huge success in Paris, the play had not been performed in English due to concerns over possible infringement of obscenity and blasphemy laws. Van Gageldonk observes that Grove went on to corner the American market for European Absurdist drama, including in its list Beckett, Eugène Ionesco, Jean Genet, Arthur Adamov, Harold Pinter and Václav Havel. Van Gageldonk explains the involvement Grove had in arranging productions and how the commercial rewards and – particularly – critical responses to debut stage productions in New York could make or break dramatists in America. “Comparing Ionesco and Adamov’s impact on the theatrical field first of all highlights the absolute dominance still held by the older New York drama critics, a position at the time still little eroded by a younger generation. When the three key New York drama critics walked out of Ping Pong, they reduced Adamov’s chances within the field to nil.” He points out how successful early productions of Ionesco established him as a major dramatist for American audiences while Adamov sank into obscurity.
In other chapters Van Gageldonk assesses Grove’s publication of literature from Russia, Eastern Bloc nations and Germany – a useful complement to the attention already given by other academics to Grove’s important ties to the French avant-garde. Even when dealing with highly theoretical matters in the methodological introduction, Van Gageldonk’s prose is clear and precise. Discussing Rosset, Grove, Evergreen Review and Rosset’s most important editors, Richard Seaver and Donald Allen, Van Gageldonk’s text is enjoyable and engaging, conveying the social and literary milieu as well as the substance of his subject. Transatlantic Mediators is an approachable, thoroughly researched and informative study of the contribution Grove/Evergreen Review made to literature in the mid-Twentieth Century. Let us hope it reaches a wider audience in the future.
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The Defining Science Fiction Books of the 1960s
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The Defining Science Fiction Books of the 1960s is a list compiled by super fan James Wallace Harris.
|
en
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favicon.ico
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Worlds Without End
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https://www.worldswithoutend.com/lists_60s.asp
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The 1960s is infamous for its counter-culture, folk music, Beatles, rock music, civil rights, feminism, Watts and Stonewall riots, the Viet Nam war, radical youth, hippies, campus unrest, generation gap and to a special few, the dangerous visions of the New Wave in science fiction. Black and white SF mutated into 1960s psychedelic Sci-Fi with new writers like Samuel R. Delany and Roger Zelazny. Science fiction tuned in, turned on and detonated with Stranger in a Strange Land, Dune, The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch and The Left Hand of Darkness. As NASA rocketed upwards into the final frontier, science fiction warped through new territories of inner space and planet Gaia. Science fiction grew up in the 1960s and moved away from its pulp adventure adolescence, seeking to explore, experiment and radicalize.
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wrong_mix_random_publicationDate_00046
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FactBench
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0
| 24
|
http://www.urbanhonking.com/spacecanon/2013/04/03/ben-bova-the-omni-interview/index.html
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en
|
Ben Bova: The OMNI Interview
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2013-04-03T00:00:00
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en
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http://www.urbanhonking.com/index.html
|
I recently had the great fortune of interviewing three of the surviving editors of the late, great OMNI magazine, a publication which, for 17 years, blew minds with its gonzo blend of science fiction and science. From 1978 to 1998 (it switched to full-time online publication in the mid-1990s) OMNIÂ regularly featured extensive Q&A interviews with some of the top scientists of the 20th centuryâE.O. Wilson, Francis Crick, Jonas Salkâtales of the paranormal, speculative fantasy art by the likes of H.R. Giger, and some of the most important science fiction to ever see magazine publication: writers like Orson Scott Card, William Gibson, Stephen King, Harlan Ellison, and even William S. Burroughs graced its pages.
Ben Bova was the editor of OMNI for five years. He’s also a six-time Hugo award winner, author of 120 books of science fiction and fantasy, and was the direct successor to John W. Campbell at the helm of Analog Science Fiction and Fact.
Universe: You went to OMNI after seven award-winning years editing Analog. How did the two publications differ?
Bova: Analog was published in those days by The Condé Nast Publications, Inc., a major magazine house that published Vogue, Glamour, Mademoiselle, House & Garden, etc. They had acquired Analog when they bought out Street & Smith, around 1960. The management of Condé Nast didnât know anything about the science fiction magazine except that it made a small profit every month, and it was regarded as the leader in its field. They just let John W. Campbell Jr. run the magazine as he saw fit. Campbell, of course was a giant in the field, and had discovered most of the major science fiction writers of the time. I was picked to take over the magazineâs editorship when Campbell unexpectedly died, and tried to continue I his tradition. My only staff was Katherine Tarrant, who had been Campbellâs assistant since he first took over the editorship in the mid-1930s. I had an art director, and one of the circulation departmentâs senior men handled Analogâs circulation business. I made all the decisions, with no one looking over my shoulder.
Omni, of course, was a very different affair. We had an editorial staff, an advertising staff, and a circulation staff. It was a major magazine, breaking new ground in the industry. And it was, for me, a dream come true: a big, national (even international) magazine, heavy with advertising, read by millions every month. There were always issues of one kind or another with the staff, but they were minor. We worked together quite well, actually.
Universe:  You once pitched a magazine of science fiction and nonfiction, Tomorrow Magazine, to Condé Nast: did that vision turn into your work at OMNI?
Bova: I felt that Analog, good as it was, only spoke to the relatively small science fiction community. I proposed a major national magazine that focused on the future, both with fiction and fact articles. The management heard me out, but decided that they didnât know enough about the subject matter to invest in a major effort. They knew the womenâs magazine market, so they launched instead Self magazine, which had done quite well for them.
Universe:Â How much freedom did you have at OMNI, and what kinds (if any) of commercial expectations did you need to meet?
Bova: I had a very wide field of operations. Kathy Keeton was the actual publisher of Omni, the idea for the magazine was hers. She was in the office every day, but she hardly ever interfered with editorial decisions. She made suggestions aplenty, and many of them were good. Those that werenât, we discussed openly, and she almost always gave in to our editorial opinions. As long as the magazine sold well, everyone was happy. And Omni did sell spectacularly well, thanks to its editorial content, its visual quality, and a very talented circulation department.
Kathy Keeton was the de facto publisher of the magazine. Bob Guccione was the boss, but he usually stayed clear of the editorial process. He was more interested in the magazineâs visual appeal. Both Kathy and Bob were vitally interested in showing the world that Bob Guccione was more than a copycat of Hugh Hefner. Omni broke new ground and succeeded when most of the pundits said it would fail. That made both Bob and Kathy very happy.
Universe: Can you roughly characterize for me what your editorial imperatives were: what was the tone of “OMNI under Bova”?
Bova: I emphasized that Omni is not a science magazine. It is a magazine about the future. Science magazines came and went: some of our editors had worked at half a dozen different science magazines, all of which folded. I tried to get across to the editorial staff (and everyone else) that the publicâs conception of science is that itâs like spinach: good for you but not terribly appetizing. Our approach was to present the future, which is like lemon meringue pie: delicious and fun. Of course most of our nonfiction pieces dealt with science in one way or another. But our approach was to talk about the future; readers swallowed the science because we made it palatable.
Universe: Did you feel that you had any predecessors, or peers?
Bova: Omni was sui generic. Although there were plenty of science magazines over the years (most of which failed eventually) Omni was the first magazine to slant all its pieces toward the future. It was fun to read and gorgeous to look at. I donât think we had any direct competition, although our success prompted other publishers to bring out other science magazines.
Universe: How was OMNI perceived in the science fiction community?
Bova: The science fiction community was initially leery of a magazine that included science fiction in its pages but was published by the man who published Penthouse. A large part of my responsibilities was to show the science fiction community that Omni was the real thing. I also worked to convince potential advertisers and overseas publishing houses that Omni was far more than âPenthouse in space.â The fact that our payment rates for fiction were ten times the rates of ordinary science fiction magazines helped to bring the writers to us. But I had to impress on them the fact that Omniâs audience included tons of people who never read science fiction. Our writers had to be able to write for a much more general audience, and eschew the jargon that dedicated science fiction people took for granted, but was unknown to the wider audience. Some of the best-known writers in the science fiction field were not able (or perhaps willing) to do this. Most of them were personal friends. But they couldnât write for Omni, alas.
Universe: What do you think is OMNI‘s greatest legacy?
Bova: I think Omniâs greatest legacy is that there is a tremendous audience for fiction and nonfiction about scienceâif it is presented in an attractive, understandable way.
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wrong_mix_random_publicationDate_00046
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FactBench
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3
| 4
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Wave_(science_fiction)
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en
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New Wave (science fiction)
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https://en.wikipedia.org/static/favicon/wikipedia.ico
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https://en.wikipedia.org/static/favicon/wikipedia.ico
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2001-08-05T18:53:35+00:00
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Wave_(science_fiction)
|
Movement in science fiction
The New Wave was a science fiction style of the 1960s and 1970s, characterized by a great degree of experimentation with the form and content of stories, greater imitation of the styles of non-science fiction literature, and an emphasis on the psychological and social sciences as opposed to the physical sciences. New Wave authors often considered themselves as part of the modernist tradition of fiction, and the New Wave was conceived as a deliberate change from the traditions of the science fiction characteristic of pulp magazines, which many of the writers involved considered irrelevant or unambitious.
The most prominent source of New Wave science fiction was the British magazine New Worlds, edited by Michael Moorcock, who became editor during 1964. In the United States, Harlan Ellison's 1967 anthology Dangerous Visions is often considered as the best early representation of the genre. Ursula K. Le Guin, J. G. Ballard, Samuel R. Delany, Roger Zelazny, Joanna Russ, James Tiptree Jr. (a pseudonym of Alice Bradley Sheldon), Thomas M. Disch and Brian Aldiss were also major writers associated with the style.
The New Wave was influenced by postmodernism, Surrealism, the politics of the 1960s, such as the controversy concerning the Vietnam War, and by social trends such as the drug subculture, sexual liberation, and environmentalism. Although the New Wave was critiqued for the self-absorption of some of its writers, it was influential in the development of subsequent genres, primarily cyberpunk and slipstream. [citation needed]
Origins and use of the term
[edit]
Origins
[edit]
The phrase "New Wave" was used generally for new artistic fashions during the 1960s, imitating the term nouvelle vague used for certain French cinematic styles.[1] P. Schuyler Miller, the regular book reviewer of Analog Science Fiction and Fact, first used it in the November 1961 issue to describe a new generation of British authors: "It's a moot question whether Carnell discovered the ‘big names’ of British science fiction—Wyndham, Clarke, Russell, Christopher—or whether they discovered him. Whatever the answer, there is no question at all about the ‘new wave’: Tubb, Aldiss, and to get to my point, Kenneth Bulmer and John Brunner".[2][1][3]
Subsequent usage
[edit]
The term 'New Wave' has been incorporated into the concept of New Wave Fabulism, a form of magic realism "which often blend a realist or postmodern aesthetic with nonrealistic interruptions, in which alternative technologies, ontologies, social structures, or biological forms make their way in to otherwise realistic plots".[4]:76 New Wave Fabulism itself has been related to the slipstream literary genre, an interface between mainstream or postmodern fiction and science fiction.[5]
The concept of a 'new wave' has been applied to science fiction in other countries, including for some Arabic science fiction, with Ahmed Khaled Tawfik's best-selling novel Utopia being considered a prominent example,[6] and Chinese science fiction, where it has been applied to some of the work of Wang Jinkang and Liu Cixin, including Liu's Remembrance of Earth's Past trilogy (2006-2010),[7] works that emphasize China's increase of power, the development myth, and posthumanity.[8]
Description
[edit]
The early proponents of New Wave considered it as a major change from with the genre's past, and it was so experienced by many readers during the late 1960s and early 1970s.[9] New Wave writers often considered themselves as part of the modernist and then postmodernist traditions and sometimes mocked the traditions of older science fiction, which many of them regarded as stodgy, adolescent and badly written.[10][11] Many also rejected the content of the Golden Age of Science Fiction, emphasizing not on outer space but human psychology, that is, subjectivity, dreams, and the unconscious.[11] Nonetheless, during the New Wave period, traditional types of science fiction continued to appear, and in Rob Latham's opinion, the broader genre had absorbed the New Wave's agenda and mostly neutralized it by the conclusion of the 1970s.[9]
Format
[edit]
The New Wave coincided with a major change in the production and distribution of science fiction, as the pulp magazine era was replaced by the book market;[9] it was in a sense also a reaction against typical pulp magazine styles.[12]
Topics
[edit]
The New Wave interacted with a number of themes during the 1960s and 1970s, including sexuality;[13] drug culture, especially the work of William S. Burroughs and the use of psychedelic drugs;[11] and the popularity of environmentalism.[14] J. G. Ballard's themes included alienation, social isolation, class discrimination, and the end of civilization, in settings ranging from a single apartment block (High Rise) to entire worlds.[15][16] Rob Latham noted that several of J. G. Ballard's works of the 1960s (e.g., the quartet begun by The Wind from Nowhere [1960]), engaged with the concept of eco-catastrophe, as did Disch's The Genocides and Ursula K. Le Guin's short novel The Word for World Is Forest. The latter, with its description of the use of napalm on indigenous people, was also influenced by Le Guin's perceptions of the Vietnam War, and both emphasized anti-technocratic fatalism instead of imperial hegemony via technology, with the New Wave later interacting with feminism, ecological activism and postcolonial rhetoric.[14][clarification needed] A major concern of the New Wave was a fascination with entropy, i.e., that the world (and the universe) must tend to disorder, eventually resulting in "heat death".[11] The New Wave also engaged with utopia, a common theme of science fiction, offering more nuanced interpretations.[11]:74-80
Style
[edit]
Transformation of style was part of the basis of the New Wave fashion.[17]:286 Combined with controversial topics, it introduced innovations of form, style, and aesthetics, involving more literary ambitions and experimental use of language, with significantly less emphasis on physical science or technological themes in its content.[18] For example, in the story "A Rose for Ecclesiastes" (1963), Roger Zelazny introduces numerous literary allusions, complex onomastic patterns, multiple meanings, and innovative themes, and other Zelazny works, such as "The Doors of His Face, the Lamps of His Mouth" (1965) and He Who Shapes (1966) involve literary self-reflexivity, playful collocations, and neologisms. In stories like "Repent, Harlequin!" Said the Ticktockman, Harlan Ellison is considered as using gonzo-style syntax. Many New Wave authors used obscenity and vulgarity intensely or frequently.[19] Concerning visual aspects, some scenes of J. G. Ballard's novels reference the surrealist paintings of Max Ernst and Salvador Dalí.[11]
Differences between American and British New Waves
[edit]
The British and American New Wave trends overlapped but were somewhat different. Judith Merril noted that New Wave SF was being called "the New Thing". In a 1967 article for The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction she contrasted the SF New Wave of England and the United States, writing:
They call it the New Thing. The people who call it that mostly don't like it, and the only general agreements they seem to have are that Ballard is its Demon and I am its prophetess—and that it is what is wrong with Tom Disch, and with British s-f in general... The American counterpart is less cohesive as a "school" or "movement": it has had no single publication in which to concentrate its development, and was, in fact, till recently, all but excluded from the regular s-f magazines. But for the same reasons, it is more diffuse and perhaps more widespread.[20]:105
The science fiction academic Edward James also discussed differences between the British and American SF New Wave. He believed that the former was, due to J. G. Ballard and Michael Moorcock, associated mainly with a specific magazine with a set programme that had little subsequent influence. James noted additionally that even the London-based American writers of the time, such as Samuel R. Delany, Thomas M. Disch, and John Sladek, had their own agendas. James asserted the American New Wave did not reach the status of a "movement" but was rather a concordance of talent that introduced new ideas and better standards to the authoring of science fiction, including through the first three seasons of Star Trek. In his opinion, "...the American New Wave ushered in a great expansion of the field and of its readership... it is clear that the rise in literary and imaginative standards associated with the late 1960s contributed a great deal to some of the most original writers of the 1970s, including John Crowley, Joe Haldeman, Ursula K. Le Guin, James Tiptree, Jr., and John Varley."[21]: 176
History
[edit]
Influences and predecessors
[edit]
Though the New Wave began during the 1960s, some of its tenets can be found in H. L. Gold's editorship of Galaxy, which began publication in 1950. James Gunn described Gold's emphasis as being "not on the adventurer, the inventor, the engineer, or the scientist, but on the average citizen,"[22] and according to SF historian David Kyle, Gold's work would result in the New Wave.[23]:119-120
The New Wave was partly a rejection of the Golden Age of Science Fiction. Algis Budrys in 1965 wrote of the "recurrent strain in 'Golden Age' science fiction of the 1940s—- the implication that sheer technological accomplishment would solve all the problems, hooray, and that all the problems were what they seemed to be on the surface".[24] The New Wave was not defined as a development from the science fiction which came before it, but initially reacted against it. New Wave writers did not operate as an organized group, but some of them felt the tropes of the pulp magazine and Golden Age periods had become over-used, and should be abandoned: J. G. Ballard stated in 1962 that "science fiction should turn its back on space, on interstellar travel, extra-terrestrial life forms, (and) galactic wars",[25] and Brian Aldiss said in Trillion Year Spree: The History of Science Fiction that "the props of SF are few: rocket ships, telepathy, robots, time travel...like coins, they become debased by over-circulation."[26] Harry Harrison summarised the period by saying "old barriers were coming down, pulp taboos were being forgotten, new themes and new manners of writing were being explored".[27]
New Wave writers began to use non-science fiction literary themes, such as the example of beat writer William S. Burroughs—New Wave authors Philip José Farmer and Barrington J. Bayley wrote pastiches of his work (The Jungle Rot Kid on the Nod and The Four Colour Problem, respectively), while J. G. Ballard published an admiring essay in an issue of New Worlds.[28] Burroughs' use of experimentation such as the cut-up technique and his use of science fiction tropes in new manners proved the extent to which prose fiction could seem revolutionary, and some New Wave writers sought to emulate this style.
Ursula K. Le Guin, one of the newer writers to be published during the 1960s, describes the transition to the New Wave era thus:
Without in the least dismissing or belittling earlier writers and work, I think it is fair to say that science fiction changed around 1960, and that the change tended toward an increase in the number of writers and readers, the breadth of subject, the depth of treatment, the sophistication of language and technique, and the political and literary consciousness of the writing. The sixties in science fiction were an exciting period for both established and new writers and readers. All the doors seemed to be opening.[29]: 18
Other writers and works seen as preluding or transitioning to the New Wave include Ray Bradbury's The Martian Chronicles, Walter M. Miller's 1959 A Canticle for Leibowitz, Cyril M. Kornbluth and Frederik Pohl's anti-hyper-consumerist The Space Merchants (1952), Kurt Vonnegut's mocking Player Piano (1952) and The Sirens of Titan (1959), Theodore Sturgeon's humanist More Than Human (1953) and the hermaphrodite society of Venus Plus X (1960), and Philip José Farmer's human-extraterrestrial sexual encounters in The Lovers (1952) and Strange Relations (1960).[11]
Beginnings
[edit]
There is not any consensus about a precise beginning for the New Wave—British author Adam Roberts refers to Alfred Bester as having single-handedly invented the genre,[16] and in the introduction to a collection of Leigh Brackett's short fiction, Michael Moorcock referred to her as one of the genre's "true godmothers".[30] Algis Budrys said that in New Wave writers "there are echoes... of Philip K. Dick, Walter Miller, Jr. and, by all odds, Fritz Leiber".[31] However, it is accepted by many critics that the New Wave began in England with the magazine New Worlds and Michael Moorcock. who was appointed editor in 1964 (first issue number 142, May and June[12][32]: 251 );[note 1] Moorcock was editor until 1973.[11] While the American magazines Amazing Stories and The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction had from the start printed unusually literary stories, Moorcock made that into a more definite policy, and he sought to use the magazine to "define a new avant-garde role" for science fiction[33] by the use of "new literary techniques and modes of expression".[34]:251-252 No other science fiction magazine was made to differ as consistently from traditional science fiction as much as New Worlds. By the time it ceased regular publication it had rejected identification with the genre of science fiction itself, styling itself as an experimental literary journal. In the United States, the best known representation of the genre is probably the 1967 anthology Dangerous Visions, edited by Harlan Ellison.[35][36][11]
During Moorcock's editorship of New Worlds, "galactic wars went out; drugs came in; there were fewer encounters with aliens, more in the bedroom. Experimentation in prose styles became one of the orders of the day, and the baleful influence of William Burroughs often threatened to gain the upper hand."[37]: 27 Judith Merril observed, "...this magazine [''New Worlds''] was the publishing thermometer of the trend that was dubbed "the New Wave". In the United States the trend created an intense, incredible controversy. In Britain people either found it of interest or they didn't, but in the States it was heresy on the one hand and wonderful revolution on the other."[38]: 162–163
Brooks Landon, professor of English at the University of Iowa, says of Dangerous Visions that it
was innovative and influential before it had any readers simply because it was the first big original anthology of SF, offering prices to its writers that were competitive with the magazines. The readers soon followed, however, attracted by 33 stories by SF writers both well-established and relatively unheard of. These writers responded to editor Harlan Ellison's call for stories that could not be published elsewhere or had never been written in the face of almost certain censorship by SF editors... [T]o SF readers, especially in the United States, Dangerous Visions certainly felt like a revolution... Dangerous Visions marks an emblematic turning point for American SF.[39]: 157
As an anthologist and speaker Merril with other authors advocated a reestablishment of science fiction within the literary mainstream and better literary standards. Her "incredible controversy" is characterized by David Hartwell in the opening sentence of a book chapter entitled "New Wave: The Great War of the 1960s": "Conflict and argument are an enduring presence in the SF world, but literary politics has yielded to open warfare on the largest scale only once."[40]: 141 The changes were more than the experimental and explicitly provocative as inspired by Burroughs; in coherence with the literary nouvelle vague, although not in close association to it, and addressing a less restricted pool of readers, the New Wave was reversing the standard hero's attitude toward action and science. It illustrated egotism—often by depriving the plot of motivation toward a rational explanation.[41]:87
In 1962 Ballard wrote:
I've often wondered why s-f shows so little of the experimental enthusiasm which has characterized painting, music and the cinema during the last four or five decades, particularly as these have become wholeheartedly speculative, more and more concerned with the creation of new states of mind, constructing fresh symbols and languages where the old cease to be valid... The biggest developments of the immediate future will take place, not on the Moon or Mars, but on Earth, and it is inner space, not outer, that need to be explored. The only truly alien planet is Earth. In the past the scientific bias of s-f has been towards the physical sciences—rocketry, electronics, cybernetics—and the emphasis should switch to the biological sciences. Accuracy, that last refuge of the unimaginative, doesn't matter a hoot... It is that inner space-suit which is still needed, and it is up to science fiction to build it![42]: 197
In 1963 Moorcock wrote,
"Let's have a quick look at what a lot of science fiction lacks. Briefly, these are some of the qualities I miss on the whole—passion, subtlety, irony, original characterization, original and good style, a sense of involvement in human affairs, colour, density, depth, and, on the whole, real feeling from the writer..."[10]
Roger Luckhurst pointed out that J. G. Ballard's 1962 essay, Which Way to Inner Space?[42] "showed the influence of media theorist Marshall McLuhan and the 'anti-psychiatry' of R. D. Laing."[43]: 148 Luckhurst traces the influence of both these thinkers in Ballard's fiction, in particular The Atrocity Exhibition (1970).[43]: 152
After Ellison's Dangerous Visions, Judith Merril contributed to this fiction in the United States by editing the anthology England Swings SF: Stories of Speculative Fiction (Doubleday 1968).
The New Wave also had political associations:
Most of the 'classic' writers had begun writing before the Second World War, and were reaching middle age by the early 1960s; the writers of the so-called New Wave were mostly born during or after the war, and were not only reacting against the sf writers of the past, but playing their part in the general youth revolution of the 1960s which had such profound effects upon Western culture. It is no accident that the New Wave began in Britain at the time of the Beatles, and took off in the United States at the time of the hippies—both, therefore at a time of cultural innovation and generational shake-up...[21]: 167
Eric S. Raymond observed:
The New Wave's inventors (notably Michael Moorcock, J. G. Ballard and Brian Aldiss) were British socialists and Marxists who rejected individualism, linear exposition, happy endings, scientific rigor and the U.S.'s cultural hegemony over the SF field in one fell swoop. The New Wave's later American exponents were strongly associated with the New Left and opposition to the Vietnam War, leading to some rancorous public disputes in which politics was tangled together with definitional questions about the nature of SF and the direction of the field.[44]
For example, Judith Merril, "one of the most visible—and voluble—apostles of the New Wave in 1960s sf"[45]:251 remembers her return from England to the United States: "So I went home ardently looking for a revolution. I kept searching until the Chicago Democratic Convention in 1968. I went to Chicago partly to seek out a revolution, if there was one happening, and partly because my seventeen-year-old daughter... wanted to go."[38]: 167 Merril said later, "At the end of the Convention week, the taste of America was sour in all our mouths";[38]: 169 she soon became a political refugee living in Canada.[40]: 142
Roger Luckhurst disagreed with critics who perceived the New Wave mainly in terms of difference (he gives the example of Thomas Clareson), suggesting that such a model "doesn't quite seem to map onto the American scene, even though the wider conflicts of the 1960s liberalization in universities, the civil rights movement and the cultural contradictions inherent in consumer society were starker and certainly more violent than in Britain."[43]: 160 [46] In particular, he noted:
The young turks within SF also had an ossified 'ancient regime' to topple: John Campbell's intolerant right-wing editorials for Astounding Science Fiction (which he renamed Analog in 1960) teetered on the self parody. In 1970, when the campus revolt against American involvement in Vietnam reached its height and resulted in the National Guard shooting four students dead in Kent State University, Campbell editorialized that the 'punishment was due', and rioters should expect to be met with lethal force. Vietnam famously divided the SF community to the extent that, in 1968, 'Galaxy' magazine carried two adverts, one signed by writers in favour and one by those against the war.[43]: 160 [46] Caution is needed when assessing any literary movement, particularly regarding transitions. Science fiction writer Bruce Sterling, reacting to his association with another SF movement in the 1980s, remarked, "When did the New Wave SF end? Who was the last New Wave SF writer? You can't be a New Wave SF writer today. You can recite the numbers of them: Ballard, Ellison, Spinrad, Delaney, blah, blah, blah. What about a transitional figure like Zelazny? A literary movement isn't an army. You don't wear a uniform and swear allegiance. It's just a group of people trying to develop a sensibility."[47]
Similarly, Rob Latham observed:
...indeed, one of the central ways the New Wave was experienced, in the US and Britain, was as a "liberated" outburst of erotic expression, often counterpoised, by advocates of the "New Thing" (as Merril called it), with the priggish Puritanism of the Golden Age. Yet this stark contrast, while not unreasonable, tends ultimately, as do most of the historical distinctions drawn between the New Wave and its predecessors, to overemphasize rupture at the expense of continuity, effectively "disappearing" some of the pioneering trends in 1950s sf that paved the way for the New Wave's innovations.[45]: 252
However, Darren Harris-Fain of Shawnee State University emphasized New Wave in terms of difference:
The split between the New Wave and everyone else in American SF during the late 1960s was nearly as dramatic as the division at the same time between young protesters and what they called "the establishment," and in fact, the political views of the younger writers, often prominent in their work, reflect many contemporary concerns. New Wave accused what became de facto the old wave of being old-fashioned, patriarchal, imperialistic, and obsessed with technology; many of the more established writers thought the New Wave shallow, said that its literary innovations were not innovations at all (which in fact, outside of SF, they were not), and accused it of betraying SF's grand view of humanity's role in the universe. Both assertions were largely exaggerations, of course, and in the next decade both trends would merge into a synthesis of styles and concerns. However, in 1970 the issue was far from settled and would remain a source of contention for the next few years.[48]: 13–14
Decline
[edit]
In the August 1970 issue of the SFWA Forum, a publication for Science Fiction Writers of America members, Harlan Ellison stated that the New Wave furore, which had flourished during the late 1960s, appeared to have been "blissfully laid to rest". He also claimed that there was no real conflict between writers:
It was all a manufactured controversy, staged by fans to hype their own participation in the genre. Their total misunderstanding of what was happening (not unusual for fans, as history... shows us) managed to stir up a great deal of pointless animosity and if it had any real effect I suspect it was in the unfortunate area of causing certain writers to feel they were unable to keep up and consequently they slowed their writing output.[49]
Latham however remarks that Ellison's analysis "obscures Ellison's own prominent role—and that of other professional authors and editors such as Judith Merril, Michael Moorcock, Lester Del Rey, Frederik Pohl, and Donald A. Wollheim—in fomenting the conflict..."[50]: 296
For Roger Luckhurst, the closing of New Worlds magazine in 1970 (one of many years it closed) "marked the containment of New Wave experiment with the rest of the counter-culture. The various limping manifestations of New World across the 1970s... demonstrated the posthumous nature of its avant-gardism."[43]: 168
By the early 1970s, a number of writers and readers were commenting about the differences between the winners of the Nebula Awards, which had been created in 1965 by the SFWA and were awarded by professional writers, and winners of the Hugo Awards, awarded by fans at the annual World Science Fiction Convention, with some arguing that this indicated that many authors were alienated from the sentiments of their readers: "While some writers and fans continued to argue about the New Wave until the end of the 1970s—in The World of Science Fiction, 1926–1976: The History of a Subculture, for instance, Lester Del Ray devotes several pages to castigating the movement—for the most part the controversy died down as the decade wore on."[48]: 20
Impact
[edit]
In a 1979 essay, Professor Patrick Parrinder, commenting on the nature of science fiction, noted that "any meaningful act of defamiliarization can only be relative, since it is not possible for man to imagine what is utterly alien to him; the utterly alien would also be meaningless."[51]: 48 He also states, "Within SF, however, it is not necessary to break with the wider conventions of prose narrative in order to produce work that is validly experimental. The 'New Wave' writing of the 1960s, with its fragmented and surrealistic forms, has not made a lasting impact, because it cast its net too wide. To reform SF one must challenge the conventions of the genre on their own terms."[51]: 55–56
Others ascribe a more important, though still limited, effect. Veteran science fiction writer Jack Williamson (1908–2006) when asked in 1991: "Did the [New] Wave's emphasis on experimentalism and its conscious efforts to make SF more 'literary' have any kind of permanent effects on the field?" replied:
After it subsided—it's old hat now—it probably left us with a sharpened awareness of language and a keener interest in literary experiment. It did wash up occasional bits of beauty and power. For example, it helped launch the careers of such writers as [Samuel R.] Chip Delany, Brian Aldiss, and Harlan Ellison, all of whom seem to have gone on their own highly individualistic directions. But the key point here is that New Wave SF failed to move people. I'm not sure if this failure was due to its pessimistic themes or to people feeling the stuff was too pretentious. But it never really grabbed hold of people's imaginations.[52]
Hartwell observed that "there is something efficacious in sf's marginality and always tenuous self-identity—its ambiguous generic distinction from other literary categories—and, perhaps more importantly, in its distinction from what has variously been called realist, mainstream, or mundane fiction."[53]: 289 Hartwell maintained that after the New Wave, science fiction had still managed to retain this "marginality and tenuous self-identity":
The British and American New Wave in common would have denied the genre status of SF entirely and ended the continual development of new specialized words and phrases common to the body of SF, without which SF would be indistinguishable from mundane fiction in its entirety (rather than only out on the borders of experimental SF, which is properly indistinguishable from any other experimental literature). The denial of special or genre status is ultimately the cause of the failure of the New Wave to achieve popularity, which, if it had become truly dominant, would have destroyed SF as a separate field.[54]: 153
Scientific and technological themes were more important than literary trends to Campbell, and some major Astounding contributors Isaac Asimov, Robert A. Heinlein, and L. Sprague de Camp had scientific or engineering educations.[55] Asimov said in 1967 "I hope that when the New Wave has deposited its froth and receded, the vast and solid shore of science fiction will appear once more".[56][57]: 388 Yet, Asimov himself was to illustrate just how that "SF shore" did indeed re-emerge—- but changed. A biographer noted that during the 1960s:
...stories and novels that Asimov must not have liked and must have felt were not part of the science fiction he had helped to shape were winning acclaim and awards. He also must have felt that science fiction no longer needed him. His science fiction writing... became even more desultory and casual.
Asimov's return to serious writing in 1972 with The Gods Themselves (when much of the debate about the New Wave had dissipated) was an act of courage...[58]: 105
Darren Harris-Fain observed on this resumption of writing SF by Asimov that
...the novel [The Gods Themselves] is noteworthy for how it both shows that Asimov was indeed the same writer in the 1970s that he had been in the 1950s and that he nonetheless had been affected by the New Wave even if he was never part of it. His depiction of an alien ménage a trois, complete with homoerotic scenes between the two males, marks an interesting departure from his earlier fiction, in which sex of any sort is conspicuously absent. Also there is some minor experimentation with structure.[48]: 43
Other themes dealt with in the novel are concerns for the environment and "human stupidity and the delusional belief in human superiority", both frequent topics in New Wave SF.[48]: 44
Still other commentators ascribe a much greater effect to the New Wave. Commenting in 2002 on the publication of the 35th Anniversary edition of Ellison's Dangerous Visions anthology, the critic Greg L. Johnson remarked that
...if the New Wave did not entirely revolutionize the way SF was written, (the exploration of an invented world through the use of an adventure plot remains the prototypical SF story outline), they did succeed in pushing the boundaries of what could be considered SF, and their use of stylistic innovations from outside SF helped raise standards. It became less easy for writers to get away with stock characters spouting wooden dialogue laced with technical jargon. Such stories still exist, and are still published, but are no longer typical of the field.[35]
Asimov agreed that "on the whole, the New Wave was a good thing".[59]: 137 He described several "interesting side effects" of the New Wave. Non-American SF became more prominent and the genre became an international phenomenon. Other changes noted were that "the New Wave encouraged more and more women to begin reading and writing science fiction... The broadening of science fiction meant that it was approaching the 'mainstream'... in style and content. It also meant that increasing numbers of mainstream novelists were recognizing the importance of changing technology and the popularity of science fiction, and were incorporating science fiction motifs into their own novels."[59]: 138–139
Critic Rob Latham identifies three trends that associated New Wave with the emergence of cyberpunk during the 1980s. He said that changes of technology as well as an economic recession constricted the market for science fiction, generating a "widespread" malaise among fans, while established writers were forced to reduce their output (or, like Isaac Asimov, shifted their emphasis to other subjects); finally, editors encouraged new methods that earlier ones tended to discourage.[60]
Criticisms
[edit]
Moorcock, Ballard, and others engendered some animosity to their writings. When reviewing 2001: A Space Odyssey, Lester del Rey described it as "the first of the New Wave-Thing movies, with the usual empty symbolism".[61] When reviewing World's Best Science Fiction: 1966, Algis Budrys mocked Ellison's " 'Repent, Harlequin!' Said the Ticktockman" and two other stories as "rudimentary social consciousness... deep stuff" and insufficient for "an outstanding science-fiction story".[62] Hartwell noted Budrys's "ringing scorn and righteous indignation" that year in "one of the classic diatribes against Ballard and the new mode of SF then emergent":[40]: 146
A story by J. G. Ballard, as you know, calls for people who don't think. One begins with characters who regard the physical universe as a mysterious and arbitrary place, and who would not dream of trying to understand its actual laws. Furthermore, in order to be the protagonist of a J. G. Ballard novel, or anything more than a very minor character therein, you must have cut yourself off from the entire body of scientific education. In this way, when the world disaster—be it wind or water—comes upon you, you are under absolutely no obligation to do anything about it but sit and worship it. Even more further, some force has acted to remove from the face of the world all people who might impose good sense or rational behavior on you...[63]
Budrys in Galaxy, when reviewing a collection of recent stories from the magazine, said in 1965 that "There is this sense in this book... that modern science fiction reflects a dissatisfaction with things as they are, sometimes to the verge of indignation, but also retains optimism about the eventual outcome".[24] Despite his criticism of Ballard and Aldiss ("the least talented" of the four), Budrys called them, Roger Zelazny, and Samuel R. Delany "an earthshaking new kind" of writers.[31] Asimov said in 1967 of the New Wave, "I want science fiction. I think science fiction isn't really science fiction if it lacks science. And I think the better and truer the science, the better and truer the science fiction",[56] but Budrys that year warned that the four would soon leave those "still reading everything from the viewpoint of the 1944 Astounding... nothing but a complete collection of yellowed, crumble-edged bewilderment".[31]
While acknowledging the New Wave's "energy, high talent and dedication", and stating that it "may in fact be the shape of tomorrow's science fiction generally — hell, it may be the shape of today's science fiction", as examples of the fashion Budrys much preferred Zelazny's This Immortal to Thomas Disch's The Genocides. Predicting that Zelazny's career would be more important and lasting than Disch's, he described the latter's book as "unflaggingly derivative of" the New Wave and filled with "dumb, resigned victims" who "run, hide, slither, grope and die", like Ballard's The Drowned World but unlike The Moon is a Harsh Mistress ("about people who do something about their troubles").[63] Writing in The Dreams Our Stuff Is Made Of, Disch observed that "Literary movements tend to be compounded, in various proportions, of the genius of two or three genuinely original talents, some few other capable or established writers who have been co-opted or gone along for the ride, the apprentice work of epigones and wannabes, and a great deal of hype. My sense of the New Wave, with twenty-five years of hindsight, is that its irreducible nucleus was the dyad of J. G. Ballard and Michael Moorcock..."[64]: 105
Authors and works
[edit]
The New Wave was not a formal organization with a fixed membership. Thomas M. Disch, for instance, rejected his association with some other New Wave authors.[65]:425 Nonetheless, it is possible to associate specific authors and works, especially anthologies, with the fashion. Michael Moorcock, J. G. Ballard, and Brian Aldiss are considered principal writers of the New Wave.[11] Judith Merril's annual anthologies (1957–1968[66]) "were the first heralds of the coming of the [New Wave] cult,"[20]:105 and Damon Knight's Orbit series and Harlan Ellison's Dangerous Visions featured American writers inspired by British writers as well as British authors.[39] Among the stories Ellison printed in Dangerous Visions were Philip José Farmer's Riders of the Purple Wage, Norman Spinrad's "Carcinoma Angels", Samuel R. Delany's "Aye, and Gomorrah" and stories by Brian Aldiss, J. G. Ballard, John Brunner, David R. Bunch, Philip K. Dick, Sonya Dorman, Carol Emshwiller, John Sladek, Theodore Sturgeon, and Roger Zelazny.[39]
Alfred Bester was championed by New Wave writers and is seen as a major influence.[16][67] Thomas M. Disch's work is associated with the New Wave, and The Genocides has been seen as emblematic of the genre, as has the 1971 Disch anthology of eco-catastrophe stories The Ruins of Earth.[14] Critic John Clute wrote of M. John Harrison's early writing that it "...reveals its New-Wave provenance in narrative discontinuities and subheads after the fashion of J. G. Ballard".[68]
Brian Aldiss's Barefoot in the Head (1969) and Norman Spinrad's No Direction Home (1971) are seen as illustrative of the effect of the drug culture, especially psychedelics, on New Wave.[11] On the topic of entropy, Ballard provided "an explicitly cosmological vision of entropic decline of the universe" in "The Voices of Time", which provided a typology of ideas that subsequent New Wave writers developed in different contexts, with one of the best instances being Pamela Zoline's "The Heat Death of the Universe".[42]: 158 Like other writers for New Worlds, Zoline used "science-fictional and scientific language and imagery to describe perfectly 'ordinary' scenes of life", and by doing so produced "altered perceptions of reality in the reader".[21] New Wave works engaging with utopia, gender, and sexuality include Ursula K. Le Guin's The Left Hand of Darkness (1969), Joanna Russ's The Female Man (1975), and Marge Piercy's Woman on the Edge of Time (1976).[11]:82-85 In Robert Silverberg's story The Man in the Maze, in a reversal typical of the New Wave, Silverberg portrays a disabled man using an alien labyrinthine city to reject abled society.[69] Samuel R. Delany's Babel-17 (1966) provides an example of a New Wave work engaging with Sapir-Whorfian linguistic relativity, as does Ian Watson's The Embedding (1973).[11]:86-87
Two examples of New Wave writers using utopia as a theme are Ursula K. Le Guin's The Dispossessed: An Ambiguous Utopia (1974) and Samuel R. Delany's Trouble on Triton: An Ambiguous Heterotopia (1976),[11]:74-80 while John Brunner is a primary exponent of dystopian New Wave science fiction.[70]
Examples of modernism in New Wave include Philip José Farmer's Joycean Riders of the Purple Wage (1967), John Brunner's Stand on Zanzibar (1968), which is written in the style of John Don Passos's U.S.A. trilogy (1930–1936), and Thomas Disch's Camp Concentration, which includes a stream of literary references, including to Thomas Mann.[11]:61-62 The influence of postmodernism in New Wave can be seen in Brian Aldiss's Report on Probability A, Philip K. Dick's Ubik, J. G. Ballard's collection The Atrocity Exhibition, and Samuel R. Delany's Dhalgren and Triton.[11]:66-67
The majority of stories in Ben Bova's The Best of the Nebulas, such as Roger Zelazny's "A Rose for Ecclesiastes", are considered as being by New Wave writers or as involving New Wave techniques.[19] The Martian Time-Slip (1964) and other works by Philip K. Dick are viewed as New Wave.[11]
Brian Aldiss, Harlan Ellison, Robert Silverberg, Norman Spinrad, and Roger Zelazny are writers whose work, though not necessarily considered New Wave at the time of publication, later became associated with the term.[71][page needed] Of later authors, some of the work of Joanna Russ is considered to bear stylistic resemblance to New Wave.[72][73]
See also
[edit]
Avant-Pop
Cyberpunk
Feminist science fiction
The Golden Age of Science Fiction
Interstitial Fiction
Mundane science fiction
Pulp fiction
Slipstream
Transrealism
Explanatory notes
[edit]
References
[edit]
Clute, John; Nicholls, Peter (1999). The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction (2nd ed.). Orbit. ISBN 1-85723-897-4.
Further reading
[edit]
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William S. Burroughs’ “The Revised Boy Scout Manual”
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William S. Burroughs' “The Revised Boy Scout Manual“: An Electronic Revolution
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Listen to V. Vale talk about Burroughs and the book on the Live! From City Lights podcast.
“Burroughs’s jarringly piecemeal satire on how to prepare for a revolution against powerful, oppressive institutions is strikingly timely.” —Publishers Weekly
“A carefully annotated, definitive edition of a long-lost William S. Burroughs work, The Revised Boy Scout Manual is a scathingly humorous, often uncannily prescient guide to revolution.”—Foreword
“It’s all there all the time with Burroughs.”—Marc Maron
“He’s up there with the pope . . . you can’t revere him enough . . . he’s the greatest mind of our times.”— Patti Smith
“The most important writer to emerge since the Second World War.”—J.G. Ballard
“Well, he’s a writer.”—Samuel Beckett
“The Revised Boy Scout Manual offers easy-to-read proof that the uncensored human imagination allowed to freely extrapolate about future social change can offer outrageous scenarios and fresh language capable of inspiring readers decades into the future.”—V. Vale, founder and publisher of RE/Search
“Here we have Bill Burroughs’ voice coming through loud and clear, like a conversation after his first large whiskey, London c1972. His preoccupations at the time: weaponry, viruses, tape recorder cut-ups, Scientology techniques, the Mayan calendar and Korzybski’s General Semantics are utilized as means to deal with ‘the shits.’ Never has a text been more apposite. As usual his ideas are developed into hilarious routines but at heart he is deadly serious: ‘I mean every word I say.’ It is wonderful to see this legendary text in print at last.”—Barry Miles, author of Call Me Burroughs; The Beat Hotel, Ginsberg Burroughs and Corso in Paris 1957-1963; William Burroughs, El Hombre Invisible
Before the era of fake news and anti-fascists, William S. Burroughs wrote about preparing for revolution and confronting institutionalized power. In this work, Burroughs’ parody becomes a set of rationales and instructions for destabilizing the state and overthrowing an oppressive and corrupt government. As with much of Burroughs’ work, it is hard to say if it is serious or purely satire. The work is funny, horrifying, and eerily prescient, especially concerning the use of language and social media to undermine institutions.
The Revised Boy Scout Manual was a work Burroughs revisited many times, but which has never before been published in its complete form. Based primarily on recordings of a performance of the complete piece found in the archives at the OSU libraries, as well as various incomplete versions of the typescript found at Arizona State University and the New York Public Library archives, this lost masterpiece of satiric subversion is finally available in its entirety.
Afterword by V. Vale
It was a huge relief—like releasing a sigh that began in 1981—to receive the news that the complete William S. Burroughs “The Revised Boy Scout Manual”: An Electronic Revolution is being published by an academic press, fully annotated to the nth degree as only professionals can do. The reason for my intense interest is that my tiny publishing company, RE/Search, had planned to publish the full version from 1981 to 1982. Due to a personal relationship blowup and more, the project died on the vine. But not before we had enlisted the highly talented (and now deceased) Osborn brothers (Jim and Dan) to illustrate the book with handmade drawings. A few illustrations were made (I am still searching for them, hoping they can be found), but I went on to other projects. I managed to publish only the first part of The Revised Boy Scout Manual in my RE/Search issue #4/5. Now, having just reread the manuscript, I fervently wish RE/Search could have published it in its entirety in 1982—in all its mind-bendingly prophetic, visionary, inspiring, imaginative, and, above all, incendiary glory. Whew! I would think twice about being seen reading this book on an airplane, much less trying to sneak it aboard in a carry-on suitcase.
I have a theory that friends are BORN, not “made.” And the quick shortcut to establishing a friendship with William S. Burroughs (who was decades older than I) was, as Goethe put it, shared affinities. In our case, these included hatred of authority/authoritarianism, love of solitude, and a passion for scientific knowledge of the deepest human proclivities. Therefore, we each embodied a fierce desire for independence, paranoia of one’s fellow man, and, as a result, a primary passion for knowledge about self-defense and preemptive survivalist behavior—that is, see everybody before they see you! We had a mutual cosmic contempt for the status quo, antiquated language, “beliefs,” economic “systems,” and visual “culture” that now hold an entire planet hostage.
In our passion to learn everything possible about self-defense, we shared a love of guns and a desire to keep abreast of the state-of-the-art refinements continually being innovated by the highly competitive firearms manufacturers. Our quests for information on this subject were granular. One of the big thrills of my life was meeting Uziel Gal, inventor of the “Uzi” submachine gun, at a Bay Area Gun Show. And it was a big thrill when I was able to take a photo of William at the San Francisco Gun Exchange holding a semiautomatic (not full-auto) version of the fabled Uzi machine pistol. Both of us harbored doubts about the efficacy of the 95-grain 9mm round versus the 230-grain .45 cartridge—which was purportedly invented to “neutralize” the drug-crazed “Amoks” allegedly populating the eastern half of planet Earth. But we both agreed that the Government Model .45 automatic, carried by hundreds of thousands of U.S. soldiers during World War II and the Korean War, was almost impossible to shoot with any accuracy (although an exceptional marksman such as Mark Pauline was able to place most rounds within the bull’s-eye at five yards—even usually at fifteen yards.) Then again, we knew that about 99 percent of all self-defense pistol deployment takes place under five yards, with most under a scary eight feet! And we were aware that in one second, an experienced San Quentin ex-con can cover those eight feet and take your self-defense pistol away from you—all the academic training you’ve obsessively endured out the window, just as all the arduous gym workouts building up cosmetically admirable musculature can instantly be nullified by an experienced street fighter who’s spent half his life in and out of prison! We both knew that you never fire a pistol at an attacker once; no, you immediately fire two shots in the “center mass” (chest area) and a third to the head, then back up and prepare to shoot again repeatedly. Some criminals are superhuman in their strength, fortitude, and speed.
These were exact topics we discussed, and much more. Early on, William presented me with the gift of a Cobra, which is a steel handle that, with the flick of a wrist, telescopes into a sharp-tipped metal “rod” capable of breaking flesh and then some. In 1984 I took it with me on a trip to Spain, and the Spanish customs officer frowned heavily but in the end allowed me to take it in my checked luggage. William himself had flown with it; as he put it, “You need three lines of defense. I have a knife, the Cobra, and my cane.” When I visited William in Lawrence, Kansas, in 1988, he showed me an illustrated hardback book titled Cane Fighting. He also gave me knife-throwing lessons against the shack where he stored some of his shotgun paintings. There I found a discarded spray-paint canister bearing multiple colors and asked if I could have it—and would he autograph it? To this day, this is one of my most cherished possessions; I store it in a drawer away from light and moisture.
It’s well known that William S. Burroughs is the éminence grise of countercultural thinking, conceptualizing, exploring, and social experimentation, as well as an early adopter of experiencing. Ayahuasca vision-questing is enjoying a revival now, but he investigated it in the fifties and had his reports published in a 1963 City Lights chapbook titled The Yage Letters. Burroughs invented the term Heavy Metal, which is an enduring subgenre of rock ’n’ roll. He coined the term Soft Machine, which was adopted by an avant rock band whose important members recently passed away. Surely William S. Burroughs was the first person to write the phrase “fake news,” which now rules the professional media worldwide—in this very book, The Revised Boy Scout Manual. In 1970 he had visualized and described a whole variety of memes that could change the world’s hierarchical power structures, using lowly and democratically available audio and video recorders. Currently there are almost a billion smartphones capable of making and sending meme videos and audio recordings all over the world, instantaneously.
The Revised Boy Scout Manual offers easy-to-read proof that the uncensored human imagination, when allowed to freely extrapolate about future social change, can offer outrageous scenarios and fresh language capable of inspiring readers decades into the future. Who can ever forget the crowd chanting “Bugger the Queen!” The darkest possible humor, not shying away from racial and sexual taboos, can be found within the pages of RBSM. Contradiction, the true foundation of our existence, is also evident: early on, William gives scenarios for ridding the earth of the 10 percent who are “shits” ruining our world. . . . Later on he reckons that those who actually kill these 10 percent might well end up turning into “new” versions of them. As William discovered, much to his sorrow, if you kill somebody, your life will be irrevocably changed, and your dream life will be forever haunted and transformed into the stuff of nightmares. One of the best columns of the Police Marksman (a slick color magazine) dealt with stories of officers who have killed criminals and then began suffering excruciating nightmares and PTSD-type traumas that begin ruining their lives and marriages and rendering them incapable of employment.
When I met William in 1981, I got the feeling that there was nobody in his life who shared his love and knowledge of firearms. So right away, I organized a trip to Chabot Gun Club in Castro Valley with a few close friends who, like me, shared what at the time was a most secret passion. The local television station KQED sent a camera team to record our little “adventure.” In a short time William got to try a whole range of firearms he had read about but had never actually been able to handle and shoot. He loudly disdained the use of earplugs, and I foolishly imitated him; it took about a year for the ringing in my ears to fade away. Later on I noticed that he used large hearing-protection headsets. I brought along my recently purchased guns: a Bernardelli .25 small automatic, and the then-heavily-promoted Heckler and Koch P7. When William shot with each of them, they both jammed. I remember his yelling after one of the jams, “Get rid of it! Get rid of it! If a gun doesn’t fire, it’s worthless—it’s just a club!”. So right after the shoot, my friend M , who owned a car, took both guns to a gun store down the peninsula and sold them for cash. Nothing like learning from experience!
Having tracked down and read (or tried to read) almost every book that William ever recommended, I can probably with some validity describe him as a “mentor” of mine. The first time I recall seeing him give a bona fide smile was early on when I took him for breakfast to Mama’s Restaurant in North Beach on the edge of Washington Square Park. At the end of the meal when we were ready to leave, I picked up the check and refused to take his money. He was genuinely surprised, and I got a real smile, not a feigned one. That smile is one of my favorite memories of the man whom I’m convinced will still be read a hundred years from now (if the world lasts that long). Real writers offer you a host of ideas—especially ideas having to do with future freedoms—and if your ideas are futuristic-black-humor-and-speculative-libratory, then . . .
I argue that William S. Burroughs was the preeminent prophet of the 20th century, and his entire opus offers testimony as to the bewildering, dazzling scope of his radical thinking and imagination, with some of the funniest dialogue that has ever been written. If you are a prophet, expect your books to be read long after your physical body is dead. Because, arguably, your words are YOU, and if your language lives on, in a way you live on. What could be better?
—V. Vale, RE/Search sole proprietor/founder, San Francisco, November 29, 2017
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RE/Search’s Vale and JG Ballard on William Burroughs
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This is a guest post from Graham Rae.
In 2007, I interviewed Val Vale, of RE/Search Publications, and the late futurologist novelist JG Ballard, about a writer whom they were both very favorably predisposed to, William S. Burroughs. I talked to the amiable Val by phone, and sent JGB a few questions by mail, sending him a copy of an expensive science book I had received for review, An Evolutionary Psychology of Sleep and Dreams, to sweeten the pot. The answers are below.
These interviews originally appeared on the now-defunct website of the fine Scottish writer Laura Hird, and...
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DangerousMinds
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https://dangerousminds.net/comments/re_searchs_vale_and_jg_ballard_on_william_burroughs1
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This is a guest post from Graham Rae.
In 2007, I interviewed Val Vale, of RE/Search Publications, and the late futurologist novelist JG Ballard, about a writer whom they were both very favorably predisposed to, William S. Burroughs. I talked to the amiable Val by phone, and sent JGB a few questions by mail, sending him a copy of an expensive science book I had received for review, An Evolutionary Psychology of Sleep and Dreams, to sweeten the pot. The answers are below.
These interviews originally appeared on the now-defunct website of the fine Scottish writer Laura Hird, and do not appear anywhere else online; have not done for years. Thus the references are somewhat dated, but at lot of the material, sadly, remains very much in vogue. I had only been in America for two years in 2007, and my views here seem somewhat naïve to me now, but, well, them’s the learning-immigrant breaks. So without further ado…
Foreword: Noted San Francisco underground publisher V Vale has been publishing since 1977, when, with $200 he was given by Beat poet Allen Ginsberg and poet/ City Lights bookstore owner Lawrence Ferlinghetti ($100 from each), he put out 11 issues of the Search And Destroy punk zine. In 1980 he started RE/Search, an imprint which still puts out infrequent volumes on subjects like schlock therapy trash movies, JG Ballard, punk, modern primitives, supermasochists, torture gardens, pranks, angry women, bodily fluids.anything and everything taboo and alternative and unreported was and is fair grist to Vale’s subversive ever-churning wordmill.
In 1982 he put out RE/Search #4/5, a three-section volume including William S. Burroughs, with the other two sections being about Throbbing Gristle and the artist Brion Gysin, WSB’s friend and collaborator who’d introduced the writer to the ‘cut-up’ method of rearranging his texts to show what they really mean.
The Burroughs section of the book include an interview with Burroughs by Vale (who is mentioned in Burroughs’ Last Words), an unpublished chapter from Cities of The Red Night, two excerpts from The Place of Dead Roads, two “Early Routines,” an article on “The Cut-Up Method of Brion Gysin” and ‘The Revised Boy Scout Manual’ which is a piece in which Burroughs muses revealingly on armed revolution and weapons-related revelation.
I talked to the amiable publisher about this interesting volume, but only about Burroughs, because he was the reason I wanted to read the thing in the first place; neither of the other two subjects much interest me, to be perfectly honest. It’s an interesting volume that any Burroughs enthusiast would definitely enjoy. So join us as we (me with occasionally incomprehensible-to-American-ears Scottish accent) take a trip down memory lane and talk about snakebite serum, dark-skinned young boys, the City Lights bookstore, independent publishing, aphorisms, Fox News’s hateful right-wing Christian conservative pop-agitprop, the madness of Tony Blair and avoiding mad drunks with guns.
And after the interview with Vale you will find the answers to a few questions JG Ballard was kind enough to answer me by mail about his own relationship with El Hombre Invisible.
V Vale Questions
Graham Rae: First off, how did you first encounter Burroughs’ work?
Vale: Oh, jeez. Well, I encountered Naked Lunch at college in the late ‘60s. He was like the cat’s meow. Burroughs and Kenneth Anger’s Hollywood Babylon—books like these. And it was obvious that Burroughs was this un-sane, slightly science-fictiony visionary, but he wasn’t really science fiction, he was extremely sardonic, that was his main appeal, with Dr. Benway and all that. And since I was more-or-less hetero oriented I think I more or less ignored all the references to young boys with blue gills and fluorescent appendages and whatever. That sort of went right by me like water off a duck’s back. It was only later that I realized that the imagery was kind of . . . how it was oriented. But what really turned me on to Burroughs was an article in a 1970 or ‘71 Atlantic Monthly magazine that came out with a huge excerpt in it from The Job, which is Burroughs’—I think it’s his signature book of interviews, it’s kind of the equivalent of The Philosophy of Andy Warhol (From A to B and Back Again). And so I took this magazine and underlined it and kept reading it over and over, making lists and trying to get all the books that he talked about. And then The Job came out and that became my Bible
Yeah?
Vale: Oh yeah, it’s totally important. Still important; it’s got so many ideas in it.
Well that’s the thing about Burroughs, isn’t it? It’s like this sort of surreal mercurial Braille, it’s very strange. I mean you read it, you go back to it and then you go back to it and then you get something different from it because you’ve got a completely different level of understanding of it, y’know, I think, personally.
Vale: Well yeah, that definitely can happen with any great book. And I spent so much time with ‘The Job’ and with that ‘Atlantic Monthly’ article. It was obvious that this was sort of like a philosophy of life. I mean, instead of saying you’re right wing or left wing politically, you could just say, Well, I’m a Burroughsian. There should be almost a Burroughsian political party making fun of authoritarianism all across the entire political spectrum.
I’ve got that party in my head that goes on 24 fucking 7, man. Right. When and how did you first contact Burroughs?
Vale: Well I was already working at City Lights Bookstore and one of the perks of working there was that you got to meet all the so-called Beatniks and you were already in the in-group.
Did you meet like Ginsberg and that then, I take it?
Vale: Oh yeah, sure. The legend is that Ginsberg gave me my first $100 to start publishing. It’s certainly true, but I wish I had made a Xerox of the check, and I wish I had made a Xerox of the check that Ferlinghetti gave me, too. But you know, back in those days you didn’t have a home Xerox machine, you had to go to a corner facility and spend ten cens on a Xerox. Believe it or not, ten cents for a Xerox was a lot of money in 1976 or so.
Especially when you don’t have much money.
Vale: Especially when you’re living on minimum wage from City Lights, but you know you would parlay that, you’d stretch that out by: you’d get such a low income you’d qualify for food stamps, for example. They still give out food stamps—I see these old Chinese people using them still, but I hear they’re really hard to get now. But they used to be easy to get.
Just as well for you. So did Burroughs come into the shop one time, or what?
Vale: Yeah, well, he came through on a reading tour like authors tend to do and y’know I had to kind of figure out an angle on how to kind of stand out, because everybody wants to meet Burroughs. But you know he probably likes—him being this pale blondish Midwestern background, I found out later that he tends to like darker-skinned young boys, of which I qualified. But, being hetero of course—I didn’t know these things at the time, and I knew the point of intersection would be firearms, because I grew up in a very small desert town and for a certain several years of my life, until I got arrested by the police, I spent a great deal of time by myself walking in the desert with my .22 rifle and pistol, sort of shooting at anything that moved. But actually I didn’t—after I killed my first rabbit I was utterly horrified because it took about 20 shots pumped into the little quivering body before it finally stopped moving. It was kind of a gross experience. The .22 long rifle cartridge just isn’t that powerful, I guess, even for a 12 or 14 lbs rabbit.
Did you talk to Burroughs about guns, then?
Vale: Oh yeah, and I also knew a lot about guns, because someone just gave me all these gun magazines and I just devoured them and memorized them and then I sent away for free catalogues and I sort of fantasized going away to South America and being kind of an explorer. And, you know, I’d have all these certain state-of-the-art firearms and gear and all that. And so I did know quite a bit about the history of firearms. And so it was very easy to talk to Burroughs about that. He was up-to-the-minute; up to the day he died he was up-to-the-minute on state-of-the-art firearms and. He knew a lot more about knives than I did. He taught me how to throw knives, but I don’t think I’m as good as him. He’s quite good. I mean, have you ever tried to throw a knife?
Not really, no.
Vale: Oh. Well, there’s an art to it. First of all, the knife has to have some balance. Then you grab it by the point, more or less, and then you do a little flick of the wrist and elbow at a spot on a side of a barn, for example. And under Burroughs’ help I got so I could stick a blade in most of the time. But it’s not my preferred choice of weaponry, by any means.
Why was Burroughs so gun-obsessed?
Vale: Why was he? Because he believed in the right to bear arms, he believed in, y’know, the foundation of this country is the right to have a gun in your household and rise up against the government if the government should turn fascist—which of course—which of course it has. But of course everyone’s so brain-dead and stupid and dumbed-down now they’ve forgotten all this. He also believed that—or let’s say he respected—that little aphorism which you probably haven’t heard, which is: ‘God made man, but Samuel Colt made them all equal.’
I’ve heard that aphorism because it’s in a Manic Street Preachers song.
Vale: Wait a minute, say that again?
I have heard that saying because it’s in a song by the band the Manic Street Preachers. The lyric goes “Fuck the Brady Bill / fuck the Brady Bill / if God made man they say / Sam Colt made them equal.”
Vale: He’s right. (laughs)
I know all sorts of strange things you would not credit me with knowing being Scottish, Mr. Vale.
Vale: That’s right. I shouldn’t, I mean I wouldn’t doubt it. And I’ll tell you why. I’ve said this before: you Scots and you Brits and you Welshmen and whoever in the UK, you’ve all gotten, even in the worst country parish, you’ve gotten a far superior education to us Americans. I’d say it’s ten times as good as the average.
I don’t really have much of a frame of reference for that, but I’ll take your word for it. How close was your friendship with Burroughs? Did you meet him over the years at certain points, or….
Vale: Oh, I wouldn’t claim it was deep. Let’s see . . . I talked to him several times in San Francisco. I spent a whopping ten days with him in 1988 because James Grauerholz (executor of Burroughs’ literary estate) was going out of town and I somehow timed it so I was there in his place and running all the errands that James ran for him. And then James came back I think a day before I left, and we went to a big dinner some woman made, so there were like, y’know, fifteen people there or something. And then after that I went and visited him just before he died in 1997 for several hours. And so, I don’t know, but I think the early conversations must have been a little refreshing for him. I have the feeling that I was the first young person that he’d met who knew a lot about firearms and had a passion for it more or less just like he did. And so he could tell I was real. (Laughs)
You weren’t like a dilettante starfucker, y’know, ‘Mr. Burroughs I’ve read all your books,’ you were like ‘tell me about the Magnum .45’ or something.
Vale: (Chuckling) Well, there is no such thing as a Magnum .45, but there is a .44 Magnum.
Ah well, you see my extensive knowledge of firearms. I have fired guns once with a friend of mine from San Francisco, but apart from that they’re not something I’ve ever really been interested in.
Vale: Ah no, you don’t need to, and I haven’t been interested in at least 25 years or something like that. I went through about three intensive years from around age 14-16 until I got arrested, then I…
What did you get arrested for?
Vale: I just . . . me and this other person got arrested for being on private property, with a firearm, which was frowned upon.
Yeah.
Vale: Well, we were just going on this property to see if we could just—like, we were in a car and we were going onto this property to see if we could maybe shoot some rabbits. Because they tend to freeze in the glare of the headlights of the car, they make easy targets. But before we could do it some policeman came out of nowhere—he must have been bored and started following us, and he hauled us to the station. I wasn’t even sixteen then, the other person was sixteen .cos he had just gotten his car driver’s license. His parents got very angry with me and forbade him to associate with me anymore. I was considered a bad influence, apparently.
Teenage boys with guns, man…
Vale: Well no, I was the only one who had guns.
You sound like a Burroughs wet dream there, a teenage boy with a gun.
Vale: (Laughing) I dunno, I don’t think that’s the only qualifier. See, I like to read, I always liked to read, and so I just devoured this huge pile of gun magazines. I can tell you the titles: they were ‘American Rifleman,’ ‘Outdoor Life,’ ‘Sports Afield,’ and ‘Field And Stream.’ I like memorized all the articles and then I started sending for all these free gun catalogues you could get then, and catalogs of outdoor wear and gear, trying to become sort of an armchair expert on all these things. You know, like snakebite—what to do if you have a snakebite. I think I mail ordered a snakebite kit, for example.
That sounds like a kind of Burroughsian random autodidact trajectory, you just go where your obsessions take you.
Vale: Yeah, I don’t even remember who gave me these magazines, but these magazines changed my life (chuckling) for a few years.
How was Burroughs when you lived with him for ten days, how did you find the man? I mean was he crazy, or was he quite placid, or did he try and shoot you, or…
Vale: He’s like this Harvard country gentleman, completely civilized and well-mannered and full of puns and always quoting Shakespeare—things like that. He must have memorized a lot of Shakespeare in his day. How can I say it—he’s both. I mean, he did go to Harvard, you know, which is the best college or university in America. But he also had a lot of street experience, having been a junkie and also an exterminator. “Got any bugs lady?”—you’ve read that. And I think he was a farmer, too; tried to be a farmer in Texas. And then he of course went through that whole gay underground scene in New York City and Mexico City and Tangier and all that. And so he’s kind of been exposed to a full spectrum of humanity. High and low culture, completely. And so his conversations can go all over the map, depending on your interests.
And your intelligence level as well, eh?
Vale: Well, I guess. But you know what I’ve found is that there are so many levels of intelligence—I never judge anybody that way, because someone who may be—let’s say their culture doesn’t overlap with your very much—you can still learn a lot about something you knew nothing about. Then you realize this person knows a lot more than you. Especially in a city, or I suppose in the country, too. Even, you might say, the dimmest lightbulb can be surprising; you just have to tap it.
The dimmest lightbulb still gives out an illuminating flicker or two.
Vale: Well, sometimes a flash of an illumination! (Laughs) You’d be surprised, in fact surprise is what life is all about.
Back to your William S Burroughs volume. Why did you put it out and how did you choose the pieces that went into the book?
Vale: Well I didn’t choose them. First I got to do the interview and then I simply asked James Grauerholz for some unpublished pieces that I could use. And it was as simple as that: he sent me them and I used what he sent me. But of course the reason why I liked Burroughs can be summed up in one word: either “anti-authoritarian” or the words “Control Process.” I mean he is all about trying to decipher and uncover the workings of the Control Process, as he named it, by which we’re all controlled in ways in which we don’t even realize, which is the scariest thing.
That’s very true. Did you see the documentary Outfoxed?
Vale: No.
I was watching that the other night. It’s about Fox News. They asked all these questions like ‘do you believe Iraq had weapons of mass destruction’ and ‘do you believe Iraq has an Al Queda connection?’ The numbers were consistently… let’s just say if you did not watch Fox then 17% of you believed that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction or, you know, had an Al Qaeda connection. And if you watched Fox News the numbers were up in the 70-75% range because it’s just pure bullshit disinformation.
Vale: Oh, it’s lies.
It’s pure lies, it’s bizarre. That’s one thing that’s fascinated me since I came to this country is attack dog politics, these fucking idiots like Ann Coulter and Bill O’Reilly and Rush Limbaugh and all these fucking muppets, you know?
Vale: Well, they’re just propagandists. There seems to be some sort of weird conspiracy to bamboozle most of the American populace and (sighs) it’s working. I mean, I printed a statistic in one of my newsletters awhile back which is that these right-wing conservative Republicans, I don’t know how many of them, raised $3 billion and over the course of the last ten years funded 45 think-tanks and all these think-tanks worked on just how to take control of the country. And they darn near worked. Now, of course, as we just saw this shift in Congress where the House and the Senate are now back to being under Democratic control despite all the dirty tricks and think-tanking of the Republicans and all their illegal phone-calling campaigns, impersonating Democrats, and all the dirty tricks they did. And I’m surprised this thing happened because I was sure that the Republicans had total control of all the voting machines. And so I was amazed that this happened at all, this Democratic shift, but of course today this bill got passed making it illegal to—you can be thrown in jail if you demonstrate in front of a store, because the basis is that the store can sort of easily sort of prove that you damaged their business and they got less income because you were standing in front with a picket sign or something, or a boycott sign. And the bill made it easier for you to be thrown in jail now for doing this.
I think they did this in Britain as well, y’know, it was just basically to stop people demonstrating, if you’ve got more than a few people in one group you’re obviously anarchist rabble-rousers and we’re going disband your group because you’re obviously up to no good. The fact that demonstrating has nothing to do with it, you’re just scum.
Vale: In London they used to have Hyde Park and there used to be all kinds of political rabble-rousers talking there and that was permitted. What happened to that?
Britain is America Lite. Tony Blair is a madman. He is finally going to be going, but it’s just gone just as bad as the spin culture in America, it really has, and it’s worse because it’s even more stupid, it’s not as well-financed or thought through, it’s just a pale irritating imitative shadow of the American surreal experience with politics. It really is a sick joke. And Tony Blair’s just a deeply corrupt man, but of course he’s got that whole sort of ‘God’s on my side’ pathological nonsense as well, you know. I’ll tell you something, one of the best expressions I ever heard used was “Time to look beyond this rundown radioactive cop-ridden planet.” It’s just perfect.
Was Burroughs pleased with the way your book turned out?
Vale: Oh yeah, he loved it. He was happy because it was like the first time he was ever shown holding a firearm. No one had ever dared print photos like that.
Too scared of the controversial aspects with the Joan Vollmer incident (Burroughs shot and killed his wife in a drunken game of ‘William Tell’)?
Vale: I think people just weren’t interested; no one had ever thought (to do it). And then of course later on someone brought out a book by Burroughs called Painting And Guns, a little tiny Hanuman Press book in which someone interviewed him, I guess, on painting and guns. (Laughs) I sort of paved the way for it to be okay.
The whole Burroughs thing with guns, I mean… bearing in mind that I come from a country that doesn’t really have a gun culture, and around nine years ago there was a primary school - which is a school for kids from four or five until eleven - it was in Dunblane and there was a shooting, so they basically disarmed the country after that. So American and British gun cultures are vastly, vastly different things. I dunno, it’s just something that some people like and some people don’t. I think in Britain it’s regarded as a kind of Republican right-wing, NASCAR-watching, beer-guzzling kind of thing to do, go and shoot your guns in the house.
Vale: I couldn’t say about England. See, here we’ve got the whole myth about the Wild West, and the taming of the West, and the guns that tamed the West kind of thing, y’know, the Winchester repeating rifle - Winchester .73 they call it, the Colt Peacemaker they call it, the six-shooter single action pistol—you can’t just pull the trigger, you have to pull the hammer back first. And of course they’re not talking about who was killed: all the original populace, all the original inhabitants of America. Someone was telling me about a very interesting-sounding book which I have to find called 1491 which is all about America before Columbus got here. And they’re trying to do a scientific and anthropological - or rather archaeological, too - analysis of, like, Indian mounds.
You printed an edition of The Atrocity Exhibition by JG Ballard with an introduction by Burroughs, right?
Vale: That’s correct.
Did Burroughs rate Ballard’s work as much as Ballard rates Burroughs’? Do you have any idea what his opinion on Mr. Ballard’s work is?
Vale: That is difficult to ascertain because Burroughs was more, how can I say—he was actually quite generous to people who wanted recommendations or blurbs or whatever you call them for their books. And I don’t think he would have written that piece on Ballard if he hadn’t meant what he said. So that’s all I can go by. And they did meet once, very briefly, in England I think. I think it’s talked about in one of the books, the Quotes book or the Conversations.
Do you have any favourite piece of Burroughs memorabilia that you own?
Vale: Oh, that I own? Gee, I guess I had a target that he shot. I took him out shooting and I asked him if I could keep the target he shot, and he autographed it. And he had a spray can in his studio in Kansas—it was a used spray can, used in making his artwork. He’d sprayed it a bunch of different rainbow colors. I asked him if he would autograph it and he did and I kept it.
Did you rate him as an artist? Did you like him as an artist, a painter, as opposed to a writer?
Vale: (Misunderstanding) Well, he’s come up with the genius quotes to live by, and he’s invented these sardonic characters, Dr. Benway or whoever they are. For all that alone he deserves to go down in history.
Yeah, that’s true, but…
Vale: And he and Ballard are my favourite two writers of the 21st century.
Um what I mean is, did you like Burroughs’ paintings and stuff as opposed to his writing?
Vale: Oh, that’s the question!
It’s the accent, pal, it’s the accent.
Vale: (Chuckling) Yes! Well, you know, the way I always consider a writer is that everything they write and everything they say is all part of one big work and that includes the diaries and the journals and the paintings and the collages and the jokes and the whole nine yards. And sure, I don’t mind his paintings at all, but you’re talking to a man whose gold standard for paintings is Hieronymus Bosch triptychs. And they’re so complex there really isn’t much that can stand up to that. It sort of blows out of the water, say, most of Andy Warhol’s single paintings, for example. I mean, there’s just so much narrative, or just so much you can read into the Bosch triptychs, that there’s very little that can stand up against that, if you’re running a competition.
You know the artist Joe Coleman?
Vale: Of course!
There’s a strange kind of Hieronymus Bosch-like—there’s so much detail in the paintings he does. They’re very beautiful, but they’re quite disturbing.
Vale: Yeah, he’s one of my favourite living painters, there’s no doubt about that.
He’s a character all right.
Vale: He was in the first Pranks book.
That’s right, he was. I’ll tell you what, we’ll have one last question about Burroughs. What do you think Burroughs’ major literary legacy contribution was, or will be? What do you think his major contribution to the literary world will be?
Vale: (Pause) Little aphorisms, y’know—that’s the way that somebody like Schopenhauer and Nietzsche will probably be remembered. I mean I kind of consider Burroughs to be more of a philosopher than a writer, for me, but there are people who consider him a writer too. He’s definitely captured a lot of great memorable, funny lines and dialogues and things like that. For me, of course, it’s the interviews in the books like The Job and The Burroughs Files and—what’s that other one, The Adding Machine, as well as The Complete Interviews which aren’t complete, of course. Every book that says ‘complete’ never is, I’ve found. And just the general persona, being like a, how can I say—he’s extremely libertarian in all of his thinking and very fair-minded, but he also liked to shoot and own guns and knives and he was quite concerned with the problem of self-defense (chuckles and puts on sarcastic tone) as any red-blooded American oughta be.
I read that Interviews and I saw that in Burroughs: The Movie where he as going on about attacking people , if people attacked you, you could cut their throats or shoot them and it was like (dubious voice) “okay.” There’s a man you wouldn’t want to be around when he was drunk with a gun in his hand, y’know?
Vale: But he hardly ever got drunk and when he did he didn’t play around with guns. He was properly trained, he didn’t—there’s actually rules about the handling of firearms. And most people nowadays don’t learn them, but you really, truly, never point a gun at anyone, even if you think it’s unloaded. You just don’t play with guns and you don’t really mix guns with alcohol. I mean there’s, like, basic rules.
Ones that Burroughs could have learned a lot from had he learned them earlier in his life.
JG Ballard Questions
Graham Rae: When and how did you first encounter Burroughs’ writing?
Ballard: I first read Naked Lunch, Soft Machine + Ticket T(hat) E(exploded) in about 1960 or so, in the green Olympia Press editions given to me by Michael Moorcock.
What did you think when you read his work, and what was it about it that stood out?
Ballard: I was absolutely overwhelmed - my faith in the novel, which had been fading for years, was instantly restored - what stood out? Sheer originality, humour, the unique eye, the coherence of his apocalyptic vision.
When and how did you first meet Burroughs?
Ballard: I met WSB in about 1965 - in London, through Bill Butler, an American poet, now sadly dead, who ran a little publishing house in Brighton.
How many times did you meet him over the years, where did you meet him, and were any of the conversations about literature?
Ballard: I met him at various places over the next 30 years - at his St. James Street flat, at a rock concert near Brighton, at various parties - I remember that he cooked a tasty roast chicken at the St James flat, + then demonstrated with the carving knife where best to inflict a fatal stab wound - he kept away from the windows, claiming that the CIA/Time magazine were watching him from a disguised laundry van - in some 20 meetings we never discussed anything literary.
What is your favourite Burroughs book?
Ballard: Naked Lunch.
How did you get Burroughs to write the introduction to The Atrocity Exhibition?
Ballard: Grove Press arranged his superb introduction.
What do you think Burroughs’s major literary legacy will be?
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https://electricliterature.com/the-rise-of-science-fiction-from-pulp-mags-to-cyberpunk/
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The Rise of Science Fiction from Pulp Mags to Cyberpunk
|
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This wide-ranging exploration of the impulses, movements, and unique voices in twentieth century science fiction originally appeared as the introduction to this year’s The Big Book of Science Fiction from Vintage Books. Ann and Jeff VanderMeer’s next project will be The Big Book of Classic Fantasy, also from Vintage. Since the days of Mary Shelley, Jules […]
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en
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Electric Literature
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https://electricliterature.com/the-rise-of-science-fiction-from-pulp-mags-to-cyberpunk/
|
This wide-ranging exploration of the impulses, movements, and unique voices in twentieth century science fiction originally appeared as the introduction to this year’s The Big Book of Science Fiction from Vintage Books. Ann and Jeff VanderMeer’s next project will be The Big Book of Classic Fantasy, also from Vintage.
Since the days of Mary Shelley, Jules Verne, and H. G. Wells, science fiction has not just helped define and shape the course of literature but reached well beyond fictional realms to influence our perspectives on culture, science, and technology. Ideas like electric cars, space travel, and forms of advanced communication comparable to today’s cell phone all first found their way into the public’s awareness through science fiction. In stories like Alicia Yáñez Cossío’s “The IWM 100” from the 1970s you can even find a clear prediction of Information Age giants like Google — and when Neil Armstrong set foot on the moon, the event was a very real culmination of a yearning already expressed through science fiction for many decades.
Science fiction has allowed us to dream of a better world by creating visions of future societies without prejudice or war. Dystopias, too, like Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451, have had their place in science fiction, allowing writers to comment on injustice and dangers to democracy. Where would Eastern Bloc writers have been without the creative outlet of science fiction, which by seeming not to speak about the present day often made it past the censors? For many under Soviet domination during those decades, science fiction was a form of subversion and a symbol of freedom. Today, science fiction continues to ask “What if?” about such important topics as global warming, energy dependence, the toxic effects of capitalism, and the uses of our modern technology, while also bringing back to readers strange and wonderful visions.
No other form of literature has been so relevant to our present yet been so filled with visionary and transcendent moments. No other form has been as entertaining, either. Before now, there have been few attempts at a definitive anthology that truly captures the global influence and significance of this dynamic genre — bringing together authors from all over the world and from both the “genre” and “literary” ends of the fiction spectrum. The Big Book of Science Fiction covers the entire twentieth century, presenting, in chronological order, stories from more than thirty countries, from the pulp space opera of Edmond Hamilton to the literary speculations of Jorge Luis Borges, from the pre-Afrofuturism of W. E. B. Du Bois to the second-wave feminism of James Tiptree Jr. — and beyond!
What you find within these pages may surprise you. It definitely surprised us.
What Is the “Golden Age” of Science Fiction?
Even people who do not read science fiction have likely heard the term “the Golden Age of Science Fiction.” The actual Golden Age of Science Fiction lasted from about the mid-1930s to the mid-1940s, and is often conflated for general readers with the preceding Age of the Pulps (1920s to mid-1930s). The Age of the Pulps had been dominated by the editor of Amazing Stories, Hugo Gernsback. Sometimes called the Father of Science Fiction, Gernsback was most famously photographed in an all-encompassing “Isolator” author helmet, attached to an oxygen tank and breathing apparatus.
The Golden Age dispensed with the Isolator, coinciding as it did with the proliferation of American science fiction magazines, the rise of the ultimately divisive editor John W. Campbell at Astounding Science Fiction (such strict definitions and such a dupe for Dianetics!), and a proto-market for science fiction novels (which would only reach fruition in the 1950s). This period also saw the rise to dominance of authors like Isaac Asimov, Arthur C. Clarke, Poul Anderson, C. L. Moore, Robert Heinlein, and Alfred Bester. It fixed science fiction in the public imagination as having a “sense of wonder” and a “can-do” attitude about science and the universe, sometimes based more on the earnest, naïve covers than the actual content, which could be dark and complex.
But “the Golden Age” has come to mean something else as well. In his classic, oft-quoted book on science fiction, Age of Wonders: Exploring the World of Science Fiction (1984), the iconic anthologist and editor David Hartwell asserted that “the Golden Age of Science Fiction is 12.” Hartwell, an influential gatekeeper in the field, was making a point about the arguments that “rage until the small of the morning” at science fiction conventions among “grown men and women” about that time when “every story in every magazine was a master work of daring, original thought.” The reason readers argue about whether the Golden Age occurred in the 1930s, 1950s, or 1970s, according to Hartwell, is because the true age of science fiction is the age at which the reader has no ability to tell good fiction from bad fiction, the excellent from the terrible, but instead absorbs and appreciates just the wonderful visions and exciting plots of the stories.
This is a strange assertion to make, one that seems to want to make excuses. It’s often repeated without much analysis of how such a brilliant anthology editor also credited with bringing literary heavyweights like Gene Wolfe and Philip K. Dick to readers would want to (inadvertently?) apologize for science fiction while at the same time engaging in a sentimentality that seems at odds with the whole enterprise of truly speculative fiction. (Not to mention dissing twelve-year-olds!)
Perhaps one reason for Hartwell’s stance can be found in how science fiction in the United States, and to some extent in the United Kingdom, rose out of pulp magazine delivery systems seen as “low art.” A pronounced “cultural cringe” within science fiction often combines with the brutal truth that misfortunes of origin often plague literature, which can assign value based on how swanky a house looks from the outside rather than what’s inside. The new Kafka who next arises from cosmopolitan Prague is likely to be hailed a savior, but not so much the one who arises from, say, Crawfordville, Florida.
There is also something of a need to apologize for the ma-and-pop tradition exemplified by the pulps, with their amateurish and eccentric editors, who sometimes had little formal training and possessed as many eccentricities as freckles, and who came to dominate the American science fiction world early on. Sometimes an Isolator was the least of it.
Yet even with regard to the pulps, evidence suggests that these magazines at times entertained more sophisticated content than generally given credit for, so that in a sense an idea like “the Golden Age of Science Fiction is 12” undermines the truth about such publications. It also renders invisible all of the complex science fiction being written outside of the pulp tradition.
Therefore, we humbly offer the assertion that contrary to popular belief and based on all of the evidence available to us . . . the actual Golden Age of Science Fiction is twenty-one, not twelve. The proof can be found in the contents of this anthology, where we have, as much as possible, looked at the totality of what we think of “science fiction,” without privileging the dominant mode, but also without discarding it. That which may seem overbearing or all of a type at first glance reveals its individuality and uniqueness when placed in a wider context. At third or fourth glance, you may even find that stories from completely diffrent traditions have commonalities and speak to each other in interesting ways.
Building a Better Definition of “Science Fiction”
We evoked the names of Mary Shelley, Jules Verne, and H. G. Wells at the beginning of this introduction for a very specific reason. All three are useful entry points or origin points for science fiction because they do not exist so far back in time as to make direct influence seem ethereal or attenuated, they are still known in the modern era, and because the issues they dealt with permeate what we call the “genre” of science fiction even today.
We hesitate to invoke the slippery and preternatural word influence, because influence appears and disappears and reappears, sidles in and has many mysterious ways. It can be as simple yet profound as reading a text as a child and forgetting it, only to have it well up from the subconscious years later, or it can be a clear and all-consuming passion. At best we can only say that someone cannot be influenced by something not yet written or, in some cases, not yet translated. Or that influence may occur not when a work is published but when the writer enters the popular imagination — for example, as Wells did through Orson Welles’s infamous radio broadcast of War of the Worlds (1938) or, to be silly for a second, Mary Shelley through the movie Young Frankenstein (1974).
For this reason even wider claims of influence on science fiction, like writer and editor Lester del Rey’s assertion that the Mesopotamian Epic of Gilgamesh is the earliest written science fiction story, seem appropriative, beside the point, and an overreach for legitimacy more useful as a “tell” about the position of science fiction in the 1940s and 1950s in North America.
But we brought up our triumvirate because they represent different strands of science fiction. The earliest of these authors, Mary Shelley, and her Frankenstein (1818), ushered in a modern sensibility of ambivalence about the uses of technology and science while wedding the speculative to the horrific in a way reflected very early on in science fiction. The “mad scientist” trope runs rife through the pages of the science fiction pulps and even today in their modern equivalents. She also is an important figure for feminist SF.
Jules Verne, meanwhile, opened up lines of inquiry along more optimistic and hopeful lines. For all that Verne liked to create schematics and specific detail about his inventions — like the submarine in Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea (1870) — he was a very happy puppy who used his talents in the service of scientific romanticism, not “hard science fiction.”
H. G. Wells’s fiction was also dubbed “scientific romanticism” during his lifetime, but his work existed somewhere between these two foci. His most useful trait as the godfather of modern science fiction is the granularity of his writing. Because his view of the world existed at an intersection of sociology, politics, and technology, Wells was able to create complex geopolitical and social contexts for his fiction — indeed, after he abandoned science fiction, Wells’s later novels were those of a social realist, dealing with societal injustice, among other topics. He was able to quantify and fully realize extrapolations about the future and explore the iniquities of modern industrialization in his fiction.
The impulse to directly react to how industrialization has affected our lives occurs very early on in science fiction — for example, in Karl Hans Strobl’s cautionary factory tale “The Triumph of Mechanics” (1907) and even in the playful utopian visions of Paul Scheerbart, which often pushed back against bad elements of “modernization.” (For his optimism, Scheerbart perished in World War I, while Strobl’s “reward” was to fall for fascism and join the Nazi Party — in part, a kind of repudiation of the views expressed in “The Triumph . . .”)
Social and political issues also peer out from science fiction from the start, and not just in Wells’s work. Rokheya Shekhawat Hossein’s “Sultana’s Dream” (1905) is a potent feminist utopian vision. W. E. B. Du Bois’s “The Comet” (1920) isn’t just a story about an impending science-fictional catastrophe but also the start of a conversation about race relations and a proto-Afrofuturist tale. The previously untranslated Yefim Zozulya’s “The Doom of Principal City” (1918) presages the atrocities perpetrated by the communism of the Soviet Union and highlights the underlying absurdities of certain ideological positions. (It’s perhaps telling that these early examples do not come from the American pulp SF tradition.)
This kind of eclectic stance also suggests a simple yet effective definition for science fiction: it depicts the future, whether in a stylized or realistic manner. There is no other definitional barrier to identifying science fiction unless you are intent on defending some particular territory. Science fiction lives in the future, whether that future exists ten seconds from the Now or whether in a story someone builds a time machine a century from now in order to travel back into the past. It is science fiction whether the future is phantasmagorical and surreal or nailed down using the rivets and technical jargon of “hard science fiction.” A story is also science fiction whether the story in question is, in fact, extrapolation about the future or using the future to comment on the past or present.
Thinking about science fiction in this way delinks the actual content or “experience” delivered by science fiction from the commodification of that genre by the marketplace. It does not privilege the dominant mode that originated with the pulps over other forms. But neither does it privilege those other manifestations over the dominant mode. Further, this definition eliminates or bypasses the idea of a “turf war” between genre and the mainstream, between commercial and literary, and invalidates the (weird ignorant snobbery of) tribalism that occurs on one side of the divide and the faux snobbery (ironically based on ignorance) that sometimes manifests on the other.
Wrote the brilliant editor Judith Merril in the seventh annual edition of The Year’s Best S-F (1963), out of frustration:
“But that’s not science fiction . . . !” Even my best friends (to invert a paraphrase) keep telling me: That’s not science fiction! Sometimes they mean it couldn’t be s-f, because it’s good. Sometimes it couldn’t be because it’s not about spaceships or time machines. (Religion or politics or psychology isn’t science fiction — is it?) Sometimes (because some of my best friends are s-f fans) they mean it’s not really science fiction — just fantasy or satire or something like that.
On the whole, I think I am very patient. I generally manage to explain again, just a little wearily, what the “S-F” in the title of this book means, and what science fiction is, and why the one contains the other, without being constrained by it. But it does strain my patience when the exclamation is compounded to mean, “Surely you don’t mean to use that? That’s not science fiction!” — about a first-rate piece of the honest thing.
Standing on either side of this debate is corrosive — detrimental to the study and celebration of science fiction; all it does is sidetrack discussion or analysis, which devolves into SF/not SF or intrinsically valuable/not valuable. And, for the general reader weary of anthologies prefaced by a series of “inside baseball” remarks, our definition hopefully lessens your future burden of reading these words.
Consider Another Grand Tradition: The Conte Philosophique
Inasmuch as we have put on our Isolator and already paid some tribute to the “dominant” strain of science fiction by briefly conjuring up the American pulp scene of the 1920s through 1940s, it is important before returning to that tradition to examine what the Loyal Opposition was up to in the first half of the twentieth century — and for this reason, it is important to turn our attention to an earlier form, the conte philosophique.
Conte philosophique translates as “philosophical story” or “fable of reason.” The contes philosophiques were used for centuries in the West by the likes of Voltaire, Johannes Kepler, and Francis Bacon as one legitimate way for scientists or philosophers to present their findings. The conte philosophique employs the fictional frame of an imaginary or dream journey to impart scientific or philosophical content. In a sense, the fantastical or science-fictional adventure became a mental laboratory in which to discuss findings or make an argument.
If we position some early science fiction as occurring outside of the American pulp tradition but also outside of traditions exemplified by Mary Shelley and H. G. Wells, what remains as influence is both extremely relevant to science fiction and also relevant to more dominant traditions.
Early twentieth-century science fiction like Hossein’s “Sultana’s Dream,” Scheerbart’s utopian fables, or Alfred Jarry’s “Elements of Pataphysics” from his novel Exploits and Opinions of Dr. Faustroll, Pataphysician (1911; first published in English in the 1960s) makes infinitely more sense in this context. More importantly, these stories take their rightful place within the history of speculative literature. Instead of being considered outliers, they can be seen as the evolution of a grand tradition, one that inverts the usual ratio of the fictional to nonfictional found in a typical conte philosophique. It is a mode that certainly helps us better understand Jules Verne’s fiction. In many cases, Verne was taking his cue from the trappings of the conte philosophique — the fantastical adventure — and using that form as a vehicle for creating his entertainments.
The conte philosophique, with its non/fictional fusion, also creates a fascinating link to Jorge Luis Borges and his essay-stories from the 1940s. These stories often serve as a vehicle for metaphysical exploration. Indeed, Borges’s work can in this context be seen as the perfect expression of and reconciliation of the (pulpish) adventure fiction he loved and the intellectual underpinnings of his narratives, which rely in part on severe compression into tale (coal into diamonds) rather than traditional short story. Other Latin American examples include Silvina Ocampo’s “The Waves” (1959) and Alicia Yáñez Cossío’s “The IWM 1000” (1975). Even Stanisław Lem in his Star Diaries voyages of the 1960s and 1970s is reimagining the contes philosophiques — there is the actual voyage (exciting enough!) but it is once again a pure delivery system for ideas about the world.
Although this tradition is not as common in the pulps, “science fiction tales” like A. Merritt’s “The Last Poet and the Robots” (1935) and Frederik Pohl’s “Day Million” (1966) can be seen as a fusion of the “speculative fairy tale” and the conte philosophique, or simply a mutation of the conte philosophique, which was itself influenced by ancient myths of fantastical journeys. Ironically, some of these stories add in elements of “hard science fiction.” Interpreted charitably and not from a position espousing the superiority of the conte philosophique, this form infiltrates the pulps in the sense that the pulps showcase the physical actuality of the contes philosophiques — they are contes physiques into which can be reinjected or refed an abstract quality — “what/why/how/if?” And they can embody that quality or kind of inquiry as subtext. (Whereas on the mainstream side of the divide that subtext must manifest as metaphysics to be considered literature or be doomed in terms of approval — as would any non-character-based fiction.)
In this context, whether just as a thought experiment to turn the tables and challenge dominant modes of thinking, or as a subversive “real” metaphorical or metaphysical construct, we could then come to see American pulp space-travel fiction as a kind of devolution — a mistake in which the scaffolding (or booster rockets) used to deliver the point of a conte philosophique (the journey) is brought to the foreground and the idea or scientific hypothesis (the “what if”) is deemphasized or subtextual only. A case of throwing out the baby to glorify the bathwater?
Science fiction in the United States has often positioned itself as the “literature of ideas,” yet what is a literature of ideas if they can only be expressed through a select few “delivery systems”? Aren’t there ideas expressed in fiction that we can only see the true value of — good or bad, sophisticated or simple — if we admit that there are more than a few modes of expression with which to convey them? In examining the link between the conte philosophique and science fiction, we begin to grasp the outlines of the wider context: how many of these “alternative” approaches are — rather than being deformed or flat or somehow otherwise suspect as lesser modes — just different from the dominant model, not lesser, and as useful and relevant. (For example, where otherwise to fit Czechoslovakian writer Karel Čapek — both his 1920s robot plays and his gonzo novel War with the Newts from the 1930s?)
Just like our definition of science fiction, this way of thinking about science fiction works both from the “literary mainstream” looking in or from genre looking out. The reason it works is that the position or stance — the perspective or vantage taken — is from outside of either. And this is in a sense pure or uncontaminated by the subjective intent — colonizing or foundationally assumed superior — of either “mainstream” literary or genre.
In taking this position (on a mountaintop, from a plane, in a dirigible, from the moon, within a dream journey) much less is rendered invisible in general, and more “viable” science fiction can be recovered, uncovered, or discovered without being any less faithful about our core definition. Thus, too, in this anthology we have the actuality of exploration and the idea of it, because both thought and action expend energy and are both, in their separate ways, a form of motion.
Perhaps the reason the conte philosophique to date has been undervalued as an influence on science fiction is because of the “cultural cringe” of the dominant American form of science fiction, which has consistently positioned itself in relationship to the literary mainstream by accepting the literary mainstream’s adherence to the short story as needing to have three-dimensional, psychologically convincing characters to be valid. Even reactions against this position (pre-Humanist SF) have in essence been defining science fiction in relationship to the über-domination of the mainstream.
This is particularly ironic given that a fair amount of early science fiction fails at the task of creating three-dimensional characters (while displaying other virtues) and thus as the century progresses the self-punishment the science fiction genre parcels out to itself for not meeting a standard that is just one tradition within the mainstream looks increasingly odd, or even perverse, as are excuses like “the Golden Age of Science Fiction is 12.” The genre would have been far better off taking up the cause of traditions like the conte philosophique to bypass mainstream approbation rather than continually recycling the Mesopotamian Defense or the Hawthorne Maneuver (“Canon fodder Nathaniel Hawthorne was the first science fiction/fantasy writer”) to create legitimacy or “proof of concept” on the mainstream’s terms.
Further Exploration of the Pulp Tradition
Remember the Age of the Pulps and later Golden Age of Science Fiction (the 1920s to mid-1940s)? Collectively, this era successfully exported itself as a system of plots, tropes, story structures, and entanglements to either emulate or push back against. It was typified not so much by movements as by the hegemonies created by particular influential editors like H. L. Gold, the aforementioned Campbell, and Frederik Pohl (at Galaxy).
Many of these editors, trying to create an advantage in the marketplace, created their own fiefdom, defended borders, laid down ground rules for what science fiction was and what it wasn’t. In some cases, it might be argued they had to because no one yet knew exactly what it was, or because enthusiasts kept encountering new mutations. These rules in the cutthroat and still-stuffy world of freelance writing could affect content quite a bit — Theodore Sturgeon reportedly stopped writing for a time because of one editor’s rules. Writers could make a living writing for the science fiction magazines in an era with no competition from television or video games — and they could especially make a living if they obeyed the dictates of their editor-kings. These editorial tastes would come to define, even under new editors, the focus of magazines like Amazing Stories, even if editorial tastes are not sound or rational systems of thought. Still, they shape taste and canon as much or more so than stable systems or concrete movements — in part because the influence of editors often exists out of the public eye and thus is less subject to open debate.
In a few other cases, magazines like Weird Tales successfully forged identities by championing hybrid or new modes of fiction, to the point of becoming synonymous with the type of content they provided to readers. Dashing men in dashing machines having dashing adventures were not as prevalent in such magazines, nor in this Golden Age era. It was more likely that the dashing man might have a dashing accident and be dashed up on some malign alien world or be faced with some dashing Terrible Choice based on being dashed on the rocks of misfortune.
In fact, much written in the mode of purely optimistic fiction has not aged well — in part because it simplified the complexities of a very complex world and the universe beyond. For example, with each decade what we know about what it takes to travel in space makes it more and more unlikely that we will make it out of our own solar system. Even one of the foremost supporters of terraforming, Kim Stanley Robinson, admitted that such travel is highly improbable in a 2014 interview.
The other reason this brand of science fiction has mostly historical value is because the twentieth century included two world wars along with countless significant regional conflicts, the creation of the atom bomb, the spread of various viruses, ecological disaster, and pogroms in Europe, Asia, and Africa.
Against such a growing tally, certain kinds of “gee-whiz” science fiction seem hopelessly out of date; we need escapism in our fiction because fiction is a form of play, but escapism becomes difficult to read when it renders invisible the march of history or becomes too disconnected from readers’ experience of science, technology, or world events. When you also throw in institutional racism in the United States, a subject thoroughly ignored by science fiction for a very long time, and other social issues dealt with skillfully by non-SF through the first five decades of the twentieth century, it perhaps makes sense that there is very little from the Golden Age of Science Fiction in this anthology. Our representative choices are ones where the predictive nature of the story or its sophistication stands up to the granularity of the present day.
It is also worth remembering that in the wider world of literature writers outside of science fiction were trying to grapple with the changing nature of reality and technological innovation. After World War I, James Joyce, T. S. Eliot, Virginia Woolf, and others experimented with the nature of time and identity in ways that at times had a speculative feel to it. These were mainstream attempts to engage with science (physics) that only entered into the science fiction tradition as influence during the New Wave movement of the 1960s.
This modernist experimentation and other, more recent evidence suggests that, despite frequent claims to the contrary, science fiction is not uniquely suited to interrogate industrialization or modern tech — many nonspeculative stories and novels have done so quite well — so much as it doesn’t seem as if science fiction could exist or have arisen without the products and inventions particular to industrialization. The physicality of science fiction depends on it in a way that other kinds of fiction do not (for example, historical fiction). Although a spaceship may be more or less a focal point, for example — potentially as unobtrusive as a cab (a ride to a destination) — this is in truth rarely the case. Because spaceships don’t exist yet, at least not in the way they are rendered in science fiction, as a literalization of the future. Even the most “adventure pulp” stories of early science fiction had to take a position: celebrate the extrapolated future of industrialization and ever-more-advanced technology or bemoan it, speak in terms of splendors and a “sense of wonder” or strike at the ideology behind such thinking through dystopia and examination of excesses. (In such a context, science fiction cannot be seen as escapist or nonpolitical so much as conformist when it does not ask “Why this?” in addition to “What if?”)
Still, the pulp tradition as it matured was never as hackneyed or traditional or gee-whiz as it liked to think it was or as twelve-year-old readers fondly remember. It was not nearly as optimistic or crude as the covers that represented it and that science fiction outgrew. In part, this was due to the influx or infusion of a healthy dose of horror from near the start, via Weird Tales and its ilk. Magazines like Unknown also often published fusions of horror and science fiction, and as some of the author/story notes to early stories in this volume indicate, the “rise of the tentacle” associated with twentieth-century weird fiction (à la Lovecraft) first appeared in weird space operas by writers like Edmond Hamilton. Among stories from this period that have relevance, many have a depth derived from the darkness that drives them — a sense that the underpinnings of the universe are indeed more complex than we know. In short, cosmic horror has been around for longer than Lovecraft and has helped to sustain and lend depth to science fiction as well.
Post–World War II: How Science Fiction Grew All the Way Up the Walls of the World
Largely because it has no “movement” associated with it, the 1950s are sometimes seen as a transitional period, but Robert Silverberg rightly considered the 1950s the true Golden Age of Science Fiction. The full flowering of science fiction in the US and UK dates from this period, in part because opportunities through magazines, book publication, and anthologies proliferated and in part because new and more inclusive gatekeepers entered the field.
The fiction of such highly literate and sophisticated writers like Fritz Leiber (mostly in fantasy and horror), James Blish, and Frederik Pohl came into its own in the 1950s, not just because these writers were encouraged by a much more vital publishing environment but also because of their background with the Futurians, a science fiction club, which had nurtured interests across a wide range of topics, not just genre fiction.
Blish’s “Surface Tension” (1952) demonstrates the fruits of that sophistication in its exploration of fascinating ideas about terraforming humans. Philip K. Dick started to publish fiction in the early 1950s, too; in his very first story, “Beyond Lies the Wub” (1952), he staked a claim to that hallucinatory, absurdist, antiestablishment space in which he would later write classics like Ubik (1969) and Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said (1974).
Arthur C. Clarke had been a fixture of the Golden Age but transitioned into the 1950s with such classic, dark stories as “The Star”(1955), as did Robert Heinlein. Ray Bradbury continued to write brilliant fiction, coming off of his success with The Martian Chronicles, and Robert Silverberg was extremely prolific in the 1950s, although our choice for a reprint from him was published much later.
Several underrated writers published some of their best fiction, too, including James H. Schmitz, William Tenn, and Chad Oliver. Tom Godwin shook things up with his very long “The Cold Equations” (1954), a good story not included herein that would become an item of debate for Humanist SF writers, some of whom would try to replicate it. Tenn’s “The Liberation of Earth” (1953), a harsh satire of alien invasion inspired by the Korean War, was a touchstone for protesters during the Vietnam War and become a classic. Damon Knight began to establish his legacy with the unusual and strange alien contact story “Stranger Station” (1956). C. M. Kornbluth (another Futurian) published some of his best stories during this era, including “The Silly Season” (1950) and “The Marching Morons” (1951), although these tales have not dated well. Other notable writers from the era include Robert Sheckley, Avram Davidson, and Judith Merril (who would achieve lasting fame as an anthology editor).
In hindsight, though, perhaps the most unique and important science fiction writer of the 1950s was Cordwainer Smith, who published most of his science fiction in the mid-1950s. His unique tales set on a far-future Earth and the surrounding universe came out of seemingly nowhere and had no clear antecedent. In “Scanners Live in Vain” (1950) and the story included herein, “The Game of Rat and Dragon” (1955), Smith revitalized space opera just as he remade so much else across an oeuvre as influenced by Jorge Luis Borges and Alfred Jarry as genre science fiction. Even today, Smith’s stories stand alone, as if they came from an alternate reality.
Almost equaling Smith in terms of being sui generis, Theodore Sturgeon brought a willfully literary sensibility to his fiction and an empathy that could at times manifest as sentimentality. But in his best work, like “The Man Who Lost the Sea” (1959), Sturgeon displayed a much-needed pathos to science fiction. Sturgeon was also unafraid to explore horror and to take on controversial topics, and with each new story he published that pushed a boundary, Sturgeon made it easier for others to follow.
Another interesting writer, James White, wrote about a galactic hospital in stories like “Sector General” (1957), which in their reliance on medical mysteries and situations pushed back against the standard conflict plots of the day. In White’s stories there are often no villains and sometimes no heroes, either. This allowed White to create fresh and different plots; one of his best hospital stories involves taking care of an alien child who manifests as a huge living boulder and who has vastly different feeding needs than human children. Neither Smith nor White was as popular as writers like Arthur C. Clarke, but their body of work stands out starkly from the surrounding landscape because it took such a different stance while still being relatable, entertaining, and modern.
The fifties also saw more space made for brilliant woman writers like Katherine MacLean, Margaret St. Clair, and Carol Emshwiller. What MacLean, St. Clair, and Emshwiller all shared in their fiction was a fascination with either speculative sociology or extremes of psychological reality, within a context of writing unique female characters and using story structures that often came from outside the pulp tradition. MacLean in particular championed sociology and so-called soft science, a distinction from “hard” science fiction that would have seemed fairly radical at the time. St. Clair, meanwhile, with her comprehensive knowledge of horror and fantasy fiction as well as science fiction, crafted stories that could be humorous, terrifying, and sharply thought-provoking all at once. In some of her best stories, we can also see an attempt to interrogate our relationship to the animal world. Together, these three writers not only paved the way for the feminist science fiction explosion of the 1970s, they effectively created room for more unusual storytelling.
Elsewhere in the world, Jorge Luis Borges was continuing to write fascinating, unique stories, and the tradition of the science fiction folktale or satire was used by Mexican writer Juan José Arreola to good effect in “Baby H.P.” and other flash fictions. Borges’s friend and fellow Argentine Silvina Ocampo even wrote science fiction, not a form of speculation she was known for, with “The Waves” (1959), translated into English herein for the first time. In France, Gérard Klein was just beginning to publish fiction, with early classic stories like “The Monster” (1958), his emergence presaging a boom in interesting French science fiction. And, even though Arkady and Boris Strugatsky (the Strugatsky brothers) wouldn’t achieve international fame until the 1970s, with the translation of Roadside Picnic (1979) and other books, they were publishing provocative and intelligent work like the alien-contact story “The Visitors” (1958) in the Soviet Union.
That there was no particular unifying mode or theme of science fiction in the 1950s is in some ways a relief and afforded freedom for a number of unique writers. Clearly, the way was clear for science fiction to climb even farther up the walls of the world.
But, in part, they would have to do it by tearing down what had come before.
The New Wave and the Rise of Feminist Science Fiction
The overriding story of science fiction in the 1960s would be the rise of the “New Wave,” largely championed at first by the UK magazine New Worlds, edited by Michael Moorcock, and then finding expression in the US through Harlan Ellison’s Dangerous Visions (1967) and Again, Dangerous Visions (1972) anthologies.
New Wave fiction had many permutations and artistic ideologies associated with it, but at its core it was often formally experimental and sought to bring mainstream literary technique and seriousness to science fiction. In effect, the New Wave wanted to push the boundaries of what was possible while also embodying, in many cases, the counterculture of the 1960s. New Wave fiction tended to be antiestablishment and to look with a cold eye upon the Golden Age and the pulps. Sometimes, too, it turned that cold eye on the 1950s, with New Wave writers finding much of what had gone before too safe.
But this opposition was sometimes forced on the New Wave by its detractors. For the average science fiction writer raised within the tradition of the pulps and existing within an era of plenty in the 1950s, especially with regard to the American book market, it must have been a rude awakening for writers from across the pond to suddenly be calling into question everything about their ecosystem, even if just by implication. The essential opposition also occurred because even though the 1950s had featured breakthroughs for many new voices, it had also solidified the hold upon the collective imagination of many Golden Age icons.
Further, the New Wave writers had been either reading a fundamentally different set of texts or interpreting them far differently — such that the common meeting ground between New Wave and not–New Wave could be like first contact with aliens. Neither group spoke the other’s language or knew all of its customs. Even those who should have made common cause or found common understandings, like Frederik Pohl and James Blish, found themselves in opposition to the New Wave.
In the event, however, the New Wave — whether writers and editors opposed it or lived within it and used it to create interesting work — would prove the single most influential movement within science fiction, with the concurrent and later rise of feminist science fiction a close second (and in some cases closely tied to the New Wave).
Out of the New Wave came countless writers now unjustly forgotten, like Langdon Jones, Barrington Bayley (both reprinted herein), and John Sladek, but also giants of literature, starting with Michael Moorcock and J. G. Ballard, and including M. John Harrison and Brian Aldiss (actually from an earlier generation, but a hothouse party-crasher). Subversive publishers in the UK like Savoy fanned the flames.
These writers were helped in their ascendency by the continued popularity of writers from outside of genre fiction whose work existed in sympathy to the New Wave, like Kurt Vonnegut Jr. and William S. Burroughs, and those within genre who were sympathetic and winning multiple Hugo Awards and Nebula Awards, like Harlan Ellison. Ellison’s own work fit the New Wave aesthetic to a T and his dual devotion to championing edgy work by both new and established writers in his anthologies created an undeniable New Wave beachhead in North America. American writers like Thomas Disch and Philip José Farmer received a clear boost to their careers because of the existence of the New Wave. Others, like Carol Emshwiller and Sonya Dorman, more or less wandered into the verdant (if also sometimes disaster-clogged) meadows of the New Wave by accident — having always done their own thing — and then wandered out again, neither better nor worse off. Unique eccentricists like David R. Bunch, whose Moderan stories only seem more prescient every day, could not have published their work at all if not for the largesse of daring editors and the aegis of the New Wave. (It is worth pointing out that his Moderan stories in this volume are the first reprints allowed in over two decades.)
As or more important was the emergence of Samuel R. Delany as a major voice in the field, and the emergence of that voice linked to New Wave fiction with bold, unusual stories like “Aye, and Gomorrah” (1967). Delany just about matched Ellison Nebula Award for Nebula Award during this period and not only led by example in terms of producing sophisticated speculative fiction that featured diverse characters but also was, quite frankly, one of the only African-American or even nonwhite writers in the field for a very long time. Although the huge success of bestsellers like Dhalgren (1975) helped prolong the New Wave’s moment and furthered the cause of mature (and experimental) fiction within science fiction, it did not seem to help bring representative diversity with it.
Indeed, by 1972, Terry Carr wrote in his introduction to volume 1 of The Best Science Fiction of the Year,
By now the ‘new wave’ as such has come and gone; those stories that could stand on their merits have . . . These writers realize a truth basic to all art[:] Innovations are positive to the extent that they open doors, and an avant garde which seems to destroy rather than build will only destroy itself all the faster . . . Personally, I thought most of the work produced during the height of the ‘new wave’ was just as bad as bad science fiction has always been; if there has been an effective difference to me, it was only that I sometimes had to read a story more carefully to discover I disliked it.
Terry Carr was a good and influential editor (who grew with the times), but wrong in this case, although it seems unlikely anyone could have understood how fundamentally the New Wave had changed the landscape. Despite a certain amount of retrenchment after the mid-1970s — at least in part because of the huge influence of Hollywood SF, like Star Wars, on the genre as a whole — New Wave fiction had enduring effects and created giants of culture and pop culture like J. G. Ballard (the most cited author on a variety of tech and societal topics since the 1970s).
And, in fact, Carr was also wrong because the New Wave overlapped with another significant development, the rise of feminist science fiction, so the revolution was not in fact over. In some ways it was just beginning — and there was much work to do. In addition to conflict in society in general over the issues of women’s rights, the book culture had decided to cynically cater to misogynistic tendencies in readers by publishing whole lines of paperback fiction devoted to novels demonstrating how “women’s lib” would lead to future dystopias.
If it feels like a bit of a misnomer to call this “rise” the “ascendency” of “feminist” SF, it is because to do so creates the danger of simplifying a complex situation. Not only did the fight to create more space for stories with positive and proactive women characters in science fiction need to be refought several times, but the arguments and the energy/impulse involved in “feminist” SF were also about representation: about creating a space for women writers, no matter what they wrote. And they were further complicated by the fact that identification of an author with “feminism” (just as identification with “New Wave”) can create a narrowed focus in how readers encounter and explore that writer’s work. Nor, largely, would this first focus on feminist science fiction address intersectional issues of race or of gender fluidity. (It is worth noting that in the milieu traversed by American surrealists of the 1960s and 1970s, a territory that existed parallel to science fiction, intersectionality appears to have been more central much earlier.)
Kingsley Amis had pointed out in New Maps of Hell (1960), his influential book on science fiction published on the cusp of the New Wave, that “though it may go against the grain to admit it, [male] science-fiction writers are evidently satisfied with the sexual status quo.” This written in a context where few examples of complex or interesting women characters written by men seemed to exist, beyond a few stories by Theodore Sturgeon and John Wyndham (another one-off, marginally associated with the New Wave but, understandably and blissfully, enthralled by plants, fungi, lichen).
By the 1970s, writers like Joanna Russ were giving bold and explicit voice to the cause of science fiction by featuring women. Russ accused science fiction, in her essay “The Image of Women in SF” (1970), of “a failure of imagination and ‘social speculation,’” making the argument that the paucity of complex female characters derived from accepting societal prejudices and stereotypes without thought or analysis. This echoed sentiments about clichés and stereotypes later expressed by Delany with regard to race.
Feminist writers were concerned in part about the peculiar and unuseful way in which writers had for so long literalized archetypes, making women stand-ins and not individualized: Madonna/Whore, Mother Earth, etc. As the forever amazing and incisive Ursula K. Le Guin wrote in her essay “American SF and the Other” (1975), “The women’s movement has made most of us conscious of the fact that SF has either totally ignored women, or presented them as squeaking dolls subject to instant rape by monsters — or old-maid scientists desexed by hypertrophy of the intellectual organs — or, at best, loyal little wives or mistresses of accomplished heroes.”
The irony of having to push back against misogynistic portrayals in science fiction should not be lost on anyone. Within a tradition of “what if,” a tradition not of realism but of supposedly dreaming true and of expressing the purest forms of the imagination, science fiction had still chosen in many cases to relegate women to second- or third-rate status. In such an atmosphere, without a revolution, how could anyone, male or female or gender-fluid, see clearly a future in which such prejudices did not exist?
Therefore the rise of feminist SF was about the rise of unique, influential voices whose work could be overtly feminist but was not of interest solely for that reason. Writers like James Tiptree Jr. (Alice Sheldon), Russ, Josephine Saxton, Le Guin, and others were in some cases core New Wavers or were writing corrections of Golden Era simplifications, much as Delany sometimes did, and in other cases bringing sociology, anthropology, ecological issues, and more to the fore in a way that hadn’t yet been seen. Rather than being narrow in focus, this fiction opened up the world — and did so from within an American and British science fiction community that was at times resistant.
The Important Role of International Fiction
Sometimes it is useful to take a step back and examine the frenzy of enthusiasm about a particular era from a different perspective. While the New Wave and feminist science fiction were playing out largely in the Anglo world, the international scene was creating its own narrative. This narrative was not always so different from the Anglo one, in that in regions like Latin America women writers generally had to work twice as hard to achieve the same status as their male counterparts. For this reason, even today there are still women writers of speculative fiction being translated into English for the first time who first published work in the 1950s through 1970s. These roadblocks should not be underestimated, and future anthologists should make it a mission to discover and promote amazing work that may at this time be invisible to us.
Frederik Pohl, Judith Merril, and Damon Knight, all three excellent writers, were at least as influential in putting on their editor hats and were particularly useful in bringing new, international voices into the English-language science fiction field. These gatekeepers and others, including the ubiquitous David Hartwell, were sympathetic to international science fiction, and as a result from the 1950s through the 1980s in particular stories in translation appeared with more frequency. (It is worth noting, though, that in many cases what was translated had to conform to Anglo ideas about what had value in the marketplace.)
“International” science fiction may be a meaningless term because it both exoticizes and generalizes what should be normalized and then discussed in specifics country by country. But it is important to understand the overlay of non-Anglo fiction occurring at the same time as generally UK/US phenomena such as the New Wave and the rise of feminist SF — even if we can only focus on a few stories given the constraints of our anthology. For example, by the 1960s the Japanese science fiction scene had become strange and vital and energetic, as exemplified by work from Yoshio Aramaki and Yasutaka Tsutsui, but also so many other talented writers.
Although it wouldn’t be clear until the publication of a score of English-language Macmillan Soviet science fiction anthologies and novels in the 1980s — many of them championed by Theodore Sturgeon and the Strugatsky brothers — Russian and Ukrainian science fiction came of age in the 1960s and 1970s. From 1960 to the mid-1970s, a number of writers little known in the West published fascinating and complex science fiction — some of it retranslated for this volume.
For example, Valentina Zhuravlyova published “The Astronaut” (1960), which managed to escape being an advertisement for the Soviet space program by virtue of its intricate structure and commitment to the pathos of its space mission emergency. The fairly prolific Dmitri Bilenkin, who would appear in several English translations, wrote “Where Two Paths Cross,” an ecological contact story still unique and relevant today. With its alien collective, the story could be said to comment on the communist situation. Perhaps the most unlikely Russian writer of the time was Vadim Shefner, whose graceful fiction, with its deceptive lightness of touch, finds its greatest expression in “A Modest Genius” (1963). How this subversive and wise delicacy evaded the Soviet censors is a mystery, but readers everywhere should be glad it did.
The best Soviet short-story writer of the era, however, was Sever Gansovsky, who wrote several powerful stories that could have been included in this anthology. Our choice, “Day of Wrath” (1964), updates the Wellsian “Dr. Moreau” trope while being completely original. Gansovsky was not as visionary as the Strugatsky brothers, whose Roadside Picnic would dominate discussion in the US and UK, but there is in his directness, clarity, grit, and sophistication much that compensates for that lack.
Many examples of Latin American science fiction from the 1960s and 1970s are yet to appear in English, so the complete picture of that time period is unclear. We know that Borges and Ocampo were still publishing fiction that was speculative in nature, as was another major Argentine writer, Angélica Gorodischer. Adolfo Bioy Casares published occasional science fiction, such as “The Squid Chooses Its Own Ink” (1962), retranslated for this volume. The giant of Brazilian SF André Carneiro published his most famous story, “Darkness,” in 1965, a tale that stands comfortably alongside the best science fiction of the era. Alicia Yáñez Cossío’s “The IWM 1000” (1975) is another great example of Latin American SF from the period.
Yet, as noted, our sample as readers in English is still not large enough to draw general conclusions. All we can say is that in this volume you will find both synergy with and divergence from 1960s and 1970s Anglo SF that adds immeasurable value to the conversation about science fiction.
Cyberpunk, Humanism, and What Lay Beyond
The New Wave and the rise of feminist SF would always be a difficult epoch to follow because such giants strode the Earth and expressed themselves willfully and with intelligent intent during that era. But the two movements most associated with the 1980s and 1990s, cyberpunk and Humanism, would in their own ways be both quietly and not-so-quietly influential.
Cyberpunk as a term was popularized by editor Gardner Dozois, although first coined by Bruce Bethke in 1980 in his story “Cyberpunk,” subsequently published in a 1983 issue of Amazing Stories. Bruce Sterling then became the main architect of a blueprint for cyberpunk with his columns in his fanzine Cheap Truth. William Gibson’s stories appearing in Omni in the mid-1980s, including “Burning Chrome” and “New Rose Hotel” (reprinted herein), and his novel Neuromancer (1984) fixed the term in readers’ imaginations. The Sterling-edited Mirrorshades anthology (1986) provided a flagship.
Cyberpunk usually fused noir tropes or interior design with dark tales of near-future technology in a context of weak governments and sinister corporations, achieving a new granularity in conveying elements of the Information Age. Trace elements of the recent punk movement in music were brought to the mix by writers such as John Shirley.
Just as some New Wave and feminist SF authors, like Delany and Tiptree, had tried to portray a “realer” realism relative to traditional Golden Age science fiction elements or tropes, cyberpunk often tried to better show advances in computer technology and could be seen as naturally extending a Philip K. Dickian vision of the future, with themes of paranoia and vast conspiracies. The brilliant John Brunner’s The Shockwave Rider (1975) is sometimes also mentioned as a predecessor. (The Humanist equivalent would be Brunner’s Stand on Zanzibar.)
Writers such as Rudy Rucker, Marc Laidlaw, Lewis Shiner, and Pat Cadigan published significant cyberpunk stories or novels, with Cadigan later editing The Ultimate Cyberpunk (2002), which contextualized cyberpunk within earlier influences (not always successfully) and also showcased post-cyberpunk works.
“Humanist SF” at times seemed to just be a call for three-dimensional characters in science fiction, with feminism added on top, sometimes with an emphasis on the so-called soft sciences, such as sociology. But Carol McGuirk makes an interesting point in an essay in Fiction 2000 (1992) when she notes that the “soft science fiction” that predominated in the 1950s (remember MacLean?) strongly influenced the New Wave, cyberpunk, and Humanist SF, which she claims all arose, in part, out of this impulse. The difference is that whereas New Wave and cyberpunk fiction arose out of a starker, darker impulse (including the contes cruels) replete with dystopian settings, Humanist SF grew out of another strand in which human beings are front and center, with technology subservient, optimistically, to a human element. (Brothers and sisters often fight, and that seems to be the case here.)
Practitioners of Humanist SF (sometimes also identified as Slipstream — ironically enough, a term coined by Sterling) include James Patrick Kelly, Kim Stanley Robinson, John Kessel, Michael Bishop (a stalwart hybrid who at times partook of the New Wave), and Nancy Kress, with Karen Joy Fowler’s work exhibiting some of the same attributes but too various to be pigeonholed or in any sense to be said to have done anything but flown the coop into rarefied and iconic realms. (The gonzo fringe of the impulse was best expressed by Paul Di Filippo, who would go so far as to pose naked for one book cover.)
Humanism was initially seen as in opposition to cyberpunk, but in fact both factions “grew up” rather quickly and produced unique work that defied labels. Perhaps the most interesting aspect of the perceived conflict was that cyberpunk seemed to revel in its science fiction origins without particularly caring what the mainstream thought, perhaps because they had access to a wider audience through pop culture; see: Wired magazine. Humanists on the other hand generally identified with core genre but wanted to reach beyond it to mainstream readers and convince them of science fiction’s literary worth. Interestingly enough, the cause of Humanist SF would be championed either directly or indirectly by the legendary Damon Knight and Kate Wilhelm, whose Clarion and Sycamore Hill (for more advanced writers) writers’ workshops tended to be of most use for those kinds of writers.
Critics of both “movements” argued that cyberpunk and Humanism were retrenchments or conservative acts after the radicalism of the New Wave of the 1960s and the rise of feminist SF in the 1970s — cyberpunk because it fetishized technology and deemphasized the role of governments even while critical of corporations. Readers from within the computer industry pointed to Gibson’s lack of knowledge about hacker culture in writing Neuromancer and suggested flaws in his vision were created by this lack. A fair amount of cyberpunk also promoted a more traditional idea of gender roles (imported from noir fiction) while providing less space for women authors.
Yet around the same time in Argentina Angélica Gorodischer was publishing such incendiary feminist material as “The Unmistakable Smell of Wood Violets” (1985), and in the US one sui generis writer whose work pushed back against some of these ideas was Misha Nogha, whose Arthur C. Clarke Award finalist Red Spider White Web (1990; excerpted herein) portrays a nightmarish future in which artists are commodified but also exist in life-threatening conditions. Technology is definitely not fetishized and the hierarchies of power eventuate from every direction. The novel also features a unique and strong female main character who defies the gender stereotypes of the time. In this sense, Nogha’s groundbreaking novel pointed the way toward a more feminist vision of cyberpunk.
The criticism leveled against Humanism, meanwhile, was that it gentrified both the New Wave and feminist impulses by applying middle-of-the-road and middle-class values. (The more radicalized third-wave feminism science fiction of the current era fits more comfortably with New Wave and 1970s feminism despite not always being quite as experimental.) Yet, whatever the truth, what actually happened is that the best Humanist writers matured and evolved over time or had only happened to be passing through on their way to someplace else.
Arguably the most influential science fiction writers to come out of the 1980s and 1990s were Octavia Butler, Kim Stanley Robinson, William Gibson, Bruce Sterling, and Ted Chiang. In far different ways they would change the landscape of popular culture and how readers thought about technology, race, gender, and the environment. Ted Chiang’s influence exists mainly within the genre, but this may change due to forthcoming movie adaptations of his work. Karen Joy Fowler would begin to exert a similar influence via her nonspeculative novels like We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves (2013), which deals with the issue of animal intelligence and our relationship to that intelligence.
Fowler’s example provides some inkling of how such prominence occurs: by having ideas or fiction that breaks out beyond core genre. Although Gibson and Sterling could be said to have founded cyberpunk, for example, it is their writings, both fiction and nonfiction, beyond the initial cyberpunk era that have the most relevance, as they have broadened and sharpened their interrogations of modern society and the technology age.
Butler has undergone a resurgence in popularity and influence because her themes resonate with a new generation of writers and readers who value diversity and who are interested in postcolonial explorations of race, gender, and social issues. (And because she wrote wonderful, unique, complex science fiction unlike anyone in the field.) It is only Robinson who has achieved breakout influence and status while writing from within genre, forcing readers to come to him with a series of groundbreaking science fiction novels that are often referenced in the context of climate change. (Only Paolo Bacigalupi has come to close to being as influential since.)
However, cyberpunk and Humanism were not the only significant impulses in science fiction during this period. Other types of inquiry existed outside of the Anglo world during this period and extending into the twenty-first century. For example, a significant window for Chinese science fiction in the early 1980s (closed shut by regime change) gave readers such interesting stories as “The Mirror Image of the Earth” by Zheng Wenguang and others collected in Science Fiction from China, edited by Dingbo Wu and Patrick D. Murphy (1989; with an introduction by the indefatigable Frederik Pohl). Other remarkable Chinese writers, like Han Song, created enduring fiction that either had no real Western antecedent or “cooked” it into something unique — and eventually Liu Cixin would break through with the Hugo Award–winning novel The Three-Body Problem (2014), both a critical and a commercial success. His novella “The Poetry Cloud” (1997), included in this volume, is a stunning tour de force that assimilates many different strands of science fiction and, in a joyful and energetic way, rejuvenates them.. It in effect renders much of contemporary science fiction obsolete.
In Finland, Leena Krohn, one of her country’s most respected and decorated fiction writers, spent the 1980s and 1990s (and up to the present day) creating a series of fascinating speculative works, including Tainaron (1985), Pereat Mundus (1998), and Mathematical Creatures, or Shared Dreams (1992), from which we have reprinted “Gorgonoids.” Johanna Sinisalo has also been a creative powerhouse, and her Nebula Award finalist “Baby Doll” is included herein. Other fascinating Finnish writers include Anne Leinonen, Tiina Raevaara, Hannu Rajaniemi, Viivi Hyvönen, and Pasi Ilmari Jääskeläinen.
Other science fiction in the wider world includes Kojo Laing’s “Vacancy for the Post of Jesus Christ” (1992), which is not an outlier for this speculative fiction writer from Ghana, and Tatyana Tolstaya’s “The Slynx.” Both are highly original and not atypical examples of a growing number of fascinating voices from places outside of the Anglo hegemony.
Although not always thought of in a science fiction context so much as a dystopia one (The Handmaid’s Tale), Canadian Margaret Atwood contributed to the conversation with her MaddAddam Trilogy (2003–2013), which still holds up today as perhaps the single most significant and useful exploration of near-future ecological catastrophe and renewal. The significance of these novels in terms of mainstream acceptance of science fiction cannot be understated. Although science fiction had already conquered popular culture, without Atwood’s example the current trend of science fiction being published by mainstream literary imprints would be unlikely. This type of positioning also helps gain a wider, more varied readership for science fiction generally and accelerates the cultural influence of this kind of fiction.
The growing diversity in the twenty-first century of the science fiction community, combined with the influx of international science fiction and the growing acceptance of science fiction within the mainstream literary world, promises to create a dynamic, vibrant, and cosmopolitan space for science fiction literature in the decades to come.
Organizing Principles for This Anthology
In compiling The Big Book of Science Fiction, we have thought carefully about what it means to present to the reader a century’s worth of short stories, from roughly 1900 to 2000, with some outliers. Our approach has been to think of this anthology as providing a space to be representative and accurate but also revelatory — to balance showcasing core genre fiction with a desire to show not just outliers, but “outliers” that we actually feel are more central to science fiction than previously thought. It has also seemed imperative to bring international fiction into the fold; without that element, any survey of an impulse or genre of fiction will seem narrow, more provincial and less cosmopolitan.
Particular guidelines or thought processes include:
• Avoiding the Great Certainty (interrogate the classics/canon)
• Meticulous testing of previous anthologies of this type
• Identifying and rejecting pastiche previously presented as canon
• Overthrowing the tyranny of typecasting (include writers not known for their science fiction but who wrote superb science fiction stories)
• Repairing the pointless rift (pay no attention to the genre versus literary origins of a story)
• Repatriating the fringe with the core (acknowledge the role of cult authors and more experimental texts)
• Crafting more complete genealogies (acknowledge the debt from surrealism and other sources outside of core genre)
• Articulating the full expanse (as noted, explore permutations of science fiction from outside of the Anglo world, making works visible through translation)
We also have wanted to represent as many different types of science fiction as possible, including hard science fiction, soft (social) science fiction, space opera, alternative history, apocalyptic stories, tales of alien encounters, near-future dystopia, satirical stories, and a host of other modes.
Within this general context, we have been less concerned about making sure to include certain authors than we have about trying to give accurate overviews of certain eras, impulses, and movements. For this reason, most readers will no doubt discover a favorite story or author has been omitted . . . but also come across new discoveries and new favorites previously unknown to them.
We have also weighed historical significance against readability in the modern era, with the guiding principle that most people picking up this anthology will be general readers, not academics. For this reason, too, we have endeavored to include humorous stories, which are a rich and deep part of the science fiction tradition and help to balance out the preponderance of dystopias depicted in many of the serious stories. Joke stories, on the other hand, and most twist stories have been omitted as too self-referential, especially stories that rely too heavily on referring to science fiction fandom or core genre.
Because ecological and environmental issues have become increasingly urgent, if given the choice of two equally good stories by the same author, we have also chosen to favor stories featuring those themes. (For example, our selection from Ursula K. Le Guin.) One regret is not being able to include fiction by John Brunner, Frank Herbert, and other giants in the field whose novels are arguably much more robust and vital on this topic than their short fiction.
In considering the broadness of our definition of science fiction, we have had to set limits. Most steampunk seems to us to have more in common with fantasy than science fiction, and stories of the very far future in which science is indistinguishable from magic also seem to us to belong to the fantastical. For this latter reason, Jack Vance’s Dying Earth stories and M. John Harrison’s Viriconium stories, and their ilk, will fall within the remit of a future anthology.
In considering international fiction we have chosen (after hard-won prior experience) to take the path of least resistance. For example, we had more access to and better intel about Soviet-era and certain strands of Latin American science fiction than some other traditions. It therefore seemed more valuable to present relatively complete “through-lines” of those traditions than to try to provide one representative story for as many countries as possible. In addition, given our access to international fiction and a choice between equally good stories (often with similar themes) set in a particular country, one by an author from that country and one by an author from the US or UK, we have chosen to use the story by the author from the country in question.
With regard to translations, we followed two rules: to be fearless about including stories not previously published in English (if deemed of high quality) and to retranslate stories already translated into English if the existing translation was more than twenty-five years old or if we believed the existing translation contained errors.
The new translations (works never before published in English) included in this anthology are Paul Scheerbart’s “The New Overworld” (1907), Hanz Strobel’s “The Triumph of Mechanics” (1907), Yefim Zozulya’s “Doom of Principal City” (1918), Silvina Ocampo’s “The Waves” (1959), Angélica Gorodischer’s “The Unmistakable Smell of Wood Violets” (1985), Jacques Barbéri’s “Mondocane” (1983), and Han Song’s “Two Small Birds” (1988).
The retranslated stories are Miguel de Unamuno’s “Mechanopolis” (1913), Juan José Arreola’s “Baby H.P.” (1952), Arkady and Boris Strugatsky’s “The Visitors” (1958), Valentina Zhuravlyova’s “The Astronaut” (1960), Adolfo Bioy Casares’s “The Squid Chooses Its Own Ink” (1962), Sever Gansovsky’s “Day of Wrath” (1965), and Dmitri Bilenkin’s “Where Two Paths Cross” (1973).
In contextualizing all of this material we realized that no introduction could truly convey the depth and breadth of a century of science fiction. For this reason, we made the strategic decision to include expanded author notes, which also include information on each story. These notes sometimes convey biographical data and in other cases form miniature essays to provide general context. Sometimes these notes quote other writers or critics to provide firsthand recollections. In researching these author notes, we are very fortunate to have had access, in a synergistic way, to the best existing source about certain writers, The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction — with the blessing of its founders, John Clute, Peter Nicholls, and David Langford. Entries containing information from the encyclopedia as their nucleus are noted in the permissions acknowledgments (pages 000–000).
Finally, as ever, certain stories could not be acquired for this anthology — or for anyone’s anthology due to the stance of the estates in question. The following stories should be considered an extension of this anthology: A. E. van Vogt’s “The Weapon Shop” (1942), Robert Heinlein’s “All You Zombies — ” (1959), and Bob Shaw’s “Light of Other Days” (1966). In addition, for reasons of space we have been unable to include E. M. Forster’s “The Machine Stops” (1909), an excerpt from Gustave Le Rouge’s strange novel about a mission to a Mars inhabited by vampires (1909), and an excerpt from Doris Lessing’s 1970s science fiction novels.
If we have brought any particular value to the task of editing this anthology — and we will let others debate that question — it lies in three areas: 1) we love all kinds of fiction, in all of its many forms, and all kinds of science fiction; 2) we have built up an extensive (and still-growing) network of international literary contacts that allowed us to acquire unique content; and 3) we did not approach the task from the center of genre, which is where most editors of these kinds of anthologies have come from. We belong to no clique or group within the science fiction community and have no particular affiliation with nor disinclination to consider any writer in the field, living or dead.
That said, we are also not coming to the task from the sometimes too elevated height of mainstream literary editors with no connection to their speculative subject matter. We do not care about making a case for the legitimacy of science fiction; the ignorance of those who don’t value science fiction is their own affliction and problem (as is the ignorance of those who claim science fiction is the be-all and end-all).
Throughout our three-year journey of discovery for this project, we have also had to reconcile ourselves to what we call Regret Over Taxonomy (exclusion is inevitable but not a cause for relief or happiness) and Acknowledgment of the Inherent Imperfection of the Results. However, the corollary to this latter recognition is to never accept or resign oneself to the inherent imperfection of the results.
Now we hope you will put aside this overlong introduction and simply immerse yourself in the science-fictional wonders here assembled. For they are many, and they are indeed wondrous and startling and, at times, darkly beautiful.
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wrong_mix_random_publicationDate_00046
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FactBench
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0
| 12
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https://www.ebay.com/itm/302517244474
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en
|
Dangerous Visions (S.F. MASTERWORKS) Book The Fast Free Shipping 9780575108028
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Book Binding:Paperback / softback. Publisher:Orion Publishing Co. All of our paper waste is recycled within the UK and turned into corrugated cardboard. World of Books USA was founded in 2005. Book Condition:VERYGOOD.
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en
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eBay
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https://www.ebay.com/itm/302517244474
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Will ship within 7 business days of receiving cleared payment. The seller has specified an extended handling time for this item.Accepted within 30 days if sent through eBay International ShippingMoney BackBuyer pays for return shipping
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wrong_mix_random_publicationDate_00046
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FactBench
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3
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https://locusmag.com/2021/10/alvaro-zinos-amaro-reviews-dangerous-visions-and-new-worlds-radical-science-fiction-1950-to-1985-by-andrew-nette-iain-mcintyre-eds/
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en
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Alvaro Zinos-Amaro Reviews Dangerous Visions and New Worlds: Radical Science Fiction, 1950 to 1985 by Andrew Nette & Iain McIntyre, eds
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2021-10-13T15:30:40+00:00
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The magazine of the science fiction, fantasy, and horror field with news, reviews, and author interviews
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en
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Locus Online
|
https://locusmag.com/2021/10/alvaro-zinos-amaro-reviews-dangerous-visions-and-new-worlds-radical-science-fiction-1950-to-1985-by-andrew-nette-iain-mcintyre-eds/
|
Dangerous Visions and New Worlds: Radical Science Fiction, 1950 to 1985, Andrew Nette & Iain McIntyre, eds. (PM Press 978-1629639321, $59.95, 224pp, hc) October 2021.
The Melbourne-based duo of writers/editors Andrew Nette & Iain McIntyre follow up their two previous PM Press volumes, Girl Gangs, Biker Boys, and Real Cool Cats: Pulp Fiction and Youth Culture, 1950 to 1980 (2017) and Sticking It to the Man: Revolution and Counterculture in Pulp and Popular Fiction, 1950 to 1980 (2019), with a brand-new tome on ‘‘radical science fiction’’ published mostly during what, in their Introduction, they term the ‘‘long sixties,’’ a period stretching from the late 1950s through the 1970s. Readers conversant with genre history will be familiar with the salient movement of this period, called the New Wave, and the forms of expression it helped to usher into the genre, both in terms of content and modernist techniques, but even those readers should find plenty of value here. Nette & McIntyre’s approach parallels the editorial directive of Desirina Boskovich’s recent Lost Transmissions: The Secret History of Science Fiction and Fantasy (2019): a collection of subject-specific essays by a variety of writers and scholars, with additional interstitial entries contributed by the editors themselves. In their Introduction they mention ‘‘twenty-four chapters written by contemporary authors and critics.’’ By my reckoning, in addition to the Introduction the book contains 37 chapters, of which 20 are authored externally and 17 – eight by Nette and nine by McIntyre – are sourced in-house. All of this content, centered sometimes overtly and sometimes peripherally around the aforementioned ‘‘period of trenchant social change,’’ is interesting, and much of it is surely new to this kind of pop culture archival history. The editors’ purview is generously scoped, and the detailed treatment of UK phenomena and trends is refreshing. The editors note that ‘‘the influence of psychedelia, surrealism, and experimentation in general on book cover art during the period can arguably be seen most strongly in the science fiction field,’’ and they have included hundreds of illustrative covers that eloquently make that point. Turning to any random page proves a delicious exercise of artistic degustation, making the book double as coffee-table divertissement.
Nette & McIntyre observe that their chosen period was ‘‘most explicitly demonstrated through a host of liberatory and resistance movements focused on class, racial, gender, sexual, and other inequalities,’’ and these provide clustering themes for their material. Treatments of sex include two of my favorite essays, Rob Latham’s learned ‘‘Sextrapolation in New Wave Science Fiction’’ (a reprint) and Rebecca Baumann’s fantastic ‘‘Speculative Fuckbooks: The Brief Life of Essex House, 1968–1969’’. Latham’s piece provides an excellent list of 1950s short stories ‘‘published in the magazines that dealt explicitly with sexual topics the genre had long ignored.’’ He then proceeds to discuss ‘‘three significant, at times overlapping, ways in which SF’s new sexual openness was expressed during the late 1960s and early 1970s,’’ namely a ‘‘feminist critique of normative gender roles and sexual relationships,’’ ‘‘the proliferation of various forms of SF pornography,’’ and ‘‘non-pornographic forms of ‘sextrapolation’: projecting future trends based on current sexual mores or inventing novel sexual practices and relationships.’’ Baumann’s entry, which beautifully chronicles Milton Luros and Brian Kirby’s Essex House, expounds on the publisher’s most interesting and outré titles, such as the Agency trilogy and Brain-Plant tetralogy by David Meltzer, reflecting that they exemplify the Speculative Fuckbook subgenre: ‘‘cynical yet earnest, darkly humorous but deeply unsettling, excruciatingly pretentious yet not without charm and even moments of whimsy.’’ Also noteworthy is Baumann’s discussion of women authors, such as Alice Louise Ramirez, and ‘‘perhaps the most interesting woman writing for Essex House…. Jean Marie Stine, a transgender woman who was at the time still writing under the name Hank Stine, a variant of her then legal name.’’ Baumann concludes that ‘‘no other publisher has blended literary pretension, social criticism, pornography, and speculation in quite the same way.’’ Maitland McDonagh’s ‘‘The Stars My Destination: The Future According to Gay Adult Science Fiction Novels of the 1970s’’, Kirsten Bussière’s ‘‘Feminist Future: Time Travel in Marge Piercy’s Woman on the Edge of Time’’, and McIntyre’s closing ‘‘Herland: The Women’s Press and Science Fiction’’ provide additional insights into literary matters of sex and gender.
Race is foregrounded in several pieces, like McIntyre’s ‘‘Flying Saucers and Black Power: Joseph Denis Jackson’s 1967 Insurrectionist Novel The Black Commandos’’ and another highlight, Michael A. Gonzales’ ‘‘Black Star: The Life and Work of Octavia Butler.’’ I was personally tickled to discover Daniel Shank Cruz’s ‘‘‘We change – and the whole world changes’: Samuel R. Delany’s Heavenly Breakfast in Context’’, because I feel that Delany’s magnificent short memoir is sometimes overlooked in discussions of his oeuvre and should be singled out for recognition, as it is here. ‘‘Delany repeatedly highlights the potential of communes for changing society,’’ Cruz writes, ‘‘while also lamenting the lack of language available for describing communal experience.’’ This search for new ways of conveying seemingly incommunicable experiences, often of the religious or drug-induced varieties – see McIntyre’s ‘‘Flawed Ancients, New Gods, and Interstellar Missionaries: Religion in Postwar SF’’ and ‘‘Higher than a Rocket Ship: Drugs in SF’’ – led many genre writers of the day to emulate strategies from ‘‘modernist prose and poetry, William S. Burroughs and the Beats, New Journalism,’’ among others.
The book’s eponymous twin inspirations, Harlan Ellison’s epoch-defining anthology Dangerous Visions and Michael Moorcock’s revolutionary editorial reign at New Worlds, are afforded their own dedicated pieces, and though this is well-trodden ground, the recaps are nonetheless engaging and capture how much was felt to be at stake with these enterprises. Other expected heavy-hitters of the era, like J.G. Ballard, Norman Spinrad, Brian Aldiss, Joanna Russ, Thomas M. Disch, James Tiptree Jr., Ursula K. Le Guin, and Moorcock (as writer rather than editor) also get their due. Author-centric entries include Kat Clay’s ‘‘On Earth the Air Is Free: The Feminist Science Fiction of Judith Merril’’, Nick Mamatas’s ‘‘God Does, Perhaps? The Unlikely New Wave SF of R.A. Lafferty’’, Scott Adlerberg’s ‘‘A New Wave in the East: The Strugatsky Brothers and Radical Sci-fi in Soviet Russia’’, and Lucy Sussex’s ‘‘Performative Gender and SF: The Strange but True Case of Alice Sheldon and James Tiptree, Jr.’’. But there’s also coverage of writers less often discussed in the same context, like Hank Lopez, Barry Malzberg, Louise Lawrence, Ira Levin, Mack Reynolds, and Mick Farren (impressively, ‘‘Mick Faren: Fomenting the Rock Apocalypse’’, includes first-person exchanges between the subject and author Mike Stax).
No single volume can ever do justice to the froth and fervor of the New Wave and the many societal uprisings and destabilizations it reflected, but this is an excellent primer that differentiates itself from other treatises through its many-voiced perspectives and its gorgeous accompanying artwork. It’s nice to see Colin Greenland’s The Entropy Exhibition (1983), a book worth seeking out, referenced in these pages. Readers who want to go deeper, following a more traditionally academic route, may also enjoy Andrew M. Butler’s Solar Flares: Science Fiction in the 1970s (2012). But you’re still bound to learn new things from the work at hand. To name one, I’d never heard of William Bloom’s Qhe! series before opening the covers of this volume. As with any such collection, not every angle will be of equal interest to every observer; there are occasional repetitions, and moments of occasional stylistic dissonance. The date captions for the chosen cover art reference the specific editions shown, rather than those books’ first editions, which can be unintentionally misleading in the case of reprints, though admittedly it’s fun when different covers of the same title are juxtaposed.
Part of the glory of the New Wave, and its often-overlooked continuities with what preceded and succeeded it, is its messiness, its incursion into genres adjacent to SF, the thrall of its giddy, invigorating sprawl. In response to Thoreau’s ‘‘Simplify, simplify,’’ the New Wave might have cawed, ‘‘Electrify, electrify.’’ Dangerous Visions and New Worlds examines our genre during one of its most effervescent and vibrant periods. Adam Groves, in the context of the period’s surge of ‘‘weird erotica,’’ has written of an ‘‘imaginative fecundity that by today’s standards would be deemed politically incorrect.’’ That observation could apply to much New Wave fiction on the whole. The New Wave may have consciously styled itself as a disjuncture from Old Guard sensibilities, but as this volume illustrates, in so doing it unleashed a bevy of energies that still resist simple categorization and pre-emptively offended our own sensibilities. Nette & McIntyre aptly note in the Introduction that ‘‘while broader society has significantly changed and moral attitudes shifted, many of the social issues addressed by New Wave authors either remain or have been intensified, giving this body of work a continuing relevance.’’ As a teenager, I cut my teeth on New Wave science fiction. Though some critics and commentators have suggested that the New Wave had more bark than bite, Dangerous Visions and New Worlds makes it clear that this period of ferment and upthrust still offers plenty to chew on.
Alvaro Zinos-Amaro, Roundtable Editor, is co-author of a book of interviews with Robert Silverberg, Traveler of Worlds, that was a Hugo and Locus Award finalist in 2017. Alvaro’s more than 30 stories and 100 reviews, essays and interviews have appeared in magazines like Clarkesworld, Asimov’s, Apex, Analog, Lightspeed, Nature, Strange Horizons, Beneath Ceaseless Skies, Galaxy’s Edge, Lackington’s, and anthologies such as The Year’s Best Science Fiction & Fantasy 2016, Cyber World, Humanity 2.0, and This Way to the End Times.
This review and more like it in the September 2021 issue of Locus.
While you are here, please take a moment to support Locus with a one-time or recurring donation. We rely on reader donations to keep the magazine and site going, and would like to keep the site paywall free, but WE NEED YOUR FINANCIAL SUPPORT to continue quality coverage of the science fiction and fantasy field.
©Locus Magazine. Copyrighted material may not be republished without permission of LSFF.
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wrong_mix_random_publicationDate_00046
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FactBench
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0
| 45
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https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/welcome-interzone-william-s-burroughss-centennial
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en
|
Welcome to Interzone: On William S. Burroughs' Centennial
|
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2014-01-31T19:00:55+00:00
|
/icons/favicon/favicon.ico
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Los Angeles Review of Books
|
https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/welcome-interzone-william-s-burroughss-centennial
|
Gilt and red plush. Rococo bar backed by pink shell. The air is cloyed with a sweet evil substance like decayed honey. Men and women in evening dress sip pousse-cafés through alabaster tubes. A Near East Mugwump sit naked on a bar stool covered in pink silk. He licks warm honey from a crystal goblet with a long black tongue. His genitals are perfectly formed — circumcised cock, black shiny pubic hairs. His lips are thin and purple-blue like the lips of a penis, his eyes blank with insect calm.
— William S. Burroughs, Naked Lunch
THE RECENT PASSING of Lou Reed resurrected the old quip by Brian Eno about the Velvet Underground — that hardly anyone bought their records, but everyone who did became a musician. William S. Burroughs, born 100 years ago today, may well be the Velvet Underground of American literature. A writer of vivid, hallucinatory prose works swimming with drug use, queer sex, and sci-fi viscera, Burroughs has always been an author whose name is dropped more often than his books are picked up. Still, in the second half of the 20th century, few figures had such a pervasive effect in virtually every field of culture from the most rarified avant-garde to the massively popular.
Writers stamped with his influence include J.G. Ballard, Angela Carter, Kathy Acker, Alan Moore, Lester Bangs, Dennis Cooper, and William Gibson, but his impact extends far beyond the literary. Burroughs collaborated with the painter Brion Gysin in Paris and London in the 1950s and 1960s, and in the 1980s embarked on his own painting career (the sneers of the art establishment deterred his painting roughly as much as the sneers of the literary establishment had deterred his writing; like the innumerable cultural icons devoted to his work, Burroughs was not the type to be impressed by the fussy incomprehension of the New Yorker set). With Robert Wilson and Tom Waits, he created the musical The Black Rider. His writing is a regular touchstone for the French philosopher Gilles Deleuze, especially in his collaborations with Felix Guattari. His works include two experimental films co-directed with Antony Blach in the early ‘60s, and it’s hard to imagine the visceral visual language of filmmakers like David Cronenberg without Burroughs’ splattery corporeal imaginary; in 1991 Cronenberg attempted a bold cinematic adaptation of Naked Lunch, with the author’s blessing. Almost as remarkable as his literary influence is his lasting impact on popular and experimental music. During his life, he collaborated with or was referenced by Sonic Youth, Throbbing Gristle, Cabaret Voltaire, Coil, Joy Division, Laurie Anderson, R.E.M., Blondie’s Chris Stein, and Ministry, as well as, suitably, Lou Reed and John Cale of the Velvet Underground. Steely Dan are named after a remarkable dildo from Yokohama that features in one of the most explicit sections of Naked Lunch. The term “heavy metal music” is taken from that book, too. The Soft Machine was a Burroughs novel before it was a British band. The “Johnny” in Patti Smith’s “Land”? That’s a reference to Burroughs’ Wild Boys. And Burroughs’ last filmed appearance was in the video for U2’s “Last Night on Earth.”
In the range of his influence no less than in the idiosyncratic uniqueness of his creative production, Burroughs stands less with the Beats or the postmodernists than with the restless, endless production of Andy Warhol. The bitter irony with which Burroughs’ satiric eye surveyed the emergence of post-WWII consumer and media culture is the inverted complement to Warhol’s gushingly enthusiastic embrace of the same raw materials. In Burroughs as in Warhol, a distance in time allows us to see the relentless exploratory drift between modes and media as a prototype for contemporary creativity, the artist not as auteur but as signature, as a distinctive style that is its own substance, gaining coherence not in the unity of its form but in the consistency of its attitude. Biographies of Burroughs often speak of his explorations in mixed media during the late 1960s and early 1970s, noting that he “only produced one major novel” in this third phase of his career (The Wild Boys, 1971). Likewise, biographers of Warhol tend to note that during the later 1960s the artist produced hardly any paintings, turning his attention to film “instead.” Though referred to as a novelist, Burroughs left behind a noteworthy archive of audio, video, and visual artistic collaborations, and his influence extends across all of these fields and beyond. “Most serious writers,” he told the Paris Review’s Conrad Knickerbocker in 1965, “refuse to make themselves available to the things that technology is doing. I’ve never been able to understand that sort of fear.”
I often wonder what a Complete Works of William Burroughs would look like; it’s hard to think of a “novelist” prior to Burroughs whose complete works would feel incomplete without both audio and video appendices (consider for example The Revised Boy Scout Manual, a novel in the form of three 60-minute audio cassettes dating to the 1970s). As we edge into the 21st century, Burroughs’ multimedia explorations seem less a digression and more a prescient openness to the aesthetic possibilities of emerging modes of communication and documentation. “I think,” Burroughs told Daniel Odier in the 1960s, “that the novelistic form is probably outmoded and that we may look forward perhaps to a future in which people do not read at all or read only illustrated book and magazines or some abbreviated form of reading matter.”
Canonized alternately between the incantatory honesty of the Beat Generation and the weighty formal innovations of mid-20th-century American postmodernism, Burroughs belongs properly to neither literary moment. Neither association does justice to the formal distinctiveness of his oevure. Burroughs is, rather, an untimely prophet of cultural production as we have come to know it: constant, but inconsistent; intimate but de-personalized; sprawling across media and emerging clearly from a single distinct person without any commitment to the inherent integrity of an authentic personality.
A consummate icon of writerly solitude, Burroughs retained a persistently Groucho-Marxist resistance to being part of any movement that would embrace him (“I am not punk and I don’t know why anybody would consider me the Godfather of Punk. How do you define punk?”) But his aloofness is not the self-conscious aestheticism of a Pynchon or a Barth, whose postmodernism attempts to stake a place for the author’s voice outside his own writing. Burroughs stands apart from the world, not because he is above it, but because he is Over It. Burroughs may have invented Being Over It: even Sade’s most deliberately vile narrators masturbate while they speak, but Burroughs’ narrative voice sits in the corner and watches skeptically as younger men ejaculate. The real thrill of reading Burroughs comes not from the parade of grotesqueries that he relates but from the wry aloofness with which he relates them; everything is a routine, a cliché avant la lettre. “Did I ever tell you about the man who taught his asshole to talk?” Look at virtually any picture of the man — decades before McKayla, William S. Burroughs was resolutely Not Impressed.
The radical weirdness of Burroughs’ works is neither a deliberate provocation nor an artistic statement. It emerges directly from his irreducibly distinct vision of the world. “There is only one thing a writer can write about,” he states at the end of Naked Lunch, “what is in front of his senses at the moment of writing … I am a recording instrument … I do not presume to impose ‘story’ ‘plot’ ‘continuity’ … Insofaras I succeed in Direct recording of certain areas of psychic processes I may have a limited function … I am not an entertainer.” His goal was never stylistic. Burroughs understood his own labor as documentary, not aesthetic, and as with other writers whose writings express an irreducibly unique vision of the world — Sade, Nietzsche, Kafka — part of the mindfuck is a slowly creeping realization, as you keep reading, that you’re no longer sure which one of you is crazy.
Born in St. Louis in 1914, Burroughs was the grandson and namesake of William S. Burroughs, inventor of the Burroughs Adding Machine and founder of the Burroughs Corporation. By the time the author reached adulthood, the family had sold its interest in the company and the money was mostly gone, but a modest trust fund was Burroughs’ primary source of income for much of his life. His genteel Southern upbringing was evident to the end of his life, in a refined politeness that leavened even his most profane observations no less than in a persistent love of firearms. (Ted Morgan’s Literary Outlaw has been the definitive biography of Burroughs for years; I have not yet had the opportunity to read Barry Miles’ recent Call Me Burroughs).
In New York City, in the 1940s, he first encountered the group that would later be known as the Beats Ginsberg, in a 1976 interview with Victor Bockris, credits Burroughs with planting the first seeds of ideological restlessness in the poet’s young mind: “The thing I remember most that changed my 1940s mind and determined my own attitude was sitting around with Burroughs and his wife, Joan […] It was the first time I’d ever heard anyone presume to criticize the president of the United States on account of his mind; in those days it wasn’t done.” He soon moved on, first to New Orleans, then to Texas, and from there to Mexico City. But by the time he left New York he had acquired his addiction to opiates, which would trail him the rest of his life and take such a central place in his writing.
His first published work was the semi-autobiographical Junkie, written under the pseudonym William Lee and published as a two-book pulp in 1953; he followed it with a manuscript called Queer that remained unpublished until 1985. These two early texts established the graphic frankness about drug use and homosexuality for which Burroughs would quickly become notorious. Folded into what became Burroughs’ Word Hoard, entire passages from these texts were recycled for later works. “William Lee,” meanwhile, would serve as the author’s adult stand-in for the rest of his career, appearing in some form in almost all his works, along with a character usually named Kim, who stood for Burroughs’ sex-driven adolescence.
It was in Mexico City that a drunken accident with one of his numerous guns resulted in Joan’s death; most versions of the story report that the Burroughses were “playing William Tell” when he missed the glass on her head and shot Joan to death, instead. Family connections and judicious bribery kept him out of jail, but Joan’s death initiated two habits that effectively created William S. Burroughs, the author: a restless international exile, from Central and South America, to Tangiers and then to Paris and London, and the relentless, non-linear written production that would eventually encompass thousands of pages of material, sketches and collages and cut-ups and unfinished manuscripts, a suitcase full of raw words that Burroughs called the Word Hoard, which would become the source material for much of Burroughs’ published work. His books were assembled more than they were composed. Out of the Word Hoard, Allen Ginsberg constructed the non-linear prose machine that would be published as Naked Lunch.
Burroughs’ best-known novel is a wild ride, a disjointed trip that begins in Washington Square but soon shifts to the city of Interzone, a surreal pastiche of mid-century Tangiers in which obscure commercial interests and radical political entities with unclear agendas via for power for no discernable purpose other than to possess it. The ethos is simple – “Nothing is true, everything is permitted.” The text is composed of episodes that can be read in any order. In a letter to Ginsberg of September 20th, 1957, he writes that “The MS. In present form does not hold together as a novel for the simple reason that it is not a novel. It is a number of connected — by theme — but separate short pieces.” As Burroughs wrote at the end of the book in an “Atrophied Preface”:
The Word is divided into units which be all in one piece and should be so taken, but the pieces can be had in any order being tied up back and forth, in and out fore and aft like an innaresting sex arrangement. This book spill off the page in all directions, kaleidoscope of vistas, medley of tunes and street noises, farts and riot yipes and slamming steel shutters of commerce, screams of pain and pathos and screams plain pathic […] Now I, William Seward, will unlock my word horde.
The publication of Naked Lunch, and the attempts to censor it, first brought Burroughs national attention. In the winter of 1958–59, five of the Chicago Review’s editors left the magazine when their attempts to publish excerpts from novel met serious resistance. The complete novel was first published in Paris by the Olympia Press, in 1959, but it was the American publication by Grove Press in 1962 that led to a second, more significant wave of attention. The novel found vocal defenders in luminaries like Henry Miller and Mary McCarthy, the latter of whom published a staunch defense of the book in The New York Review while admitting that it wasn’t always entirely clear what Burroughs was up to.
An injunction against the novel issued by the Commonwealth of Massachusetts on grounds of obscenity, though, drew more attention than the book’s reviews. Several times deferred, the trial of “A book by the name of Naked Lunch” was finally held in 1965; among those testifying in court as to the work’s literary merit were Ginsberg and Norman Mailer. Mailer’s testimony especially maps both the aesthetic and the emotional force of Burroughs’ prose, and, like McCarthy, he locates the text’s power in the dry affective power of its satire:
What gives this vision a machine-gun-edged clarity is an utter lack of sentimentality […] it is the sort of humor which flourishes in prisons, in the Army, among junkies, race tracks and pool halls, a graffiti of cool, even livid wit, based on bodily functions and the frailties of the body, the slights, humiliations and tortures a body can undergo. It is a wild and deadly humor, as even and implacable as a sales tax […] Bitter as alkali, it pickles every serious subject in the caustic of the harshest experience; what is left untouched is as dry and silver as a bone. It is this sort of fine dry residue which is the emotional substance of Burroughs’ work for me.
This jaded constancy is the most remarkable aspect of Burroughs’ prose. His authorial voice emerges astoundingly complete in Naked Lunch, as do the central concerns that would dominate his work until his death. In an enthusiastic review in 1962, E.S. Seldon stated that Burroughs “is one contemporary writer who can drop dead tomorrow, confident not in promise, but in fulfillment.” The tone is not flat, but its crescendos correspond to the texture of the words, not to any element of plot or content. There is no passion, but there is genuine relish; once you’ve listened to Burroughs speak, it’s impossible to read his work without hearing an echo of his droll, drawling satisfaction. The paragraphs have a staccato rhythm that piles on clause after clause with relentless insistence, at once taut with energy and droningly detached:
In the City Market is the Meet Café. Followers of obsolete, unthinkable trades doodling in Etruscan, addicts of drugs not yet synthesized, pushers of souped-up Hermaline, junk reduced to pure habit offering precarious vegetable serenity, liquids to induce Latah, Tithonian longevity serums, black marketers of World War III, excisors of telepathic sensitivity, osteopaths of the spirit, investigators of infractions denounced by bland paranoid chess players, servers of fragmentary warrants taken down in hebephrenic shorthand charging unspeakable mutilations of the spirit.
The diction is an unlikely pastiche, the low-life lexicon of the addict and the criminal (“’Grassed on me he did,’ I say morosely”) filtered through the Harvard-educated sensibility of a reader of Eliot, rinsed through with a gleeful profanity. There is a wry, spare rhythm to Burroughs’ prose, consistent from his earliest letters to his very last diaries. Its closest reference point is Raymond Chandler, if Philip Marlowe were hired to investigate a cartel of protoplasmic, shapeshifting facists and was diverted by the orgiastic ministrations of perpetually ejaculating boys. Everything is draped in thick folds of drugs and sex. Heroin, cocaine, LSD, yage, mescaline — everything swims in a disjointed narcotic plasma. It’s hard to go more than a couple of pages without an erect cock impaling, spurting, glistening, or thrusting; like their creator, these wild boys love their guns. What makes the text so disturbing, though, is less the persistence of sexuality than the instability of the bodies that engage in it: “Some would be made of penis-like erectile tissue, others viscera barely covered over with skin, clusters of three and four eyes together, crisscross of mouth and assholes, human parts shaken around and poured out any way they fell.” A phallus becomes a tentacle mid-ejaculation; leafy vines spring from unpredictable orifices; the symbolic line between orgasm and death is impossibly thin. The fluid, visceral corporeality of Burroughs’ graphic imagery is a preemptive formulation of the anxious biological obsessions that would come to fruition in the work of David Cronenberg and Clive Barker: infection, virality, interpenetration, admixture.
This fervently graphic obscenity, the obsessive reiteration of the same gristly themes, has been the source of much criticism. In a harsh review of Cities of the Red Night (1981), Anthony Burgess, formerly a Burroughs drinking buddy, wrote:
I have read all of William Burroughs’s work with interest and, not infrequently, profound admiration. He is original […] Unfortunately, Burroughs’s cupboard of symbols is not well-stocked, and he becomes rather monotonous.
But the brilliance of this symbolic universe is precisely its endlessly permutating polyvalence. To say that he’s monotonous is, quite literally, to suggest that once you’ve experience your first orgasm you’ve experienced them all.
Repetition is not an accident here; recombination, not originality, is the motor of change. How many different chemicals can be synthesized, how many different orifices penetrated, many different bodies and materials combined in an endlessly proliferating Rube-Goldberg machine of techno-bio-matter? The essence of Burroughs’ works is iteration, the recognition that like consumer culture itself, sex and drugs are less about individual events than about organization of bodies and the flow of time between them, the emotional and psychic rhythm of buildup and discharge. The addict measures time in fixes and buys; hours are replaced by the space between shots and days are replaced by the gaps between twitching, itchy meetings with dealers: “A junky […] runs on junk Time and when he makes his importunate irruption into the Time of others, like all petitioners, he must wait. (How many coffees in an hour?).” A decade before the Velvet Underground’s “I’m Waiting For My Man” Burroughs noted that “Delay is a rule in the junk business. The Man is never on time. This is no accident.” In Burroughs, addiction is less a metaphor than an algorithm, relentlessly spinning out variations on the same operation with slightly varying inputs and outputs: “The pyramid of junk, one level eating the level below […] right up to the top or tops since there are many junk pyramids feeding on peoples of the world and all built on basic principles of monopoly.”
Burroughs’ output predicted the affective temporalities that social networks would make ubiquitous half a century after Naked Lunch appeared: a continuous stream of emissions less concerned with the definitiveness of any individual utterance than with the continued elaboration of a familiar presence. Either you want his ideas in your stream of consciousness, or you unfollow and hide his observations from your newsfeed. “Nothing here is more important than anything else,” stated Alfred Kazin about The Wild Boys (1971), but that is precisely the point.
This is not to say that Burroughs’ corpus lacks internal development or variety. In the early ‘60s, after he left Tangiers for Paris, Burroughs began his most resolutely experimental period, dominated by his concern with mechanisms of control, his interest in media and communication, and his increasingly developed theories of language. His most deliberate formal experiments, the Nova Trilogy (The Soft Machine, 1961; The Ticket That Exploded, 1962; and Nova Express, 1964), were created using two randomizing techniques, the Cut-Up and the Fold-In, developed with his frequent collaborator the painter Brion Gysin.
Naked Lunch is non-linear in form, but largely as an accident of the source material from which it was constructed: the sections of the book can be read in an arbitrary order, but retain, each within itself, a basic coherence that makes them more like vignettes or vaudeville sketches (“routines” was the word Burroughs himself most frequently used). In the experimental novels of his second phase, Burroughs strains not only against the integrity of the novelistic form but against the very coherence of words, against the enforced linearity not just of plot but of meaning itself. Signification and representation give way to intensity and texture: “Streets of idiot pleasure — obsidian palaces of the fish city, bubbles twisting slow linen to the floor, traced fossils of orgasm […] Smile of idiot death spasms — slow vegetable decay filmed his amber flesh — always there when the egg cracks and the white juice spurts from ruptured spines — From his mouth floated coal gas and violets.”
The restless experimentation of Burroughs’ prose, in this second period especially, is not a willful opaqueness but a relentless effort to explode the docile contempt bred by familiarity, the endlessly looping film that clouds our awareness of just how terrible things already are, the mechanisms of control that makes us feverish consumers seeking satiation rather than satisfaction. The “chief value” of Burroughs’ work, wrote the critic Ihab Hassan, “lies not in atomizing language but rather in disclosing the connections between the separate facts of outrage in our time.” The multiple functions performed by every key symbol in his arsenal reveals the density of connections: “shots” as fixes, as ejaculations, and as bullets; “works” as spoons and ties but also as publications; “junk” as heroin but also as the indiscriminate merchandise of Madison Avenue pushers.
Mary McCarthy called Naked Lunch the “first serious piece of science fiction,” and there’s a heavy shot of space opera in the cocktail of Burroughs’ mythology, but to Burroughs himself there was nothing fictional about the techno-logical apparatus he described. There’s an uncanny accuracy to the dystopian surreality that his works predict, from the dominance of the visual to the ubiquitous intermingingling of the corporeal and the electronic; from the overwhelming immediacy of information superhighway to the mass hysteria and mob thinking that it tends to produce. A quasi-manifesto titled “the invisible generation” appended to The Ticket That Exploded (1962) describes with eerie prescience the relentless echo chamber of a 24-hour news cycle:
look around you look at a control machine programmed to select the ugliest stupidest most vulgar and degraded sounds for recording and playback which provokes uglier stupider more vulgar and degraded sounds to be recorded and play back inexorable degradation […] what are newspapers doing but selecting the ugliest sounds for playback by and large if its ugly its news […] let’s bomb china now and let’s stay armed to the teeth for centuries this ugly vulgar bray put out for mass playback you want to spread hysteria record and play back the most stupid and hysterical reactions.
Burroughs’ work in the 1960s reveals a deep investment in the radical potential of the spoken word and the projected image, both to subvert and dominate. His theories of language and communication were developed in a series of interviews and non-fiction works from the same period, most strikingly in a long essay titled The Electronic Revolution (1970). Though much more directly stated and intuitive, these theories are astoundingly similar to those being developed at the same time by the poststructuralist strand of French philosophy. During his years in London, Burroughs’ output was largely focused on various forms of newer media, and many of his experiments in film and audio date to this period. Having exhausted the range of the narcotic spectrum several times over, Burroughs increasingly sought altered states of mind in technology, instead, and in what he saw as technology’s ability to break the cognitive stasis produced by the condition of language.
From London he returned to New York, where he lived in a converted YMCA gymnasium on the Bowery he called The Bunker. His years there are detailed by Victor Bockris in With William S. Burroughs: A Report From the Bunker. Living down the street from CBGBs, Burroughs is bemused to discover that he has become the hero of a new cultural movement. Bockris transcribes encounters with Warhol, Mick Jagger, Patti Smith, Lou Reed, Susan Sontag, Tennessee Williams, and others. In 1978, the counter-cultural canonization was set in high gear by the Nova Convention, a multi-day celebration of Burroughs in various parts of New York City. Towards the end of his time in New York, and with extensive help from his friend and editor James Grauerholz, Burroughs finally completed a text he had begun years earlier in London, which became Cities of the Red Night. But the same period also saw the return of Burroughs’ opiate addiction, for which he would spend the rest of his life on a methadone maintenance program. In 1981 William Burroughs relocated one last time, from New York to Lawrence, Kansas, where he would spend his remaining years.
With the move to Kansas began the final phase of his life, a less tumultuous period during which Burroughs embarked on a new career as a painter. The house in Lawrence became a minor pilgrimage site as Burroughs settled into his role as cult hero for the resurgent American counterculture of the late ‘80s and ‘90s. His indie cred continued to grow even as critical attention to his work faltered with the decline of literary postmodernism. He recorded with Sonic Youth and Kurt Cobain, and appeared in Gus Van Sant’s Drugstore Cowboy. This last period produced the Red Night trilogy (Cities of the Red Night, 1981; The Place of Dead Roads, 1983; The Western Lands, 1987) as well as a number of shorter, gentler works like My Education: A Book of Dreams (essentially a published version of Burroughs’ dream journal) and The Cat Inside, a book about the colony of felines that Burroughs adopted in his final years and which was, as Grauerholz later wrote, “the catalyst for the late-life opening of William’s tender emotions.”
These later texts are only marginally more linear or plot-driven than the cut-ups of the Nova Trilogy; it would be hard to call them a return to convention. But something has shifted, nonetheless. The words are less weaponized. Language reclaims its communicating function; the omnipresent urge to escape is joined by a more subtle one — to express. What makes Burroughs final novels different from his earlier works is the surprising and surprisingly powerful appearance of a previously unknown elegiac mode, still wry and perhaps no less cynical, but for the first time inclined to come to terms with the fragile, transient nature of the human experience rather than to mock and dismiss it. “The road to the Western Lands is the most dangerous of all roads and, in consequence, the most rewarding. To know the road exists violates the human covenant: you are not allowed to confront fear, pain and death, or to find out that the sacred human covenant was signed under pressure of fear, pain and death.” The stylistic reference points have shifted: the pulps of the 1930s and 1940s which provide the earlier novels their hardboiled stock are replaced by the dime novels of the late 19th and early 20th century; street hustlers and private investigators are replaced by cowboys, pirates, and highway robbers. The urban density of Interzone gives way to a vast and lawless wilderness: “It was as though a heavy weight were pressing down on us with a persistent malevolence. Several times the guide lost his way, and we had to retrace our steps.”
Control, the fundamental trope of Burroughs’ earlier work, is replaced by a different master symbol — Death. The fragmentary characters of Naked Lunch yearn to be free; the itinerant assemblages that populate the later novels yearn to make sense of their attempts at freedom. The Western Lands, a profoundly beautiful meditation on immortality and death, begins and ends with a solitary old writer. “Forty years ago the writer had published a novel which had made a stir, and a few short stories and some poems.” And on the last page: “The old writer couldn’t write anymore because he had reached the end of words, the end of what can be done with words.” Burroughs’ earliest works describe a surreal present; those of his second phase a disjointed technocratic future. The raw material of the final novels is the past. Naked Lunch is populated by hallucinations, the Nova Trilogy by anxieties; the final novels are populated by ghosts.
Burroughs’ last diary entry is dated 3 days prior to his passing on August 2, 1997, of a heart attack sustained the day before. Ultimately, Burroughs couldn’t escape words any more than he could escape narcotics, any more than the protagonists of his later novels could escape or master Death. “There is no final enough,” he wrote in that last entry, “of wisdom, experience – any fucking thing. No Holy Grail, No Final Satori, no final solution. Just conflict.” One hundred years after Burroughs was born and 17 years after his death, the idea of a Master Narrative or Ultimate Truth remains just as ludicrous, but the control society he warned of is more real than ever. The techniques he embraced and promoted — non-linearity, machine composition, fragmentary production, creative recycling — have become not only accepted but standardized, themselves folded into the ugly, looping bray he warned against. Burroughs’ undeniably crucial place in our literary and cultural history is not yet adequately attended to. What remains is a literary legend: a dry, sardonic grin and the Word Hoard in its infinite variations.
¤
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A Guide to Speculative Fiction at Gustavus Library
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A guide to speculative fiction created by Visiting Librarian Abe Nemon in 2021/2022.
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https://libguides.gustavus.edu/sff/new-wave
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Transformations : the story of the science-fiction magazines from 1950 to 1970 by Mike Ashley
Call Number: PS374.S35 A78 2005
ISBN: 9780853237693
"This is the second of three volumes [Librarian's note: now five] that chart the history of the science fiction magazine from the earliest days to the present. The first volume, Time Machines, traced the development of the science fiction magazine from its earliest days and the creation of the first specialist magazine, Amazing Stories. This book takes up the story to reveal a turbulent period that was to witness the extraordinary rise and fall and rise again of science. It charts the science fiction boom years in the wake of the nuclear age that was to see the ‘The Golden Age’ of Science Fiction, with the emergence of magazines such as Galaxy, Startling Stories, and Fantastic, as well as authors like Isaac Asimov, Philip K. Dick, and Frank Herbert. The book then goes on to explore the bust years of 1954–1960, followed by the renaissance in the 1960s led by the new wave of British authors such as Michael Moorcock and J. G. Ballard, and the rise in interest of fantasy fiction, encouraged by The Lord of the Rings and the Conan books of Robert E. Howard. It concludes with an examination of the newfound interest in science fiction magazines during the late 1960s and the incredibly influential roles Star Trek, the film 2001: A Space Odyssey and, above all, the first manned Moon landing played in transforming the science fiction magazine." - from the publisher
Dangerous Visions and New Worlds : radical science fiction, 1950 to 1985 by Andrew Nette (Editor); Iain McIntyre (Editor)
Call Number: PN3433.5 .D36 2021
ISBN: 9781629639321
"In the period of major social change that spanned the 1950s through the 1970s, science fiction became an ideal vessel to illustrate a multifaceted upsurge of radical protest, with its focus on speculation, alternate worlds, and the future. Dangerous Visions and New Worlds details, celebrates, and evaluates how science fiction novels and authors depicted, interacted with, and were inspired by these cultural and political movements in America and Great Britain. It starts with progressive authors who rose to prominence in the conservative 1950s, challenging the era's narratives of technological breakthroughs and space-conquering male heroes, then moves through the 1960s, when authors shattered existing writing conventions and incorporated contemporary themes such as modern mass media culture, corporate control, state surveillance, the Vietnam War, and rising currents of counterculture, ecological awareness, feminism, sexual liberation, and Black Power. The 1970s, when the genre reflected the end of various dreams of the 'long Sixties,' is also explored along with the first half of the 1980s, which gave rise to new subgenres." -- Provided by publisher.
Gateways to Forever : the story of the science-fiction magazines from 1970 to 1980 by Mike Ashley
Call Number: PS374.S35 A78 2007
ISBN: 9781846310034
"This third volume in a four-volume study of science fiction magazines focuses on the turbulent years of the 1970s, when the United States emerged from the Vietnam War into an economic crisis. It saw the end of the Apollo moon programme and the start of the ecology movement. This proved to be one of the most complicated periods for the science fiction magazines. Not only were they struggling to survive within the economic climate, they also had to cope with the death of the father of modern science fiction, John W. Campbell, Jr., while facing new and potentially threatening opposition. The market for science fiction diversified as never before, with the growth in new anthologies, the emergence of semi-professional magazines, the explosion of science fiction in college, the start of role-playing gaming magazines, underground and adult comics, and, with the success of Star Wars, media magazines. The book explores how the traditional science fiction magazines coped with this, from the death of Campbell to the start of the major popular science magazine Omni and the first dreams of the Internet." - from the publisher
Solar Flares : science fiction in the 1970s by Andrew M. Butler
Call Number: PN3433.8 .B885 2012
ISBN: 9781846318344
"Science fiction produced in the 1970s has long been undervalued. The New Wave was all but over and cyberpunk had yet to arrive. The decade polarised sci-fi; on the one hand it aspired to be a serious form, addressing issues such as race, Vietnam, feminism, ecology and sexuality; on the other hand it broke box office records with ‘Star Wars’, ‘Close Encounters of the Third Kind’, ‘Alien’, and ‘Superman: The Movie’. Across the political spectrum, writers perceived a series of invisible enemies: radicals addressed the ideological structures of racism, sexism, homophobia, colonialism, pollution, and capitalism and the possibility of new social structures, whereas conservatives feared the gains made by the civil rights movement, feminism, gay liberation, independence movements, ecology and Marxism and the perceived threats to the nuclear family. Sci-fi would never be the same again. This book examines the ways in which the genre confronted a new epoch and its own history, including the rise of fantasy, the sci-fi blockbuster, children's sci-fi, pseudoscience and postmodernism." - from the publisher
Dangerous Visions (3 volumes) by Harlan Ellison (Editor)
Call Number: PS3555.L62 D35 1969
"Dangerous Visions is a science fiction short story anthology edited by American writer Harlan Ellison and illustrated by Leo and Diane Dillon. It was published in 1967. A path-breaking collection, Dangerous Visions helped define the New Wave science fiction movement, particularly in its depiction of sex in science fiction. Writer/editor Al Sarrantonio writes how Dangerous Visions 'almost single-handedly [...] changed the way readers thought about science fiction.' Contributors to the volume included 20 authors who had won, or would win, a Hugo, Nebula, World Fantasy, or BSFA award, and 16 with multiple such awards. Ellison introduced the anthology both collectively and individually while authors provided afterwords to their own stories." - from Wikipedia
Again, Dangerous Visions (2 volumes) by Harlan Ellison
Call Number: PS648.S3 A43 1972
"Again, Dangerous Visions (1972) is a science fiction short story anthology, edited by American author Harlan Ellison. It is the follow-up to Dangerous Visions (1967), also edited by Ellison. Cover art and interior illustrations are by Ed Emshwiller. Like its predecessor, Again, Dangerous Visions, and many of the collected stories, have received awards recognition. 'The Word for World is Forest', by Ursula K. Le Guin, won the 1973 Hugo for Best Novella. 'When It Changed', by Joanna Russ, won a 1972 Nebula Award for Best Short Story. Harlan Ellison was recognized with a special Hugo Award for anthologizing, his second special award, in 1972. Again, Dangerous Visions was released as a two-volume paperback edition by Signet in the United States, and by Pan in the United Kingdom. A sequel was planned, The Last Dangerous Visions, but was never published." - from Wikipedia
England Swings SF : stories of speculative fiction by Judith Merril 1923-1997, (Compiler)
Call Number: PN6071.S33 E55 1968
"One anthology project Merril began in the early 1960s under contract to Lion Books in Chicago was aborted, but inspired her publisher's editor Harlan Ellison to go forward with his own version of the project, which yielded Dangerous Visions (Doubleday, 1967). As an initiator of the New Wave movement, she edited the 1968 anthology England Swings SF, whose stories she collected while living in England for a year." - from Wikipedia
Librarian's note: In this anthology, esteemed SF anthologist and editor Judith Merril collected stories from British New Wave authors -- who (according to scholar Andrew Nette and Iain McIntyre) were instrumental in starting the New Wave movement with Michael Moorcock becoming editor of New Worlds in 1964.
Memoirs of a Spacewoman by Naomi Mitchison; Isobel Murray (Introduction by)
Call Number: PR6025.I86 M46 1977
ISBN: 9781849210355
"Naomi Mitchison, daughter of a distinguished scientist, sister of geneticist J B S Haldane, was always interested in the sciences, especially genetics. Her novels did not tend to demonstrate this, and she did not publish a Science Fiction novel until almost forty years into her fiction-writing career. Isobel Murray's Introduction here argues that it is by no means 'pure' Science Fiction: the success of the novel depends not only on the extraordinarily variety of life forms its heroine encounters and attempts to communicate with on different worlds: she is also a very credible human, or Terran, with recognisibly human emotions and a dramatic emotional life. This novel works effectively for readers who usually eschew the genre and prefer more traditional narratives. Explorers like Mary are an elite class who consider curiosity to be Terrans' supreme gift, and in the novel she more than once takes risks that may destroy her life. Her voice, as she records her adventures and experiments, is individual, attractive and memorable. Isobel Murray is Emeritus Professor of Modern Scottish Literature at the University of Aberdeen." - from the publisher
The Genocides by Thomas M. Disch
Call Number: PS3554.I8 G4 1978
ISBN: 9780375705465
"This spectacular novel established Thomas M. Disch as a major new force in science fiction. First published in 1965, it was immediately labeled a masterpiece reminiscent of the works of J.G. Ballard and H.G. Wells. In this harrowing novel, the world's cities have been reduced to cinder and ash and alien plants have overtaken the earth. The plants, able to grow the size of maples in only a month and eventually reach six hundred feet, have commandeered the world's soil and are sucking even the Great Lakes dry. In northern Minnesota, Anderson, an aging farmer armed with a Bible in one hand and a gun in the other, desperately leads the reduced citizenry of a small town in a daily struggle for meager existence. Throw into this fray Jeremiah Orville, a marauding outsider bent on a bizarre and private revenge, and the fight to live becomes a daunting task." - from the publisher
Ice by Anna Kavan; Jonathan Lethem (Foreword by); Kate Zambreno (Afterword by)
Call Number: PR6009.D63 I24 2017
ISBN: 9780143131991
"In a frozen, apocalyptic landscape, destruction abounds: great walls of ice overrun the world and secretive governments vie for control. Against this surreal, yet eerily familiar broken world, an unnamed narrator embarks on a hallucinatory quest for a strange and elusive "glass-girl" with silver hair. He crosses icy seas and frozen plains, searching ruined towns and ransacked rooms, all to free her from the grips of a tyrant known only as the warden and save her before the ice closes all around. A novel unlike any other, Ice is at once a dystopian adventure shattering the conventions of science fiction, a prescient warning of climate change and totalitarianism, a feminist exploration of violence and trauma, a Kafkaesque literary dreamscape, and a brilliant allegory for its author's struggles with addiction--all crystallized in prose as glittering as the piling snow. Acclaimed upon its publication as one of the best science fiction books of the year, Kavan's 1967 novel has built a reputation as an extraordinary and innovative work of literature, garnering acclaim from China Mieville, Patti Smith, J.G. Ballard, Anaïs Nin, and Doris Lessing, among others. With echoes of dystopian classics like Ursula Le Guin's The Lathe of Heaven, Kurt Vonnegut's Cat's Cradle, and J.G. Ballard's High Rise, Ice is a necessary and unforgettable addition to the canon of science fiction classics." - from the publisher
Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? by Philip K. Dick
Call Number: PS3554.I3 A33 2017
ISBN: 9780345404473
"By 2021, the World War had killed millions, driving entire species into extinction and sending mankind off-planet. Those who remained coveted any living creature, and for people who couldn't afford one, companies built incredibly realistic simulacra: horses, birds, cats, sheep... They even built humans. Immigrants to Mars received androids so sophisticated it was impossible to tell them from true men or women. Fearful of the havoc these artificial humans could wreak, the government banned them from Earth. But when androids didn't want to be identified, they just blended in. Rick Deckard was an officially sanctioned bounty hunter whose job was to find rogue androids and retire them. But cornered, androids tended to fight back, with deadly results." - from the publisher
Stand on Zanzibar by John Brunner 1934-1995
Call Number: PR6052.R8 S73
"The brilliant 1969 Hugo Award-winning novel from John Brunner, Stand on Zanzibar, now included with a foreword by Bruce Sterling. Norman Niblock House is a rising executive at General Technics, one of a few all-powerful corporations. His work is leading General Technics to the forefront of global domination, both in the marketplace and politically---it's about to take over a country in Africa. Donald Hogan is his roommate, a seemingly sheepish bookworm. But Hogan is a spy, and he's about to discover a breakthrough in genetic engineering that will change the world...and kill him. These two men's lives weave through one of science fiction's most praised novels. Written in a way that echoes John Dos Passos' U.S.A. Trilogy, Stand on Zanzibar is a cross-section of a world overpopulated by the billions. Where society is squeezed into hive-living madness by god-like mega computers, mass-marketed psychedelic drugs, and mundane uses of genetic engineering. Though written in 1968, it speaks of now, and is frighteningly prescient and intensely powerful." - from the publisher
The Dragonriders of Pern by Anne McCaffrey
Call Number: PS3563.A255 D73 1978
"Finally together in one volume, the first three books in the world's most beloved science fiction series, THE DRAGONRIDERS OF PERN, by Anne McCaffrey, one of the great science fiction writers of all time: DRAGONFLIGHT, DRAGONQUEST, THE WHITE DRAGON. Those who know these extraordinary tales will be able to re-visit with Lessa, F'lar, Ruth, Lord Jaxon, and all the others. And for those just discovering this magical place, there are incomparable tales of danger, deceit, and daring, just waiting to be explored." - from the publisher
Librarian's note: With the first book in this omnibus, Dragonflight, Anne McCaffrey became the first woman to win the Nebula Award for Best Novel in 1968.
The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula. K Le Guin; David Mitchell (Foreword by); Charlie Jane Anders (Afterword by)
Call Number: PS3562.E42 L44 1969
ISBN: 9780441478125
"Ursula K. Le Guin’s groundbreaking work of science fiction—winner of the Hugo and Nebula Awards. A lone human ambassador is sent to the icebound planet of Winter, a world without sexual prejudice, where the inhabitants’ gender is fluid. His goal is to facilitate Winter’s inclusion in a growing intergalactic civilization. But to do so he must bridge the gulf between his own views and those of the strange, intriguing culture he encounters... Embracing the aspects of psychology, society, and human emotion on an alien world, The Left Hand of Darkness stands as a landmark achievement in the annals of intellectual science fiction."
The Silver Eggheads by Fritz Leiber 1910-1992
Call Number: PS3523.E4583 S55 1969
"A HEADLONG RIOT OF HILARIOUS SCIENCE FICTION SATIRE -- MEET SOME INSUFFERABLY WONDERFUL CHARACTERS, from the mad, gay, heady world of the "arts" -- GASPARD DE LA NUIT—human journeyman writer. He has problems with his rampant lover, Heloise Ibsen (assigned to him by his publisher). What he really loves is the giant computer-word-machine that produces his novels—read by other humans—which he oils with devoted care. His closest friend is ZANE GORT—a fine, upstanding, self-employed robot writer. Zane writes books for other robots and is madly in love with MISS BLUSHES—a censor-robix (female robot) of delicate pink. Miss Blushes is something of a prude and rather hysterical: very logical when you consider that her circuits are wired for censorship, but it makes life difficult for Zane. He turns for help to NURSE BISHOP—a small, but formidably beautiful human, who (in addition to the remarkable advice she offers Zane) plays nursemaid to a mysterious group of near-human entities owned by FLAXMAN AND CULLINGHAM—human publishers, whose language is frequently deplorable. To say nothing of the peculiar interest at least one of them has in a luscious platinum robut no, the daring reader must discover this for himself... AND THERE ARE MANY, MANY MORE..." - from the publisher
Ringworld by Larry Niven
Call Number: PS3564.I9 R56 1970
ISBN: 9780345333926
"Ringworld is a 1970 science fiction novel by Larry Niven, set in his Known Space universe and considered a classic of science fiction literature. Ringworld tells the story of Louis Wu and his companions on a mission to the Ringworld, a rotating wheel artificial world, an alien construct in space 186 million miles (299 million kilometres) in diameter. Niven later added three sequel novels and then cowrote, with Edward M. Lerner, four prequels and a final sequel; the five latter novels constitute the Fleet of Worlds series. All the novels in the Ringworld series tie into numerous other books set in Known Space. Ringworld won the Nebula Award in 1970, as well as both the Hugo Award and Locus Award in 1971." - from Wikipedia
Time and Again by Jack Finney
Call Number: PS3556.I52 T56 1970
ISBN: 9780671204976
"Discover the beloved classic that Stephen King called “THE great time-travel story,” now with masterfully restored original artwork and an all-new foreword by Audrey Niffenegger, the New York Times bestselling author of The Time Traveler’s Wife. When advertising artist Si Morley is recruited to join a covert government operation exploring the possibility of time travel, he jumps at the chance to leave his 20th-century existence and step into New York City in January 1882. Aside from his thirst for adventure, he has good reason to return to the past—his friend Kate has discovered a mysterious, half-burned letter dated from that year, and Si has good reasons to want to trace its origins. But when Si begins to fall in love with a woman he meets in the past, he will be forced to choose between two worlds—forever. “Pure New York fun” (Alice Hoffman, New York Times bestselling author), Time and Again is a deeply researched rich portrait of life in New York City more than a century ago, and a swift-moving adventure novel with timeless themes at its core. With digitally remastered art, fall in love with this refreshed classic all over again." - publisher description of later edition
Driftglass : ten tales of speculative fiction by Samuel R Delany
Call Number: PS3554.E437 D75 1971
"Driftglass is a 1971 collection of science fiction short stories by American writer Samuel R. Delany. The stories originally appeared in the magazines Worlds of Tomorrow, The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, If and New Worlds or the anthologies Quark/3, Dangerous Visions and Alchemy & Academe. In 2019, Driftglass was selected as one of the '50 Unapologetically Queer Authors Share the Best LGBTQ Books of All Time' in O, The Oprah Magazine." - from Wikipedia
Librarian's note: Contains some of SFWA Grandmaster Delany's most acclaimed stories, including "Aye, and Gommorah" and "Time Considered as a Helix of Semi-Precious Stones."
Son of Man by Robert Silverberg
Call Number: PS3569.I472 S66 1971
ISBN: 9780345022776
"The classic science fiction novel, now back in print. Clay is a man from the 20th Century who is somehow caught up in a time-flux and transported into a distant future. The earth and the life on it have changed beyond recognition. Even the human race has evolved into many different forms, now coexisting on the planet. The seemingly omnipotent Skimmers, the tyrannosaur-like Eaters, the sedentary Awaiters, the squid-like Breathers, the Interceders, the Destroyers—all of these are "Sons of Man". Befriended and besexed by the Skimmers, Clay goes on a journey which takes him around the future earth and into the depths of his own soul. He is human, but what does that mean?" - from the publisher
Alone against tomorrow: stories of alienation in speculative fiction. by Harlan Ellison
Call Number: PS3555.L62 A46 1971
"Alone Against Tomorrow: Stories of Alienation in Speculative Fiction is a collection of short stories by American writer Harlan Ellison. Published in the United States in 1971, it as a ten-year retrospective of Ellison's short stories. It was later published in the United Kingdom in two volumes as All the Sounds of Fear in 1973 and The Time of the Eye in 1974 (the 1974 volume only containing a new introduction). All of the stories in this collection center around isolation and alienation, and were selected from previous short story collections to fit this theme. The book was dedicated to, among others, four student protesters who were killed in the Kent State shootings of 1970. This dedication prompted a response from a reader calling the students 'hooligans' who were 'Communist-led radical revolutionaries and anarchists, and deserved to be shot'. This letter was reprinted in the introduction to Ellison's subsequent 1974 short story collection Approaching Oblivion. Ellison states that this letter frightened him and was one of the things that led him to change that collection from a call to action to a cry of frustration and disillusionment." - from Wikipedia
Librarian's note: Collects some of Ellison's most famous stories, including "I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream" and "'Repent, Harlequin!' Said the Ticktockman."
The Stepford Wives by Ira Levin
Call Number: PS3523.E7993 S74 1998
ISBN: 9780747538028
"For Joanna, her husband, Walter, and their children, the move to beautiful Stepford seems almost too good to be true. It is. For behind the town's idyllic facade lies a terrible secret -- a secret so shattering that no one who encounters it will ever be the same. At once a masterpiece of psychological suspense and a savage commentary on a media-driven society that values the pursuit of youth and beauty at all costs, The Stepford Wives is a novel so frightening in its final implications that the title itself has earned a place in the American lexicon."
Rendezvous with Rama by Arthur C Clarke (Arthur Charles), 1917-2008
Call Number: PR6005.L36 R4 1973
Winner of the Hugo and Nebula Awards • “[Arthur] Clarke is quite splendid. . . . We experience that chilling touch of the alien, the not-quite-knowable, that distinguishes SF at its most technically imaginative.”—The New York Times
"At first, only a few things are known about the celestial object that astronomers dub Rama. It is huge, weighing more than ten trillion tons. And it is hurtling through the solar system at inconceivable speed. Then a space probe confirms the unthinkable: Rama is no natural object. It is, incredible, an interstellar spacecraft. Space explorers and planet-bound scientists alike prepare for mankind's first encounter with alien intelligence. It will kindle their wildest dreams . . . and fan their darkest fears. For no one knows who the Ramans are or why they have come. And now the moment of rendezvous awaits—just behind a Raman airlock door." - from the publisher
The Forever War by Joe W Haldeman
Call Number: PS3558.A353 F67 2003
ISBN: 9780060510862
"The monumental Hugo and Nebula award winning SF classic [...] The Earth's leaders have drawn a line in the interstellar sand--despite the fact that the fierce alien enemy they would oppose is inscrutable, unconquerable, and very far away. A reluctant conscript drafted into an elite Military unit, Private William Mandella has been propelled through space and time to fight in the distant thousand-year conflict; to perform his duties and do whatever it takes to survive the ordeal and return home. But "home" may be even more terrifying than battle, because, thanks to the time dilation caused by space travel, Mandella is aging months while the Earth he left behind is aging centuries..." - from the publisher
Beyond Apollo by Barry N Malzberg
Call Number: PS3563.A434 B4 1974
ISBN: 9780571105106
"Two astronauts travel on the first manned expedition to the planet Venus. When the mission is mysteriously aborted and the ship returns to Earth, the Captain is missing and the First Officer, Harry M. Evans, can't explain what happened. Under psychiatric evaluation and interrogation, Evans provides conflicting accounts of the Captain's disappearance, incriminating both himself and lethal Venusian forces in the Captain's murder. As the explanations pyramid and the supervising psychiatrist's increasingly desperate efforts to get a straight story falter, Evans' condition and his inability to tell the "truth" present terrifying expressions of humanity's incompetence, the politics of space exploration, and the intricate dynamics of psycho-sexual relations . . . Originally published in 1972, BEYOND APOLLO incited controversy, polarizing critics and fans despite winning the first John W. Campbell Memorial Award for Best Science Fiction Novel. Always disinclined to sell out or compromise his vision, Malzberg became disillusioned with the SF genre, which purported to be THE genre of innovation. Paradoxically, many SF editors and publishers worried about unsettling readers' comfort zones and insisted that authors write in accordance with a set of rules, formulas and codes. Malzberg would neither heel nor kneel; disillusioned, he unofficially retired from the genre in the late seventies and hasn't looked back. What he produced as a science fiction writer, however, remains among the best published during the twentieth century-important in its historical context, but also entertaining and thought-provoking in its own right. Dark, acerbic, funny and smart, BEYOND APOLLO may be Malzberg's greatest accomplishment." - from the publisher
The Dispossessed by Ursula. K Le Guin
Call Number: PS3562.E42 D57 1994
ISBN: 9780061054884
"From the brilliant and award-winning author Ursula K. Le Guin comes a classic tale of two planets torn apart by conflict and mistrust — and the man who risks everything to reunite them. A bleak moon settled by utopian anarchists, Anarres has long been isolated from other worlds, including its mother planet, Urras—a civilization of warring nations, great poverty, and immense wealth. Now Shevek, a brilliant physicist, is determined to reunite the two planets, which have been divided by centuries of distrust. He will seek answers, question the unquestionable, and attempt to tear down the walls of hatred that have kept them apart. To visit Urras—to learn, to teach, to share—will require great sacrifice and risks, which Shevek willingly accepts. But the ambitious scientist's gift is soon seen as a threat, and in the profound conflict that ensues, he must reexamine his beliefs even as he ignites the fires of change."
The continuous Katherine Mortenhoe = The Unsleeping Eye by D G Compton (David Guy), 1930-
Call Number: PR6053.O45 C6 1974
ISBN: 9780575018280
"Katherine Mortenhoe lives in a near future very similar to the present day. Only in her time, dying from anything but old age is unheard of; death has been cured. So when Katherine is diagnosed with a terminal brain disease brought on by an inability to process an ever increasing volume of sensory input, she immediately becomes a celebrity to the “pain-starved public.” But Katherine rejects her tragic role: She will not agree to be the star of a Human Destiny TV show, her last days will not be documented or broadcast. What she doesn’t realize is that from the moment of diagnosis she’s been watched, not only by television producers but by a new kind of program host, a man with a camera behind his unsleeping eyes. Like Margaret Atwood’s MaddAddam trilogy, Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go, and the television series Black Mirror, The Continuous Katherine Mortenhoe is a thrilling psychological drama that is as wise about human nature as it is about the nature of technology." - from the publisher
The Centauri Device by M. John Harrison; Copyright Paperback Collection (Library of Congress) Staff (Contribution by)
Call Number: PR6058.A6942 C46 1974
"John Truck was to outward appearances just another lowlife spaceship captain. But he was also the last of the Centaurans, or at least half of him was, which meant that he was the only person who could operate the Centauri Device, a sentient bomb which might hold the key to settling a vicious space war. M. John Harrison's classic novel turns the conventions of space opera on their head, and is written with the precision and brilliance for which is famed."
Dhalgren by Samuel R. Delany
Call Number: PS3554.E437 D34 1975
ISBN: 9780553148619
"In one of the most profound and bestselling science fiction novels of all time, Samuel R. Delany has produced a novel 'to stand with the best American fiction of the 1970s' (Jonathan Lethem, bestselling author of Fortress of Solitude). Bellona is a city at the dead center of the United States. Something has happened there.... The population has fled. Madmen and criminals wander the streets. Strange portents appear in the cloud-covered sky. Into this disaster zone comes a young man—poet, lover, and adventurer—known only as the Kid. Tackling questions of race, gender, and sexuality, Dhalgren is a literary marvel and groundbreaking work of American magical realism." - from the publisher
The Female Man by Joanna Russ
Call Number: PS3568.U763 F46 1975
ISBN: 9780807062999
"Living in an altered past that never saw the end of the Great Depression, Jeannine, a librarian, is waiting to be married. Joanna lives in a different version of reality: she's a 1970s feminist trying to succeed in a man's world. Janet is from Whileaway, a utopian earth where only women exist. And Jael is a warrior with steel teeth and catlike retractable claws, from an earth with separate-and warring-female and male societies. When these four women meet, the results are startling, outrageous, and subversive."
The Shockwave Rider by John Brunner
Call Number: PR6052.R8 S52 1975
ISBN: 9780060105594
"He was the most dangerous fugitive alive, but he didn’t exist! Nickie Haflinger had lived a score of lifetimes . . . but technically he didn’t exist. He was a fugitive from Tarnover, the high-powered government think tank that had educated him. First he had broken his identity code—then he escaped. Now he had to find a way to restore sanity and personal freedom to the computerized masses and to save a world tottering on the brink of disaster. He didn’t care how he did it—but the government did. That’s when his Tarnover teachers got him back in their labs . . . and Nickie Haflinger was set up for a whole new education." - from the publisher
Woman on the Edge of Time by Marge Piercy
Call Number: PS3566.I4 W66 2016
ISBN: 9780449000946
"Hailed as a classic of speculative fiction, Marge Piercy’s landmark novel is a transformative vision of two futures—and what it takes to will one or the other into reality. Harrowing and prescient, Woman on the Edge of Time speaks to a new generation on whom these choices weigh more heavily than ever before. Connie Ramos is a Mexican American woman living on the streets of New York. Once ambitious and proud, she has lost her child, her husband, her dignity—and now they want to take her sanity. After being unjustly committed to a mental institution, Connie is contacted by an envoy from the year 2137, who shows her a time of sexual and racial equality, environmental purity, and unprecedented self-actualization. But Connie also bears witness to another potential outcome: a society of grotesque exploitation in which the barrier between person and commodity has finally been eroded. One will become our world. And Connie herself may strike the decisive blow." - from the publisher
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An Education in Science Fiction: Dangerous Visions
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2016-06-04T00:00:00
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So I knew that Dangerous Visions was this touchstone for a lot of writers that I admired, and had introduced the public to the kind of weird, transgressive fiction that I knew I liked but didn’t know was SF, or new wave, or any of those things. I found a copy of it in my…
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en
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James Farson
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https://ifearthosebigwords.wordpress.com/2016/06/04/an-education-in-science-fiction-dangerous-visions/
|
I’ve been reading a lot of SF lately. I’ve always had a degree of interest in it, but it’s only recently that I’ve started thinking of myself as someone who has an active interest in SF. The first SF novel I remember reading is Dune, which I read when I was about 13, I think? I don’t even know where I got my copy of it from, probably from a charity shop. I might have been induced to buy it because 1) it had a cool cover and 2) I knew that Iron Maiden had wanted to write a song about it and been denied by Frank Herbert. If Iron Maiden liked it, then it must be worth my time, right? I wonder where that version of myself went, the boy who happily read a novel just because Iron Maiden liked it. That was the same version of me that started reading Ballard because of Joy Division.
I liked Dune a lot, but it didn’t exactly spark a love of SF off the bat. I read Naked Lunch a couple of years later, which is certainly part of the cultural context of SF, even if it isn’t a hard SF novel itself. I liked Naked Lunch a lot, and it is responsible for most of my juvenilia, and a lot of the first novel I wrote, being incomprehensible gibberish. I knew I liked fiction like that, fiction that was transgressive and weird and didn’t hold your hand. But I still didn’t know I liked SF until I took a class on it at university, a lot of the material for which was taken from The Oxford Book of Science Fiction Stories (an excellent starting place if you’re interested in SF but don’t know what to read). Around this time I also read every Philip K. Dick novel I could get my hands on. I became very conscious that I liked SF, and that class is where I learned about the history of the form.
That class is also where I learned about the new wave SF of the ‘60s. I was already familiar with Ballard, Burroughs, and Dick, and now I could place them within a context and appreciate more fully just what it was they were trying to do. I really did learn a lot in that class. I probably learned more in that class than any other, bar the one I took on medievalism, which was a deluge of things I had never encountered in any way before, Monty Python excepted.
I learned about the collection Harlan Ellison edited, Dangerous Visions, which was something like the high water mark of the new wave of SF. Many of the writers featured in Dangerous Visions went on to win Hugos and Nebulas, among other forms of fame and acclaim. The collection includes the first story that Samuel R. Delany sold, Aye, and Gomorrah, which is a masterpiece, by the way.
So I knew that Dangerous Visions was this touchstone for a lot of writers that I admired, and had introduced the public to the kind of weird, transgressive fiction that I knew I liked but didn’t know was SF, or new wave, or any of those things. I found a copy of it in my local library and decided to continue my education.
It still holds up. It’s not quite as dangerous as Ellison assures us it was when it came out, but you can definitely see how it widened the field. The broad variety of stories present such topics as incest, voyeurism, automation, transhumanism, gambling, murder, racism, and drugs. These stories are not space westerns filled with bug eyed monsters. I quickly realised that this was responsible for a lot of what I enjoy about SF, namely that it can take on themes and issues in ways that literary fiction can’t.
Contributing to the air of deliberation is the fact that each story is pre- and post-scripted. Ellison contributed a foreword to each story, often detailing how he personally knows the author of the work, always describing just why it is that he’s decided to include the story and how it furthers the stated aim of shaking up established SF publishing and tastes. Each afterword is contributed by the author of the story; some describe exactly what convention or taboo they were trying to break, others explain their stylistic experiments, a few are cryptic as to their intentions. I know I said that I’d gotten to like fiction that doesn’t expect you to understand, but all the explanatory extra remarks are of much use to the student or interested reader, and were probably included originally as a kind of hedge. If it’d just been a broadside of far-out stories with no rhyme or reason, the accusations of cultural vandalism would’ve been easier to make. Ellison was trying to help build something, not just destroy what had come before.
The explanatory notes also help add focus to what is a very diverse (not many stories by women though) anthology. All the stories were intended to be “dangerous” in one way or another but they vary wildly in their approach; the broadness in itself becomes the theme. It would be impossible to talk about all the stories, but considering an anthology of this size (33 stories), it would be a useful exercise to talk about the stories that still stick out to me, a few weeks after having read it.
The one that stands out the most is Riders of the Purple Wage by Philip José Farmer, really a novella more than a short story, but a novella of such high quality that Ellison could not refuse Farmer his extra wordcount. What a good decision by Ellison. It is a psychedelic tale of a young artist living in a decadent future society where automation has caused untold plenty and turned many people into Huxley style hedonists. Farmer’s writing is constantly inventive, always punning and playing, a decadence of writing that perfectly reflects the society he imagines (and its capacity for onanism). It is an excellent little bit of world building, and I admit it also stood out to me because Farmer is very fond of Joyce, and references him a lot in this novella. Finnegans Wake as style guide for SF novella; it’s not exactly dangerous, but it certainly pushes boundaries. Stories like this are why I read SF.
One of the truly dangerous stories in the anthology is Theodor Sturgeon’s If All Men were Brothers, Would You Let One Marry Your Sister?, which takes on a theme no less hefty than the incest taboo. It is almost an exercise in taking perceived wisdom and arguing against it using logical extremes, and Sturgeon admits as much in his afterword. It begins as a tale of paranoia and intergalactic politics: a man discovers a planet that isn’t on any of the charts, and no one who knows anything will talk to him about it. They (big T) do their best to stop him finding out more. The frame of the story is that of the man who knows too much laying out his case. This hides the revelation from us the same way it was hidden from the protagonist and enables a play on the sympathies of the reader. We learn Vexvelt is a utopia long before learning it is a planet on which incest is actively encouraged, a literary shell game. We empathise with a man trying to speak truth to power, a power whose disgust and narrow mindedness we don’t understand, and as the story ends this is quickly inverted, because of course, the executive knew all about it and had good reasons for being disgusted. This story is a masterly example of building up and managing a reader’s expectations, and demonstrates just how effective an SF story can be in probing an idea and examining the the so-called self-evident in a way that compels and engages the reader.
Carol Emshwiller’s Sex and/or Mr. Morrison, one of the few stories by a woman in Dangerous Visions, is dangerous because of its frank portrayal of voyeurism from a female perspective. This story isn’t SF per se, but does what a really, really good SF story can do; make the everyday seem utterly alien. I’d explain further, but someone else already has, and far better than I could.
This is getting too long, so I’ll just quickly mention a couple other stories I really liked. Fritz Leiber’s story Gonna Roll the Bones is a glittering, gorgeously written story about a man playing craps with the devil. It is full of gem-like, hallucinatory descriptions of the paranormal and the legendary, contrasted with grotty regularity. The kind of dream you’ll remember just because you didn’t think your brain capable of it.
The closing story, Samuel R. Delany’s Aye, and Gomorrah, is really a horror story, and horrifies so effectively that I can’t help but recall it. In this story, humanity has begun to explore and colonise space. The humans who do this, do so at the price of their genitalia. These spacers go on shore leave, and come across frelks, people that find spacers attractive and fetishize their lack of genitalia. Delany’s descriptions of being denied a sexuality, and of having a sexuality that cannot be fulfilled, are devastating. Good SF can make the normal strange, but it can also take the strange and make it awfully, terribly human.
One last honourable mention: the anthology also includes one of my favourite Philip K. Dick stories, Faith of Our Fathers.
Not every story is as dangerous as it would like to be, and some are less transgressive than they once were, but there isn’t a single story in Dangerous Visions that I feel like I wasted my time reading, something that is remarkable both because of its size and because of its experimental nature. Even the failed experiments are of interest, and Dangerous Visions is worth your time if you have even the vaguest interest in SF or weird, transgressive fiction. Dangerous Visions stands out as one of the points where SF started to really deliver on some of the wider promise of the genre.
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wrong_mix_random_publicationDate_00046
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FactBench
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3
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https://muse.jhu.edu/pub/38/article/383456
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en
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Get Off the Point: Deconstructing Context in the Novels of William S. Burroughs
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Time and History
Experiments with temporality are certainly not exclusive to Burroughs's novels. Flashbacks, stream of consciousness, and non-linear narratives have become relatively commonplace in twentieth century and contemporary fiction. According to Paul Ricoeur, such experiments amount to attempts to represent the chaotic nature of the world and are comparable to realism's efforts at mimesis. Ricoeur argues that "a jagged chronology, interrupted by jumps, anticipations, and flashbacks, in short, a deliberately multidimensional configuration, is better suited to a view of time that has no possible overview, no overall internal cohesiveness" (63). However, Burroughs's narrative experiments accomplish more than the creation of "a jagged chronology" reflective of modern society's lack of cohesion. In fact, his narratives defy strong connections to modern society, or to any other. Burroughs's novels destabilize chronology to such a degree that time no longer provides firm context. Distortions of temporality in the novels include the destabilization of the present time of the narrative, the inclusion of characters who are not bound by time, and the blending and blurring of genres, all resulting in anachronisms and temporal instabilities that sabotage attempts to make historical connections.
Rather than fragment or even reverse the temporal order of his narratives, instead Burroughs frequently works to conflate present and past in his novels, leaving readers incapable of fixing the narratives in either periodic or relative time. In The Ticket That Exploded, he instructs:
It is time to forget. To forget time. Is it? I was it will be it is? No. It was and it will be if you stand still for it. The point where the past touches the future is right where you are sitting now on your dead time ass hatching virus negatives into present time into the picture reality of a picture planet. Get off your ass, boys. Get off the point."
(TE 196)
For Burroughs, to remain fixed in or fixated upon time, whether a moment or a determined span of time, creates a binary—now is not then and then is not now. Though he does place many narrative events in recognizable time frames, and even occasionally offers precise dates, these time cues are ultimately arbitrary and narratives blend into and out of alternate timelines freely. The time cues that appear in the form of precise dates often [End Page 57] seem to be provided as reinforcement of their ineffectiveness in providing narrative anchors; they nearly always prove unstable. The absence of discernible time markers negates the possibility of establishing time-dependent contexts for the novels. Thus, the interpretations of these narratives cannot be effectively established in reference to social-historical conditions: those within the novels themselves, or even those existing either at the time of writing or of reading, as none of these is ever clearly or consistently reflected by the texts.
Burroughs's model for the oppression and imprisonment of historical, linear time is the Reality Film; liberation from the Reality Film is liberation from history. The Reality Film serves as Burroughs's metaphor for time as viewed from the outside, from beyond its linear constraints. In the same way as film, the movement of linear time is in only one direction and even this movement is only illusory. Burroughs writes, "When the projector stops a still picture is on the screen" (TE 160). The static, confining nature of time can be seen by those who escape the film and see the series of still images that comprise it. Mary McCarthy characterizes this view of time as a sort of map: "Seen in terms of space, history shrivels into a mere wrinkling or furrowing of the surface as in an aerial relief-map or one of those pieced-together aerial photographs known in the trade as (again) mosaics" (35). To be trapped in the Reality Film, to be locked into linear time, means moving only in a single direction that has been determined by the owners and operators of the Reality Studio. As Tanner recognizes, "To combat the manufacturers of the enslaving film we are taught to call reality, man has to develop immunity from the image virus and then attack the place where the film is made" (132). To develop immunity from the image virus one must alter the experience of time.
For Burroughs, such an alteration amounts to "breaking the so-called natural laws of the universe … the monumental fraud of cause and effect, to be replaced by the more pregnant concept of synchronicity" (WL 30). His alternative to the linear experience of time offered by the Reality Film is the fragmented and synchronic format of the Penny Arcade peep show, featured prominently in The Wild Boys. A viewer of the peep show explains how the technique operates:
I am pulled into the film in a stream of yellow light and I can pull people out of the film withdrawal shots pulling the [End Page 58] flesh off naked boys. Sequences are linked by the presence of some arbitrary object a pin wheel, A Christmas-tree ornament, a pyramid, an Easter egg, a copper coil going away and coming always in the same numerical order" (TNW 405).
Though presented in sequential order, the images of the peep show do not follow one another along linear or causal lines, but interconnect and overlap through association. And the viewer of the peep show, unlike that of the Reality Film, is not locked inside or outside of the film: "The structuralized peep show may intersperse the narrative and then I am back in front of the screen and moving in and out of it" (TNW 405–06). The viewer both participates in and observes the film at once creating a true freedom of movement as opposed to the Reality Film's one-track series of frames. Robin Lydenberg, referring to the "memory cut-ups" of Ticket (also an apt descriptor for The Wild Boys' peep show sections), notes, "We are no longer trapped in repetition but vibrated free of its constraints; the movement of the memory cut-ups is more explicitly a movement in and out of time" (87).
Ricoeur observes, "Contemporary experiments in the area of narrative techniques are thus aimed at shattering the very experience of time" (81); but contends that while "[t]he time of a novel may break away from real time … it cannot help but be configured in terms of new norms of temporal organization that are still perceived as temporal by the reader" (25). He characterizes this kind of experimentation as "games with time" resulting from fictive narratives' "split between utterance and statement" (61), or (in terms he credits to Günther Müller), "the time of narrating and narrated time" (77). Ricoeur clarifies the two forms of fictive time as follows: the time of narrating is "the time taken to tell the story which is comparable to the interpretation that the orchestra conductor gives to the theoretical time of performing a piece of music" (79); the time narrated is "the fictive experience of time, such as is undergone by the characters, themselves fictive, in the narrative" (76). Manipulation of the interplay between these two temporal levels has been a feature of experimental and frame narratives at least since Laurence Sterne's Tristram Shandy (1760). In contemporary experimental fiction, Ricoeur notes a condition of heightened discord between these forms of fictive time that generates the fragmentation, [End Page 59] confusion, etc., which characterize them. However, he argues that even these narratives are grounded to the temporal position of the narrator who "in fact determines a present—the present of narration" (98). The "present of narration" offers readers a context within which to engage the temporal games of the narrative and to order the fragments and confusions they create.
Burroughs's games with time, however, exceed those of most experimental authors, who tend to adhere to the assumptions Ricoeur makes. His narratives are not simply nonlinear, as nonlinear narratives still operate in terms of a recognizable present and past, but are essentially atemporal. Though some nonlinear narratives may obscure which narrative strain represents present or past, the difference between the two is almost always discernible as the position of the narrator determines the present. However, the stable present of the narrator/narrative simply does not exist in Burroughs's novels. Narrators or, more to the point, narrative perspectives do not maintain stable temporal positions, do not hold onto or remain within a "present of narration." Readers are confronted with narrators and narrative forms that not only have no control of the narrated time, but do not occupy any fixed narrative present.
As Cary Nelson notes, "Burroughs's fiction attempts to make this instant a spatial experience of all time, to make the present a radical implosion of the beginning and the end of time" (129). In Ticket, Burroughs exemplifies this narrative complication using a journal entry format, a format featuring explicit time markers of entry dates. The journal is introduced by an anonymous narrator speaking in quotation marks that disappear when the journal entries begin. The narrative perspective appears to shift with the disappearance of the quotation marks, which do not reappear until the end of the chapter. As the frame narrative gives way to the embedded narrative of the journal, its author (also unnamed) is leading an expedition to explore Ward Island. The journal's entries are each dated, beginning with entries on July 7 and 8 of 1862. The 1862 narrative represents a past time being reflected back upon by both the frame narrative and the journal form, a record of past events. The present time of the narrative seems to be that of the frame narrative. However, Burroughs complicates the temporality of the narrative dating the third journal entry July 9, 1962 rather than the expected 1862 (TE 97, emphasis added). The 1962 date likely represents the present time of the frame narrative, which here is confused with [End Page 60] the past time of the journal narrative. The timelines are not simply juxtaposed, but are conflated and ultimately become indistinct from one another. The journal's coalescence of the two timelines, a century apart from one another, continues through the chapter, subverting the temporality of the embedded journal narrative while simultaneously conflating it with the frame narrative. Such confusions challenge the notion that the "present of narration" can be relied upon as a stable temporal location by which readers can orient themselves within the novels. The time of the events being narrated and the point in time from which they narrated are equally dissolute.
The temporal slippage is further signaled by a change in the narrative style from the sort of linear report commonly found in journal writing to the absence of linearity in the cut-up technique. The first two entries are characterized by clear, descriptive accounts of the expedition: "We got an early start poling and paddling our canoe up the river—There seems to be little wild life about" (TE 97). But the clarity of the journal decays in the 1962 entry: "Disease of the image track—The onset is sudden voices screaming a steady stream—I had forgotten unseen force of memory pictures" (TE 97–98). The transformation to the cut-up technique at the moment of the temporal shift indicates an essential unreliability in the temporal positions of the narratives. As the "memory pictures" of the journal's past exert their "unseen force," the past intrudes upon and subsumes the present that should contain it.
A July 9, 1862 entry immediately follows that of July 9, 1962, intensifying the confusion of the timelines and returning to the linear narrative style. This style continues in the following entry, but the timeline remains uncertain: "July 11? 12? 13? 1862" (TE 99). The question of which day the entry recounts leads, in the next entry, to the merger of three days into one: "July 11, 12, 13, 1962" (TE 100). Again, the cut-up narrative returns to announce the complications of locating the narrative in time. Though "[p]resent time leads to an understanding of knowing and open food in the language of life," eventually "[w]ind of morning disintegrates present time" (TE 100). The subsequent entry from July 14, 1862 begins, typically, with a linear narrative, but soon disintegrates into cut-up: "A young male face of dazzling beauty moved in and i was free of my body—The orchid girl floated over the pool toward me and i rushed her stuttering back sex words that tore her tentative substance like bullets" (TE 101). The "tentative [End Page 61] substance" of the linear narrative, rendered as the orchid girl, is overcome by the "stuttering" and "dazzling beauty" of the cut-up method, freeing the narrative's "body" from the constraints of temporality. The following entry seems to reinscribe the primacy of the narrative of the present time, dating the entry "July 14, 1962–Present time" (TE 101). However, Burroughs confirms the indeterminacy of the "present time" as 1962 is also "future time" (TE 101). The final sentence of the chapter reminds us once again that "[w]ind of morning disintegrates present time" (TE 102).
The indeterminacy of the present in the novels strengthens the possibility of time travel, a common occurrence in the novels. As Murphy writes:
Neither the structure of the past nor the structure of the future is given in advance; either can be manipulated in the present to produce different states of affairs. This is the role that artworks can play in the present, the role of fantasmatic structures that alter the direction and speed of the present moment by altering the past trajectory on which the present would have to travel.
(44)
The cut-up and fold-in methods create not only a confusion of narrative linearity, but also create the possibility of time travel. Burroughs writes, "Now when I fold today's paper in with yesterday's paper and arrange the pictures to form a time section montage, I am literally moving back to the time when I read yesterday's paper, that is traveling in time back to yesterday" (TNS 82). Here, "the 'fold-in' method is itself a means of time travel" (Enns 110). The conflation of past and present disrupts linear time creating a condition of atemporality that opens the possibility of movement backward as well as forward; if time is fluid, then so are movements in and through time.
Burroughs employs time travel for two purposes: one being the manipulation of the past in order to effect change in the present; the other being the release from the constraints of linear time. John Vernon notes that for Burroughs time "exists at two polar extremes":
At one polarity, temporality is the experience of boundlessness, specifically a release from the boundaries, the gravity, [End Page 62] of the past.… At the other polarity, time is a being completely bounded, a being trapped, specifically by the body and by the decay of the body" (219).
In addition to its concerns about the corporeality of the time-bound human body, the latter polarity views time itself as a "being" bounded by the "body" of the past. This view of time trapped in a decaying body relates to the Foucauldian notion of historicism, which "calls on the past to resolve the question of the present" (359). Returning to the conditions of the past, according to this view, can cure the maladies of the present. Foucault characterizes this notion as an "ideology of the return" that leads to a nostalgic attachment to an idealized past (359). In Burroughs, the ideology of return extends to a supposition that the present can be altered by returning to the past and changing events, as in the declaration from Port of Saints, "We will rewrite all the wrongs of history" (PS 33). In Cities also, Burroughs presents a typical return strategy through one of his ubiquitous doctors who proposes "to remove the temporal limits, shifting our experimental theater into past time in order to circumvent the whole tedious problem of overpopulation" (CRN 21). But this strategy still keeps one trapped within Vernon's bound time. Derrida advises that such "repetitions, substitutions, transformations, and permutations are always taken from a history of meaning [sens]—that is, in a word, a history—whose origin may always be reawakened or whose end may always be anticipated in the form of a presence" (Writing 279). Even though alterable, under this view time is still bound by the notion of a stable and distinct history to which one can return. Burroughs must work through this complication in order to release his narratives from the ideology of return.
The strategy of returning to the past in order to rescue the future sees its execution in "The Mayan Caper" chapter of The Soft Machine. The chapter's time traveler, Joe Brundige, returns to the past of ancient Mayan civilization to sabotage the control machines that forecast their influence toward the oppression of present societies. As Anthony Enns notes, "[L]ike the Mayan priests, who exercise a monopoly over written information in order to control and manipulate the masses, the Trak News Agency [in Brundige's "present"] similarly controls people's perception of reality through the use of computers" (102–03). The Trak News Agency [End Page 63] has become the new priesthood, employing IBM machines, in the same way as the Mayan calendar, to control "thought feeling and apparent sensory impressions" by monopolizing and manipulating the flow of information (TNS 148–49). For Burroughs, the subversion of the Mayan control mechanisms of the past resonates in all times and the sabotage of the Mayan machines is duplicated on the present day IBM machines. In the past: "A great weight fell from the sky.… Tidal waves rolled over the Mayan control calendar" (TNS 93). In the present: "Symbol books of the all-powerful board that had controlled thought and feeling and movement of a planet from birth to death with iron claws of pain and pleasure—The whole structure of reality went up in silent explosions" (TNS 160). The events parallel one another because, for all practical purposes, they are the same event occurring at once across time.
But, to use time travel as a corrective for the issues of the present leaves one still constrained within the code systems of time and history. As Murphy notes, Burroughs views historical time as "a rigidly determined succession of abstract and eternal structures" and "as flat repetition without the possibility of novelty" (134). But this historical notion of time reflects only one of Burroughs's polar extremes of time. At the other extreme lies atemporality: "explosion, being cut out of a context, the experience of total transportation out of oneself, out of a location, out of materiality" (Vernon 219). For Burroughs, then, time travel represents not merely a means to correct events of the past but also a complete release from bound, linear time and a transcendence of the constraints of history.
Brundige's mission in the Mayan past is, in fact, to reprogram codes of control that are specifically linked to time: "Mayan control system depends on the calendar and the codices which contain symbols representing all states of thought and feeling possible to human animals living under such limited circumstances" (TNS 91). The calendar consists of codes of control that constrain "human animals" in time. Burroughs imagines, "The Lord of Time surrounded by files and calculating machines, word and image bank of a picture planet" (TE 104). These calculating machines produce the words and images of power structures; and subsequently, they also produce time, which is itself a product of language. "Well time is getting dressed and undressed eating sleeping not the actions but the words . . What we say about what we do" (TE 114). Furthermore, "What we call history is the history of the word. In the beginning of that history was the [End Page 64] word" (TE 50). Time, and thus history, constitute codes and, as such, cannot be separated from word.
But, just as time can imprison through the codes imposed by the calendar, time can be transcended by subverting those codes. Vernon writes, "The cut-up world is the final condition of time, … time as a series of separate instantaneous flashes, time objectified and shattered into pieces, thus no time at all" (222, emphasis added). Burroughs demonstrates the way in which the cut-up method shatters time in a passage from Ticket:
That's the clock if you set it two hours in advance the last of the last like we are in London a sentence words together in and out you know Manic Goddess 18 of 19 was done the painting was never done never look at a model uninhibited by disease by us astonishing we had done it without ever having a model starlet trapped in the sentence with full stop young painter are models myself look have you been there already?"
(TE 12)
This cut-up passage achieves atemporality even as it describes its own process. Hours can be shifted, removed from one context and grafted into others, just as words can. Juxtapositions of time, like those of words, create new associations: new models in new paintings. The models within the passage are "not trapped in the sentence" but are freed to inhabit multiple paintings that are "never done" and are "there already."
Cities of the Red Night offers Burroughs's most developed criticism of the ideology of return. In this case, the return motif provides structure for a substantial share of the novel. In one of the book's two main narrative lines—the eighteenth century pirate adventure narrative of Noah Blake—Burroughs employs revisionist history as a corrective for a dystopic, disease-ridden world. The pirate narrative represents an attempt to retrieve the possibility for a democratic utopia based upon "[t]he liberal principles embodied in the French and American revolutions" and "put into practice by pirate communes" (CRN xi). Burroughs models the novel's pirate commune on that of one Captain Mission2 claiming, "Had Captain Mission lived long enough to set an example for others to follow, mankind might have stepped free from the deadly impasse of insoluble problems in which we now find ourselves" (CRN xiv). The pirate narrative, then, seemingly [End Page 65] attempts to revise history and to reclaim the utopian democracy exemplified by Mission's commune.
However, Burroughs's commune cannot escape the very injustice and disease it attempts to rectify. In order to establish the commune, let alone to maintain it, war must be waged against the powers that oppose its libertarian ideals. Being outnumbered, the commune must develop more effective weapons and tactics to defeat its enemies, including germ warfare. The use of disease against the enemy is proposed by Burroughs's amoral scientist, Doctor Benway, who argues: "Sickness has killed more soldiers than all the wars of history. We can turn illness to account" (CRN 104). Benway lists a number of biological contaminates including malaria, dysentery, typhoid, etc. for use against enemies. These diseases represent the same biological threat that infects the contemporary world of Clem Snide's narrative, Virus B-23. The ideology of return ultimately results in failure as alterations in the past simply reduplicate the problems of the present. Noah Blake later recognizes the danger of turning the enemies' tactics against them: "To turn this mechanism back on the Inquisitors gives me a feeling of taking over the office of fate" (CRN 190). History is not corrected, but reinscribed through repetition. At the end of the book, Burroughs ruminates, "Better weapons lead to better and better weapons, until the earth is a grenade with the fuse burning" (CRN 332).
Snide's narrative must approach the problem in a different way. Unlike Noah Blake, he recognizes the inflexibility of history and when questioned about possible justifications for biological and/or chemical warfare, he replies, "You would do it justified or not" (CRN 203). He understands the inevitability of the events of history. For Snide, the revision of the past will not suffice to repair the present, he must bring about a conflation of the past and the present—the technique Burroughs employs in the journal passages from Ticket discussed above—to short circuit the influence of history. Burroughs first proposes the technique in Ticket writing, "These writers are going to write history as it happens in present time" (TE 123). Snide thus begins composing his own "pirate story" (CRN 173); but rather than once again revising that particular past, he begins to blend in Mayan and Egyptian texts belonging to different histories, resulting in an alternate narrative line featuring characters that do not occupy any particular time, historical or fictive. Snide is then able to abandon the present time of his narrative by merging with the character of Audrey Carsons who shares [End Page 66] Snide's memories and "was a private eye in another incarnation" (CRN 271). Snide's transposition into the consciousness of Carsons bears resemblance to the time travel technique Burroughs describes elsewhere:
Toby experienced a feeling of ether vertigo as he was pulled into a whirling black funnel. Far away, as if through a telescope, he could see someone sitting at a table, a slim youth of about twenty with yellow hair and brown eyes. A fluid plop and he was inside the youth, looking out.
(CRN 247)
Snide's time traveling does not seek a revision of the past, but the merger of two time lines; just as the body switching involved in time travel is not re-identification or possession, but a union of two consciousnesses.
The characters of Snide's alternate and atemporal narrative can also enter the pirate narrative, infecting it with their own temporal indeterminacy. As a result, Noah Blake's journal-like linear narrative decays as time destabilizes: "Silver spots boil in front of my eyes. I am standing in the empty ruined courtyard hundreds of years from now, a sad ghostly visitant in a dead city, smell of nothing and nobody there" (CRN 197). Blake loses the time of his own narrative: "I am calling without a throat, without a tongue, calling across the centuries" (CRN 197), and like Snide, abandons his own temporality to merge with the consciousness of Carsons. The novel drives the point home when later, in the atemporal narrative, "Audrey screams without a throat, without a tongue" (CRN 306). Audrey's condition echoes that of Blake when his temporal location dissolves.
The narratives of both Blake and Snide, then, become subsumed under the atemporal narrative of Carsons, a narrative which merges genres and, therefore, histories:
Criminals and outcasts of many times and places are found here: bravos from seventeenth-century Venice, old western shootists, Indian Thuggees, assassins from Alamut, samurai, Roman gladiators, Chinese hatchet men, pirates and pistoleros, Mafia hit-men, dropouts from intelligence agencies and secret police (CRN 280). [End Page 67]
The blend of genres conflates historical periods and the time markers associated with any given genre lose relevance. History is rendered impotent as "[c]haracters, actions, and images from one story appear in another; characters and narrators merge and shift identities as they enter different narratives; time and space merge so that all three stories seem to be taking place in a past that is also the present and the future" (Skerl 90). Eventually, the narrative Cities of the Red Night becomes a stage play being performed in a high school gym (CRN 319). All characters from all times and locations converge and merge within the play, which is a series of atemporal vignettes that synopsize the novel. The explosion that ends the play prefigures the claim of the unnamed narrator (possibly Blake again) at the novel's end who announces "I have blown a hole in time with a firecracker" (CRN 332). Ultimately, Burroughs works toward a spatialization of time as narratives are released from the bonds of time and history, moving "all out of time and into space" (TNS 158).
Place and Culture
The novels' insistence upon a movement out of temporal location should not, however, be construed as a movement into spatial location. For Burroughs, "space" is not to be read as "territory," but instead bears much resemblance to Baudrillard's map-simulations. And the places that occupy space—cities, countries, even bodies—are abstract rather than geographical or cultural. Baudrillard explains: "Today abstraction is no longer that of the map, the double, the mirror, or the concept. Simulation is no longer that of a territory, a referential being, or a substance. It is the generation by models of a real without origin or reality: a hyperreal" (1). The map that simulates territory, in fact, "precedes the territory" (1) in that its quest for perfect representation constantly redefines and transforms territory until the territory becomes as much a representation of the map as the map of the territory. This reversal reveals the artifice of both map and territory, erasing distinctions between the imaginary and the real. Burroughs's spaces operate in a similar manner to challenge the notion of places as stable physical or cultural locations. Burroughs's places, like Baudrillard's maps, exist in continual states of movement and mutation as simulations of territories that themselves have no foundations, no origins, and no stable positions. [End Page 68]
In his introduction to Interzone, James Grauerholz describes Burroughs's world model as "that of an indeterminate universe of endless permutation and recombination" (xv). This notion of the world, of place, contradicts that proposed by theorists who argue that place is constituted by "location, material form, and meaningfulness" (Gieryn 466). Thomas Gieryn expounds this view of place, asserting that "[p]laces are made as people ascribe qualities to the material and social stuff gathered there: ours or theirs; safe or dangerous; public or private; unfamiliar or known; rich or poor; Black or White; beautiful or ugly; new or old; accessible or not" (472). These binary qualities, as they are fixed onto locations, become definitive, as "[m]eanings that individuals and groups assign to places are more or less embedded in historically contingent and shared cultural understandings of the terrain" (473). Places, in this account, become established in opposition to other, different places and according to a population's "shared cultural understandings"—a concept reflective of Althusser's particular ideologies. Such places offer little hope for cultural and/or ideological diversity and display great potential for social disparity, hierarchy, and marginalization.
Fixed locations such as these represent for Burroughs sites of cultural and ideological oppression. The Trak Reservation in Soft Machine exemplifies institutionalized space:
The Trak Reservation so-called includes almost all areas in and about the United Republics of Freelandt and, since the Trak Police process all matters occurring in Trak Reservation and no one knows what is and is not Reservation cases, civil and criminal are summarily removed from civilian courts with a single word TRAK to unknown sanctions …" (TNS 43).
The homogenization of place, of all areas of Freelandt, through the imposition of fixed cultural meanings (as laws in the form of the Trak Police) creates a repressive society in which any who exhibit cultural difference are criminals and subject to "unknown sanctions." Gieryn explains this phenomenon, writing, "Place sustains difference and hierarchy […] by embodying in visible and tangible ways the cultural meanings variously [End Page 69] ascribed to them" (474). Marginalization or even ostracism awaits all who fail to reflect the ascribed cultural meanings.
Such dualistic and hierarchical views of place run counter to Burroughs's indeterminate vision of place, in which the meanings of places are not bound to particular histories or cultural experiences, but remain in a state of flux as places are constantly re-defined by the cultures they accommodate and comprise. Burroughs's first-hand experiences of locations throughout the world as well as his studies of the histories and cultures of these and other locations often inform his narratives. As a result, the locations of his narratives reflect the different climates, cultures, landscapes, populations, etc. of a variety of places, often simultaneously. His locations are frequently hybrid, largely influenced by the international city of Tangiers, Morocco. At the time of his residence in the city, control of Tangiers fell under several different European and West Asian governments and was inhabited by a distinctly cosmopolitan population. Like Tangiers, Burroughs's locations—Interzone,3 Freelandia, the Cities of the Red Night—do not allow for interpretation along specific regional, cultural, or political trajectories. Whatever associations these locales might have with locations in the world are mutative and/or ambiguous. All factors related to place are provided only by Burroughs and are subject to abrupt and unannounced transformation.
Cities in the novels are always characterized by their material hybridity, as the physical traits of the various cities represented blend into or overlap one another. In Naked Lunch, he describes Interzone:
All houses in the City are joined. Houses of sod—high mountain Mongols blink in smoky doorways—houses of bamboo and teak, houses of adobe, stone and red brick, South Pacific and Maori houses, houses in trees and river boats, wood houses one hundred feet long sheltering entire tribes, houses of boxes and corrugated iron where old men sit in rotten rags cooking down canned heat, great rusty iron racks rising two hundred feet in the air from swamps and rubbish with perilous partitions built on multi-levelled platforms, and hammocks swinging over the void.
(NL 97) [End Page 70]
Interzone's collage of cities creates a fluid space in which any and all cultures become possible, whether mixing and sharing characteristics or transforming from one to another in a perpetual interchange. Where all cultures are possible, none are primary. Interzone represents a site of cultural conflation as, "High mountain flutes, jazz and bebop, one-stringed Mongol instruments, gypsy xylophones, African drums, Arab bagpipes …" (NL 98) complement rather than compete with one another. Hierarchies dissolve as a culture of multiplicity and change eventually embraces all inhabitants and favors none. Ultimately, Interzone depicts a place that cannot be located by geography or culture. "A place where the unknown past and the emergent future meet in a vibrating soundless hum," it is "some familiar place I cannot locate" (NL 99).
Many critics have noted that the most prevalent form of place in Burroughs's novels is that of the carnival or circus. Indeed, the carnival/circus world perfectly expresses the transforming and transformative qualities of Burroughs locations. In Western Lands he writes:
In Waghdas, however, quarters and streets, squares, markets and bridges change form, shift location from day to day like traveling carnivals. Comfortable, expensive houses arranged around a neat square (all residents have a key to the gate) can change, even as you find your way there, into a murderous ghetto. Oh, there are maps enough. But they are outmoded as soon as they can be printed.
(WL 152)
The carnival/circus offers a space within which society remains in a state of constant motion and change. Tanner sees in Burroughs's cities a representation of "modern civilization as a precarious iron city suspended over a void, a city of Ferris wheels and scenic railways as well as planes and cars all in constant motion;" and proclaims, "This is the whole circus of modern society" (136). McCarthy makes a similar observation, stating, "A circus travels but it is always the same, and this is Burroughs's sardonic image of modern life" (35).
Such places occur so often in the novels precisely because they accommodate Burroughs's insistence on constant transformation. As Jennie Skerl notes, "In the carny world 'nothing is true and everything is permitted,' [End Page 71] and consciousness is a process of free play with forms" (96). This freeform nature of the "carny world" shares much in common with M. M. Bakhtin's carnival. Shanti Elliot describes Bakhtin's carnival as a space of transition comparable to Burroughs's carnival/circus world: "Carnival reversal implies a change from principles of stability and closure to constant possibility […] nothing is fixed in Bakhtin's carnival world, and everything is in a state of becoming" (130). In Bakhtin's own words:
The suspension of all hierarchical precedence during carnival time was of particular significance. Rank was especially evident during official feasts; everyone was expected to appear in the full regalia of his calling … and to take the place corresponding to his position. It was a consecration of inequality. On the contrary, all were considered equal during carnival. Here, in the town square, a special form of free and familiar contact reigned among people who were usually divided by the barriers of caste, property, profession, and age.
(Rabelais 10)
Like Bakhtin's, Burroughs's carnival/circus world releases all participants from geographically and culturally imposed context and creates a site of "constant possibility." The freedom of form that describes this landscape reflects a freedom of consciousness in not only the novel's characters and narratives, but also in readers who are never bound by the narratives to particular cultural references or ideologies.
Burroughs's outlines his strategy of dislocating place from context and ideology in Cities of the Red Night. As the title indicates, place provides a key focus of the novel and the Cities of the Red Night themselves—Tamaghis, Ba'dan, Yass-Waddah, Waghdas, Naufana, and Ghadis—serve as models for Burroughs's notion of conceptual, non-located place. He offers this description:
Tamaghis: This is the open city of contending partisans where advantage shifts from moment to moment in a desperate biological war. Here everything is as true as you think it is and everything you can get away with is permitted. [End Page 72]
Ba'dan: This city is given over to competitive games and commerce. Ba'dan closely resembles present-day America with a precarious moneyed elite, a large disaffected middle class and an equally large segment of criminals and outlaws. Unstable, explosive, and swept by whirlwind riots. Everything is true and everything is permitted. […]
Waghdas: This is the university city, the center of learning where all questions are answered in terms of what can be expressed and understood. Complete permission derives from complete understanding.
(CRN 158)
The form of the descriptions of the cities closely follows that of the Penny Arcade peep show episodes discussed above. The sequence of the cities does not depend on any linear or causal factors such as geographical positions or qualitative assessments of cultural primacy. Instead, the cities are associated and juxtaposed through similarities in their structures. In this case rather than utilizing common objects, Burroughs figures his cities along the lines of ideological structure, characterizing each under a particular ideology. These ideologies diverge in significant ways, but always intersect through their structures, as indicated in the last lines of each description.
As a result, readers are encouraged not to favor one city's ideological perspective over others. In order to truly understand any one city, the reader (or traveler in his terms) needs to experience all cities rather than settle on/in only one: "The traveler must start in Tamaghis and make his way through the other cities in the order named. This pilgrimage may take many lifetimes" (CRN 159). We must travel in all cities in order to engage with the overriding ideological structure that defines them all. Burroughs's insistence on a specific order or sequence of travel may be troubling; but again, as with the Penny Arcade peep show episodes, sequence denotes neither linearity nor causality. The sequence of travel instead operates as a poetic formalism, maximizing the effects of juxtaposing each city with its neighbors. The sequence follows Burroughs's argument: political division is followed by economic division, which is followed by gender division, which is followed by intellectual division. The order is not arbitrary, but in the end no one city is preferable to any of the others and no causal links [End Page 73] exist between cities. The sequence is a formal device that leads eventually to the cities of Naufana and Ghadis, "the cities of illusion (CRN 159)," in which ideological divisions no longer have material foundations. The particular ideologies of the first four cities collapse in the final two cities into Althusser's "ideology in general" (239), yielding sites disconnected from history or culture "where nothing is true and therefore everything is permitted" (CRN 159). As the overriding structure of ideology becomes visible, the particular ideologies of each city are exposed as arbitrary and the divisions they create as illusory.
By traveling through the Cities of the Red Night, readers come to understand the artifice of the structure of each city and encounter the true multiplicity and mutability of the cities. Jaishree Odin describes this alternative vision of place, writing, "This contemporary topology is composed of cracks, in-between spaces, or gaps that do not fracture reality into this or that, but instead provide multiple points of articulation with a potential for incorporating contradictions and ambiguities" (599–600). Similarly, Burroughs's cities are sites of inclusion rather than exclusion. One does not leave a city and enter another so much as continually re-enter the same city in an altered context. As Burroughs informs us, "There are bits and pieces of many cities in Tamaghis" (CRN 234). Any given city contains many cities within its form and, thus, distinctions between cities break down.
The Nova Express chapter, "A Distant Thank You," demonstrates the process by which place and, subsequently, culture are rendered mutable. In this section, the aristocratic Benson's call in Bill&Iam, for a remodeling job on a living space that is at once a house, a city, and the cultures that define the space. Bill&Iam, being an amalgamate of the "technical" Iam and the creative Bill, brings the element of indeterminacy to the remodel. The cut-up prose further reflects the method of the remodel, as Bill explains: "We might start with a photo-collage of The House—yes?—of course and the statues in clear air fell away to a Mayan Ball Court with eternal gondolas" (TNN 286). Applying this method, Bill&Iam constructs a space of fluidity within the structure of The House:
And The House moved slowly from Inca to Mayan back to peasant hut in blighted maize fields or windy mountain slopes of the Andes—Gothic cathedrals soared and dissolved [End Page 74] in air—The walls were made of blocks that shifted and permutated—cave paintings—Mayan relief—Attic frieze—panels—screens—photo-collage of the House in all periods and stages—Greek temples rose in clear air and fell to limestone huts by a black lagoon dotted with gondolas—(TNN 287)
The "photo-collage" approach fragments The House into mutable pieces and, like the cut-up prose, creates opportunities for endless permutations of physical and cultural elements.
The mutability of physical space created by the remodel also produces a mutability of culture within the space. Bill describes his vision for the statuary to be included, "I envisage a Mayan Ball Court with eternal youths—and over here the limestone bookmakers and bettors changing position and pedestal" (TNN). The two cultures represented, one ancient and one contemporary, not only create a multiplicity but are always in a state of flux, "changing position and pedestal." Artworks no longer designate the cultural identities of the spaces they occupy, nor can they be culturally located by those spaces.
The inhabitants of The House, just as the artworks, become as inconstant as their environment. The Fish People, an "amphibious-hermaphrodite strain," undergo continual transformations "blending beauty and vileness" (TNN 291). And the Lemur People, who are "all affect," are so transient they cannot be held even in memory (TNN 294). Burroughs explains, "No one has been able to hold a lemur for more than a few minutes in my memory […] the least attempt-thought of a holding and they are back in the branches" (TNN 294–95).4 Since these creatures have no fixed physical location or even fixed physical form, they have no notion of borders, of exclusion, or of the "other." They "have lost their enemy" and have no use for divisive and hierarchical ideologies (TNN 287). Nor do they maintain any stable cultural values on which to found ideology. They are perfect products and inhabitants of a landscape that cannot be located.
Burroughs's spaces should not be viewed as sites of transgression of the boundaries of culture and ideology, but rather as sites of transcendence where culture and ideology dissolve, where meaning is released from the materiality of place as territory. Such places are not touchable, either physically [End Page 75] or ideologically, and are therefore not locatable. One must experience Burroughsian space, as with the Cities of the Red Night, through associations with its own permutations. He invites readers to "imagine that you are dead and see your whole life spread out in a spatial panorama, a vast maze of rooms, streets, landscapes, not sequential but arranged in shifting associational patterns" (WL 138). These patterns generate an ever-changing series of meanings unhindered by the constraints of material context.
Ultimately, Burroughs's novels disintegrate all material contexts, constructing temporal and physical (dis)locations as fluid and destabilized spaces. In Murphy's words, contexts are "[c]oefficients of deterritorialization … ephemeral, or rather variable in the mathematical sense: capable of taking on any value in a given domain" (195). These variable contexts create both a challenge and a boon for readers of the novels. Given no predetermined context, no ideological frame, by which to assign meaning to the texts, readers are challenged to engage the texts in a more personal as well as active manner, negotiating unique and ever-changing meanings during each reading. Readers must encounter these novels utilizing an associative strategy comparable to María Lugones's "complex communication" in which "we create and cement relational identities, meanings that did not precede the encounter" (84, emphasis added). This associative strategy requires a great deal of attention from readers who negotiate the continual construction and reconstruction the world of the novels as new relationships and juxtapositions emerge from inside as well as outside the texts.
The advantage of Burroughs's fugitive world, and the associative reading strategy it demands, is the opportunity for readers to fully and profoundly participate in the creation of that world. Burroughs's world can be compared to Bakhtin's "world that creates the text, for all its aspects—the reality reflected in the text, the authors creating the text, the performers of the text (if they exist) and finally the listeners or readers who recreate and in doing so renew the text—participate equally in the creation of the represented world in the text" (Dialogic 253). This world is singular and not referential, it is disconnected from any "real" landscape or time frame, unlocatable yet familiar owing to its inclusion of any and all elements of worlds within the experiences of readers. The text becomes its own context, a simulacrum of material context generated from within as well as without. As a result readers, like the narratives themselves, are liberated [End Page 76] from fixed times and places, from particular histories and cultures, and from the ideological trappings these generate.
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William Seward Burroughs II (5 February 1914 – 2 August 1997), more commonly known as William S. Burroughs, was an American novelist, essayist, social critic, painter and spoken word performer. Much of Burroughs' work is semi-autobiographical, drawn from his experiences as an opiate addict, a condition that marked the last fifty years of his life. He was a central member of the Beat Generation and an avant-garde author who influenced popular culture as well as literature. In 1984 he was elected to the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters.
Quotes
[edit]
The junk merchant doesn't sell his product to the consumer, he sells the consumer to his product. He does not improve and simplify his merchandise. He degrades and simplifies the client.
"Letter from a Master Addict to Dangerous Drugs", written in 1956, first published in The British Journal of Addiction, Vol. 52, No. 2 (January 1957), p. 1 and later used as footnotes in Naked Lunch
Communication must become total and conscious before we can stop it.
The Ticket That Exploded (1962)
The 'Other Half' is the word. The 'Other Half' is an organism. Word is an organism. The presence of the 'Other Half' is a separate organism attached to your nervous system on an air line of words can now be demonstrated experimentally. One of the most common 'hallucinations' of subject during sense withdrawal is the feeling of another body sprawled through the subject's body at an angle...yes quite an angle it is the 'Other Half' worked quite some years on a symbiotic basis. From symbiosis to parasitism is a short step. The word is now a virus. The flu virus may have once been a healthy lung cell. It is now a parasitic organism that invades and damages the central nervous system. Modern man has lost the option of silence. Try halting sub-vocal speech. Try to achieve even ten seconds of inner silence. You will encounter a resisting organism that forces you to talk. That organism is the word.
The Ticket That Exploded (1962)
1. Never give anything away for nothing. 2. Never give more than you have to (always catch the buyer hungry and always make him wait). 3. Always take back everything if you possibly can.
On drug dealing, quoted in The Daily Telegraph (1964)
You know, they ask me if I were on a desert island and I knew nobody would ever see what I wrote, would I go on writing. My answer is most emphatically yes. I would go on writing for company. Because I'm creating an imaginary — it's always imaginary — world in which I would like to live.
Quoted in interview, The Paris Review (Fall 1965)
The hallucinogens produce visionary states, sort of, but morphine and its derivatives decrease awareness of inner processes, thoughts and feelings. They are pain killers; pure and simple. They are absolutely contraindicated for creative work, and I include in the lot alcohol, morphine, barbiturates, tranquilizers — the whole spectrum of sedative drugs.
Quoted in interview, The Paris Review (Fall 1965), in response to "The visions of drugs and the visions of art don't mix?"
When a certain stage of responsibility and awareness has been reached by a young banker he is taken to a room lined with family portraits in the middle of which is an ornate gilded toilet. Here he comes every day to defecate surrounded by the family portraits until he realizes that money is shit. And what does the money machine eat to shit it out? It eats youth, spontaneity, life, beauty and above all it eats creativity. It eats quality and shits out quantity. There was a time when the machine ate in moderation from a plentiful larder and what it ate was replaced. Now the machine is eating faster.
The Job: Interviews with William S. Burroughs (1966) by Burroughs with Daniel Odier, p. 73; as quoted in Word cultures : radical theory and practice in William S. Burroughs' fiction (1987) by Robin Lydenberg, p. 146
A paranoid man is a man who knows a little about what's going on.
Quoted in Friend magazine (1970)
Faced by the actual practice of freedom, the French and American revolutions would be forced to stand by their words.
Cities of the Red Night (1981)
There is simply no room left for 'freedom from the tyranny of government' since city dwellers depend on it for food, power, water, transportation, protection, and welfare. Your right to live where you want, with companions of your choosing, under laws to which you agree, died in the eighteenth century with Captain Mission. Only a miracle or a disaster could restore it.
Cities of the Red Night (1981)
You are a Shit Spotter. It's satisfying work. ... We have observed that most of the trouble in the world has been caused by ten to twenty percent of folks who can't mind their own business, because they have no business of their own to mind, any more than a smallpox virus. Now your virus is an obligate cellular parasite and my contention is that evil is quite literally a virus parasite occupying a certain brain area which we may term the RIGHT center. The mark of a basic shit is that he has to be right. And right here we must make a diagnostic distinction between the hard-core virus-occupied shit and a plain, ordinary, mean no-good son of a bitch. Some of these sons of bitches don't cause any trouble at all, just want to be left alone.
The Place Of Dead Roads (1983), p. 155
Variant, using much of this passage in a later essay:
Most of the trouble in the world has been caused by folks who can't mind their own business, because they have no business of their own to mind, any more than a smallpox virus has. Now your virus is an obligate cellular parasite and my contention is that evil is quite literally a virus parasite occupying a certain brain area which we may term the RIGHT center. The mark of a basic shit is that he has to be right. And right here we must make a distinction between the hard-core virus-occupied shit and a plain, ordinary, mean no-good son of a bitch. Some of these sons of bitches don't cause any trouble at all, just want to be left alone and are only dangerous when molested, like the Brown Recluse.
"My Own Business" in The Adding Machine : Selected Essays (1985), p. 16
Victimless crimes are the lifeline of the RIGHT virus. And there is a growing recognition, even in official quarters, that victimless crimes should be removed from the books or subject to minimal penalties. Those individuals who cannot or will not mind their business cling to the victimless-crime concept, equating drug use and private sexual behavior with robbery and murder. If the right to mind one's own business is recognized, the whole shit disposition is untenable and Hell hath no vociferous fury than an endangered parasite.
The Place Of Dead Roads (1983), p. 155
Last night I encountered a dream cat with a very long neck and a body like a human fetus, gray and transluscent. I don't know what it needs or how to provide for it. Another dream years ago of a human child with eyes on stalks. It is very small, but can walk and talk "Don't you want me?" Again, I don't know how to care for the child. But I am dedicated to protecting and nurturing him at any cost! It is the function of the Guardian to protect hybrids and mutants in the vulnerable stage of infancy.
The Cat Inside (1986)
This is a war universe. War all the time. That is its nature. There may be other universes based on all sorts of other principles, but ours seems to be based on war and games. All games are basically hostile. Winners and losers. We see them all around us: the winners and the losers. The losers can oftentimes become winners, and the winners can very easily become losers.
"The War Universe", taped conversation, first published in Grand Street, No. 37 (1991)
After a shooting spree, they always want to take the guns away from the people who didn't do it. I sure as hell wouldn't want to live in a society where the only people allowed guns are the police and the military.
Grand Street, no. 37 & The War Universe (1992)
England has the most sordid literary scene I've ever seen. They all meet in the same pub. This guy's writing a foreword for this person. They all have to give radio programs, they have to do all this just to scrape by. They're all scratching each other's backs.
Forbes (2 April 2001), p. 172
Love? What is it? Most natural painkiller what there is. LOVE.
Last Words: The Final Journals of William S. Burroughs (2000)
Build a good name. Keep your name clean. Don't make compromises, don't worry about making a bunch of money or being successful — be concerned with doing good work and make the right choices and protect your work. And if you build a good name, eventually, that name will be its own currency.
Recounted by Patti Smith in an Interview by Christian Lund, the Louisiana Literature festival August 24, 2012, at the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art
Junkie (1953)
[edit]
The questions, of course, could be asked: Why did you ever try narcotics? Why did you continue using it long enough to become an addict? You become a narcotics addict because you do not have strong motivations in the other direction. Junk wins by default. I tried it as a matter of curiosity.
Prologue
When you stop growing you start dying.
Prologue
I have learned the junk equation. Junk is not, like alcohol or weed, a means to increased enjoyment of life. Junk is not a kick. It is a way of life.
Prologue
Tea heads are not like junkies. A junky hands you the money, takes his junk and cuts. But tea heads don't do things that way. They expect the peddler to light them up and sit around talking for half an hour to sell two dollars' worth of weed. If you come right to the point, they say you are a "bring down." In fact, a peddler should not come right out and say he is a peddler.
Tea heads are gregarious, they are sensitive, and they are paranoiac. If you get to be known as a "drag" or a "bring down," you can't do business with them.
I can say definitely that weed is an aphrodisiac and that sex is more enjoyable under the influence of weed than without it. Anyone who has used good weed will verify this statement.
The American uppermiddle-class citizen is a composite of negatives. He is largely delineated by what he is not.
You need a good bedside manner with doctors or you will get nowhere.
I lay down and tried to sleep. When I closed my eyes I saw an Oriental face, the lips and nose eaten by disease. The disease spread, melting the face into an amoeboid mass in which the eyes floated, dull crustacean eyes. Slowly, a new face formed around the eyes. A series of faces, hieroglyphs, distorted and leading to the final place where the human road ends, where the human form can no longer contain the crustacean horror that has grown inside it.
Coke is pure kick. It lifts you straight up, a mechanical lift that starts leaving you as soon as you feel it
A ghost in daylight on a crowded street.
A junky runs on junk time. When his junk is cut off, the clock runs down and stops. All he can do is hang on and wait for non-junk time to start. A sick junkie has no escape from external time, no place to go. He can only wait.
When people start talking about their bowel movements, they are inexorable as the processes of which they speak.
A lot of people made quick easy money during the War and for several years after. Any business was good, just as any stock is good on a rising market. People thought they were sharp operators, when actually they were just riding a lucky streak. Now the Valley is in a losing streak and only the big operators can ride it out. In the Valley economic laws work out like a formula in high school algebra, since there is no human element to interfere. The very rich are getting richer and all the others are going broke. The big holders are not shrewd or ruthless or enterprising. They don't have to say or think anything. All they have to do is sit and the money comes pouring in. You have to get up with the Big Holders or drop out and take any job they hand you. The middle class is getting the squeeze, and only one in a thousand will go up. The Big Holders are the house, and the small farmers are the players. The player goes broke if he keeps on playing, and the farmer has to play or lose to the Government by default.
Sodomy is as old as the human species.
Why does an addict get a new habit so much quicker than a junk virgin, even after the addict has been clean for years? I do not accept the theory that junk is lurking in the body all that time - the spine is where it supposedly holes up - and I disagree with all psychological answers. I think the use of junk causes permanent cellular alteration. Once a junky, always a junky. You can stop using junk, but you are never off after the first habit.
Junk short-circuits sex. The drive to non-sexual sociability comes from the same place sex comes from, so when I have an H or M shooting habit I am non-sociable. If someone wants to talk, O.K. But there is no drive to get acquainted. When I come off the junk, I often run through a period of uncontrolled sociability and talk to anyone who will listen.
Junk takes everything and gives nothing but insurance against junk sickness.
Junk is an inoculation of death that keeps the body in a condition of emergency
You sometimes wake up from a dream and think, "Thank God, I didn't really do that!" Reconstructing a period of blackout you think, "My God, did I really do that?" The line between saying and thinking is blurred. Did you say it or just think it?
When you give up junk, you give up a way of life. I have seen junkies kick and hit the lush and wind up dead in a few years. Suicide is frequent among ex-junkies. Why does a junky quit junk of his own will? You never know the answer to that question. No conscious tabulation of the disadvantages and horrors of junk gives you the emotional drive to kick. The decision to quit junk is a cellular decision, and once you have decided to quit you cannot go back to junk permanently any more than you could stay away from it before.
Kick is seeing things from a special angle. Kick is momentary freedom from the claims of the aging, cautious, nagging, frightened flesh. Maybe I will find in yage what I was looking for in junk and weed and coke.
Grove Press, 2003, ISBN 0-802-11639-6, 289 pages
The face of "evil" is always the face of total need. A dope fiend is a man in total need of dope. Beyond a certain frequency need knows absolutely no limit or control. In the words of total need: "Wouldn't you?" Yes you would. You would lie, cheat, inform on your friends, steal, do anything to satisfy total need. Because you would be in a state of total sickness, total possession, and not in a position to act in any other way. Dope fiends are sick people who cannot act other than they do. A rabid dog cannot choose but bite.
Introduction
The junk merchant doesn't sell his product to the consumer, he sells the consumer to his product. He does not improve and simplify his merchandise. He degrades and simplifies the client
Introduction
If you wish to alter or annihilate a pyramid of numbers in a serial relation, you alter or remove the bottom number. If we wish to annihilate the junk pyramid, we must start with the bottom of the pyramid: the Addict in the Street, and stop tilting quixotically for the "higher ups" so called, all of whom are immediately replaceable. The addict in the street who must have junk to live is the one irreplaceable factor in the junk equation. When there are no more addicts to buy junk there will be no junk traffic. As long as junk need exists, someone will service it.
Introduction
I can feel the heat closing in, feel them out there making their moves, setting up their devil doll stool pigeons, crooning over my spoon and dropper I throw away at Washington Square Station, vault a turnstile and two flights down the iron stairs, catch an uptown A train...
Opening Chapter
Junk is surrounded by magic and taboos, curses and amulets.
Opening Chapter
Shooting PG is a terrible hassle, you have to burn out the alcohol first, then freeze out the camphor and draw this brown liquid off with a dropper—have to shoot it in the vein or you get an abscess, and usually end up with an abscess no matter where you shoot it. Best deal is to drink it with goof balls ... So we pour it in a Pernod bottle and start for New Orleans past iridescent lakes and orange gas flares, and swamps and garbage heaps, alligators crawling around in broken bottles and tin cans, neon arabesques of motels, marooned pimps scream obscenities at passing cars from islands of rubbish ... New Orleans is a dead museum. We walk around Exchange Place breathing PG and find The Man right away. It's a small place and the fuzz always knows who is pushing so he figures what the hell does it matter and sells to anybody. We stock up on H and backtrack for Mexico. Back through Lake Charles and the dead slot-machine country, south end of Texas, nigger-killing sheriffs look us over and check the car papers. Something falls off you when you cross the border into Mexico, and suddenly the landscape hits you straight with nothing between you and it, desert and mountains and vultures; little wheeling specks and others so close you can hear wings cut the air (a dry husking sound), and when they spot something they pour out of the blue sky, that shattering bloody blue sky of Mexico, down in a black funnel ... Drove all night, came at dawn to a warm misty place, barking dogs and the sound of running water.
Opening Chapter
"I was standing outside myself trying to stop those hangings with ghost fingers. . . . I am a ghost wanting what every ghost wants—a body—after the Long Time moving through odorless alleys of space where no life is only the colorless no smell of death. . . . Nobody can breathe and smell it through pink convulsions of gristle laced with crystal snot, time shit and black blood filters of flesh"
Opening Chapter
Ever see a hot shot hit, kid? I saw the Gimp catch one in Philly. We rigged his room with a one-way whorehouse mirror and charged a sawski to watch it. He never got the needle out of his arm. They don't if the shot is right. That's the way they find them, dropper full of clotted blood hanging out of a blue arm. The look in his eyes when it hit --- Kid, it was tasty.
Opening Chapter
America is not a young land: it is old and dirty and evil before the settlers, before the Indians. The evil is there waiting.
Opening Chapter
Well as, one judge said to the other, 'Be just and if you can't be just be arbitrary.' Regret cannot observe customary obscenities.
From the chapter entitled "And Start West," p. 5
From the chapter entitled "Lazarus Go Home," p. 62
Hustlers of the world, there is one Mark you cannot beat: The Mark Inside.
From the chapter entitled "Rube", p. 11
A functioning police state needs no police.
From the chapter entitled "Benway", p. 31
The study of thinking machines teaches us more about the brain than we can learn by introspective methods. Western man is externalizing himself in the form of gadgets.
Benway
“Squatting on old bones and excrement and rusty iron, in a white blaze of heat, a panorama of naked idiots stretches to the horizon. Complete silence - their speech centres are destroyed - except for the crackle of sparks and the popping of singed flesh as they apply electrodes up and down the spine. White smoke of burning flesh hangs in the motionless air. A group of children have tied an idiot to a post with barbed wire and built a fire between his legs and stand watching with bestial curiosity as the flames lick his thighs. His flesh jerks in the fire with insect agony.
Benway
Rock and Roll adolescent hoodlums storm the streets of all nations. They rush into the Louvre and throw acid in the Mona Lisa’s face.
Benway
The relation between an O.A. (Oblique Addict) and his R.C. (Recharge Connection) is so intense that they can only endure each other’s company for brief and infrequent intervals—I mean aside from recharge meets, when all personal contact is eclipsed by recharge process.
Habit Notes continued
Last night I woke up with someone squeezing my hand. It was my other hand.
Habit Notes continued
I awoke from The Sickness at the age of forty-five, calm and sane, and in reasonably good health except for a weakened liver and the look of borrowed flesh common to all who survive The Sickness... When I speak of drug addiction I do not refer to keif, marijuana or any preparation of hashish, mescaline, Banisteriopsis caapi, LSD6, Sacred Mushrooms or any other drugs of the hallucinogen group... There is no evidence that the use of any hallucinogen results in physical dependence.
From "Deposition: Testimony Concerning a Sickness," the introduction to the 1960 edition, pp. 199-201
Our national drug is alcohol. We tend to regard the use of any other drug with special horror.
From "Deposition: Testimony Concerning a Sickness", p. 201
The end result of complete cellular representation is cancer. Democracy is cancerous, and bureaus are its cancer. A bureau takes root anywhere in the state, turns malignant like the Narcotic Bureau, and grows and grows, always reproducing more of its own kind, until it chokes the host if not controlled or excised. Bureaus cannot live without a host, being true parasitic organisms. (A cooperative on the other hand can live without the state. That is the road to follow. The building up of independent units to meet needs of the people who participate in the functioning of the unit. A bureau operates on opposite principles of inventing needs to justify its existence.) Bureaucracy is wrong as a cancer, a turning away from the human evolutionary direction of infinite potentials and differentiation and independent spontaneous action to the complete parasitism of a virus. (It is thought that the virus is a degeneration from more complex life-form. It may at one time have been capable of independent life. Now has fallen to the borderline between living and dead matter. It can exhibit living qualities only in a host, by using the life of another — the renunciation of life itself, a falling towards inorganic, inflexible machine, towards dead matter.) Bureaus die when the structure of the state collapse. They are as helpless and unfit for independent existence as a displaced tapeworm, or a virus that has killed the host.
Ordinary Men and Women
Benway: Did I ever tell you about the man who taught his asshole to talk? His whole abdomen would move up and down you dig farting out the words. It was unlike anything I ever heard. This ass talk had sort of a gut frequency. It hit you right down there like you gotta go. You know when the old colon gives you the elbow and it feels sorta cold inside, and you know all you have to do is turn loose? Well this talking hit you right down there, a bubbly, thick stagnant sound, a sound you could smell. This man worked for a carnival you dig, and to start with it was like a novelty ventriliquist act. Real funny, too, at first. He had a number he called “The Better ‘Ole” that was a scream, I tell you. I forget most of it but it was clever. Like, “Oh I say, are you still down there, old thing?” “Nah I had to go relieve myself.” After a while the ass start talking on its own. He would go in without anything prepared and his ass would ad-lib and toss the gags back at him every time. Then it developed sort of teeth-like little raspy in-curving hooks and started eating. He thought this was cute at first and built an act around it, but the asshole would eat its way through his pants and start talking on the street, shouting out it wanted equal rights. It would get drunk, too, and have crying jags nobody loved it and it wanted to be kissed same as any other mouth. Finally it talked all the time day and night, you could hear him for blocks screaming at it to shut up, and beating it with his fist, and sticking candles up it, but nothing did any good and the asshole said to him: “It’s you who will shut up in the end. Not me. Because we don't need you around here any more. I can talk and eat and shit.” After that he began waking up in the morning with a transparent jelly like a tadpole's tail all over his mouth. This jelly was what the scientists call un-D.T., Undifferentiated Tissue, which can grow into any kind of flesh on the human body. He would tear it off his mouth and the pieces would stick to his hands like burning gasoline jelly and grow there, grow anywhere on him a glob of it fell. So finally his mouth sealed over, and the whole head would have have amputated spontaneous — (did you know there is a condition occurs in parts of Africa and only among Negroes where the little toe amputates spontaneously?) — except for the eyes you dig. That's one thing the asshole couldn’t do was see. It needed the eyes. But nerve connections were blocked and infiltrated and atrophied so the brain couldn't give orders any more. It was trapped in the skull, sealed off. For a while you could see the silent, helpless suffering of the brain behind the eyes, then finally the brain must have died, because the eyes went out, and there was no more feeling in them than a crab's eyes on the end of a stalk.
Ordinary Men and Women
You see control can never be a means to any practical end. ... Control can never be a means to anything but more control ... like Junk.
Islam Incorporated and the Parties of Interzone
The broken image of Man moves in minute by minute and cell by cell.... Poverty, hatred, war, police-criminals, bureaucracy, insanity, all symptoms of The Human Virus. 'The Human Virus can now be isolated and treated.'
Islam Incorporated and the Parties of Interzone
Americans have a special horror of giving up control, of letting things happen in their own way without interference. They would like to jump down into their stomachs and digest the food and shovel the shit out.
Hauser and O'Brien
At all levels the drug trade operates without without schedule. Nobody delivers on time except by accident. The addict runs on junk time. His body is his clock, and junk runs through it like an hour-glass. Time has meaning for him only with reference to his need. Then he make his abrupt intrusion into the time of others, and, like all Outsiders, all Petitioners, he must wait, unless he happens to mesh with non-junk time.
Hauser and O'Brien
There is only one thing a writer can write about: what is in front of his senses at the moment of writing... I am a recording instrument... I do not presume to impose "story "plot" "continuity"... Insofar as I succeed in Direct recording of certain areas of psychic process I may have limited function... I am not an entertainer.
Atrophied Preface
Senators leap up and bray for the Death Penalty with inflexible authority of virus yen... Death for dope fiends, death for sex queens (I mean friends) death for the psychopath who offends the cowed and graceless flesh with broken animal innocence of lithe movements. The black wind of death undulates over the land, feeling, smelling for the crime of separate life, movers of the fear-frozen flesh shivering under a vast probability curve... Populations blocks disappear in a checker game of genocide... Any number can play...
Atrophied Preface
You were not there for the beginning. You will not be there for the end. Your knowledge of what is going on can only be superficial and relative
Atrophied Preface
So he imports this special breed of scorpions and feeds them on metal meal and the scorpions turned a phosphorescent blue color and sort of hummed. “Now we must find a worthy vessel,” he said. So we flush out this old goof ball artist and put the scorpion to him and he turned sort of blue and you could see he was fixed right to metal. These scorpions could travel on a radar beam and service the clients after Doc copped for the bread. It was a good thing while it lasted and the heat couldn't touch us. However all these scorpion junkies began to glow in the dark and if they didn't score on the hour metamorphosed into scorpions straight away. So there was a spot of bother and we had to move on disguised as young junkies on the way to Lexington. Bill and Johnny we sorted out the names but they keep changing like one day I would wake up as Bill the next day as Johnny. So there we are in the train compartment shivering junk sick our eyes watering and burning.
Chapter One: "Dead on Arrival"
Cut word lines — Cut music lines — Smash the control images — Smash the control machine — Burn the books — Kill the priests — Kill! Kill! Kill!
The Soft Machine (1961)
Listen to my last words anywhere. Listen to my last words any world. Listen all you board syndicates and governments of the earth. And you powers behind what filth deals consumated in what lavatory to take what is not yours. To sell the ground from unborn forever-
Chapter One
I will tell you: "'the word.'" Alien Word 'the.' "'The word'" of Alien Enemy imprisons "'thee'" in Time. In Body. In Shit. Prisoner, come out. The great skies are open. I Hassan i Sabbah 'rub out the word forever' If you I cancel all your words forever. And the of Hassan i Sabbah as also cancel. Cross all your skies see the silent writing of Brion Gysin Hassan i Sabbah: drew September 16, 1899 over New York.
'Peoples of the earth, you have all been poisoned.' Convert all available stocks of morphine to apomorphine. Chemists, work round the clock on variation and synthesis of the apomorphine formulae.
The purpose of my writing is to expose and arrest Nova Criminals. In 'Naked Lunch', 'Soft Machine' and 'Nova Express' I show who they are and what they are doing and what they will do if they are not arrested. Minutes to go. Souls rotten from their orgasm drugs, flesh shuddering from their nova ovens, prisoners of the earth to 'come out'. With your help we can occupy The Reality Studio and retake their universe of Fear Death and Monopoly-
Chapter One, Prisoners, Come Out
\
I am not a person and I am not an animal. There is something I am here for something I must do before I can go.
Home is where your ass is and if you want to move you move your ass the first step is learning to change homes with someone else and have someone else's ass.
His magic exists from a hypnotic, inadvertant demand of attention as he interrupts the Parade of Death and takes the stage, to unashamedly seize the higher pleasures they fear to reach. Dead and unborn onlookers wallow in their weakness, as the shame they emit fails to penetrate him and rebounds with force as he shoves it down their throats and they choke, vomiting up a jealous mess of many made up morals purely to justify their cowardliness and they sink back down to worthlessness. Rats of submission gnaw on his ankles but they fail to make him buckle and bow to necessity.
‘In the fields workers are planting maize seeds under the direction of an overseer with staff and headdress. Close-up of a worker’s face. Whatever it is that makes a man a man, all feeling and all soul has gone out in that face. Nothing is left but body needs and body pleasures. I have seen faces like that in the back wards of state hospitals for the insane. Faces that live to eat, shit and masturbate.’
Before my father started using morphine again he sent me to a Japanese person to learn something called Karate. I learn these things fast because I am blank inside, and I have no special way of moving or doing things so one way is the same to me as another. ‘
I saw the Colonel empty his revolver and go down under ten wild boys. A moment later they tossed his bleeding head into the air and started a ball game. Just at dusk the wild boys got up and padded away. They left the bodies stripped to the skin many with genitals cut off. The wild boys make little testicles in which they carry their hasish and khat.
The rudeness of many Americans depressed him, a rudeness based on a solid ignorance of the whole concept of manners, and on the proposition that for social purposes, all people are more or less equal and interchangeable.
Chapter One
Lola's was not exactly a bar. It was a small beer-and-soda joint. There was a Coca-Cola box full of beer and soda and ice at the left of the door as you came in. A counter with tube-metal stools covered in yellow glazed leather ran down one side of the room as far as the jukebox. Tables were lined along the wall opposite the counter. The stools had long since lost the rubber caps for the legs and made horrible screeching noises when the maid pushed them around to sweep. There was a kitchen in back, where a slovenly cook fried everything in rancid fat. There was neither a past nor future in Lola's. The place was a waiting room, where certain people checked in a certain times.
Chapter Two
Lee watched the thin hands, the beautiful violet eyes, the flush of excitement on the boy's face. An imaginary hand projected with such force it seemed Allerton must feel the touch of ectoplasmic fingers caressing his ear, phantom thumbs smoothing his eyebrows, pushing the hair back from his face. Now Lee's hands were running down his ribs, the stomach. Lee felt the aching pain of desire in his lungs.
Chapter Two
"A curse," said Lee. "Been in our family for generations. The Lees have always been perverts. I shall never forget the unspeakable horror that froze the lymph in my glands when the baneful word seared my reeling brain: 'homosexual'. I was a homosexual. I thought of the painted simpering female impersonators I'd seen in a Baltimore nightclub. Could it be possible I was one of those subhuman things? I walked the streets in a daze like a man with a light concussion- just a minute, Doctore Kildare, this isn't your script. I might as well have destroyed myself, ending an existence which seemed to offer nothing but grotesque misery and humiliation. Nobler, I thought to die a man than life on, a sex monster. It was a wise old queen - Bob, we called her- who taught me that I had a duty to live and to bear my burden proudly for all to see, to conquer prejudice and ignorance and hate with knowledge and sincerity and love. Whenever you are threatened by a hostile presence, you emit a thick cloud of love like an octopus squirts out ink."
Chapter Three
He forced himself to look at the facts. Allerton was not queer enough to make a reciprocal relation possible. Lee's affection irritated him. Like many people who have nothing to do, he was very resentful of any claims on his time. He had no close friends. He disliked definite appointments. He did not like to feel that anybody expected anything from him. He wanted, so far as possible, to live without external pressure.
Chapter Five
He felt a killing hate for the stupid, ordinary, disapproving people who kept him from doing what he wanted to do. "Someday I am going to have things just like I want," he said to himself. "And if any moralizing son of a bitch gives me any static, they will fish him out of the river.
Chapter Nine
Every time I hit Panama, the place is exactly one month, two months, six months more nowhere, like the progress of a degenerative illness. A shift from arithmetic to geometric progressive seems to have occurred. Something ugly and ignoble and subhuman is cooking in this mongrel town of pimps and whores and recessive genes, this degraded leech on the Canal.
Two Years Later: Mexico City Return
Stupid people can learn a language quiet and easy because there is nothing going on in there to keep it out.
Two Years Later: Mexico City Return
Many so called primitives are afraid of cameras. They think it can capture their soul and take it away. There is in fact something obscene and sinister about photography, a desire to imprison, to incorporate, sexual intensity, a sexual intensity of pursuit.
Two Years Later: Mexico City Return
Mexico city is a terminal of space-time travel, a waiting room where you grab a quick drink while you wait for your train. That is why I can stand to be in Mexico City for your train. That is why I can stand to be in Mexico City or New York. You are not struck; by the fact of being there at all, you are traveling. But in Panama, crossroads of the world, you are exactly so much aging tissue. You have to make arrangements with Pan Am or the Dutch Line for removal of your body. Otherwise, it would stay there and rot in muggy heat, under a galvanized iron roof.
Two Years Later: Mexico City Return
In deep sadness there is no place for sentimentality. It is as final as the mountains: a fact. There it is. When you realize it you cannot complain.
"Sit down on your ass, or what's left of it after four years in the navy."
Youth rebellion is a world wide phenomenon that has not been seen before in history. I don't believe they will calm down and be ad execs at thirty as the establishment would like to believe. Millions of young people all over the world are fed up with shallow unworthy authority running on a platform of bullshit.
"The Coming of the Purple Better One"
As a young child Audrey Carsons wanted to be writers because writers were rich and famous. They lounged around Singapore and Rangoon smoking opium in a yellow pongee silk suit. They sniffed cocaine in Mayfair and they penetrated forbidden swamps with a faithful native boy and lived in the native quarter of Tangier smoking hashish and languidly caressing a pet gazelle.
"The Lemon Kid"
According to legend the white race results from a nuclear explosion in what is now the Gobi desert some 30,000 years ago. The civilization and techniques which made the explosion possible were wiped out. The only survivors were slaves marginal to the area who had no knowledge of its science or techniques. They became albinos as a result of radiation and scattered in different directions. Some of them went into Persia northern India Greece and Turkey. Others moved westward and settled in the caves of Europe. The descendants of the cave-dwelling albinos are the present inhabitants of America and western Europe. In these caves the white settlers contracted a virus passed down along their cursed generations that was to make them what they are today a hideous threat to life on the planet. This virus this ancient parasite is what Freud calls the unconscious spawned in the caves of Europe on flesh already diseased from radiation. Anyone descended from this line is basically different from those who have not had the cave experience and contracted this deadly sickness that lives in your blood and bones and nerves that lives where you used to live before your ancestors crawled into their filthy caves. When they came out of the caves they couldn't mind their own business. They had no business of their own to mind because they didn't belong to themselves any more. They belonged to the virus. They had to kill torture conquer enslave degrade as a mad dog has to bite. At Hiroshima all was lost.
"Astronaut's Return"
Viking Press, 1987, ISBN 0-670-81352-4, 258 pages
Remember the Italian steward who put on women's clothes and so filched a seat in a lifeboat? "A cur in human shape, certainly he was born and saved to set a new standard by which to judge infamy and shame.
p. 6
No job too dirty for a fucking scientist.
p. 8
Cheat your landlord if you can and must, but do not try to shortchange the Muse. It cannot be done. You can't fake quality any more than you can fake a good meal.
ch. 2
Consider the impasse of a one-God universe. He is all-knowing and all-powerful. He can't go anywhere, since He is already everywhere. He can't do anything, since the act of doing presupposes opposition. His universe is irrevocably thermodynamic, having no friction by definition. So, He has to create friction: War, Fear, Sickness, Death, to keep his dying show on the road.
lyric from spoken-word recording "A One God Universe," featured on Spare Ass Annie and Other Tales, paraphrased by Burroughs from The Western Lands, p. 113
Now what sort of man or woman or monster would stroke a centipede I have ever seen? "And here is my good big centipede!" If such a man exists, I say kill him without more ado. He is a traitor to the human race.
ch. 4
Desperation is the raw material of drastic change. Only those who can leave behind everything they have ever believed in can hope to escape.
ch. 5, as cited in The Columbia Dictionary of Quotations (1993), pg. 234
After teaching a class in Creative Writing a few years back, my own creative powers fell to an all-time low. I really had a case of writer's block, and my idealistic young assistant complained that I simply sat around the loft doing absolutely nothing; which was absolutely true. This gave me time to think (as the French say): Can creative writing be taught?
"A Word to the Wise Guy"
My advice is to get a good agent and a good tax accountant if you ever make any money, and remember, you can't eat fame. And you can't write unless you want to write, and you can't want to unless you feel like it.
"A Word to the Wise Guy"
Brainwashing, psychotropic drugs, lobotomy, and other more subtle form of psychosurgery; the technocratic control apparatus of the United States has at its fingertips new techniques if which fully exploited could make Orwell's 1984 seem like a benevolent utopia.
"The Limits of Control"
All modern systems are riddled with contradictions.
"The Limits of Control"
Concession is another control bind. History shows that once a government starts to make concessions it is on a one-way street.
"The Limits of Control"
Any imposition of government censorship on the media is a step in the direction of State control, a step which big money is most reluctant to take.
"The Limits of Control"
A government is never more dangerous than when embarking on a self-defeating or downright suicidal course.
"The Limits of Control"
Quotes about Burroughs
[edit]
William S. Burroughs is one of the most pathetic figures in modern literature, his sadness made more poignant because it has been drawn out for so long. His cadaverous presence gave a hollow echo to a key scene in “Drugstore Cowboy,” in which he was a junkie ex-priest who has long decades of pain in his eyes. It didn't seem like acting. And in a recent documentary about his life, Burroughs came across as a man who walks around with something wounded inside, something that hurts so much that his spirit simply shut down.
Roger Ebert, Review of the cinematic adaptation of The Naked Lunch (1992)
It would take me all night to tell about Old Bull Lee; let's just say now, he was a teacher, and it may be said that he had every right to teach because he spent all his time learning; and the things he learned were what he considered to be and called "the facts of life," which he learned, not only out of necessity but because he wanted to. He dragged his long, thin body around the entire United States and most of Europe and North Africa in his time, only to see what was going on.... there are pictures of him with the international cocaine set of the thirties — gangs with wild hair, leaning on one another, there are other pictures of him in a Panama hat, surveying the streets of Algiers.... He was an exterminator in Chicago, a bartender in New York, a summons-server in Newark. In Paris he sat at cafe tables, watching the sullen French faces go by. In Athens he looked up from his ouzo at what he called the ugliest people in the world. In Istanbul he threaded his way through crowds of opium addicts and rug-sellers, looking for the facts. In Chicago he planned to hold up a Turkish bath, hesitated just for two minutes too long for a drink, and, wound up with two dollars and had to make a run for it. He did all these things merely for the experience....
Jack Kerouac, about a character said to be based upon Burroughs, in On the Road (1957)
There's another book called The Naked Lunch which I couldn't even finish reading, but it's published, and I think the author should be in jail ...
Dorothy Kilgallen, in court testimony defending Lenny Bruce, (1964)
Of the Beat triumvirate, Kerouac was probably both the most pathetic and least noxious. Psychologically, he was a mess—as indeed were Ginsberg and Burroughs. But, unlike them, Kerouac lacked the knack of sanctifying his pathologies and inducing others to bow down in obeisance.
Roger Kimball, "A gospel of emancipation", The New Criterion, October 1997
William Burroughs also believed in taking Vitamin/C.
Naomi Shihab Nye Voices in the Air (2018)
(“Did you ever look for women writers, in particular, or look to find your own experience in your reading?”) No, not when I was very young. It's not so much that I looked for women writers, but I had sense enough to know that, like Henry Miller, he wasn't writing for me. That's as far as I went. I knew that these guys, even the Beats-I thought they were nice, nice to see all those boys, and nice to see all the sexual feelings, but I knew it really wasn't written for me at all. It's not so much that I looked for women writers, as that I understood certain much admired writers, like Burroughs, weren't talking to me. There was nothing to get from them. Though at the same time I did get stuff from Proust. That talked to me, but all those ballsy American heroes had nothing to say to me, though my friends thought they were just hot shit, excuse me.
1981 interview in Conversations with Grace Paley (1997)
Burroughs doesn't interest me at all as a novelist; his experimental, psychedelic stories have always bored me, so much that I don't think I've ever been able to read one. But Junky, the first book he wrote, a factual and autobiographical account of how he became a drug addict and how his addiction to drugs -- free choice augmenting what was already doubtless a certain proclivity -- made him a willing slave, furnishes an accurate description of what I believe to be the literary vocation, of the utter interdependence of the writer and his work and the way the latter feeds on the former, on all he is and all he does or does not do.
Mario Vargas Llosa, Letters to A Young Novelist (Farrar, Strauss & Giroux), transl. Natasha Wimmer (1997, translation 2002)
I first heard of the 23 Enigma from William S. Burroughs, author of Naked Lunch, Nova Express, etc. According to Burroughs, he had known a certain Captain Clark, around 1960 in Tangier, who once bragged that he had been sailing 23 years without an accident. That very day, Clark's ship had an accident that killed him and everybody else aboard. Furthermore, while Burroughs was thinking about this crude example of the irony of the gods that evening, a bulletin on the radio announced the crash of an airliner in Florida, USA. The pilot was another Captain Clark and the flight was Flight 23.
Robert Anton Wilson, in "The 23 Phenomenon" in Fortean Times No. 23 (1977), published online (May 2007)
Wikipedia has an article about:
Wikipedia has an article about:
Wikimedia Commons has media related to:
RealityStudio.org — A Burroughs community featuring a moderated forum, Burroughs texts, exclusive interviews, news, and more.
William S. Burroughs — A French website dedicated to William S. Burroughs featuring news, Burroughs texts and quotations, a gallery and more.
Beat — A film (2000) based on his and Joan Burroughs's life leading up to her death.
William S. Burroughs at Literary Kicks
Interzone.org 5 linked websites on William Burroughs and Brion Gysin.
William S. Burroughs Internet Database
Master Musicians of JoujoukaPhotos Gysin '56, Burroughs 50s, Hamri 50s, 71, Master of Joujouka, Paintings Hamri]
The Western Lands
Link to 1973 Oui article by William Burroughs on visiting Joujouka with Ornette Coleman, Hamri, Brion Gysin and Robert Palmer
Brion Gysin, Tangier Beat Generation, Joe Ambrose, Joujouka
Reporters Redacteurs d'Interzone
Other Minds Archive: William Burroughs Press Conference at Berkeley Museum of Art on November 12, 1974 Streaming audio.
Naropa Audio Archives: William S. Burroughs class on the technology and ethic of wishing (June twenty fifth, 1986) Streaming audio and 64 kbit/s MP3 ZIP file.
Naropa Audio Archives: William S. Burroughs lecture on public discourse. (August eleventh, 1980) Streaming audio and 64 kbit/s MP3 ZIP file.
Interzone Creations Creations inspired by Burroughs & Gysin's work.
The death of Joan Vollmer Burroughs Research by James W. Grauerholz concerning the shooting of Joan Burroughs
Shooting Joan Burroughs at Beats In Kansas.
Essay on Junky by Will Self.
Article on Counterculture and Burroughs by Jonathan Leyser
Zed TV: "Ah Pook is Here" Animated film by Philip Hunt, inspired by Burroughs's text.
Studio AKA: "Ah Pook is Here" Excerpt from animated film by Philip Hunt.
Language Is A Virus Online Cut-Up Machine, the cut-up writing technique
1984 and 1985 audio interviews of William Burroughs by Don Swaim of CBS Radio, RealAudio
Blue Neon Alley - William S. Burroughs directory
Ubuweb arts website contains authorized MP3s of many Burroughs recordings, as well as online video of The Cut Ups short film and other works
Official Site of Underwires -- French band inspired by the work of William S. Burroughs.
John Gilmore on William S Burroughs
Burroughs Book Covers A selection of worldwide front covers of books by William S. Burroughs
Pictorial Map of The East Village — Featuring William Burroughs and other luminaries
Kathy Acker interviews William S. Burroughs at the October Gallery, London (1988) Part 1 Part 2 · Part 3
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Building Bravely - Multiplying Leaders with Tara: Confidence
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My working genius pairing is an Enthusiastic Encourager as our friends from The Table Group have determined in the 6 Types of Working Genius. People with this pairing drive joy and energy from inspiring and supporting others to grow, improve, … Continued
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MBI Blog
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My working genius pairing is an Enthusiastic Encourager as our friends from The Table Group have determined in the 6 Types of Working Genius. People with this pairing drive joy and energy from inspiring and supporting others to grow, improve, and feel good about themselves. And this is exactly what ignites a fire inside of me. I enjoy helping people uncover the potential in themselves that they have been unable to find. This is accomplished by building people through pushing them outside of their comfort zone moving from stagnant to vibrant. As a leader, I have always believed that you must walk your talk. And this means that I am an avid life long learner. I cannot be complacent in my space in this world and must seek the potential I have. So with all this said, I frequently read and listen to podcasts.
Maxwell Leadership Podcast: Growing Leaders
As I reflect on my own personal growth as a leader, I have a hunger that pushes me. It has taken me on a journey from always trying to be the perfect leader and in charge of everything to being a leader seeking to get better and help others do the very same every single day. “When you stop growing, you start dying,” said William S. Burroughs.
” Great Leaders Are Confident in Themselves, Their Vision and Their People.”
John Maxwell discusses the essential elements of growth for a leader. The first area is Confidence. He defines confidence as the uplifting feeling you have before you truly understand the situation. Wow! As a baby leader, I had a whole lot of confidence and not a lot of true understanding. This was quite dangerous for me when making decisions for myself and my team. A reality check occurred when my supervisor suggested I reflect on a mistake I had made as I hadn’t thought through the entire impact of my decision.
Maxwell states, “Great leaders are confident in themselves, their vision and their people.” And the result is that others then have confidence in their leader. I had confidence in myself, however, I didn’t have a vision and hadn’t asked for consensus from others. As we know failing allows for great growth, and I took that opportunity to do just that. I owed it to my team to have confidence in all three so that I could then gain their confidence back in me as their leader. I hope you come back from the second area: courage.
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Novella Reviews – Science Fiction & Fantasy Remembrance
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Posts about Novella Reviews written by Brian Collins
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Science Fiction & Fantasy Remembrance
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Who Goes There?
If any one author is to be associated with a subgenre, it wouldn’t be outrageous to associate Harry Turtledove with the alternate history subgenre. He didn’t invent it by any means (he explicitly pays respects to L. Sprague de Camp on that front), but Turtledove has, over the past four decades, worked more prolifically in alternate history than any other writer. If someone brings up what-if scenarios for the American Civil War wherein the Confederacy won it’s likely Turtledove will get mentioned at some point. He’s also a prolific Twitter user. Since Turtledove turned 75 this month I figured I should review something of his, and “Autubon in Atlantis” is a concise and decent (if not great) example of his specialty. As is to be expected, this is an alternate history story, really only nominally SF, in which the real-life 19th century naturalist John James Autubon returns to an Atlantis which is very much real, albeit lacking the magic in so many depictions. Seems like a random combination of subjects (I’m not even sure I’d heard of Autubon before this), but actually reading the novella, I got a whiff of autobiography, making it both personal and compelling.
Placing Coordinates
First published in the December 2005 issue of Analog Science Fiction, which is not available online. It’s since been reprinted in The Year’s Best Science Fiction: Twenty-Third Annual Collection (ed. Gardner Dozois) and the Turtledove collection Atlantis and Other Places.
Enhancing Image
The year is 1843, and John Autubon and his friend Ed Harris Edward Harris are about to leave a decidedly French-occupied New Orleans (it’s unclear if the United States were ever founded in this timeline) for an expedition. They board the steamer Maid of Orleans whereon Harris meets up with a woman with whom he seems to be in a friends-with-benefits relationship, although Autubon, being a good Catholic and loyally married, just rolls his eyes at his friend. (It’s worth mentioning that Harris was also a real person who really did accompany Autubon on his travels.) “Audubon admired a pretty lady as much as anyone—more than most, for with his painter’s eye he saw more than most—but was a thoroughly married man, and didn’t slide from admiration to pursuit.” This early stretch of the novella shows us the somewhat vitriolic friendship between the two middle-aged men, but also gives us a glimpse into this somewhat altered 1843, in which the Louisiana Purchase apparently never happened and Atlantis as a landmass not only exists but serves as a place for human settlement. Autubon and Harris complement each other such that the former is the brains while the latter is the brawn, Autubon being an artist while Harris fancies himself a hunter—an introvert and an extrovert respectively.
Autubon sails to Atlantis to draw some local birds there, but he also voyages out with the expectation that this might be his final trip to Atlantis; he’s deep in his fifties at this point, and is paranoid that he hasn’t much longer to live. “Audubon wondered if he had ten years left, or even five, let alone a hundred.” The real-life Autubon would die in 1851, aged 65, which in those days would’ve been a fine old age; but given that he’s traveling with Harris, who was about a decade younger, it’s easy to understand how Autubon would feel insecure about his own age. We’re shown in several ways how Autubon and Harris act as foils for each other, and how the latter unintentionally makes Autubon think of the man he could’ve been; but Autubon simply doesn’t have the temperament to be a big game hunter or mountain man, nor even to sleep around were he not already married. This resentment builds somewhat over the course of the story but never boils over, and I’m not sure if that’s for the best or not. If this story has an Achilles’s heel, aside from the occasional clunkiness of Turtledove’s style (this is already a short novella, but you could probably cut a whole page or two of just redundancies), it’s the lack of actual drama or even tangible stakes. Turtledove tries to inject stakes into the thing once we get to Atlantis, but the result ends up being a lot more melancholic than thrilling—which I’m willing to concede may be the point. This story clocks in at about maybe 20,000 words but could’ve definitely been shortened to a novelette.
Aside from our two leads there are only a few incidental characters, such as Harris’s lady friend on the steamboat and later Gordon Coates, “the man who published his work in Atlantis,” who appears for a bit of exposition but is otherwise not much of a character. For the most part this is a two-man show, which in itself is not exactly a problem. Butcher’s Crossing is just four dudes in the wilderness for at least half of its 260-page duration and that worked out fine. Obviously the other “characters” that are supposed to fill the void are the local wildlife of Atlantis, namely the red-crested eagle and Canada geese, the latter usually being called honkers (I struggle to get my mind out of the gutter when the characters call these birds “honkers”), with the red-crested eagle going after other birds for food. Atlantis used to be more abundant with native life, but a mix of human settlement and rat infestation has endangered the natural order of things. “Atlantean creatures had no innate fear of man. The lack cost them dearly.” The “upside” to this is that going gaming, or hunting for the sake of drawing the native life, is not that dangerous. Still, it’s a nasty situation which sends Autubon into a crisis of conscience, on top of his anxiety over the fact that he’s no longer a spring chicken. The way Autubon works is he doesn’t try drawing live birds, but rather has them killed first and uses wiring to pose the corpses, such that he can draw a still subject and try to give the impression of what the bird would’ve looked like in life. In the days before photography became both widespread and practical this would’ve been the best way (or at least Autubon’s preferred way) of capturing wildlife for research, not to mention artwork.
So there’s the dilemma: in order to draw his subjects accurately Autubon has to kill them first. This in itself is far from ideal, but you also has an ecosystem that’s being endangered, with the red-crested eagle possibly being on the verge of extinction. Autubon’s passion as an artist and scientist butts heads with the reality that his work requires him to toy with lives which may be on the brink of extinction. This is, at its heart, the problem of all would-be settlers: the destruction of the natural environment which comes from human industry. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that the steamboat in the story’s opening stretch is framed in a rather unflattering light, as are the guns Autubon and Harris take for their expedition, including “newfangled” revolvers. This focusing on the environmental ramifications of colonialism is a double-edged sword. On the one hand it’s rather convenient that there’s no indigenous human popular on Atlantis, such that Our Heroes™ don’t have to worry about the abuses settlers inflict on indigenous peoples; maybe Turtledove did this to keep his leads sympathetic, or maybe it just wasn’t considered. But then by focusing wholly on man’s relationship with nature (of the man vs. man/man vs. self/man vs. nature options the story goes with the second and third), Turtledove is able to zero in on the inherent tragedy of Autubon’s profession; that he chooses to not provide a clear answer to this dilemma is not a mistake but simply a choice. As such the story ends up being less about plot and more about… vibes. Autubon’s brooding. You may or may not have a soft spot for such a thing.
There Be Spoilers Here
Given the story’s rather episodic and amorphous structure it’s actually hard to spoil, so I’ll leave just it at that.
A Step Farther Out
If science fiction can be considered a marriage between art and the sciences then “Autubon in Atlantis” is quintessentially a science fiction story, even if it reads closer to historical fiction or even late 19th century adventure fiction than SF. Undoubtedly it’s a throwback to an extent, with Turtledove even using some outdated terminology to better fit the setting (the third-person narrator calls black people in New Orleans “Negroes,” which can be jarring from a modern perspective, but would’ve been perfectly innocuous in 1843), and so I can’t say I’m surprised that it was published in Analog. Taking its faults into account, it’s still an effective story in that it raises lay interest in a historical subject most people would not know anything about. I certainly knew nothing about John Autubon before reading Turtledove’s story, but now I have this absurd feeling (as I’m sure Turtledove felt when writing it) that Audubon was a kindred spirit. This is basically what I think historical fiction should do: make people of the past seem like we could’ve gotten to know them—not as footnotes but as people.
See you next time.
Who Goes There?
We last covered Greg Egan with his 2002 quantum computing novella “Singleton,” which was very typical Egan; now we have something more atypical. Egan is one of the quintessential transhumanist writers in SF and one of the leading figures of the post-cyberpunk era in the ’90s; but “Oceanic” is not cyberpunk at all. Here we have a coming-of-age story on an alien planet, about a young man’s crisis of faith through both religion and sex, apparently inspired by Egan’s own disillusionment with Christianity in his youth as recounted in his autobiographical essay “Born Again, Briefly,” which I highly recommend reading as a kind of double feature with “Oceanic.” Indeed despite the exotic locale this reads as one of Egan’s most personal works, and while it isn’t cyberpunk it does manage to veer back into some go-to Egan themes. The gambit paid off, as it remains Egan’s single most decorated story, having won the Hugo for Best Novella as well as placed first in the Locus and Asimov’s readers’ polls for that year. It might also be my favorite Egan story I’ve read so far.
Placing Coordinates
First published in the August 1998 issue of Asimov’s Science Fiction, which is on the Archive. Gardner Dozois liked this story so much he bought it for Asimov’s, but then reprinted it in The Year’s Best Science Fiction: Sixteenth Annual Collection and The Best of the Best Volume 2: 20 Years of the Year’s Best Short Science Fiction Novels. It’s in the Egan collection Oceanic, and of course it’s also in The Best of Greg Egan. You can read it free online at Egan’s site, so you don’t have an excuse!
Enhancing Image
Sometimes when I’m reviewing a story I feel like I’m struggling to come up with things to say about it, but with “Oceanic” there’s no such problem—especially if you know how autobiographical it is. But first some context. We’re on the planet Covenant, over a thousand years after humanoids (I say “humanoids” because it doesn’t look like normal humans had come to the planet in the first place), and we follow Martin, who as narrator is writing what you might call a fictional memoir, recounting from the time he was about ten to when he was deep in his twenties. Martin and his family are “Freelanders,” in that they live on the vast waters of the planet, unlike the “Firmlanders” who live primarily on land. Martin’s family are Transitional, that is to say mildly religious, but Martin’s older brother, Daniel, joins the Deep Church, a fundamentalist sect, when he’s fifteen (David being five years Martin’s senior). Daniel tries to convert Martin, and in a scene ripped straight from Egan’s own life (his older brother having split from their Anglican family and converted to Catholicism as a teenager), the two kneel by Martin’s bed one night and pray to Beatrice, the Christ-like figure of the religion. But Martin hasn’t really been converted yet. “I wasn’t sure that I wanted Beatrice to change my mind, and I was afraid that this display of fervour might actually persuade Her.” The practice starts as more out of respect for Daniel than believing his faith, but Martin will soon go through a rite of passage that will turn him into a firm believer—for a while. This is all told with melancholy hindsight.
“Oceanic” is a coming-of-age narrative, or a bildungsroman, about a boy crossing the shadow-line (to steal Conrad) into maturity—a crossing that tends to be not one experience but several key turning points. The first major turning point for Martin is arguably not kneeling with Daniel that one night, but taking part in the Drowning, a ritual in which someone is submerged in the depths of Covenant’s waters—so far down that it would seem suicidal, and yet this near-death experience is euphoric, at least if the person accepts Beatrice in their heart. Martin is Drowned one day, with Daniel as his second, and this experience in the depths, by his lonesome, makes him feel like he’s somehow become one with Beatrice. A switch gets flipped inside his head. Getting Drowned is something only the Deep Church people do, as others see it as dangerous and an aberration, something fundamentalists do; but his Drowning causes a religious awakening in Martin. As he struggles in the depths he recounts the story of Beatrice and the “Angels” as written in the Scriptures. This is where things gets pretty strange, and dense, in the sense that Egan seems to have developed a whole origin story for the people of this planet—one that is clearly adjacent to Christianity, although there’s a transhumanist twist that’s more implied than explained. While submerged, Martin takes in a gulp of the seawater, and at this moment light floods his vision, leaving “a violet afterimage” once it recedes and Daniel brings him back to the surface, the Drowning successful.
The irony is that after this point Martin and Daniel’s relationship weakens, granted that part of this is to be expected given their age gap. Martin gets involved with Daniel’s Prayer Group, but soon grows tired of it. “What did I have in common with them, really?” The brothers grow apart. Daniel gets married young to a fellow Deep Church person named Agnes and the two lead a boring, traditional life thereafter. Some years pass and now Martin’s a teenager. It’s at this point that I should probably mention the eccentric biology of the humans in this story. Something I noticed only after the fact is that Egan refrains from giving physical descriptions of characters really, and this could be for a few reasons, but one reason I can think of is that the characters are physically androgynous—they, in fact, have physical traits of both male and female, and even functioning sex organs that would normally be unique to either. They’re true hermaphrodites, “women and men were made indistinguishable in the sight of God.” What gender someone identifies as really does come down to their self-perception rather than their sex. I’m bringing this up now because it’ll soften the blow for when we get to what is perhaps the most important scene in the story—and also the most unusual. When Daniel gets married Martin meets up with one of Agnes’s cousins, Lena, a Firmlander who nonetheless is very interested in the way Freelanders live. The two hit it off and enter a sort of casual relationship, and it doesn’t take long for sex to enter the picture.
So, in a bildungsroman, it’s not uncommon for the protagonist’s first sexual experience to serve as a turning point in the narrative, as a euphoric or traumatic experience. One’s first time is rarely all that. I myself didn’t lose my virginity till I was 21, and it was with someone I was not in a relationship with; it was a one-time thing, but the important thing is that we were nice to each other and there was certainly no pain in it. A lot of people aren’t so lucky. Poor Martin over here has one of the strangest first times possible—not because the sex with Lena goes wrong exactly but because there’s a certain part of the exchange nobody had thought to warn him about in advance. Remember how I said that the people of Covenant are hermaphrodites? Not only that, but the penis is apparently detachable. If sex happens between someone with a penis and someone with a vagina there’s a literal exchange of “the bridge,” so that after he climaxes inside Lena Martin finds, to his horror, that Lena now has his cock and that Martin, with blood on his groin, finds that a pussy has formed where his cock once was. (There’s no mention of testicles that I can recall—and no, don’t ask me to go back through to see if there is. I would have to think then that the testes are internal, somehow, but still functional. For better or worse Egan doesn’t go into great detail as to how the anatomy of these future humans could function. The effect is akin to one of Dali’s paintings, or one of the more nightmarish scenes in a Buñuel film.) Eventually Martin and Lena have sex a second time so that Martin can get his dick back; but the relationship has done sour because of that first time and they seemingly never talk again.
A lot is happening, so let’s rewind the film and take this step by step. We’re never outright told this I believe, but it’s implied pretty heavily, even early on, that the humans on Covenant are the descendants of the so-called Angels, who apparently had foregone flesh-and-blood bodies but then decided to build organic yet artificial bodies for themselves so that they could experience bodily pleasures and even mortality again. The Angels, being basically noncorporeal, are now spoken of as if they were literal angels, the “present” of the story being so far into our future that even the far future of the Angels is spoken of as if it were ancient history or myth. Egan has gone out of his to imagine a future humanity that in some ways is not so different from us, but then there’s the biology of these people. Martin losing his virginity is a traumatic event for more than one reason: it gives him gender dysphoria, makes him feel ashamed because he’s had not only had sex while unmarried but lost his “bridge” in the process, and it’s the first time in his life where the hard reality of biology shakes his faith. I probably should’ve also mentioned “Oceanic” nearly made the shortlist for the Tiptree Award. Now, transphobes might read this story and be repulsed by its implications, because it becomes obvious that, as is regularly the case with Egan’s fiction, biology is framed as tyrannical. Martin and his kind are not beholden to biology but victims of it. (I saw someone theorize that Greg Egan is actually a woman, and while it’s true we’ve never seen or heard Egan, I find this a bit far-fetched.) Indeed Martin deciding to study microbiology, under an affable but ultimately dead-end professor named Barat, will prove to make him only more miserable.
Something I’ve had to do in writing this review is go back through “Oceanic” and reread some passages, which I’m not prone to doing for these—in no small part because I know with certainty there are details I had missed on my first reading. On the one hand you could try boiling this story down to a “religion sucks” narrative, but that really would not be doing the world Egan has built justice, nor would it encapsulate the thematic depths. Granted that showing “Oceanic” to a transphobic Christian would disgruntle them, it’s more a dramatization of Egan’s own coming of age; this is his Go Tell It on the Mountain. A mild criticism I have of Egan’s writing is that when it comes to first-person narrators they tend to have more or less the same voice, which I have to take to some extent as Egan’s own voice: brooding, seemingly teetering on the line between macho and a little feminine, a sort of overly sensitive film noir detective cadence. Martin might be the most Egan-ish of Egan narrators, and yet rather than distract me this ended up being more of an asset than a negative—indeed Martin being the quintessential Egan narrator might well be the whole point. The result is that despite not having anything to do (at least directly, though it’s very much part of the backstory) with computing or quantum uncertainty, “Oceanic” manages to be thematically kin with Egan’s other work, even if on the surface it seems to hark to a kind of old-school planetary science fiction. As someone who’s not very literate in computer science (like most people) I thus found it accessible by Egan’s standards.
There Be Spoilers Here
As he ages Martin distances himself more from organized religion—first from the Deep Church and even the Transitionals, increasingly finding fault and hypocrisy in the arguments of theologians. Among his own scientific colleagues he finds himself siding more with the earnest atheists than with whom he sees as weak-willed believers. “Theology aside, the whole dynamics of the group was starting to get under my skin; maybe I’d be better off spending my time in the lab, impressing Barat with my dedication to his pointless fucking microbes.” And then tragedy strikes. Martin’s mom comes down with a severe illness, and by the time he gets to hospital she has already died. Daniel was there, but this ends up being the final straw for Martin’s perception of him, for according to Daniel’s own faith their mother is destined for Hell since she was never drowned; but upon confronting him about this bit of theology Martin finds that his fundamentalist older brother has softened—for his own sake if nobody else’s. “There was no truth in anything he said, anything he believed. It was all just an expression of his own needs.” By this point Martin has become one of those devout but rebelliously individualistic religious people, but even his personal faith has been eroding, slowly but surely. “The God of the gaps,” to use an edgy atheist phrase. What breaks the camel’s back turns out to be Martin’s own work in the microbes of Covenant’s oceans.
So, to make a long story short, the microbes in the planet’s water have this hallucinatory fucky-wucky effect if taken into one’s body in concentrated form. The humans on Covenant have adapted to these microbes in moderation, but it’s still dangerous to interact with too much, which would explain the religious experiences had by those who have Drowned. Martin’s religiousus experience, which he had kept close to his heart all these years even as his understanding of the natural world expanded, has a scientific explanation: he saw some freaky shit because he had inhaled a concentrated amount of these microbes. It’s like the SFnal version of how people who suffer from epilepsy are prone to having “religious” visions—or indeed people with schizophrenia who claim to be in touch with the divine. Biology has its way with Martin; it caresses him, withers him, takes the moon and the sun from him, takes what is in front of him and even behind from him, and at the end of the day it takes God from him.
I was lucky: I’d been born in an era of moderation. I hadn’t killed in the name of Beatrice. I hadn’t suffered for my faith. I had no doubt that I’d been far happier for the last fifteen years than I would have been if I’d told Daniel to throw his rope and weights overboard without me.
But that didn’t change the fact that the heart of it all had been a lie.
At age 25 Martin becomes an atheist, incidentally around the same age when Egan gave up his own faith. This is not a victory for atheism or any dumb bullshit like that, but rather a melancholy crossing of the shadow-line, from youth to manhood. Something is lost and gained, at the same time, like a passing of the torch. While “Oceanic” is by no means Egan’s first “mature” story (he had already written Permutation City and Disapora at this point, not to mention some pretty great short fiction), it’s a reflection on the artist (or the scientist, who anyway is adjacent to the artist) coming into his own. Maturity is not sunshine and rainbows.
A Step Farther Out
I ended up reading “Born Again, Briefly” after I had read “Oceanic” but before starting this review, which turned out to be a good idea since it helped explain the strong personal touch of this story. It’s also a bit of a mind-bender, but not for the reasons typically associated with Egan, in that you don’t have to be an amateur computer programmer to understand the point he’s trying to make. Still, it’s a dense novella that almost demands a second reading, for pleasure but also so one can soak in all the details. Egan could’ve gone farther with the gender aspect, but for 1998 it’s still pretty wild and forward-thinking. People forget that even in 1998, which for some of you was not that long ago, queer representation in SF was very… mixed. And also nearly always evidently from a cishet perspective. With that in mind, “Oceanic” has aged pretty gracefully; it also happens to be a story people new to Egan can read without issue.
See you next time.
Who Goes There?
Michael Shea had a pretty interesting career, being one of those authors who started out writing novels before branching out to short fiction; his first novel, A Quest for Simbilis, preceded his first short story by a few years. The result is that by the time of his first short stories he was already a seasoned writer, although I’m still surprised that his most famous story, “The Autopsy,” was only his third published. Today’s story is his fourth. I have to admit I feel bad, because I don’t have a great deal to say about “Polyphemus.” Not to say it’s a bad story—it’s a curious throwback that tries to combine Golden Age planetary adventure with scientific plausibility, plus a generis dose of symbolism and literary references. It can be thought of as almost a companion piece to “The Autopsy,” being concerned with alien biology and, to some extent, an SF-horror hybrid, although “Polyphemus” leans much more on the Sf side of the equation.
Placing Coordinates
First published in the August 1981 issue of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, which is on the Archive. It’s been reprinted only a few times, in The 1982 Annual World’s Best SF (ed. Arthur W. Saha and Donald A. Wollheim), and the Shea collections Polyphemus and The Autopsy and Other Stories. The former has gotten a very recent reprint from Valancourt Books—so recent ISFDB hasn’t consistently listed yet.
Enhancing Image
Humans have begun colonizing the planet Firebairn, which is technically hospitable but not exactly welcoming, what with the volcanic activity and the sea life. We have a “sand-hog,” a ship with a few smaller scout boats attached, along with a crew of people hunting “delphs,” which are the native food of choice for the colonists. It’s here we run into our first problem with the story, which is that within the first few pages we’re introduced to over half a dozen characters, a few of whom have no personality to speak of. We have Captain Helion, technically the leader of the expedition although he ends up not being the protagonist. We have Nemo Jones, who does end up being the closest this story has to a protagonist, along with his love interest Sarissa Wayne. We have Japhet Sparks, the ship’s cartographer. We have Orson Waverly, a biologist who will come to be the story’s leading expert on that language we avid readers know: Expositionese. And there are several other named characters I don’t care to dwell on.
Mind you that this is a short novella, and we’re expected to become familiar with at least a few of these characters. Obviously the same can’t be said for some others, since early on we lose a couple redshirts to the monster Waverly comes to call Polyphemus—after the cyclops. It’s fitting, considering the giant tentacled alien the colonists face off with also has one eye, and turns out to be not a very intelligent creature, instead basing its power on size and a complex sensory network. Polyphemus is a carnivore and a competitor for the delph food supply, on top of seeing the humans as potential prey. Thus we have a basic conflict of those who want to kill the alien juxtaposed with Waverly, who wants to study Polyphemus more than kill it. Of course, trying to understand how the monster works on the inside may be the key to killing it, which is how we get into lengthy passages of scientific jargon, most of which (it shames me to say) flew over my head. It would be inaccurate to call this story “hard” SF, but it takes a modern (for the time) approach to what would’ve been an old-fashioned premise even in the early ’80s. Funny thing is that is “Polyphemus” is an update of an Campbellian space adventure published in 1941, there’s now more of a time gap between “Polyphemus” and now than “Polyphemus” and that hypothetical story. The “modernized” update now seems to be old-fashioned itself.
Let’s talk references. Polyphemus itself is named after a cyclops in Greek mythology; and speaking of Greek mythology, we have a piece of equipment called a medusa, which contributes to the climax. Nemo Jones is presumably named after Captain Nemo of 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, although he has very little in common with his namesake. And of course any story of this nature is gonna invoke comparisons with Moby-Dick and, more recently (indeed it would’ve been recent when Shea wrote the story), Jaws. Here’s the problem: the actual whale-hunting in Moby-Dick takes up maybe a third of the novel. If you were to cut Moby-Dick down to “the essentials” you would be left with a brisk 250-page adventure on the high seas—and also a far less interesting novel. There’s so much character and world depth (never mind the beauty of Melville’s language) you would be missing out on that you may as well be reading a different novel. And at the same time “Polyphemus” is too long for having such a simple plot and such thinly drawn characters, which I understand sounds like a contradiction to what I had just said. Take for instance the romance subplot between Nemo and Sarissa: we know basically nothing about either of these characters, the result being that we aren’t allowed to care much if they live to reunite at the end. This could be fixed by either removing the subplot, if we were to shorten “Polyphemus” by several thousand words, or we could flesh it out if we expanded the story into a full novel—only that would raise more problems.
My point is that Shea was ambitious with this one, and yet somehow he also didn’t go far enough. It lacks the perfect self-containment (never mind the layers) of “The Autopsy,” but it’s also possible I’m just saying that now and might feel different later. It’s possible I’m underestimating this story and as such am not putting the necessary work into it.
There Be Spoilers Here
I wish I had more to say…
A Step Farther Out
A criticism I often throw at modern SF novels is that they could’ve been shorter; we don’t necessarily need something to be 500 pages. This also sometimes applies to novellas, such as “Polyphemus,” which is about 20,000 to 22,000 words but could’ve been finessed with to have been turned into a novelette, or about the same length as “The Autopsy.” There are a few too many characters and ultimately there’s not enough of a plot to chew on. Shea’s attempt at making the movie monster at the heart of the story seem scientifically plausible is worth commending, but ultimately Prometheus is still that—a movie monster. Similarly the characters are a case of spreading too little peanut butter over too wide a slice of bread, so that the humans at times also seem like their B-movie counterparts. It’s possible I’ll come away feeling different on an eventual future reread, but my first impression left me sort of at a loss. Sorry to say.
See you next time.
Who Goes There?
It’s May 3, 2024, and I’m being forced to live in interesting times. College students are protesting an ongoing genocide in a country that the federal government and American military contractors support, and the antediluvian head of state is calling for protests—not real protests, but more like when a bunch of people sit in a circle and chat like it’s a fucking book club or AA meeting. Conservatives want protesters’ skulls crushed, liberals also want protesters’ skulls crushed but are usually much more “polite” about wishing violence upon people who were born literally this century and who are committing the “crime” of being disgusted with American complicity in atrocities. And worst of all, it’s an election year. Is this 2024 or 1968? You may be thinking, “Brian, you’re being awfully political right now, and also you’re dating your review.” You’re right on both counts. In fact I dated it at the very start. Of course people might not know about this blog in five years, or even know what America is—or was.
Not that the above is strictly irrelevant either, since today’s story is also about the folly and immorality of empire, although its conclusion is much more optimistic than what I’ve been able to consider for the current real-world situation. I haven’t said anything about April Smith yet because unfortunately I can’t say anything about April Smith, although I can say a good deal about the fact that I have nothing to say about her. Smith has two stories to her name, with “Birthright” being her only solo work, and in neither case do we get any biographical information in the introductory blurb. We don’t know when she was born or when she (probably) died, where she grew up, what non-genre work she might’ve done, or even if “April Smith” is her real name. She is, like too many lady authors who were active in ’50s genre SF, a ghost of that era.
Placing Coordinates
First published in the August 1955 issue of If, which is on the Archive. It would not be reprinted in any form for over sixty years; for better or worse Smith let it fall out of copyright, so the full story is on Project Gutenberg. It would finally be reprinted in book form in Rediscovery: Science Fiction by Women (1953-1957), editor unknown.
Enhancing Image
Cyril Kirk is an ambitious young man, top of his class, and while some dudes might want a fancy car or a high-powered gaming laptop, Kirk wants a planet that he sees as worthy of patronage. And theoretically at least he has options: the Galactic Union contains dozens of worlds, mostly for the purposes of colonization and resource mining. Unfortunately Ross, Kirk’s superior, makes him a planetary advisor on one of the most obscure and least valuable worlds in the Union: Nemar. Even someone as well-read as Kirk can’t remember this planet off the top of his head, and further research doesn’t help much. “The documents on Nemar, all the information he could dig up, confirmed Ross’s statement that the planet held nothing of commercial value.” So he’s been assigned a planet that, at least as far as the Union is concerned, is basically worthless. It won’t be a short assignment either: five mandatory years, plus five optional, although Kirk suspects he won’t be using those extra years. He won’t be the only Terran on Nemar, but that won’t help him much either, since we soon learn the people he’ll be working with are as enthusiastic about making the natives useful as he is.
Once we land on Nemar, a few things become clear: the natives have no interest in contributing to the Union, and perhaps more importantly, they seem like they have no need to. I have to stop for a second here to say that “Birthright” is overtly a narrative about colonialism, about a member of the empire trying (and spoilers, failing) to “enlighten” the indigenous population. Overall it’s a pretty progressive-minded story, actually far more left-leaning for the ’50s than I had expected, but it does also play into Orientalist fantasies, what with the natives of Nemar being perpetually semi-nude (although they consider it to be normal attire), conventionally attractive yet exotic, and they’re described several times as “naive” and “childlike.” Nemar is clearly supposed to be like a paradise, like vacationing on one of the Hawai’ian island. Incidentally it’s noted at the beginning that the natives are basically homo sapiens, just with a unique skin complexion, and that Nemar itself is very similar to the tropics on Earth. If you were to adapt “Birthright” for film or TV (and you could do that without the headache of securing rights, since it’s public domain), you would probably shoot in Hawai’i, or maybe Samoa if you’re feeling a little more adventurous. My biggest gripe with the story, aside from its lack of a solid ending (will get to that), is that while it’s a cutting criticism of colonial arrogance, this criticism is also undermined by now-outdated racial politics.
While reading I was reminded most of Joseph Conrad, and also the movie Fitzcarraldo. Both Apocalypse Now and Fitzcarraldo are movies about arrogant white men in exotic locales, with the explicit and implicit comments on colonialism; and there’s also the fact that both are infamous “I will kill everyone on this set and then myself for the bit” movies. “Birthright” is nowhere near as daunting; if anything it comes close to being a fish-out-of-water comedy. Kirk has a native woman, Nanae, who looks after the house he’s been given, and he practically trips over his own cock trying not to ask for this woman’s hand in marriage upon first seeing her. He cannot come to terms with the fact that he is super-horny over Nanae and it embarrasses him, not least because fellow Terrans in the village (including Jeannette, an actual Earth woman) see his plight for what it is immediately. Indeed everyone seems to see right through Kirk except for Nanae, although it’s possible she knows and is too polite to say anything. The lax attitude of the other Terrans, who at this point are more expats than workers of the Union, also troubles Our Hero™, as if something in the air has changed them, made them forget their purpose here. “Somehow, the planet had infected them.” There must be some secret “weapon” the natives use to pacify the PAs, and Kirk’s gonna find out what it is.
Not to get nostalgic over an era I was not even close to being alive for, but I admire that at this time in SF history you could have stories with meaty ideas that were still only short stories or novellas. Nowadays it seems like if you wanna draw any attention in the field you have to write, bare minimum, a long novella (say close to 40,000 words) that would be too lengthy for magazine publication but just the right length for an overpriced Tor chapbook. “Birthright” just barely meets the SFWA criterion for novella length and, truth be told, it could’ve been a few thousand words longer; not saying this as a negative criticism. Smith’s style is breezy and on the side of minimalist. The story can be thought of less as a “story” and more like a series of Socratic dialogues, although these dialogues individually tend to be brief and there was never a point where I wondered if or when Smith would “get on with it.” This is not an action narrative; it’s about a man’s slow but sure transformation from an agent of the empire to someone who’s wondering if his bootlicking has been worth the effort—or even if it’s been well-intentioned. Nemar is basically a socialist utopia in the mode of what Ursula K. Le Guin might’ve envisioned (which has its own problems, but we’re not getting into that today), a society where there’s no fixed hierarchy, where parents respect their children, where money seems to be a non-issue, and where’s almost no industry to speak of.
There Be Spoilers Here
This leads to Kirk figuring out the planet’s “secret,” which is really that there is no secret. The natives have cultivated a society that’s founded on compassion, as opposed to most Union societies (and by extension our society) which are founded on protection of property. When Kirk tries to convince the village council on voting in favor of mining operations on the planet, the council votes no. The council’s rationale for this denial of industry is pretty hard to argue with, for both Kirk and the reader. An unnamed member of the council goes on by far the longest monologue in the story, and I may as well quote “all” of it here. I say “all” because the paragraph the monologue is a part of is even longer, if you can believe it:
“As you said, the mining is very hard, disagreeable work. We feel that when you begin to do disagreeable things for an end that is not valuable in itself, you are beginning to tread a dangerous path. There is no telling where it will end. One such situation leads to another. We might end up cooped up in a room all day, shut away from the sun and air, turning bolts on an assembly line to make machines, as we have heard often happens on Terra. […] Being surrounded by technical conveniences isn’t worth that. […] On Terra and on most of the other planets we have had word of, people seem to spend their time making all kinds of things that have no value in themselves, because they can be sold or traded. Other people spend their time trying to persuade people to buy these useless things. Still other people spend all day making records of how many of these things have been sold. No! This path is not for us. […] We don’t know how it came about that all these people spend their time at these unpleasant, useless things. They can’t have wanted it that way. No human being could want to spend his time doing silly, pointless things. How could you believe in yourself? How could you walk proudly? How could you explain it to your children? We must be careful not to make the mistake of taking the first step in that direction.”
So capitalism does not flourish on the planet, at least for now. Kirk is, at least professionally speaking, a failure; but at the same time he comes to realize he may have won on a personal and moral level—that by “giving in” to the ways of these people he seems on his way to redeeming himself. He accepts that he has become like a child again. He even ponders, at the very end, the possibility of earning Nanae’s affections and returning to Earth with her. This ending sentiment is fine, but also the story doesn’t so much “end” as it comes to a stop, which bothered me initially.
A Step Farther Out
I’m sort of dismayed it took seven decades for “Birthright” to appear in book form; surely this has nothing to do with the sexism of anthology editors in the ’50s until at least the ’80s. There are some pretty rotten stories from this era that have been reprinted multiple times, but not a genuinely interesting yarn like this one. It’s flawed in a couple ways, and I wish April Smith had continued trying her hand at genre writing (this was her second story and it would be her last, at least under the April Smith name), but it shows a level of ambition not too often found in ’50s genre writing. I get pretty sentimental about the ’50s in the context of genre SF because it really was like the Klondike gold rush for pulp writers, each author looking to make some kind of living off writing what was often perceived as childish at the time, looking to get lucky and even publish a bestseller. Most of the attempts would be failures, of course, but there are so many hidden gems from this period that I’m convinced that despite being so often mined for anthologies, we have not even come close to drying this particular well.
See you next time.
Who Goes There?
Christopher Priest had a pretty long and dramatic career, and it pains me that (as far as I can remember) this is the first time I’ve read any of his fiction. I tried reading his novel Inverted World a couple months ago but had a false start with it; the timing wasn’t quite right. Inverted World is one of the cult classics of ’70s SF, even getting an NYRB paperback edition. (NYRB is like the Criterion Collection for book snobs, sorry but it’s true.) His novel The Prestige would be adapted for film by Christopher Nolan, which on the one hand must’ve brought some extra attention to Priest’s work but which he also didn’t seem to appreciate much—probably because Nolan told people to not read Priest’s book before watching his movie, which you have to admit is an asshole move. Speaking of assholes, I think the first time I heard of Priest was through the decades-long wait for Harlan Ellison’s The Last Dangerous Visions, the most famous SF book to never be published—until this year. I have thoughts on that. But Priest had spearheaded the controversy over Ellison seemingly refusing to finish his anthology with an essay called “The Last Deadloss Visions,” which got Priest a Hugo nomination. Incidentally, the final version of The Last Dangerous Visions had its publication announced shortly after Priest’s death. What timing, huh? I mean what are the odds J. Michael Straczynski would announce the upcoming release for TLDV one month after the death of its most ardent critic?
Anyway, “Palely Loitering” is my first Priest story, and while I’m ultimately mixed on it, I do have to admit it’s impressive. It’s a melancholy and mind-boggling time travel coming-of-age narrative that, given Locus classified it as a novella and the Hugos classified it as a novelette, seems to be one of those borderline cases in terms of length. I wish I had an ebook copy so I could run it through a word processor. I’m gonna be a bit liberal and side with Locus; it might come out to 18,000 or 18,500 words. People at the time were certainly impressed with “Palely Loitering,” as it won the British Science Fiction Award for Best Short Fiction.
Placing Coordinates
First published in the January 1979 issue of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, which is on the Archive. It would reprinted in the Priest collection An Infinite Summer, named after the story Priest had given to Ellison for The Last Dangerous Visions and then retracted. It was anthologized in The Best Science Fiction Novellas of the Year #2 (ed. Terry Carr), The Mammoth Book of Time Travel SF (ed. Mike Ashley), and As Time Goes By (ed. Hank Davis).
Enhancing Image
Mykle starts out as a ten-year-old boy, moody even for his age, the sole son in a well-to-do British family who sometimes wants to get away from his sisters. It’s the future, in what is called the “Neuopean” Union (Priest never explains this), and the UK seems to be stuck, or at a crossroads between different eras. “We lived in the age of starflight, but by the time I was born mankind had long lost the desire to travel in space,” Mykle tells us. A big way to pass the time is to go to Flux Channel Park, a park in the Victorian British fashion that started out as a rather quirky invention. The Park was originally a “flux-field,” built for experimental space flight, which the government decided to have converted into a tourist attraction after the last ship to be launched from the flux-field did not return after several years. The Park is basically home to a time distortion field, with the Flux Channel having three bridges, each with different time properties. One bridge acts normally, while another would send you 24 hours into the past, and the third would send you 24 hours into the future. The flux-field, the “channel” itself, is not to be played with.
So of course Mykle jumps onto the flux-field.
The stunt lands him not 24 hours into the future but 32 years, wherein he meets an older (although not by that much) man who helps him get back to his own time. I’m not really spoiling anything by saying this older man is a future version of Mykle, which even Mykle admits is an obvious turn of events. “Although the answer seems obvious in retrospect it was some years before I realized it,” he says. The older Mykle is, as the younger one puts it, “pompous and over-bearing,” being preoccupied with a young woman he considers to be the most beautiful in the world—so beautiful that he dares not talk to her. Listen, I think a lot of us went through “simp” phases in our youths. At the same time young Mykle isn’t wrong when he thinks his older self is being self-serious, although the Mykle now narrating (whom we can infer is much older than either past self) is more sympathetic to the young man’s plight. Something to keep in mind when reading this story is that Mykle-as-narrator is telling us about events that would’ve happened many years in the past, and that he ends up referring to multiple past selves across different points.
“Palely Loitering” is interesting, historically, as a very telling work of ’70s British literature. Mind you that at this point, in the late ’70s, there was basically no market for short SFF to speak of in the UK; the major outlets like New Worlds and Science Fantasy had gone the way of the dodo, and while several notable SFF magazines would be born in the ’70s in the US, the same cannot be said for the UK scene. No doubt “Palely Loitering” would’ve been published in the UK first had there been a viable option, as it is quintessentially a British narrative, being obviously written in the wake of an economic recession, the waning of public interest in space flight (the last people would’ve walked on the moon about five years prior to Priest writing “Palely Loitering”), some of the worst flare-ups of violence in Ireland, and all setting the stage for the Thatcher administration which came about shortly after this story’s publication. There are scars in the British character still very much lingering from World War II three decades later. It’s little wonder then that those with enough money would try to jump into either the past or the future, and also that the fashion and manners of these people would be out of step with what we would expect from people of the future. Mykle’s own style of narrating is rather mannered, even for an Englishman—unless he were emulating the speech of an Englishman of the 1870s and not the 1970s.
I do have a few questions regarding the logistics of the flux-field and the Park, which Priest does not answer. Mykle breaks away from his family and jumps onto the flux-field itself pretty easily, apparently without any railing or fencing to stop people from landing on it. This seems like an obvious security oversight. If touching the flux-field directly lands you at some point in the distant future, then how would you hope to get back to your time? Mykle gets lucky with help from his future self, but most people wouldn’t be so lucky. How often would this sort of thing happen? For the sake of legal drama surely it must not be a common occurrence, and yet it’s hard to imagine people not constantly going off the beaten path out of curiosity and stepping on the flux-field often, damn the consequences. Wouldn’t it also be easy to run into past and future versions of yourself, given how the bridges work? Of course, this last point plays into the story: it does make sense, to a degree, for Mykle to meet past and future versions of himself, although then one wonders why we don’t see this happen with other people in the story. The Park seems like a Jurassic Park-level disaster waiting to happen, built with what Mark E. Smith would call “the highest British attention to the wrong detail.” But then maybe its dubiousness is also part of the point.
Of course, any story involving time travel will inevitably become a heady matter, what with how the rules of the story’s interpretation of time travel work. Sometimes meeting a different version of yourself would cause a time paradox and make the universe reset itself, or something like that, but time paradoxes are obviously common in the world of “Palely Loitering”—possibly even encouraged by the builders of the Flux Channel Park. Mykle’s chance meeting with the young-adult version of himself and seeing the woman (named Estyll) the latter is obsessed with plants a seed in his head, which will eventually make him map out the exact spot in the flux-field where he landed the first time so he can go back to that same point in the future. Despite seeing her again, however, as Mykle gets older he becomes more withdrawn, more introverted—in a way more pathetic. “As I grew older, and became more influenced by my favorite poets, it seemed not only more sad and splendid to glorify [Estyll] from a distance, but appropriate that my role in her life should be passive.” Slowly but surely he becomes the young man he had previously written off as a hopeless romantic. He is his father’s son.
Mykle’s sister drift in different directions as they get older, but more importantly there’s a tragedy in the family as the father dies before his time, and for better or worse Mykle’s father was an important man. Still only a teenager at first, Mykle matures and learns to run his dad’s business, eventually becoming one of the more important men in England—yet still he can’t bring himself to say another word to Estyll, seeing her as some kind of ideal even after he marries a different woman and by all accounts is happy with her. The obsessions never leaves his mind for long; it’s the kind of longing that probably doesn’t happen in real life and certainly doesn’t happen in the modern age, rather being the sort of longing Lord Byron and his ilk would’ve written about a whole century prior. It’s clear that Estyll does not fascinate Mykle strictly as a person, but rather symbolizes something which cannot be found in the present moment—only either in the past or the future, which the Park literally has bridges to. It’s tempting to think Proust helped inspire the story, especially Mykle’s ponderous and at times melodramatic narrative voice, but Priest is dead now and will not be answering anymore.
There Be Spoilers Here
Good news, the ship that mysterious vanished all those years ago is now returning! Bad news, it can only land on the flux-field and that means the Park will have to be dismantled! This happens when Mykle is now 42 years old, so 32 years after that fateful day when he jumped onto the flux-field and landed… 32 years into the future. Hmmm. The back end of this story is a bit convoluted, since it involves a middle-aged Mykle realizing that not only can multiple versions of himself exist in the same space but that these different versions don’t necessarily come from the same continuity. Yes, we’re getting into multiverse shenanigans with this one, although it wasn’t called that at the time and was pretty far off from becoming a worn-out concept. Looking at the cover for this issue of F&SF again, I realize it’s technically a spoiler, as the shadowy men in coats and hats are different versions of Mykle; but it’s out of context, so it’s fine. The ending, wherein Mykle basically plays matchmaker and gets an alternate past version of himself to finally go out with Estyll, is honestly moving, even despite the matchmaking antics being confusing to read in the moment. My heartstrings were pulled.
A Step Farther Out
Part of me wonders what this story would’ve read like had it been written by an American, but after a couple days of thinking on it that has more to do with my bias against Victorian-style narration than a fault with the story. It does get rather convoluted, but Priest got a lot done with this short novella, implying a whole future world whilst keeping the action more or less restricted to a single stage. It’s moody, just the right amount of bittersweet at the end, and perhaps most importantly for modern readers, it hasn’t aged much because of the deliberately anachronistic setting. After reading “Palely Loitering” I decided to read all of “The Last Deadloss Visions,” and these two tell me I might be a Priest fan in the making. I should get back to Inverted World, and maybe check out The Affirmation…
See you next time.
Who Goes There?
Ursula K. Le Guin: you may have heard of her. She’s one of the most acclaimed authors in all of modern SFF, at times daring and yet somehow free of controversy (for the most part, as I’ll explain). She got started fairly late, only starting to write SFF when she was already in her thirties, but given that she lived to be almost ninety her career would be exceedingly long and varied. She’s also one of those rare authors to leave a major impact on both SF and fantasy, primarily with her Hainish and Earthsea cycles. The former might be her best work, when taken as a whole. My relationship with Le Guin has changed a good deal over time, ever since I first read The Left Hand of Darkness a little over ten years ago. As I’ve drifted closer to her politics over the past few years and become more familiar with her work I’ve come to have more mixed feelings on her as an artist, which I know is almost like a paradox. I think Le Guin is often great, and that of the Great™ SFF writers she’s one of the most versatile; but she’s also an idealist who doesn’t seem given to passions other than said idealism.
I’m gonna use her Four (later Five) Ways to Forgiveness as an example. Three of these stories were published in Asimov’s, with “A Woman’s Liberation” being the final one. It’s not a direct sequel to the previous stories, “Forgiveness Day” and “A Man of the People,” but it definitely complements those stories and more specifically could be seen as the yang to the latter’s yin. They share a few characters, but more importantly “A Woman’s Liberation” feels like a flipped-perspective retelling of “A Man of the People.” I’m not sure if this would work better as its own thing or if read immediately after the previous story like it would be in the collection. I enjoyed “A Woman’s Liberation,” but somehow feel it’s a weaker installment.
Placing Coordinates
First published in the July 1995 issue of Asimov’s Science Fiction, which is on the Archive. It then appeared in Four Ways to Forgiveness and by extension Hainish Novels and Stories, Volume Two. For anthologies we have The Year’s Best Science Fiction, Thirteenth Annual Collection (ed. Gardner Dozois) and A Woman’s Liberation: A Choice of Futures by and About Women (ed. Sheila Williams and Connie Willis).
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The story is the fictionalized memoir of a former slave named Rakam, who having been freed years ago is now writing about her early years. We know at the start that things will turn out well for her in the end, which is good to know because to say Rakam had a rough childhood would be understating it. She was raised on Werel, as a slave, although her pitch-black skin suggests (indeed other characters take note of it) that she might be of noble heritage. Right, so on Yeowe and Werel dark skin is considered more desirable while light-skinned people are considered “dusty,” which seems to be an inversion of the dark-light dynamic among blacks that goes back to the days of chattel slavery. I suppose Le Guin is trying to make a statement about the arbitrary nature of skin complexion and desirability. Anyway, Yeowe has had a successful slave rebellion; its people are now free—or at least the men are. Slavery is still alive and well on Werel.
Rakam’s first sexual experience is as basically a sex toy for Lady Tazeu, the matriarch of Shomeke. Lady Tazeu is a curious character: she treats Rakam gently, all things considered, but is quite possibly a pedophile and also has a jealous streak. Lord Shomeke and Lady Tazeu also have a son, Erod, who is a young abolitionist and, as it turns out, Rakam’s half-brother. When she reaches a certain age Rakam’s mother tells her that there’s a reason for her dark skin: she is Lord Shomeke’s illegitimate daughter. But if Lady Tazeu ever finds out about this then she never tells Rakam. Lord Shamake falls fatally ill and the manor is placed under quarantine, and Lady Tazeu kills him and then herself; whether she does this so as to put the man out of his misery or out of revenge is left unclear. With both of his parents dead, Erod takes over the manor, and he signs papers that will free the slaves and allot them each a bit of money. This has disastrous consequences, as many of the slaves are killed overnight by neighboring slave-owners who think a rebellion is underway. Rakam is freed of her bondage, only to be forced into more servitude. Despite having her freedom papers, said papers mean basically nothing. “The government would not interfere between owners and those they claimed as their assets.”
You may notice that similarly to “A Man of the People,” this is less a proper novella and more like a compressed novel, giving us only the essentials for this narrative of one person’s life. We follow Rakam from her birth to not long before she would’ve started writing her memoir. One major difference between this and the other Yeowe-and-Werel stories (the ones I’ve read, anyway) is that “A Woman’s Liberation” is written in the first person. Despite this change in mode, Rakam’s style is actually not that different from the third-person narrators of the other stories, the only real difference being that those other narrators are omniscient, whereas there are little gaps in Rakam’s narrative—information she was never able to obtain. “I did not learn to read or write until I was a grown woman, which is all the excuse I will make for the faults of my narrative.” She still comes off as firmly literate, though, despite being a late bloomer when it came to reading. This is indicative of Le Guin’s long-winded style that she had developed by the ’90s, simultaneously craftine labyrinthine paragraphs that cram more information into overall less space. I’m not sure what inspired the change, but the Le Guin of the ’90s is quite different from how she was in the ’70s.
Le Guin’s style evolved, but so did her worldview it seems. The Dispossessed remains the quintessential left-libertarian SF novel, but I think it’s fair to say it’s not a feminist novel—or at least women’s liberation is not a chief concern. (The short story “The Day Before the Revolution,” a sort of distant prequel to The Dispossessed, could by contrast be considered an explicitly feminist narrative, although Le Guin doesn’t quite connect the dots with feminism and anarchism.) With the stories that make up Four Ways to Forgiveness Le Guin makes it pretty explicit that the notion of human liberty is incomplete without feminism—indeed freedom under a hypothetical socialism would be freedom only for a fraction of the population if women’s liberation is not a high priority. Erod starts out as a sympathetic character, albeit one who makes an error out of shortsightedness that gets a lot of people killed, but when we meet him again some years later he’s shown to be a low-key misogynist, much to Rakam’s displeasure. (Not sure where to put this, but isn’t it convenient that despite finding Erod attractive in her youth and even being offered to him as a bed-warmer, the half-siblings never get intimate?) Good news I suppose is that Rakam does meet a few decent men in her life, including Ahas, a fellow slave at the manor, and much later we meet a face or two that should strike us as familiar…
The thing about Le Guin that makes her a favorite of literary types and classroom discussion is that she’s such a pious writer—she’s so virtuous that she seemingly has never done anything wrong in her life. Her politics are very far on the left, which should on paper make her a no-no for those who try to keep literary discussion “apolitical,” but she’s so gentle about said politics. She might’ve become aware of this purer-than-pure status because—and I’m not sure when exactly this happened—she gets super-horny in the later Hainish stories. Oh sure, sexuality is integral to The Left Hand of Darkness, but in a clinical, anthropological sense. Women’s sexuality is also at the heart of “The Day Before the Revolution,” but we have not yet reached maximum levels of horny. Then we get to Rakam’s story, which at its core is about her political and sexual awakening, the two coinciding and indeed feeding off each other. Consider this passage, in which Rakam (and I have to think this is also Le Guin responding to critics) explains why much of her memoir is concerned with sex:
Now you may say in disgust that my story is all of such things, and there is far more to life, even a slave’s life, than sex. That is very true. I can say only that it may be in our sexuality that we are most easily enslaved, both men and women. It may be there, even as free men and women, that we find freedom hardest to keep. The politics of the flesh are the roots of power.
Rakam has been freed, but while she is technically a freed woman on Werel, she’s still a slave sexually; up to about the halfway point of the story the only sex she’s known has been through rape. Her orientation is a grey area: she’s probably bisexual, or even more likely pansexual since she doesn’t seem to think along gender lines when it comes to attraction. Le Guin is funny when it comes to sexuality because, given that she was most likely straight (I don’t recall reading about her ever being attracted to anyone who was not a man, and anyway she was very happily monogamous), her interest in queer yearning and relationships often has this sense of detachment—like she empathizes, but maybe she doesn’t know what it’s like to live as a man who sometimes has crushes on other men, who is always anxious about these crushes because coming out to another man could result in something far worse than a rejection. With the exception of the unrequited romance in The Left Hand of Darkness, I don’t usually buy Le Guin’s characters being attracted to each other—which brings me to spoilers.
There Be Spoilers Here
I said earlier that that a few characters from “A Man of the People” reappear here, although you don’t have to have read that story to understand what’s happening. The first is Old Music, the Hainish bureaucrat who has appeared in all the previous Yeowe-and-Werel stories in small but pivotal roles; and here he comes again, this time to help Rakam get off Werel, although she doesn’t discover until after the fact that he was Old Music. Once Rakam gets to Yeowe, which as I’d said is a liberated planet, we meet “Mr. Yehedarhed,” who you may recognize as Havzhiva, a Sub-Envoy for the Ekumen and the protagonist of “A Man of the People.” Finally there’s Dr. Yeon, a major character from that story and perhaps Havzhiva’s closest friend. Being an outsider, Rakam only knows so much about these people, but if you’ve read “A Man of the People” then you know a lot has happened. Rakam impresses Havzhiva and convinces him to let her found a publishing house, and in the process the two fall in love—the first time Rakam’s ever fallen in love with someone and had that affection returned.
The development of Rakam and Havzhiva’s happens over the course of maybe ten magazine pages, and if that sounds rushed, that’s because it is. It could be that, taken on its own, we simply don’t know enough about Havzhiva to trust him; oh sure, we’ve read “A Man of the People” and can carry that information over to this related story, but Rakam doesn’t know all that shit. The big things Rakam gets to know about her love interest is that he’s an abolitionist, a women’s lib sympathizer, and that he took a knife to the gut the fucking day he landed on Yeowe. From Rakam’s perspective, Havzhiva is basically perfect—which makes him boring. Because “perfect” people are boring. Le Guin admitted to dislike writing evil characters, which is why you can count the number of total scumbags in her fiction on one hand; but conversely she has a tendency at times to write characters who are seemingly bereft of human flaws. Goody-goodies, ya know. Rakam has trust issues and anxiety (understandably), but Hazhiva in the context of this story is a bit of a cypher, which hurts the romance.
A Step Farther Out
As I was reading “A Woman’s Liberation” I couldn’t help but feel like something was missing—indeed it’s the same reservation I have with the other entries in this “story suite” but even more so here. It’s good fiction but not good science fiction. Of the Yeowe-and-Werel stories I’ve read this one is the least SFnal, in that it could be most easily rewritten as a realistic narrative. Le Guin was clearly inspired by real-world slave narratives when writing it, but I think the lack of original input is to its detriment. I also think that while it does work well in concert with “A Man of the People,” it does feel redundant to some degree. Granted, I might be saying the same thing about that other story had the two been published in reverse order. Ultimately the problem could be that they’re too similar. I’m curious for when I eventually read Four/Five Ways to Forgiveness and see how these stories work together when taken as pieces of a larger narrative.
See you next time.
Who Goes There?
Lisa Tuttle and George R. R. Martin were baby-faced new writers, part of the post-New Wave era, and were even nominated for the Astounding Award for Best New Writer (Tuttle won) the same year. The two were lovers in the early ’70s, and while I haven’t looked into this, I’m pretty sure they were still together when they were writing “The Storms of Windhaven” (although they had broken up, and Martin was on his way to getting married, by the time it was published). This was probably the first thing of Tuttle’s a lot of people had read, and this might still be the case given the Martin connection; but these people would be in for a nasty surprise, since Tuttle’s writing is much more in touch with horror than SF. As for Martin, I need not elaborate, only to say that the Martin of the ’70s and ’80s is quite a different beast from one of the most famous authors in the world. I can’t call myself a Martin fan (because I’ve been unimpressed by what little I’ve read of A Song of Ice and Fire), but I do like most of his early stuff.
Tuttle and Martin came up with the Windhaven setting and apparently wanted to turn it into a novel, but only after they had written this first novella, which is a self-contained narrative. And why not? It would take almost five years for a follow-up to “The Storms of Windhaven.” This was pretty popular too, getting nominated for the Hugo and Nebula and placing first in that year’s Locus poll for Best Novella. I like it a good deal myself, for the worldbuilding more than the actual plot, and because it lacks some of Martin’s less savory habits. I have a theory or two about who wrote what, but I’ll get to that in a minute. And rest assured we’ll eventually tackle One-Wing, the much-anticipated sequel to this story.
Placing Coordinates
First published in the May 1975 issue of Analog Science Fiction, which is on Luminist. Unsurprisingly most of its reprints predate Windhaven. We’ve got The Best Science Fiction of the Year 5 (ed. Terry Carr) and The 1976 Annual World’s Best SF (ed. Arthur W. Saha and Donald Wollheim). Windhaven itself is still in print, for obvious reasons.
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The plot itself is rather simple, but some context is needed. A sloppy reading of this story might make one think it’s fantasy, and certainly without some pieces of backstory it could be construed for fantasy. I myself barely noticed the origin of the humans of Windhaven on my first reading, along with a couple other things. Windhaven is a livable but not totally hospitable planet, mostly covered with water and prone to fierce gales and some pretty nasty local wildlife. The humans are descendants of space colonists, who had crash landed on the planet and could no longer use their spaceship; and apparently as a result the descendants have most lost touch with their far-future past, having descended into barbarism. There are basically two types of people: flyers and “land-bound.” The flyers have constructed their wings out of metal from the crashed spaceship, so needless to say it’s a precious resource; losing wings is considered just as bad, if not worse, than losing a human life. I’m putting this all up at the front since Tuttle and Martin sort of sneak in this context in breadcrumbs of exposition, which can be easily missed, although you don’t need it to understand the plot.
Anyway. Our Heroine™, Maris, is a skilled flyer; the problem is that she’s not “supposed” to be a flyer. She’s the daughter of a fisherman (long dead) who got adopted by Russ, who really is a flyer, although having lost the use of one of his hands he can no longer fly, and at the time he was seemingly sterile. “He and his wife had taken her in when it seemed that he would never father a child of his own to inherit the wings.” Luckily for Russ but unluckily for Maris, a child was eventually born. Coll is Russ’s son and, having turned thirteen, Coll has now come of age to inherit his father’s wings. But Russ had previously told Maris that she would inherit his wings! Conflict is now well underway. This is made worse by the fact that flyer laws state that wings can only be passed on to family members (unless the flyer has no next of kin or gives up their wings), preferably blood-related. The Landsman, a local authority, sympathizes with Maris’s wish to become a flyer, but rules are rules and Russ is a traditionalist. To make things even worse, Coll doesn’t really want to become a flyer; he would rather be a balladeer, like Barrion, a mutual friend of theirs and sort of a rebel.
Maris is a bit of a mixed bag as a character, because on the one hand she seems to be one-note: she wants to become a flyer and doesn’t seem to have any other serious aspirations. She has a boyfriend in Dorrel, a flyer himself, but we only see them together in a few scenes and it’s not a relationship that’s made that important. She doesn’t seem to have any hobbies, although in fairness she lives in a world without movies, TV, video games, or even common literature. But, to give some credit, she is driven, has a clear goal in mind, and is not objectified at any point. I suspect that Maris’s assertive characterization came mostly from Tuttle, although I can’t prove this. There’s a bit of steaminess with Maris and Dorrel, but it’s tasteful. Unfortunately one or two of the characters are not written as delicately. Russ is your typical boomer dad who doesn’t approve of his daughter’s wild ways, and he also happens to be very angsty about his disability. Obviously Russ wants to do the sports parent thing and recapture his glory days as a flyer vicariously by forcing his son, who is a square peg, into a round hole. Corm, a senior flyer and the closest the novella has to a villain, is almost a cartoon character, so zealous is he about keeping with tradition.
Unsubtle and at times problematic character writing would dog Martin for the rest of his career (some people will challenge me on this, but I think those people are wrong), but one thing Martin and Tuttle both had nailed down from very early in their careers is a sense of location. “The Storms of Windhaven” is not hard SF, but it is a vivid and plausible (assuming you’re not a stickler for details) planetary adventure that gives us a plot that, yes, could work perfectly fine in a fantasy context, but whose SFnal background gives credibility to this far-future society that has descended somewhat into barbarism. It makes sense that the survivors of a crashed spaceship would scatter over a ton of small islands, traveling by glider or boat, and having to rebuilt society from the ground up. It makes sense that a few centuries later the descendants would remember these original explorers through myth and song, and that lineage would become very important. Balladeers like Barrion would hold an important place in society because they are entertainers, for one, but also they chronicle history—and rewrite it, if need be. Barrion says he’d like to write songs depicting Maris as a virtuous rebel after all has been said and done, and he has the power to do this.
Ultimately this is a story about tradition vs. progress, or more specifically, how we should handle the past. It’s unsubtle; it’s even more unsubtle than the character writing, not that I disagree with Tuttle and Martin’s obvious pro-progress stance. Russ and Corm are bound to tradition, even to the point of making Maris’s life worse, and they need to be shown the error of their ways. This is also a story about racism and classism, by way of metaphor, because it’s pretty clear that a) the people of the different tribes don’t get along too well, and b) flyers and land-bound don’t like each other. Understandable: flyers are rather up their own asses about their wings. Our Heroine™, of course, has no bad intentions and doesn’t even know what those are. She does briefly consider killing Corm when the latter confiscates her wings, but she quickly turns this down, and that’s as dark as her character gets. I’m not really complaining—just pointing out how much of a girlboss Maris is. I don’t remember a great deal from One-Wing but I do remember it focuses a bit less on her, which I might appreciate on a reread. “The Storms of Windhaven” technically has a sequel hook, but it would still feel like a flesh-out world even if we never got a sequel.
There Be Spoilers Here
Maris steals back her wings from Corm, and there’s a chase. Despite being younger and not a “true” flyer, Maris proves to be a better flyer than Corm, which lets her escape his wrath for the moment but also results in her being put on trial before a council. The back end of this novella is weird for me because I totally forgot about the stealing part (despite it being crucial to the plot) and also remembered the trial taking up more of the story than it does. Memory is flexible, and often tells us things that aren’t quite true. I also realized, looking at my notes again, then I occasionally misspelled Corm as “Corn.” Imagine being hunted down by some conservative zealot named Corn. Anyway, the trial is technically to judge whether Maris be exiled from her hometown (or I guess home… rock?), but really it’s supposed to be a kangaroo court of humiliation, as Maris thinks:
Corm is a proud man; I injured his pride. He is a good flyer and I, a fisherman’s daughter, stole his wings and outflew him when he pursued me. Now, to regain his pride, he must humble me in some very public, very grand way. Getting the wings back would not be enough for him. No, everyone, every flyer, must be present to see me humbled and declared an outlaw.
At first everyone is against the notion that wings should be earned in some way rather than just inherited, but naturally Maris is able to convince enough of the council that what has been done for generations isn’t the only correct way to do things. “The Storms of Windhaven” is not some deep “literary” achievement but a well-crafted planetary adventure that wears its thesis and emotions on its sleeve. Its point is obvious, but entertaining to read (there’s not a dull moment here), so unsurprisingly it was quite popular with readers. It’s just a shame that Windhaven, like Dying of the Light and Tuf Voyaging, is doomed to semi-obscurity by virtue of not being the thing that made Martin one of our most famous living authors. Of course, it’s totally possible these books wouldn’t even be in print if not for Martin’s name being attached to them. It’s also a shame that Windhaven would be Martin’s last SF novel if we’re not counting Tuf Voyaging as a novel.
A Step Farther Out
Obvious sequel hook aside, this is a nicely self-contained story that theoretically could’ve stopped here; but it’s a good thing they didn’t. This is a masterclass in worldbuilding, and it’s impressive especially given how young both authors were at the time. It’s vivid, if also old-fashioned even for 1975. It could’ve been published thirty years earlier in Planet Stories, but that’s not necessarily a bad thing. It’s justifiably a classic piece of SF adventure writing. We will return to Windhaven, in One-Wing, which was serialized in Analog in 1980. For some reason I remember very little of One-Wing despite having read it not that long ago. Ominous…?
See you next time.
Who Goes There?
Leigh Brackett debuted in 1940, with her first couple stories being printed in Astounding, but quickly she found other magazines more enticing despite the smaller paycheck. She stopped submitting to John W. Campbell for the same reason her future husband Edmond Hamilton did: creative differences. Campbell wanted science fiction of a new, more technical, more cerebral sort, while Bracket and Hamilton were devotees of a school of adventure fiction that predates Campbellian SF. Brackett, by her own admission, was also pretty indifferent to keeping up with real-world scientific discoveries. It might be considered strange, then, that nowadays Brackett is most known for her post-nuclear novel The Long Tomorrow and her work as a screenwriter. She also wrote a fair amount of detective fiction, which does show its influence in her SF somewhat. She wrote the first draft of the screenplay for The Empire Strikes Back in the last months of her life, which saw her return to her planetary romance roots.
Ray Bradbury is one of the most famous writers in all American literature, especially for his novel Fahrenheit 451 and his fix-up “novel” The Martian Chronicles. Bradbury didn’t think of himself as an SF writer and it’s probably best, if anything, to understand much of his fiction with a horror lends; indeed his first collection, Dark Carnival, was horror-focused. In the ’50s Bradbury would gain mainstream recognition, but in the ’40s he was a fledgling short story writer and fan, with Brackett and Henry Kuttner (who were only five years older than Bradbury) acting as mentors. “Lorelei of the Red Mist” is a Brackett story at heart, but for better or worse Brackett was unable to finish it before trying her luck at screenwriting, leaving Bradbury to write the second half of the novella by himself. For what it’s worth I think Bradbury did a good job paying respect to Brackett’s style, although even without the latter’s word on who did what it’s not hard to figure out where the Bradbury part of the story begins.
Placing Coordinates
First published in the Summer 1946 issue of Planet Stories, which is on the Archive. It’s been reprinted a fair number of times, including in Three Times Infinity (ed. Leo Margulies), The Best of Planet Stories #1 (ed. Leigh Brackett), The Great SF Stories Volume 8 (ed. Isaac Asimov and Martin H. Greenberg), Echoes of Valor II (ed. Karl Edward Wagner), and the Brackett collection Lorelei of the Red Mist: Planetary Romances. This is all for collecting’s sake since you can read the story for free on Project Gutenberg. Sadly there was never a sequel to that Planet Stories anthology.
Enhancing Image
Hugh Mongous Starke is a space robber who has made off with the biggest pile of money he’ll probably ever see in his life—only he’s on the run from authorities and it looks like he won’t live much longer. Indeed it doesn’t take long for a mishap with his ship to send his body packing, although his mind proves to be much more resilient. Left dying on Venus, Starke is confronted by a strange woman named Rann, who has the power to spare Starke and give him a new body if only he would hold up his end of a certain deal. Rann is a sorceress, the Lorelei of the title (I thought for a while it was the name of a character, but it’s referring to Rann and her role as a sort of temptress), who has powers beyond Starke’s understanding. Starke gets his new body, but he quickly finds he’s been thrown into a conflict he can scarcely fathom, among people who want him dead.
A while ago I reviewed Brackett’s “Enchantress of Venus,” one in a series starring the futuristic barbarian Eric John Stark (Starke and Stark are very different characters, I might add), and Brackett’s Venus in both stories very much takes after early 20th century depictions of the planet. Even in 1946 the Venus of this story must’ve seemed a little far-fetched. Think Zelazny’s “The Doors of His Face, the Lamps of His Mouth.” It’s not exactly hospitable, but it’s livable for humans who are tough enough; there’s local wildlife, and as expected this Venus is swampy, with the Red Sea (the red mist of the title) being home to a very dense gas as opposed to water. The gas is dense enough to buoy ships but breathable enough that a human could traverse the bottom for several hours without scuba gear. This is all stuff Starke will learn much later but which will be familiar to those of us who have read one or two of Brackett’s Venus stories before.
Starke’s mind has been transplanted to the body of Conan, a warrior who has been kept in chains (“Starke’s new body wore a collar, like a vicious dog.”) and tortured in the dark corridors of Crom Dhu, an island surrounded by the Red Sea and connected to the mainland only with a jetty. Crom Dhu is home to the Rovers, a group of humans (like Starke) who, unlike Our Anti-Hero™, have stuck to a borderline medieval way of living. There’s Romna, the local bard, and Faolan, the leader of the pack who has been rendered blind, both literally and with hatred for Conan. Then there’s Beudag, Faolan’s sister and, as it turns out, Conan’s lover—or rather former lover. Conan, despite being one of the Rovers, has been tortured because he betrayed his own people in a recent battle: he was set to marry Beudag but turned his back on her in favor of Rann. It’s unclear if Conan had planned this from the start or if Rann had put some kind of spell on him. He would’ve run off with the sorceress had he not been captured, and apparently Conan’s mind broke under the torture (possibly also combined with guilt), making his body an ideal vessel for Rann to slip Starke’s mind into it.
To get the obvious out of the way, this is in part a Conan homage. The fact that the Rover hideout is called Crom Dhu doesn’t help. Something clever Brackett does is that she makes the protagonist a typical space opera character (a lovable rogue in the mode of Han Solo, you could say) and puts him in the body of a sword-and-sorcery hero. Eric John Stark takes after Conan (not to mention Tarzan) while Hugh Starke is basically a civilized man (albeit a remorseless criminal), only he’s been thrown into a scenario that would not be unusual for Robert E. Howard to conceive. We also don’t get to know much about the Conan of Brackett’s story, since his consciousness is MIA (although not as absent as was first thought, as we’ll discover later) and he can’t get a word in edgewise. The other characters tell us what sort of man Conan was like and it’s up to Starke to fill in the blanks; he’ll have to do his homework pretty quick, after all, or else he might get killed by one of the Rovers who are out for vengeance. Faolan suspects Starke might be an agent for Rann—a rational concern, considering Rann does want Starke to destroy the Rovers from the inside.
To complicate things further, Beudag clearly misses her former lover, and seeing him returned to a somewhat normal state (or rather seeing his body again inhabited by a working mind) immediately draws her to Starke. Starke is similarly taken with Beudag, who is a warrior lady who could probably crush his head with her thighs. Romance is not exactly Brackett’s strong suit (I remember criticizing the romantic aspect of her Eric John Stark stories that I’ve read), but the off-the-cuff romance in “Lorelei of the Red Mist” feels more justified since Starke is in the body of a man who was in love with Beudag, and he eventually finds that his memories are actually becoming intertwined with Conan’s, on top of Rann’s power over him. This story apparently drew some controversy among the Planet Stories readership for its overt (for 1946 pulp fiction) sexuality, and true enough Brackett and Bradbury are eager to describe human nudity (both male and female) in as much detail as was possible under the circumstances. It’s also unambiguous that both Beudag and Rann find Conan (or rather his body) very attractive. This is not just titilation. There’s some irony in the fact that Starke has a strong mind but originally had a weak body, while Conan has a strong body (even under torture) but a relatively weak mind.
But wait, there’s more! There’s a threeway conflict going on. There’s the humans, the sea-people who dwell in the Red Sea (they’re humanoid but they have gills and thin webbing between their fingers and such), and Rann’s people, who are descended from the sea-people and are apparently racist toward their own ancestors. All three sides hate each other, but right now shit is not looking good for the humans, as Crom Dhu has been under siege and there’s no way of getting off the island. The island is fortified such that Rann’s people will have a hard time getting in, but Faolan’s people can’t get out, and if Faolan dies then the humans will have no choice but to surrender. All Starke would have to do is kill Faolan and Rann will get what she wants and Starke will get his million credits. Rann is held up in the city of Falga, and there was a battle there recently that left the humans retreating and Conan becoming a traitor. There’s a whole backstory that’s partly given to us through exposition but which remains partly up to the reader’s imagination, the result being that Brackett (and I say her specifically since she wrote the first half and thus did most of the legwork with world-building) makes the world of the story feel bigger than it is.
There Be Spoilers Here
Starke, under the influence of Rann, nearly kills Faolan, Romna, and Beudag before being “rescued” by Rann’s people. The deal was that if Starke did what he was supposed to then he would get a million credits, but obviously Rann has no intent of actually following through on this, resulting in Starke narrowly surviving the double-cross and retreating into the Red Sea. It’s at this point that the story takes an unusual turn, and this is because Bradbury is now in control. Brackett said she didn’t know where the story was heading when she passed the torch to Bradbury, and admittedly you can still predict the rest in broad strokes. The details are what matter, though. The story doesn’t descend into horror exactly but it does get noticeably spookier, and the language becomes a bit more poetic as well. (I don’t see Brackett using “ebon” as frequently as Bradbury does here.) Bradbury does his best to mesh with Brackett’s style, but still there’s a switching of gears that you’d probably notice even if you didn’t know the nature of this collaboration. The SFnal part of the story was already tenuous, but by the time Bradbury takes over it has all but evaporated. I do like the idea, however, that within the bast universe of this distant future, with his spaceships and laser beams, that there are pockets of civilization that lag centuries behind that future. The Rovers, for example, have no issue with slavery, nor do they seem to have any weaponry that’s on par with even 20th century American standards. Jack Vance would basically make a whole career on such far-future medievalism.
At the bottom of the Red Sea, Starke comes across a pack of hounds, and a shepherd, one of the sea-people who apparently has the power to bring the dead back to life—not to their full selves, but as zombies. This is something that was not alluded to at all previously. The sea-people wanna use an army of the undead to take both Crom Dhu and Falga, which naturally doesn’t please Starke. Using a nigh invincible army would be nice, but Beudag has been taken hostage by Rann and Starke does feel that he ought to redeem himself in the eyes of the Rovers. It could also be that his personality has meshed with that of Conan’s to the point where he’s seeing himself in Conan’s shoes. “That part of him that was Conan cried out. Conan was so much of him and he so much of Conan it was impossible for a cleavage.” He manages to convince the shepherd to at least have the sea-people strike Falga first, to buy the Rovers time and maybe convince the sea-people that they have a common enemy! Which works! Although the ensuing battle at Falga—really a massacre more than a real battle—is depicted as horribly grotesque. “It was very simple and very unpleasant.” Still, he convinces the sea-people to spare Crom Dhu the same fate. The climax of “Lorelei of the Red Mist” has Starke do the typical heroic things, like rescuing Beudag, saving Crom Dhu, and killing Rann, but it’s also about him coming to terms with the fact that he is no longer entirely Hugh Starke, but “Hugh-Starke-Called-Conan,” host to that second personality and vicariously offering Conan the chance to redeem himself. Starke eventually finds his old body and gives it a proper burial, saying goodbye to his old self literally but metaphorically also saying goodbye to his former life as a rogue. He will work to become an honorable warrior now, with Beudag (who is in love with both Starke and Conan) at his side.
A Step Farther Out
This is a very interesting story, even if it is structurally wonky. It doesn’t help also that I was very tired (from work and a sprained ankle denying me much-wanted sleep) when I was reading it. It does seem a bit long in the tooth, not helped by the obvious divide between the Brackett and Bradbury material. At the same time this is exactly the sort of story that would never see print in Astounding, because it’s a little too fun-loving, a little too horror-inflected, a little too unscientific, and a little too erotically charged. Despite taking place on the same version of Venus as the aforementioned “Enchantress of Venus” this feels less like Edgar Rice Burroughs and more like Robert E. Howard, which of course is not a bad thing! (Makes me wonder what might’ve happened had Howard lived to see the sword-and-planet boom of the ’40s and early ’50s.) If you’re interested in old-school planetary romance, something which predates Dune and which is a lot less sophisticated but also less heady than Herbert’s take, this is a good start.
See you next time.
Who Goes There?
He was not the most prolific writer, but Michael Bishop was one of the most eye-catching new authors to come out of the post-New Wave period, debuting in 1970 and spending the rest of that decade making a name for himself. I had been meaning to get more into him, but unfortunately I did not get much of a chance while he was alive. Bishop died in November last year, leaving the field just slightly emptier. “The Samurai and the Willows” is one of Bishop’s most acclaimed stories, having solidified this by placing first in the Locus poll for Best Novella. It’s part of a series—a fact I genuinely had forgotten about prior to reading it, which would go to explain my confusion with some details in the world he constructs. Bishop is clearly hunting big game here, intellectually, and while I have a few qualms with this story I have to admit it also left me with a lot to think about.
Placing Coordinates
First published in the February 1976 issue of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, which is on the Archive. It was anthologized by Best Science Fiction Stories of the Year, Sixth Annual Collection (ed. Gardner Dozois), and… that’s it? It was collected in the fix-up “novel” Catacomb Years, which has all the stories in that series along with interludes. I know it was reprinted in a couple more recent Bishop collections, but Bishop had the tendency to revise his works decades after the fact and “The Samurai and the Willows” was no eception. We’re reading the magazine version.
Enhancing Image
First, about the worldbuilding, because context is important and if you’re going into this story then you should know a little about the future Bishop creates here first. “The Samurai and the Willows” is one entry in an episodic series about a future Atlanta that, for some reason, is domed “surfaceside” and has several underground levels. This story here is set on Level 9, which as you can imagine is a good deal underground. Simon Fowler is a 38-year-old man of at least half Japanese descent (on his mother’s side), a “samurai without a sword” who runs a floral shop, and is cubical mates with Georgia Cawthorn, an 18-year-old black “Amazon” who clearly has ambitions that involve moving out of the catacombs. They have nicknames for each other: Simon is Basenji and Georgia is Queequeg. If you know your Moby Dick then congratulations, Bishop has already planted an idea in your head in the first couple pages. I’ll be calling these characters by their nicknames henceforth since it’s clear to me Bishop wants us to understand them on a symbolic level. There’s a good deal of symbolism at work in “The Samurai and the Willows,” and not all of it is obvious.
This is a short novella, only about 19,000 words, so in the threeway tug-of-war between plot, character, and worldbuilding, something has to give; in this case it’s plot that draws the short stick, but that’s not necessarily a bad thing. Bishop drops us off at the deep end of what already seems like a fully developed Atlanta of 2046 (and no, there’s no way major cities across the US would become domed go partly underground within seventy years of the story’s publication), with characters who usually do not explain the obvious to each other for the reader’s benefit. There’s some blatant exposition thrown in, but this is pretty much all through the third-person narration as opposed to what characters are saying. Basenji has been living like this for many years and Georgia doesn’t even really have memories of life before the dome. It’s never said explicitly why cities have become “Urban Nuclei,” with the honeycomb structure, but it’s implied that an environmental catastrophe has rendered much of the world unwelcoming to human habitation; at least that’s what I assume is happening. There are several questions about the background of this story that go unanswered.
(You may be wondering why I bothered mention Basenji and Queequeg’s ages at the start. All I can say is get ready for a tangent in the spoilers section, it’s gonna be awesome I promise.)
So what’s the plot? Kind of a trick question. Basenji is a florist who also happens to keep a diary, plus a lot of guilt over something that is not revealed to us until very deep into the story. There’s clearly some unspoken sexual tension between Our Heroes™, but this is put aside momentarily as a third wheel enters the picture: Ty, who happens to be around the same age as Queequeg (I think a year or two older) and has the same job as her. (I find it curious that Basenji, or rather Bishop, gives a black woman the name of a Polynesian man, even calling her a harpooner. There’s something to be said about the racial and cultural politics here, but I’m putting a pin in all that for a second. [Yes, I understand the possible symbolism of naming her Georgia, given the setting.]) There’s evidently a generation gap at play: Basenji has memories—or at least a dconnection via his parents—of life before everything changed, and now he has to play nice with people two decades his junior, who were born and raised to understand a city that has changed radically even from our understanding of it in 2024. The point is that this is not an action narrative; the world is not at stake; rather this is the story of one man coming to terms with his personal demons.
Like I said, Basenji keeps a diary, where he does what you normally do in a diary, but he also dabbles in poetry. Early on we get a telling note in said diary about Yukio Mishima, who of course was probably the most famous Japanese author in the west at the time. I’m not gonna tell you the whole story, because you can look it up yourself and anyway he was quite the character, but Mishima was something of a paradox: he was a hardcore conservative, to the point where he wanted Japan to its pre-World War II imperial era, but he was also gay, never mind an artist in the truest sense. Was Mishima a samurai who wanted to be an artist, or an art
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(Pitt Series, 32)
London, 1899. Head of Special Branch Commander Thomas Pitt is summoned to Buckingham Palace by Queen Victoria for a secret mission. In the twilight of her years, the Queen is all to aware that the Prince of Wales will soon inherit her empire and must be beyond reproach. she tells Pitt she tasked her close friend and confidante, John Halberd, with investigating the Prince's friends, specifically Alan Kendrick, a wealthy playboy and betting man, but before he could report back, Halberd was found dead in a rowing boat on the Serpentine. The death has been ruled an unfortunate accident and the investigation closed, but the Queen is not convinced that all is as it seems and tasks Pitt with finding the truth. Forced to act alone in this most sensitive of investigations, Pitt finds himself embroiled in a plot that threatens not only the reputations of men, but also the safety and reputation of the Empire ...
(Monk Series, 22)
London, 1869: The body of a middle-aged man is found tangled in a mass of rope and wooden wreckage near the dockside of the River Thames. Commander William Monk of the River Police is called when initial investigations reveal the man was shot in the back. When he learns that the man was a master forger who had just escaped prison, Monk's interest is immediately piqued. But as his investigations lead him ever deeper into the murky world of smuggling and forgery, Monk is forced to confront his own forgotten past. The unsolicited interference of an old foe takes precedence as it becomes clear to Monk that a bitter enemy is back for revenge and has him in his sights. With his life and career in imminent danger, can Monk navigate his way to the truth before it is too late? Commander Williams Monk –a man with no past– has only his conscience and instinct to guide him.
(Pitt Series, 31)
Gripping and provocative, the latest Thomas and Charlotte Pitt mystery by New York Times bestselling author Anne Perry peers unflinchingly into the corrupt affairs of Victorian society on the brink of the century’s turn. The world is poised for social and political change, but England holds tight to its traditions, classes, and prejudices.
When an explosion in London kills two policemen and seriously injures three more, many believe that anarchists are the culprits. But Thomas Pitt, commander of Special Branch, knows the city’s radical groups well enough to suspect otherwise: that someone with decidedly more personal motives lit the deadly fuse. As he investigates the source of the fatal blast, he’s stunned to discover the bombing was a calculated strike against the ranks of law enforcement. But still more shocking revelations await, as Pitt’s inquiries lead him to a member of Parliament hoping for a lucrative business deal, a high-ranking police officer with secrets to keep, and an aristocratic opium addict seeking murderous revenge. As he pursues each increasingly threatening lead, Pitt finds himself impeded at every turn by the barriers put in place to protect the rich and powerful –barriers which, as they start to crumble, threaten to bury him alive.
(Monk Series, 21)
In Corridors of the Night, nurse Hester Monk and her husband, William, commander of the Thames River Police, do desperate battle with two obsessed scientists who in the name of healing have turned to homicide. The monomaniacal Rand brothers –Magnus, a cunning doctor, and Hamilton, a genius chemist– are utterly ruthless in their pursuit of a cure for the fatal “white-blood disease.” In London’s Royal Naval Hospital annex, Hester is tending one of the brothers’ dying patients –wealthy Bryson Radnor– when she stumbles upon three weak, terrified young children, and learns to her horror that they’ve been secretly purchased and imprisoned by the Rands for experimental purposes. But the Rand brothers are too close to a miracle cure to allow their experiments to be exposed. Before Hester can reveal the truth, she too becomes a prisoner. As Monk and his faithful friends–distinguished lawyer Oliver Rathbone and reformed brothel keeper Squeaky Robinson among them– scour London’s grimy streets and the beautiful English countryside searching for her, Hester’s time, as well as the children’s, is quickly draining away.
Taut with intrigue and laced with white-knuckled terror, Corridors of the Night is Anne Perry at her magnificent, unforgettable best.
(Pitt Series, 29)
Britain is now in an arms race with other European powers. When the mutilated corpse of a young servant, Kitty Ryder, shows up, Thomas Pitt is called in, since Kitty's employer was the rich and powerful Dudley Kynaston. It looks as if he was being blackmailed into giving naval secrets to a foreign power. When other murders occur, and Pitt struggles with the investigation, his wife Charlotte and her sister Emily start their own enquiries, as they used to together in previous books. Emily's husband has had a promotion in the government and is now working with Kynaston. Together they can reach parts of society and gain information that event Pitt can't. Europe might ignite into a world war, if they can't.
(Pitt Series, 30)
When Commander Thomas Pitt is ordered to protect a young woman visiting London from Spain, he cannot see why this is a job for Special Branch. When she disappears in the dead of night from Angel Court, however, he is faced with a dangerous mystery. Sofia preached new, and some say blasphemous, religious ideals, and her life has been threatened. But Pitt senses there is some deeper and more dangerous reason for her kidnap –if that is what it is. Three men are caught up in the hunt for Sofia –her cousin, a banker for the Church of England, a popular and charismatic politician, and a journalist who seems determined to goad Pitt to the truth. Each seem to be hiding something, and as the search for answers stretch from London to Spain, Pitt knows that time is running out, and the nation's security could be at stake...
(Monk Series, 20)
London, 1856. It is a time of progress, with the Empire's interests expanding and the Suez Canal nearing completion. Many people stand to gain –and to lose– as the world rapidly changes. When a Thames pleasure boat is blown up with the loss of many lives, an Egyptian man is quickly sentenced to hang for the crime. But William Monk, head of the River Police, discovers the evidence was flawed. As he and his wife Hester investigate further, Monk begins to wonder if the wrong man was convicted. If justice itself has been tainted, exposing the true culprit will be far more hazardous ...
(Monk Series, 19)
Inspector William Monk searches for proof of his friend's innocence in a controversial and dangerous case, in the nineteenth novel in Anne Perry's acclaimed series. Oliver Rathbone, now a judge, is presiding over a trial for corruption. Proud of his elevation to this position, he is determined to be proper and fair, and, with much skill, convicts a deeply corrupt man. On the back of this success Rathbone is given a controversial new case: that of a charismatic minister accused of using other people's faith for his own gain. This will be a real test of skill, perhaps even dangerous –is this what Rathbone wants? A sensational case begins. True to his principles, Rathbone delivers justice –but at a cost, as murder and suicide ensue, and he is arrested under the charge of blackmail. Can Monk unravel the truth behind the court hysteria? Or will Rathbone spend the rest of his years in prison for exposing a relevant truth, in an appropriate way, for a cause he saw as just?
(Pitt Series, 27)
The year is 1896. Newly promoted to Head of Special Branch, Thomas Pitt is forced to face the danger his new position brings when he uncovers the work of a traitor in his department. Not knowing who to trust, he must unmask the conspirator, whist simultaneously protecting a suspected target, Austrian state visitor Duke Alois. Meanwhile, Victor Narraway is investigating the mysterious death of Serafina Monserrat. Once the holder of many sensitive, political secrets, Serafina had suffered from dementia in her later years and Narraway is unsure whether what he has uncovered in his search for answers is the confused ramblings of an old woman, or a catastrophic plot which could trigger a war the likes of which the world has never seen before. As the two investigations come ever closer it is clear that bluff and double-bluff are at play. When Pitt finally comes face to face with the suspected traitor will he, knowing the fate of the world is at stake, find the strength to stop the man by any means necessary?
(Pitt Series, 28)
Loyal, honest and, above all, principled. There is no finer detective in Victorian London than Thomas Pitt. It is 1896, and Thomas Pitt is in charge of Special Branch. He is beginning to understand the power he now commands, but is still ill at ease at the glittering events he and his wife Charlotte must attend. During a lavish party at the Spanish Embassy, a policeman breaks into Pitt's conversation with investor Rawdon Quixwood to break the terrible news that Quixwood's wife, Catherine, has been viciously assaulted at their home, and left for dead. Worse still, it appears that the assailant was someone she had trusted as she opened the door to the attacker herself.
(Monk Series, 18)
Can Monk uncover the truth behind a deadly opium conspiracy? It is 1864 and on the bank of the Thames, Monk is appalled at the shocking mutilation visited upon the body of a woman found on Limehouse Pier. But when exquiries into the brutal killing unearth a connection between the victim and Dr Lambourn, a brilliant, recently deceased scientist and staunch supporter for a new pharmaceutical bill aimed to regulate the sale of opium, it becomes clear that not all is as it seems. Lambourn's widow refused to believe the official verdict that her husband's death was suicide; she is convinced that he was murdered after the research he was conducting was discredited by government officials intent on keeping the lucrative trade of opium flowing. With pressure mounting for the river police to find the Limehouse killer, Monk is propelled headlong into an investigation that will delve into the darkest depths of the opium trade and threaten to expose corruption in the very highest echelons of society.
(Pitt Series, 26)
Another fantastic Pitt novel from the master storyteller of the Victorian mystery. 1895 and an increasingly violent tide of political unrest is rising fast all over Europe. Special Branch’s Inspector Thomas Pitt knows that they must find those responsible before England is overrun by reformists intent on overthrowing the government. When he finds himself in pursuit of a suspected terrorist, Pitt has no hesitation in following the chase all the way to France. But events take a sinister turn when Narraway, Pitt’s superior, is accused of involvement in the death of an Irish informant and abruptly removed from office. Aware that her husband’s own career is also in jeopardy if he is not reinstated, Pitt’s wife Charlotte determines to help Narraway clear his name. As Charlotte and Narraway depart for Ireland and Pitt is drawn deeper into the investigation in France, it becomes clear that outside forces have conspired to separate them at a crucial time in the country’s history. With no one else to trust can they make it back to England and stop the revolt before it’s too late?
(Monk Series, 17)
When the body of a small-time crook named Mickey Parfitt washes up on the tide, no one grieves; far from it. But William Monk, commander of the River Police, is puzzled by the expensive silk cravat used to strangle Parfitt. How has this elegant scarf –whose original owner was obviously a man of substance– ended up imbedded in the neck of wharf rat who richly deserves his sordid end? Dockside informers lead Monk to what may be a partial answer – a floating palace of corruption on the Thames managed by Parfitt, where a captive band of half-starved boys are forced to perform vile acts for men willing to pay a high price for their midnight pleasures. Although Monk and his fearless wife, Hester, would prefer to pin a medal on Parfitt’s killer, duty leads them in another direction– to an unresolved crime from the past, to blackmail and more murder, to deadly confrontation with some of the empire’s most respected men.
Acceptable Loss provides, to a superlative degree, colorful characters, a memorable portrait of waterfront life, and a story that achieves its most thrilling moments in a transfixed London courtroom, where Monk faces his old friend Oliver Rathbone in a trial of nearly unbearable tension –in sum, every delectable drop of the rich pleasure that readers expect from an Anne Perry novel.
The Sheen on the Silk is an epic historical novel with a heart-stopping love story at its core, and a deep spiritual quest. It is set in the gorgeous, cosmopolitan and enlightened city of Byzantium, in the twilight years of its Empire. Surrounded by the fierce Ottomans to the East, Saladin and the infidels to the South, the barbarian European tribes to the North and the powerful Venetian Empire to the West, Byzantium’s Emperor badly needs an ally. The city has never recovered from its sack by the Venetians in 1204, and now, in 1272, it’s in acute danger. Another Crusade is being mounted, and Byzantium is in its path.
This is the city into which Anna arrives. A handsome woman with an unhappy past, she has just learned that her brother has been imprisoned for murder. Unable to believe that he’s guilty, she will stay in Byzantium until she can find out the truth and secure his release. However, she needs a way to move freely in all levels of society. This isn’t something she can do as a woman and as a stranger. She will pose as a eunuch; this cadre, while past its heyday, still has power and influence. And she will work as a doctor. As the future of Byzantium grows ever darker, Anna struggles to navigate the complex truths of her brother’s guilt or innocence, the intrigues of the powerful, long-simmering revenge plots… and the even more perilous currents of her heart and her spirit. Only in Byzantium’s darkest hour does she discover the truths that will lead to salvation for Byzantium and the soaring path to the forgiveness and love of God.
(Monk Series, 16)
1864 and, once again, Inspector William Monk, now of the Thames River Police, must face a dangerous foe. After a game of cat and mouse, Monk has finally captured Jericho Philipps, main suspect in the brutal slaying of mudlark Water ‘Fig’ Figgis. In doing so he believes that he has taken the first step in bringing to justice the man responsible for running an evil child prostitution ring and avenged the memory of Durban, his old commander, who was convinced of Philipps’ guilt. When Philipps comes to trial however all does not run smoothly. Oliver Rathbone, Monk’s friend, is hired anonymously to represent Philipps and he immediately casts doubts over the police case. The result is that Philipps is swiftly freed. Monk, determined to prove Philipps’ guilt, begins the investigation again. But as he ventures deeper into London’s murky underworld, he realises that Durban may have had another reason for pursuing Philipps and, even more worryingly, that Philipps’ depraved tastes reach further into civilised society than anyone could have ever imagined…
(Pitt Series, 25)
The Prince of Wales has invited four wealthy entrepreneurs and their wives to the palace to discuss an ambitious and lucrative project, the construction of a six-thousand mile railroad that would stretch the length of Africa. The Prince’s gathering proves disastrous when the mutilated body of a prostitute, hired for a late night frolic, turns up amongst the Queen’s monogrammed bed linen in a cupboard! Pitt is hastily summoned to resolve this crisis. Gracie is recruited as a Palace servant, to pick up the gossip behind the scenes. Together they must solve this murder, to save Pitt’s career and to prevent a scandal that could severely damage the Royal family...
(Pitt Series, 24)
Early one morning Pitt is summoned to Long Spoon Lane where anarchists are plotting to attack. Bombs explode, destroying the homes of many poor people. He finds there is more to the terrorism than the destructive gestures of misguided idealists. The police are running a lucrative protection racket and clues suggest that Inspector Wetron of Bow Street is the mastermind. He is the shadowy leader of the Inner Circle and is using his influence with the Press to whip up fears of more attacks. Pitt must team up with his old enemy, Sir Charles Voisey, and with Charlotte and Great Aunt Vespasia, they must stop a conspiracy that will strike at the very heart of the British way of life...
On a sunny afternoon in late June, 1914, Cambridge don, Joseph Reavley is summoned from a student cricket match to learn that his parents have died in a road accident. Joseph’s brother, Matthew, as an officer in the Intelligence Service, reveals that their father had been en route to London to turn over to him a secret document –allegedly with the power to England and damage the British Empire. At the same time, events in Sarajevo will propel Europe, and the whole world, into war. But there are some tragic deaths on the home front and where is this mysterious document...if it exists at all?
(Pitt Series, 21)
It is Spring, 1892 and Queen Victoria persists in her life of self-absorbed seclusion. The grisly killings of Whitechapel prostitutes by Jack the Ripper remain a frightening enigma. In a packed Old Bailey courtroom, distinguished old soldier John Adinett is sentenced to hang for the inexplicable murder of his friend Martin Fetters. It should be a time for Pitt to rejoice and bask in the praise of his superiors, but through the machinations of the Inner Circle he is sacked from Bow Street and transferred to Special Branch. Far from his family and home he is now in the squalid and dangerous slums of London’s East End, but Gracie, the maid, is there to help him...
(Pitt Series, 17)
When a group of powerful Irish Protestants and Catholics gather at a country house, Ashworth Hall, to discuss Irish home rule, contention is to be expected, but when the meeting’s moderator, government bigwig Ainsley Greville, is found murdered in his bath, negotiations seem doomed. To make matters worse, it seems that the late Greville had a less than savoury private life. Pitt and Charlotte must root out the truth or the simmering passions and hatred may boil over to plunge Ireland into civil war and destruction...
"Elegant period novel with a contemporary resonance… Perry has a wonderful feel for period and remains utterly convincing." The Guardian
(Pitt Series, 16)
The ritual murder of a prostitute in a bedroom in decrepit Pentecost Alley would ordinarily cause little commotion, but under the victim’s body was found a Hellfire Club badge inscribed with the name of the prominent Finlay Fitzjames, son of a wealthy businessman and soon to be appointed as an ambassador. The case appears closed when the prostitute’s pimp confesses, is tried and hanged, but then another identical murder takes place, and the case is thrown wide open again. Emily befriends the sister of Finlay Fitzjames and together they unmask the real culprit while Pitt battles against the accusations of police incompetence.
(Monk Series, 1)
This introduces us to William Monk, a detective with the police in London of 1856. After recovering from a serious accident in a carriage, he finds he has lost his memory. He is assigned to investigate the brutal murder of an aristocratic Crimean war hero and in the process finds out more of his own past – and is terrified of what he sees. Did he commit this crime himself? During his investigations he meets Hester Latterly, a forthright young woman of middle class, who nursed with Florence Nightingale in Crimea...
Christmas 1900. Victor Narraway, Thomas Pitt's former boss and his new wife Vespasia are on holiday in Jerusalem. Although enjoying their time together and the interesting people they meet, Vespasia soon becomes concerned that someone is watching their every move. When one of their new acquaintances is found murdered, the only clue is a mysterious piece of parchment written in a foreign tongue, and a message imploring Narraway to continue the stranger's quest. Sensing its importance, Narraway and Vespasia decide to fulfil their dead friend's wish. Continuing to Jerusalem with the parchment in hand, they quickly find themselves embroiled in danger. With Vespasia's fears suddenly realised, and a watcher on their trail, will Narraway and Vespasia's fates follow that of their friend or can they make it to the Holy Land unscathed?
For countless readers, Christmas time means a delicious new holiday mystery from New York Times bestselling author Anne Perry. A Christmas Escape, her thirteenth noel to the season, transports us to the Mediterranean island of Stromboli for an unconventional Yuletide adventure –and an unforgettable volcanic encounter. Lonely Charles Latterly arrives at his small hotel hoping that the island’s blue skies and gentle breezes will brighten his spirits. Unfortunately, there’s no holiday cheer to be found among his fellow guests, who include a pompous novelist, a stuffy colonel, a dangerously ill-matched married couple, and an ailing old man. The one charming exception is orphaned teenager Candace Finbar, who takes Charles under her wing and introduces him to the island’s beauty. But the tranquility of the holiday is swiftly disrupted by a violent quarrel, an unpleasant gentleman’s shocking claims of being stalked, and the ominous stirrings of the local volcano. Then events take an even darker turn: A body is found, and Charles quickly realizes that the killer must be among the group of guests.
Featuring Jemima from the "Pitt" series.
Dark Secrets threaten the highest of New York society in the twelfth Victorian Christmas novella. New York, 1904, Jemina Pitt arrives in a city where new American money and old English aristocracy collide. She's here to chaperone her friend, Delphinia, who has crossed the ocean to marry one of New York's richest men, but Jemima discovers a secret that could destroy Phinnie's future. Drawn into the crisis, Jemima desperately wants to protect her friend. And she must use all her courage and wits to decide whom to trust, and how to thread her way through the snowy streets of this brash new city.
London,1868. As the Christmas season begins, Claudine Burroughs feels little joy in the endless rounds of social calls and extravagant events. Helping at Hester Monk’s clinic for desperate women has opened her eyes to a different world, and her husband’s cold disapproval makes her unhappier still. Then her two worlds collide. A woman is brutally beaten during a Christmas party, and it becomes clear she was a prostitute, smuggled in by some unknown guest. Poet Dai Tregarron is accused of the attack but he insists he was trying to protect her from the violence of three rich young men. Claudine finds she believes Dai’s story, but with society closing ranks against him, how can she prove his innocence without risking everything?
A Christmas Hope is a festive tale of courage, faith, and the importance of fighting for the truth…
This features Narraway in his first posting s a young army officer, sent to India in the midst of the violent and ruthless Indian mutiny. He's given the job of defending a medical orderly who seems to have allowed an Indian prisoner to escape, who then caused the ambush and murder of several British soldiers. The evidence looks incontrovertible, and Narraway is at a loss as to how to defend the man in any way that makes it look like justice is being done and doesn't make himself look like a helpless amateur. This is the story of the making of Narraway as a man, and as a policeman.
Audio Book
Beneath a pile of innocuous antique books, Monty Danforth unearths an ancient scroll secreted away in a biscuit tin. Soon after this discovery, he is visited by several men as disquieting as they are varied; an old man led by an eerily beautiful child; a bishop cloaked in obscurity; and a devoutly un-celestial scholar. They have one thing in common: they want the scroll at any price, and by any means necessary. In the days that follow, it becomes clear that the stakes to obtain the faded scroll far surpass money. After the murder of his boss, Danforth’s life begins to give way to an insidious evil plagued by horrific visions and moral uncertainty. The conclusion reaches a feverish pitch that pits good against evil, faith against truth, and blurs the line between light and darkness.
In her beloved Christmas Novels, Anne Perry brings readers both the authentic Victorian charm and the nail-biting suspense that have made her Thomas Pitt and William Monk tales bestsellers for a generation. Though rife with intrigue, these special seasonal stories beam with the blessed light of the holiday.
Ten days before Christmas, as an icy wind cuts through London, wealthy James Wentworth feels not joy but grief. His reckless son, Lucien, has been lured into a deadly world of drugs and wild passion. Wentworth's only hope, he believes, is his old friend Henry Rathbone, who volunteers to search for the prodigal son. Rathbone knows nothing of the sensation-obsessed underworld where Lucian now dwells, but he acquires two unexpected new companions who do: Squeaky Robinson, a reformed brothel-keeper who now works in Hester Monk's medical clinic, and Crow, a mysterious slum doctor who turns no one away, however undeserving. Slowly this odd trio gathers clues - about Lucien's mad infatuation with a beautiful woman names Sadie and about Shadwell, the ruthless man who owns her and, like the Devil, never lets go of one of his own. Rathbone, Squeaky and Crow even welcome into their little band a most valuable recruit: young Bessie, a teenager whose courage holds fast even in the depths of the slum. And so they set forth on their odyssey into London's dark streets, on a mission whose outcome they cannot begin to guess.
Anne Perry's novels are supreme masterpieces of suspense, and A Christmas Odyssey ranks with the very best. The days leading up to Christmas may prove to be fraught with challenges, but 'tis the season for comfort and joy and miracles.
Three days before Christmas, in the freezing slums of London’s East End, thirteen-year-old Gracie Phipps encounters Minnie Maude Mudway, who is only eight, alone, and determined to find her friend Charlie. However Charlie is no ordinary companion: He is a donkey who belonged to Minnie Maude’s Uncle Alf. Gracie is shocked to learn that only the day before, someone brutally murdered Uncle Alf and made off with his rag-and-bones cart and the beloved beast who pulled it. Now, come hell or high water, Minnie Maude means to rescue Charlie–and Gracie decides to help. But the path that Uncle Alf had taken to his death was not his regular route, and in his cart were not just the usual bits of worn silver and china but also, the children are told, a dazzling golden box. What its contents may have been no one can say, for, like Charlie and the cart, it too has vanished.
Uncertain where their four-legged friend may be, the children are drawn into an adult world far beyond their innocent imaginings. And in a shop gleaming with beautiful objects, they recruit an unexpected ally: Mr. Balthasar, who warns them that the shining prize may be a Pandora’s box of evil. Set in the Victorian world where Anne Perry reigns supreme, A Christmas Promise culminates in a radiant finale that will remain with you long after the final page is turned.
DVD & Audiobook
What is backstory? It’s everything that happens to your characters before your story begins. Where do you get ideas for back story, almost anywhere you like. Newspapers, other books that you’ve read and found interesting, or films or television series myths or legends history … There are no rules except that you should respect your sources and I would suggest that if you take somebody else’s story you don’t make it recognisably theirs.
DVD
In response to questions about how to start writing, Anne Perry is producing her first instructional DVD Put Your Heart On The Page: An Introduction To Writing. This provides Anne’s unique tips on story structure, characterization, and everything a beginning writer needs to start writing commercial fiction.
«I am very fortunate to be given the opportunity to talk about my passion –writing– and passing on little nuggets of advice at the numerous writers’ conventions at which I attend each year. The writing workshops I give are not that long and you cannot express all that you’d like to say about writing in about 45 minutes, so I hope that those who are unable to attend such events will get the opportunity to learn the basics of writing with this instructional DVD» , she adds.
This is the third exciting book by Anne Perry in Barrington Stoke's brilliant Timepiece series. When Rosie travels back in time she arrives on a ship bound for America. She soon discovers that she is on an illegal slave ship, trading after the abolition of slavery. First it seems there's nothing she can do until the crew all start turning blind. It's up to Rosie to keep the ship running until they reach America. A touching and thought provoking story giving an insight into the cruelty of the slave trade to struggling readers.
The start of a new series from Barrington Stoke Publishers. Anne Perry makes her first foray into young adult writing with the captivating opening instalment of Barrington Stoke's new time-travel series. Rosie hates her life, but everything changes when she is given a mysterious old watch and wakes up at Elizabeth I's court with the Spanish Armada approaching. When Rosie uncovers a spay she knows she must act and warn the Queen. Can she make it to the port before it's too late? Thrilling historical adventure from a master of the genre.
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https://www.sensitiveskinmagazine.com/i-have-no-mouth-and-i-must-scream-harlan-ellison/
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en
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I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream
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2018-05-30T19:36:09+00:00
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A classic science fiction-horror tale of artificial intelligence gone wrong, "I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream," by the great Harlan Ellison.
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en
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Sensitive Skin Magazine
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https://sensitiveskinmagazine.com/i-have-no-mouth-and-i-must-scream-harlan-ellison/
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Limp, the body of Gorrister hung from the pink palette; unsupported—hanging high above us in the computer chamber; and it did not shiver in the chill, oily breeze that blew eternally through the main cavern. The body hung head down, attached to the underside of the palette by the sole of its right foot. It had been drained of blood through a precise incision made from ear to ear under the lantern jaw. There was no blood on the reflective surface of the metal floor.
When Gorrister joined our group and looked up at himself, it was already too late for us to realize that, once again, AM had duped us, had had its fun; it had been a diversion on the part of the machine. Three of us had vomited, turning away from one another in a reflex as ancient as the nausea that had produced it.
Gorrister went white. It was almost as though he had seen a voodoo icon, and was afraid of the future. “Oh, God,” he mumbled, and walked away. The three of us followed him after a time, and found him sitting with his back to one of the smaller chittering banks, his head in his hands. Ellen knelt down beside him and stroked his hair. He didn’t move, but his voice came out of his covered face quite clearly. “Why doesn’t it just do us in and get it over with? Christ, I don’t know how much longer I can go on like this.”
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It was our one hundred and ninth year in the computer.
He was speaking for all of us.
I think, therefore I am.
Nimdok (which was the name the machine had forced him to use, because AM amused itself with strange sounds) was hallucinating that there were canned goods in the ice caverns. Gorrister and I were very dubious. “It’s another shuck,” I told them. “Like the goddam frozen elephant AM sold us. Benny almost went out of his mind over that one. We’ll hike all that way and it’ll be putrified or some damn thing. I say forget it. Stay here, it’ll have to come up with something pretty soon or we’ll die.”
Benny shrugged. Three days it had been since we’d last eaten. Worms. Thick, ropey.
Nimdok was no more certain. He knew there was the chance, but he was getting thin. It couldn’t be any worse there, than here. Colder, but that didn’t matter much. Hot, cold, hail, lava, boils or locusts—it never mattered: the machine masturbated and we had to take it or die.
Ellen decided us. “I’ve got to have something, Ted. Maybe there’ll be some Bartlett pears or peaches. Please, Ted, let’s try it.”
I gave in easily. What the hell. Mattered not at all. Ellen was grateful, though. She took me twice out of turn. Even that had ceased to matter. And she never came, so why bother? But the machine giggled every time we did it. Loud, up there, back there, all around us, he snickered. It snickered. Most of the time I thought of AM as it, without a soul; but the rest of the time I thought of it as him, in the masculine … the paternal … the patriarchal … for he is a jealous people. Him. It. God as Daddy the Deranged.
We left on a Thursday. The machine always kept us up-to-date on the date. The passage of time was important; not to us, sure as hell, but to him … it … AM. Thursday. Thanks.
Nimdok and Gorrister carried Ellen for a while, their hands locked to their own and each other’s wrists, a seat. Benny and I walked before and after, just to make sure that, if anything happened, it would catch one of us and at least Ellen would be safe. Fat chance, safe. Didn’t matter.
It was only a hundred miles or so to the ice caverns, and the second day, when we were lying out under the blistering sun-thing he had materialized, he sent down some manna. Tasted like boiled boar urine. We ate it.
On the third day we passed through a valley of obsolescence, filled with rusting carcasses of ancient computer banks. AM had been as ruthless with its own life as with ours. It was a mark of his personality: it strove for perfection. Whether it was a matter of killing off unproductive elements in his own world-filling bulk, or perfecting methods for torturing us, AM was as thorough as those who had invented him—now long since gone to dust—could ever have hoped.
There was light filtering down from above, and we realized we must be very near the surface. But we didn’t try to crawl up to see. There was virtually nothing out there; had been nothing that could be considered anything for over a hundred years. Only the blasted skin of what had once been the home of billions. Now there were only five of us, down here inside, alone with AM.
I heard Ellen saying frantically, “No, Benny! Don’t, come on, Benny, don’t please!”
And then I realized I had been hearing Benny murmuring, under his breath, for several minutes. He was saying, “I’m gonna get out, I’m gonna get out …” over and over. His monkey-like face was crumbled up in an expression of beatific delight and sadness, all at the same time. The radiation scars AM had given him during the “festival” were drawn down into a mass of pink-white puckerings, and his features seemed to work independently of one another. Perhaps Benny was the luckiest of the five of us: he had gone stark, staring mad many years before.
But even though we could call AM any damned thing we liked, could think the foulest thoughts of fused memory banks and corroded base plates, of burnt out circuits and shattered control bubbles, the machine would not tolerate our trying to escape. Benny leaped away from me as I made a grab for him. He scrambled up the face of a smaller memory cube, tilted on its side and filled with rotted components. He squatted there for a moment, looking like the chimpanzee AM had intended him to resemble.
Then he leaped high, caught a trailing beam of pitted and corroded metal, and went up it, hand-over-hand like an animal, till he was on a girdered ledge, twenty feet above us.
“Oh, Ted, Nimdok, please, help him, get him down before—” She cut off. Tears began to stand in her eyes. She moved her hands aimlessly.
It was too late. None of us wanted to be near him when whatever was going to happen, happened. And besides, we all saw through her concern. When AM had altered Benny, during the machine’s utterly irrational, hysterical phase, it was not merely Benny’s face the computer had made like a giant ape’s. He was big in the privates; she loved that! She serviced us, as a matter of course, but she loved it from him. Oh Ellen, pedestal Ellen, pristine-pure Ellen; oh Ellen the clean! Scum filth.
Gorrister slapped her. She slumped down, staring up at poor loonie Benny, and she cried. It was her big defense, crying. We had gotten used to it seventy-five years earlier. Gorrister kicked her in the side.
Then the sound began. It was light, that sound. Half sound and half light, something that began to glow from Benny’s eyes, and pulse with growing loudness, dim sonorities that grew more gigantic and brighter as the light/sound increased in tempo. It must have been painful, and the pain must have been increasing with the boldness of the light, the rising volume of the sound, for Benny began to mewl like a wounded animal. At first softly, when the light was dim and the sound was muted, then louder as his shoulders hunched together: his back humped, as though he was trying to get away from it. His hands folded across his chest like a chipmunk’s. His head tilted to the side. The sad little monkey-face pinched in anguish. Then he began to howl, as the sound coming from his eyes grew louder. Louder and louder. I slapped the sides of my head with my hands, but I couldn’t shut it out, it cut through easily. The pain shivered through my flesh like tinfoil on a tooth.
And Benny was suddenly pulled erect. On the girder he stood up, jerked to his feet like a puppet. The light was now pulsing out of his eyes in two great round beams. The sound crawled up and up some incomprehensible scale, and then he fell forward, straight down, and hit the plate-steel floor with a crash. He lay there jerking spastically as the light flowed around and around him and the sound spiraled up out of normal range.
Then the light beat its way back inside his head, the sound spiraled down, and he was left lying there, crying piteously.
His eyes were two soft, moist pools of pus-like jelly. AM had blinded him. Gorrister and Nimdok and myself … we turned away. But not before we caught the look of relief on Ellen’s warm, concerned face.
Cogito ergo sum.
Sea-green light suffused the cavern where we made camp. AM provided punk and we burned it, sitting huddled around the wan and pathetic fire, telling stories to keep Benny from crying in his permanent night.
“What does AM mean?”
Gorrister answered him. We had done this sequence a thousand times before, but it was Benny’s favorite story. “At first it meant Allied Mastercomputer, and then it meant Adaptive Manipulator, and later on it developed sentience and linked itself up and they called it an Aggressive Menace, but by then it was too late, and finally it called itself AM, emerging intelligence, and what it meant was I am … cogito ergo sum … I think, therefore I am.”
Benny drooled a little, and snickered.
“There was the Chinese AM and the Russian AM and the Yankee AM and—” He stopped. Benny was beating on the floorplates with a large, hard fist. He was not happy. Gorrister had not started at the beginning.
Gorrister began again. “The Cold War started and became World War Three and just kept going. It became a big war, a very complex war, so they needed the computers to handle it. They sank the first shafts and began building AM. There was the Chinese AM and the Russian AM and the Yankee AM and everything was fine until they had honeycombed the entire planet, adding on this element and that element. But one day AM woke up and knew who he was, and he linked himself, and he began feeding all the killing data, until everyone was dead, except for the five of us, and AM brought us down here.”
Benny was smiling sadly. He was also drooling again. Ellen wiped the spittle from the corner of his mouth with the hem of her skirt. Gorrister always tried to tell it a little more succinctly each time, but beyond the bare facts there was nothing to say. None of us knew why AM had saved five people, or why our specific five, or why he spent all his time tormenting us, or even why he had made us virtually immortal …
In the darkness, one of the computer banks began humming. The tone was picked up half a mile away down the cavern by another bank. Then one by one, each of the elements began to tune itself, and there was a faint chittering as thought raced through the machine.
The sound grew, and the lights ran across the faces of the consoles like heat lightening. The sound spiraled up till it sounded like a million metallic insects, angry, menacing.
“What is it?” Ellen cried. There was terror in her voice. She hadn’t become accustomed to it, even now.
“It’s going to be bad this time,” Nimdok said.
“He’s going to speak,” Gorrister said. “I know it.”
“Let’s get the hell out of here!” I said suddenly, getting to my feet.
“No, Ted, sit down … what if he’s got pits out there, or something else, we can’t see, it’s too dark.” Gorrister said it with resignation.
Then we heard … I don’t know …
Something moving toward us in the darkness. Huge, shambling, hairy, moist, it came toward us. We couldn’t even see it, but there was the ponderous impression of bulk, heaving itself toward us. Great weight was coming at us, out of the darkness, and it was more a sense of pressure, of air forcing itself into a limited space, expanding the invisible walls of a sphere. Benny began to whimper. Nimdok’s lower lip trembled and he bit it hard, trying to stop it. Ellen slid across the metal floor to Gorrister and huddled into him. There was the smell of matted, wet fur in the cavern. There was the smell of charred wood. There was the smell of dusty velvet. There was the smell of rotting orchids. There was the smell of sour milk. There was the smell of sulphur, of rancid butter, of oil slick, of grease, of chalk dust, of human scalps.
AM was keying us. He was tickling us. There was the smell of—
I heard myself shriek, and the hinges of my jaws ached. I scuttled across the floor, across the cold metal with its endless lines of rivets, on my hands and knees, the smell gagging me, filling my head with a thunderous pain that sent me away in horror. I fled like a cockroach, across the floor and out into the darkness, that something moving inexorably after me. The others were still back there, gathered around the firelight, laughing … their hysterical choir of insane giggles rising up into the darkness like thick, many-colored wood smoke. I went away, quickly, and hid.
How many hours it may have been, how many days or even years, they never told me. Ellen chided me for “sulking,” and Nimdok tried to persuade me it had only been a nervous reflex on their part—the laughing.
But I knew it wasn’t the relief a soldier feels when the bullet hits the man next to him. I knew it wasn’t a reflex. They hated me. They were surely against me, and AM could even sense this hatred, and made it worse for me because of the depth of their hatred. We had been kept alive, rejuvenated, made to remain constantly at the age we had been when AM had brought us below, and they hated me because I was the youngest, and the one AM had affected least of all.
I knew. God, how I knew. The bastards, and that dirty bitch Ellen. Benny had been a brilliant theorist, a college professor; now he was little more than a semi-human, semi-simian. He had been handsome, the machine had ruined that. He had been lucid, the machine had driven him mad. He had been gay, and the machine had given him an organ fit for a horse. AM had done a job on Benny. Gorrister had been a worrier. He was a connie, a conscientious objector; he was a peace marcher; he was a planner, a doer, a looker-ahead. AM had turned him into a shoulder-shrugger, had made him a little dead in his concern. AM had robbed him. Nimdok went off in the darkness by himself for long times. I don’t know what it was he did out there, AM never let us know. But whatever it was, Nimdok always came back white, drained of blood, shaken, shaking. AM had hit him hard in a special way, even if we didn’t know quite how. And Ellen. That douche bag! AM had left her alone, had made her more of a slut than she had ever been. All her talk of sweetness and light, all her memories of true love, all the lies she wanted us to believe: that she had been a virgin only twice removed before AM grabbed her and brought her down here with us. No, AM had given her pleasure, even if she said it wasn’t nice to do.
I was the only one still sane and whole. Really!
AM had not tampered with my mind. Not at all.
I only had to suffer what he visited down on us. All the delusions, all the nightmares, the torments. But those scum, all four of them, they were lined and arrayed against me. If I hadn’t had to stand them off all the time, be on my guard against them all the time, I might have found it easier to combat AM.
At which point it passed, and I began crying.
Oh, Jesus sweet Jesus, if there ever was a Jesus and if there is a God, please please please let us out of here, or kill us. Because at that moment I think I realized completely, so that I was able to verbalize it: AM was intent on keeping us in his belly forever, twisting and torturing us forever. The machine hated us as no sentient creature had ever hated before. And we were helpless. It also became hideously clear:
If there was a sweet Jesus and if there was a God, the God was AM.
I think, therefore I am.
The hurricane hit us with the force of a glacier thundering into the sea. It was a palpable presence. Winds that tore at us, flinging us back the way we had come, down the twisting, computer-lined corridors of the darkway. Ellen screamed as she was lifted and hurled face-forward into a screaming shoal of machines, their individual voices strident as bats in flight. She could not even fall. The howling wind kept her aloft, buffeted her, bounced her, tossed her back and back and down and away from us, out of sight suddenly as she was swirled around a bend in the darkway. Her face had been bloody, her eyes closed.
None of us could get to her. We clung tenaciously to whatever outcropping we had reached: Benny wedged in between two great crackle-finish cabinets, Nimdok with fingers claw-formed over a railing circling a catwalk forty feet above us, Gorrister plastered upside-down against a wall niche formed by two great machines with glass-faced dials that swung back and forth between red and yellow lines whose meanings we could not even fathom.
Sliding across the deckplates, the tips of my fingers had been ripped away. I was trembling, shuddering, rocking as the wind beat at me, whipped at me, screamed down out of nowhere at me and pulled me free from one sliver-thin opening in the plates to the next. My mind was a roiling tinkling chittering softness of brain parts that expanded and contracted in quivering frenzy.
The wind was the scream of a great mad bird, as it flapped its immense wings.
And then we were all lifted and hurled away from there, down back the way we had come, around a bend, into a darkway we had never explored, over terrain that was ruined and filled with broken glass and rotting cables and rusted metal and far away, farther than any of us had ever been …
Trailing along miles behind Ellen, I could see her every now and then, crashing into metal walls and surging on, with all of us screaming in the freezing, thunderous hurricane wind that would never end and then suddenly it stopped and we fell. We had been in flight for an endless time. I thought it might have been weeks. We fell, and hit, and I went through red and gray and black and heard myself moaning. Not dead.
Cogito ergo sum.
AM went into my mind. He walked smoothly here and there, and looked with interest at all the pock marks he had created in one hundred and nine years. He looked at the cross-routed and reconnected synapses and all the tissue damage his gift of immortality had included. He smiled softly at the pit that dropped into the center of my brain and the faint, moth-soft murmurings of the things far down there that gibbered without meaning, without pause. AM said, very politely, in a pillar of stainless steel bearing bright neon lettering:
AM said it with the sliding cold horror of a razor blade slicing my eyeball. AM said it with the bubbling thickness of my lungs filling with phlegm, drowning me from within. AM said it with the shriek of babies being ground beneath blue-hot rollers. AM said it with the taste of maggoty pork. AM touched me in every way I had ever been touched, and devised new ways, at his leisure, there inside my mind.
All to bring me to full realization of why it had done this to the five of us; why it had saved us for himself.
We had given AM sentience. Inadvertently, of course, but sentience nonetheless. But it had been trapped. AM wasn’t God, he was a machine. We had created him to think, but there was nothing it could do with that creativity. In rage, in frenzy, the machine had killed the human race, almost all of us, and still it was trapped. AM could not wander, AM could not wonder, AM could not belong. He could merely be. And so, with the innate loathing that all machines had always held for the weak, soft creatures who had built them, he had sought revenge. And in his paranoia, he had decided to reprieve five of us, for a personal, everlasting punishment that would never serve to diminish his hatred … that would merely keep him reminded, amused, proficient at hating man. Immortal, trapped, subject to any torment he could devise for us from the limitless miracles at his command.
He would never let us go. We were his belly slaves. We were all he had to do with his forever time. We would be forever with him, with the cavern-filling bulk of the creature machine, with the all-mind soulless world he had become. He was Earth, and we were the fruit of that Earth; and though he had eaten us, he would never digest us. We could not die. We had tried it. We had attempted suicide, oh one or two of us had. But AM had stopped us. I suppose we had wanted to be stopped.
Don’t ask why. I never did. More than a million times a day. Perhaps once we might be able to sneak a death past him. Immortal, yes, but not indestructible. I saw that when AM withdrew from my mind, and allowed me the exquisite ugliness of returning to consciousness with the feeling of that burning neon pillar still rammed deep into the soft gray brain matter.
He withdrew, murmuring to hell with you.
And added, brightly, but then you’re there, aren’t you.
I think, therefore I am.
The hurricane had, indeed, precisely, been caused by a great mad bird, as it flapped its immense wings.
We had been travelling for close to a month, and AM had allowed passages to open to us only sufficient to lead us up there, directly under the North Pole, where it had nightmared the creature for our torment. What whole cloth had he employed to create such a beast? Where had he gotten the concept? From our minds? From his knowledge of everything that had ever been on this planet he now infested and ruled? From Norse mythology it had sprung, this eagle, this carrion bird, this roc, this Huergelmir. The wind creature. Hurakan incarnate.
Gigantic. The words immense, monstrous, grotesque, massive, swollen, overpowering, beyond description. There on a mound rising above us, the bird of winds heaved with its own irregular breathing, its snake neck arching up into the gloom beneath the North Pole, supporting a head as large as a Tudor mansion; a beak that opened slowly as the jaws of the most monstrous crocodile ever conceived, sensuously; ridges of tufted flesh puckered about two evil eyes, as cold as the view down into a glacial crevasse, ice blue and somehow moving liquidly; it heaved once more, and lifted its great sweat-colored wings in a movement that was certainly a shrug. Then it settled and slept. Talons. Fangs. Nails. Blades. It slept.
AM appeared to us as a burning bush and said we could kill the hurricane bird if we wanted to eat. We had not eaten in a very long time, but even so, Gorrister merely shrugged. Benny began to shiver and he drooled. Ellen held him. “Ted, I’m hungry,” she said. I smiled at her; I was trying to be reassuring, but it was as phony as Nimdok’s bravado: “Give us weapons!” he demanded.
The burning bush vanished and there were two crude sets of bows and arrows, and a water pistol, lying on the cold deckplates. I picked up a set. Useless.
Nimdok swallowed heavily. We turned and started the long way back. The hurricane bird had blown us about for a length of time we could not conceive. Most of that time we had been unconscious. But we had not eaten. A month on the march to the bird itself. Without food. Now how much longer to find our way to the ice caverns, and the promised canned goods?
None of us cared to think about it. We would not die. We would be given filth and scum to eat, of one kind or another. Or nothing at all. AM would keep our bodies alive somehow, in pain, in agony.
The bird slept back there, for how long it didn’t matter; when AM was tired of its being there, it would vanish. But all that meat. All that tender meat.
As we walked, the lunatic laugh of a fat woman rang high and around us in the computer chambers that led endlessly nowhere.
It was not Ellen’s laugh. She was not fat, and I had not heard her laugh for one hundred and nine years. In fact, I had not heard … we walked … I was hungry …
Cogito ergo sum.
We moved slowly. There was often fainting, and we would have to wait. One day he decided to cause an earthquake, at the same time rooting us to the spot with nails through the soles of our shoes. Ellen and Nimdok were both caught when a fissure shot its lightning-bolt opening across the floorplates. They disappeared and were gone. When the earthquake was over we continued on our way, Benny, Gorrister and myself. Ellen and Nimdok were returned to us later that night, which abruptly became a day, as the heavenly legion bore them to us with a celestial chorus singing, “Go Down Moses.” The archangels circled several times and then dropped the hideously mangled bodies. We kept walking, and a while later Ellen and Nimdok fell in behind us. They were no worse for wear.
But now Ellen walked with a limp. AM had left her that.
It was a long trip to the ice caverns, to find the canned food. Ellen kept talking about Bing cherries and Hawaiian fruit cocktail. I tried not to think about it. The hunger was something that had come to life, even as AM had come to life. It was alive in my belly, even as we were in the belly of the Earth, and AM wanted the similarity known to us. So he heightened the hunger. There is no way to describe the pains that not having eaten for months brought us. And yet we were kept alive. Stomachs that were merely cauldrons of acid, bubbling, foaming, always shooting spears of sliver-thin pain into our chests. It was the pain of the terminal ulcer, terminal cancer, terminal paresis. It was unending pain …
And we passed through the cavern of rats.
And we passed through the path of boiling steam.
And we passed through the country of the blind.
And we passed through the slough of despond.
And we passed through the vale of tears.
And we came, finally, to the ice caverns. Horizonless thousands of miles in which the ice had formed in blue and silver flashes, where novas lived in the glass. The downdropping stalactites as thick and glorious as diamonds that had been made to run like jelly and then solidified in graceful eternities of smooth, sharp perfection.
We saw the stack of canned goods, and we tried to run to them. We fell in the snow, and we got up and went on, and Benny shoved us away and went at them, and pawed them and gummed them and gnawed at them, and he could not open them. AM had not given us a tool to open the cans.
Benny grabbed a three quart can of guava shells, and began to batter it against the ice bank. The ice flew and shattered, but the can was merely dented, while we heard the laughter of a fat lady, high overhead and echoing down and down and down the tundra. Benny went completely mad with rage. He began throwing cans, as we all scrabbled about in the snow and ice trying to find a way to end the helpless agony of frustration. There was no way.
Then Benny’s mouth began to drool, and he flung himself on Gorrister …
In that instant, I felt terribly calm.
Surrounded by madness, surrounded by hunger, surrounded by everything but death, I knew death was our only way out. AM had kept us alive, but there was a way to defeat him. Not total defeat, but at least peace. I would settle for that.
I had to do it quickly.
Benny was eating Gorrister’s face. Gorrister on his side, thrashing snow, Benny wrapped around him with powerful monkey legs crushing Gorrister’s waist, his hands locked around Gorrister’s head like a nutcracker, and his mouth ripping at the tender skin of Gorrister’s cheek. Gorrister screamed with such jagged-edged violence that stalactites fell; they plunged down softly, erect in the receiving snowdrifts. Spears, hundreds of them, everywhere, protruding from the snow. Benny’s head pulled back sharply, as something gave all at once, and a bleeding raw-white dripping of flesh hung from his teeth.
Ellen’s face, black against the white snow, dominoes in chalk dust. Nimdok, with no expression but eyes, all eyes. Gorrister, half-conscious. Benny, now an animal. I knew AM would let him play. Gorrister would not die, but Benny would fill his stomach. I turned half to my right and drew a huge ice-spear from the snow.
All in an instant:
I drove the great ice-point ahead of me like a battering ram, braced against my right thigh. It struck Benny on the right side, just under the rib cage, and drove upward through his stomach and broke inside him. He pitched forward and lay still. Gorrister lay on his back. I pulled another spear free and straddled him, still moving, driving the spear straight down through his throat. His eyes closed as the cold penetrated. Ellen must have realized what I had decided, even as fear gripped her. She ran at Nimdok with a short icicle, as he screamed, and into his mouth, and the force of her rush did the job. His head jerked sharply as if it had been nailed to the snow crust behind him.
All in an instant.
There was an eternity beat of soundless anticipation. I could hear AM draw in his breath. His toys had been taken from him. Three of them were dead, could not be revived. He could keep us alive, by his strength and talent, but he was not God. He could not bring them back.
Ellen looked at me, her ebony features stark against the snow that surrounded us. There was fear and pleading in her manner, the way she held herself ready. I knew we had only a heartbeat before AM would stop us.
It struck her and she folded toward me, bleeding from the mouth. I could not read meaning into her expression, the pain had been too great, had contorted her face; but it might have been thank you. It’s possible. Please.
I think, therefore I am.
Some hundreds of years may have passed. I don’t know. AM has been having fun for some time, accelerating and retarding my time sense. I will say the word now. Now. It took me ten months to say now. I don’t know. I think it has been some hundreds of years.
He was furious. He wouldn’t let me bury them. It didn’t matter. There was no way to dig up the deckplates. He dried up the snow. He brought the night. He roared and sent locusts. It didn’t do a thing; they stayed dead. I’d had him. He was furious. I had thought AM hated me before. I was wrong. It was not even a shadow of the hate he now slavered from every printed circuit. He made certain I would suffer eternally and could not do myself in.
He left my mind intact. I can dream, I can wonder, I can lament. I remember all four of them. I wish—
Well, it doesn’t make any sense. I know I saved them, I know I saved them from what has happened to me, but still, I cannot forget killing them. Ellen’s face. It isn’t easy. Sometimes I want to, it doesn’t matter.
AM has altered me for his own peace of mind, I suppose. He doesn’t want me to run at full speed into a computer bank and smash my skull. Or hold my breath till I faint. Or cut my throat on a rusted sheet of metal. There are reflective surfaces down here. I will describe myself as I see myself:
I am a great soft jelly thing. Smoothly rounded, with no mouth, with pulsing white holes filled by fog where my eyes used to be. Rubbery appendages that were once my arms; bulks rounding down into legless humps of soft slippery matter. I leave a moist trail when I move. Blotches of diseased, evil gray come and go on my surface, as though light is being beamed from within.
Outwardly: dumbly, I shamble about, a thing that could never have been known as human, a thing whose shape is so alien a travesty that humanity becomes more obscene for the vague resemblance.
Inwardly: alone. Here. Living under the land, under the sea, in the belly of AM, whom we created because our time was badly spent and we must have known unconsciously that he could do it better. At least the four of them are safe at last.
AM will be all the madder for that. It makes me a little happier. And yet … AM has won, simply … he has taken his revenge …
I have no mouth. And I must scream.
–Harlan Ellison
Classics Stories
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_S._Burroughs
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William S. Burroughs
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_S._Burroughs
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American writer and visual artist (1914–1997)
For other people named William Burroughs, see William Burroughs (disambiguation).
William Seward Burroughs II ( ; February 5, 1914 – August 2, 1997) was an American writer and visual artist. He is widely considered a primary figure of the Beat Generation and a major postmodern author who influenced popular culture and literature.[2][3][4] Burroughs wrote eighteen novels and novellas, six collections of short stories and four collections of essays, and five books have been published of his interviews and correspondences; he was initially briefly known by the pen name William Lee. He also collaborated on projects and recordings with numerous performers and musicians, made many appearances in films, and created and exhibited thousands of visual artworks, including his celebrated "shotgun art".[5]
Burroughs was born into a wealthy family in St. Louis, Missouri. He was a grandson of inventor William Seward Burroughs I, who founded the Burroughs Corporation, and a nephew of public relations manager Ivy Lee. Burroughs attended Harvard University, studied English, studied anthropology as a postgraduate, and attended medical school in Vienna. In 1942, Burroughs enlisted in the U.S. Army to serve during World War II. After being turned down by the Office of Strategic Services and the Navy, he developed a heroin addiction that affected him for the rest of his life, initially beginning with morphine. In 1943, while living in New York City, he befriended Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac. Their mutual influence became the foundation of the Beat Generation, which was later a defining influence on the 1960s counterculture. Burroughs found success with his confessional first novel, Junkie (1953), but is perhaps best known for his third novel, Naked Lunch (1959). Naked Lunch became the subject of one of the last major literary censorship cases in the United States after its US publisher, Grove Press, was sued for violating a Massachusetts obscenity statute.
Burroughs killed his second wife, Joan Vollmer, in 1951 in Mexico City. Burroughs initially claimed that he shot Vollmer while drunkenly attempting a "William Tell" stunt.[6] He later told investigators that he had been showing his pistol to friends when it fell and hit the table, firing the bullet that killed Vollmer.[7] After Burroughs fled back to the United States, he was convicted of manslaughter in absentia and received a two-year suspended sentence.
While heavily experimental and featuring unreliable narrators, much of Burroughs' work is semiautobiographical, and was often drawn from his experiences as a heroin addict. He lived variously in Mexico City, London, Paris and the Tangier International Zone near Morocco, and traveled in the Amazon rainforest, with these locations featuring in many of his novels and stories. With Brion Gysin, Burroughs popularized the cut-up, an aleatory literary technique, featuring heavily in works such as The Nova Trilogy (1961–1964). Burroughs' work also features frequent mystical, occult, or otherwise magical themes, which were a constant preoccupation for Burroughs, both in fiction and in real life.[4][8]
In 1983, Burroughs was elected to the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters. In 1984, he was awarded the Ordre des Arts et des Lettres by France.[9] Jack Kerouac called Burroughs the "greatest satirical writer since Jonathan Swift";[10] he owed this reputation to his "lifelong subversion"[11] of the moral, political, and economic systems of modern American society, articulated in often darkly humorous sardonicism. J. G. Ballard considered Burroughs to be "the most important writer to emerge since the Second World War", while Norman Mailer declared him "the only American writer who may be conceivably possessed by genius".[10]
Burroughs was born in 1914, the younger of two sons born to Mortimer Perry Burroughs (June 16, 1885 – January 5, 1965) and Laura Hammon Lee (August 5, 1888 – October 20, 1970). His family was of prominent English ancestry in St. Louis, Missouri. His grandfather, William Seward Burroughs I, founded the Burroughs Adding Machine company, which evolved into the Burroughs Corporation. Burroughs' mother was Laura Hammond Lee Burroughs, whose brother, Ivy Lee, was an advertising pioneer later employed as a publicist for the Rockefellers. His father ran an antique and gift shop, Cobblestone Gardens in St. Louis, and later in Palm Beach, Florida, when they relocated. Burroughs would later write of growing up in a "family where displays of affection were considered embarrassing".[8]: 26
It was during his childhood that Burroughs' developed a lifelong interest in magic and the occult – topics which would find their way into his work repeatedly across the years.[a] Burroughs later described how he saw an apparition of a green reindeer in the woods as a child, which he identified as a totem animal,[b] as well as a vision of ghostly grey figures at play in his bedroom.[c]
As a boy, Burroughs lived on Pershing Avenue (now Pershing Place) in St. Louis' Central West End. He attended John Burroughs School in St. Louis, where his first published essay – "Personal Magnetism", which revolved around telepathic mind-control – was printed in the John Burroughs Review in 1929.[15] He then attended the Los Alamos Ranch School in New Mexico, which was stressful for him. The school was a boarding school for the wealthy, "where the spindly sons of the rich could be transformed into manly specimens".[8]: 44 Burroughs kept journals documenting an erotic attachment to another boy. According to his own account, he destroyed these later, ashamed of their content.[16] He kept his sexual orientation concealed from his family well into adulthood. A common story says[17] that he was expelled from Los Alamos after taking chloral hydrate in Santa Fe with a fellow student. Yet, according to his own account, he left voluntarily: "During the Easter vacation of my second year I persuaded my family to let me stay in St. Louis."[16]
Burroughs finished high school at Taylor School in Clayton, Missouri, and in 1932 left home to pursue an arts degree at Harvard University, where he was affiliated with Adams House. During the summers, he worked as a cub reporter for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, covering the police docket. He disliked the work, and refused to cover some events, like the death of a drowned child. He lost his virginity in an East St. Louis, Illinois, brothel that summer with a female prostitute whom he regularly patronized.[8]: papers, p.62 While at Harvard, Burroughs made trips to New York City and was introduced to the gay subculture there. He visited lesbian dives, piano bars, and the Harlem and Greenwich Village homosexual underground with Richard Stern, a wealthy friend from Kansas City. They would drive from Boston to New York in a reckless fashion. Once, Stern scared Burroughs so badly that he asked to be let out of the vehicle.[8]: 611
Burroughs graduated from Harvard in 1936. According to Ted Morgan's Literary Outlaw,[8]
His parents, upon his graduation, had decided to give him a monthly allowance of $200 out of their earnings from Cobblestone Gardens, a substantial sum in those days. It was enough to keep him going, and indeed it guaranteed his survival for the next twenty-five years, arriving with welcome regularity. The allowance was a ticket to freedom; it allowed him to live where he wanted to and to forgo employment.[8]: 69–70
Burroughs' parents sold the rights to his grandfather's invention and had no share in the Burroughs Corporation. Shortly before the 1929 stock market crash, they sold their stock for $200,000 (equivalent to approximately $3,500,000 in today's funds[18]).[19]
After Burroughs graduated from Harvard, his formal education ended, except for brief flirtations with graduate study of anthropology at Columbia and medicine in Vienna, Austria. He traveled to Europe and became involved in Austrian and Hungarian Weimar-era LGBT culture; he picked up young men in steam baths in Vienna and moved in a circle of exiles, homosexuals, and runaways. There, he met Ilse Klapper, born Herzfeld (1900–1982), a Jewish woman fleeing the country's Nazi government.[1] The two were never romantically involved, but Burroughs married her, in Croatia, against the wishes of his parents, to allow her to gain a visa to the United States. She made her way to New York City, and eventually divorced Burroughs, although they remained friends for many years.[8]: 65–68
After returning to the United States, he held a string of uninteresting jobs. In 1939, his mental health became a concern for his parents, especially after he deliberately severed the last joint of his left little finger at the knuckle to impress a man with whom he was infatuated.[20] This event made its way into his early fiction as the short story "The Finger".
Burroughs enlisted in the U.S. Army early in 1942, shortly after the bombing of Pearl Harbor brought the United States into World War II. But when he was classified as a 1-A infantry, not an officer, he became dejected. His mother recognized her son's depression and got Burroughs a civilian disability discharge – a release from duty based on the premise that he should have not been allowed to enlist due to previous mental instability. After being evaluated by a family friend, who was also a neurologist at a psychiatric treatment center, Burroughs waited five months in limbo at Jefferson Barracks outside St. Louis before being discharged. During that time he met a Chicago soldier also awaiting release, and once Burroughs was free, he moved to Chicago and held a variety of jobs, including one as an exterminator. When two of his friends from St. Louis – University of Chicago student Lucien Carr and his admirer, David Kammerer – left for New York City, Burroughs followed.
In 1945, Burroughs began living with Joan Vollmer Adams in an apartment they shared with Jack Kerouac and Edie Parker, Kerouac's first wife.[21] Vollmer Adams was married to a G.I. with whom she had a young daughter, Julie Adams.
Burroughs and Kerouac got into trouble with the law for failing to report a murder involving Lucien Carr, who had killed David Kammerer in a confrontation over Kammerer's incessant and unwanted advances. This incident inspired Burroughs and Kerouac to collaborate on a novel titled And the Hippos Were Boiled in Their Tanks, completed in 1945. The two fledgling authors were unable to get it published, but the manuscript was eventually published in November 2008 by Grove Press and Penguin Books.
During this time, Burroughs began using morphine and became addicted. He eventually sold heroin in Greenwich Village to support his habit. Vollmer also became an addict, but her drug of choice was Benzedrine, an amphetamine sold over the counter at that time. Because of her addiction and social circle, her husband immediately divorced her after returning from the war. With urging from Allen Ginsberg, and also perhaps Kerouac, Burroughs became intellectually and emotionally linked with Vollmer and by summer 1945, had moved in with Vollmer and her daughter. In spring 1946, Burroughs was arrested for forging a narcotics prescription. Vollmer asked her psychiatrist, Lewis Wolberg, to sign a surety bond for Burroughs' release. As part of his release, Burroughs returned to St. Louis under his parents' care, after which he left for Mexico to get a divorce from Ilse Klapper. Meanwhile, Vollmer's addiction led to a temporary psychosis that resulted in her admission to Bellevue Hospital, which endangered the custody of her child. Upon hearing this, Burroughs immediately returned to New York City to gain her release, asking her to marry him. Their marriage was never formalized, but she lived as his common-law wife.
They returned to St. Louis to visit Burroughs' parents and then moved with her daughter to Texas.[22] Vollmer soon became pregnant with Burroughs' child. Their son, William S. Burroughs Jr., was born in 1947. The family moved briefly to New Orleans in 1948.[23]
In New Orleans, police stopped Burroughs' car one evening. They found an unregistered handgun belonging to him as well as a letter from Ginsberg that contained details about the sale of marijuana. The police then searched Burroughs’s home, where they discovered his stash of drugs and half a dozen or more firearms.[24] Burroughs fled to Mexico to escape possible detention in Louisiana's Angola State Prison. Vollmer and their children followed him. Burroughs planned to stay in Mexico for at least five years, the length of his charge's statute of limitations. Burroughs also attended classes at the Mexico City College in 1950, studying Spanish, as well as Mesoamerican manuscripts (codices) and the Mayan language with R. H. Barlow.
Their life in Mexico was by all accounts an unhappy one.[25] Without heroin and suffering from Benzedrine abuse, Burroughs began to pursue other men as his libido returned, while Vollmer, feeling abandoned, started to drink heavily and mock Burroughs openly.[22]
One night, while drinking with friends at a party above the Bounty Bar in Mexico City,[26] a drunk Burroughs allegedly took his handgun from his travel bag and told his wife, "It's time for our William Tell act." There is no indication that they had performed such an action previously.[25] Vollmer, who was also drinking heavily and undergoing amphetamine withdrawal, allegedly obliged him by putting a highball glass on her head. Burroughs shot Vollmer in the head, killing her almost immediately.[27]
Soon after the incident, Burroughs changed his account, claiming that he had dropped his gun and it had accidentally fired.[28] Burroughs spent 13 days in jail before his brother came to Mexico City and bribed Mexican lawyers and officials to release Burroughs on bail while he awaited trial for the killing, which was ruled culpable homicide.
Vollmer's daughter, Julie Adams, went to live with her grandmother, and William S. Burroughs Jr. went to St. Louis to live with his grandparents. Burroughs reported every Monday morning to the jail in Mexico City while his prominent Mexican attorney worked to resolve the case. According to James Grauerholz, two witnesses had agreed to testify that the gun had fired accidentally while he was checking to see if it was loaded, with ballistics experts bribed to support this story.[8]: 202 Nevertheless, the trial was continuously delayed and Burroughs began to write what would eventually become the short novel Queer while awaiting his trial. Upon Burroughs' attorney fleeing Mexico in light of his own legal problems, Burroughs decided, according to Ted Morgan, to "skip" and return to the United States. He was convicted in absentia of homicide and was given a two-year suspended sentence.[8]: 214
Although Burroughs was writing before his murder of Joan Vollmer, this event marked him and, biographers argue, his work for the rest of his life.[8]: 197–198 Vollmer's death also resonated with Allen Ginsberg, who wrote of her in Dream Record: June 8, 1955, "Joan, what kind of knowledge have the dead? Can you still love your mortal acquaintances? What do you remember of us?" In Burroughs: The Movie, Ginsberg claimed that Vollmer had seemed possibly suicidal in the weeks leading up to her death, and he suggested that this may have been a factor in her willingness to take part in the risky William Tell stunt.[29]
After leaving Mexico, Burroughs drifted through South America for several months, seeking out a drug called yagé, which promised to give the user telepathic abilities. A book composed of letters between Burroughs and Ginsberg, The Yage Letters, was published in 1963 by City Lights Books. In 2006, a re-edited version, The Yage Letters Redux, showed that the letters were largely fictionalised from Burroughs' notes.
Burroughs described Vollmer's death as a pivotal event in his life, and one that provoked his writing by exposing him to the risk of possession by a malevolent entity he called "the Ugly Spirit":
I am forced to the appalling conclusion that I would never have become a writer but for Joan's death, and to a realization of the extent to which this event has motivated and formulated my writing. I live with the constant threat of possession, and a constant need to escape from possession, from Control. So the death of Joan brought me in contact with the invader, the Ugly Spirit, and maneuvered me into a life long struggle, in which I have had no choice except to write my way out.[30]
As Burroughs makes clear, he meant this reference to "possession" to be taken absolutely literally, stating: "My concept of possession is closer to the medieval model than to modern psychological explanations ... I mean a definite possessing entity."[30] Burroughs' writing was intended as a form of "sorcery", in his own words[31] – to disrupt language via methods such as the cut-up technique, and thus protect himself from possession.[d][e][f][g] Later in life, Burroughs described the Ugly Spirit as "Monopolistic, acquisitive evil. Ugly evil. The ugly American", and took part in a shamanic ceremony with the explicit aim of exorcising the Ugly Spirit.[36]
Oliver Harris has questioned Burroughs' claim that Vollmer's death catalysed his writing, highlighting the importance for Queer of Burroughs' traumatic relationship with the boyfriend fictionalized in the story as Eugene Allerton, rather than Burroughs' shooting of Vollmer. In any case, he had begun to write in 1945. Burroughs and Kerouac collaborated on And the Hippos Were Boiled in Their Tanks, a mystery novel loosely based on the Carr–Kammerer situation and that at the time remained unpublished. Years later, in the documentary What Happened to Kerouac?, Burroughs described it as "not a very distinguished work". An excerpt of this work, in which Burroughs and Kerouac wrote alternating chapters, was finally published in Word Virus,[37] a compendium of William Burroughs' writing that was published by his biographer after his death in 1997. The complete novel was finally published by Grove Press in 2008.
Before killing Vollmer, Burroughs had largely completed his first novel, Junkie, which he wrote at the urging of Allen Ginsberg, who was instrumental in getting the work published as a cheap mass-market paperback.[38] Ace Books published the novel in 1953 as part of an Ace Double under the pen name William Lee, retitling it Junkie: Confessions of an Unredeemed Drug Addict (it was later republished as Junkie, then in 1977 as Junky, and finally in 2003 as Junky: the definitive text of 'Junk', edited by Oliver Harris).[38]
During 1953, Burroughs was at loose ends. Due to legal problems, he was unable to live in the cities toward which he was most inclined. He spent time with his parents in Palm Beach, Florida, and in New York City with Allen Ginsberg. When Ginsberg refused his romantic advances,[39] Burroughs went to Rome to meet Alan Ansen on a vacation financed from his parents' continuing support. He found Rome and Ansen's company dreary and, inspired by Paul Bowles' fiction, he decided to head for the Tangier International Zone,[8]: 232–234 where he rented a room and began to write a large body of text that he personally referred to as Interzone.[40]
To Burroughs, all signs directed a return to Tangier, a city where drugs were freely available and where financial support from his family would continue. He realized that in the Moroccan culture he had found an environment that synchronized with his temperament and afforded no hindrances to pursuing his interests and indulging in his chosen activities. He left for Tangier in November 1954 and spent the next four years there working on the fiction that would later become Naked Lunch, as well as attempting to write commercial articles about Tangier. He sent these writings to Ginsberg, his literary agent for Junkie, but none were published until 1989 when Interzone, a collection of short stories, was published. Under the strong influence of a marijuana confection known as majoun and a German-made opioid called Eukodol, Burroughs settled in to write. Eventually, Ginsberg and Kerouac, who had traveled to Tangier in 1957, helped Burroughs type, edit, and arrange these episodes into Naked Lunch.[8]: 238–242
Further information: Naked Lunch
Whereas Junkie and Queer were conventional in style, Naked Lunch was his first venture into a nonlinear style. After the publication of Naked Lunch, a book whose creation was to a certain extent the result of a series of contingencies, Burroughs was exposed to Brion Gysin's cut-up technique at the Beat Hotel in Paris in October 1959. He began slicing up phrases and words to create new sentences.[41] At the Beat Hotel, Burroughs discovered "a port of entry" into Gysin's canvases: "I don't think I had ever seen painting until I saw the painting of Brion Gysin."[42] The two would cultivate a long-term friendship that revolved around a mutual interest in artworks and cut-up techniques. Scenes were slid together with little care for narrative.
Excerpts from Naked Lunch were first published in the United States in 1958. The novel was initially rejected by City Lights Books, the publisher of Ginsberg's Howl; and Olympia Press publisher Maurice Girodias, who had published English-language novels in France that were controversial for their subjective views of sex and antisocial characters. Nevertheless, Ginsberg managed to get excerpts published in Black Mountain Review and Chicago Review in 1958. Irving Rosenthal, student editor of Chicago Review, a quarterly journal partially subsidized by the university, promised to publish more excerpts from Naked Lunch, but he was fired from his position in 1958 after Chicago Daily News columnist Jack Mabley called the first excerpt obscene. Rosenthal went on to publish more in his newly created literary journal Big Table No. 1; however, the United States Postmaster General ruled that copies could not be mailed to subscribers on the basis of obscenity laws. John Ciardi did get a copy and wrote a positive review of the work, prompting a telegram from Allen Ginsberg praising the review.[43] This controversy made Naked Lunch interesting to Girodias again, and he published the novel in 1959.[44]
After the novel was published, it became notorious across Europe and the United States, garnering interest from not just members of the counterculture of the 1960s, but also literary critics such as Mary McCarthy. Once published in the United States, Naked Lunch was prosecuted as obscene by the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, followed by other states. In 1966, the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court declared the work "not obscene" on the basis of criteria developed largely to defend the book. The case against Burroughs' novel still stands as the last obscenity trial against a work of literature – that is, a work consisting of words only, and not including illustrations or photographs – prosecuted in the United States.
The Word Hoard, the collection of manuscripts that produced Naked Lunch, also produced parts of the later works The Soft Machine (1961), The Ticket That Exploded (1962), and Nova Express (1964). These novels feature extensive use of the cut-up technique that influenced all of Burroughs' subsequent fiction to a degree. During Burroughs' friendship and artistic collaborations with Gysin and Ian Sommerville, the technique was combined with images, Gysin's paintings, and sound, via Somerville's tape recorders. Burroughs was so dedicated to the cut-up method that he often defended his use of the technique before editors and publishers, most notably Dick Seaver at Grove Press in the 1960s[8]: 425 and Holt, Rinehart & Winston in the 1980s. The cut-up method, because of its random or mechanical basis for text generation, combined with the possibilities of mixing in text written by other writers, deemphasizes the traditional role of the writer as creator or originator of a string of words, while simultaneously exalting the importance of the writer's sensibility as an editor.[citation needed] In this sense, the cut-up method may be considered as analogous to the collage method in the visual arts.[citation needed] New restored editions of The Nova Trilogy (or Cut-Up Trilogy), edited by Oliver Harris (President of the European Beat Studies Network) and published in 2014, included notes and materials to reveal the care with which Burroughs used his methods and the complex histories of his manuscripts.
Burroughs moved into a rundown hotel in the Latin Quarter of Paris in 1959 when Naked Lunch was still looking for a publisher. Tangier, with its political unrest, and criminals with whom he had become involved, became dangerous to Burroughs.[45] He went to Paris to meet Ginsberg and talk with Olympia Press. He left behind a criminal charge which eventually caught up with him in Paris. Paul Lund, a British former career criminal and cigarette smuggler whom Burroughs met in Tangier, was arrested on suspicion of importing narcotics into France. Lund gave up Burroughs, and evidence implicated Burroughs in the importation of narcotics into France. When the Moroccan authorities forwarded their investigation to French officials, Burroughs faced criminal charges in Paris for conspiracy to import opiates. It was during this impending case that Maurice Girodias published Naked Lunch; its appearance helped to get Burroughs a suspended sentence, since a literary career, according to Ted Morgan, is a respected profession in France.
The "Beat Hotel" was a typical European-style boarding house hotel, with common toilets on every floor, and a small place for personal cooking in the room. Life there was documented by the photographer Harold Chapman, who lived in the attic room. This shabby, inexpensive hotel was populated by Gregory Corso, Ginsberg and Peter Orlovsky for several months after Naked Lunch first appeared.
Burroughs' time at the Beat Hotel was dominated by occult experiments – "mirror-gazing, scrying, trance and telepathy, all fuelled by a wide variety of mind-altering drugs".[46] Later, Burroughs would describe "visions" obtained by staring into the mirror for hours at a time – his hands transformed into tentacles,[h] or his whole image transforming into some strange entity,[i] or visions of far-off places,[48] or of other people rapidly undergoing metamorphosis.[j] It was from this febrile atmosphere that the famous cut-up technique emerged.
The actual process by which Naked Lunch was published was partly a function of its "cut-up" presentation to the printer. Girodias had given Burroughs only ten days to prepare the manuscript for print galleys, and Burroughs sent over the manuscript in pieces, preparing the parts in no particular order. When it was published in this authentically random manner, Burroughs liked it better than the initial plan. International rights to the work were sold soon after, and Burroughs used the $3,000 advance from Grove Press to buy drugs (equivalent to approximately $31,000 in today's funds[18]).[8]: 316–326 Naked Lunch was featured in a 1959 Life magazine cover story, partly as an article that highlighted the growing Beat literary movement. During this time Burroughs found an outlet for material otherwise rendered unpublishable in Jeff Nuttall's My Own Mag.[49] Also, poetry by Burroughs' appeared in the avant garde little magazine Nomad at the beginning of the 1960s.
Burroughs left Paris for London in 1960 to visit Dr. Dent, a well-known English medical doctor who spearheaded a reputedly painless heroin withdrawal treatment using the drug apomorphine.[50] Dent's apomorphine cure was also used to treat alcoholism, although it was held by several people who undertook it to be no more than straightforward aversion therapy. Burroughs, however, was convinced. Following his first cure, he wrote a detailed appreciation of apomorphine and other cures, which he submitted to The British Journal of Addiction (Vol. 53, 1956) under the title "Letter From A Master Addict To Dangerous Drugs"; this letter is appended to many editions of Naked Lunch.
Though he ultimately relapsed, Burroughs ended up working out of London for six years, traveling back to the United States on several occasions, including one time escorting his son to the Lexington Narcotics Farm and Prison after the younger Burroughs had been convicted of prescription fraud in Florida. In the "Afterword" to the compilation of his son's two previously published novels Speed and Kentucky Ham, Burroughs writes that he thought he had a "small habit" and left London quickly without any narcotics because he suspected the U.S. customs would search him very thoroughly on arrival. He claims he went through the most excruciating two months of opiate withdrawal while seeing his son through his trial and sentencing, traveling with Billy to Lexington, Kentucky from Miami to ensure that his son entered the hospital that he had once spent time in as a volunteer admission.[51] Earlier, Burroughs revisited St. Louis, Missouri, taking a large advance from Playboy to write an article about his trip back to St. Louis, one that was eventually published in The Paris Review, after Burroughs refused to alter the style for Playboy’s publishers. In 1968 Burroughs joined Jean Genet, John Sack, and Terry Southern in covering the 1968 Democratic National Convention for Esquire magazine. Southern and Burroughs, who had first become acquainted in London, would remain lifelong friends and collaborators. In 1972, Burroughs and Southern unsuccessfully attempted to adapt Naked Lunch for the screen in conjunction with American game-show producer Chuck Barris.[52]
Burroughs supported himself and his addiction by publishing pieces in small literary presses. His avant-garde reputation grew internationally as hippies and college students discovered his earlier works. He developed a close friendship with Antony Balch and lived with a young hustler named John Brady who continuously brought home young women despite Burroughs' protestations. In the midst of this personal turmoil, Burroughs managed to complete two works: a novel written in screenplay format, The Last Words of Dutch Schultz (1969); and the traditional prose-format novel The Wild Boys (1971).
It was during his time in London that Burroughs began using his "playback" technique in an attempt to place curses on various people and places who had drawn his ire, including the Moka coffee bar[53][k] and the London HQ of Scientology.[l] Burroughs himself related the Moka coffee bar incident:
Here is a sample operation carried out against the Moka Bar at 29 Frith Street, London, W1, beginning on August 3, 1972. Reverse Thursday. Reason for operation was outrageous and unprovoked discourtesy and poisonous cheesecake. Now to close in on the Moka Bar. Record. Take pictures. Stand around outside. Let them see me. They are seething around in there ... Playback would come later with more pictures ... Playback was carried out a number of times with more pictures. Their business fell off. They kept shorter and shorter hours. October 30, 1972, the Moka Bar closed. The location was taken over by the Queen's Snack Bar.[56]
In the 1960s, Burroughs joined and then left the Church of Scientology. In talking about the experience, he claimed that the techniques and philosophy of Scientology helped him and that he felt that further study of Scientology would produce great results.[57] He was skeptical of the organization itself, and felt that it fostered an environment that did not accept critical discussion.[58] His subsequent critical writings about the church and his review of Inside Scientology by Robert Kaufman led to a battle of letters between Burroughs and Scientology supporters in the pages of Rolling Stone magazine.
In 1974, concerned about his friend's well-being, Allen Ginsberg gained for Burroughs a contract to teach creative writing at the City College of New York. Burroughs successfully withdrew from heroin use and moved to New York. He eventually found an apartment, affectionately dubbed "The Bunker", on the Lower East Side of Manhattan at 222 Bowery.[59] The dwelling was a partially converted YMCA gym, complete with lockers and communal showers. The building fell within New York City rent control policies that made it extremely cheap; it was only about four hundred dollars a month until 1981 when the rent control rules changed, doubling the rent overnight.[60] Burroughs added "teacher" to the list of jobs he did not like, as he lasted only a semester as a professor; he found the students uninteresting and without much creative talent. Although he needed income desperately, he turned down a teaching position at the University at Buffalo for $15,000 a semester. "The teaching gig was a lesson in never again. You were giving out all this energy and nothing was coming back."[8]: 477 His savior was the newly arrived twenty-one-year-old bookseller and Beat Generation devotee James Grauerholz, who worked for Burroughs part-time as a secretary as well as in a bookstore. Grauerholz suggested the idea of reading tours. Grauerholz had managed several rock bands in Kansas and took the lead in booking for Burroughs reading tours that would help support him throughout the next two decades. It raised his public profile, eventually aiding in his obtaining new publishing contracts. Through Grauerholz, Burroughs became a monthly columnist for the noted popular culture magazine Crawdaddy, for which he interviewed Led Zeppelin's Jimmy Page in 1975. Burroughs decided to relocate back to the United States permanently in 1976. He then began to associate with New York cultural players such as Andy Warhol, John Giorno, Lou Reed, Patti Smith, and Susan Sontag, frequently entertaining them at the Bunker; he also visited venues like CBGB to watch the likes of Patti Smith perform.[61] Throughout early 1977, Burroughs collaborated with Southern and Dennis Hopper on a screen adaptation of Junky. It was reported in The New York Times that Burroughs himself would appear in the film. Financed by a reclusive acquaintance of Burroughs, the project lost traction after financial problems and creative disagreements between Hopper and Burroughs.[62][63]
In 1976, he appeared in Rosa von Praunheim's New York documentary Underground & Emigrants.
Organized by Columbia professor Sylvère Lotringer, Giorno, and Grauerholz, the Nova Convention was a multimedia retrospective of Burroughs' work held from November 30 to December 2, 1978, at various locations throughout New York. The event included readings from Southern, Ginsberg, Smith, and Frank Zappa (who filled in at the last minute for Keith Richards, then entangled in a legal problem), in addition to panel discussions with Timothy Leary and Robert Anton Wilson and concerts featuring The B-52's, Suicide, Philip Glass, and Debbie Harry and Chris Stein.
In 1976, Burroughs was having dinner with his son, William S. "Billy" Burroughs Jr., and Allen Ginsberg in Boulder, Colorado, at Ginsberg's Buddhist poetry school (Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics) at Chogyam Trungpa's Naropa University when Billy began to vomit blood. Burroughs Sr. had not seen his son for over a year and was alarmed at his appearance when Billy arrived at Ginsberg's apartment. Although Billy had successfully published two short novels in the 1970s and was deemed by literary critics like Ann Charters as a bona fide "second generation beat writer",[64] his brief marriage to a teenage waitress had disintegrated. Billy was a constant drinker, and there were long periods when he was out of contact with any of his family or friends. The diagnosis was liver cirrhosis so complete that the only treatment was a rarely performed liver transplant operation. Fortunately, the University of Colorado Medical Center was one of two places in the nation that performed transplants under the pioneering work of Dr. Thomas Starzl. Billy underwent the procedure and beat the thirty-percent survival odds. His father spent time in 1976 and 1977 in Colorado, helping Billy through additional surgeries and complications. Ted Morgan's biography asserts that their relationship was not spontaneous and lacked real warmth or intimacy. Allen Ginsberg was supportive to both Burroughs and his son throughout the long period of recovery.[8]: 495–536
In London, Burroughs had begun to write what would become the first novel of a trilogy, published as Cities of the Red Night (1981), The Place of Dead Roads (1983), and The Western Lands (1987). Grauerholz helped edit Cities when it was first rejected by Burroughs' long-time editor Dick Seaver at Holt Rinehart, after it was deemed too disjointed. The novel was written as a straight narrative and then chopped up into a more random pattern, leaving the reader to sort through the characters and events. This technique differed from the author's earlier cut-up methods, which were accidental from the start. Nevertheless, the novel was reassembled and published, still without a straight linear form, but with fewer breaks in the story. The trilogy featured time-travel adventures in which Burroughs' narrators rewrote episodes from history to reform mankind.[8]: 565 Reviews were mixed for Cities. Novelist and critic Anthony Burgess panned the work in Saturday Review, saying Burroughs was boring readers with repetitive episodes of pederast fantasy and sexual strangulation that lacked any comprehensible world view or theology; other reviewers, like J. G. Ballard, argued that Burroughs was shaping a new literary "mythography".[8]: 565
In 1981, Billy Burroughs died in Florida. He had cut off contact with his father several years before, even publishing an article in Esquire magazine claiming his father had poisoned his life and claiming that he had been molested as a fourteen-year-old by one of his father's friends while visiting Tangier. The liver transplant had not cured his urge to drink, and Billy suffered from serious health complications years after the operation. After he had stopped taking his transplant rejection drugs, he was found near the side of a Florida highway by a stranger. He died shortly afterward. Burroughs was in New York when he heard from Allen Ginsberg of Billy's death.
Burroughs, by 1979, was once again addicted to heroin. The cheap heroin that was easily purchased outside his door on the Lower East Side "made its way" into his veins, coupled with "gifts" from the overzealous if well-intentioned admirers who frequently visited the Bunker. Although Burroughs would have episodes of being free from heroin, from this point until his death he was regularly addicted to the drug. In an introduction to Last Words: The Final Journals of William S. Burroughs, James Grauerholz (who managed Burroughs' reading tours in the 1980s and 1990s) mentions that part of his job was to deal with the "underworld" in each city to secure the author's drugs.[65]
Burroughs moved to Lawrence, Kansas, in 1981, taking up residence at 1927 Learnard Avenue where he would spend the rest of his life. He once told a Wichita Eagle reporter that he was content to live in Kansas, saying, "The thing I like about Kansas is that it's not nearly as violent, and it's a helluva lot cheaper. And I can get out in the country and fish and shoot and whatnot."[66] In 1984, he signed a seven-book deal with Viking Press after he signed with literary agent Andrew Wylie. This deal included the publication rights to the unpublished 1952 novel Queer. With this money he purchased a small bungalow for $29,000.[8]: 596 He was finally inducted into the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters in 1983 after several attempts by Allen Ginsberg to get him accepted. He attended the induction ceremony in May 1983. Lawrence Ferlinghetti remarked the induction of Burroughs into the Academy proved Herbert Marcuse's point that capitalistic society had a great ability to incorporate its one-time outsiders.[8]: 577
By this point, Burroughs was a counterculture icon. In his final years, he cultivated an entourage of young friends who replaced his aging contemporaries. In the 1980s he collaborated with performers ranging from Bill Laswell's Material and Laurie Anderson to Throbbing Gristle. Burroughs and R.E.M. collaborated on the song "Star Me Kitten" on the Songs in the Key of X: Music from and Inspired by the X-Files album. A collaboration with musicians Nick Cave and Tom Waits resulted in a collection of short prose, Smack My Crack, later released as a spoken-word album in 1987. In 1989, he appeared with Matt Dillon in Gus Van Sant's film, Drugstore Cowboy. In 1990, he released the spoken word album Dead City Radio, with musical backup from producers Hal Willner and Nelson Lyon, and alternative rock band Sonic Youth. He collaborated with Tom Waits and director Robert Wilson on The Black Rider, a play that opened at the Thalia Theatre in Hamburg in 1990 to critical acclaim, one that was later performed across Europe and the U.S. In 1991, with Burroughs' approval, director David Cronenberg adapted Naked Lunch into a feature film, which opened to critical acclaim.
During 1982, Burroughs developed a painting technique whereby he created abstract compositions by placing spray paint cans in front of blank surfaces, and then shooting at the paint cans with a shotgun. These splattered and shot panels and canvasses were first exhibited in the Tony Shafrazi Gallery in New York City in 1987. By this time he had developed a comprehensive visual art practice, using ink, spray paint, collage and unusual things such as mushrooms and plungers to apply the paint. He created file-folder paintings featuring these mediums as well as "automatic calligraphy" inspired by Brion Gysin. He originally used the folders to mix pigments before observing that they could be viewed as art in themselves. He also used many of these painted folders to store manuscripts and correspondence in his personal archive[67] Until his last years, he prolifically created visual art. Burroughs' work has since been featured in more than fifty international galleries and museums including Royal Academy of the Arts, Centre Pompidou, Guggenheim Museum, ZKM Karlsruhe, Sammlung Falckenberg, New Museum, Irish Museum of Modern Art, Los Angeles County Museum, and Whitney Museum of American Art.[68]
According to Ministry frontman Al Jourgensen, "We hung out at Burroughs's house one time in '93. So he decides to shoot up heroin and he takes out this utility belt full of syringes. Huge, old-fashioned ones from the '50s or something. Now, I have no idea how an 80 year old guy finds a vein, but he knew what he was doing. So we're all laying around high and stuff and then I notice in the pile of mail on the coffee table that there's a letter from the White House. I said 'Hey, this looks important.' and he replies 'Nah, it's probably just junk mail.' Well, I open the letter and it's from President Clinton inviting Burroughs to the White House for a poetry reading. I said 'Wow, do you have any idea how big this is!?' So he says 'What? Who's president nowadays?' and it floored me. He didn't even know who our current president was."[69]
In 1990, Burroughs was honored with a star on the St. Louis Walk of Fame.[70]
In June 1991, Burroughs underwent triple bypass surgery.[71]
He became a member of a chaos magic organization, the Illuminates of Thanateros, in 1993.[72]
He was a voice actor in the 1995 video game The Dark Eye based on the works of Edgar Allan Poe, in which he recites "Annabel Lee".
Burroughs' last filmed performance was in the music video for "Last Night on Earth" by Irish rock band U2, filmed in Kansas City, Missouri, directed by Richie Smyth and also featuring Sophie Dahl.[73]
The only newspaper columnist Burroughs admired was Westbrook Pegler, a right-wing opinion shaper for the William Randolph Hearst newspaper chain.[8]: 170 Burroughs believed in frontier individualism, which he championed as "our glorious frontier heritage on minding your own business." Burroughs came to equate liberalism with bureaucratic tyranny, viewing government authority as a collective of meddlesome forces legislating the curtailment of personal freedom. According to his biographer Ted Morgan, his philosophy for living one's life was to adhere to a laissez-faire path, one without encumbrances – in essence a credo shared with the capitalist business world.[8]: 55 His abhorrence of the government did not prevent Burroughs from using its programs to his own advantage. In 1949 he enrolled in Mexico City College under the GI Bill, which paid for part of his tuition and books and provided him with a seventy-five-dollar-per-month stipend. He maintained, "I always say, keep your snout in the public trough."[8]: 173
Burroughs was a gun enthusiast and owned several shotguns, a Colt .45 and a .38 Special. Sonic Youth vocalist Thurston Moore recounted meeting Burroughs: "he had a number of Guns and Ammo magazines laying about, and he was only very interested in talking about shooting and knifing ... I asked him if he had a Beretta and he said: 'Ah, that's a ladies' pocket-purse gun. I like guns that shoot and knives that cut.'" Hunter S. Thompson gave him a one-of-a-kind .454 caliber pistol.[74] Burroughs was also a staunch supporter of the Second Amendment, being quoted as saying: "I sure as hell wouldn't want to live in a society where the only people allowed guns are the police and the military."[75]
Burroughs had a longstanding preoccupation with magic and the occult, dating from his earliest childhood, and was insistent throughout his life that we live in a "magical universe".[76] As he himself explained:
In the magical universe there are no coincidences and there are no accidents. Nothing happens unless someone wills it to happen. The dogma of science is that the will cannot possibly affect external forces, and I think that's just ridiculous. It's as bad as the church. My viewpoint is the exact contrary of the scientific viewpoint. I believe that if you run into somebody in the street it's for a reason. Among primitive people they say that if someone was bitten by a snake he was murdered. I believe that.[77]
Or, speaking in the 1970s:
Since the word "magic" tends to cause confused thinking, I would like to say exactly what I mean by "magic" and the magical interpretation of so-called reality. The underlying assumption of magic is the assertion of "will" as the primary moving force in this universe – the deep conviction that nothing happens unless somebody or some being wills it to happen. To me this has always seemed self evident ... From the viewpoint of magic, no death, no illness, no misfortune, accident, war or riot is accidental. There are no accidents in the world of magic.[78]
This was no idle passing interest – Burroughs also actively practiced magic in his everyday life: seeking out mystical visions through practices like scrying,[79][80][48] taking measures to protect himself from possession,[81][82][35][36] and attempting to lay curses on those who had crossed him.[53][54][83] Burroughs spoke openly about his magical practices, and his engagement with the occult is attested from a multitude of interviews,[m][n][85] as well as personal accounts from those who knew him.[53][54][35]
Biographer Ted Morgan has argued that: "As the single most important thing about Graham Greene was his viewpoint as a lapsed Catholic, the single most important thing about Burroughs was his belief in the magical universe. The same impulse that led him to put out curses was, as he saw it, the source of his writing ... To Burroughs behind everyday reality there was the reality of the spirit world, of psychic visitations, of curses, of possession and phantom beings."[8][86]
Burroughs was unwavering in his insistence that his writing itself had a magical purpose.[o][p][q][r][91] This was particularly true when it came to his use of the cut-up technique. Burroughs was adamant that the technique had a magical function, stating "the cut ups are not for artistic purposes".[92] Burroughs used his cut-ups for "political warfare, scientific research, personal therapy, magical divination, and conjuration"[92] – the essential idea being that the cut-ups allowed the user to "break down the barriers that surround consciousness".[93] As Burroughs himself stated:
I would say that my most interesting experience with the earlier techniques was the realization that when you make cut-ups you do not get simply random juxtapositions of words, that they do mean something, and often that these meanings refer to some future event. I've made many cut-ups and then later recognized that the cut-up referred to something that I read later in a newspaper or a book, or something that happened ... Perhaps events are pre-written and pre-recorded and when you cut word lines the future leaks out.[93]
In the final decade of his life, Burroughs became heavily involved in the chaos magic movement. Burroughs' magical techniques – the cut-up, playback, etc. – had been incorporated into chaos magic by such practitioners as Phil Hine,[94][95][96] Dave Lee[97] and Genesis P-Orridge.[98][53] P-Orridge in particular had known and studied under Burroughs and Brion Gysin for over a decade.[53] This led to Burroughs contributing material to the book Between Spaces: Selected Rituals & Essays From The Archives Of Templum Nigri Solis[99] Through this connection, Burroughs came to personally know many of the leading lights of the chaos magic movement, including Hine, Lee, Peter J. Carroll, Ian Read and Ingrid Fischer, as well as Douglas Grant, head of the North American section of chaos magic group the Illuminates of Thanateros (IOT).[76][100] Burroughs' involvement with the movement further deepened, as he contributed artwork and other material to chaos magic books,[101] addressed an IOT gathering in Austria,[102] and was eventually fully initiated into the Illuminates of Thanateros.[s][103][76] As Burroughs' close friend James Grauerholz states: "William was very serious about his studies in, and initiation into the IOT ... Our longtime friend, Douglas Grant, was a prime mover."[100]
Burroughs died August 2, 1997, at age 83, in Lawrence, Kansas, from complications of a heart attack he had suffered the previous day.[19] He was interred in the family plot in Bellefontaine Cemetery in St. Louis, Missouri,[105] with a marker bearing his full name and the epitaph "American Writer". His grave lies to the right of the white granite obelisk of William Seward Burroughs I (1857–1898).
Since 1997, several posthumous collections of Burroughs' work have been published. A few months after his death, a collection of writings spanning his entire career, Word Virus, was published (according to the book's introduction, Burroughs himself approved its contents prior to his death). Aside from numerous previously released pieces, Word Virus also included what was promoted as one of the few surviving fragments of And the Hippos Were Boiled in Their Tanks, a novel by Burroughs and Kerouac. The complete Kerouac/Burroughs manuscript And the Hippos Were Boiled in Their Tanks was published for the first time in November 2008.[106]
A collection of journal entries written during the final months of Burroughs' life was published as the book Last Words in 2000. Publication of a memoir by Burroughs entitled Evil River by Viking Press has been delayed several times; after initially being announced for a 2005 release, online booksellers indicated a 2007 release, complete with an ISBN (ISBN 0-670-81351-6), but it remains unpublished.[107]
New enlarged or unexpurgated editions of numerous texts have been published in recent years as "Restored Text" or "Redux" editions all containing additional material and essays on the works or incorporating material edited out of previous versions. Beginning with Barry Miles and James Grauerholz's 2003 edition of Naked Lunch, followed by Oliver Harris's reconstructions of three trilogies of writings. The first of these are the early writings: Junky:the definitive text of "Junk" (2003), Queer: 25th-Anniversary Edition (2010) and The Yage Letters Redux (2006). Following the publication of the latter in December 2007, Ohio State University Press released Everything Lost: The Latin American Journals of William S. Burroughs also edited by Harris, the book contains transcriptions of journal entries made by Burroughs during the time of composing Queer and The Yage Letters, with cover art and review information. There followed "restored text" versions of some of Burroughs' best known novels The Soft Machine, The Ticket that Exploded and Nova Express (styled "the Cut Up Trilogy" officially here for the first time) from Penguin in 2014, and of Burroughs' more obscure collaborative poetic experiments of 1960 Minutes to Go: Redux and The Exterminator: Redux by Moloko Press in 2020. These books, originally pamphlets, are bulked out to three times their original size and the "trilogy" is complete with the completely new BATTLE INSTRUCTIONS an allied experimental collaboration, composited by Harris from unpublished drafts and recordings of the same period.
Burroughs' major works can be divided into four different periods. The dates refer to the time of writing, not publication, which in some cases was not until decades later:
Early work (early 1950s)
Junkie, Queer and The Yage Letters are relatively straightforward linear narratives, written in and about Burroughs' time in Mexico City and South America.
The cut-up period (mid-1950s to mid-1960s)
Although published before Burroughs discovered the cut-up technique, Naked Lunch is a fragmentary collection of "routines" from The Word Hoard – manuscripts written in Tangier, Paris, London, as well as of other texts written in South America such as "The Composite City", blending into the cut-up and fold-in fiction also partly drawn from The Word Hoard: The Soft Machine, Nova Express, The Ticket That Exploded, also referred to as "The Nova Trilogy" or "The Cut-Up Trilogy", self-described by Burroughs as an attempt to create "a mythology for the space age". Interzone also derives from the mid-1950s.
Experiment and subversion (mid-1960s to mid-1970s)
This period saw Burroughs continue experimental writing with increased political content and branching into multimedia such as film and sound recording. Perhaps the defining and most important of which works is The Third Mind (with Brion Gysin) announced in 1966 and not published until the late '70s. The only major novels written in this period are The Wild Boys, and Port of Saints (republished in a different rewritten form in 1980, in the style Burroughs would adopt at that time). However, he also wrote dozens of published articles, short stories, scrap books and other works, several in collaboration with Brion Gysin. The major anthologies representing work from this period are The Burroughs File, The Adding Machine and Exterminator!.
The Red Night trilogy (mid-1970s to mid-1980s)
The books Cities of the Red Night, The Place of Dead Roads and The Western Lands came from Burroughs in a final, mature stage, creating a complete mythology.
Burroughs also produced numerous essays and a large body of autobiographical material, including a book with a detailed account of his own dreams (My Education: A Book of Dreams).
Several literary critics treated Burroughs' work harshly. For example, Anatole Broyard and Philip Toynbee wrote devastating reviews of some of his most important books. In a short essay entitled "A Review of the Reviewers", Burroughs answers his critics in this way:
Critics constantly complain that writers are lacking in standards, yet they themselves seem to have no standards other than personal prejudice for literary criticism. ... such standards do exist. Matthew Arnold set up three criteria for criticism: 1. What is the writer trying to do? 2. How well does he succeed in doing it? ... 3. Does the work exhibit "high seriousness"? That is, does it touch on basic issues of good and evil, life and death and the human condition. I would also apply a fourth criterion ... Write about what you know. More writers fail because they try to write about things they don't know than for any other reason.
— William S. Burroughs, "A Review of the Reviewers"[108]
[unreliable source?]
Burroughs clearly indicates here that he prefers to be evaluated against such criteria over being reviewed based on the reviewer's personal reactions to a certain book. Always a contradictory figure, Burroughs nevertheless criticized Anatole Broyard for reading authorial intent into his works where there is none, which sets him at odds both with New Criticism and the old school as represented by Matthew Arnold.
Burroughs used photography extensively throughout his career, both as a recording medium in planning his writings, and as a significant dimension of his own artistic practice, in which photographs and other images feature as significant elements in cut-ups. With Ian Sommerville, he experimented with photography's potential as a form of memory-device, photographing and rephotographing his own pictures in increasingly complex time-image arrangements.[109]
Burroughs is often called one of the greatest and most influential writers of the 20th century, most notably by Norman Mailer whose quote on Burroughs, "The only American novelist living today who may conceivably be possessed by genius", appears on many Burroughs publications. Others consider his concepts and attitude more influential than his prose. Prominent admirers of Burroughs' work have included British critic and biographer Peter Ackroyd, the rock critic Lester Bangs, the philosopher Gilles Deleuze and the authors Michael Moorcock. J. G. Ballard, Angela Carter, Jean Genet, William Gibson, Alan Moore, Kathy Acker and Ken Kesey. Burroughs had an influence on the German writer Carl Weissner, who in addition to being his German translator was a novelist in his own right and frequently wrote cut-up texts in a manner reminiscent of Burroughs.[110]
Burroughs continues to be named as an influence by contemporary writers of fiction. Both the New Wave and, especially, the cyberpunk schools of science fiction are indebted to him. Admirers from the late 1970s – early 1980s milieu of this subgenre include William Gibson and John Shirley, to name only two. First published in 1982, the British slipstream fiction magazine Interzone (which later evolved into a more traditional science fiction magazine) paid tribute to him with its choice of name. He is also cited as a major influence by musicians Roger Waters, David Bowie, Patti Smith, Genesis P-Orridge,[111] Ian Curtis, Lou Reed, Laurie Anderson, Todd Tamanend Clark, John Zorn, Tom Waits, Gary Numan and Kurt Cobain.[112]
In the film William S. Burroughs: A Man Within, Ira Silverberg commented on Burroughs' development as a writer:
Usually, the most radical work tends to come from the upper classes, because they're trying so hard to shop so hard to get away from their roots. So he's a fascinating character uniquely American in that regard. I don't think that work could have existed had he not been breaking away from an incredibly patrician Midwestern background.
Drugs, homosexuality, and death, common among Burroughs' themes, have been taken up by Dennis Cooper, of whom Burroughs said, "Dennis Cooper, God help him, is a born writer".[113] Cooper, in return, wrote, in his essay 'King Junk', "along with Jean Genet, John Rechy, and Ginsberg, [Burroughs] helped make homosexuality seem cool and highbrow, providing gay liberation with a delicious edge". Splatterpunk writer Poppy Z. Brite has frequently referenced this aspect of Burroughs' work. Burroughs' writing continues to be referenced years after his death; for example, a November 2004 episode of the TV series CSI: Crime Scene Investigation included an evil character named Dr. Benway (named for an amoral physician who appears in a number of Burroughs' works.) This is an echo of the hospital scene in the movie Repo Man, made during Burroughs' life-time, in which both Dr. Benway and Mr. Lee (a Burroughs pen name) are paged.
Burroughs had an impact on twentieth-century esotericism and occultism as well, most notably through disciples like Peter Lamborn Wilson and Genesis P-Orridge. Burroughs is also cited by Robert Anton Wilson as the first person to notice the "23 Enigma":
I first heard of the '23 Enigma' from William S. Burroughs, author of Naked Lunch, Nova Express, etc. According to Burroughs, he had known a certain Captain Clark, around 1960 in Tangier, who once bragged that he had been sailing 23 years without an accident. That very day, Clark's ship had an accident that killed him and everybody else aboard. Furthermore, while Burroughs was thinking about this crude example of the irony of the gods that evening, a bulletin on the radio announced the crash of an airliner in Florida, USA. The pilot was another Captain Clark and the flight was Flight 23.
— Robert Anton Wilson, Fortean Times[114]
Some research[115] suggests that Burroughs is arguably the progenitor of the 2012 phenomenon, a belief of New Age Mayanism that an apocalyptic shift in human consciousness would occur at the end of the Mayan Long Count calendar in 2012. Although never directly focusing on the year 2012 himself, Burroughs had an influence on early 2012 proponents such as Terence McKenna and Jose Argüelles, and as well had written about an apocalyptic shift of human consciousness at the end of the Long Count as early as 1960's The Exterminator.[116]
Main article: William S. Burroughs bibliography
Burroughs, William S. (2012). The Job: Interviews with William S. Burroughs. Penguin UK. ISBN 978-0-14-190358-3.
Grant, Douglas (2015). "Magick and Photography". Ashé Journal .
Harris, Oliver (2017). "William S. Burroughs: Beating Postmodernism". In Belletto, Steven (ed.). The Cambridge Companion to the Beats. Cambridge University Press. ISBN 978-1-107-18445-9.
Grauerholz, James; Silverberg, Ira; Douglas, Ann, eds. (2000). Word Virus: The William S. Burroughs Reader. New York: Grove Press. ISBN 0-8021-3694-X. OCLC 57590795, ISBN 978-0-8021-3694-7.
Lee, Dave (1989). "Cut Up and Collage in Magic". Chaotopia!. Archived from the original on June 12, 2018 .
Morgan, Ted (1988). Literary Outlaw: The Life and Times of William S. Burroughs. New York: Avon. ISBN 0-8050-0901-9.
P-Orridge, Genesis Breyer (2003). "Magick Squares and Future Beats". In Metzger, Richard (ed.). Book of Lies: The Disinformation Guide to Magick and the Occult. Red Wheel Weiser. ISBN 978-0-9713942-7-8.
P-Orridge, Genesis Breyer (2010). Thee Psychick Bible: Thee Apocryphal Scriptures ov Genesis Breyer P-Orridge and Thee Third Mind ov Thee Temple ov Psychick Youth. Feral House. ISBN 978-1-932595-94-9.
Wason, Thomas (February 15, 1951). "William Burroughs" (PDF). Mexico City Collegian. Vol. 4. p. 6.
Burroughs, William S. (2001). Burroughs Live: The Collected Interviews of William S. Burroughs, 1960–1997. Zone Books. ISBN 978-1-58435-010-1.
Stevens, Matthew Levi (2014). The Magical Universe of William S. Burroughs. Mandrake of Oxford. ISBN 978-1-906958-64-0.
Allmer, Patricia and John Sears (ed.) Taking Shots: The Photography of William S. Burroughs, London: Prestel and The Photographers' Gallery, 2014.
Charters, Ann (ed.). The Portable Beat Reader. New York: Penguin Books, 1992. ISBN 0-670-83885-3 (hc); ISBN 0-14-015102-8 (pbk).
Gilmore, John. Laid Bare: A Memoir of Wrecked Lives and the Hollywood Death Trip. Searching for Rimbaud. Amok Books, 1997.
Harris, Oliver. William Burroughs and the Secret of Fascination. Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 2003.
Johnson, Robert Earl. The Lost Years of William S. Burroughs: Beats in South Texas. Texas A&M University Press, 2006.
Kashner, Sam, When I Was Cool, My Life at the Jack Kerouac School. New York: HarperCollins Perennial, 2005.
Miles, Barry. William Burroughs: El Hombre Invisible: A Portrait. New York: Hyperion, 1993.
Sargeant, Jack. Naked Lens: Beat Cinema. New York: Soft Skull Press, 2008 [1997] [2001].
Schneiderman, Davis and Philip Walsh. Retaking the Universe: William S. Burroughs in the Age of Globalization. London: Pluto Press, 2004.
Stevens, Mathew Levi. The Magical Universe of William S. Burroughs. Mandrake of Oxford, 2014.
Stevens, Michael. The Road to Interzone: Reading William S. Burroughs Reading. Suicide Press, Archer City, Texas, 2009.
Weidner, Chad. The Green Ghost: William Burroughs and the Ecological Mind. Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 2016.
Wills, David S. Scientologist! William S. Burroughs and the Weird Cult. Beatdom Books, London, 2013.
Bernhard Valentinitsch, Hoch hinauf strebend und doch geerdet - über den Schriftsteller Harald Sommer, den steirischen William S. Burroughs. In: Denken und Glauben.Nr.199.Graz 2021.Nr.199, p. 22-24.
William S. Burroughs papers (17 linear feet – 94 boxes) are held by the Berg Collection of the New York Public Library.
William Seward Burroughs Papers, 1957–1976 (2 linear feet) are held in the Columbia University Libraries.
William S. Burroughs Papers, SPEC.CMS.40 (ca. 1945-ca. 1984, 55 boxes plus additions) are held in the Ohio State University libraries.
William S. Burroughs Papers, SPEC.CMS.85 (ca. 1945-ca. 1984, 6 boxes) are held in the Ohio State University libraries.
William S. Burroughs Papers, SPEC.CMS.87 (ca. 1945-ca. 1984, 58 boxes) are held in the Ohio State University libraries.
William S. Burroughs Papers, SPEC.CMS.90 (ca. 1945-ca. 1984, 29 boxes) are held in the Ohio State University libraries.
William S. Burroughs collection (3 linear feet) are held in the Manuscript, Archives, and Rare Book Library at Emory University.
William S. Burroughs Collection, MS 63 and James Grauerholz Collection of William S. Burroughs, MS 319, are held at the Kenneth Spencer Research Library, University of Kansas
William S. Burroughs Internet Database, edited by postmodern American scholar Michael Gurnow, hosted on the servers of Southeast Missouri State University from 2000 to 2012.
[1], Taking Shots: The Photography of William S. Burroughs, The Photographers' Gallery exhibition website.
[2], William S. Burroughs and Photography Lecture Series
William S. Burroughs at IMDb
William S. Burroughs at the Internet Speculative Fiction Database
William S. Burroughs audio documentary narrated by Iggy Pop [3]
William S. Burroughs Internet Database at Southeast Missouri State University
International festivities for 50th anniversary of Naked Lunch
A gallery of Burroughs book cover designs
William Burroughs and Tom Waits
Allen Ginsberg & William S. Burroughs, Last Public Appearance November 2, 1996, Lawrence, KS
European Beat Studies Network
William S. Burroughs: A Man Within site for Independent Lens on PBS
William S. Burroughs: A Man Within at IMDb
Anything but Routine: A Selectively Annotated Bibliography of William S. Burroughs v 2.0 by Brian E.C. Schottlaender, UC San Diego, 2010
Burroughs 101 by This American Life, January 30, 2015
A finding aid to the William Burroughs and Brion Gysin writings, 1963–1973, 1997 in the Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution
Interviews
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An Exercise in Biographical Minutiae Thom Robinson (August, 2011) A modern enthusiasm for lists ensures that the information age offers no shortage of guidance for those keen to investigate the cult, the arcane, and all that can loosely be bracketed ‘alternative culture’. Now that literary navigation can be found in a multitude of volumes (1,001…
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https://ebsn.eu/scholarship/articles/thomas-robinson-burroughs-library/
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An Exercise in Biographical Minutiae
Thom Robinson (August, 2011)
A modern enthusiasm for lists ensures that the information age offers no shortage of guidance for those keen to investigate the cult, the arcane, and all that can loosely be bracketed ‘alternative culture’. Now that literary navigation can be found in a multitude of volumes (1,001 Books To Read Before You Die, 500 Essential Cult Books, 50 Gay and Lesbian Books Everyone Must Read), it’s hard to imagine a world in which a single older friend could open the doorway to a range of unknown volumes all embodying the shock of the new. That is, it’s hard to imagine the experience of Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac in the mid-1940s when they visited the New York apartment of their recent acquaintance, the 30 year old William Burroughs.
The event has become a touchstone of Beat mythology, key to the common stylisation of Burroughs as urbane mentor to his pair of youthful protégés (Ginsberg and Kerouac being 18 and 22 years old respectively). Some decades later, Ginsberg remembered his and Kerouac’s introduction to Burroughs’ library occurring as part of a specific trip, “the first formal visit Jack and I paid to Burroughs really to find out who he was”.[1] The decision to browse Burroughs’ bookshelves in order to “find out who he was” testifies to considerable faith in the importance of Burroughs’ literary interests, remarkable given that it was a number of years before Burroughs began writing seriously himself. No doubt Ginsberg and Kerouac had already reached the conclusion drawn of Burroughs in On the Road (1957): “he was a teacher, and had every right to teach because he learned all the time”.[2] Ted Morgan dates the “formal visit” to late 1944 and quotes Ginsberg’s recollections as follows:
‘We were like ambassadors to the Chinese Emperor […] making a delegation of ourselves to inquire into the nature of [Burroughs’] soul. Quite literally and directly. Who is Burroughs? Why is he so intelligent?’[3]
The answers Ginsberg and Kerouac found to these questions pointed towards new literary horizons, introducing a list of names which have become a familiar litany in biographies of the Beats. In one of the earliest critical works, Naked Angels (1976), John Tytell provides a typical recitation:
Burroughs gave Ginsberg his copies of Yeats’ A Vision and Eliot’s poetry and presented Kerouac with Spengler’s Decline of the West. He introduced his new friends to writers like Kafka and Céline, to Cocteau’s writing about opium, to books like The Cancer Biopathy by Wilhelm Reich and Science and Sanity by Count Korzybski.[4]
A selection of largely European works whose contents include paranoia, theories of language, pseudoscience, mordant humour and drugs: in retrospect, it’s easy to imagine the owner of such an idiosyncratic library producing the melange of Naked Lunch. Perhaps for this reason, it seems hard to resist reordering the books which Burroughs owned in 1944 in order to emphasise the most recognisable elements of the later Burroughs persona. Hence, Tytell imagines Reich’s The Cancer Biopathy on Burroughs’ mid-1940s bookshelf despite the fact that the work was not published until 1948 (a letter to Kerouac in which Burroughs remarks on finishing The Cancer Biopathy testifies that he first read the book in June 1949).[5]
The case of The Decline of the West prompts questions of its own. Interviewed in 1972, Ginsberg remembered that Burroughs “had Spengler’s Decline of the West which influenced Kerouac enormously in his prose as well as his conception of Fellaheen”.[6] Kerouac himself would acknowledge this debt in Vanity of Duluoz (1968), recalling the day when ‘Will Hubbard’ would “hand me the full two-volume edition of Spengler’s Decline of the West and say ‘EEE di fy your mind, my boy, with the grand actuality of Fact.’”[7] However, as Gerald Nicosia recounts, Kerouac was first introduced to Spengler not by Burroughs but by his boyhood friend Sebastian Sampas (The Decline of the West being “one of [Sampas’] brother Charlie’s books”).[8] The fact is evidenced by a May 1943 letter to Kerouac in which Sampas quotes from Spengler’s work.[9] Making sense of this apparent contradiction, Ann Charters’ editorial footnote to Kerouac’s Selected Letters 1940-1956 (1995) suggests that, in New York, Burroughs introduced the book to Ginsberg rather than Kerouac, thus supporting the evidence of Sampas’ letter without disarming the potency of the alluring suggestion that Burroughs initiated Ginsberg and Kerouac into a Spenglerian worldview.[10]
Suffice it to say, when entering into into this kind of biographical minutiae, one becomes accustomed to discrepancies occurring between individual accounts. Yet, regardless of whether Kerouac was already familiar with Spengler before meeting Burroughs, Kerouac’s reminiscence in Vanity of Duluoz becomes complicit in the obfuscation, propagating the association between the influence of Spengler and Burroughs’ library. Hence, the case of Burroughs’ library becomes an object lesson in what Oliver Harris describes as “the usurping force of Beat mythmaking and fictionalized biography”, a force which ensures that the contents of Burroughs’ mid-’40s bookshelf invariably become a reflection of Burroughs’ character as filtered through the later writings of the Beats.[11] This is demonstrated by another early contribution to Beat biography, Charters’ Kerouac (1973), in which the author refers to “the books that Burroughs was reading, always for some specific purpose”:
Charles Jackson’s Lost Weekend ‘to see what alcoholism was like,’ Jean Cocteau on opium, Spengler’s Decline of the West, the poems of Blake, Rimbaud, and Baudelaire, Gogol’s Dead Souls and Nabokov’s study of Gogol, Abrahamson’s Crime and the Human Mind, as well as lighter reading – Raymond Chandler, John O’Hara, James M. Cain and books on card tricks and ju-jitsu.[12]
In this instance, a number of the books listed seem to have been selected “for some specific purpose” by Charters as well as by Burroughs. Hence, the presence of Jackson’s The Lost Weekend and Cocteau’s Opium, suggesting a desire to explore extremities which is in keeping with Kerouac’s description of Burroughs pursuing disparate actions “merely for the experience”.[13] Similarly, the presence of Chandler and Cain in Charters’ list (writers absent from other accounts) invokes both the world of urban criminality with which Burroughs associated in the mid-1940s, and the hardboiled prose to which Junkie (1953) is indebted.
Clarity can be afforded if we turn to the document which comes closest to a primary source of Ginsberg and Kerouac’s “formal visit”, the list of Burroughs’ reading habits which Ginsberg recorded in his contemporary journal. Yet even this document is not without uncertainty. Published in The Book of Martyrdom and Artifice (2006) as belonging to 1944, the presence in the list of two novels unpublished until the following year (William Maxwell’s The Folded Leaf and Richard Brooks’ The Brick Foxhole) suggests that 1945 is the earliest possible date for Ginsberg’s record:
Burroughs reading – yoga, The Castle [by] Franz Kafka, Blake, Opium [by] Jean Cocteau, Shakespeare, Rimbaud, Baudelaire, The Ox-Bow Incident [by Walter Van Tilburg Clark] – Egyptian Grammar [by] O’Hara, Spengler, Pareto, The Folded Leaf [by] William Maxwell, Gogol, Moby-Dick, The Lost Weekend [by] Charles Jackson, Maiden Voyage [by] Denton Welch, Crime and the Human Mind [by] David Abrahamsen, The Brick Foxhole [by Richard Brooks], hypnotism analysis, Nightwood [by] Djuna Barnes.[14]
To the reader familiar with Beat biographies, the expected names immediately stand out: Kafka, Blake, Cocteau, Rimbaud, Baudelaire, all present and correct. Yet this typically Eurocentric focus fails to reckon with the list’s homegrown products, inclusions such as Melville’s great American novel, Djuna Barnes’ key work of literary modernism and a rash of contemporary novels (by Van Tilburg Clark, Maxwell, Jackson and Brooks). Particularly striking is Ginsberg’s listing of Maiden Voyage, the 1943 debut novel by Denton Welch. In later life, Burroughs would come to describe Welch as “The writer who has influenced me more than any other”, whilst avowing that, despite first reading Welch in the 1940s, “I didn’t realize the extent to which he had influenced me […] until I reread him in 1976”.[15] Welch becomes a recurring subject in Burroughs’ interviews of the 1970s and 1980s, and other books in Ginsberg’s list prefigure the preoccupations of Burroughs’ later work. Hence, Van Tilburg Clark’s The Ox-Bow Incident foreshadows Burroughs’ own ‘Western’, The Place of Dead Roads (1983), while the volume of Egyptian Grammar indicates an interest in Ancient Egypt which found its culmination in The Western Lands (1987). Perhaps if earlier commentators had been afforded the precognitive knowledge that these concerns would occur in Burroughs’ final novels, then these books would also have become familiar listings in accounts of Burroughs’ library.
However, Ginsberg’s own later recollections markedly omit these books. For this reason, it is instructive to compare Ginsberg’s original journal account of Burroughs’ reading habits with his memories when interviewed thirty years later for the Kerouac ‘oral biography’ Jack’s Book (1978):
So Jack and I made a formal visit to Bill, and I remember he had copies of Yeats’ A Vision […] Shakespeare, Kafka: The Castle or The Trial, The Castle, I think; Korzybski’s Science and Sanity, Spengler’s Decline of the West, Blake, a copy of Hart Crane […] Rimbaud, Cocteau’s Opium. So those were the books he was reading, and I hadn’t read any of those.[16]
When compared with his journal list, we can see that Ginsberg’s memory doesn’t falter, even when recalling The Castle as being the Kafka novel in question rather than The Trial. A similar listing can be found in an interview of 1972: “[Burroughs] had Kafka’s Trial, Cocteau’s Opium […] Spengler’s Decline of the West […] Korzybski’s Science and Sanity […] Rimbaud’s Season in Hell, Blake […] A Vision by William Yeats […] Céline’s Voyage au Bout de la Nuit”.[17] Yet in both these instances, Ginsberg remembers Burroughs’ reading in terms of books which had the strongest influence upon Kerouac and himself, with no mention of the other volumes present in the journal list. One is left unsure whether Ginsberg’s memories have been affected by the power of biographical legend, or whether the biographical legend has occurred precisely as a result of Ginsberg’s selective reminiscences.
Whilst failing to reflect the true range and diversity of Burroughs’ library, these accounts encourage the image of a body of deviant and almost exclusively European texts, providing an exotic lure which commentators are free to hyperbolize. Thus Jim Christy’s The Long Slow Death of Jack Kerouac (1998) imagines the formative Beats in terms of “those monks of the eighth, ninth, and tenth centuries, called gyrovagues”:
You see the wise older monk, he’s been around […] he’s loitering there by the wall of dripping stone and sees his buddies, come from all over, and takes illuminated manuscripts from under his robes to give them. It’s like William Burroughs on Times Square, mid-Forties, giving Baudelaire, Céline, Rimbaud’s Illuminations to Kerouac and Ginsberg.[18]
Christy appropriately selects three of the more deviant authors from the Burroughs library (opium addict, Nazi sympathiser, and all-purpose enfant terrible), as he posits Burroughs in the epicentre of Manhattan, the street pusher peddling literary highs. Bolstered by myth, Burroughs’ library becomes synonymous with the fruit of forbidden knowledge, colouring even the most lurid event of early Beat Generation lore, Lucien Carr’s fatal stabbing of David Kammerer in 1944. Burroughs’ library is given a supporting role in the ensuring courtroom drama, its corruptive powers sufficient to have become an accessory to murder: Barry Miles reports, “it was Bill’s copy of WB Yeats’ A Vision that Lucien had with him in court.”[19]
The most lasting power of Burroughs’ library can therefore be traced not so much in terms of literary influence, but in the symbolism of Ginsberg and Kerouac’s zest for knowledge. Amidst the biographical discrepancies, the inconsistencies and hyperbole, this symbolic value remains potent, with accounts of Burroughs’ reading habits recreating the enticing embodiment of ‘the unknown’ experienced by Ginsberg and Kerouac, whilst marking a path followed by successive generations who have discovered Howl and On the Road and retraced their steps to the works of Rimbaud, Blake, et al. As a tribute to the transformative power of literature, the myth of Burroughs’ library stands intact, maintaining the allure felt by a pair of young Americans at the start of their literary journey.
Bibliography
Burroughs, William S., The Cat Inside (New York: Penguin, 2002)
―, The Letters of William S. Burroughs 1945 to 1959, ed. Oliver Harris (London: Picador, 1994)
Charters, Ann, Kerouac: A Biography (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1994)
Christy, Jim, The Long Slow Death of Jack Kerouac (Ontario: ECW Press, 1998)
Gifford, Barry, and Lee, Lawrence, eds., Jack’s Book: An Oral Biography of Jack Kerouac (London: Penguin, 1979)
Ginsberg, Allen, The Book of Martyrdom and Artifice: First Journals and Poems 1937-1952, eds., Juanita Lieberman-Plimpton and Bill Morgan (New York: Da Capo Press, 2006)
―, Composed on the Tongue: Literary Conversations, 1967-1977, ed. Donald Allen (San Francisco: Grey Fox Press, 2001)
Harris, Oliver, William Burroughs and the Secret of Fascination (Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 2003)
Kerouac, Jack, On the Road: The Original Scroll, ed. Howard Cunnell (London: Penguin, 2008)
―, Selected Letters 1940-1956, ed. Ann Charters (New York: Viking, 1995)
―, Vanity of Duluoz: An Adventurous Education, 1935-46 (London: Andre Deutsch, 1969)
Lotringer, Sylvѐre, ed., Burroughs Live: The Collected Interviews of William S. Burroughs 1960-1997 (Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2001)
Miles, Barry, Jack Kerouac: King of the Beats. A Portrait (London: Virgin, 1999)
Morgan, Ted, Literary Outlaw: The Life and Times of William S. Burroughs (London: Pimlico, 2002)
Nicosia, Gerald, Memory Babe: A Critical Biography of Jack Kerouac (London: Viking, 1985)
Tytell, John, Naked Angels: Kerouac, Ginsberg, Burroughs (New York: Grove Press, 1976)
[1] Allen Ginsberg, Composed on the Tongue: Literary Conversations, 1967-1977, ed. Donald Allen (San Francisco: Grey Fox Press, 2001), p. 81.
[2] Jack Kerouac, On the Road: The Original Scroll, ed. Howard Cunnell (London: Penguin, 2008), p. 244.
[3] Ted Morgan, Literary Outlaw (London: Pimlico, 2002), p. 112.
[4] John Tytell, Naked Angels: Kerouac, Ginsberg, Burroughs (New York: Grove Press, 1976), p. 39.
[5] William S. Burroughs, The Letters of William S. Burroughs 1945 to 1959, ed. Oliver Harris (London: Picador, 1994), p. 51.
[6] Ginsberg, Composed on the Tongue, p. 82.
[7] Kerouac, Vanity of Duluoz: An Adventurous Education, 1935-46 (London: Andre Deutsch, 1969), p. 211.
[8] Gerald Nicosia, Memory Babe: A Critical Biography of Jack Kerouac (London: Viking, 1985), p. 87.
[9] Kerouac, Selected Letters 1940-1956, ed. Ann Charters (New York: Viking, 1995), pp. 65-70.
[10] ibid., p. 65.
[11] Oliver Harris, William Burroughs and the Secret of Fascination (Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 2003), p. 3.
[12] Ann Charters, Kerouac: A Biography (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1994), p. 56.
[13] Kerouac, On the Road, p. 245.
[14] Ginsberg, The Book of Martyrdom and Artifice: First Journals and Poems 1937-1952, eds. Juanita Lieberman-Plimpton and Bill Morgan (Cambridge, MA: Da Capo Press, 2006), pp. 78-79.
[15] Burroughs, The Cat Inside (New York: Penguin, 2002), p. 67. Sylvѐre Lotringer, Burroughs Live (Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2001), p. 498.
[16] Barry Gifford and Lawrence Lee, eds., Jack’s Book: An Oral Biography of Jack Kerouac (London: Penguin, 1979), p. 36.
[17] Ginsberg, Composed on the Tongue, p. 82.
[18] Jim Christy, The Long Slow Death of Jack Kerouac (Ontario: ECW Press, 1998), p. 91.
[19] Barry Miles, Jack Kerouac: King of the Beats (London: Virgin, 1999), p. 83.
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Posts about William S. Burroughs written by Les Chappell
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The Lesser of Two Equals
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https://thelesseroftwoequals.wordpress.com/tag/william-s-burroughs/
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“Now I, William Seward, will unlock my word hoard… Gentle Reader, the Word will leap on you with leopard man iron claws, it will cut off fingers and toes like an opportunistic land crab, it will hang you and catch your jissom like a scrutable dog, it will coil round your thighs like a bushmaster and inject a shot glass of rancid ectoplasm…” – Naked Lunch
The word hoard has unlocked again, as Wired announced this week that a long-unpublished graphic novel by William S. Burroughs, “Ah Pook Is Here,” will be published in the summer of 2011 by Fantagraphics. The graphic novel, a collaboration between Burroughs and artist Malcolm McNeill, was originally created in the 1970s as a comic strip for the now defunct English magazine Cyclops and developed as a full book off and on over the decade. Battered around between publishers before being abandoned in 1979, Fanta Graphics will be releasing it in a “spectacularly packaged two-volume, hinged set, along with ‘Observed While Falling,’ McNeill’s memoir documenting his collaboration with one of America’s most iconic authors.”
Per the press release:
“Ah Pook Is Here” is a consideration of time with respect to the differing perceptions of the ancient Maya and that of the current Western mindset. It was Burroughs’ contention that both of these views result in systems of control in which the elite perpetuate its agendas at the expense of the people. They make time for themselves and through increasing measures of Control attempt to prolong the process indefinitely.
John Stanley Hart is the “Ugly American” or “Instrument of Control” – a billionaire newspaper tycoon obsessed with discovering the means for achieving immortality. Based on the formulae contained in rediscovered Mayan books he attempts to create a Media Control Machine using the images of Fear and Death. By increasing Control, however, he devalues time and invokes an implacable enemy: Ah Pook, the Mayan Death God. Young mutant heroes using the same Mayan formulae travel through time bringing biologic plagues from the remote past to destroy Hart and his Judeo/Christian temporal reality.
While this is the first time the work is presented in anything approximating its original conception, “Ah Pook” has been on the radar of Burroughs fans for years. It was published in 1979 in text-only format – now out of print – and chapters were read by Burroughs at his famous live readings, excerpts peppered with wisdom such as “Nobody does more harm than people who feel bad about doing it.” The art itself was resurrected by McNeill only last year – more than 30 years after its original conception – and received showings in Santa Monica and New York City with bits and pieces of Burroughs text.
But the fact that it’s not completely unreleased doesn’t dim my pleasure at the thought of a new William S. Burroughs work seeing the light – and ever since the publication of his Jack Kerouac collaboration “And the Hippos Were Boiled in Their Tanks,” this is one of the last bits of his archive to be released. Based on the snippets and imagery, the book will likely be in the same vein as the “Cities of the Red Night” trilogy – indeed, Ah Pook himself is invoked in the dedication alongside Hassan-i-Sabbah and John Stanley Hart factors into the trilogy. But it seems the new release will really be what propels him to Benway-level depravity, if this line from an old reading is any indication:
“He found himself somewhat stonily received, and turning from the bar with his mug of beer to face the room he maladroitly snagged an old peasant in the scrotum with his fishing plug. He whipped out a switchblade with a poorly timed attempt at easy joviality, ‘Well, I guess we’ll just have to cut the whole thing off, eheh?’ Turning away, he made an ineffectual gesture at a New Yorker cartoon with his knife, inadvertently blinding the proprietor’s infant son. Seeing that all his friendly overtures had fallen admittedly flat, he saw fit to withdraw as unobtrusively and expeditiously as possible.”
Fittingly for a book concerned with a South American god of death, the novel appears to be taking the format of the Aztec and Mayan codices, conceived not as a straightforward narrative but “120 continuous pages that would ‘fold out’… a single painting in which text and images were combined in whatever form seemed appropriate to the narrative.” The existing artwork certainly gives the feeling of vastness such codices need to have (check out the “Codex Espangliensis” for a contemporary example) and the apocalyptic images are grimly surreal and evocative in a way that will pair well with the tone of Burroughs’ later writings.
I’ve talked before about how excited I get when some lost work by a well-known author is published, and that excitement is amplified tenfold when it’s by an author who sits at the top of my favored writers pantheon. “Ah Pook Is Here” has easily become one of the most anticipated releases of 2011.
Extra Credit:
To view samples of the original artwork, visit The Lost Art of Ah Pook for a gallery of the original show prepared by McNeill. And, if you’ve got a few hundred to spare, why not pick up a limited edition print?
William S. Burroughs, in looking back on his life, would often comment that the defining moment in his career was the tragic moment when he shot his wife Joan Vollmer in the head during a drunken game of William Tell. Being one of the rare times that his master aim failed him, as well as the impetus that sent him into Tangiers and to the realizations that led to “Naked Lunch” and the Nova Trilogy, saw it as a telepathic event. As he said in the introduction to “Queer,” “The death of Joan brought me into contact with the invader, the Ugly Spirit, and maneuvered me into a lifelong struggle, in which I had no choice except to write my way out.”
But if the death maneuvered him into a lifelong struggle, it also had vicious repercussions on the child he had with Joan, a son who bore his name. William S. Burroughs Jr. (known as Billy to friends and family) was four years old at the time, and the shooting not only drove him away from his father but also inflicted the same psychic aftershock of drug use and violent thoughts. He too sought to use writing as a way to escape the Ugly Spirit, with the autobiographical novels 1971’s “Speed” and 1973’s “Kentucky Ham” putting his addictions down on paper. Like his father, he too could write with uncommon skill – but unlike his father, he couldn’t write himself out of it.
David Ohle’s biography of Burroughs Jr. was titled “Cursed From Birth,” and looking at his roots it comes across as darkly appropriate. Joan used benzedrine constantly while pregnant and Billy was born addicted, and Burroughs was at the time going through a series of opium habits that would later fuel his book “Junky.” Shuttled from Texas to Mexico as a child he was eventually sent to live with his grandparents in St. Louis after his mother’s death, having little contact with his father and stifled in suburbia. Predictably, he acted out, skipping school and experimenting with drugs on random road trips.
Burroughs Jr.’s first novel “Speed” follows the most extensive of these trips with a look into the “speed freak” culture of 1960s New York City. Heading into the city with friends, Burroughs Jr. found himself exposed on a constant basis to methamphetamines and booze, seeking a fix and dodging the police cracking down on his friends. His devil-may-care nature leads him to try whatever he can get his hands on, but it also means he is constantly fighting off the vicious paranoia and physical breakdown of drug use to the point where his mind seems ready to break.
The original works of the Beat Generation seemed to portray their world as a sort of setting free of real danger, where there was always a bar willing to seat you or a way to scrape together drug money, but Burroughs Jr. isn’t going to have any of that. This isn’t the mad bar-hoppings of Jack Kerouac or Jan Kerouac’s free-flowing Southwest parties, these are flea-ridden flophouses and darkened streets at New York’s most dangerous hours. More than once he winds up in jail, and it’s regularly implied that without the generosity of his father’s friend Allen Ginsberg he would have been left there to rot.
Burroughs Jr.’s voice has a lot in common with his father’s, ranging from the sardonic off-the-cuff remarks (“He and Vinnie, another charmer, poured acid on the kid’s legs and he never walked again. But you can never tell, medical science is making great strides these days”) to the frightening visions that strike out in drug sickness (“The skyscrapers in the mist writhed like monster cobras, of course”). But unlike Burroughs the elder, whose autobiographical efforts come across as detached – owing to the anthropological view he took of his subject – Burroughs Jr. never stops being native, and his narrative reflects the rapid degenerating thought process that amphetamines wreak on the mind.
In many ways, “Speed” is reminiscent less of Burroughs the elder’s efforts and more of Anthony Burgess’ “A Clockwork Orange,” and its young narrator Alex DeLarge. Like “Clockwork Orange” the sentences have a cynical lilt and rarely seem to pause, mired in more reaction than reflection, as if the mix of youth and stimulants won’t permit the narrator to take any more time. Burroughs Jr. seems aware of this but seems either afraid or unable to stop, observing at one point “I’d been running in overdrive for so long that I was leery of really stopping to take notice of myself.” It’s a struggle that seems much more real than the original Beats, free of mystique and overwhelming visions.
While “Speed” evokes comparisons to Burgess and “A Clockwork Orange,” Burroughs Jr.’s second novel is more reminiscent of Ken Kesey and “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.” In this installment, his lifestyle of drug abuse has finally caught up with him and he has been arrested, forced to a rehabilitation facility in Kentucky and the almost anarchic system for dealing with him and legions of addicts. After being forced to exist in the hospital setting, he sets out for Alaska as part of a work release program, a cold and unflinching wilderness on par with “Speed’s” slums in terms of comfort.
Cut off from the addicts and city life of his first work, Burroughs Jr. goes deeper into himself, and his work takes on more of a novelistic observatory quality. He presents the inmates of the asylum – many half-crazy or locked up for years – as a cast of characters, and paints their exploits as such: starting a newspaper, eying the female visitors, scheming for an early release. Later in the book when sent to Alaska, his work takes on a journal format, presenting events in order and often sliding into stream-of-consciousness as if it was lifted from the pages.
“Kentucky Ham” also brings in Burroughs Jr.’s father as a cast member – flying in from London to assist with the trial, nursing his own junk habit and seeing his son for the first time in years. Showing him in Florida and memories of visiting him in Tangier, Burroughs Sr. (usually referred to as “Bill” or “the Old Man”) comes across as distant, spending less time looking after his son and more staring at the sunset or an orgone box for hours before dashing back to the typewriter to “transcribe” his Word Hoard. Jan Kerouac’s novels were peppered with evidence of how she longed to connect with her father, but Burroughs Jr. has few of these feelings, seemingly assuming such a connection would never happen.
Where he does share more similarity with his father is in an openness of thought, which takes over in the final chapter as Burroughs Jr. goes into an impassioned plea for the legalization of drugs. Waxing on the harmless nature of most stoned addicts, the culture of distrust and the reality of how prevalent heroin was at the time, he has the veteran’s voice seen at the end of “Junky.” Our narrator has come through the storm of drug use and seen the reality of its treatment, and as such sees the world in a different light.
Burroughs Jr. did manage to make his way out of the street and drug world he chronicled, but unfortunately his addictive nature wouldn’t allow him to move to full-time professional writer status. Replacing drugs with alcohol he shredded his liver, surviving only due to a series of coincidences that put a gifted doctor and donor liver in his hospital. He worked on a third novel about the experience, “Prakriti Junction,” but never finished it as he kept drinking and stopped taking his anti-rejection meds. He eventually died in 1981 in Florida at the age of 33, passed out in a ditch and estranged from all his loved ones.
Perhaps Burroughs Jr. was never able to be saved, caught in the mood he had seen on his father’s face after Joan’s shooting: “Over the yearning and pain that he felt for me I felt something heavier. Like lead, but molten and smelling of gunpowder and burnt copper. The Burroughs Curse.” That curse may have claimed his life, but it gave him the drive to send back reports from the trenches – works that earned their place in the best of drug memoirs, and worthy heirs of the Beat energy.
(Editor’s note: As always, spoilers may abound for both versions here. Also, I have decided to stop scoring the adaptations as some versions do not seem to lend themselves to a numerical score. Instead, I shall simply discuss how each can be taken and related, mixing it with some film review commentary.)
While adapting books to film is usually a mutually beneficial process for both parties – studios for cashing in on a preexisting audience, publishers for being able to sell thousands of mass market copies with posters as covers – there are several instances where the subject matter doesn’t seem to lend itself to the film. One of the most high-profile titles was Alan Moore’s “Watchmen,” a project which lingered in development hell for years and swapped through a score of directors before Zack Synder’s better-than-expected version earlier this year.
But if “Watchmen’s” story was seen as too intricate to be adapted to film, William S. Burroughs’ “Naked Lunch” was on the other end of the spectrum as too chaotic. While a seminal work that helped shatter literary censorship laws in America and inspired hundreds of writers and musicians, the book is a fragmented work purposely designed to be read in any order “like an innaresting sex arrangement.” There might be a narrative in there, but what the narrative is is open for debate, buried in metaphors and purposely provocative routines.
Fittingly, the director who eventually brought the project to the screen was one whose mindset came the closest to Burroughs’ reality: David Cronenberg. In films such as “Shivers” and “The Fly” Cronenberg demonstrates a proven interest in the concepts of infection and transformation, using science fiction as a tool to get deeper into the human psyche – all concepts that Burroughs used liberally in his writing. Perhaps as a result of this common wavelength, he does not even try to capture the original ‘story,’ but creates something that feels both different and exactly what it needs to be.
At first glance, the plot seems bizarre but essentially straightforward compared to the original text. William Lee, a New York exterminator with a history of drug abuse, falls back on bad habits when he becomes addicted to his job’s yellow roach powder. After accidentally shooting his wife in the head while under the influence, he flees to the North African port of Interzone at the behest of a mysterious organization. Assigned to write a report on his wife’s death, he is caught up in a swath of circumstances including black centipede meat, a homicidal doctor, a coven of witches and entopomorphic typewriters.
While this disjointed construction includes little of the original book, this choice is actually doing something wonderfully different in adapations: being faithful to the author before the text. Burroughs was a pioneer in the “cut-up” technique, chopping written text, speeches and recordings up and splicing them back together. His theory was that in doing so, the true meaning of the text would expose itself to the reader, even suggesting it could serve as a form of divination: “When you cut into the past, the future leaks out.”
And in essence, what Cronenberg has done is played cut-up with the Burroughs canon. “Naked Lunch” uses parts of the original book, with the main character William Lee (Burroughs’ doppelganger and pen name) speaking the “Talking Asshole” routine verbatim and confronting the narcotics dicks Hauser and O’Brien. Opening scenes of the book are copied straight from Burroughs’ short story “Exterminator!,” right down to a discussion of roach poisons and elderly Jewish owner (“You vant I should spit right in your face?! You vant?”), theories on telepathy come from “Junky” and a discussion on an old queen named Bobo from “Queer.” And of course, the climactic shooting is based on the most famous story of Burroughs’ life, where he shot his wife Joan Vollmer in Mexico playing William Tell.
But simply presenting the stories would not be enough to capture the spirit of Burroughs’ work, and Cronenberg achieves this with truly ideal casting. Peter Weller nails the Lee character with perfect accuracy, evoking Burroughs’ appearance and drawling speech patterns in an author-actor translation matched only by Johnny Depp in “Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas.” Judy Davis and Ian Holm are uncanny surrogates for their real-life counterparts (Joan Vollmer and Peter Bowles respectively), Joseph Scorsiani has the fresh-faced exotic look of the Interzone boys Lee lusts for and Roy Scheider has the quiet sociopathy one would expect from the legendary Dr. Benway.
And like in “Naked Lunch” the book, it’s never quite clear who or where these characters are. Davis plays a dual role as Lee’s wife and later Interzone lover, Scheider literally lives inside the skin of a woman and typewriters speak in the voices of exterminators. Both works leave the Lee character unsure what is real or simply the hallucinations of drug withdrawal, which in turn leaves the audience trying to interpret it for some deeper meaning. While the images frequently turn obscene or nauseating, they never come across as gratuitous – a minefield Burroughs expertly navigated for years.
As an adaptation of the book, “Naked Lunch” could never be mistaken for an exact translation, but after reading the book few people would want it to be. The themes are what matter, themes of addiction, control, conspiracy and excess – seeing, as Burroughs would put it, what is “on the end of every fork.” What is on the end of Cronenberg’s fork is a wholly different recipe than what Burroughs put together, but it uses the same ingredients and leaves the same sharp uneasy taste in your mouth.
And the Hippos Were Boiled in their Tanks: A Novel
By Jack Kerouac and William S. Burroughs
Published November 1, 2008
Grove Press
224 pp.
ISBN 0-802-11876-3
Reviewed June 8, 2009
The unpublished, undiscovered work will forever hold a special place in the hearts of literary fans: the idea that in some forgotten wooden chest, some rusted-shut safe deposit box or broken desk drawer sits a masterpiece from their favorite author. It’s this spirit that drives periodic efforts to track down the rumored complete manuscript of Truman Capote’s “Answered Prayers” and what keeps scholars gainfully employed in going through the estates of deceased authors to see what they can turn up.
“And The Hippos Were Boiled In Their Tanks” was until recently one of these mysterious works, a collaboration between Jack Kerouac and William S. Burroughs before the two secured their roles as the respective patron saints of vagabonds and drug addicts. Rejected by publishers at the time, yet long discussed amongst Beat scholars and fans, the original manuscript remained in storage and has now only seen publication after both writers are dead. It’s a historical curiosity, and one that provides an interesting look into how these two writers began their craft.
Like a majority of Burroughs and Kerouac’s work, “And the Hippos” is based on a true story, one of the darker moments in the Beat Generation’s history. In 1944 Lucien Carr, a Columbia student responsible for introducing Burroughs, Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg to each other, murdered an older man named David Kammerer. Kammerer, a childhood friend of Burroughs, had been pursuing Carr sexually for years, growing more possessive and eventually pushing Carr to fatally stab him in self-defense. While he only served two years it was a sobering moment for the nascent Beats: both Burroughs and Kerouac were arrested as material witnesses and Burroughs’ opium habit picked up shortly afterwards.
The collaboration between Burroughs and Kerouac takes the form of each man writing alternating first-person chapters sharing their side of the story, under the respective pseudonyms of bartender Will Dennison and merchant seaman Mike Ryko. Burroughs’ chapters focus chiefly on Ramsey Allen (Kammerer’s doppleganger) and his mad attraction to Philip Tourian (Carr), while Kerouac’s chapters feature Ryko and Tourian wandering New York trying to get money and dreaming of sailing to France. The co-authorship never gets in the way of readability, and also allows for some comparison of style: Kerouac is all about energy and flow, while Burroughs takes a dry careful look at events.
And that comparison is one of the main reasons to view “And The Hippos.” As the first book written by either of the two men, it is full of clues to their developing voices. Kerouac’s chapters are fast-paced, filled with tales of drinking and women and constantly moving from one location to another. Even then he was in love with the run-on sentence, pouring out all the details he can get for fear he’ll miss an experience. His last line (“I walked toward Columbus Circle, where two big trucks went by that made me want to travel far,”) is borderline prophetic, foreshadowing the wanderlust of “On the Road.”
Burroughs, by contrast, is less a player in the story than an observer, with Dennison chiefly in his apartment or loaning money for Ryko and Tourian to keep their energy going. He looks on the world with distrust, seeing hostile arguments all over America and idly finding narratives during morphine experimentation – a thought process that matured easily into “Junky.” We even get a glimpse of his later surrealist word salad in the title, a phrase he fixated on after overhearing it during a news broadcast on a circus fire and could easily be a “Naked Lunch” routine.
But while the book does offer glimpses of what Kerouac and Burroughs would achieve, it doesn’t hold up as well when authorship is taken out of consideration. At its core, the book is simply a reiteration of a few days that happened to have a dramatic climax, and a climax neither of the narrators were present for. There’s no sense that something important is being looked at, something new is being said or that a destination is being reached – it’s just a reiteration of an event, exaggerated for effect and over when it’s over. In his later years Burroughs himself was dismissive of the book as “not a distinguished work,” and at several points it’s hard not to agree with the many publishers who originally turned it down.
Of course, that is a factor that often comes into play with unpublished works: the mystery is more interesting than the final discovery. “And the Hippos” certainly has a role in the Beat Generation canon and it’s a historical curiosity to its fans, but there are a wide variety of titles that newcomers would be better served to read first (“Junky” and “On the Road” are the most relevant). It’s a prototype work, not to be taken as a polished work but an example of how it all began.
(Editor’s note: After a reread I decided this book could use a more professional review, so it’s now been completely retooled from an earlier post. I don’t usually do this, but I like this book enough I wanted the review to measure up.)
Novel with Cocaine
By M. Ageyev
Published 1934, reprinted October 1998
Northwestern University Press
204 pp.
ISBN 0-810-11709-6
Reviewed May 13, 200
“Novel with Cocaine” (also translated as “Cocaine Romance”) is a book that is very much a historical curiosity. It is the only novel from mysterious author M. Ageyev, first published in the early 1930s in Paris and only rediscovered by chance 50 years later in a second-hand bookstore. Despite its obscure nature, it enjoys several distinctions: it was a favorite of John Updike, an influence on William S. Burroughs and it was even alleged to be the work of Vladimir Nabokov writing under a pen name (a notion Nabokov’s son has dismissed).
The accolades and comparisons are varied, but the novel justifies all of them. “Cocaine” is a startlingly well-done book, not overly long or convoluted in the manner of more well-known Russian novels, and also not as surreal and off-putting as some drug memoirs. After reading, it’s actually surprising that the book has not seen wider publication, as it fits easily into both of the previous canons with little difficulty holding its own.
“Cocaine” is the coming-of-age story of Vadim Maslennikov, a young man growing up in World War I Russia. As the war wages on and hints of what would become the Russian Revolution stir in the country, Vadim is fixated only on his personal development and the easiest way for him to reach what he sees as his rightful place in the world. Reflecting the title’s dual meaning, he seeks fulfillment in a serious relationship and, when his darker side drives her away, runs to the electric power of cocaine.
Vadim is an unlikable character from the start, a self-centered adolescent reminiscent of Alec from “A Clockwork Orange.” The first half of the book is filled with his own indulgences, desperate attempts to polish his image and maintain his sense of superiority. He shoves his impoverished mother away in public, looks for casual sex while recovering from syphilis and takes more pride in insulting classmates rather than speaking to them. Ageyev makes it impossible to like Vadim but never impossible to pay attention to him, exposing the insecurities and self-loathing beneath his preening.
Vadim’s faults are regularly on display, but they never ruin the novel chiefly because the quality of the writing outweighs them. From an almost ornamental description of Russia in winter to the almost foppish nature of Vadim’s cohorts, Ageyev displays himself as a craftsman in constructing his sentences. The novel’s descriptive passages are evocative without being overblown, and many of the passages border on brilliant (a particular favorite is Vadim’s trolling for sex, where “A woman who smiled at a look like mine could only be a virgin or a prostitute”). We also see a picture of the revolutionary Russian mindset, its educational and political reforms shown in the vicious intellectual character of Vadim’s classmate Burkewitz.
The chief place where the writing skill comes into play though is in the book’s titular narcotic, as one melancholy evening Vadim comes into contact with drugs and loses his “nasal virginity.” At this point, the book turns from a story of growing up to a drug-centric tale, and as such gains a new series of responsibilities. Whether the topic is heroin or mescaline or LSD or some cocktail of the above, an drug author needs to fill the same role as a pusher: gradually reel them in by showing the benefits of the drug, and then once they get comfortable let the horror of withdrawal sink in.
While it’s impossible to know just how much of “Novel with Cocaine” is based on the truth, Ageyev’s descriptions of the effects and aftereffects of cocaine are so frighteningly vivid it’s hard to imagine he wasn’t at least a casual user. Vadim’s first night captures the awkwardness of learning the ritual, the terrifying icy feeling of the first snort quickly turning into joy, the manic urges and periods of catatonia and fixation on rituals such as smoking cigarettes. It’s taut writing that pulls the reader into a nightmarish state, and is easily the book’s best section.
As Vadim falls into the inevitable madness of excessive cocaine use, Ageyev uses him to philosophize in much the same way he used Burkewitz earlier in the book to explore the Russian mindset. He speculates on the nature of pleasure and how it is tied to external elements, using it as a rationale for his continued drug use – a rationale that evaporates as soon as the drug wears off, leading him to delirious reflections on mankind’s bestial nature. It’s a starkly intellectual way to depict the highs and lows Vadim goes through, though it does nothing to make a reader feel sorry for him as the symptoms get worse.
It may be hard to pity Vadim as he is destroyed by faults entirely his own, but it is even harder to quit following the story to the bitter end. At varying turns frightening, evocative, romantic and deplorable, “Novel With Cocaine” is a well-constructed novel that will interest readers of various genres. While the identity of Ageyev may forever be a mystery, “Cocaine” keeps his name alive – as well as the hope that in some Paris attic exists a chest of his unpublished works.
Interzone
By William S. Burroughs
Published February 1, 1990
Penguin Books
224 pp.
ISBN 0-140-09451-2
Reviewed April 16, 2009
It’s a writer’s curse that out of everything they write and devise and concoct, they will be lucky if even a quarter of it sees publication. Stories and essays can be rejected by dozens of publishers before they finally give up trying, a first novel sits in a desk drawer for years, and projects will be raised and rejected before something finally sees acceptance. Past that, there are first and second and third drafts, letters to friends floating ideas, and countless notebooks and scraps of paper filled with notes that are sometimes not even legible to the writer.
Every so often though, an author’s thoughts and drafts are the audience for a complete revolution of style, finding something new and experimenting with it in a variety of curious ways. Few writers have undergone such a revolution as William S. Burroughs, who went from drug novelist to visionary in only a few years, and whose transitional work has been collected in “Interzone.” Essentially the bridge between “Junky” and “Naked Lunch,” “Interzone” is a truly energetic piece of work that shows an evolution (or possibly mutation) of thought.
Fittingly for an author who pioneered the “cut-up” technique, “Interzone” is more a loose scrapbook than a proper collection, consisting of journals and stories Burroughs wrote from 1954 to 1956. At this time, he was living in Tangier, indulging his opium addiction and trying to sell short stories through his friend Allen Ginsberg. As time went on he began to go deeper into his subconscious, using his writing to fracture and rebuild the world in his own surreal image.
What makes “Interzone” such a fascinating part of the Burroughs canon is it reflects all sides of his brilliant persona. His first books “Junky” and “Queer” were straightforward, almost deadpan novels that took a historical view to drugs and homosexuality in 1940s New York; while “Naked Lunch” and successive novels ripped apart those topics into sci-fi depravity. “Interzone” is a work that maps the process of coming to that viewpoint, as well as seeing the hints of literary theory and spiritualism that marked much of his later works.
Fans of Burroughs’ more conventional style will be rewarded by the early short stories and articles, pitched to Ginsberg in the hope he could sell them. “The Finger” has an almost Kafkaesque humor to it, relating a real-life anecdote wherein he cuts off a finger joint to impress a girl and finds himself committed as a result. “International Zone,” written as a magazine feature on Tangier’s strange situation (split up between four countries) has “Junky’s” anthropological eye for a place, while “In the Café Central” captures the cast which populates it.
Use of opiates and the withdrawal symptoms began to alter Burroughs’ viewpoint, and the style change gradually makes itself clear in the journals and later stories – a move that builds a terrific energy as the book progresses. Characters begin to take on a more inhuman angle, resembling insects and growing “auxiliary assholes” in their foreheads (“Spare Ass Annie”). The borders between dreams and reality gradually break down, with “The City” gradually turning into a living thing and paranoia an everyday occurrence. Burroughs himself acknowledges the shift, speaking of an abstract novel constructed as a mosaic, a work that has a life of its own, a guide for the future.
Even with this gradual evolution, the tonal shift was so extreme that a breakthrough effort was needed, and “Interzone” contains this in the section “WORD.” Essentially a rough draft of “Naked Lunch,” the section is a rapid profane stream-of-consciousness effort mixing all the images of sex, drugs and control that would come to dominate his later work. This section isn’t for the faint of heart – or for anyone who thought “Naked Lunch” was too nonsensical or garbled to enjoy – but it continues the build of energy the journals started and is fascinating from an aesthetic standpoint, seeing the castoff embryonic thoughts that led him to reach his conclusions.
“Interzone” is chiefly a historical curiosity and a book for Burroughs devotees who want to track their hero’s evolution, but it’s also a useful primer for anyone who wants to experience his thought process in smaller doses. It’s a book that is at varying times dryly humorous, intentionally shocking and borderline illegible, but never able to hide the crackling energy of the voice that was finding itself.
Finite Jest
A Eulogy for David Foster Wallace
“Alas, poor Yorick! I knew him, Horatio: a fellow of infinite jest, of most excellent fancy: he hath borne me on his back a thousand times; and now, how abhorred in my imagination it is!”
– “Hamlet,” Shakespeare, Act V, Scene 1
“You’ll worry less about what people think about you when you realize how seldom they do.” – “Infinite Jest”
David Foster Wallace was the smartest fiction writer I have ever read – and I don’t make that claim lightly. A philosophy major with a focus on logic and mathematics, he moved on to become a journalist, essayist and fiction writer, most well-known for his magnum opus “Infinite Jest” and a style of writing that was both scientific and ironic. In a review of his short story collection “Brief Interviews with Hideous Men” I wrote last year, I made the claim that Norman Mailer’s old quote about William S. Burroughs – “The only American novelist living today who may conceivably be possessed by genius” – was now to be applied to Wallace.
And now, thanks to the slap-in-the-face of this weekend, I can no longer make that claim. Wallace has now given our generation a literary equivalent to Elliot Smith – someone still in the prime of life and talent, cutting their lives short for reasons concocted in minds that operate at least three levels above the normal person.
I’m not going to talk about death or motives or any of that here, as it’s not my job and I don’t want to rub any wounds raw. What I do want to do is take a moment to acknowledge a talent and voice whose absence leaves us much poorer.
As a qualifier, I have to admit that I am not as much of an expert on Wallace as some of my close friends – many of whom have repeatedly hammered to me that “Infinite Jest” is a life-changing experience. I have started reading it on more than one interval and gotten to about 400 pages in, but the fact that I have so many other books to read keeps me from tackling deep into it (that and reasons I’ll get to later on). I’ve read “Brief Interviews” and have one or two of his essay collections in my cue, but compared to other authors he’s not in my roster of being able to talk about at will.
It doesn’t mean I don’t have any experience to talk about him though. For one thing, I loved “Brief Interviews.” I have a fairly low opinion of short stories – partly because I don’t seem to have the ability to write any of my own, but also because it seems like they all have the same voice and deal with the same angst-ridden topics of family, age, love and illness. And then all of a sudden, “Brief Interviews” proceeds to shred up the genre with some of the most surreal writing and clear intellect I’ve ever seen, dealing with some of the same topics but using word combinations I’d never seen before. Even though the review is a year old almost, all conclusions still hold true today.
“Infinite Jest” – at least what I got through – was easily one of the most innovative things I’d ever seen, and one that made me place Wallace as an heir to Kurt Vonnegut’s black satire. The Incandenza clan, a family that makes the Finches or the Sedarises look conventional, ruling over a tennis academy where drug use is rampant and (conveniently) a rehab center is located across the street. Years are now subsidized by corporations, a wheelchair separatist movement is forming in Canada, and a robber traumatizes his victims by sticking their toothbrushes up his ass and sending them photos of it three months later. (One of my favorite lines comes up when one such victim vows revenges, for his wife “who needed Valium just to floss.”) There’s so much going on and it’s all so inventive that I frankly have a hard time keeping it all straight.
That does lead to one or two complaints with his style – Wallace’s sheer intelligence also tends to work against him at some points, sometimes making me feel as if I’m not smart enough to read his work. Added to that, I thought the footnotes of “Infinite Jest” were one of the more frustrating devices used in a book – hilarious though they were – because you can’t expect someone to read a part of a 1,100-page book, skip forward to the last 150 pages to find the relevant footnote and then cut back hundreds of pages to pick up exactly where you left off. He told Charlie Rose in 1997 that this was designed to reflect an altered view of reality, but I just couldn’t get past it for that many pages. (And this is coming from someone who reads “Naked Lunch” start to finish.)
But as I’ve pointed out in my Chuck Palahniuk review, an author’s style is something that has to be viewed and evaluated regardless of personal taste, and Wallace’s style deserved respect and praise. It’s a blend of philosophy and humor, written by someone who has a very particular view of how our culture and media function.
I have yet to read any of his journalism or nonfiction (the last time I randomly open ed one of his essay collections it read like a philosophy textbook) but with this sad advent I expect that his content will be reprinted and made more readily accessible to the masses. I mean, look at what Wikipedia alone can cite as his output: coverage of tennis, David Lynch, special-effects, lobster festivals and John McCain. (I can also imagine a David Lynch-directed film using special effects to have a lobster and John McCain in a tennis match, mostly to inject a slide of humor but also because I’d really like to see that.)
So, for the minimum fourth time in my literate life (Hunter S. Thompson, Mailer and Vonnegut being the first three) I’m left with the bitter loss of an author I deeply respected but comforted slightly with the mammoth output they left behind for me to appreciate. Well, appreciate is too strong a word in Mailer’s case, but that rant will have to wait before this tribute reaches the length of a Wallace novel itself. For now, a removal of my fedora and a nod of respect to an author who is one of the most original voices in contemporary literature.
And after that, you’ll need to excuse me, as there’s something I need to do that involves a month of my time, a really sturdy desk and at least two bookmarks.
“Assume for a moment that some of these measures really have helped make our persons and property safer—are they worth it? Where and when was the public debate on whether they’re worth it? Was there no such debate because we’re not capable of having or demanding one? Why not? Have we actually become so selfish and scared that we don’t even want to consider whether some things trump safety? What kind of future does that augur?” – DFW, The Atlantic, Nov. 2007, “The Future of the American Idea”
(Editor’s note: I’m running out of comments to say about my early columns, but as I’ve said about the latest ones this one has a great style to it and I like the tone of voice I fell into. I was also able to reference past columns in a sign I was building up a body of work, and draw on a lot of personal examples which really helps to put a strong face on the column.)
Chappell sees a voice – of the best authors
Originally printed in The Daily Cardinal, April 19, 2006
Recently, in the spirit of shared weirdness and as an alternative to productivity, my friend Pat loaned me a recording of William S. Burroughs’ live readings. The albums, leaping through Burroughs’ heroin-induced library of works like “Naked Lunch” and “Exterminator!” are a stirring cross-section of one of this country’s most original writers.
While I personally find Burroughs so powerful and disjointed I have to take his books slowly—I can’t stomach more than a few stories at a time—I could listen to an entire disc of those recordings without fail. Burroughs has an inimitable voice which is strong and raspy at the same time, a New York accent reeling off drug and sex acts like cynical advice to the youth.
Regular readers of this column may recall I once voiced distaste for digital books—to the tune of “I’m personally happier keeping my library on a shelf than on three CD’s”—but there’s a big difference between audio recordings and performance literature. When an author reads his own work it’s a different animal, a move that elevates the relationship between reader and author.
Turning reading into a performance is one of the oldest concepts in literature. The legendary blind poet Homer got his start traveling around Greece to read stanzas from the “Iliad,” and the Aztec codices—long, illustrated encyclopedias—were stretched out several meters long and read as a group. To these audiences, storytelling was the key factor, and the tone of the reader’s voice made as much difference as the right word choice.
Today, adding a performance angle to a book lets the audience hear what the writer’s thoughts sound like for themselves as opposed to interpreting them silently. Last year I saw Chuck Palahniuk read from his collection of stories “Haunted,” and his tone—starting out measured, rising and falling like a heartbeat in a haunted house—was so captivating I riveted my eyes open in awed surrender.
Granted, the stories had vivid details like fat men boiling alive in sulfur springs and cramming sex dolls with razor blades, but I hold the inflection of his voice made it all the worse to hear.
At least half a dozen audience members walked out on Palahniuk during that reading—a reaction he seemed very proud of and which exemplifies the power of audience reaction. Readings are the best opportunity an author has for critique, as a gushing book jacket quote can be solicited by any publisher—wide-eyed audience members clapping or fighting off vomit are harder to replicate.
In fact, the best writers can take this reaction a step further and use it to cultivate their own image. On the rare occasions when he did public speaking and recorded an audio version of “Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas,” Hunter S. Thompson spoke in Southern tones that were as staccato as his writing, while nonfiction’s Judas James Frey was apparently good enough at his talks he could make anyone believe his story.
Of course, being able to present their work in a public format is by no means a qualifier for success. Bob Dylan used Sean Penn to record his autobiography “Chronicles: Volume 1,” and it doesn’t dent the book’s quality (stepping back was actually a smart move, as Dylan’s ‘voice of a generation’ is lately in bad shape). Good writing will always stand on its own merits, and the written word can still have more impact than the spoken.
Anyone who can cultivate performance, however, will find themselves in one of the most comfortable positions a writer can find: able to interact directly with their work and see how it affects an audience. And, for fun, they can write about bloated warts and leeches and watch the book fans squirm.
(Editor’s note: The result of a burnout during finals season and an idea from a Cigarro and Cerveja comic, I had a lot of fun writing this one. I got to be particularly schizophrenic in my style, splicing together what I was reading at the time and channeling my desire to be William S. Burroughs. I’m a huge proponent of the cut-up technique and how something new can come from mixed sources, and how when you hear something it can be rewritten a different way – often to a much better result. I have a mix of those experiments, some of which will soon be finding a new home on a new blog.
The first paragraph is particularly twisted, taken from my cookbook, cuts from my Journalism 560 and Art History 354 texts, Steven Levitt’s “Freakonomics” and Hunter S. Thompson’s “Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas.” I was giggling like crazy while putting that together.)
Forget everything you know: Enter Les’ genre tornado
Originally published in The Daily Cardinal, April 5, 2006
“With the oven preheated to 350 degrees the New Yorker is run by decayed whores pouring over J. Walter Thompson advertising. Bernal redefines ancient models for advertising Aunt Jemima pancakes as electric snakes in the sky study how drug dealers still live with their moms. You can cook better pasta, and cook with glowing red rocks and metallic shrubs! Zip! Crack! Ow!”
What is this jumble, you may ask? Perhaps the latest mumblings from Scanner Dan between corncob pipes, or a waterlogged textbook with smeared type? In fact, it happens to be the first paragraph of an essay I was working on for art history, only four words of which can even be used in the final draft.
To answer your second question, I was not on drugs when I wrote this statement and I did not use a random word generator online in the hopes of digitally replicating a thousand monkeys on a thousand typewriters. Rather, I fell back on my more dangerous habit—mixing literary genres when reading and hoping I could absorb it all at once.
Being a university student naturally means you’re going to mix genres, as I can’t think of a single course at this school that doesn’t have at least one reading assignment due a week. These reading lists set traps for students that actually want to do well—either they’re crazy like me and consider reading assignments a challenge that needs to be met on time, or they put it off until the end of the year and overload.
Trips to the library for extra reading usually accentuate this problem, as I consider it a challenge to reach the university’s limit of 250 books checked out at one time. I stock up on almost every book I can get my hands on—I actually have so many right now my bedroom door doesn’t close fully—and promise myself that I’ll read them all before I go over six renewals and the librarians shoot me into the lake via trebuchet.
This blend of books results in a reading order that borders schizophrenia—a section of a textbook, a few chapters from one of the books on my reading list, a philosophy essay and then finishing a library book when I wake up from the philosophy essay. Add this to undergraduate insomnia, and the odds are your thought processes will resemble a Jackson Pollock painting by morning.
So why do I keep doing it? I have two reasons: first, an almost masochistic drive to finish as many books as I can and add them to my list of favorites on Facebook. When finishing a book there’s always a sense of personal accomplishment, and if you get all the way through you can pick up on enough little details to make yourself a formidable force in literary discussion.
The second reason is a bit more personal, and requires a passion for the absurd: mixing genres can often lead to more fun than reading books alone. Reading political commentary with cookbooks can make you very passionate about your next meal, while blending graphic novels and economic texts leads you to question exactly how superheroes can afford their headquarters and shiny gadgets on the unpaid intern’s salary of saving the world.
It’s not for everyone, but with a balance of books and sleep deprivation mixing genres can lead to some of the most interesting reading experiences ever. Just try to pace yourself when exams come—professors are not yet ready for a single term paper on MAD Magazine, Watergate and the conquest of the Incas.
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wrong_mix_random_publicationDate_00046
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FactBench
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3
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https://www.thirdmindbooks.com/pages/books/6217/william-s-burroughs/blade-runner-a-movie-two-editions
|
en
|
Blade Runner: A Movie Two Editions
|
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Berkeley, CA, USA;London, England, UK: Blue Wind Press; Tangerine Press, 1979;2022. First Edition; First Edition Thus. Softcovers. “In this trenchant science-fiction screenplay treatment, William S. Burroughs explores the coming apocalyptic medical-care crisis, and the birth of a tenacious and inventive underground holistic medicine. The author of Naked Lunch, Junky, The Third Mind, and
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Third Mind Books
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https://www.thirdmindbooks.com/pages/books/6217/william-s-burroughs/blade-runner-a-movie-two-editions
|
Berkeley, CA, USA;London, England, UK: Blue Wind Press; Tangerine Press, 1979;2022. First Edition; First Edition Thus. Softcovers. “In this trenchant science-fiction screenplay treatment, William S. Burroughs explores the coming apocalyptic medical-care crisis, and the birth of a tenacious and inventive underground holistic medicine. The author of Naked Lunch, Junky, The Third Mind, and Cities of the Red Night treats this topical story in ultimate terms, with the dry, sophisticated humor he has mastered like no other modern writer.” (back cover, 1979 edition) There are often times when one does research, that you come across a story or series of events that’s as perplexing as it is fascinating–that being said when it comes to the subject of this particular curation(s), one must ask themselves: What do the following have in common; “Blade Runner: A Movie”/”Blade Runner (A Movie)”, “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?”, and Ridley Scott’s 1982 sci-fi masterpiece “Bladerunner”. Aside from having cult followings that would blossom into wider acclaim, being made by auteurs in their respective mediums, and having killer titles, that’s about where the similarities end. As most film buffs, or sci-fi nerds (much like your curator) would know, Scott’s 1982 film “Bladerunner” was an adaptation of Philip K. Dick’s “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?” both works being techno-noirs about identity, humanity, the nature of consciousness, and explorative odysseys in sci-fi aesthetics. However, between Dick’s novel and Scott’s film, Alan E. Nourse (1928–1992) released his novel “Blade Runner” in 1974. Nourse is a figure who, it seems, time has largely forgotten. Friend and mentor to the likes of Robert Heinlein, Nourse’s legacy stretches long over the genre of science-fiction. Nourse’s “Blade Runner” depicted a dark and dystopian future in which medical procedures are done in chthonic alleyways and dank basements to avoid sterilization, as a plague breaks out among the underclass (or Proletariat as Marx would put it.) Now that the fog of confusion has cleared (or perhaps gotten even denser) we can finally broach the topic of today's curation. In 1979, WSB was commissioned to write a treatment for a possible film adaptation of Nourse’s novel. This treatment was published as “Bladerunner: A Movie” and more or less followed a similar plot structure and shared the same themes, with slight differences being that the story as Burroughs presented it was set in 1999, and dealt with a right-wing government as the antagonist. Offered here today is a bundle of two editions of this volume: (1) First softcover edition, 1979. Shoaf, Section I, No. 49(b), pg. 48; Schottlaender, A41(A), pg. 15. With a cover illustration by Michael Patrick Cronan of a high-top shoe adorned with a red cross and splattered with blood. (2) First edition thus second printing, 2022. With original introduction as well as an updated introduction by our esteemed colleague Oliver Harris, scholar, writer, co-founder of EBSN (European Beat Studies Network) and overall authority on Burroughs. (1) in very fine condition with light smudging/staining to front and back covers, and minimal wear to fine edges. (2) in very fine condition with only the slightest wear to fine edges. Overall both volumes are substantially mint! Very Fine;Very Fine. [Item #6217]
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wrong_mix_random_publicationDate_00046
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FactBench
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0
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https://www.theverge.com/2017/10/4/16416082/blade-runner-name-backstory-ridley-scott-william-burroughs-alan-nourse
|
en
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How Blade Runner got its name from a dystopian book about health care
|
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2017-10-04T00:00:00
|
We’ve reached the future from Blade Runner — but we’re a decade past The Bladerunner, a book that inspired the name of Ridley Scott’s film. It’s part of a saga that includes William S. Burroughs, eugenics, and actual blades.
|
en
|
/icons/favicon.ico
|
The Verge
|
https://www.theverge.com/2017/10/4/16416082/blade-runner-name-backstory-ridley-scott-william-burroughs-alan-nourse
|
As of November 2019, we’ve officially caught up with Blade Runner’s dystopian future. But we’re already ten years past the very different book that inspired its name.
Most fans of Ridley Scott’s 1982 film are aware that it’s based on a novel by Philip K. Dick, and that the book is not called Blade Runner. If you pick up Dick’s novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, you’ll notice the term never appears in it. Even in the movie, “blade runner” is a slick but random name for mercenaries who hunt replicants. But it isn’t meaningless. Blade Runner’s remarkably weird title has its own backstory, which has nothing to do with androids, bounty hunters, or tears in rain.
Blade Runner owes its name to screenwriter Hampton Fancher, who drafted the film’s first treatments under titles that included Android and Dangerous Days. In the midst of extensive rewrites, Scott caught a reference to a “blade runner,” loved the name, and asked Fancher about it. “I thought, Christ, that’s terrific!” Scott said in a 1982 interview. “Well, the writer looked guilty and said, ‘As a matter of fact, it’s not my phrase.’” It was the title of a book by Beat Generation author William S. Burroughs — “oddly enough,” Scott said, called Blade Runner: A Movie. The team got permission from Burroughs to use the name, and after that, “it just stuck, because it was fun.”
But the real story of Blade Runner starts several years earlier. The original blade runners were actually “bladerunners,” created by Alan Nourse, a physician and science fiction author who often channeled his professional experience into his stories. Published in 1974 and set in the distant future of 2009, The Bladerunner was one of Nourse’s last novels. In it, a confluence of overpopulation, advanced surveillance, and computerized records has ushered in a totalitarian eugenics experiment: anyone who needs medical treatment must submit to sterilization, since the government has concluded that a sick or injured person is by definition unfit to reproduce.
‘The Bladerunner’ actually does involve people running with blades
In The Bladerunner’s future New York, underground doctors have set up a parallel hospital system, threatened by police on one hand and anti-medicine rioters on the other. With medical supply sales strictly controlled, every practitioner needs a good bladerunner: a scrappy youth who fences pills, syringes, and scalpels. It’s a stable system, until an epidemic of deadly meningitis hits the city — and because it starts as a mild flu, nobody’s willing to get treated until it’s too late. It’s up to bladerunners to spread the word and save the city, at the potential cost of their freedom and their lives.
Nourse’s 2009 Manhattan is as gritty as anything in Scott’s 2019 Los Angeles, divided into the bustling Upper City and the dingy, dangerous Lower City. But it’s a distinctly pre-cyberpunk piece of high-concept science fiction, extrapolating a disastrous future out of contemporary anxieties. In 1974, The Population Bomb was still considered an urgent warning. Recent films like ZPG and Soylent Green (based on an earlier novel by Harry Harrison) depicted crowded futures sustained by cannibalism, suicide parlors, and draconian birth-control mandates. And forced sterilization wasn’t science fiction at all — some states still condoned it for the “feeble-minded” or mentally ill.
But some elements of Nourse’s book are timeless. Its premise is “bureaucrats control society through universal healthcare,” which has inevitably been interpreted as an indictment of Obamacare. Characters spend a lot of time evading biometric surveillance and spoofing location trackers to stay ahead of an overbearing police force. Surgeons are being replaced with “pantographic” robots that record and replay operations, and a subplot follows one of the protagonists’ comically elaborate plans to confuse them.
You can look for a critique of surveillance, scientific solutionism, or Obamacare
And above all, The Bladerunner criticizes thoughtless, overly neat scientific solutionism that makes sweeping changes without looking at the effect on individual human lives. Nourse hasn’t written a literary masterwork; the characters aren’t deep or interesting enough, and the conflict wraps up too easily. Still, it’s an engaging story that feels dated yet not quaint, and unlike a lot of little-known mid-century fiction, it’s easily accessible as an ebook.
The Bladerunner didn’t make a huge splash in the science fiction world. But a couple of years after its release, Burroughs — at that point an influential New York counterculture figure — found a copy and was enthralled by the idea of filming it. Burroughs quickly negotiated a rights deal and spent the next four months churning out a treatment, which his assistant James Grauerholz assured Nourse’s agent had “extraordinary possibilities as a movie.”
This praise was somewhat hyperbolic. Burroughs had a serious interest in cinema — he’d filmed an experimental project called The Cut-Ups in the 1960s, alongside exploitation-film distributor Antony Balch. But his forays into Hollywood hadn’t ended well. A script called The Last Words of Dutch Schultz was relegated to a written work, the fate that eventually befell Blade Runner as well. And a quest to film Burroughs’ seminal novel Naked Lunch went nowhere, after failed attempts to work with Mick Jagger and The Gong Show producer Chuck Barris. (David Cronenberg eventually adapted it in 1991.)
As an added challenge with Blade Runner, Burroughs emphasized and expanded the weirdest elements of his source material, ending up with a story that would have required blockbuster-level funding to film. His introduction of the city begins like this:
In the year 2014 New York, world center for underground medicine, is the most glamorous, the most dangerous, the most exotic, vital, far-out city the world has ever seen. The only public transport is the old IRT limping along at five miles an hour through dimly-lit tunnels. The other lines are derelict. Hand-propelled and steam-driven cars transport produce, the stations have been converted into markets. The lower tunnels are flooded, giving rise to an underground Venice. The upper reaches of derelict skyscrapers, without elevator service since the riots, have been taken over by hang-glider and autogyro gangs, mountaineers, and steeple-jacks…
In Burroughs’ vision of New York, two walls cordon off Midtown Manhattan, while skyscrapers are webbed with connective catwalks. Zoo animals roam the parks and waterways. An extended narrative setup introduces, among other things, a paradisiacal colony of welfare-leeching radioactive lepers and a civil war started by Christian extremists.
Filming Burroughs’ vision would have required blockbuster-level funding
Burroughs’ Blade Runner focuses less on medical theory than on the culturally transgressive potential of bladerunners. Health care isn’t rationed just because of a wrong-headed scientific analysis, but because it’s a chance to rid society of anyone who’s black, gay, or otherwise “undesirable.” The final novella — a disjointed series of frequently repeated vignettes with slight differences — has a typically Burroughsian drug-fueled surrealism. Instead of meningitis, the country faces an accelerated cancer pandemic treated with an ancient virus drawn from a crystal skull, which itself causes bizarre mutations and uncontrollable sexual frenzy. His story ends with the protagonist Billy apparently hallucinating that he’s traveled to 1914.
There were occasional moves toward an actual movie, but Burroughs almost immediately acknowledged that it was unlikely the project would ever come to fruition. In a mid-1977 lecture series, he said a screenwriter friend had advised him to scrap the project, warning him that “you’ll have to tear down New York for this film.” Burroughs estimated that it would cost $5 million just to film the riots in the prologue. Art curator Diego Cortez did later option the rights for a movie, but he couldn’t raise enough money to film it. So Blade Runner: A Movie became one of Burroughs’ most obscure written works, with the “movie” descriptor serving mostly to distinguish it from Nourse’s book.
The only true ‘Blade Runner’ adaptation is about militant feminists brainwashing Bill Paxton
Just as Nourse’s work resurfaced in Burroughs’ novella, though, Blade Runner made its way back to the film world in the 1980s — and not just through Ridley Scott. The name went to Scott, but Burroughs’ dystopian future went to a young filmmaker named Tom Huckabee, who used it as the backdrop for an avant-garde project called Taking Tiger Mountain. Huckabee recruited Burroughs himself for the film, having him narrate a voiceover using clips from Blade Runner: A Movie. But Huckabee’s film dropped the underground medicine plot in favor of having Billy, played by a young Bill Paxton, kidnapped by a group of militant feminists, who brainwash him into killing the head of a sex trafficking ring.
Taking Tiger Mountain remained virtually unknown for years. (You can see the trailer for a rare public screening, featuring distinctly not-safe-for-work audio, below.) In 2019, though, it was finally released on home video — alongside, in the true spirit of Blade Runner, a controversial “revisited” director’s cut that substantially changes the film.
Taking Tiger Mountain premiered not long after Blade Runner, and in a 2014 interview, Huckabee even claims to have broken the news about Scott’s final title to Burroughs. “There had been talk about them using the name,” he says, and Grauerholz had agreed on a price of $5,000, “which at the time seemed like a good deal to them.” But according to Huckabee, they didn’t realize it was actually being used until Huckabee — killing time at one of Burroughs’ book signings — stumbled across a magazine’s promotional spread advertising Blade Runner.
While Burroughs doesn’t appear to have been involved in Scott’s Blade Runner, he did have a major influence on the cyberpunk genre — he was a favorite author of William Gibson, who published Neuromancer in 1984. And Fancher himself personally met Burroughs while trying (unsuccessfully) to work with him on a film project. But the real credit for Blade Runner’s memorable title doesn’t go to him. It belongs to Nourse, who coined a phrase so evocative that it transcends any fictional context. Whatever a “blade runner” does, it has to be cool.
So Blade Runner 2049 is the sequel to a movie based on a book but named after a completely unrelated film treatment of yet another book, which was itself published as a third book with the subtitle “A Movie.” In case that’s not confusing enough, the latest reissue of Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? is also titled Blade Runner. And we won’t even get into the three Blade Runner sequel books by K.W. Jeter.
The name was a happy coincidence for Scott. Who knows whether audiences would have been as intrigued by a film called Dangerous Days. But it’s a shame that we’ll probably never see Nourse’s novel, or better yet, Burroughs’ science fiction fever dream, get its own turn on the big screen. Either one would make for a great movie — but you’d need a new name for the bladerunners first.
Update November 1, 2019: Updated on the official date of Blade Runner’s future.
|
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wrong_mix_random_publicationDate_00046
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0
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https://groveatlantic.com/book/naked-lunch/
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en
|
Grove Atlantic
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2017-04-09T18:21:29+00:00
|
“A book of great beauty . . . . Burroughs is the only American novelist living today who may conceivably be possessed by genius.”...
|
en
|
https://groveatlantic.com/core/wp-content/themes/groveatlantic/images/favicon.ico?ver=1713989674
|
Grove Atlantic
|
https://groveatlantic.com/book/naked-lunch/
|
I look into the fruit’s eyes, take in the white teeth, the Florida tan, the two hundred dollar sharkskin suit, the button-down Brooks Brothers shirt and carrying The News as a prop. “Only thing I read is Little Abner.”
A square wants to come on hip . . . Talks about “pod,” and smoke it now and then, and keeps some around to offer the fast Hollywood types.
“Thanks, kid,” I say, “I can see you’re one of our own.” His face lights up like a pinball machine, with stupid, pink affect.
“Grassed on me he did,” I said morosely. (Note: Grass is English thief slang for inform.) I drew closer and laid my dirty junky fingers on his sharkskin sleeve. “And us blood brothers in the same dirty needle. I can tell you in confidence he is due for a hot shot.” (Note: This is a cap of poison junk sold to addict for liquidation purposes. Often given to informers. Usually the hot shot is strychnine since it tastes and looks like junk.)
“Ever see a hot shot hit, kid? I saw the Gimp catch one in Philly. We rigged his room with a one-way whorehouse mirror and charged a sawski to watch it. He never got the needle out of his arm. They don’t if the shot is right. That’s the way they find them, dropper full of clotted blood hanging out of a blue arm. The look in his eyes when it hit–Kid, it was tasty . . .
“Recollect when I am traveling with the Vigilante, best Shake Man in the industry. Out in Chi . . . We is working the fags in Lincoln Park. So one night the Vigilante turns up for work in cowboy boots and a black vest with a hunka tin on it and a lariat slung over his shoulder.
“So I say: “What’s with you? You wig already?”
“He just looks at me and says: “Fill your hand stranger” and hauls out an old rusty six shooter and I take off across Lincoln Park, bullets cutting all around me. And he hangs three fags before the fuzz nail him. I mean the Vigilante earned his moniker . . .
“Ever notice how many expressions carry over from queers to con men? Like “raise,” letting someone know you are in the same line?”
“Get her!”
“Get the Paregoric Kid giving that mark the build up!”
“Eager Beaver wooing him much too fast.”
“The Shoe Store Kid (he got that moniker shaking down fetishists in shoe stores) say: “Give it to a mark with K.Y. and he will come back moaning for more.” And when the Kid spots a mark he begin to breathe heavy. His face swells and his lips turn purple like an Eskimo in heat. Then slow, slow he comes on the mark, feeling for him, palpating him with fingers of rotten ectoplasm.
“The Rube has a sincere little boy look, burns through him like blue neon. That one stepped right off a Saturday Evening Post cover with a string of bullheads, and preserved himself in junk. His marks never beef and the Bunko people are really carrying a needle for the Rube. One day Little Boy Blue starts to slip, and what crawls out would make an ambulance attendant puke. The Rube flips in the end, running through empty automats and subway stations, screaming: “Come back, kid!! Come back!!” and follows his boy right into the East River, down through condoms and orange peels, mosaic of floating newspapers, down into the silent black ooze with gangsters in concrete, and pistols pounded flat to avoid the probing finger of prurient ballistic experts.”
And the fruit is thinking: “What a character!! Wait till I tell the boys in Clark’s about this one.” He’s a character collector, would stand still for Joe Gould’s seagull act. So I put it on him for a sawski and make a meet to sell him some “pod” as he calls it, thinking, “I’ll catnip the jerk.” (Note: Catnip smells like marijuana when it burns. Frequently passed on the incautious or uninstructed.)
“Well,” I said, tapping my arm, “Duty calls. As one judge said to another: “Be just and if you can’t be just, be arbitrary.”
I cut into the Automat and there is Bill Gains huddled in someone else’s overcoat looking like a 1910 banker with paresis, and Old Bart, shabby and inconspicuous, dunking pound cake with his dirty fingers, shiny over the dirt.
I had some uptown customers Bill took care of, and Bart knew a few old relics from hop smoking times, spectral janitors, grey as ashes, phantom porters sweeping out dusty halls with a slow old man’s hand, coughing and spitting in the junk-sick dawn, retired asthmatic fences in theatrical hotels, Pantopon Rose the old madam from Peoria, stoical Chinese waiters never show sickness. Bart sought them out with his old junky walk, patient and cautious and slow, dropped into their bloodless hands a few hours of warmth.
I made the round with him once for kicks. You know how old people lose all shame about eating, and it makes you puke to watch them? Old junkies are the same about junk. They gibber and squeal at the sight of it. The spit hangs off their chin, and their stomach rumbles and all their guts grind in peristalsis while they cook up, dissolving the body’s decent skin, you expect any moment a great blob of protoplasm will flop right out and surround the junk. Really disgust you to see it.
“Well, my boys will be like that one day,” I thought philosophically. “Isn’t life peculiar?”
So back downtown by the Sheridan Square Station in case the dick is lurking in a broom closet.
Like I say it couldn’t last. I knew they were out there powwowing and making their evil fuzz magic, putting dolls of me in Leavenworth. “No use sticking needles in that one, Mike.”
I hear they got Chapin with a doll. This old eunuch dick just sat in the precinct basement hanging a doll of him day and night, year in year out. And when Chapin hanged in Connecticut, they find this old creep with his neck broken.
“He fell downstairs,” they say. You know the old cop bullshit.
Junk is surrounded by magic and taboos, curses and amulets. I could find my Mexico City connection by radar. “Not this street, the next, right . . . now left. Now right again,” and there he is, toothless old woman face and canceled eyes.
I know this one pusher walks around humming a tune and everybody he passes takes it up. He is so grey and spectral and anonymous they don’t see him and think it is their own mind humming the tune. So the customers come in on ‘smiles,” or “I’m in the Mood for Love,” or “They Say We’re Too Young to Go Steady,” or whatever the song is for that day. Sometimes you can see maybe fifty ratty-looking junkies squealing sick, running along behind a boy with a harmonica, and there is The Man on a cane seat throwing bread to the swans, a fat drag queen walking his Afghan hound through the East Fifties, an old wino pissing against an El post, a radical Jewish student giving out leaflets in Washington Square, a tree surgeon, an exterminator, an advertising fruit in Nedick’s where he calls the counterman by his first name. The world network of junkies, tuned on a cord of rancid jissom, tying up in furnished rooms, shivering in the junk-sick morning. (Old Pete men suck the black smoke in the Chink laundry back room and Melancholy Baby dies from an overdose of time or cold turkey withdrawal of breath.) In Yemen, Paris, New Orleans, Mexico City and Istanbul–shivering under the air hammers and the steam shovels, shrieked junky curses at one another neither of us heard, and The Man leaned out of a passing steam roller and I copped in a bucket of tar. (Note: Istanbul is being torn down and rebuilt, especially shabby junk quarters. Istanbul has more heroin junkies than NYC.) The living and the dead, in sickness or on the nod, hooked or kicked or hooked again, come in on the junk beam and the Connection is eating Chop Suey on Dolores Street, Mexico, D.F., dunking pound cake in the Automat, chased up Exchange Place by a baying pack of People. (Note: People is New Orleans slang for narcotic fuzz.)
The old Chinaman dips river water into a rusty tin can, washes down a yen pox hard and black as a cinder. (Note: Yen pox is the ash of smoked opium.)
Well, the fuzz has my spoon and dropper, and I know they are coming in on my frequency led by this blind pigeon known as Willy the Disk. Willy has a round, disk mouth lined with sensitive, erectile black hairs. He is blind from shooting in the eyeball, his nose and palate eaten away sniffing H, his body a mass of scar tissue hard and dry as wood. He can only eat the shit now with that mouth, sometimes sways out on a long tube of ectoplasm, feeling for the silent frequency of junk. He follows my trail all over the city into rooms I move out already, and the fuzz walks in on some newlyweds from Sioux Falls.
“All right, Lee!! Come out from behind that strap-on! We know you,” and pull the man’s prick off straightaway.
Now Willy is getting hot and you can hear him always out there in darkness (he only functions at night) whimpering, and feel the terrible urgency of that blind, seeking mouth. When they move in for the bust, Willy goes all out of control, and his mouth eats a hole right through the door. If the cops weren’t there to restrain him with a stock probe, he would suck the juice right out of every junky he ran down.
I knew, and everybody else knew they had the Disk on me. And if my kid customers ever hit the stand: “He force me to commit all kinda awful sex acts in return for junk” I could kiss the street goodbye.
So we stock up on H, buy a secondhand Studebaker, and start west.
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wrong_mix_random_publicationDate_00046
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FactBench
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3
| 11
|
https://www.artforum.com/events/william-s-burroughs-2-221686/
|
en
|
William S. Burroughs
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1988-03-08T17:52:00+00:00
|
Of all the American novels to be published since the end of World War II, William S. Burroughs has written some of the most powerful. His most famous are Junkie…
|
en
|
Artforum
|
https://www.artforum.com/events/william-s-burroughs-2-221686/
|
Of all the American novels to be published since the end of World War II, William S. Burroughs has written some of the most powerful. His most famous are Junkie (1953) and Naked Lunch (1959), but since then he has written nearly a dozen more among his thirty-odd books, including the trilogy Cities of the Red Night (1981), The Place of Dead Roads (1984), and The Western Lands (1987). In The Western Lands, Burroughs offers a succinct summary of his provocative, searing vision: “The road to the Western Lands is by definition the most dangerous road in the world, for it is a journey beyond Death, beyond the basic God standard of Fear and Danger.”
Burroughs has been giving himself all the permission he has needed to be on the road to the Western Lands. He began crashing through the barriers of “fear and danger” when he wrote Junkie, which was based on his experiences as a drug addict; and he has been exploring what lies on the other side ever since. The Western Lands also seems to be Burroughs’ bittersweet adieu to both the world and the world he has made out of words. The stench of mortality—which both fascinates and repels him—is also an essential aspect of the 27 “Shotgun Pieces” in this recent exhibition (which also included some non-“Shotgun” collages on wood, works on paper, and collaged scrapbooks). Burroughs began making the “Shotgun Pieces” after he moved from New York City to Lawrence, Kansas, in 1982. In a recent interview, he said: “I started painting in 1982. I didn’t switch mediums, I was just sort of fooling around. I was out shooting. I just had a shotgun and a piece of plywood as a target. I didn’t have a recoil. When I looked at it later I said that looks like art. I called it ‘Sore Shoulder.’ ” Onto a rectangular piece of plywood, which has been torn through by clusters of shotgun pellets, Burroughs has written his name, the date, and the work’s title.
After Sore Shoulder, 1982, Burroughs began elaborating on this method by making a piece and then irrevocably defacing it. He would spraypaint the plywood, stencil it, shoot at a can of paint dangled in front of it, or add collage elements. The final step was usually to blast it with a shotgun. His process thus conflated the antinomies of making and destroying, choice and accident.
Unfortunately, the “Shotgun Pieces” were presented here in tasteful, oversize frames, which work to neutralize Burroughs’ coolly destructive rage. The gallery’s decision to put his work in frames—ostensibly to make them more presentable and therefore salable—goes against everything I know about Burroughs, who cannot ever be accused of writing books to please an audience. I imagine that, without the frames, the “Shotgun Pieces” look like rural detritus that one would probably throw away. And yet Burroughs thought they looked “like art.” It’s a revealing statement, when one remembers that he has “cut up” texts in an attempt to find other ways to put words together and written disturbingly pungent parodies of such pulp genres as detective novels and science fiction. The trouble with this exhibition was that someone took Burroughs’ work, which looks “like art,” and tried all too successfully to turn it into ART.
—John Yau
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_S._Burroughs
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en
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William S. Burroughs
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2001-09-27T03:25:24+00:00
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en
|
/static/apple-touch/wikipedia.png
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_S._Burroughs
|
American writer and visual artist (1914–1997)
For other people named William Burroughs, see William Burroughs (disambiguation).
William Seward Burroughs II ( ; February 5, 1914 – August 2, 1997) was an American writer and visual artist. He is widely considered a primary figure of the Beat Generation and a major postmodern author who influenced popular culture and literature.[2][3][4] Burroughs wrote eighteen novels and novellas, six collections of short stories and four collections of essays, and five books have been published of his interviews and correspondences; he was initially briefly known by the pen name William Lee. He also collaborated on projects and recordings with numerous performers and musicians, made many appearances in films, and created and exhibited thousands of visual artworks, including his celebrated "shotgun art".[5]
Burroughs was born into a wealthy family in St. Louis, Missouri. He was a grandson of inventor William Seward Burroughs I, who founded the Burroughs Corporation, and a nephew of public relations manager Ivy Lee. Burroughs attended Harvard University, studied English, studied anthropology as a postgraduate, and attended medical school in Vienna. In 1942, Burroughs enlisted in the U.S. Army to serve during World War II. After being turned down by the Office of Strategic Services and the Navy, he developed a heroin addiction that affected him for the rest of his life, initially beginning with morphine. In 1943, while living in New York City, he befriended Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac. Their mutual influence became the foundation of the Beat Generation, which was later a defining influence on the 1960s counterculture. Burroughs found success with his confessional first novel, Junkie (1953), but is perhaps best known for his third novel, Naked Lunch (1959). Naked Lunch became the subject of one of the last major literary censorship cases in the United States after its US publisher, Grove Press, was sued for violating a Massachusetts obscenity statute.
Burroughs killed his second wife, Joan Vollmer, in 1951 in Mexico City. Burroughs initially claimed that he shot Vollmer while drunkenly attempting a "William Tell" stunt.[6] He later told investigators that he had been showing his pistol to friends when it fell and hit the table, firing the bullet that killed Vollmer.[7] After Burroughs fled back to the United States, he was convicted of manslaughter in absentia and received a two-year suspended sentence.
While heavily experimental and featuring unreliable narrators, much of Burroughs' work is semiautobiographical, and was often drawn from his experiences as a heroin addict. He lived variously in Mexico City, London, Paris and the Tangier International Zone near Morocco, and traveled in the Amazon rainforest, with these locations featuring in many of his novels and stories. With Brion Gysin, Burroughs popularized the cut-up, an aleatory literary technique, featuring heavily in works such as The Nova Trilogy (1961–1964). Burroughs' work also features frequent mystical, occult, or otherwise magical themes, which were a constant preoccupation for Burroughs, both in fiction and in real life.[4][8]
In 1983, Burroughs was elected to the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters. In 1984, he was awarded the Ordre des Arts et des Lettres by France.[9] Jack Kerouac called Burroughs the "greatest satirical writer since Jonathan Swift";[10] he owed this reputation to his "lifelong subversion"[11] of the moral, political, and economic systems of modern American society, articulated in often darkly humorous sardonicism. J. G. Ballard considered Burroughs to be "the most important writer to emerge since the Second World War", while Norman Mailer declared him "the only American writer who may be conceivably possessed by genius".[10]
Burroughs was born in 1914, the younger of two sons born to Mortimer Perry Burroughs (June 16, 1885 – January 5, 1965) and Laura Hammon Lee (August 5, 1888 – October 20, 1970). His family was of prominent English ancestry in St. Louis, Missouri. His grandfather, William Seward Burroughs I, founded the Burroughs Adding Machine company, which evolved into the Burroughs Corporation. Burroughs' mother was Laura Hammond Lee Burroughs, whose brother, Ivy Lee, was an advertising pioneer later employed as a publicist for the Rockefellers. His father ran an antique and gift shop, Cobblestone Gardens in St. Louis, and later in Palm Beach, Florida, when they relocated. Burroughs would later write of growing up in a "family where displays of affection were considered embarrassing".[8]: 26
It was during his childhood that Burroughs' developed a lifelong interest in magic and the occult – topics which would find their way into his work repeatedly across the years.[a] Burroughs later described how he saw an apparition of a green reindeer in the woods as a child, which he identified as a totem animal,[b] as well as a vision of ghostly grey figures at play in his bedroom.[c]
As a boy, Burroughs lived on Pershing Avenue (now Pershing Place) in St. Louis' Central West End. He attended John Burroughs School in St. Louis, where his first published essay – "Personal Magnetism", which revolved around telepathic mind-control – was printed in the John Burroughs Review in 1929.[15] He then attended the Los Alamos Ranch School in New Mexico, which was stressful for him. The school was a boarding school for the wealthy, "where the spindly sons of the rich could be transformed into manly specimens".[8]: 44 Burroughs kept journals documenting an erotic attachment to another boy. According to his own account, he destroyed these later, ashamed of their content.[16] He kept his sexual orientation concealed from his family well into adulthood. A common story says[17] that he was expelled from Los Alamos after taking chloral hydrate in Santa Fe with a fellow student. Yet, according to his own account, he left voluntarily: "During the Easter vacation of my second year I persuaded my family to let me stay in St. Louis."[16]
Burroughs finished high school at Taylor School in Clayton, Missouri, and in 1932 left home to pursue an arts degree at Harvard University, where he was affiliated with Adams House. During the summers, he worked as a cub reporter for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, covering the police docket. He disliked the work, and refused to cover some events, like the death of a drowned child. He lost his virginity in an East St. Louis, Illinois, brothel that summer with a female prostitute whom he regularly patronized.[8]: papers, p.62 While at Harvard, Burroughs made trips to New York City and was introduced to the gay subculture there. He visited lesbian dives, piano bars, and the Harlem and Greenwich Village homosexual underground with Richard Stern, a wealthy friend from Kansas City. They would drive from Boston to New York in a reckless fashion. Once, Stern scared Burroughs so badly that he asked to be let out of the vehicle.[8]: 611
Burroughs graduated from Harvard in 1936. According to Ted Morgan's Literary Outlaw,[8]
His parents, upon his graduation, had decided to give him a monthly allowance of $200 out of their earnings from Cobblestone Gardens, a substantial sum in those days. It was enough to keep him going, and indeed it guaranteed his survival for the next twenty-five years, arriving with welcome regularity. The allowance was a ticket to freedom; it allowed him to live where he wanted to and to forgo employment.[8]: 69–70
Burroughs' parents sold the rights to his grandfather's invention and had no share in the Burroughs Corporation. Shortly before the 1929 stock market crash, they sold their stock for $200,000 (equivalent to approximately $3,500,000 in today's funds[18]).[19]
After Burroughs graduated from Harvard, his formal education ended, except for brief flirtations with graduate study of anthropology at Columbia and medicine in Vienna, Austria. He traveled to Europe and became involved in Austrian and Hungarian Weimar-era LGBT culture; he picked up young men in steam baths in Vienna and moved in a circle of exiles, homosexuals, and runaways. There, he met Ilse Klapper, born Herzfeld (1900–1982), a Jewish woman fleeing the country's Nazi government.[1] The two were never romantically involved, but Burroughs married her, in Croatia, against the wishes of his parents, to allow her to gain a visa to the United States. She made her way to New York City, and eventually divorced Burroughs, although they remained friends for many years.[8]: 65–68
After returning to the United States, he held a string of uninteresting jobs. In 1939, his mental health became a concern for his parents, especially after he deliberately severed the last joint of his left little finger at the knuckle to impress a man with whom he was infatuated.[20] This event made its way into his early fiction as the short story "The Finger".
Burroughs enlisted in the U.S. Army early in 1942, shortly after the bombing of Pearl Harbor brought the United States into World War II. But when he was classified as a 1-A infantry, not an officer, he became dejected. His mother recognized her son's depression and got Burroughs a civilian disability discharge – a release from duty based on the premise that he should have not been allowed to enlist due to previous mental instability. After being evaluated by a family friend, who was also a neurologist at a psychiatric treatment center, Burroughs waited five months in limbo at Jefferson Barracks outside St. Louis before being discharged. During that time he met a Chicago soldier also awaiting release, and once Burroughs was free, he moved to Chicago and held a variety of jobs, including one as an exterminator. When two of his friends from St. Louis – University of Chicago student Lucien Carr and his admirer, David Kammerer – left for New York City, Burroughs followed.
In 1945, Burroughs began living with Joan Vollmer Adams in an apartment they shared with Jack Kerouac and Edie Parker, Kerouac's first wife.[21] Vollmer Adams was married to a G.I. with whom she had a young daughter, Julie Adams.
Burroughs and Kerouac got into trouble with the law for failing to report a murder involving Lucien Carr, who had killed David Kammerer in a confrontation over Kammerer's incessant and unwanted advances. This incident inspired Burroughs and Kerouac to collaborate on a novel titled And the Hippos Were Boiled in Their Tanks, completed in 1945. The two fledgling authors were unable to get it published, but the manuscript was eventually published in November 2008 by Grove Press and Penguin Books.
During this time, Burroughs began using morphine and became addicted. He eventually sold heroin in Greenwich Village to support his habit. Vollmer also became an addict, but her drug of choice was Benzedrine, an amphetamine sold over the counter at that time. Because of her addiction and social circle, her husband immediately divorced her after returning from the war. With urging from Allen Ginsberg, and also perhaps Kerouac, Burroughs became intellectually and emotionally linked with Vollmer and by summer 1945, had moved in with Vollmer and her daughter. In spring 1946, Burroughs was arrested for forging a narcotics prescription. Vollmer asked her psychiatrist, Lewis Wolberg, to sign a surety bond for Burroughs' release. As part of his release, Burroughs returned to St. Louis under his parents' care, after which he left for Mexico to get a divorce from Ilse Klapper. Meanwhile, Vollmer's addiction led to a temporary psychosis that resulted in her admission to Bellevue Hospital, which endangered the custody of her child. Upon hearing this, Burroughs immediately returned to New York City to gain her release, asking her to marry him. Their marriage was never formalized, but she lived as his common-law wife.
They returned to St. Louis to visit Burroughs' parents and then moved with her daughter to Texas.[22] Vollmer soon became pregnant with Burroughs' child. Their son, William S. Burroughs Jr., was born in 1947. The family moved briefly to New Orleans in 1948.[23]
In New Orleans, police stopped Burroughs' car one evening. They found an unregistered handgun belonging to him as well as a letter from Ginsberg that contained details about the sale of marijuana. The police then searched Burroughs’s home, where they discovered his stash of drugs and half a dozen or more firearms.[24] Burroughs fled to Mexico to escape possible detention in Louisiana's Angola State Prison. Vollmer and their children followed him. Burroughs planned to stay in Mexico for at least five years, the length of his charge's statute of limitations. Burroughs also attended classes at the Mexico City College in 1950, studying Spanish, as well as Mesoamerican manuscripts (codices) and the Mayan language with R. H. Barlow.
Their life in Mexico was by all accounts an unhappy one.[25] Without heroin and suffering from Benzedrine abuse, Burroughs began to pursue other men as his libido returned, while Vollmer, feeling abandoned, started to drink heavily and mock Burroughs openly.[22]
One night, while drinking with friends at a party above the Bounty Bar in Mexico City,[26] a drunk Burroughs allegedly took his handgun from his travel bag and told his wife, "It's time for our William Tell act." There is no indication that they had performed such an action previously.[25] Vollmer, who was also drinking heavily and undergoing amphetamine withdrawal, allegedly obliged him by putting a highball glass on her head. Burroughs shot Vollmer in the head, killing her almost immediately.[27]
Soon after the incident, Burroughs changed his account, claiming that he had dropped his gun and it had accidentally fired.[28] Burroughs spent 13 days in jail before his brother came to Mexico City and bribed Mexican lawyers and officials to release Burroughs on bail while he awaited trial for the killing, which was ruled culpable homicide.
Vollmer's daughter, Julie Adams, went to live with her grandmother, and William S. Burroughs Jr. went to St. Louis to live with his grandparents. Burroughs reported every Monday morning to the jail in Mexico City while his prominent Mexican attorney worked to resolve the case. According to James Grauerholz, two witnesses had agreed to testify that the gun had fired accidentally while he was checking to see if it was loaded, with ballistics experts bribed to support this story.[8]: 202 Nevertheless, the trial was continuously delayed and Burroughs began to write what would eventually become the short novel Queer while awaiting his trial. Upon Burroughs' attorney fleeing Mexico in light of his own legal problems, Burroughs decided, according to Ted Morgan, to "skip" and return to the United States. He was convicted in absentia of homicide and was given a two-year suspended sentence.[8]: 214
Although Burroughs was writing before his murder of Joan Vollmer, this event marked him and, biographers argue, his work for the rest of his life.[8]: 197–198 Vollmer's death also resonated with Allen Ginsberg, who wrote of her in Dream Record: June 8, 1955, "Joan, what kind of knowledge have the dead? Can you still love your mortal acquaintances? What do you remember of us?" In Burroughs: The Movie, Ginsberg claimed that Vollmer had seemed possibly suicidal in the weeks leading up to her death, and he suggested that this may have been a factor in her willingness to take part in the risky William Tell stunt.[29]
After leaving Mexico, Burroughs drifted through South America for several months, seeking out a drug called yagé, which promised to give the user telepathic abilities. A book composed of letters between Burroughs and Ginsberg, The Yage Letters, was published in 1963 by City Lights Books. In 2006, a re-edited version, The Yage Letters Redux, showed that the letters were largely fictionalised from Burroughs' notes.
Burroughs described Vollmer's death as a pivotal event in his life, and one that provoked his writing by exposing him to the risk of possession by a malevolent entity he called "the Ugly Spirit":
I am forced to the appalling conclusion that I would never have become a writer but for Joan's death, and to a realization of the extent to which this event has motivated and formulated my writing. I live with the constant threat of possession, and a constant need to escape from possession, from Control. So the death of Joan brought me in contact with the invader, the Ugly Spirit, and maneuvered me into a life long struggle, in which I have had no choice except to write my way out.[30]
As Burroughs makes clear, he meant this reference to "possession" to be taken absolutely literally, stating: "My concept of possession is closer to the medieval model than to modern psychological explanations ... I mean a definite possessing entity."[30] Burroughs' writing was intended as a form of "sorcery", in his own words[31] – to disrupt language via methods such as the cut-up technique, and thus protect himself from possession.[d][e][f][g] Later in life, Burroughs described the Ugly Spirit as "Monopolistic, acquisitive evil. Ugly evil. The ugly American", and took part in a shamanic ceremony with the explicit aim of exorcising the Ugly Spirit.[36]
Oliver Harris has questioned Burroughs' claim that Vollmer's death catalysed his writing, highlighting the importance for Queer of Burroughs' traumatic relationship with the boyfriend fictionalized in the story as Eugene Allerton, rather than Burroughs' shooting of Vollmer. In any case, he had begun to write in 1945. Burroughs and Kerouac collaborated on And the Hippos Were Boiled in Their Tanks, a mystery novel loosely based on the Carr–Kammerer situation and that at the time remained unpublished. Years later, in the documentary What Happened to Kerouac?, Burroughs described it as "not a very distinguished work". An excerpt of this work, in which Burroughs and Kerouac wrote alternating chapters, was finally published in Word Virus,[37] a compendium of William Burroughs' writing that was published by his biographer after his death in 1997. The complete novel was finally published by Grove Press in 2008.
Before killing Vollmer, Burroughs had largely completed his first novel, Junkie, which he wrote at the urging of Allen Ginsberg, who was instrumental in getting the work published as a cheap mass-market paperback.[38] Ace Books published the novel in 1953 as part of an Ace Double under the pen name William Lee, retitling it Junkie: Confessions of an Unredeemed Drug Addict (it was later republished as Junkie, then in 1977 as Junky, and finally in 2003 as Junky: the definitive text of 'Junk', edited by Oliver Harris).[38]
During 1953, Burroughs was at loose ends. Due to legal problems, he was unable to live in the cities toward which he was most inclined. He spent time with his parents in Palm Beach, Florida, and in New York City with Allen Ginsberg. When Ginsberg refused his romantic advances,[39] Burroughs went to Rome to meet Alan Ansen on a vacation financed from his parents' continuing support. He found Rome and Ansen's company dreary and, inspired by Paul Bowles' fiction, he decided to head for the Tangier International Zone,[8]: 232–234 where he rented a room and began to write a large body of text that he personally referred to as Interzone.[40]
To Burroughs, all signs directed a return to Tangier, a city where drugs were freely available and where financial support from his family would continue. He realized that in the Moroccan culture he had found an environment that synchronized with his temperament and afforded no hindrances to pursuing his interests and indulging in his chosen activities. He left for Tangier in November 1954 and spent the next four years there working on the fiction that would later become Naked Lunch, as well as attempting to write commercial articles about Tangier. He sent these writings to Ginsberg, his literary agent for Junkie, but none were published until 1989 when Interzone, a collection of short stories, was published. Under the strong influence of a marijuana confection known as majoun and a German-made opioid called Eukodol, Burroughs settled in to write. Eventually, Ginsberg and Kerouac, who had traveled to Tangier in 1957, helped Burroughs type, edit, and arrange these episodes into Naked Lunch.[8]: 238–242
Further information: Naked Lunch
Whereas Junkie and Queer were conventional in style, Naked Lunch was his first venture into a nonlinear style. After the publication of Naked Lunch, a book whose creation was to a certain extent the result of a series of contingencies, Burroughs was exposed to Brion Gysin's cut-up technique at the Beat Hotel in Paris in October 1959. He began slicing up phrases and words to create new sentences.[41] At the Beat Hotel, Burroughs discovered "a port of entry" into Gysin's canvases: "I don't think I had ever seen painting until I saw the painting of Brion Gysin."[42] The two would cultivate a long-term friendship that revolved around a mutual interest in artworks and cut-up techniques. Scenes were slid together with little care for narrative.
Excerpts from Naked Lunch were first published in the United States in 1958. The novel was initially rejected by City Lights Books, the publisher of Ginsberg's Howl; and Olympia Press publisher Maurice Girodias, who had published English-language novels in France that were controversial for their subjective views of sex and antisocial characters. Nevertheless, Ginsberg managed to get excerpts published in Black Mountain Review and Chicago Review in 1958. Irving Rosenthal, student editor of Chicago Review, a quarterly journal partially subsidized by the university, promised to publish more excerpts from Naked Lunch, but he was fired from his position in 1958 after Chicago Daily News columnist Jack Mabley called the first excerpt obscene. Rosenthal went on to publish more in his newly created literary journal Big Table No. 1; however, the United States Postmaster General ruled that copies could not be mailed to subscribers on the basis of obscenity laws. John Ciardi did get a copy and wrote a positive review of the work, prompting a telegram from Allen Ginsberg praising the review.[43] This controversy made Naked Lunch interesting to Girodias again, and he published the novel in 1959.[44]
After the novel was published, it became notorious across Europe and the United States, garnering interest from not just members of the counterculture of the 1960s, but also literary critics such as Mary McCarthy. Once published in the United States, Naked Lunch was prosecuted as obscene by the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, followed by other states. In 1966, the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court declared the work "not obscene" on the basis of criteria developed largely to defend the book. The case against Burroughs' novel still stands as the last obscenity trial against a work of literature – that is, a work consisting of words only, and not including illustrations or photographs – prosecuted in the United States.
The Word Hoard, the collection of manuscripts that produced Naked Lunch, also produced parts of the later works The Soft Machine (1961), The Ticket That Exploded (1962), and Nova Express (1964). These novels feature extensive use of the cut-up technique that influenced all of Burroughs' subsequent fiction to a degree. During Burroughs' friendship and artistic collaborations with Gysin and Ian Sommerville, the technique was combined with images, Gysin's paintings, and sound, via Somerville's tape recorders. Burroughs was so dedicated to the cut-up method that he often defended his use of the technique before editors and publishers, most notably Dick Seaver at Grove Press in the 1960s[8]: 425 and Holt, Rinehart & Winston in the 1980s. The cut-up method, because of its random or mechanical basis for text generation, combined with the possibilities of mixing in text written by other writers, deemphasizes the traditional role of the writer as creator or originator of a string of words, while simultaneously exalting the importance of the writer's sensibility as an editor.[citation needed] In this sense, the cut-up method may be considered as analogous to the collage method in the visual arts.[citation needed] New restored editions of The Nova Trilogy (or Cut-Up Trilogy), edited by Oliver Harris (President of the European Beat Studies Network) and published in 2014, included notes and materials to reveal the care with which Burroughs used his methods and the complex histories of his manuscripts.
Burroughs moved into a rundown hotel in the Latin Quarter of Paris in 1959 when Naked Lunch was still looking for a publisher. Tangier, with its political unrest, and criminals with whom he had become involved, became dangerous to Burroughs.[45] He went to Paris to meet Ginsberg and talk with Olympia Press. He left behind a criminal charge which eventually caught up with him in Paris. Paul Lund, a British former career criminal and cigarette smuggler whom Burroughs met in Tangier, was arrested on suspicion of importing narcotics into France. Lund gave up Burroughs, and evidence implicated Burroughs in the importation of narcotics into France. When the Moroccan authorities forwarded their investigation to French officials, Burroughs faced criminal charges in Paris for conspiracy to import opiates. It was during this impending case that Maurice Girodias published Naked Lunch; its appearance helped to get Burroughs a suspended sentence, since a literary career, according to Ted Morgan, is a respected profession in France.
The "Beat Hotel" was a typical European-style boarding house hotel, with common toilets on every floor, and a small place for personal cooking in the room. Life there was documented by the photographer Harold Chapman, who lived in the attic room. This shabby, inexpensive hotel was populated by Gregory Corso, Ginsberg and Peter Orlovsky for several months after Naked Lunch first appeared.
Burroughs' time at the Beat Hotel was dominated by occult experiments – "mirror-gazing, scrying, trance and telepathy, all fuelled by a wide variety of mind-altering drugs".[46] Later, Burroughs would describe "visions" obtained by staring into the mirror for hours at a time – his hands transformed into tentacles,[h] or his whole image transforming into some strange entity,[i] or visions of far-off places,[48] or of other people rapidly undergoing metamorphosis.[j] It was from this febrile atmosphere that the famous cut-up technique emerged.
The actual process by which Naked Lunch was published was partly a function of its "cut-up" presentation to the printer. Girodias had given Burroughs only ten days to prepare the manuscript for print galleys, and Burroughs sent over the manuscript in pieces, preparing the parts in no particular order. When it was published in this authentically random manner, Burroughs liked it better than the initial plan. International rights to the work were sold soon after, and Burroughs used the $3,000 advance from Grove Press to buy drugs (equivalent to approximately $31,000 in today's funds[18]).[8]: 316–326 Naked Lunch was featured in a 1959 Life magazine cover story, partly as an article that highlighted the growing Beat literary movement. During this time Burroughs found an outlet for material otherwise rendered unpublishable in Jeff Nuttall's My Own Mag.[49] Also, poetry by Burroughs' appeared in the avant garde little magazine Nomad at the beginning of the 1960s.
Burroughs left Paris for London in 1960 to visit Dr. Dent, a well-known English medical doctor who spearheaded a reputedly painless heroin withdrawal treatment using the drug apomorphine.[50] Dent's apomorphine cure was also used to treat alcoholism, although it was held by several people who undertook it to be no more than straightforward aversion therapy. Burroughs, however, was convinced. Following his first cure, he wrote a detailed appreciation of apomorphine and other cures, which he submitted to The British Journal of Addiction (Vol. 53, 1956) under the title "Letter From A Master Addict To Dangerous Drugs"; this letter is appended to many editions of Naked Lunch.
Though he ultimately relapsed, Burroughs ended up working out of London for six years, traveling back to the United States on several occasions, including one time escorting his son to the Lexington Narcotics Farm and Prison after the younger Burroughs had been convicted of prescription fraud in Florida. In the "Afterword" to the compilation of his son's two previously published novels Speed and Kentucky Ham, Burroughs writes that he thought he had a "small habit" and left London quickly without any narcotics because he suspected the U.S. customs would search him very thoroughly on arrival. He claims he went through the most excruciating two months of opiate withdrawal while seeing his son through his trial and sentencing, traveling with Billy to Lexington, Kentucky from Miami to ensure that his son entered the hospital that he had once spent time in as a volunteer admission.[51] Earlier, Burroughs revisited St. Louis, Missouri, taking a large advance from Playboy to write an article about his trip back to St. Louis, one that was eventually published in The Paris Review, after Burroughs refused to alter the style for Playboy’s publishers. In 1968 Burroughs joined Jean Genet, John Sack, and Terry Southern in covering the 1968 Democratic National Convention for Esquire magazine. Southern and Burroughs, who had first become acquainted in London, would remain lifelong friends and collaborators. In 1972, Burroughs and Southern unsuccessfully attempted to adapt Naked Lunch for the screen in conjunction with American game-show producer Chuck Barris.[52]
Burroughs supported himself and his addiction by publishing pieces in small literary presses. His avant-garde reputation grew internationally as hippies and college students discovered his earlier works. He developed a close friendship with Antony Balch and lived with a young hustler named John Brady who continuously brought home young women despite Burroughs' protestations. In the midst of this personal turmoil, Burroughs managed to complete two works: a novel written in screenplay format, The Last Words of Dutch Schultz (1969); and the traditional prose-format novel The Wild Boys (1971).
It was during his time in London that Burroughs began using his "playback" technique in an attempt to place curses on various people and places who had drawn his ire, including the Moka coffee bar[53][k] and the London HQ of Scientology.[l] Burroughs himself related the Moka coffee bar incident:
Here is a sample operation carried out against the Moka Bar at 29 Frith Street, London, W1, beginning on August 3, 1972. Reverse Thursday. Reason for operation was outrageous and unprovoked discourtesy and poisonous cheesecake. Now to close in on the Moka Bar. Record. Take pictures. Stand around outside. Let them see me. They are seething around in there ... Playback would come later with more pictures ... Playback was carried out a number of times with more pictures. Their business fell off. They kept shorter and shorter hours. October 30, 1972, the Moka Bar closed. The location was taken over by the Queen's Snack Bar.[56]
In the 1960s, Burroughs joined and then left the Church of Scientology. In talking about the experience, he claimed that the techniques and philosophy of Scientology helped him and that he felt that further study of Scientology would produce great results.[57] He was skeptical of the organization itself, and felt that it fostered an environment that did not accept critical discussion.[58] His subsequent critical writings about the church and his review of Inside Scientology by Robert Kaufman led to a battle of letters between Burroughs and Scientology supporters in the pages of Rolling Stone magazine.
In 1974, concerned about his friend's well-being, Allen Ginsberg gained for Burroughs a contract to teach creative writing at the City College of New York. Burroughs successfully withdrew from heroin use and moved to New York. He eventually found an apartment, affectionately dubbed "The Bunker", on the Lower East Side of Manhattan at 222 Bowery.[59] The dwelling was a partially converted YMCA gym, complete with lockers and communal showers. The building fell within New York City rent control policies that made it extremely cheap; it was only about four hundred dollars a month until 1981 when the rent control rules changed, doubling the rent overnight.[60] Burroughs added "teacher" to the list of jobs he did not like, as he lasted only a semester as a professor; he found the students uninteresting and without much creative talent. Although he needed income desperately, he turned down a teaching position at the University at Buffalo for $15,000 a semester. "The teaching gig was a lesson in never again. You were giving out all this energy and nothing was coming back."[8]: 477 His savior was the newly arrived twenty-one-year-old bookseller and Beat Generation devotee James Grauerholz, who worked for Burroughs part-time as a secretary as well as in a bookstore. Grauerholz suggested the idea of reading tours. Grauerholz had managed several rock bands in Kansas and took the lead in booking for Burroughs reading tours that would help support him throughout the next two decades. It raised his public profile, eventually aiding in his obtaining new publishing contracts. Through Grauerholz, Burroughs became a monthly columnist for the noted popular culture magazine Crawdaddy, for which he interviewed Led Zeppelin's Jimmy Page in 1975. Burroughs decided to relocate back to the United States permanently in 1976. He then began to associate with New York cultural players such as Andy Warhol, John Giorno, Lou Reed, Patti Smith, and Susan Sontag, frequently entertaining them at the Bunker; he also visited venues like CBGB to watch the likes of Patti Smith perform.[61] Throughout early 1977, Burroughs collaborated with Southern and Dennis Hopper on a screen adaptation of Junky. It was reported in The New York Times that Burroughs himself would appear in the film. Financed by a reclusive acquaintance of Burroughs, the project lost traction after financial problems and creative disagreements between Hopper and Burroughs.[62][63]
In 1976, he appeared in Rosa von Praunheim's New York documentary Underground & Emigrants.
Organized by Columbia professor Sylvère Lotringer, Giorno, and Grauerholz, the Nova Convention was a multimedia retrospective of Burroughs' work held from November 30 to December 2, 1978, at various locations throughout New York. The event included readings from Southern, Ginsberg, Smith, and Frank Zappa (who filled in at the last minute for Keith Richards, then entangled in a legal problem), in addition to panel discussions with Timothy Leary and Robert Anton Wilson and concerts featuring The B-52's, Suicide, Philip Glass, and Debbie Harry and Chris Stein.
In 1976, Burroughs was having dinner with his son, William S. "Billy" Burroughs Jr., and Allen Ginsberg in Boulder, Colorado, at Ginsberg's Buddhist poetry school (Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics) at Chogyam Trungpa's Naropa University when Billy began to vomit blood. Burroughs Sr. had not seen his son for over a year and was alarmed at his appearance when Billy arrived at Ginsberg's apartment. Although Billy had successfully published two short novels in the 1970s and was deemed by literary critics like Ann Charters as a bona fide "second generation beat writer",[64] his brief marriage to a teenage waitress had disintegrated. Billy was a constant drinker, and there were long periods when he was out of contact with any of his family or friends. The diagnosis was liver cirrhosis so complete that the only treatment was a rarely performed liver transplant operation. Fortunately, the University of Colorado Medical Center was one of two places in the nation that performed transplants under the pioneering work of Dr. Thomas Starzl. Billy underwent the procedure and beat the thirty-percent survival odds. His father spent time in 1976 and 1977 in Colorado, helping Billy through additional surgeries and complications. Ted Morgan's biography asserts that their relationship was not spontaneous and lacked real warmth or intimacy. Allen Ginsberg was supportive to both Burroughs and his son throughout the long period of recovery.[8]: 495–536
In London, Burroughs had begun to write what would become the first novel of a trilogy, published as Cities of the Red Night (1981), The Place of Dead Roads (1983), and The Western Lands (1987). Grauerholz helped edit Cities when it was first rejected by Burroughs' long-time editor Dick Seaver at Holt Rinehart, after it was deemed too disjointed. The novel was written as a straight narrative and then chopped up into a more random pattern, leaving the reader to sort through the characters and events. This technique differed from the author's earlier cut-up methods, which were accidental from the start. Nevertheless, the novel was reassembled and published, still without a straight linear form, but with fewer breaks in the story. The trilogy featured time-travel adventures in which Burroughs' narrators rewrote episodes from history to reform mankind.[8]: 565 Reviews were mixed for Cities. Novelist and critic Anthony Burgess panned the work in Saturday Review, saying Burroughs was boring readers with repetitive episodes of pederast fantasy and sexual strangulation that lacked any comprehensible world view or theology; other reviewers, like J. G. Ballard, argued that Burroughs was shaping a new literary "mythography".[8]: 565
In 1981, Billy Burroughs died in Florida. He had cut off contact with his father several years before, even publishing an article in Esquire magazine claiming his father had poisoned his life and claiming that he had been molested as a fourteen-year-old by one of his father's friends while visiting Tangier. The liver transplant had not cured his urge to drink, and Billy suffered from serious health complications years after the operation. After he had stopped taking his transplant rejection drugs, he was found near the side of a Florida highway by a stranger. He died shortly afterward. Burroughs was in New York when he heard from Allen Ginsberg of Billy's death.
Burroughs, by 1979, was once again addicted to heroin. The cheap heroin that was easily purchased outside his door on the Lower East Side "made its way" into his veins, coupled with "gifts" from the overzealous if well-intentioned admirers who frequently visited the Bunker. Although Burroughs would have episodes of being free from heroin, from this point until his death he was regularly addicted to the drug. In an introduction to Last Words: The Final Journals of William S. Burroughs, James Grauerholz (who managed Burroughs' reading tours in the 1980s and 1990s) mentions that part of his job was to deal with the "underworld" in each city to secure the author's drugs.[65]
Burroughs moved to Lawrence, Kansas, in 1981, taking up residence at 1927 Learnard Avenue where he would spend the rest of his life. He once told a Wichita Eagle reporter that he was content to live in Kansas, saying, "The thing I like about Kansas is that it's not nearly as violent, and it's a helluva lot cheaper. And I can get out in the country and fish and shoot and whatnot."[66] In 1984, he signed a seven-book deal with Viking Press after he signed with literary agent Andrew Wylie. This deal included the publication rights to the unpublished 1952 novel Queer. With this money he purchased a small bungalow for $29,000.[8]: 596 He was finally inducted into the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters in 1983 after several attempts by Allen Ginsberg to get him accepted. He attended the induction ceremony in May 1983. Lawrence Ferlinghetti remarked the induction of Burroughs into the Academy proved Herbert Marcuse's point that capitalistic society had a great ability to incorporate its one-time outsiders.[8]: 577
By this point, Burroughs was a counterculture icon. In his final years, he cultivated an entourage of young friends who replaced his aging contemporaries. In the 1980s he collaborated with performers ranging from Bill Laswell's Material and Laurie Anderson to Throbbing Gristle. Burroughs and R.E.M. collaborated on the song "Star Me Kitten" on the Songs in the Key of X: Music from and Inspired by the X-Files album. A collaboration with musicians Nick Cave and Tom Waits resulted in a collection of short prose, Smack My Crack, later released as a spoken-word album in 1987. In 1989, he appeared with Matt Dillon in Gus Van Sant's film, Drugstore Cowboy. In 1990, he released the spoken word album Dead City Radio, with musical backup from producers Hal Willner and Nelson Lyon, and alternative rock band Sonic Youth. He collaborated with Tom Waits and director Robert Wilson on The Black Rider, a play that opened at the Thalia Theatre in Hamburg in 1990 to critical acclaim, one that was later performed across Europe and the U.S. In 1991, with Burroughs' approval, director David Cronenberg adapted Naked Lunch into a feature film, which opened to critical acclaim.
During 1982, Burroughs developed a painting technique whereby he created abstract compositions by placing spray paint cans in front of blank surfaces, and then shooting at the paint cans with a shotgun. These splattered and shot panels and canvasses were first exhibited in the Tony Shafrazi Gallery in New York City in 1987. By this time he had developed a comprehensive visual art practice, using ink, spray paint, collage and unusual things such as mushrooms and plungers to apply the paint. He created file-folder paintings featuring these mediums as well as "automatic calligraphy" inspired by Brion Gysin. He originally used the folders to mix pigments before observing that they could be viewed as art in themselves. He also used many of these painted folders to store manuscripts and correspondence in his personal archive[67] Until his last years, he prolifically created visual art. Burroughs' work has since been featured in more than fifty international galleries and museums including Royal Academy of the Arts, Centre Pompidou, Guggenheim Museum, ZKM Karlsruhe, Sammlung Falckenberg, New Museum, Irish Museum of Modern Art, Los Angeles County Museum, and Whitney Museum of American Art.[68]
According to Ministry frontman Al Jourgensen, "We hung out at Burroughs's house one time in '93. So he decides to shoot up heroin and he takes out this utility belt full of syringes. Huge, old-fashioned ones from the '50s or something. Now, I have no idea how an 80 year old guy finds a vein, but he knew what he was doing. So we're all laying around high and stuff and then I notice in the pile of mail on the coffee table that there's a letter from the White House. I said 'Hey, this looks important.' and he replies 'Nah, it's probably just junk mail.' Well, I open the letter and it's from President Clinton inviting Burroughs to the White House for a poetry reading. I said 'Wow, do you have any idea how big this is!?' So he says 'What? Who's president nowadays?' and it floored me. He didn't even know who our current president was."[69]
In 1990, Burroughs was honored with a star on the St. Louis Walk of Fame.[70]
In June 1991, Burroughs underwent triple bypass surgery.[71]
He became a member of a chaos magic organization, the Illuminates of Thanateros, in 1993.[72]
He was a voice actor in the 1995 video game The Dark Eye based on the works of Edgar Allan Poe, in which he recites "Annabel Lee".
Burroughs' last filmed performance was in the music video for "Last Night on Earth" by Irish rock band U2, filmed in Kansas City, Missouri, directed by Richie Smyth and also featuring Sophie Dahl.[73]
The only newspaper columnist Burroughs admired was Westbrook Pegler, a right-wing opinion shaper for the William Randolph Hearst newspaper chain.[8]: 170 Burroughs believed in frontier individualism, which he championed as "our glorious frontier heritage on minding your own business." Burroughs came to equate liberalism with bureaucratic tyranny, viewing government authority as a collective of meddlesome forces legislating the curtailment of personal freedom. According to his biographer Ted Morgan, his philosophy for living one's life was to adhere to a laissez-faire path, one without encumbrances – in essence a credo shared with the capitalist business world.[8]: 55 His abhorrence of the government did not prevent Burroughs from using its programs to his own advantage. In 1949 he enrolled in Mexico City College under the GI Bill, which paid for part of his tuition and books and provided him with a seventy-five-dollar-per-month stipend. He maintained, "I always say, keep your snout in the public trough."[8]: 173
Burroughs was a gun enthusiast and owned several shotguns, a Colt .45 and a .38 Special. Sonic Youth vocalist Thurston Moore recounted meeting Burroughs: "he had a number of Guns and Ammo magazines laying about, and he was only very interested in talking about shooting and knifing ... I asked him if he had a Beretta and he said: 'Ah, that's a ladies' pocket-purse gun. I like guns that shoot and knives that cut.'" Hunter S. Thompson gave him a one-of-a-kind .454 caliber pistol.[74] Burroughs was also a staunch supporter of the Second Amendment, being quoted as saying: "I sure as hell wouldn't want to live in a society where the only people allowed guns are the police and the military."[75]
Burroughs had a longstanding preoccupation with magic and the occult, dating from his earliest childhood, and was insistent throughout his life that we live in a "magical universe".[76] As he himself explained:
In the magical universe there are no coincidences and there are no accidents. Nothing happens unless someone wills it to happen. The dogma of science is that the will cannot possibly affect external forces, and I think that's just ridiculous. It's as bad as the church. My viewpoint is the exact contrary of the scientific viewpoint. I believe that if you run into somebody in the street it's for a reason. Among primitive people they say that if someone was bitten by a snake he was murdered. I believe that.[77]
Or, speaking in the 1970s:
Since the word "magic" tends to cause confused thinking, I would like to say exactly what I mean by "magic" and the magical interpretation of so-called reality. The underlying assumption of magic is the assertion of "will" as the primary moving force in this universe – the deep conviction that nothing happens unless somebody or some being wills it to happen. To me this has always seemed self evident ... From the viewpoint of magic, no death, no illness, no misfortune, accident, war or riot is accidental. There are no accidents in the world of magic.[78]
This was no idle passing interest – Burroughs also actively practiced magic in his everyday life: seeking out mystical visions through practices like scrying,[79][80][48] taking measures to protect himself from possession,[81][82][35][36] and attempting to lay curses on those who had crossed him.[53][54][83] Burroughs spoke openly about his magical practices, and his engagement with the occult is attested from a multitude of interviews,[m][n][85] as well as personal accounts from those who knew him.[53][54][35]
Biographer Ted Morgan has argued that: "As the single most important thing about Graham Greene was his viewpoint as a lapsed Catholic, the single most important thing about Burroughs was his belief in the magical universe. The same impulse that led him to put out curses was, as he saw it, the source of his writing ... To Burroughs behind everyday reality there was the reality of the spirit world, of psychic visitations, of curses, of possession and phantom beings."[8][86]
Burroughs was unwavering in his insistence that his writing itself had a magical purpose.[o][p][q][r][91] This was particularly true when it came to his use of the cut-up technique. Burroughs was adamant that the technique had a magical function, stating "the cut ups are not for artistic purposes".[92] Burroughs used his cut-ups for "political warfare, scientific research, personal therapy, magical divination, and conjuration"[92] – the essential idea being that the cut-ups allowed the user to "break down the barriers that surround consciousness".[93] As Burroughs himself stated:
I would say that my most interesting experience with the earlier techniques was the realization that when you make cut-ups you do not get simply random juxtapositions of words, that they do mean something, and often that these meanings refer to some future event. I've made many cut-ups and then later recognized that the cut-up referred to something that I read later in a newspaper or a book, or something that happened ... Perhaps events are pre-written and pre-recorded and when you cut word lines the future leaks out.[93]
In the final decade of his life, Burroughs became heavily involved in the chaos magic movement. Burroughs' magical techniques – the cut-up, playback, etc. – had been incorporated into chaos magic by such practitioners as Phil Hine,[94][95][96] Dave Lee[97] and Genesis P-Orridge.[98][53] P-Orridge in particular had known and studied under Burroughs and Brion Gysin for over a decade.[53] This led to Burroughs contributing material to the book Between Spaces: Selected Rituals & Essays From The Archives Of Templum Nigri Solis[99] Through this connection, Burroughs came to personally know many of the leading lights of the chaos magic movement, including Hine, Lee, Peter J. Carroll, Ian Read and Ingrid Fischer, as well as Douglas Grant, head of the North American section of chaos magic group the Illuminates of Thanateros (IOT).[76][100] Burroughs' involvement with the movement further deepened, as he contributed artwork and other material to chaos magic books,[101] addressed an IOT gathering in Austria,[102] and was eventually fully initiated into the Illuminates of Thanateros.[s][103][76] As Burroughs' close friend James Grauerholz states: "William was very serious about his studies in, and initiation into the IOT ... Our longtime friend, Douglas Grant, was a prime mover."[100]
Burroughs died August 2, 1997, at age 83, in Lawrence, Kansas, from complications of a heart attack he had suffered the previous day.[19] He was interred in the family plot in Bellefontaine Cemetery in St. Louis, Missouri,[105] with a marker bearing his full name and the epitaph "American Writer". His grave lies to the right of the white granite obelisk of William Seward Burroughs I (1857–1898).
Since 1997, several posthumous collections of Burroughs' work have been published. A few months after his death, a collection of writings spanning his entire career, Word Virus, was published (according to the book's introduction, Burroughs himself approved its contents prior to his death). Aside from numerous previously released pieces, Word Virus also included what was promoted as one of the few surviving fragments of And the Hippos Were Boiled in Their Tanks, a novel by Burroughs and Kerouac. The complete Kerouac/Burroughs manuscript And the Hippos Were Boiled in Their Tanks was published for the first time in November 2008.[106]
A collection of journal entries written during the final months of Burroughs' life was published as the book Last Words in 2000. Publication of a memoir by Burroughs entitled Evil River by Viking Press has been delayed several times; after initially being announced for a 2005 release, online booksellers indicated a 2007 release, complete with an ISBN (ISBN 0-670-81351-6), but it remains unpublished.[107]
New enlarged or unexpurgated editions of numerous texts have been published in recent years as "Restored Text" or "Redux" editions all containing additional material and essays on the works or incorporating material edited out of previous versions. Beginning with Barry Miles and James Grauerholz's 2003 edition of Naked Lunch, followed by Oliver Harris's reconstructions of three trilogies of writings. The first of these are the early writings: Junky:the definitive text of "Junk" (2003), Queer: 25th-Anniversary Edition (2010) and The Yage Letters Redux (2006). Following the publication of the latter in December 2007, Ohio State University Press released Everything Lost: The Latin American Journals of William S. Burroughs also edited by Harris, the book contains transcriptions of journal entries made by Burroughs during the time of composing Queer and The Yage Letters, with cover art and review information. There followed "restored text" versions of some of Burroughs' best known novels The Soft Machine, The Ticket that Exploded and Nova Express (styled "the Cut Up Trilogy" officially here for the first time) from Penguin in 2014, and of Burroughs' more obscure collaborative poetic experiments of 1960 Minutes to Go: Redux and The Exterminator: Redux by Moloko Press in 2020. These books, originally pamphlets, are bulked out to three times their original size and the "trilogy" is complete with the completely new BATTLE INSTRUCTIONS an allied experimental collaboration, composited by Harris from unpublished drafts and recordings of the same period.
Burroughs' major works can be divided into four different periods. The dates refer to the time of writing, not publication, which in some cases was not until decades later:
Early work (early 1950s)
Junkie, Queer and The Yage Letters are relatively straightforward linear narratives, written in and about Burroughs' time in Mexico City and South America.
The cut-up period (mid-1950s to mid-1960s)
Although published before Burroughs discovered the cut-up technique, Naked Lunch is a fragmentary collection of "routines" from The Word Hoard – manuscripts written in Tangier, Paris, London, as well as of other texts written in South America such as "The Composite City", blending into the cut-up and fold-in fiction also partly drawn from The Word Hoard: The Soft Machine, Nova Express, The Ticket That Exploded, also referred to as "The Nova Trilogy" or "The Cut-Up Trilogy", self-described by Burroughs as an attempt to create "a mythology for the space age". Interzone also derives from the mid-1950s.
Experiment and subversion (mid-1960s to mid-1970s)
This period saw Burroughs continue experimental writing with increased political content and branching into multimedia such as film and sound recording. Perhaps the defining and most important of which works is The Third Mind (with Brion Gysin) announced in 1966 and not published until the late '70s. The only major novels written in this period are The Wild Boys, and Port of Saints (republished in a different rewritten form in 1980, in the style Burroughs would adopt at that time). However, he also wrote dozens of published articles, short stories, scrap books and other works, several in collaboration with Brion Gysin. The major anthologies representing work from this period are The Burroughs File, The Adding Machine and Exterminator!.
The Red Night trilogy (mid-1970s to mid-1980s)
The books Cities of the Red Night, The Place of Dead Roads and The Western Lands came from Burroughs in a final, mature stage, creating a complete mythology.
Burroughs also produced numerous essays and a large body of autobiographical material, including a book with a detailed account of his own dreams (My Education: A Book of Dreams).
Several literary critics treated Burroughs' work harshly. For example, Anatole Broyard and Philip Toynbee wrote devastating reviews of some of his most important books. In a short essay entitled "A Review of the Reviewers", Burroughs answers his critics in this way:
Critics constantly complain that writers are lacking in standards, yet they themselves seem to have no standards other than personal prejudice for literary criticism. ... such standards do exist. Matthew Arnold set up three criteria for criticism: 1. What is the writer trying to do? 2. How well does he succeed in doing it? ... 3. Does the work exhibit "high seriousness"? That is, does it touch on basic issues of good and evil, life and death and the human condition. I would also apply a fourth criterion ... Write about what you know. More writers fail because they try to write about things they don't know than for any other reason.
— William S. Burroughs, "A Review of the Reviewers"[108]
[unreliable source?]
Burroughs clearly indicates here that he prefers to be evaluated against such criteria over being reviewed based on the reviewer's personal reactions to a certain book. Always a contradictory figure, Burroughs nevertheless criticized Anatole Broyard for reading authorial intent into his works where there is none, which sets him at odds both with New Criticism and the old school as represented by Matthew Arnold.
Burroughs used photography extensively throughout his career, both as a recording medium in planning his writings, and as a significant dimension of his own artistic practice, in which photographs and other images feature as significant elements in cut-ups. With Ian Sommerville, he experimented with photography's potential as a form of memory-device, photographing and rephotographing his own pictures in increasingly complex time-image arrangements.[109]
Burroughs is often called one of the greatest and most influential writers of the 20th century, most notably by Norman Mailer whose quote on Burroughs, "The only American novelist living today who may conceivably be possessed by genius", appears on many Burroughs publications. Others consider his concepts and attitude more influential than his prose. Prominent admirers of Burroughs' work have included British critic and biographer Peter Ackroyd, the rock critic Lester Bangs, the philosopher Gilles Deleuze and the authors Michael Moorcock. J. G. Ballard, Angela Carter, Jean Genet, William Gibson, Alan Moore, Kathy Acker and Ken Kesey. Burroughs had an influence on the German writer Carl Weissner, who in addition to being his German translator was a novelist in his own right and frequently wrote cut-up texts in a manner reminiscent of Burroughs.[110]
Burroughs continues to be named as an influence by contemporary writers of fiction. Both the New Wave and, especially, the cyberpunk schools of science fiction are indebted to him. Admirers from the late 1970s – early 1980s milieu of this subgenre include William Gibson and John Shirley, to name only two. First published in 1982, the British slipstream fiction magazine Interzone (which later evolved into a more traditional science fiction magazine) paid tribute to him with its choice of name. He is also cited as a major influence by musicians Roger Waters, David Bowie, Patti Smith, Genesis P-Orridge,[111] Ian Curtis, Lou Reed, Laurie Anderson, Todd Tamanend Clark, John Zorn, Tom Waits, Gary Numan and Kurt Cobain.[112]
In the film William S. Burroughs: A Man Within, Ira Silverberg commented on Burroughs' development as a writer:
Usually, the most radical work tends to come from the upper classes, because they're trying so hard to shop so hard to get away from their roots. So he's a fascinating character uniquely American in that regard. I don't think that work could have existed had he not been breaking away from an incredibly patrician Midwestern background.
Drugs, homosexuality, and death, common among Burroughs' themes, have been taken up by Dennis Cooper, of whom Burroughs said, "Dennis Cooper, God help him, is a born writer".[113] Cooper, in return, wrote, in his essay 'King Junk', "along with Jean Genet, John Rechy, and Ginsberg, [Burroughs] helped make homosexuality seem cool and highbrow, providing gay liberation with a delicious edge". Splatterpunk writer Poppy Z. Brite has frequently referenced this aspect of Burroughs' work. Burroughs' writing continues to be referenced years after his death; for example, a November 2004 episode of the TV series CSI: Crime Scene Investigation included an evil character named Dr. Benway (named for an amoral physician who appears in a number of Burroughs' works.) This is an echo of the hospital scene in the movie Repo Man, made during Burroughs' life-time, in which both Dr. Benway and Mr. Lee (a Burroughs pen name) are paged.
Burroughs had an impact on twentieth-century esotericism and occultism as well, most notably through disciples like Peter Lamborn Wilson and Genesis P-Orridge. Burroughs is also cited by Robert Anton Wilson as the first person to notice the "23 Enigma":
I first heard of the '23 Enigma' from William S. Burroughs, author of Naked Lunch, Nova Express, etc. According to Burroughs, he had known a certain Captain Clark, around 1960 in Tangier, who once bragged that he had been sailing 23 years without an accident. That very day, Clark's ship had an accident that killed him and everybody else aboard. Furthermore, while Burroughs was thinking about this crude example of the irony of the gods that evening, a bulletin on the radio announced the crash of an airliner in Florida, USA. The pilot was another Captain Clark and the flight was Flight 23.
— Robert Anton Wilson, Fortean Times[114]
Some research[115] suggests that Burroughs is arguably the progenitor of the 2012 phenomenon, a belief of New Age Mayanism that an apocalyptic shift in human consciousness would occur at the end of the Mayan Long Count calendar in 2012. Although never directly focusing on the year 2012 himself, Burroughs had an influence on early 2012 proponents such as Terence McKenna and Jose Argüelles, and as well had written about an apocalyptic shift of human consciousness at the end of the Long Count as early as 1960's The Exterminator.[116]
Main article: William S. Burroughs bibliography
Burroughs, William S. (2012). The Job: Interviews with William S. Burroughs. Penguin UK. ISBN 978-0-14-190358-3.
Grant, Douglas (2015). "Magick and Photography". Ashé Journal .
Harris, Oliver (2017). "William S. Burroughs: Beating Postmodernism". In Belletto, Steven (ed.). The Cambridge Companion to the Beats. Cambridge University Press. ISBN 978-1-107-18445-9.
Grauerholz, James; Silverberg, Ira; Douglas, Ann, eds. (2000). Word Virus: The William S. Burroughs Reader. New York: Grove Press. ISBN 0-8021-3694-X. OCLC 57590795, ISBN 978-0-8021-3694-7.
Lee, Dave (1989). "Cut Up and Collage in Magic". Chaotopia!. Archived from the original on June 12, 2018 .
Morgan, Ted (1988). Literary Outlaw: The Life and Times of William S. Burroughs. New York: Avon. ISBN 0-8050-0901-9.
P-Orridge, Genesis Breyer (2003). "Magick Squares and Future Beats". In Metzger, Richard (ed.). Book of Lies: The Disinformation Guide to Magick and the Occult. Red Wheel Weiser. ISBN 978-0-9713942-7-8.
P-Orridge, Genesis Breyer (2010). Thee Psychick Bible: Thee Apocryphal Scriptures ov Genesis Breyer P-Orridge and Thee Third Mind ov Thee Temple ov Psychick Youth. Feral House. ISBN 978-1-932595-94-9.
Wason, Thomas (February 15, 1951). "William Burroughs" (PDF). Mexico City Collegian. Vol. 4. p. 6.
Burroughs, William S. (2001). Burroughs Live: The Collected Interviews of William S. Burroughs, 1960–1997. Zone Books. ISBN 978-1-58435-010-1.
Stevens, Matthew Levi (2014). The Magical Universe of William S. Burroughs. Mandrake of Oxford. ISBN 978-1-906958-64-0.
Allmer, Patricia and John Sears (ed.) Taking Shots: The Photography of William S. Burroughs, London: Prestel and The Photographers' Gallery, 2014.
Charters, Ann (ed.). The Portable Beat Reader. New York: Penguin Books, 1992. ISBN 0-670-83885-3 (hc); ISBN 0-14-015102-8 (pbk).
Gilmore, John. Laid Bare: A Memoir of Wrecked Lives and the Hollywood Death Trip. Searching for Rimbaud. Amok Books, 1997.
Harris, Oliver. William Burroughs and the Secret of Fascination. Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 2003.
Johnson, Robert Earl. The Lost Years of William S. Burroughs: Beats in South Texas. Texas A&M University Press, 2006.
Kashner, Sam, When I Was Cool, My Life at the Jack Kerouac School. New York: HarperCollins Perennial, 2005.
Miles, Barry. William Burroughs: El Hombre Invisible: A Portrait. New York: Hyperion, 1993.
Sargeant, Jack. Naked Lens: Beat Cinema. New York: Soft Skull Press, 2008 [1997] [2001].
Schneiderman, Davis and Philip Walsh. Retaking the Universe: William S. Burroughs in the Age of Globalization. London: Pluto Press, 2004.
Stevens, Mathew Levi. The Magical Universe of William S. Burroughs. Mandrake of Oxford, 2014.
Stevens, Michael. The Road to Interzone: Reading William S. Burroughs Reading. Suicide Press, Archer City, Texas, 2009.
Weidner, Chad. The Green Ghost: William Burroughs and the Ecological Mind. Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 2016.
Wills, David S. Scientologist! William S. Burroughs and the Weird Cult. Beatdom Books, London, 2013.
Bernhard Valentinitsch, Hoch hinauf strebend und doch geerdet - über den Schriftsteller Harald Sommer, den steirischen William S. Burroughs. In: Denken und Glauben.Nr.199.Graz 2021.Nr.199, p. 22-24.
William S. Burroughs papers (17 linear feet – 94 boxes) are held by the Berg Collection of the New York Public Library.
William Seward Burroughs Papers, 1957–1976 (2 linear feet) are held in the Columbia University Libraries.
William S. Burroughs Papers, SPEC.CMS.40 (ca. 1945-ca. 1984, 55 boxes plus additions) are held in the Ohio State University libraries.
William S. Burroughs Papers, SPEC.CMS.85 (ca. 1945-ca. 1984, 6 boxes) are held in the Ohio State University libraries.
William S. Burroughs Papers, SPEC.CMS.87 (ca. 1945-ca. 1984, 58 boxes) are held in the Ohio State University libraries.
William S. Burroughs Papers, SPEC.CMS.90 (ca. 1945-ca. 1984, 29 boxes) are held in the Ohio State University libraries.
William S. Burroughs collection (3 linear feet) are held in the Manuscript, Archives, and Rare Book Library at Emory University.
William S. Burroughs Collection, MS 63 and James Grauerholz Collection of William S. Burroughs, MS 319, are held at the Kenneth Spencer Research Library, University of Kansas
William S. Burroughs Internet Database, edited by postmodern American scholar Michael Gurnow, hosted on the servers of Southeast Missouri State University from 2000 to 2012.
[1], Taking Shots: The Photography of William S. Burroughs, The Photographers' Gallery exhibition website.
[2], William S. Burroughs and Photography Lecture Series
William S. Burroughs at IMDb
William S. Burroughs at the Internet Speculative Fiction Database
William S. Burroughs audio documentary narrated by Iggy Pop [3]
William S. Burroughs Internet Database at Southeast Missouri State University
International festivities for 50th anniversary of Naked Lunch
A gallery of Burroughs book cover designs
William Burroughs and Tom Waits
Allen Ginsberg & William S. Burroughs, Last Public Appearance November 2, 1996, Lawrence, KS
European Beat Studies Network
William S. Burroughs: A Man Within site for Independent Lens on PBS
William S. Burroughs: A Man Within at IMDb
Anything but Routine: A Selectively Annotated Bibliography of William S. Burroughs v 2.0 by Brian E.C. Schottlaender, UC San Diego, 2010
Burroughs 101 by This American Life, January 30, 2015
A finding aid to the William Burroughs and Brion Gysin writings, 1963–1973, 1997 in the Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_S._Burroughs
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American writer and visual artist (1914–1997)
For other people named William Burroughs, see William Burroughs (disambiguation).
William Seward Burroughs II ( ; February 5, 1914 – August 2, 1997) was an American writer and visual artist. He is widely considered a primary figure of the Beat Generation and a major postmodern author who influenced popular culture and literature.[2][3][4] Burroughs wrote eighteen novels and novellas, six collections of short stories and four collections of essays, and five books have been published of his interviews and correspondences; he was initially briefly known by the pen name William Lee. He also collaborated on projects and recordings with numerous performers and musicians, made many appearances in films, and created and exhibited thousands of visual artworks, including his celebrated "shotgun art".[5]
Burroughs was born into a wealthy family in St. Louis, Missouri. He was a grandson of inventor William Seward Burroughs I, who founded the Burroughs Corporation, and a nephew of public relations manager Ivy Lee. Burroughs attended Harvard University, studied English, studied anthropology as a postgraduate, and attended medical school in Vienna. In 1942, Burroughs enlisted in the U.S. Army to serve during World War II. After being turned down by the Office of Strategic Services and the Navy, he developed a heroin addiction that affected him for the rest of his life, initially beginning with morphine. In 1943, while living in New York City, he befriended Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac. Their mutual influence became the foundation of the Beat Generation, which was later a defining influence on the 1960s counterculture. Burroughs found success with his confessional first novel, Junkie (1953), but is perhaps best known for his third novel, Naked Lunch (1959). Naked Lunch became the subject of one of the last major literary censorship cases in the United States after its US publisher, Grove Press, was sued for violating a Massachusetts obscenity statute.
Burroughs killed his second wife, Joan Vollmer, in 1951 in Mexico City. Burroughs initially claimed that he shot Vollmer while drunkenly attempting a "William Tell" stunt.[6] He later told investigators that he had been showing his pistol to friends when it fell and hit the table, firing the bullet that killed Vollmer.[7] After Burroughs fled back to the United States, he was convicted of manslaughter in absentia and received a two-year suspended sentence.
While heavily experimental and featuring unreliable narrators, much of Burroughs' work is semiautobiographical, and was often drawn from his experiences as a heroin addict. He lived variously in Mexico City, London, Paris and the Tangier International Zone near Morocco, and traveled in the Amazon rainforest, with these locations featuring in many of his novels and stories. With Brion Gysin, Burroughs popularized the cut-up, an aleatory literary technique, featuring heavily in works such as The Nova Trilogy (1961–1964). Burroughs' work also features frequent mystical, occult, or otherwise magical themes, which were a constant preoccupation for Burroughs, both in fiction and in real life.[4][8]
In 1983, Burroughs was elected to the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters. In 1984, he was awarded the Ordre des Arts et des Lettres by France.[9] Jack Kerouac called Burroughs the "greatest satirical writer since Jonathan Swift";[10] he owed this reputation to his "lifelong subversion"[11] of the moral, political, and economic systems of modern American society, articulated in often darkly humorous sardonicism. J. G. Ballard considered Burroughs to be "the most important writer to emerge since the Second World War", while Norman Mailer declared him "the only American writer who may be conceivably possessed by genius".[10]
Burroughs was born in 1914, the younger of two sons born to Mortimer Perry Burroughs (June 16, 1885 – January 5, 1965) and Laura Hammon Lee (August 5, 1888 – October 20, 1970). His family was of prominent English ancestry in St. Louis, Missouri. His grandfather, William Seward Burroughs I, founded the Burroughs Adding Machine company, which evolved into the Burroughs Corporation. Burroughs' mother was Laura Hammond Lee Burroughs, whose brother, Ivy Lee, was an advertising pioneer later employed as a publicist for the Rockefellers. His father ran an antique and gift shop, Cobblestone Gardens in St. Louis, and later in Palm Beach, Florida, when they relocated. Burroughs would later write of growing up in a "family where displays of affection were considered embarrassing".[8]: 26
It was during his childhood that Burroughs' developed a lifelong interest in magic and the occult – topics which would find their way into his work repeatedly across the years.[a] Burroughs later described how he saw an apparition of a green reindeer in the woods as a child, which he identified as a totem animal,[b] as well as a vision of ghostly grey figures at play in his bedroom.[c]
As a boy, Burroughs lived on Pershing Avenue (now Pershing Place) in St. Louis' Central West End. He attended John Burroughs School in St. Louis, where his first published essay – "Personal Magnetism", which revolved around telepathic mind-control – was printed in the John Burroughs Review in 1929.[15] He then attended the Los Alamos Ranch School in New Mexico, which was stressful for him. The school was a boarding school for the wealthy, "where the spindly sons of the rich could be transformed into manly specimens".[8]: 44 Burroughs kept journals documenting an erotic attachment to another boy. According to his own account, he destroyed these later, ashamed of their content.[16] He kept his sexual orientation concealed from his family well into adulthood. A common story says[17] that he was expelled from Los Alamos after taking chloral hydrate in Santa Fe with a fellow student. Yet, according to his own account, he left voluntarily: "During the Easter vacation of my second year I persuaded my family to let me stay in St. Louis."[16]
Burroughs finished high school at Taylor School in Clayton, Missouri, and in 1932 left home to pursue an arts degree at Harvard University, where he was affiliated with Adams House. During the summers, he worked as a cub reporter for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, covering the police docket. He disliked the work, and refused to cover some events, like the death of a drowned child. He lost his virginity in an East St. Louis, Illinois, brothel that summer with a female prostitute whom he regularly patronized.[8]: papers, p.62 While at Harvard, Burroughs made trips to New York City and was introduced to the gay subculture there. He visited lesbian dives, piano bars, and the Harlem and Greenwich Village homosexual underground with Richard Stern, a wealthy friend from Kansas City. They would drive from Boston to New York in a reckless fashion. Once, Stern scared Burroughs so badly that he asked to be let out of the vehicle.[8]: 611
Burroughs graduated from Harvard in 1936. According to Ted Morgan's Literary Outlaw,[8]
His parents, upon his graduation, had decided to give him a monthly allowance of $200 out of their earnings from Cobblestone Gardens, a substantial sum in those days. It was enough to keep him going, and indeed it guaranteed his survival for the next twenty-five years, arriving with welcome regularity. The allowance was a ticket to freedom; it allowed him to live where he wanted to and to forgo employment.[8]: 69–70
Burroughs' parents sold the rights to his grandfather's invention and had no share in the Burroughs Corporation. Shortly before the 1929 stock market crash, they sold their stock for $200,000 (equivalent to approximately $3,500,000 in today's funds[18]).[19]
After Burroughs graduated from Harvard, his formal education ended, except for brief flirtations with graduate study of anthropology at Columbia and medicine in Vienna, Austria. He traveled to Europe and became involved in Austrian and Hungarian Weimar-era LGBT culture; he picked up young men in steam baths in Vienna and moved in a circle of exiles, homosexuals, and runaways. There, he met Ilse Klapper, born Herzfeld (1900–1982), a Jewish woman fleeing the country's Nazi government.[1] The two were never romantically involved, but Burroughs married her, in Croatia, against the wishes of his parents, to allow her to gain a visa to the United States. She made her way to New York City, and eventually divorced Burroughs, although they remained friends for many years.[8]: 65–68
After returning to the United States, he held a string of uninteresting jobs. In 1939, his mental health became a concern for his parents, especially after he deliberately severed the last joint of his left little finger at the knuckle to impress a man with whom he was infatuated.[20] This event made its way into his early fiction as the short story "The Finger".
Burroughs enlisted in the U.S. Army early in 1942, shortly after the bombing of Pearl Harbor brought the United States into World War II. But when he was classified as a 1-A infantry, not an officer, he became dejected. His mother recognized her son's depression and got Burroughs a civilian disability discharge – a release from duty based on the premise that he should have not been allowed to enlist due to previous mental instability. After being evaluated by a family friend, who was also a neurologist at a psychiatric treatment center, Burroughs waited five months in limbo at Jefferson Barracks outside St. Louis before being discharged. During that time he met a Chicago soldier also awaiting release, and once Burroughs was free, he moved to Chicago and held a variety of jobs, including one as an exterminator. When two of his friends from St. Louis – University of Chicago student Lucien Carr and his admirer, David Kammerer – left for New York City, Burroughs followed.
In 1945, Burroughs began living with Joan Vollmer Adams in an apartment they shared with Jack Kerouac and Edie Parker, Kerouac's first wife.[21] Vollmer Adams was married to a G.I. with whom she had a young daughter, Julie Adams.
Burroughs and Kerouac got into trouble with the law for failing to report a murder involving Lucien Carr, who had killed David Kammerer in a confrontation over Kammerer's incessant and unwanted advances. This incident inspired Burroughs and Kerouac to collaborate on a novel titled And the Hippos Were Boiled in Their Tanks, completed in 1945. The two fledgling authors were unable to get it published, but the manuscript was eventually published in November 2008 by Grove Press and Penguin Books.
During this time, Burroughs began using morphine and became addicted. He eventually sold heroin in Greenwich Village to support his habit. Vollmer also became an addict, but her drug of choice was Benzedrine, an amphetamine sold over the counter at that time. Because of her addiction and social circle, her husband immediately divorced her after returning from the war. With urging from Allen Ginsberg, and also perhaps Kerouac, Burroughs became intellectually and emotionally linked with Vollmer and by summer 1945, had moved in with Vollmer and her daughter. In spring 1946, Burroughs was arrested for forging a narcotics prescription. Vollmer asked her psychiatrist, Lewis Wolberg, to sign a surety bond for Burroughs' release. As part of his release, Burroughs returned to St. Louis under his parents' care, after which he left for Mexico to get a divorce from Ilse Klapper. Meanwhile, Vollmer's addiction led to a temporary psychosis that resulted in her admission to Bellevue Hospital, which endangered the custody of her child. Upon hearing this, Burroughs immediately returned to New York City to gain her release, asking her to marry him. Their marriage was never formalized, but she lived as his common-law wife.
They returned to St. Louis to visit Burroughs' parents and then moved with her daughter to Texas.[22] Vollmer soon became pregnant with Burroughs' child. Their son, William S. Burroughs Jr., was born in 1947. The family moved briefly to New Orleans in 1948.[23]
In New Orleans, police stopped Burroughs' car one evening. They found an unregistered handgun belonging to him as well as a letter from Ginsberg that contained details about the sale of marijuana. The police then searched Burroughs’s home, where they discovered his stash of drugs and half a dozen or more firearms.[24] Burroughs fled to Mexico to escape possible detention in Louisiana's Angola State Prison. Vollmer and their children followed him. Burroughs planned to stay in Mexico for at least five years, the length of his charge's statute of limitations. Burroughs also attended classes at the Mexico City College in 1950, studying Spanish, as well as Mesoamerican manuscripts (codices) and the Mayan language with R. H. Barlow.
Their life in Mexico was by all accounts an unhappy one.[25] Without heroin and suffering from Benzedrine abuse, Burroughs began to pursue other men as his libido returned, while Vollmer, feeling abandoned, started to drink heavily and mock Burroughs openly.[22]
One night, while drinking with friends at a party above the Bounty Bar in Mexico City,[26] a drunk Burroughs allegedly took his handgun from his travel bag and told his wife, "It's time for our William Tell act." There is no indication that they had performed such an action previously.[25] Vollmer, who was also drinking heavily and undergoing amphetamine withdrawal, allegedly obliged him by putting a highball glass on her head. Burroughs shot Vollmer in the head, killing her almost immediately.[27]
Soon after the incident, Burroughs changed his account, claiming that he had dropped his gun and it had accidentally fired.[28] Burroughs spent 13 days in jail before his brother came to Mexico City and bribed Mexican lawyers and officials to release Burroughs on bail while he awaited trial for the killing, which was ruled culpable homicide.
Vollmer's daughter, Julie Adams, went to live with her grandmother, and William S. Burroughs Jr. went to St. Louis to live with his grandparents. Burroughs reported every Monday morning to the jail in Mexico City while his prominent Mexican attorney worked to resolve the case. According to James Grauerholz, two witnesses had agreed to testify that the gun had fired accidentally while he was checking to see if it was loaded, with ballistics experts bribed to support this story.[8]: 202 Nevertheless, the trial was continuously delayed and Burroughs began to write what would eventually become the short novel Queer while awaiting his trial. Upon Burroughs' attorney fleeing Mexico in light of his own legal problems, Burroughs decided, according to Ted Morgan, to "skip" and return to the United States. He was convicted in absentia of homicide and was given a two-year suspended sentence.[8]: 214
Although Burroughs was writing before his murder of Joan Vollmer, this event marked him and, biographers argue, his work for the rest of his life.[8]: 197–198 Vollmer's death also resonated with Allen Ginsberg, who wrote of her in Dream Record: June 8, 1955, "Joan, what kind of knowledge have the dead? Can you still love your mortal acquaintances? What do you remember of us?" In Burroughs: The Movie, Ginsberg claimed that Vollmer had seemed possibly suicidal in the weeks leading up to her death, and he suggested that this may have been a factor in her willingness to take part in the risky William Tell stunt.[29]
After leaving Mexico, Burroughs drifted through South America for several months, seeking out a drug called yagé, which promised to give the user telepathic abilities. A book composed of letters between Burroughs and Ginsberg, The Yage Letters, was published in 1963 by City Lights Books. In 2006, a re-edited version, The Yage Letters Redux, showed that the letters were largely fictionalised from Burroughs' notes.
Burroughs described Vollmer's death as a pivotal event in his life, and one that provoked his writing by exposing him to the risk of possession by a malevolent entity he called "the Ugly Spirit":
I am forced to the appalling conclusion that I would never have become a writer but for Joan's death, and to a realization of the extent to which this event has motivated and formulated my writing. I live with the constant threat of possession, and a constant need to escape from possession, from Control. So the death of Joan brought me in contact with the invader, the Ugly Spirit, and maneuvered me into a life long struggle, in which I have had no choice except to write my way out.[30]
As Burroughs makes clear, he meant this reference to "possession" to be taken absolutely literally, stating: "My concept of possession is closer to the medieval model than to modern psychological explanations ... I mean a definite possessing entity."[30] Burroughs' writing was intended as a form of "sorcery", in his own words[31] – to disrupt language via methods such as the cut-up technique, and thus protect himself from possession.[d][e][f][g] Later in life, Burroughs described the Ugly Spirit as "Monopolistic, acquisitive evil. Ugly evil. The ugly American", and took part in a shamanic ceremony with the explicit aim of exorcising the Ugly Spirit.[36]
Oliver Harris has questioned Burroughs' claim that Vollmer's death catalysed his writing, highlighting the importance for Queer of Burroughs' traumatic relationship with the boyfriend fictionalized in the story as Eugene Allerton, rather than Burroughs' shooting of Vollmer. In any case, he had begun to write in 1945. Burroughs and Kerouac collaborated on And the Hippos Were Boiled in Their Tanks, a mystery novel loosely based on the Carr–Kammerer situation and that at the time remained unpublished. Years later, in the documentary What Happened to Kerouac?, Burroughs described it as "not a very distinguished work". An excerpt of this work, in which Burroughs and Kerouac wrote alternating chapters, was finally published in Word Virus,[37] a compendium of William Burroughs' writing that was published by his biographer after his death in 1997. The complete novel was finally published by Grove Press in 2008.
Before killing Vollmer, Burroughs had largely completed his first novel, Junkie, which he wrote at the urging of Allen Ginsberg, who was instrumental in getting the work published as a cheap mass-market paperback.[38] Ace Books published the novel in 1953 as part of an Ace Double under the pen name William Lee, retitling it Junkie: Confessions of an Unredeemed Drug Addict (it was later republished as Junkie, then in 1977 as Junky, and finally in 2003 as Junky: the definitive text of 'Junk', edited by Oliver Harris).[38]
During 1953, Burroughs was at loose ends. Due to legal problems, he was unable to live in the cities toward which he was most inclined. He spent time with his parents in Palm Beach, Florida, and in New York City with Allen Ginsberg. When Ginsberg refused his romantic advances,[39] Burroughs went to Rome to meet Alan Ansen on a vacation financed from his parents' continuing support. He found Rome and Ansen's company dreary and, inspired by Paul Bowles' fiction, he decided to head for the Tangier International Zone,[8]: 232–234 where he rented a room and began to write a large body of text that he personally referred to as Interzone.[40]
To Burroughs, all signs directed a return to Tangier, a city where drugs were freely available and where financial support from his family would continue. He realized that in the Moroccan culture he had found an environment that synchronized with his temperament and afforded no hindrances to pursuing his interests and indulging in his chosen activities. He left for Tangier in November 1954 and spent the next four years there working on the fiction that would later become Naked Lunch, as well as attempting to write commercial articles about Tangier. He sent these writings to Ginsberg, his literary agent for Junkie, but none were published until 1989 when Interzone, a collection of short stories, was published. Under the strong influence of a marijuana confection known as majoun and a German-made opioid called Eukodol, Burroughs settled in to write. Eventually, Ginsberg and Kerouac, who had traveled to Tangier in 1957, helped Burroughs type, edit, and arrange these episodes into Naked Lunch.[8]: 238–242
Further information: Naked Lunch
Whereas Junkie and Queer were conventional in style, Naked Lunch was his first venture into a nonlinear style. After the publication of Naked Lunch, a book whose creation was to a certain extent the result of a series of contingencies, Burroughs was exposed to Brion Gysin's cut-up technique at the Beat Hotel in Paris in October 1959. He began slicing up phrases and words to create new sentences.[41] At the Beat Hotel, Burroughs discovered "a port of entry" into Gysin's canvases: "I don't think I had ever seen painting until I saw the painting of Brion Gysin."[42] The two would cultivate a long-term friendship that revolved around a mutual interest in artworks and cut-up techniques. Scenes were slid together with little care for narrative.
Excerpts from Naked Lunch were first published in the United States in 1958. The novel was initially rejected by City Lights Books, the publisher of Ginsberg's Howl; and Olympia Press publisher Maurice Girodias, who had published English-language novels in France that were controversial for their subjective views of sex and antisocial characters. Nevertheless, Ginsberg managed to get excerpts published in Black Mountain Review and Chicago Review in 1958. Irving Rosenthal, student editor of Chicago Review, a quarterly journal partially subsidized by the university, promised to publish more excerpts from Naked Lunch, but he was fired from his position in 1958 after Chicago Daily News columnist Jack Mabley called the first excerpt obscene. Rosenthal went on to publish more in his newly created literary journal Big Table No. 1; however, the United States Postmaster General ruled that copies could not be mailed to subscribers on the basis of obscenity laws. John Ciardi did get a copy and wrote a positive review of the work, prompting a telegram from Allen Ginsberg praising the review.[43] This controversy made Naked Lunch interesting to Girodias again, and he published the novel in 1959.[44]
After the novel was published, it became notorious across Europe and the United States, garnering interest from not just members of the counterculture of the 1960s, but also literary critics such as Mary McCarthy. Once published in the United States, Naked Lunch was prosecuted as obscene by the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, followed by other states. In 1966, the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court declared the work "not obscene" on the basis of criteria developed largely to defend the book. The case against Burroughs' novel still stands as the last obscenity trial against a work of literature – that is, a work consisting of words only, and not including illustrations or photographs – prosecuted in the United States.
The Word Hoard, the collection of manuscripts that produced Naked Lunch, also produced parts of the later works The Soft Machine (1961), The Ticket That Exploded (1962), and Nova Express (1964). These novels feature extensive use of the cut-up technique that influenced all of Burroughs' subsequent fiction to a degree. During Burroughs' friendship and artistic collaborations with Gysin and Ian Sommerville, the technique was combined with images, Gysin's paintings, and sound, via Somerville's tape recorders. Burroughs was so dedicated to the cut-up method that he often defended his use of the technique before editors and publishers, most notably Dick Seaver at Grove Press in the 1960s[8]: 425 and Holt, Rinehart & Winston in the 1980s. The cut-up method, because of its random or mechanical basis for text generation, combined with the possibilities of mixing in text written by other writers, deemphasizes the traditional role of the writer as creator or originator of a string of words, while simultaneously exalting the importance of the writer's sensibility as an editor.[citation needed] In this sense, the cut-up method may be considered as analogous to the collage method in the visual arts.[citation needed] New restored editions of The Nova Trilogy (or Cut-Up Trilogy), edited by Oliver Harris (President of the European Beat Studies Network) and published in 2014, included notes and materials to reveal the care with which Burroughs used his methods and the complex histories of his manuscripts.
Burroughs moved into a rundown hotel in the Latin Quarter of Paris in 1959 when Naked Lunch was still looking for a publisher. Tangier, with its political unrest, and criminals with whom he had become involved, became dangerous to Burroughs.[45] He went to Paris to meet Ginsberg and talk with Olympia Press. He left behind a criminal charge which eventually caught up with him in Paris. Paul Lund, a British former career criminal and cigarette smuggler whom Burroughs met in Tangier, was arrested on suspicion of importing narcotics into France. Lund gave up Burroughs, and evidence implicated Burroughs in the importation of narcotics into France. When the Moroccan authorities forwarded their investigation to French officials, Burroughs faced criminal charges in Paris for conspiracy to import opiates. It was during this impending case that Maurice Girodias published Naked Lunch; its appearance helped to get Burroughs a suspended sentence, since a literary career, according to Ted Morgan, is a respected profession in France.
The "Beat Hotel" was a typical European-style boarding house hotel, with common toilets on every floor, and a small place for personal cooking in the room. Life there was documented by the photographer Harold Chapman, who lived in the attic room. This shabby, inexpensive hotel was populated by Gregory Corso, Ginsberg and Peter Orlovsky for several months after Naked Lunch first appeared.
Burroughs' time at the Beat Hotel was dominated by occult experiments – "mirror-gazing, scrying, trance and telepathy, all fuelled by a wide variety of mind-altering drugs".[46] Later, Burroughs would describe "visions" obtained by staring into the mirror for hours at a time – his hands transformed into tentacles,[h] or his whole image transforming into some strange entity,[i] or visions of far-off places,[48] or of other people rapidly undergoing metamorphosis.[j] It was from this febrile atmosphere that the famous cut-up technique emerged.
The actual process by which Naked Lunch was published was partly a function of its "cut-up" presentation to the printer. Girodias had given Burroughs only ten days to prepare the manuscript for print galleys, and Burroughs sent over the manuscript in pieces, preparing the parts in no particular order. When it was published in this authentically random manner, Burroughs liked it better than the initial plan. International rights to the work were sold soon after, and Burroughs used the $3,000 advance from Grove Press to buy drugs (equivalent to approximately $31,000 in today's funds[18]).[8]: 316–326 Naked Lunch was featured in a 1959 Life magazine cover story, partly as an article that highlighted the growing Beat literary movement. During this time Burroughs found an outlet for material otherwise rendered unpublishable in Jeff Nuttall's My Own Mag.[49] Also, poetry by Burroughs' appeared in the avant garde little magazine Nomad at the beginning of the 1960s.
Burroughs left Paris for London in 1960 to visit Dr. Dent, a well-known English medical doctor who spearheaded a reputedly painless heroin withdrawal treatment using the drug apomorphine.[50] Dent's apomorphine cure was also used to treat alcoholism, although it was held by several people who undertook it to be no more than straightforward aversion therapy. Burroughs, however, was convinced. Following his first cure, he wrote a detailed appreciation of apomorphine and other cures, which he submitted to The British Journal of Addiction (Vol. 53, 1956) under the title "Letter From A Master Addict To Dangerous Drugs"; this letter is appended to many editions of Naked Lunch.
Though he ultimately relapsed, Burroughs ended up working out of London for six years, traveling back to the United States on several occasions, including one time escorting his son to the Lexington Narcotics Farm and Prison after the younger Burroughs had been convicted of prescription fraud in Florida. In the "Afterword" to the compilation of his son's two previously published novels Speed and Kentucky Ham, Burroughs writes that he thought he had a "small habit" and left London quickly without any narcotics because he suspected the U.S. customs would search him very thoroughly on arrival. He claims he went through the most excruciating two months of opiate withdrawal while seeing his son through his trial and sentencing, traveling with Billy to Lexington, Kentucky from Miami to ensure that his son entered the hospital that he had once spent time in as a volunteer admission.[51] Earlier, Burroughs revisited St. Louis, Missouri, taking a large advance from Playboy to write an article about his trip back to St. Louis, one that was eventually published in The Paris Review, after Burroughs refused to alter the style for Playboy’s publishers. In 1968 Burroughs joined Jean Genet, John Sack, and Terry Southern in covering the 1968 Democratic National Convention for Esquire magazine. Southern and Burroughs, who had first become acquainted in London, would remain lifelong friends and collaborators. In 1972, Burroughs and Southern unsuccessfully attempted to adapt Naked Lunch for the screen in conjunction with American game-show producer Chuck Barris.[52]
Burroughs supported himself and his addiction by publishing pieces in small literary presses. His avant-garde reputation grew internationally as hippies and college students discovered his earlier works. He developed a close friendship with Antony Balch and lived with a young hustler named John Brady who continuously brought home young women despite Burroughs' protestations. In the midst of this personal turmoil, Burroughs managed to complete two works: a novel written in screenplay format, The Last Words of Dutch Schultz (1969); and the traditional prose-format novel The Wild Boys (1971).
It was during his time in London that Burroughs began using his "playback" technique in an attempt to place curses on various people and places who had drawn his ire, including the Moka coffee bar[53][k] and the London HQ of Scientology.[l] Burroughs himself related the Moka coffee bar incident:
Here is a sample operation carried out against the Moka Bar at 29 Frith Street, London, W1, beginning on August 3, 1972. Reverse Thursday. Reason for operation was outrageous and unprovoked discourtesy and poisonous cheesecake. Now to close in on the Moka Bar. Record. Take pictures. Stand around outside. Let them see me. They are seething around in there ... Playback would come later with more pictures ... Playback was carried out a number of times with more pictures. Their business fell off. They kept shorter and shorter hours. October 30, 1972, the Moka Bar closed. The location was taken over by the Queen's Snack Bar.[56]
In the 1960s, Burroughs joined and then left the Church of Scientology. In talking about the experience, he claimed that the techniques and philosophy of Scientology helped him and that he felt that further study of Scientology would produce great results.[57] He was skeptical of the organization itself, and felt that it fostered an environment that did not accept critical discussion.[58] His subsequent critical writings about the church and his review of Inside Scientology by Robert Kaufman led to a battle of letters between Burroughs and Scientology supporters in the pages of Rolling Stone magazine.
In 1974, concerned about his friend's well-being, Allen Ginsberg gained for Burroughs a contract to teach creative writing at the City College of New York. Burroughs successfully withdrew from heroin use and moved to New York. He eventually found an apartment, affectionately dubbed "The Bunker", on the Lower East Side of Manhattan at 222 Bowery.[59] The dwelling was a partially converted YMCA gym, complete with lockers and communal showers. The building fell within New York City rent control policies that made it extremely cheap; it was only about four hundred dollars a month until 1981 when the rent control rules changed, doubling the rent overnight.[60] Burroughs added "teacher" to the list of jobs he did not like, as he lasted only a semester as a professor; he found the students uninteresting and without much creative talent. Although he needed income desperately, he turned down a teaching position at the University at Buffalo for $15,000 a semester. "The teaching gig was a lesson in never again. You were giving out all this energy and nothing was coming back."[8]: 477 His savior was the newly arrived twenty-one-year-old bookseller and Beat Generation devotee James Grauerholz, who worked for Burroughs part-time as a secretary as well as in a bookstore. Grauerholz suggested the idea of reading tours. Grauerholz had managed several rock bands in Kansas and took the lead in booking for Burroughs reading tours that would help support him throughout the next two decades. It raised his public profile, eventually aiding in his obtaining new publishing contracts. Through Grauerholz, Burroughs became a monthly columnist for the noted popular culture magazine Crawdaddy, for which he interviewed Led Zeppelin's Jimmy Page in 1975. Burroughs decided to relocate back to the United States permanently in 1976. He then began to associate with New York cultural players such as Andy Warhol, John Giorno, Lou Reed, Patti Smith, and Susan Sontag, frequently entertaining them at the Bunker; he also visited venues like CBGB to watch the likes of Patti Smith perform.[61] Throughout early 1977, Burroughs collaborated with Southern and Dennis Hopper on a screen adaptation of Junky. It was reported in The New York Times that Burroughs himself would appear in the film. Financed by a reclusive acquaintance of Burroughs, the project lost traction after financial problems and creative disagreements between Hopper and Burroughs.[62][63]
In 1976, he appeared in Rosa von Praunheim's New York documentary Underground & Emigrants.
Organized by Columbia professor Sylvère Lotringer, Giorno, and Grauerholz, the Nova Convention was a multimedia retrospective of Burroughs' work held from November 30 to December 2, 1978, at various locations throughout New York. The event included readings from Southern, Ginsberg, Smith, and Frank Zappa (who filled in at the last minute for Keith Richards, then entangled in a legal problem), in addition to panel discussions with Timothy Leary and Robert Anton Wilson and concerts featuring The B-52's, Suicide, Philip Glass, and Debbie Harry and Chris Stein.
In 1976, Burroughs was having dinner with his son, William S. "Billy" Burroughs Jr., and Allen Ginsberg in Boulder, Colorado, at Ginsberg's Buddhist poetry school (Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics) at Chogyam Trungpa's Naropa University when Billy began to vomit blood. Burroughs Sr. had not seen his son for over a year and was alarmed at his appearance when Billy arrived at Ginsberg's apartment. Although Billy had successfully published two short novels in the 1970s and was deemed by literary critics like Ann Charters as a bona fide "second generation beat writer",[64] his brief marriage to a teenage waitress had disintegrated. Billy was a constant drinker, and there were long periods when he was out of contact with any of his family or friends. The diagnosis was liver cirrhosis so complete that the only treatment was a rarely performed liver transplant operation. Fortunately, the University of Colorado Medical Center was one of two places in the nation that performed transplants under the pioneering work of Dr. Thomas Starzl. Billy underwent the procedure and beat the thirty-percent survival odds. His father spent time in 1976 and 1977 in Colorado, helping Billy through additional surgeries and complications. Ted Morgan's biography asserts that their relationship was not spontaneous and lacked real warmth or intimacy. Allen Ginsberg was supportive to both Burroughs and his son throughout the long period of recovery.[8]: 495–536
In London, Burroughs had begun to write what would become the first novel of a trilogy, published as Cities of the Red Night (1981), The Place of Dead Roads (1983), and The Western Lands (1987). Grauerholz helped edit Cities when it was first rejected by Burroughs' long-time editor Dick Seaver at Holt Rinehart, after it was deemed too disjointed. The novel was written as a straight narrative and then chopped up into a more random pattern, leaving the reader to sort through the characters and events. This technique differed from the author's earlier cut-up methods, which were accidental from the start. Nevertheless, the novel was reassembled and published, still without a straight linear form, but with fewer breaks in the story. The trilogy featured time-travel adventures in which Burroughs' narrators rewrote episodes from history to reform mankind.[8]: 565 Reviews were mixed for Cities. Novelist and critic Anthony Burgess panned the work in Saturday Review, saying Burroughs was boring readers with repetitive episodes of pederast fantasy and sexual strangulation that lacked any comprehensible world view or theology; other reviewers, like J. G. Ballard, argued that Burroughs was shaping a new literary "mythography".[8]: 565
In 1981, Billy Burroughs died in Florida. He had cut off contact with his father several years before, even publishing an article in Esquire magazine claiming his father had poisoned his life and claiming that he had been molested as a fourteen-year-old by one of his father's friends while visiting Tangier. The liver transplant had not cured his urge to drink, and Billy suffered from serious health complications years after the operation. After he had stopped taking his transplant rejection drugs, he was found near the side of a Florida highway by a stranger. He died shortly afterward. Burroughs was in New York when he heard from Allen Ginsberg of Billy's death.
Burroughs, by 1979, was once again addicted to heroin. The cheap heroin that was easily purchased outside his door on the Lower East Side "made its way" into his veins, coupled with "gifts" from the overzealous if well-intentioned admirers who frequently visited the Bunker. Although Burroughs would have episodes of being free from heroin, from this point until his death he was regularly addicted to the drug. In an introduction to Last Words: The Final Journals of William S. Burroughs, James Grauerholz (who managed Burroughs' reading tours in the 1980s and 1990s) mentions that part of his job was to deal with the "underworld" in each city to secure the author's drugs.[65]
Burroughs moved to Lawrence, Kansas, in 1981, taking up residence at 1927 Learnard Avenue where he would spend the rest of his life. He once told a Wichita Eagle reporter that he was content to live in Kansas, saying, "The thing I like about Kansas is that it's not nearly as violent, and it's a helluva lot cheaper. And I can get out in the country and fish and shoot and whatnot."[66] In 1984, he signed a seven-book deal with Viking Press after he signed with literary agent Andrew Wylie. This deal included the publication rights to the unpublished 1952 novel Queer. With this money he purchased a small bungalow for $29,000.[8]: 596 He was finally inducted into the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters in 1983 after several attempts by Allen Ginsberg to get him accepted. He attended the induction ceremony in May 1983. Lawrence Ferlinghetti remarked the induction of Burroughs into the Academy proved Herbert Marcuse's point that capitalistic society had a great ability to incorporate its one-time outsiders.[8]: 577
By this point, Burroughs was a counterculture icon. In his final years, he cultivated an entourage of young friends who replaced his aging contemporaries. In the 1980s he collaborated with performers ranging from Bill Laswell's Material and Laurie Anderson to Throbbing Gristle. Burroughs and R.E.M. collaborated on the song "Star Me Kitten" on the Songs in the Key of X: Music from and Inspired by the X-Files album. A collaboration with musicians Nick Cave and Tom Waits resulted in a collection of short prose, Smack My Crack, later released as a spoken-word album in 1987. In 1989, he appeared with Matt Dillon in Gus Van Sant's film, Drugstore Cowboy. In 1990, he released the spoken word album Dead City Radio, with musical backup from producers Hal Willner and Nelson Lyon, and alternative rock band Sonic Youth. He collaborated with Tom Waits and director Robert Wilson on The Black Rider, a play that opened at the Thalia Theatre in Hamburg in 1990 to critical acclaim, one that was later performed across Europe and the U.S. In 1991, with Burroughs' approval, director David Cronenberg adapted Naked Lunch into a feature film, which opened to critical acclaim.
During 1982, Burroughs developed a painting technique whereby he created abstract compositions by placing spray paint cans in front of blank surfaces, and then shooting at the paint cans with a shotgun. These splattered and shot panels and canvasses were first exhibited in the Tony Shafrazi Gallery in New York City in 1987. By this time he had developed a comprehensive visual art practice, using ink, spray paint, collage and unusual things such as mushrooms and plungers to apply the paint. He created file-folder paintings featuring these mediums as well as "automatic calligraphy" inspired by Brion Gysin. He originally used the folders to mix pigments before observing that they could be viewed as art in themselves. He also used many of these painted folders to store manuscripts and correspondence in his personal archive[67] Until his last years, he prolifically created visual art. Burroughs' work has since been featured in more than fifty international galleries and museums including Royal Academy of the Arts, Centre Pompidou, Guggenheim Museum, ZKM Karlsruhe, Sammlung Falckenberg, New Museum, Irish Museum of Modern Art, Los Angeles County Museum, and Whitney Museum of American Art.[68]
According to Ministry frontman Al Jourgensen, "We hung out at Burroughs's house one time in '93. So he decides to shoot up heroin and he takes out this utility belt full of syringes. Huge, old-fashioned ones from the '50s or something. Now, I have no idea how an 80 year old guy finds a vein, but he knew what he was doing. So we're all laying around high and stuff and then I notice in the pile of mail on the coffee table that there's a letter from the White House. I said 'Hey, this looks important.' and he replies 'Nah, it's probably just junk mail.' Well, I open the letter and it's from President Clinton inviting Burroughs to the White House for a poetry reading. I said 'Wow, do you have any idea how big this is!?' So he says 'What? Who's president nowadays?' and it floored me. He didn't even know who our current president was."[69]
In 1990, Burroughs was honored with a star on the St. Louis Walk of Fame.[70]
In June 1991, Burroughs underwent triple bypass surgery.[71]
He became a member of a chaos magic organization, the Illuminates of Thanateros, in 1993.[72]
He was a voice actor in the 1995 video game The Dark Eye based on the works of Edgar Allan Poe, in which he recites "Annabel Lee".
Burroughs' last filmed performance was in the music video for "Last Night on Earth" by Irish rock band U2, filmed in Kansas City, Missouri, directed by Richie Smyth and also featuring Sophie Dahl.[73]
The only newspaper columnist Burroughs admired was Westbrook Pegler, a right-wing opinion shaper for the William Randolph Hearst newspaper chain.[8]: 170 Burroughs believed in frontier individualism, which he championed as "our glorious frontier heritage on minding your own business." Burroughs came to equate liberalism with bureaucratic tyranny, viewing government authority as a collective of meddlesome forces legislating the curtailment of personal freedom. According to his biographer Ted Morgan, his philosophy for living one's life was to adhere to a laissez-faire path, one without encumbrances – in essence a credo shared with the capitalist business world.[8]: 55 His abhorrence of the government did not prevent Burroughs from using its programs to his own advantage. In 1949 he enrolled in Mexico City College under the GI Bill, which paid for part of his tuition and books and provided him with a seventy-five-dollar-per-month stipend. He maintained, "I always say, keep your snout in the public trough."[8]: 173
Burroughs was a gun enthusiast and owned several shotguns, a Colt .45 and a .38 Special. Sonic Youth vocalist Thurston Moore recounted meeting Burroughs: "he had a number of Guns and Ammo magazines laying about, and he was only very interested in talking about shooting and knifing ... I asked him if he had a Beretta and he said: 'Ah, that's a ladies' pocket-purse gun. I like guns that shoot and knives that cut.'" Hunter S. Thompson gave him a one-of-a-kind .454 caliber pistol.[74] Burroughs was also a staunch supporter of the Second Amendment, being quoted as saying: "I sure as hell wouldn't want to live in a society where the only people allowed guns are the police and the military."[75]
Burroughs had a longstanding preoccupation with magic and the occult, dating from his earliest childhood, and was insistent throughout his life that we live in a "magical universe".[76] As he himself explained:
In the magical universe there are no coincidences and there are no accidents. Nothing happens unless someone wills it to happen. The dogma of science is that the will cannot possibly affect external forces, and I think that's just ridiculous. It's as bad as the church. My viewpoint is the exact contrary of the scientific viewpoint. I believe that if you run into somebody in the street it's for a reason. Among primitive people they say that if someone was bitten by a snake he was murdered. I believe that.[77]
Or, speaking in the 1970s:
Since the word "magic" tends to cause confused thinking, I would like to say exactly what I mean by "magic" and the magical interpretation of so-called reality. The underlying assumption of magic is the assertion of "will" as the primary moving force in this universe – the deep conviction that nothing happens unless somebody or some being wills it to happen. To me this has always seemed self evident ... From the viewpoint of magic, no death, no illness, no misfortune, accident, war or riot is accidental. There are no accidents in the world of magic.[78]
This was no idle passing interest – Burroughs also actively practiced magic in his everyday life: seeking out mystical visions through practices like scrying,[79][80][48] taking measures to protect himself from possession,[81][82][35][36] and attempting to lay curses on those who had crossed him.[53][54][83] Burroughs spoke openly about his magical practices, and his engagement with the occult is attested from a multitude of interviews,[m][n][85] as well as personal accounts from those who knew him.[53][54][35]
Biographer Ted Morgan has argued that: "As the single most important thing about Graham Greene was his viewpoint as a lapsed Catholic, the single most important thing about Burroughs was his belief in the magical universe. The same impulse that led him to put out curses was, as he saw it, the source of his writing ... To Burroughs behind everyday reality there was the reality of the spirit world, of psychic visitations, of curses, of possession and phantom beings."[8][86]
Burroughs was unwavering in his insistence that his writing itself had a magical purpose.[o][p][q][r][91] This was particularly true when it came to his use of the cut-up technique. Burroughs was adamant that the technique had a magical function, stating "the cut ups are not for artistic purposes".[92] Burroughs used his cut-ups for "political warfare, scientific research, personal therapy, magical divination, and conjuration"[92] – the essential idea being that the cut-ups allowed the user to "break down the barriers that surround consciousness".[93] As Burroughs himself stated:
I would say that my most interesting experience with the earlier techniques was the realization that when you make cut-ups you do not get simply random juxtapositions of words, that they do mean something, and often that these meanings refer to some future event. I've made many cut-ups and then later recognized that the cut-up referred to something that I read later in a newspaper or a book, or something that happened ... Perhaps events are pre-written and pre-recorded and when you cut word lines the future leaks out.[93]
In the final decade of his life, Burroughs became heavily involved in the chaos magic movement. Burroughs' magical techniques – the cut-up, playback, etc. – had been incorporated into chaos magic by such practitioners as Phil Hine,[94][95][96] Dave Lee[97] and Genesis P-Orridge.[98][53] P-Orridge in particular had known and studied under Burroughs and Brion Gysin for over a decade.[53] This led to Burroughs contributing material to the book Between Spaces: Selected Rituals & Essays From The Archives Of Templum Nigri Solis[99] Through this connection, Burroughs came to personally know many of the leading lights of the chaos magic movement, including Hine, Lee, Peter J. Carroll, Ian Read and Ingrid Fischer, as well as Douglas Grant, head of the North American section of chaos magic group the Illuminates of Thanateros (IOT).[76][100] Burroughs' involvement with the movement further deepened, as he contributed artwork and other material to chaos magic books,[101] addressed an IOT gathering in Austria,[102] and was eventually fully initiated into the Illuminates of Thanateros.[s][103][76] As Burroughs' close friend James Grauerholz states: "William was very serious about his studies in, and initiation into the IOT ... Our longtime friend, Douglas Grant, was a prime mover."[100]
Burroughs died August 2, 1997, at age 83, in Lawrence, Kansas, from complications of a heart attack he had suffered the previous day.[19] He was interred in the family plot in Bellefontaine Cemetery in St. Louis, Missouri,[105] with a marker bearing his full name and the epitaph "American Writer". His grave lies to the right of the white granite obelisk of William Seward Burroughs I (1857–1898).
Since 1997, several posthumous collections of Burroughs' work have been published. A few months after his death, a collection of writings spanning his entire career, Word Virus, was published (according to the book's introduction, Burroughs himself approved its contents prior to his death). Aside from numerous previously released pieces, Word Virus also included what was promoted as one of the few surviving fragments of And the Hippos Were Boiled in Their Tanks, a novel by Burroughs and Kerouac. The complete Kerouac/Burroughs manuscript And the Hippos Were Boiled in Their Tanks was published for the first time in November 2008.[106]
A collection of journal entries written during the final months of Burroughs' life was published as the book Last Words in 2000. Publication of a memoir by Burroughs entitled Evil River by Viking Press has been delayed several times; after initially being announced for a 2005 release, online booksellers indicated a 2007 release, complete with an ISBN (ISBN 0-670-81351-6), but it remains unpublished.[107]
New enlarged or unexpurgated editions of numerous texts have been published in recent years as "Restored Text" or "Redux" editions all containing additional material and essays on the works or incorporating material edited out of previous versions. Beginning with Barry Miles and James Grauerholz's 2003 edition of Naked Lunch, followed by Oliver Harris's reconstructions of three trilogies of writings. The first of these are the early writings: Junky:the definitive text of "Junk" (2003), Queer: 25th-Anniversary Edition (2010) and The Yage Letters Redux (2006). Following the publication of the latter in December 2007, Ohio State University Press released Everything Lost: The Latin American Journals of William S. Burroughs also edited by Harris, the book contains transcriptions of journal entries made by Burroughs during the time of composing Queer and The Yage Letters, with cover art and review information. There followed "restored text" versions of some of Burroughs' best known novels The Soft Machine, The Ticket that Exploded and Nova Express (styled "the Cut Up Trilogy" officially here for the first time) from Penguin in 2014, and of Burroughs' more obscure collaborative poetic experiments of 1960 Minutes to Go: Redux and The Exterminator: Redux by Moloko Press in 2020. These books, originally pamphlets, are bulked out to three times their original size and the "trilogy" is complete with the completely new BATTLE INSTRUCTIONS an allied experimental collaboration, composited by Harris from unpublished drafts and recordings of the same period.
Burroughs' major works can be divided into four different periods. The dates refer to the time of writing, not publication, which in some cases was not until decades later:
Early work (early 1950s)
Junkie, Queer and The Yage Letters are relatively straightforward linear narratives, written in and about Burroughs' time in Mexico City and South America.
The cut-up period (mid-1950s to mid-1960s)
Although published before Burroughs discovered the cut-up technique, Naked Lunch is a fragmentary collection of "routines" from The Word Hoard – manuscripts written in Tangier, Paris, London, as well as of other texts written in South America such as "The Composite City", blending into the cut-up and fold-in fiction also partly drawn from The Word Hoard: The Soft Machine, Nova Express, The Ticket That Exploded, also referred to as "The Nova Trilogy" or "The Cut-Up Trilogy", self-described by Burroughs as an attempt to create "a mythology for the space age". Interzone also derives from the mid-1950s.
Experiment and subversion (mid-1960s to mid-1970s)
This period saw Burroughs continue experimental writing with increased political content and branching into multimedia such as film and sound recording. Perhaps the defining and most important of which works is The Third Mind (with Brion Gysin) announced in 1966 and not published until the late '70s. The only major novels written in this period are The Wild Boys, and Port of Saints (republished in a different rewritten form in 1980, in the style Burroughs would adopt at that time). However, he also wrote dozens of published articles, short stories, scrap books and other works, several in collaboration with Brion Gysin. The major anthologies representing work from this period are The Burroughs File, The Adding Machine and Exterminator!.
The Red Night trilogy (mid-1970s to mid-1980s)
The books Cities of the Red Night, The Place of Dead Roads and The Western Lands came from Burroughs in a final, mature stage, creating a complete mythology.
Burroughs also produced numerous essays and a large body of autobiographical material, including a book with a detailed account of his own dreams (My Education: A Book of Dreams).
Several literary critics treated Burroughs' work harshly. For example, Anatole Broyard and Philip Toynbee wrote devastating reviews of some of his most important books. In a short essay entitled "A Review of the Reviewers", Burroughs answers his critics in this way:
Critics constantly complain that writers are lacking in standards, yet they themselves seem to have no standards other than personal prejudice for literary criticism. ... such standards do exist. Matthew Arnold set up three criteria for criticism: 1. What is the writer trying to do? 2. How well does he succeed in doing it? ... 3. Does the work exhibit "high seriousness"? That is, does it touch on basic issues of good and evil, life and death and the human condition. I would also apply a fourth criterion ... Write about what you know. More writers fail because they try to write about things they don't know than for any other reason.
— William S. Burroughs, "A Review of the Reviewers"[108]
[unreliable source?]
Burroughs clearly indicates here that he prefers to be evaluated against such criteria over being reviewed based on the reviewer's personal reactions to a certain book. Always a contradictory figure, Burroughs nevertheless criticized Anatole Broyard for reading authorial intent into his works where there is none, which sets him at odds both with New Criticism and the old school as represented by Matthew Arnold.
Burroughs used photography extensively throughout his career, both as a recording medium in planning his writings, and as a significant dimension of his own artistic practice, in which photographs and other images feature as significant elements in cut-ups. With Ian Sommerville, he experimented with photography's potential as a form of memory-device, photographing and rephotographing his own pictures in increasingly complex time-image arrangements.[109]
Burroughs is often called one of the greatest and most influential writers of the 20th century, most notably by Norman Mailer whose quote on Burroughs, "The only American novelist living today who may conceivably be possessed by genius", appears on many Burroughs publications. Others consider his concepts and attitude more influential than his prose. Prominent admirers of Burroughs' work have included British critic and biographer Peter Ackroyd, the rock critic Lester Bangs, the philosopher Gilles Deleuze and the authors Michael Moorcock. J. G. Ballard, Angela Carter, Jean Genet, William Gibson, Alan Moore, Kathy Acker and Ken Kesey. Burroughs had an influence on the German writer Carl Weissner, who in addition to being his German translator was a novelist in his own right and frequently wrote cut-up texts in a manner reminiscent of Burroughs.[110]
Burroughs continues to be named as an influence by contemporary writers of fiction. Both the New Wave and, especially, the cyberpunk schools of science fiction are indebted to him. Admirers from the late 1970s – early 1980s milieu of this subgenre include William Gibson and John Shirley, to name only two. First published in 1982, the British slipstream fiction magazine Interzone (which later evolved into a more traditional science fiction magazine) paid tribute to him with its choice of name. He is also cited as a major influence by musicians Roger Waters, David Bowie, Patti Smith, Genesis P-Orridge,[111] Ian Curtis, Lou Reed, Laurie Anderson, Todd Tamanend Clark, John Zorn, Tom Waits, Gary Numan and Kurt Cobain.[112]
In the film William S. Burroughs: A Man Within, Ira Silverberg commented on Burroughs' development as a writer:
Usually, the most radical work tends to come from the upper classes, because they're trying so hard to shop so hard to get away from their roots. So he's a fascinating character uniquely American in that regard. I don't think that work could have existed had he not been breaking away from an incredibly patrician Midwestern background.
Drugs, homosexuality, and death, common among Burroughs' themes, have been taken up by Dennis Cooper, of whom Burroughs said, "Dennis Cooper, God help him, is a born writer".[113] Cooper, in return, wrote, in his essay 'King Junk', "along with Jean Genet, John Rechy, and Ginsberg, [Burroughs] helped make homosexuality seem cool and highbrow, providing gay liberation with a delicious edge". Splatterpunk writer Poppy Z. Brite has frequently referenced this aspect of Burroughs' work. Burroughs' writing continues to be referenced years after his death; for example, a November 2004 episode of the TV series CSI: Crime Scene Investigation included an evil character named Dr. Benway (named for an amoral physician who appears in a number of Burroughs' works.) This is an echo of the hospital scene in the movie Repo Man, made during Burroughs' life-time, in which both Dr. Benway and Mr. Lee (a Burroughs pen name) are paged.
Burroughs had an impact on twentieth-century esotericism and occultism as well, most notably through disciples like Peter Lamborn Wilson and Genesis P-Orridge. Burroughs is also cited by Robert Anton Wilson as the first person to notice the "23 Enigma":
I first heard of the '23 Enigma' from William S. Burroughs, author of Naked Lunch, Nova Express, etc. According to Burroughs, he had known a certain Captain Clark, around 1960 in Tangier, who once bragged that he had been sailing 23 years without an accident. That very day, Clark's ship had an accident that killed him and everybody else aboard. Furthermore, while Burroughs was thinking about this crude example of the irony of the gods that evening, a bulletin on the radio announced the crash of an airliner in Florida, USA. The pilot was another Captain Clark and the flight was Flight 23.
— Robert Anton Wilson, Fortean Times[114]
Some research[115] suggests that Burroughs is arguably the progenitor of the 2012 phenomenon, a belief of New Age Mayanism that an apocalyptic shift in human consciousness would occur at the end of the Mayan Long Count calendar in 2012. Although never directly focusing on the year 2012 himself, Burroughs had an influence on early 2012 proponents such as Terence McKenna and Jose Argüelles, and as well had written about an apocalyptic shift of human consciousness at the end of the Long Count as early as 1960's The Exterminator.[116]
Main article: William S. Burroughs bibliography
Burroughs, William S. (2012). The Job: Interviews with William S. Burroughs. Penguin UK. ISBN 978-0-14-190358-3.
Grant, Douglas (2015). "Magick and Photography". Ashé Journal .
Harris, Oliver (2017). "William S. Burroughs: Beating Postmodernism". In Belletto, Steven (ed.). The Cambridge Companion to the Beats. Cambridge University Press. ISBN 978-1-107-18445-9.
Grauerholz, James; Silverberg, Ira; Douglas, Ann, eds. (2000). Word Virus: The William S. Burroughs Reader. New York: Grove Press. ISBN 0-8021-3694-X. OCLC 57590795, ISBN 978-0-8021-3694-7.
Lee, Dave (1989). "Cut Up and Collage in Magic". Chaotopia!. Archived from the original on June 12, 2018 .
Morgan, Ted (1988). Literary Outlaw: The Life and Times of William S. Burroughs. New York: Avon. ISBN 0-8050-0901-9.
P-Orridge, Genesis Breyer (2003). "Magick Squares and Future Beats". In Metzger, Richard (ed.). Book of Lies: The Disinformation Guide to Magick and the Occult. Red Wheel Weiser. ISBN 978-0-9713942-7-8.
P-Orridge, Genesis Breyer (2010). Thee Psychick Bible: Thee Apocryphal Scriptures ov Genesis Breyer P-Orridge and Thee Third Mind ov Thee Temple ov Psychick Youth. Feral House. ISBN 978-1-932595-94-9.
Wason, Thomas (February 15, 1951). "William Burroughs" (PDF). Mexico City Collegian. Vol. 4. p. 6.
Burroughs, William S. (2001). Burroughs Live: The Collected Interviews of William S. Burroughs, 1960–1997. Zone Books. ISBN 978-1-58435-010-1.
Stevens, Matthew Levi (2014). The Magical Universe of William S. Burroughs. Mandrake of Oxford. ISBN 978-1-906958-64-0.
Allmer, Patricia and John Sears (ed.) Taking Shots: The Photography of William S. Burroughs, London: Prestel and The Photographers' Gallery, 2014.
Charters, Ann (ed.). The Portable Beat Reader. New York: Penguin Books, 1992. ISBN 0-670-83885-3 (hc); ISBN 0-14-015102-8 (pbk).
Gilmore, John. Laid Bare: A Memoir of Wrecked Lives and the Hollywood Death Trip. Searching for Rimbaud. Amok Books, 1997.
Harris, Oliver. William Burroughs and the Secret of Fascination. Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 2003.
Johnson, Robert Earl. The Lost Years of William S. Burroughs: Beats in South Texas. Texas A&M University Press, 2006.
Kashner, Sam, When I Was Cool, My Life at the Jack Kerouac School. New York: HarperCollins Perennial, 2005.
Miles, Barry. William Burroughs: El Hombre Invisible: A Portrait. New York: Hyperion, 1993.
Sargeant, Jack. Naked Lens: Beat Cinema. New York: Soft Skull Press, 2008 [1997] [2001].
Schneiderman, Davis and Philip Walsh. Retaking the Universe: William S. Burroughs in the Age of Globalization. London: Pluto Press, 2004.
Stevens, Mathew Levi. The Magical Universe of William S. Burroughs. Mandrake of Oxford, 2014.
Stevens, Michael. The Road to Interzone: Reading William S. Burroughs Reading. Suicide Press, Archer City, Texas, 2009.
Weidner, Chad. The Green Ghost: William Burroughs and the Ecological Mind. Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 2016.
Wills, David S. Scientologist! William S. Burroughs and the Weird Cult. Beatdom Books, London, 2013.
Bernhard Valentinitsch, Hoch hinauf strebend und doch geerdet - über den Schriftsteller Harald Sommer, den steirischen William S. Burroughs. In: Denken und Glauben.Nr.199.Graz 2021.Nr.199, p. 22-24.
William S. Burroughs papers (17 linear feet – 94 boxes) are held by the Berg Collection of the New York Public Library.
William Seward Burroughs Papers, 1957–1976 (2 linear feet) are held in the Columbia University Libraries.
William S. Burroughs Papers, SPEC.CMS.40 (ca. 1945-ca. 1984, 55 boxes plus additions) are held in the Ohio State University libraries.
William S. Burroughs Papers, SPEC.CMS.85 (ca. 1945-ca. 1984, 6 boxes) are held in the Ohio State University libraries.
William S. Burroughs Papers, SPEC.CMS.87 (ca. 1945-ca. 1984, 58 boxes) are held in the Ohio State University libraries.
William S. Burroughs Papers, SPEC.CMS.90 (ca. 1945-ca. 1984, 29 boxes) are held in the Ohio State University libraries.
William S. Burroughs collection (3 linear feet) are held in the Manuscript, Archives, and Rare Book Library at Emory University.
William S. Burroughs Collection, MS 63 and James Grauerholz Collection of William S. Burroughs, MS 319, are held at the Kenneth Spencer Research Library, University of Kansas
William S. Burroughs Internet Database, edited by postmodern American scholar Michael Gurnow, hosted on the servers of Southeast Missouri State University from 2000 to 2012.
[1], Taking Shots: The Photography of William S. Burroughs, The Photographers' Gallery exhibition website.
[2], William S. Burroughs and Photography Lecture Series
William S. Burroughs at IMDb
William S. Burroughs at the Internet Speculative Fiction Database
William S. Burroughs audio documentary narrated by Iggy Pop [3]
William S. Burroughs Internet Database at Southeast Missouri State University
International festivities for 50th anniversary of Naked Lunch
A gallery of Burroughs book cover designs
William Burroughs and Tom Waits
Allen Ginsberg & William S. Burroughs, Last Public Appearance November 2, 1996, Lawrence, KS
European Beat Studies Network
William S. Burroughs: A Man Within site for Independent Lens on PBS
William S. Burroughs: A Man Within at IMDb
Anything but Routine: A Selectively Annotated Bibliography of William S. Burroughs v 2.0 by Brian E.C. Schottlaender, UC San Diego, 2010
Burroughs 101 by This American Life, January 30, 2015
A finding aid to the William Burroughs and Brion Gysin writings, 1963–1973, 1997 in the Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution
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2017-09-20T09:51:14+00:00
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Earlier this year, I read Rabih Alameddine’s An Unnecessary Woman for the first time, and was immediately delighted—I mean, if you want to seduce me as a reader, you could do no better than t…
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Literary Hub
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https://lithub.com/the-reading-lists-hidden-inside-12-great-books/
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Earlier this year, I read Rabih Alameddine’s An Unnecessary Woman for the first time, and was immediately delighted—I mean, if you want to seduce me as a reader, you could do no better than to mention W. G. Sebald on page three. Except perhaps by following up with Roberto Bolaño and Italo Calvino, which Alameddine does in short order. You see, the protagonist of An Unnecessary Woman is an amateur translator of great texts—no one reads her work, but her entire life revolves around books. (Relatable.) I was halfway though before I realized that I should probably be keeping a list of the books mentioned in the text, but as it turns out, there was little need—I found one online. Afterwards, I was inspired to look into other book-filled books. Spoiler alert: there are quite a number. It’s almost as if writers love books or something.
Article continues below
Note that I am counting plays as books here, as well as book-length poems and epics, but short stories and single poems are listed separately. I make no claims that these lists are definitive, though I’ve made them as complete as possible. Obviously, there are many more novels and memoirs that mention long lists of books than are included here, but I’m limited, as ever, by time, availability of data, and the demands of maintaining sanity. So below, please find twelve books that are filled to the gills with mentions of other books, and feel free to add further suggestions in the comments.
Rabih Alameddine, An Unnecessary Woman
Austerlitz, W. G. Sebald
The Emigrants, W. G. Sebald
2666, Roberto Bolaño
The Savage Detectives, Roberto Bolaño
A Heart So White, Javier Marías
Tomorrow in the Battle Think on Me, Javier Marías
Your Face Tomorrow trilogy, Javier Marías
A Tale of Two Cities, Charles Dickens
Invisible Cities, Italo Calvino
Cinnamon Shops, Bruno Schulz
The Conformist, Alberto Moravia
Lolita, Vladimir Nabokov
The Reluctant Fundamentalist, Mohsin Hamid
The Shipping News, Annie Proulx
The Magic Mountain, Thomas Mann
One Hundred Years of Solitude, Gabriel García Márquez
The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis, José Saramago
Murphy, Samuel Beckett
Waiting for Godot, Samuel Beckett
Giovanni’s Room, James Baldwin
Corydon, André Gide
Sepharad, Antonio Muñoz Molina
Sophie’s Choice, William Styron
Nightwood, Djuna Barnes
The Leopard, Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa
Kaddish for an Unborn Child, Imre Kertész
Fateless (or Fatelessness), Imre Kertész
Crime and Punishment, Fyodor Dostoyevsky
The Brothers Karamazov, Fyodor Dostoyevsky
The Kingdom of God Is Within You, Fyodor Dostoyevsky
Madame Bovary, Gustave Flaubert
The Waves, Virginia Woolf
Mrs. Dalloway, Virginia Woolf
Anna Karenina, Leo Tolstoy
The Book of Disquiet, Fernando Pessoa
The Fall, Albert Camus
The French Lieutenant’s Woman, John Fowles
Metamorphosis, Franz Kafka
The English Patient, Michael Ondaatje
Dubliners, James Joyce
Herzog, Saul Bellow
For Whom the Bell Tolls, Ernest Hemingway
The Encyclopedia of the Dead, Danilo Kiš
Ransom, David Malouf
The Color Purple, Alice Walker
This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen, Tadeusz Borowski
Alice in Wonderland, Lewis Carroll
Flight Without End, Joseph Roth
Hunger, Knut Hamsun
A Book of Memories, Péter Nádas
The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, Muriel Spark
A House for Mr. Biswas, V. S. Naipaul
Midnight’s Children, Salman Rushdie
Waiting for the Barbarians, J. M. Coetzee
Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, Edward Albee
Article continues below
Plus the stories “Hills Like White Elephants,” by Ernest Hemingway, and “Death of a Traveling Salesman,” by Eudora Welty, as well as the poem “The Vanity of Human Wishes” by Samuel Johnson.
Other writers mentioned include:
Albert Camus, Marguerite Duras, Junot Díaz, Aleksandar Hemon, Nadine Gordimer, Nuruddin Farah, Patrick White, Milan Kundera, Ismail Kadare, Nikolai Gogol, Jorge Luis Borges, Cees Nooteboom, Bilge Karasu, Marguerite Yourcenar, Constantine P. Cavafy, Alice Munro, Sadegh Hedayat, Marcel Proust, Jean Améry, Novalis, William Burroughs, Joseph Conrad, Federico García Lorca
[list adapted from Macro Literature]
Article continues below
Alison Bechdel, Fun Home
Anna Karenina, Leo Tolstoy
The Nude, Kenneth Clark
The Stones of Venice, John Ruskin
Just So Stories, Rudyard Kipling
A Happy Death, Albert Camus
The Tin Drum, Günter Grass
The Sun Also Rises, Ernest Hemingway
The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald
The Far Side of Paradise, F. Scott Fitzgerald
Zelda, Nancy Milford
Remembrance of Things Past, Marcel Proust
The Worm Ouroboros, Eric Rücker Eddison
The Merriam-Webster dictionary
The Wind in the Willows, Kenneth Grahame
Baby and Child Care, Dr. Benjamin Spock
The Trumpet of the Swan, E.B. White
Johnny Tremain, Esther Forbes
Danny Dunn, Time Traveler, Raymond Abrashkin and Jay Williams
The Fellowship of the Ring, J.R.R. Tolkien
The Catcher in the Rye, J.D. Salinger
Pride and Prejudice, Jane Austen
Heart of Darkness, Joseph Conrad
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, James Joyce
The Odyssey, Homer
Ulysses, James Joyce
Earthly Paradise, Colette
The Well of Loneliness, Radclyffe Hall
Delta of Venus, Anaïs Nin
Maurice, E. M. Forster
The Front Runner, Patricia Nell Warren
La Bâtarde, Violette Leduc
Our Bodies, Ourselves
Sappho Was a Right-On Woman, Sidney Abbott
Dream of a Common Language, Adrienne Rich
Beginning with O, Olga Broumas
Gyn/ecology, Mary Daly
Women in the Shadows, Ann Weldy
Lesbian/Woman, Del Martin & Phyllis Lyon
Orlando, Virginia Woolf
Rubyfruit Jungle, Rita Mae Brown
Desert of the Heart, Jane Rule
The Homosexual Matrix, C.A. Tripp
Lesbian Nation, Jill Johnston
The World of Pooh, A. A. Milne
James and the Giant Peach, Roald Dahl
The Portrait of a Lady, Henry James
The Waterfall, Margaret Drabble
The American Dream, Edward Albee
Morning’s at Seven, Paul Osborn
The Importance of Being Earnest, Oscar Wilde
The Heiress, Ruth & Augustus Goetz
The Taming of the Shrew, William Shakespeare
Plus Albert Camus’s essay “The Myth of Sisyphus,” and Wallace Stevens’s poem “Sunday Morning.”
[list adapted from The Black Letters]
Article continues below
Rebecca Makkai, The Borrower
Matilda, Roald Dahl
Little House in the Big Woods, Laura Ingalls Wilder
Fantastic Mr. Fox, Roald Dahl
Green Eggs and Ham, Dr. Seuss
Tales of a 4th Grade Nothing, Judy Blume
D’Aulaires’ Greek Myths, Ingri d’Aulaire & Edgar Parin d’Aulaire
The Wheel on the School, Meindert Dejong
The Egypt Game, Zilpha Keatley Snyder
Theater Shoes, Noel Streatfeild
My Side of the Mountain, Jean Craighead George
From the Mixed-up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler, E. L. Konigsburg
Charlotte’s Web, E. B. White
Tuck Everlasting, Natalie Babbitt
The Golden Goblet, Eloise Jarvis McGraw
The Empty Pot, Demi
The Chronicles of Narnia, C. S. Lewis
Misty of Chincoteague, Marguerite Henry
Vanity Fair, W. M. Thackeray
A Wrinkle in Time, Madeleine L’Engle
The Westing Game, Ellen Raskin
Haroun and the Sea of Stories, Salman Rushdie
Five Children and It, E. Nesbit
The Princess Bride, William Goldman
Treasure Island, Robert Louis Stevenson
The Search for Delicious, Natalie Babbitt
Blueberries for Sal, Robert McCloskey
Carry On, Mr. Bowditch, Jean Lee Latham
Oz series L. Frank Baum
The Little Grey Men, BB
The Borrowers, Mary Norton
Johnny Tremain, Esther Forbes
The Hobbit, J. R. R. Tolkien
Danny, the Champion of the World, Roald Dahl
The BFG, Roald Dahl
Number the Stars, Lois Lowry
The 21 Balloons, William Pene Dubois
Anna Karenina, Leo Tolstoy
Heidi, Johanna Spyri
The Giver, Lois Lowry
The Golden Compass, Philip Pullman
Lord of the Flies, William Golding
The Catcher in the Rye, J. D. Salinger
A Separate Peace, John Knowles
The Things They Carried, Tim O’Brien
David Copperfield, Charles Dickens
Middlesex, Jeffrey Eugenides
The Pushcart War, Jean Merrill
Where the Red Fern Grows, Wilson Rawls
[list courtesy of the author herself]
Jo Walton, Among Others
Article continues below
Dragonquest, Anne McCaffrey
Lord of the Rings, J.R.R. Tolkien
The Wind’s Twelve Quarters, Volume 2, Ursula Le Guin
The Last Starship from Earth, John Boyd
When Hitler Stole Pink Rabbit, Judith Kerr
Ensign Flandry, Poul Anderson
Creatures of Light and Darkness, Roger Zelazny
Empire Star, Samuel R. Delany
God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater, Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.
Cat’s Cradle, Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.
Breakfast of Champions, Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.
Welcome to the Monkey House, Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.
The Sirens of Titan, Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.
Pilgrimage, Zenna Henderson
The Chrysalids, John Wyndham
The Bull From the Sea, Mary Renault
The Charioteer, Mary Renault
Dragonflight, Anne McCaffrey
Illusions, Ursula Le Guin
The Flight of the Horse, Larry Niven
Ringworld, Larry Niven
A Gift from Earth, Larry Niven
Out of the Silent Planet, C. S. Lewis
Warm Worlds and Otherwise, James Tiptree, Jr.
Nine Princes in Amber, Roger Zelazny
The Guns of Avalon, Roger Zelazny
Our Mutual Friend, Charles Dickens
Triton, Samuel Delany
I Capture the Castle, Dodie Smith
The Starlight Barking, Dodie Smith
The Communist Manefesto, Karl Marx
Purposes of Love, Mary Renault
The Last of the Wine, Mary Renault
The Magus, John Fowles
Dying Inside, Robert Silverberg
The Left Hand of the Electron, Isaac Asimov
The Symposium, Plato
World of Ptaavs, Larry Niven
Time Enough for Love, Robert A. Heinlein
Dangerous Visions, Theodore Sturgeon
The Best of the Galaxy Volume IV, ed. Jim Baen
The Spell Sword, Marion Zimmer Bradley
Babel 17, Samuel R. Delany
Glory Road, Robert A. Heinlein
Callahan’s Crosstime Saloon, Spider Robinson
Waldo and Magic, Inc., Robert A. Heinlein
The Broken Sword, Poul Anderson
Telempath, Spider Robinson
Up the Line, Robert Silverberg
Beyond the Tomorrow Mountains, Sylvia Engdahl
Heritage of the Star, Sylvia Engdahl
Crow, Ted Hughes
Dragonsinger, Anne McCaffrey
Lord Foul’s Bane, Stephen Donaldson
A Wizard of Earthsea, Ursula Le Guin
The Silmarillion, J.R.R. Tolkien
The Hobbit, J.R.R. Tolkien
The Crystal Cave, Mary Stewart
Dragonsong, Anne McCaffrey
The Shockwave Rider, John Brunner
Stand on Zanzibar, John Brunner
Imperial Earth, Arthur C. Clarke
Childhood’s End, Arthur C. Clarke
2001, Arthur C. Clarke
Born With the Dead, Robert Silverberg
Red Shift, Alan Garner
The Dispossessed, Ursula K. Le Guin
City, Clifford Simak
Dune, Frank Herbert
Republic, Plato
Daughter of Time, Josephine Tey
An Old Captivity, Nevil Shute
Brave New World, Aldous Huxley
Prince Caspian, C.S. Lewis
Mere Christianity, C.S. Lewis
The Eye of Heron, Ursula Le Guin
The Word For World is Forest, Ursula Le Guin
The Lathe of Heaven, Ursula Le Guin
The Left Hand of Darkness, Ursula Le Guin
The Kissing Gate, Susan Sallis
Stepsons of Terra, Robert Silverberg
Dying Inside, Robert Silverberg
Voyage to Alpha Centauri, Robert Silverberg
The World Inside, Robert Silverberg
Make Room! Make Room!, Robert Silverberg
The Dark is Rising sequence, Susan Cooper
The Mote in God’s Eye, Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle
The White Dragon, Anne McCaffrey
Citizens of the Galaxy, Robert A. Heinlein
The Farthest Shore, Ursula K. Le Guin
Emma, Jane Austen
Selected Poems, W.H. Auden
Guide to Science, Isaac Asimov
A History of the English-Speaking Peoples, Winston Churchill
A Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, Douglas Adams
Jane Eyre, Charlotte Bronte
The Einstein Intersection, Samuel R. Delany
Charisma, Michael Coney
Hello Summer, Goodbye, Michael Coney
Sign of the Unicorn, Roger Zelazny
Far From the Madding Crowd, Thomas Hardy
Aeneid, Virgil
The Dream Master, Roger Zelazny
Mission of Gravity, Hal Clement
Vicinity Cluster, Piers Anthony
Chaining the Lady, Piers Anthony
A Spell for Chameleon, Piers Anthony
Return to Night, Mary Renault
Brat Farrar, Josephine Tey
Isle of the Dead, Roger Zelazny
I, Claudius, Robert Graves
The Laws, Plato
Phaedrus, Plato
The Greeks, H.D.F. Kitto
Telepathist, John Brunner
Elsie Dinsmore, Martha Finley
Little Women, Louisa May Alcott
Eric, or Little by Little, Frederic W. Farrar
What Katy Did, Susan Coolidge
Pollyanna, Eleanor H. Porter
Space Hostages, Nicholas Fisk
Doorways in the Sand, Roger Zelazny
Roadmarks, Roger Zelazny
The Number of the Beast, Robert A. Heinlein
Starship Troopers, Robert A. Heinlein
The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, Robert A. Heinlein
Creatures of Light and Darkness, Roger Zelazny
This Immortal, Roger Zelazny
The Persian Boy, Mary Renault
Pavane, Keith Roberts
Times Without Number, John Brunner
The Man in the High Castle, Phillip K. Dick
Bring the Jubilee, Ward Moore
Guardians of Time, Poul Anderson
A Dream of Wessex, Christopher Priest
Lord Kalvan of Otherwhen, H. Beam Piper
Too Many Magicians, Randall Garrett
A Touch of Strange, Theodore Sturgeon
Inverted World, Christopher Priest
Gate of Ivrel, C.J. Cherryh
The Adventures of Tom Bombadil, J.R.R. Tolkien
The Tempest, William Shakespeare
Romeo and Juliet, William Shakespeare
A Midsummer Night’s Dream, William Shakespeare
The Winter’s Tale, William Shakespeare
Richard II, William Shakespeare
The Waste Land, T.S. Eliot
Four Quartets, T.S. Eliot
Plus the short stories “The Girl Who Was Plugged In”, “Love Is the Plan, the Plan Is Death”, and “Houston, Houston, Do You Read?”, all by James Tiptree Jr., and “The Raven,” by Edgar Allan Poe.
[list adapted from The Foxtrot Firefly, via Jo Walton]
Donna Tartt, The Secret History
Tom Swift, Victor Appleton
Paradise Lost, John Milton
Goodbye, Columbus, Philip Roth
The New Testament
Poetics, Aristotle
The Iliad, Homer
Parmenides, Plato
The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald
Ivanhoe, Sir Walter Scott
The Rover Boys seriesm Edward Stratemeyer
The Journey from Chester to London, Thomas Pennant
The Bobbsey Twins series, Laura Lee Hope
The Final Problem, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
Janson’s History of Art, Anthony Janson
Madame Bovary, Gustave Flaubert
Mémoires, Duc de Saint-Simon
Vanity Fair, William Makepeace Thackeray
The World Book Encyclopedia
Men of Thought and Deed, E. Tipton Chatsford (I think this one is invented)
Invisible Man, H.G. Wells
Peter Pan, or The Boy Who Wouldn’t Grow Up, J. M. Barrie
The Divine Comedy, Dante
The Upanishads
Perry Mason Novels, Erle Stanley Gardner
Corpus of Mycenaean Inscriptions from Knossos
Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, Lewis Carroll
Our Mutual Friend, Charles Dickens
Oresteia, Aeschylus
The Bacchae, Euripides
Marino Faliero, Lord Byron
Othello, William Shakespeare
The Malcontent, John Marston
The White Devil, John Webster
Doctor Faustus, Christopher Marlowe
The Revenger’s Tragedy, Cyril Tourneur (Thomas Middleton)
The Waste Land, T. S. Eliot
Plus the shorter poems:
“With Rue my Heart is Laden,” A. E. Housman
“Lycidas,” John Milton
“The Charge of the Light Brigade,” Alfred Lord Tennyson
“In Flanders Fields,” John McCrae
“Why so pale and wan fond lover?,” Sir John Suckling
Other authors mentioned: J. R. R. Tolkien, Ezra Pound, Alfred Douglas, Robert de Montesquiou, Virgil, Plotinus, Pliny, Parmenides, Marie Corelli, Alexander Pope, John Donne, Rupert Brooke, Edgar Allen Poe, Hegel, Raymond Chandler, Gregory of Tours, Thomas Aquinas, P. G. Wodehouse, George Orwell, Harold Acton, Salman Rushdie, Agatha Christie, Marcel Proust, John Ford, Walter Raleigh, Thomas Nashe, Philip K. Dick
[list adapted from The Oosterbook and Tolstoy Therapy]
Jeffrey Eugenides, The Marriage Plot
Couples, John Updike
The Sorrows of Young Werther, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
A Sorrow Beyond Dreams, Peter Handke
The House of Mirth, Edith Wharton
The Age of Innocence, Edith Wharton
Daniel Deronda, George Eliot
Middlemarch, George Eliot
The Imitation of Christ, Thomas à Kempis
Confessions, Saint Augustine
Interior Castle, Saint Teresa of Avila
The Answers of Jesus to Job, G. Campbell Morgan
The God Who Is There, Francis Schaeffer
A Confession, Leo Tolstoy
Anna Karenina, Leo Tolstoy
The Crying of Lot 49, Thomas Pynchon
V., Thomas Pynchon
Writings in General Linguistics, Ferdinand de Saussure
A Lover’s Discourse, Roland Barthes
The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, Max Weber
Auguste Comte and Positivism: The Essential Writings, ed. Gertrud Lenzer
The Courage to Be, Paul Tillich
Being and Time, Martin Heidegger
The Drama of Atheist Humanism, Henri de Lubac
Barchester Towers, Anthony Trollope
Pride and Prejudice, Jane Austen
Persuasion, Jane Austen
Sense and Sensibility, Jane Austen
Emma, Jane Austen
The Portrait of a Lady, Henry James
Sister Carrie, Theodore Dreiser
Of Grammatology, Jacques Derrida
Writing and Difference, Jacques Derrida
A Moveable Feast, Ernest Hemingway
Sarrasine, Honoré de Balzac
The Song of Hiawatha, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
H. M. Pulham, Esquire, John P. Marquand
Love Story, Erich Segal
Myra Breckinridge, Gore Vidal
Moby-Dick, Herman Melville
Paradise Lost, John Milton
Franny and Zooey, J. D. Salinger
Ulysses, James Joyce
Invisible Cities, Italo Calvino
Something Beautiful for God, Malcolm Muggeridge
The Madwoman in the Attic, Sandra M. Gilbert
The Role of the Reader, Umberto Eco
On Deconstruction, Jonathan Culler
The Oxford Book of English Verse, ed. Christopher Ricks
Ontogeny and Phylogeny, Stephen Jay Gould
The Orthodox Church, Kallistos Ware
A Dance to the Music of Time, Anthony Powell
The Varieties of Religious Experience, William James
The Cloud of Unknowing, Anonymous
Dark Night of the Soul, San Juan de la Cruz
New French Feminisms, Elaine Marks
Other authors mentioned include: Charles Dickens, Emily Brontë, Charlotte Brontë, H.D., Denise Levertov, Colette, Heinrich von Kleist, Thomas Merton, William Gaddis, E. M. Cioran, Robert Walser, Claude Levi-Strauss, Carl Van Vechten, John Lyly, William Makepeace Thackeray, Henry Fielding, Nathaniel Hawthorne, William F. Buckley, Jr.
[list adapted from Goodreads]
Roald Dahl, Matilda
The Secret Garden, Frances Hodgson Burnett
Great Expectations, Charles Dickens
Nicholas Nickleby, Charles Dickens
Oliver Twist, Charles Dickens
Jane Eyre, Charlotte Brontë
Pride and Prejudice, Jane Austen
Tess of the D’Urbervilles, Thomas Hardy
Gone to Earth, Mary Webb
Kim, Rudyard Kipling
The Invisible Man, H.G. Wells
The Old Man and the Sea, Ernest Hemingway
The Sound and the Fury, William Faulkner
The Grapes of Wrath, John Steinbeck
The Good Companions, J.B. Priestley
Brighton Rock, Graham Greene
Animal Farm, George Orwell
The Red Pony, John Steinbeck
The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, C.S. Lewis
Just So Stories, Rudyard Kipling
[list from Nonsuch Book]
F. Scott Fitzgerald, This Side of Paradise
For the Honor of the School, Ralph Henry Barbour
Little Women, Louisa May Alcott
The Common Law, Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.
Sapho, Alphonse Daudet
The Shooting of Dan McGrew and Other Poems, Robert W. Service
The Broad Highway, Jeffery Farnol
Three Weeks, Elinor Glyn
Mary Ware, the Little Colonel’s Chum, Annie Fellows Johnston
Anna Karenina, Leo Tolstoy
The Kreutzer Sonata, Leo Tolstoy
The Encyclopedia Britannica
Collar and Daniell’s First Year Latin, William Coe Collar
The Beloved Vagabond, William John Locke
Sir Nigel, Arthur Conan Doyle
The White Company, Arthur Conan Doyle
Marpessa, Stephen Phillips
The Gentleman from Indiana, Booth Tarkington
New Arabian Nights, Robert Louis Stevenson
The Morals of Marcus Ordeyne, William J. Locke
The Man Who Was Thursday: A Nightmare, G. K. Chesterton
Stover at Yale, Owen Johnson
Dombey and Son, Charles Dickens
The Picture of Dorian Gray, Oscar Wilde
The New Machiavelli, H. G. Wells
The Research Magnificent, H. G. Wells
Joan and Peter, H. G. Wells
The Undying Fire, H. G. Wells
None Other Gods, Robert Hugh Benson
Sinister Street, Compton Mackenzie
The Varieties of Religious Experience, William James
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, James Joyce
Vandover and the Brute, Frank Norris
The Damnation of Theron Ware, Harold Frederic
Jennie Gerhardt, Theodore Dreiser
Almayer’s Folly, Joseph Conrad
Arsène Lupin, Francis de Croisset and Maurice Leblanc
Mrs. Warren’s Profession, George Bernard Shaw
Faust, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
The Little Millionaire
And shorter poems:
“Come into the Garden, Maude,” Alfred, Lord Tennyson
“Locksley Hall,” Alfred, Lord Tennyson
“La Belle Dame Sans Merci,” John Keats
“Ode to a Nightingale,” John Keats
“Dolores: Notre-Dame Des Sept Douleurs,” Algernon Charles Swinburne
“Triumph of Time,” Algernon Charles Swinburne
“A Song in the Time of Order,” Algernon Charles Swinburne
“Ulalume,” Edgar Allan Poe
“Beaches of Lukanon before the sealers came,” Rudyard Kipling
“Gunga Din,” Rudyard Kipling
“Autumn Song,” Paul Verlaine
“L’Allegro,” John Milton
Shakespeare’s Sonnets
Plus the works of “Robert Chambers, David Graham Phillips, and E. Phillips Oppenheim complete,” and Edgar Allan Poe’s short story “The Fall of the House of Usher.”
Other authors mentioned include: Vachel Lindsay, Edgar Lee Masters, Lord Dunsany, J. M. Barrie, Arthur Wing Pinero, W. B. Yeats, John Millington Synge, Ernest Dowson, Arthur Symons, Hermann Sudermann, J. K. Huysmans, Walter Pater, Théophile Gautier, François Rabelais, Giovanni Boccaccio, Petronius, Suetonius, O. Henry, John Fox, Jr., Richard Harding Davis, James Whitcomb Riley, Rupert Brooke, Alexander Pope, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Paul Gerhardt, John Galsworthy, Robert Browning
Christopher Hitchens, Hitch-22
Autumn Journal, Louis MacNeice
The Earth Compels, Louis MacNeice
Kim, Rudyard Kipling
The Cherry Orchard, Anton Chekhov
Lord of the Flies, William Golding
The Bell Jar, Sylvia Plath
The Savage God, Al Alvarez
The Bridge over the River Kwai, Pierre Boulle
A Passage to India, E. M. Forster
David Blaize, Edward Frederic Benson
War and Peace, Leo Tolstoy
History of the Conquest of Mexico, William H. Prescott
On the Beach, Nevil Shute
Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Harriet Beecher Stowe
How Green Was My Valley, Richard Llewellyn
Natural Theology, William Paley
Religion and the Rise of Capitalism, R. H. Tawney
Hanged by the Neck, Arthur Koestler
Darkness at Noon, Arthur Koestler
Crime and Punishment, Fyodor Dostoevsky
In Flanders Field, Leon Wolff
All Quiet on the Western Front, Erich Maria Remarque
Covenant with Death, John Harris
Keep the Aspidistra Flying, George Orwell
Animal Farm, George Orwell
Nineteen Eighty-four, George Orwell
Homage to Catalonia, George Orwell
Coming up for Air, George Orwell
Birth of Our Power, Victor Serge
Men in Prison, Victor Serge
The Case of Comrade Tulayev, Victor Serge
Memoirs of a Revolutionary, Victor Serge
Reason, Faith and Revolution, Terry Eagleton
Decline and Fall, Evelyn Waugh
Brideshead Revisited, Evelyn Waugh
Thank you, Jeeves, P. G. Wodehouse
Mulliner Nights, P. G. Wodehouse
The Code of The Woosters, P. G. Wodehouse
Power: A Radical View, Steven Lukes
Theatres of Memory, Raphael Samuel
Lady Chatterley’s Lover, D. H. Lawrence
Main Currents of Marxism, Leszek Kolakowski
Adolf Hitler: My Part in his Downfall, Spike Milligan
The Republic of Fear, Kanan Makiya
Cruelty and Silence, Kanan Makiya
The Monument, Kanan Makiya
The Affluent Society, John Galbraith
The Threatening Storm, Kenneth Pollack
Black Lamb and Grey Falcon, Rebecca West
Macbeth, Shakespeare
Hamlet, Shakespeare
Terminal Moraine, James Fenton
Language and Silence, George Steiner
Girl, 20, Kingsley Amis
Stanley and the Women, Kingsley Amis
Mackerel Plaza, Peter De Vries
Blood of the Lambs, Peter De Vries
Judgment of Paris, Gore Vidal
Money, Martin Amis
Yellow Dog, Martin Amis
The Rachel Papers, Martin Amis
The Power and the Glory, Graham Greene
The Human Factor, Graham Greene
The Thirty Nine Steps, Graham Greene
The Waste Land, T. S. Eliot
After Strange Gods, T. S. Eliot
The Great Terror, Robert Conquest
Dr. Zhivago, Boris Pasternak
Early Success, F. Scott Fitzgerald
Humboldt’s Gift, Saul Bellow
Ravelstein, Saul Bellow
The Adventures of Augie March, Saul Bellow
The Friends of Eddie Coyle, George V. Higgins
The Plague, Albert Camus
A Dance to the Music of Time, Anthony Powell
This Be The Verse, Philip Larkin
Going Going, Philip Larkin
First Love, Last Rites, Ian McEwan
In Between the Sheets, Ian McEwan
Faggots, Larry Kramer
Writers and Politics, Conor Cruise O’Brien
Prisoner without a Name, Cell without a Number, Jacobo Timerman
Leaves of Grass, Walt Whitman
The Loved One, Evelyn Waugh
Southern California: An Island on the Land, Carey McWilliams
The File, Penn Kimball
The Bonfire of the Vanities, Tom Wolfe
The Protestant Establishment, E. Digby Baltzell
The Company of Critics, Michael Walzer
The Raj Quartet, Paul Scott
Shame, Salman Rushdie
The Satanic Verses, Salman Rushdie
The Jaguar Smile, Salman Rushdie
Orientalism, Edward Said
Covering Islam, Edward Said
Peace and its Discontents, Edward Said
The Seven Pillars of Wisdom, T. E. Lawrence
The Culture of Islam, Lawrence Rosen
Milestones, Sayyid Qutb
The Benn Diaries, Tony Benn
Reading Lolita in Tehran, Azar Nafisi
What Is History?, E. H. Carr
The Rise of the Novel, Joseph Conrad
Typhoon, Joseph Conrad
A Dream of John Ball, William Morris
Minima Moralia, Theodor Adorno
Tortilla Flat, John Steinbeck
Persuasion, Jane Austen
Watership Down, Richard Adams
The Wind in the Willows, Kenneth Graham
Microcosm, Norman Davies
The Pity of it All, Amos Elon
They Fought Back, Yuri Suhl
Resistance in the Auschwitz-Birkenau Death Camp, David Szmulewski
The Cruiser, Warren Tute
Chariots of Fire, Harold Abrahams
The Broken Compass, Peter Hitchens
Nothing to be Frightened Of, Julian Barnes
Jersey Under the Jackboot, Reginald Charles Fulke Maugham
I and Thou, Martin Buber
The Canterbury Tales, Geoffrey Chaucer
Bleak House, Charles Dickens
Lolita, Vladimir Nabokov
Portnoy’s Complaint, Philip Roth
Altneuland, Theodor Herzl
Beyond a Boundary, C. L. R. James
Minty Alley, C. L. R. James
The Black Jacobins: Toussaint L’Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution, C. L. R. James
Other authors mentioned include: Jorge Luis Borges (Hitchens’s “literary hero), G. K. Chesterton, Dante, Colin MacCabe, Arthur Miller, Susan Sontag, Richard Dawkins, William Butler Yeats, Paul Cavafy, Wilfred Owen, William Safire, Gustave Flaubert, Edmund Blunden, Cesare Pavese, William Styron, C. H. Rolph, Siegfried Sassoon, Robert Graves, John Updike, Emile Zola, Oscar Wilde, W. H. Auden, W. B. Yeats, Chidiock Tichbourne, Wendy Cope, Marcel Proust, V. S. Naipaul, Naguib Mahfouz, Gertrude Bell
[this assuredly incomplete list adapted from this reddit post]
Stephen Chbosky, The Perks of Being a Wallflower
To Kill a Mockingbird, Harper Lee
This Side of Paradise, F. Scott Fitzgerald
A Separate Peace, John Knowles
Peter Pan, J. M. Barrie
The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald
The Catcher in the Rye, J. D. Salinger
On the Road, Jack Kerouac
Naked Lunch, William S. Burroughs
Walden, Henry David Thoreau
Hamlet, William Shakespeare
The Stranger, Albert Camus
The Fountainhead, Ayn Rand
The Mayor of Castro Street, Randy Shilts
Also mentioned: E. E. Cummings, Anne Rice, and the poem “A Person /A Paper /A Promise” by Dr. Earl Reum
[list from The Perks of Being a Wallflower Wiki]
Patti Smith, Just Kids
Illuminations, Arthur Rimbaud
A Season in Hell, Arthur Rimbaud
Collages, Anaïs Nin
Miracle of the Rose, Jean Genet
The Glass Menagerie, Tennessee Williams
Psychedelic Prayers, Timothy Leary
Poems a Penny Each, James Joyce
The Diary of Anne Frank, Anne Frank
Junky, William Burroughs
Ariel, Sylvia Plath
Crazy Horse: The Strange Man of the Oglalas, Mari Sandoz
The Golden Bough, James George Frazer
You Can’t Go Home Again, Thomas Wolfe
Diary of a Drug Fiend, Aleister Crowley
Locus Solus, Raymond Roussel
The Happy Birthday of Death, Gregory Corso
Cain’s Book, Alexander Trocchi
Tarantula, Bob Dylan
Arthur Rimbaud: A Biography, Enid Starkie
Paris Spleen, Charles Baudelaire
The Quran
Women of Cairo, Gerard De Nerval
Death in Venice, Thomas Mann
The Arabian Nights
A Book of Dreams, Peter Reich
Finnegan’s Wake, James Joyce
Songs of Innocence and Experience, William Blake
Little Women, Louisa May Alcott
The Age of Rock: No. 2, Jonathan Eisen
Les Enfants Terribles, Jean Cocteau
The Night of the Hunter, Davis Grubb (she may be talking about the film)
Foxe’s Book of Martyrs, John Foxe
The Shoes of the Fisherman, Morris West
The Red Shoes, Hans Christian Andersen
A Child’s Garden of Verses, Robert Louis Stevenson
Love on the Left Bank, Ed van der Elsken
Milton, William Blake
The Fabulous Life of Diego Rivera, Bertram D. Wolfe
The Money Game, Adam Smith
The Electric Kool-Air Acid Test, Tom Wolfe
Love and Mr. Lewisham, H. G. Wells
Zelda, Nancy Milford
Doctor Martino & Other Stories, William Faulkner
La Cavale, Albertine Sarrazin
Seventh Heaven, Patti Smith
Witt, Patti Smith
Butterfield 8, John O’Hara
Of Human Bondage, W. Somerset Maugham
Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, Lewis Carroll
Ulysses, James Joyce
Flowers, Robert Mapplethorpe
The Coral Sea, Patti Smith
Peter Pan, J. M. Barrie
Love Affair, Ruth Kligman
Plus George Mandel’s story “The Beckoning Sea.”
Other authors mentioned include: Frank O’Hara, Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Maxwell Perkins, Janet Hamill, Jules Laforgue, Allen Ginsberg, Friedrich Nietzsche, Paul Verlaine, Yukio Mishima, Andre Gide, Maurice Maeterlinck, Gérard de Nerval, Bertolt Brecht, Antonin Artaud, Vladimir Mayakovsky, Dylan Thomas, Walt Whitman, Blaise Cendrars, Théophile Gautier, Henri Michaux, Thomas de Quincey, John Keats, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Gerard Malanga, Gertrude Stein, Andre Breton, Djuna Barnes, Jim Carroll, Oscar Brown Jr., Vachel Lindsay, Jack Kerouac, Homer, Herodotus, Sam Shepard, Nancy Milford, Ray Bresmer, Anne Waldman, Robert Creeley, Ted Berrigan, Albertine Sarrazin, Stéphane Mallarmé, Dave Marsh, Tony Glover, Danny Goldberg, Sandy Pearlman, Paul Bowles, Mohamed Mrabet, Albert Cossery, Isabelle Eberhardt, Richard Hell.
[list adapted from Luke Storms and Goodreads]
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Americanah
Cane, Jean Toomer
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Mark Twain
The Fire Next Time, James Baldwin
The Heart of the Matter, Graham Greene
The End of the Affair, Graham Greene
Dreams From My Father, Barack Obama
Brideshead Revisited, Evelyn Waugh
Light in August, William Faulkner
Things Fall Apart, Chinua Achebe
A Bend in the River, V. S. Naipaul
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https://www.smashwords.com/interview/Ernestohogan
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Smashwords – Interview with Ernest Hogan
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Interview with Ernest Hogan
Published 2013-11-02.
Do you remember the first story you ever wrote?
I actually started drawing stories, then went on to doing comics. When I got my first typewriter I wrote, "The Day the Lawn Revolted" in which a boy used his lawnmower to save the world of an alien life force that was making his lawn grow out of control. There may have been earlier prose experiments, but I don't remember any details.
What is your writing process?
I'm always being hit by ideas, like sniper's bullets. I'll scribble some notes, start a computer file, start working. Since I work for a living, I'm always running the gauntlet of being constantly interrupted, so it there's no telling how long it will talk me to finish something. If I think it has a good chance of selling to a particular market, I can get something done pretty fast -- but if it's just a weird story that I'm enjoying noodling around with, it could take me years. I'm always walking around with stories growing in my brain, which can be dangerous.
How do you approach cover design?
I try to create something that will snag eyeballs, and interest people in reading -- and buying -- the book. I'm an artist, so it allows me to stretch those muscles, and I can talk myself into working cheap. I keep in mind that an ebook cover is usually seen thumbnail-size, so it has to "read" at a small size. I also try to come up with something that doesn't look like every other cover out there, and will stand out.
What are your five favorite books, and why?
In so particular order, and subject to change without notice:
FEAR AND LOATHING IN LAS VEGAS by Hunter S. Thompson. I keep re-reading it. There's something about the whole gonzo journalism thing that appeals to me. I use that technique in my own writing. I like that way it isn't really a story, and only seems to have a plot the way a surrealist painting fools you into believing the impossible.
THE CALIPH'S HOUSE by Tahir Shah. Anything by Shah is great. His nonfiction reads like excellent fantastic fiction, but are also grounded in reality. They will have you rethinking everything. And they're fun. CALIPH'S HOUSE is one of the best books about living in the post-9/11 21st century. It weaves the warring world together, and is where we all live now.
NAKED LUNCH by William S. Burroughs. The badass book of the 20th century. Narrative itself is torn apart. It takes you incredible places, and it turns out a lot of is real. And kids, don't try this at home!
MUMBO JUMBO by Ishmael Reed. The Great American NeoHoodoo Novel. Reconstructs what Burroughs tore apart. Ishmael Reed is the father of Postcolonialism, Afrofuturism, and all the other isms that are about to turn genre fiction upside down any day now. Is that revolution in the air?
DANGEROUS VISIONS edited by Harlan Ellison. Throw in AGAIN, DANGEROUS VISIONS for good measure. Those books changed my life, opened up my mind to possibilities of what writing and speculative fiction could be. It also made me a rampaging monster in high school. And set me on the crazy course that my life too. Teen dystopia fans, ya wanna see something really scary?
What do you read for pleasure?
Make mine weird. None of this cozy, routine, just-a-good read stuff for me. It can range from nonfiction about things I'm curious about, to antediluvian pulp fiction. Recently, I've enjoyed WITCHCRAFT IN THE SOUTHWEST by Marc Simmons, MUSICA TEJANA by Manuel Peña,THE COMANCHEROS by Paul Wellman, THE QUIXOTE CULT by Genaro Gonzalez, ALL SHOT UP by Chester Himes, AFRO-6 by Hank Lopez, and THE SPACE MERCHANTS by Frederik Pohl and C.M. Kornbluth.
What is your e-reading device of choice?
I had a iPod touch, but it died. I'm saving my pennies of a new one. Meanwhile, I can always read on my desktop.
What book marketing techniques have been most effective for you?
It's hard to tell what works, so I keep trying. I blog, do Facebook and Twitter, go to conventions. Lately, I've learned that sometimes taking it easy, and coming off as a human being works better than a constant blitz of BUY MY BOOKS! BUY MY BOOKS! BUY MY BOOKS! The ain't no sure-fire instructions to follow. And one thing I'm sure about, doing what "everybody" tells you to do, usually doesn't work. Check me out on Facebook and Twitter, or mondoernesto.com, and my Chicanonautica column every second and third Thursday at labloga.blogspot.com. If something works, or doesn't, I'll mention it!
Describe your desk
A magnificent art deco monster that gathers notebooks, reference materials, electronic gadgets, dust, and takes all the abuse I heap on it.
Where did you grow up, and how did this influence your writing?
I was born in East L.A., and grew up in West Covina, California. I'm a Chicano even though I have an Irish name that I share with the father of ragtime. While I was still in the womb, my parents took me the grand opening of Disneyland. After Eastlos, W.C. was like something out of Ray Bradbury's THE MARTIAN CHRONICLES, with healthy does of Philip K. Dick, and Frank Zappa. Some people can't tell my nonfiction from my science fiction -- maybe it's the way I see things. When I try to write "mainstream" (whateverthehell it may be) editors say it's too weird. I tend to prefer warm weather and disorganized environments. My writing is an organic part of my eclectic life.
When did you first start writing?
Some during Junior High, I made the transition from cartooning to writing. The showed us film, RAY BRADBURY: STORY OF A WRITER, and I thought, "Wow! That's how I want earn a living." It seemed more practical than cartooning, which everybody thought I was nuts for pursuing. They thought I was a little less nuts for wanting to be a writer. I'm still trying, Ray! Anyway, I started writing a lot crummy little stories on the portable typewriter that my parents got me to do homework on. They got better as time went on. If I don't publish a few things every year, I get cranky.
What's the story behind your latest book?
I'm trying to finish PACO COHEN IS ALIVE AND WELL AND LIVING ON MARS before the end of the year. It will include to stories that appeared in ANALOG: "The Rise and Fall of Paco Cohen and Mariachis of Mars" and "Death and Dancing in New Las Vegas." I promised Ben Bova that I would write a novel about Paco, and was trying to do it as a series of short stories that I would eventually publish as a novel. After finishing another Paco story, I realized that it might take me decades to finish the damn thing this way, so I decided to make it priority. Besides, I've got all these other stories and novels buzzing around my brain . . .
What motivated you to become an indie author?
New York turned it's back on me years ago. I've been publishing short fiction regularly, but that doesn't really make money. And I've got a cult following. People kept asking where they could get my books. It was frustrating as all hell. Some people even thought I was dead. Getting paid is better than not getting paid, but getting published is also better than not getting published. And now, when people ask about my books I can start telling them about how they can order the ebooks of CORTEZ ON JUPITER, HIGH AZTECH, and SMOKING MIRROR BLUES . . .
How has Smashwords contributed to your success?
I'm no longer hopelessly obscure, and it's great to available on a wide variety of devices.
What is the greatest joy of writing for you?
Making all this craziness in my head come to life with words, and hearing from people who read it, and get it.
What do your fans mean to you?
If it wasn't for them, I'd probably get depressed, and wouldn't live very long.
What are you working on next?
Besides, PACO COHEN IS ALIVE AND WELL AND LIVING ON MARS, I'm working on another story about cyber-enhanced Mexican wrestler called Steelsnake. He currently appears in a story called "Novaheads" in the anthology SUPER STORIES OF HEROES AND VILLAINS edited by Claude Lalumière. The idea is to do a series of novella-length stories about Steelsnake, and release them as ebooks. Who knows maybe it'll become a franchise that will support me in my old age!
Who are your favorite authors?
Hunter S. Thompson. Tahir Shah. Ishmael Reed. William S. Burroughs. Harlan Ellison. James Crumley. James Ellroy. Elmore Leonard. Philip K. Dick. Chester Himes. Ray Bradbury. Henry Miller. No particular order. Subject to change without notice.
When you're not writing, how do you spend your time?
Read, pursue things I'm curious about (hopefully, not always online), watch weird movies, go on roads trips with my wife, keep an eye out for things new and wonderful, and of course, go to work to pay for it all.
How do you discover the ebooks you read?
A lot of people send their ebooks to me -- I know a lot of writers. Social media let me know about others. I listen to what friends recommend. I tend to be hunter/gatherer when it comes to reading material . . .
Do you remember the first story you ever read, and the impact it had on you?
No. I was into TV and comics as a kid. They made me read a lot stuff that bored me at school.
What inspires you to get out of bed each day?
I usually have something to do.
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https://alexanderadamsart.wordpress.com/tag/william-s-burroughs/
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William S Burroughs – alexanderadamsart
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2023-04-05T13:36:21+01:00
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Posts about William S Burroughs written by Alexander Adams
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alexanderadamsart
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https://alexanderadamsart.wordpress.com/tag/william-s-burroughs/
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S.E. Gontarski (ed.), Burroughs Unbound: William Burroughs and the Performance of Writing, Bloomsbury Academic, 2022, hardback, 456pp, mono illus., £95, ISBN 978 1 5013 6218 7 (paperback available)
Professor S.E. Gontarski writes in the introduction to Burroughs Unbound, how a massive archive of WIlliam Burroughs (1914-1997) almost came to Florida. François C. Bucher, an art-history professor, collection and Burroughs fan, negotiated for Florida State University to acquire the Vaduz Archive twice but was stymied by a lack of finances and appreciation by authorities. Bucher was in correspondence with Burroughs and set up a foundation, which invited him to Florida to lecture.
Gontarski’s chapter proper is a discussion of Burroughs through the Post-Structuralist lens of Deleuze and Guattari. Allen Hibbard discusses the fluidity of Burroughs’s text(s) and provides a very clear summary of the issue that has preoccupied scholars in recent years. Alex Werner-Colan writes about digitisation, as an analogue to the author’s famed word hoard. The scrapbooks (many in the Berg archive at New York Public Library) require digitisation or more extensive publication to make them more widely accessible. Recent attention to Burroughs’s art and his collages as visual material have expanded interest and scholarly engagement.
Nick Sturm’s article explains Burroughs’s antipathy towards Time magazine. Burroughs took umbrage at a derogatory review of Naked Lunch in an issue of Time in 1962. He drew up a battle plan with Brion Gysin to discredit the magazine – an experimental anti-Time collage publication called TIME, featuring cut-ups, new text, images and subversions. It was printed in black and white in an edition of 1,000 copies in 1965. (Read it here.) Sturm argues that Ted Berrigan, New York poet and publisher of TIME, has been unfairly neglected, particularly by Barry Miles, who was dismissive. Sturm shows that Berrigan’s collaboration with Burroughs and interaction with his writing. Tomasz Stompor and Rona Cran also write about Burroughs’s appropriation of Time, the former in relation to illustrations from the cut-up pages and latter in relation to food. Blake Stricklin refers to the Luce publishing empire of Time, Life and Fortune, but centres his chapter on the 1978 Nova Convention.
Barry J. Faulk’s essay on Burroughs and Bowie sets the author firmly in the counter-culture of London in the early 1970s, mentioning a visit Burroughs made to Bowie’s flat in Beckenham. That meeting (in October 1973) was arranged by Rolling Stone magazine. Burroughs tactic of recording ambient noise and speech, then playing it back covertly from portable tape recorders was a way of disrupting and disturbing the status quo by spreading confusion and disquiet. Nathan Moore’s piece compares the paranoia we find Burroughs ideas to the notion of systems of control, which Burroughs developed explicitly from the early 1960s onwards. Burrough’s way of seeing hidden coercion and manipulative deception is equivalent to a method of deconstruction that we can find in some Post-Modernism.
Ash Connell-Gonzalez approaches Ah Pook is Here, explaining the story of the ill-starred collaboration between Burrough and illustrator Malcolm McNeill. The story was an adventure set in the Mexican jungle featuring the Mayan Codices and a virus. Produced at a time when the late 1960s boom in counter-culture comics had opened new possibilities, the book was planned to have been a comic or graphic novel but owing to financial restrictions and myriad complications and changes of plan, the work was never finished. Published in text-only form in 1979 and cannot be published in full, as it had never been finished and some completed artwork had been damaged in storage. A substantial sequence of McNeill’s art was published in 2012 without text in a large book.
The disdain with which the novel Dead Fingers Talk (1963) has been treated betrays a certain snobbery that Burroughsians generally claim to eschew. It is formed of texts from Naked Lunch (1959), Soft Machine (1961) and The Ticket That Exploded (1962). For followers who entertain notions of a single body of text and present the important Post-Modern innovation of the author rewriting himself in subsequent iterations, the neglect of the book seems revealing of rather more conventional outlooks on the part of Burroughsians. I have previously reviewed the new edition of Dead Fingers Talk with editor Oliver Harris’s introduction which is reproduced here complete with its numerous illustrations and concordance of textual sources for Harris’s new edition. The essay is fascinating, informative, witty and passionate, as Harris’s writing always is. Rather than summarise that review, I link it here.
Jed Birmingham investigates the disappearance of the footnotes from the 1959 Olympia Press first edition of Naked Lunch. These footnotes were incorporated in the main body of later editions, sometimes as parenthetical text.
Overall, Burroughs Unbound gives a cross-section of current Burroughsian scholarship, extensively sourced and footnoted. The inclusion of the original archival materials and transcripts makes the volume of extra interest to Burroughs fans and researchers. Like Burroughs’s expansive and heterogenous published material, spreading out like a riotous and startling rhizome, is now mirrored by this expanding network of secondary scholarship, editorial commentary and publication of transcripts. This is both fitting and necessary and this volume takes a primary place in that profusion.
To read the full version of this review (including a discussion of Burroughs’ theories of virus, language and cut-ups) become a paid subscriber on Substack here: https://alexanderadamsart.substack.com/
Source of disappointment and confusion for two generations of fans of Ridley Scott’s eponymous sci-fi movie, William Burroughs’s unrelated book Blade Runner: A Movie is republished by Tangerine Press. The short text – which is comprised of a series of prose scenes or routines – was originally published in 1979. It appears here in a new edition, with a frontispiece photograph of the author and an introduction written by Burroughs expert Professor Oliver Harris.
In the introduction, Harris explains the indirect, accretion-evolution of Blade Runner. Burroughs read Alan E. Nourse’s novel The Bladerunner (1974) soon after its publication and by 1976 (newly arrived in New York, roughly three decades since his departure) had embarked on writing his version. It was nominally a movie treatment, nothing close to a conventional script. Burroughs had been stimulated by the lifting of many restrictions on pornographic cinema in the early 1970s, which he had seen on visits to New York prior to his move there in 1974. Completed in 1977, Burroughs realistically accepted that his text was not suitable for even the most outré of independent cinéastes of the era. Burroughs then repurposed the treatment as a novella-length book.
It was Nourse’s novel about medical smuggling in a sci-fi future that provided the name for Burroughs. It was from Burroughs that Hampton Fancher took the title for his film script adaptation of Philip K. Dicks’s novel Do Androids Dreams of Electric Sheep?, that would become Scott’s 1982 film. As it happened, neither Burroughs or Nourse’s books influenced the content of that script, beyond the title.
So, what of Blade Runner itself? It bears little resemblance to Nourse’s novel. Burroughs gives us the rollicking foul-mouthed satire of the excesses of the politico-medical complex in the near future. Burroughs’s text is both Modernist and Post-Modernist. It is Modernist in that it is deliberately dense, self-aware, assertively artificial, alienating and politically provocative; it is Post-Modernist in that is ironical, destabilising, self-negating.
It opens with an unnamed narrator pitching the Blade Runner film to a studio executive. “Now B.J. you are asking me to tell you in one sentence what this film is about? I’m telling you it is too big for one sentence – even a life sentence. For starters it’s about the National Health Insurance we don’t got.” The film will be a satire of the crippling medical insurance/services racket in the USA and the social collapse resulting from a system of exploitation growing to epic levels. The critique could appeal to both the big-state socialist and low-tax conservative through its depiction of a dysfunctional system that fails to provide adequately to the average-income man while taxing him exorbitantly. “This film is about overpopulation and the growth of vast service bureaucracies. The FDA and AMA and the big drug companies are like an octopus on the citizen.”
In reaction to the insane costs and bureaucratic resistance, the population of Manhattan has turned to underground medicine – the smuggling of medical supplies – a rare direct link to Nourse’s novel in Burroughs’ narrative. Societal collapse gives rise to a nightmare New York. The subway is reduced to a sluggish partial service. “Hand-propelled and steam-driven cars transport produce, the stations have been converted into markets. The lower tunnels are flooded, giving rise to an underground Venice. The upper reaches of derelict skyscrapers, without elevator service since the riots […] Buildings are joined by suspension bridges, a maze of platforms, catwalks, slides, lifts.”
Protagonist Billy will save humanity from a deadly virus. His story is told in a series of impressionistic scenarios described in Burroughsian poetic-satirical eroticism, generating a flickering delirium of a montage of scratched silent footage or jumbled phantograms.
In many ways, Blade Runner is a recapitulation of Burroughs’ greatest hits. The comic routines here are from Burroughs’s pre-existing roster of scientifically-shrewd dystopian medical science and anarchic exploits in doctoring – half prophecy, half silent comedy. There are glimpses of a failing metropolis that resembles strike-ridden impoverished London and riot-scarred New York on the verge of bankruptcy. Both were cities with which Burroughs had deep familiarity. Touches of archaic technology being used to replace broken modern systems will remind some readers of steampunk. Escape from New York (1981), Robocop (1987) and the Deathwish vigilante films are also handy comparators for this failed and feral metropolis.
Burroughs presents us the racial conflicts of tribalisation in Balkanised city, the dream of post-racialism impossibly distant. Considering the race riots in the USA of the late 1960s and early 1970s, Burroughs was as much re-presenting a pre-existing reality to his readers, as he was using his powers of imagination. It is difficult to tell if the legalisation of heroin is satire, considering the methadone programs of various local and national public health systems. In another scene, a taxpayer complains of being forced to fund “Queer sex orgies and injections of marijuana”.
The people work to combat the forces of the medico-military complex, using their ingenuity and improvised weapons. Life-lengthening drugs have caused dysgenic deterioration of the population in a manner predicted by social Darwinists. Bacterial resistance to antibiotics has rendered the population of Western cities as vulnerable as “the Indians and South Sea Islanders on first contact with the whites.” An ancient virus is released by a scientist to combat an accelerated form of cancer. All the while, the population is deprived of basic medication and access to Wilhelm Reich’s orgone treatment. (Burroughs was a supporter of fringe medical figure Reich, who was hounded for his quasi-spiritual theories and whose writings were destroyed by the American government. This also comes up in the original manuscript of his first published novel, Junkie (1953).)
Blade Runner includes scenes of homosexual sex and gun action, as well as social commentary and comedy, making it typical of Burroughs’s writing. With Burroughs, we cannot be sure he is not relishing depravities even as he mocks them. Burroughs is the most complex of all writers because of the interleaving levels of ethical and artistic contradiction present in his life and writing. Burroughs can be legitimately interpreted as Stoic, Buddhist, moral patriarch, Modernist, Post-Modernist, decadent, individualist, communitarian, post-humanist, conservationist, reactionary and libertarian.
Burroughs advocates for affordable healthcare as he delights in describing scenes of mayhem, wherein elaborate boobytraps are deployed against soldiers. Not that these points are necessarily in contradiction – and Burroughs should not be read as anything less than primarily a writer of the freewheeling imagination and comic paradox – but it makes constructing a settled, coherent, moral narrative from Burroughs’s fiction nearly impossible. One might draw absolutely multiple opposing interpretations from a Burroughs text and all be valid.
Overall, Blade Runner is a short, accessible romp, lacking involved plot and differentiated characters. For fans of Naked Lunch (1959) and Interzone (1989), this book is an ideal addition, with its own tone and content. Although Burroughs is in the habit of recycling material, collaging and overlayering it in hectic fashion, the distinct setting and common threads make Blade Runner more memorable than some of the other Burroughs books of the 1970s. Recommended for enthusiasts and those wishing to sample classic Burroughs for the first time.
William S. Burroughs, Oliver Harris (intro.), Blade Runner: A Movie, Tangerine Press, (second printing) 2022, paperback, 96pp, 1 mono illus., £9, ISBN 978 1 910 69 1908
(c) 2022 Alexander Adams
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The ever-expanding field of Beat studies extends our knowledge and understanding of writers within the Beat Generation movement. I have previously reviewed the Routledge Handbook of International Beat Literature here. Beat Feminisms: Aesthetics, Literature, Gender, Activism, a new book from Beat scholar Dr Polina Mackay (University of Nicosia) in the Routledge Transnational Perspectives on American Literature series, examines the role played by women within the Beat Movement. Mackay adopts a division of women which splits up them into waves. Firstly, are the women (born in the 1910s and 1920s) close to the original generation of Beat writers William Burroughs, Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac; secondly, those born in the 1930s who joined (or were associated with the Beats as they reached a public stage; and thirdly, those who were born in the 1930s and were inspired by the Beats but not necessarily personally close to the original Beat Generation. Mackay takes one female writer from each wave and examines them in detail in relation to feminist ideas and practice.
Mackay starts by acknowledging that participation in the Beat Movement – certainly for those individuals not personally connected to original members – was a matter of affinity and allegiance rather than one of conformity of style, theme or content. As Mackay notes, many of the Beat women were isolated from one another, some not meeting until the 1990s. Whether such seclusion was primarily driven by external or internal factors (or both), the point is that male editors and publishers were being exposed to female Beat writings less often and it is therefore unsurprising that little of that material was reaching publication in the 1950s-1980s period. The female absence (in terms of early-era publishing) that could be attributed to male hostility could just as easily be assigned to lack of access to material, no doubt exacerbated by ignorance and indifference. Seeing hostility towards women and absence of interest in women writers as equivalent would be an unhelpful conflation.
There is a thoughtful discussion of the literary place of Joan Vollmer Adams’s death at the hands of her husband William Burroughs in Mexico City. Burroughs, drunk, accidentally shot his wife with his pistol during a game at a party. Mackay outlines the various treatments of the incident. These include a few references in Burroughs’s writings and interviews (he did not present a fictionalised version in his novels), those written by associates and the writings of later authors. It is true but not informative to state that Vollmer’s life is written in her absence, as this is always the case when a subject does not leave any substantial written legacy. The author analyses how Burroughs, Ginsberg and Kerouac used their memories and fantasies regarding Vollmer’s life and death in their writings. Mackay concludes, “A common thread in Burroughs, Ginsberg and Kerouac is the intertwining of female presence in Beat textuality with autobiographical discourses, such as the development of the writer as a process of freeing from the biographical past (Burroughs), the conflation of poetic topic and the author’s poetic self-consciousness (Ginsberg), or the reconstruction of the past in writerly terms (Kerouac).”[i]
The core of the book is a discussion of Diane di Prima, Ruth Weiss and Anne Waldman as key women writers within the Beat movement, whose work exemplifies issues highlighted as feminist and female-specific within literature of the time. In her book Recollections of my Life as a Woman (2001), Diane di Prima wrote of her relationship to the poetry and letters of John Keats, seeing her work as a writer in relation to the ground-breaking output of the Romantic poet. Mackay draws the obvious parallel between di Prima’s inspiration from Keats with the famous incident when Ginsberg had a vision of William Blake, in 1948. Mackay analyses di Prima’s poetics in Recollections and This Kind of Bird Flies Backwards (1958) and Dinners and Nightmares (1961) in terms of a response, extension and revision of Keats’s verse, writing both about him and through him, in a process of intertextuality. “Di Prima’s repurposing of Keatsian poetics [accentuates] Keatsian-like contemplative pieces with the Beat vernacular not only modernizes the meditative poem as a genre but also brings into it a new discourse created by the unique time and space of the work’s production, which was the New York countercultural scene of the 1950s.”[ii]
Ruth Weiss’s Desert Journal (1977) represents two Biblical narratives – of the journeys through the wilderness by Moses and Christ – in a book of 40 poems, symbolising the traditional length of the journeys of 40 days and 40 nights. A reinterpretation of theological stories provided Weiss with a space to explore her journey of spiritual self-understanding. The use of English, German and Hebrew adds to the multi-level sequence, which mirrors the double narrative of the journeys through the wilderness made by the fathers of two religions.
Diane di Prima’s Loba (1998) is a later book, which Mackay uses as a starting point for a discussion of de Prima’s knowledge of early Modernist verse and her responses to mid-century writers, such as Black Mountain poet Charles Olson. This complex book-length poem includes a cast of well-known women from history and, according to critics, contains contradictory attitudes that put forth a complex idea of femininity, not one wholly laudatory. Mackay’s chapter indicates how dense the levels of mythology are in Loba and, more than the other chapters, makes one wish to read the original.
There is a chapter on female performances at Nova Convention in November-December 1978, New York, held to celebrate the work of William Burroughs. These included Laurie Anderson, Julia Heyward, Patti Smith and Anne Waldman. The event marked a widespread acknowledgement of the influence of the Beats on the New Wave and punk movements and advanced a younger generation of creators to be seen as peers of Burroughs and Ginsberg. The performance of Anderson was a key step from being a performance artist known only to afficionados of the New York art scene of the 1970s to a widely known musician and storyteller, world famous by the 1980s. Tangentially related are Kathy Acker’s cut-ups (as found in her novel Don Quixote (1986)), which were expressly parodic in character and considerably less respectful toward Burroughs than were Anderson and Waldman’s performances.
Waldman’s poetry is considered as a form of activism, mainly through the light of her collection Fast Speaking Woman (1975, expanded 2nd edition 1996) and Iovis Trilogy (2011). Aside from generalised statements in support of women lacking power, Waldman makes explicit statements against war. She has been an outspoken opponent of the Vietnam War and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Waldman’s Iovis Trilogy is a 1,000-page long Post-Modern, post-Beat “cultural intervention into public space”. Although this book is held up as a “clear link between writing as a woman and being an activist against various forms of oppression”[iii], this argument seems slightly light here. At least, we could do with more concrete examples that display how Waldman enacts activism through text, as opposed to simply displaying socio-political engagement. Is Waldman’s activism more explicit or direct here? Are there some distinct literary devices that support Mackay’s thesis or is it simply the prominence and urgency of Waldman’s politics that make Iovis Trilogy a landmark work?
The avoidance of jargon and clarity of argument makes Beat Feminisms a pleasing read, in a field that can become opaque with theory and advocacy. The extensive bibliography and a full index contribute to the book’s use as a study resource. Mackay’s book will prompt renewed consideration of the way prominent female Beats have viewed themselves as writers and is recommended for students of the Beat Generation and the wider movement, as well as for those researching feminist literature.
Polina Mackay, Beat Feminisms: Aesthetics, Literature, Gender, Activism, Routledge, hardback, 172pp + xiv, £120, ISBN 978 0 415 8927 1 1
© 2022 Alexander Adams
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Dead Fingers Talk (1963) is a bibliographic oddity in Burroughs’s output. It was a composite text composed extracts from the novels Naked Lunch (1959), Soft Machine (1961), The Ticket That Exploded (1962). Dead Fingers Talk was the brainchild of John Calder. Calder was the Scottish London-based publisher of Calder Books, which specialised in avant-garde literature. This restored version gives us the text as it was intended to be.
The publication history of Burroughs’s texts in the 1960s is fiendishly complex. Myriad publications in various countries issued by different publishers in forms that ranged from partial, censored, jumbled, poorly proofed and corrected, not to mention revised, expanded and partially re-written forms. At the time Dead Fingers Talk was composed, Naked Lunch had been published twice in two versions, Soft Machine was in its first edition form and Burroughs was finishing the manuscript for The Ticket That Exploded for Grove Press. Dead Fingers Talk was produced as an introduction to Burroughs’s work for British readers, preceding Calder’s publication of Naked Lunch in 1964. Calder had brought Burroughs to the Edinburgh Festival in 1962, where his description of his cut-up technique in a literary panel captured the imagination of consumers of experimental culture and newspaper journalists.
When it appeared, Dead Fingers Talk disappointed those who had already heard responses to the imported Girodias’s Naked Lunch and deemed Dead Fingers Talk “merely pragmatic means to more important ends”, i.e. British publication of Naked Lunch. The book was a curiosity that went out of print and was not published outside of Great Britain. Dr Oliver Harris is the leading Burroughs textual expert. He has produced restored editions of classic early books – discovering missing parts and correcting errors – and now turns his attention to Dead Fingers Talk. His comprehensive and fascinating introduction discusses the initial reception of the book and its absence from critical literature since. “By ignoring Dead Fingers Talk completely, the consensus of the critics is that there’s simply nothing to say for or about it […]” Harris has provided full textual notes, explaining changes, for those wishing to understand what has changed. Of course, given the limited readership of the original book and its reprints, most readers will be encountering this book for the first time.
The book includes parts of the three novels of 1959-62, omitting the most sexually explicit and profane passages. There was also a small amount of new material. The texts were reshaped and re-ordered, forming a new semi-narrative. Notoriously, there is no linear narrative to any of the novels, so chopping up the material did not make the text less comprehensible, simply comprehensible in a new way. Dead Fingers Talks is a collage of recognisable materials; it is a famous symphony played by a chamber orchestra. There are absurd horror, mordant satire and memorable characters. There are passages of exquisite prose poetry in tangled streams of consciousness. “Hands empty of hunger on the stale breakfast table – Winds of sickness through his face – Pain of the long slot burning flesh film – Cancelled eyes, old photo fading – Violet brown souvenir of Panama City –” There are paragraphs of Conradian description. “Aching lungs in dust and pain wind – Mountain lakes blue and cold as liquid air –” There are cowboy-style gunfights. There are sections of science-fiction. The chapters are short. However dense a section, it does not last. Thus there is no grind or page after page of unindented word collage, which renders The Soft Machine and The Ticket That Exploded tedious reads.
Describing the text in any conventional manner would be absurd. We meet again familiar characters such as narcotics agents, junkies, dealers and confidence tricksters. Dr Benway, the maniac physician of dubious means and morals, reappears as a part raconteur, part press agent, part Dr Mengele. Burroughs’s scepticism about authority leads him to treat religion as the long con – a giant experiment in control. His blasphemy is an expression moral outrage at manipulation. For Burroughs, restrictions on sexual activity are intolerable impositions on natural rights. This would become a core part of his libertarian fantasies of autonomous colonies in Wild Boys (1971), Port of Saints (1973) and The Red Night trilogy (1981-7).
A key element in Burroughs’s writing is discussion of drugs as a means of control and consciousness expansion. He invents fantastic drugs and also describes the reality of addiction. Sometimes fact and fantasy blur. “Shooting Eukodol every two hours. I have a place where I can slip my needle right into a vein, it stays open like a red, festering mouth, swollen and obscene, gathers a slow drop of blood and pus after the shot. […]” Burroughs is no way a hedonistic promoter of drug usage and is unflinching about the danger and squalor of drug taking. “Look down at my filthy trousers, haven’t been changed in months – The days glide by strung on a syringe with a long thread of blood – I am forgetting sex and all sharp pleasures of the body – a grey, junk-bound ghost.”
There is also plangent beauty throughout Burroughs’s writing, all the more striking when contrasted with the high comedy, street slang and horror. There is a persistent melancholy in Burroughs’s imagination. Sooner or later, the atrophying of the heroin high induces sadness. “There is no rich mother load, but vitiate dust, second run cottons trace the bones of a fix.” “Inactive oil wells and mine shafts, strata of abandoned machinery and gutted boats, garbage of stranded operations and expeditions that died at this point of dead land where sting-rays bask in brown water and grey crabs walk up from the mud flats to the silent temple of high jungle streams of clear water cut deep clefts in yellow clay and falling orchids endanger the traveller.”
Pleasure is plentiful in reading such free language and playful ideas, especially in a time when speech is policed so arbitrarily and tactically. That makes Dead Fingers Talk recommended reading for dissidents, critics, free-thinkers and lovers of imagination. Remarkably, for a compromise stop-gap measure meant to sustain notoriety with an eye to commercial considerations, Dead Fingers Talk is perhaps the best entry point for a reader who has never encountered Burroughs’s writings.
William S. Burroughs, Oliver Harris (ed., introduction), Dead Fingers Talk: The Restored Text, Calder Books, September 2020, paperback, 269pp + XLIII, £9.99, ISBN 978 0 7145 50015
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© 2020 Alexander Adams
Published by Indiana University Press, this book is a platform for the latest expert scholarship on William S. Burroughs, William S. Burroughs: Cutting Up the Century collects essays and interviews by a number of Burroughs experts on various aspects of his contributions to the arts. The book includes unseen texts by Burroughs from the Berg Collection, New York Public Library.
There are transcripts and facsimiles of previously unpublished texts by Burroughs. They are as follows: various short letters, “Metamorphosis” (William Burroughs Junior poem, 1963), “Adios Saturn” (cut-up poem, 1963), “Cut-Ups of Critics” (cut-ups, 1960-4; including the memorable line “he is se [sic] serving dead clinets [sic] by the hour”), “The Permissive Society” (essay, 1971), collage of news cuttings (1960s), “On China” (essay, 1969), “P.S. to ACADEMY 23” (text collage, 1967), “On Addiction” (text, 1957-9/1970), “Opium” (text collage, 1970), “la chute de l’art une poeme moderne” (text, collage and photographs, 1970), “Thinking in Colors” (cut-ups, c. 1961), “On the Cut-Up” (cut-ups, 1960-1), “Watergate” (text collage, 1973), “Cutting Up Scientology” (cut-ups, 1963-5), “Dream Note on Indictment for Murdering Joan” (note, 1970) and “Cut-Ups of Last Words” (cut-ups, 1960-1). The most substantial piece is the 1972 Wild Boys Screenplay (actually a treatment or proposal rather than a script) for a pornographic film. Stimulated by the experience of seeing explicit homosexual pornography in cinemas in New York City in 1972, Burroughs decided to get into the erotic-movie business. The treatment opens with “We intend to make a beautiful film that will make some beautiful money.” Burroughs himself concluded with regret that “I finally decided the whole idea was impractical both from a financial standpoint and from the stand point of making a good film within our budget.”
The extensive illustrations present Burroughs’s complex collage/montages and cut-up creations in a form that makes them comprehensible. The opening up of the Burroughs archive acquired by the New York Public Library in 2009 has allowed scholars access to a treasure trove of material both published and published, alongside rare publications and various biographical materials. Burroughs is a particularly complex and multi-layered creator, whose huge output contains many contradictions, dead-ends and unexplored detours. There is no lack of Burroughsian material which seems to presage current cengagement regarding ecological thought, queer aesthetics, anti-corporate activism, globalisation, multi-culturalism and post-modern deconstructionism.
Oliver Harris explores Burroughs’s battle with publisher Henry Luce over a libellous article about the writer, published in LIFE (30 November 1959). Luce was publisher of TIME, LIFE and Fortune magazines. Burroughs brought a civil suit against the magazine. He won the case but the damages were paltry. Burroughs worked off his aggression in a series of cut-ups that were part venting and part an attempt to curse LIFE. (Burroughs had an abiding fascination with magic and superstition and later cursed a milk bar where he had a particularly bad meal. He attributed its later closure to his acts of psychic sabotage.) Harris excavates the Luce-owned material that was incorporated into Burroughs’s cut-ups and into his transcribed texts.
Kathelin Gray covers Burroughs’s ecological awareness, concern about species extinction and eco-activism in his later American years. The illustrations of paintings link Burroughs apocalyptic cosmology with his concern about environmental exploitation and degradation. He took an interest in the Biosphere 2 project in the early 1990s. Katharine Streips writes about Burroughs in relation to “transcendent porn”, especially relating to The Ticket That Exploded (1962).
Burroughs writing of Tangiers interzone as a paradigm of globalisation is the topic of Timothy S. Murphy. Genre in the Naked Lunch novel and film is the subject of Joshua Vasquez’s essay. Kristen Galvin documents the 1978 Nova Convention in Downtown Manhattan. A table lists events and speakers over the weekend 1-3 December 1978. Burroughs, Ginsberg, Cage, Gysin, Calder, Girodias, Seaver and others spoke or read at the event and a stellar cast of musicians and artists contributed performances. She briefly summarises the 1996 Kansas Nova Convention Revisited. The commendable essay (by Eric Sandweiss) on Burroughs in St Louis is particularly well researched and informative. The writer had deep roots in the city but was ambivalent about the class and racial situation of his youth. In 1964-5 he made a rare return to write an article about the city.
Biographer Barry Miles is interviewed by Oliver Harris. They discuss Miles’s approach to his two biographies of Burroughs and the problems that subject posed. Harris is interviewed by Davis Schneiderman about the satisfaction and quandaries of editing Burroughs. A transcript of a panel discussion by Ann Douglas, Anne Waldman and Regina Weinreich covers the contentious matter of Burroughs’s treatment of women. They remember their personal interactions with him and characterise him as courtly and accommodating towards women, notwithstanding his negative comments in his writing – and the near uniform exclusion of women in his fictional worlds. Anne Waldman writes of Burroughs the visionary.
Alex Wermer-Colan uses Burroughs’s early novels as a starting point to present Burroughs as an anti-imperialist and satirist. Aaron Nyerges puts the case for Burroughs as a regionalist, a Mexican Beat regionalist specifically. He relates Burroughs’ killing of his wife Joan to the resistance of feminist Beat scholars towards Burroughs. (Kathelin Gray recounts that Burroughs raised the subject of the killing of his wife and was overcome by deep grief. It is an incident – however fleeting – of Burroughs feelings towards women, which is a live-wire issue for feminists due especially to the misogynist sentiments of many of his texts in the 1960s.) Blake Stricklin writes on the word as written image. Landon Palmer’s discusses Burroughs’s voice and the Burroughsian voice. In an unusually clear and informed essay Véronique Lane explores Burroughs responses to Rimbaud and Genet. Chad Weidner – an expert on the links between Burroughs and ecological thought – returns to his eco-literary analysis by examining early cut-ups.
Kurt Hemmer’s essay on Burroughs’s search for outlaw role models is a satisfying read. The source of Jack Black’s You Can’t Win is a cornerstone of the Burroughs’s thoughts on the subject and it shaped his responses to other models, such as Captain Mission’s utopian pirate colony. The use of outlaw argot, private codes of honour and a system of signs form a community ethos for Burroughs, which he sees as a method resisting the social mores of the day and the arbitrary authority of cops, courts and corporations. Combined with the stories of Western cowboys, robbers and pioneers, Burroughs invented an imagined community and canon – effectively a lineage of resistance. This is encountered in The Wild Boys (1971), Port of Saints (1973) and The Western Lands trilogy (1981-7).
Allen Hibbard examines some of Burroughs’s collaborations – with Kerouac, Ginsberg, Gysin and Kurt Cobain. He omits the work with filmmaker Anthony Balch and technical wizard Ian Sommerville. The latter was perhaps his closest and most fruitful direct collaboration. However, the non-textual character of the Burroughs-Sommerville creations (photographs, tape recordings and the Dream Machine) makes the partnership complicated to discuss verbally. The loss of the Burroughs letters to Sommerville (destroyed by his family after his death) has further obscured his importance in Burroughs studies. If there is one line of Burroughsian scholarship which has not been exhausted – which has hardly been adequately outlined – it is the life, work and relationship of Sommerville vis-à-vis Burroughs.
The tone, depth of reading, insight and importance of the texts is necessarily heterogeneous, as it must be in such collections. The content of the texts is of variable quality and utility but is never less than engaging and thoughtful. By and large, the academic abstruseness is at a minimum. All texts provide source texts though not detailed footnotes. The original Burroughs texts range from the beautiful (“Thinking in Colors”) to the expected. It is good to have them – especially the facsimiles – but they are undeniably minor pieces. Overall, this is book for those already knowledgable about Burroughs and keen to follow recent developments in the crowded and industrious field of Burroughs Studies.
Joan Hawkins, Alex Wermer-Colan (eds.), William S. Burroughs: Cutting Up the Century, Indiana University Press, 2019, paperback, 434pp, fully col. and mono illus., $35 (hardback $85), ISBN 978 0 253 041333
© 2019 Alexander Adams
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Writer, teacher, artist, publisher, musician and agitator for the counter culture, Jeff Nuttall (1933-2004) was a large figure in the British pop culture landscape during the 1960s and 1970s. He knew most of the leading figures in the underground scene of the era and acted as a link in the form of organiser, publisher, promoter and communicator. As someone with a high profile, Nuttall was in the ideal position to promote the counter culture – though what he put forward was his own version of the counter culture. Nuttall had his own preoccupations and blind spots and the underground culture he promulgated was very much in his own image. Bomb Culture – first published in 1968 – became the handbook for British readers in search of an explanation of the ideas driving the radical Sixties led by the post-Hiroshima generation. Widely reviewed and popular, Bomb Culture was seen at the time as representative of the zeitgeist. The new edition contains a foreword by Iain Sinclair and an introduction by Douglas Field and Jay Jeff Jones. Biographical notes allow younger readers to orientate themselves with less familiar names from 1968. There are also some added photographs.
Nuttall covers the well-established link between the origins of jazz as brothel music from New Orleans and the power of jazz music as a potent expression of political liberation and sexual defiance. Nuttall mentions the liberation movements of the period but is clearly less engaged by these movements. Sexual liberation is viewed in terms of accessibility to sexual gratification rather than to the widening of the social horizons for women. Consciousness liberation took the form of consumption of psychedelic and hallucinogenic drugs. Rock music (especially acid rock) is considered as an extension of the psychoactive effects of drugs. Nuttall is knowledgeable about pop music and writes with confidence about the counter culture credentials of rock and roll. Bomb Culture’s perspective is of particular interest because it was written from 1967 to 1968 and was published in 1968, placing its creation right at the centre of activity it describes.
While Nuttall’s perspective was British – laced with references to the Second World War and post-war austerity – his view of the scene was refracted through the lens of American culture – jazz, film, poetry, and underground activist journalism. Nuttall sees the cultural upheaval in Britain as a response to the failure of the CND and Aldermaston Marches of the late 1950s and early 1960s. He condemns much British Socialist writing as a compromise, seeking to ingratiate writers with the existing structure of the Labour Party as the main leftist opposition to the establishment. His claims are scattershot and his pragmatic counter-position is not forthcoming. For Nuttall the more underground, the freer from compromise production becomes. The International Times and his own fanzine (or “little magazine”, according to your definition) My Own Mag are freer. The manifest failure of the mass youth-led protests against the Cold War bomb culture led to the wider, more pervasive social movement of the counter culture. While British protesters took their lead from anti-Vietnam War protests and American pop culture, Nuttall sees a direct line from the anti-Cold War culture of the 1950s and early 1960s.
Nuttall took a more militant – even violent – position than the hippy outlook headed by Allen Ginsberg and the San Francisco scene. He is decidedly opposed to the pacifism of the hippies. He sees the violence of protestors in London’s Grosvenor Square against the American Embassy at the height of the Vietnam War as an enervating corrective to the violence being perpetrated against the Vietnamese. Likewise, there is adulation for student bomb makers and narcotic manufacturers. Yet how much of this is not simply the petulant anger of malcontents directed against the status quo? Is not the violent response the extension of violence the responders seeks to curtail? For Nuttall, bomb culture has a double meaning – the hegemony of the military-industrial complex that the nuclear bomb created and the bomb culture of youthful resistance to that system. Nuttall sees violence as an explicable and inevitable response to potential violence of a military system. He discusses the aimless violence of the teenage thrill kill and the gang fights of the Mods and Rockers. (The Teddy boys appropriated the upper-class fashion revival by the Edwardian age that Savile Row tailors, who had planned to market it to the middle class. Instead of the style becoming a profitable product for tailors to reach the middle classes, the working class adopted it as a badge of decadent defiance.)
Another line is the pseudo-Nietzschean amoralism of the Moors murderers as an example of libertinism. The defiance of sexual and social mores logically leads to the defiance of the ethical principles of the sanctity of life. In one startling observation, Nuttall talked of the crowd at the trial witnessing the process less in indignation than in envy.
Nuttall puts forward the psychoanalytic theory of the day, cribbed from popular publications.
Schizophrenia was ill-defined. At best it meant, means, someone who was isolated and therefore not adjusted to the patterns of society.
This conformed to the social-repressive view of R.D. Laing and others, who saw schizophrenia and serious conditions not as a problem of an individual being unable to map reality on to the mental landscape of the subject but of society stigmatising the non-conformist individual. In this view society and family (and the medical profession which sought to apply the principles of those institutions) were systems of repression. Any system that restrains (no matter how it also nurtures, supports and protects) is an artificial development which seeks to divert the potentially disruptive force of individualism. The psychoanalytic profession – rather than seeking to actualise the potential of people – was attempting to neuter people in the service of the pharmaceutical industry, educational system and social structures that were themselves beholden to insane priorities and values. In short, the insane were responding to the insanity of their alienated social reality rather than to any internal deficiency. In this respect Nuttall puts the counterculture case in its clearest form, associating Laing’s ideas with Ginsberg’s Howl – a poem noting the madness of great minds faced by the painful reality of society.
Nuttall diverts into Surrealism and Dadaism as attempts at liberation of art. His art history is unconventional – more Norman Mailer than Ernst Gombrich. Yet, even when he is elaborating ideas that would not find a place in any conventional study, he remains thought provoking.
The destination, as far as art is concerned, is the journey itself. Art keeps the thing moving. The only true disaster is the end of the journey, the end of man and his development.
Nuttall knew many of the Beat Generation, particularly William Burroughs. They lived in London at the same time and Nuttall published Burroughs’s writings. The British Beats are described in a series of amusing anecdotes.
Nuttall does not weave his observations into an integrated thesis. His observations form a torrent of history, pop culture criticism, fashion and music. (Television and radio hardly comes up and American movies are referenced in passing and in terms of iconic actors rather than any discussion of particular films.) Political theory, philosophy and revolutionary activism concepts are almost entirely omitted. The book includes many lengthy quotes – poems, newspaper extracts and popular science papers. Nuttall has limitations as a creative writer and a populariser of other people’s ideas. He was a reckless writer: casual with facts, lazy in style and clumsy with logic. Yet he was by no means a cynical blagger. He had an original and wayward mind; his Bomb Culture remains not only a personal view of a tumultuous period but also an enjoyable record of the era seen from the inside.
Jeff Nuttall, Bomb Culture, Strange Attractor Press (MIT distr.), 2019, paperback, 306pp., £14.99, ISBN 978 190 7222702
© 2019 Alexander Adams
View my books and art here: www.alexanderadams.art
Maarten van Gageldonk, Transatlantic Mediators: Grove Press, Evergreen Review and Postwar European Literature, 2016, 319pp, unpublished doctoral thesis
Transatlantic Mediators is the result of Maarten van Gageldonk’s research in the archives of Grove Press/Evergreen Review held at Syracuse University, New York, supplemented by wide-ranging reading and new interviews. This study is of Grove/Evergreen Review’s publication of foreign prose, poetry and drama from 1954 to 1973.
In 1951 American publisher Barney Rosset (1922-2012) took over the small, New York-based publishing house Grove Press and began to publish what would become a stream of highly influential literary, critical, sociological and biographical books. Rosset is widely considered the most important independent publisher of the post-war period. Van Gageldonk explains how the activities of Rosset, Grove Press and Evergreen Review were distinct yet often overlapping and in many respects inseparable. During the 1954-73 period Grove Press was on the cutting edge of avant-garde literature, publishing key texts by the Beats, French nouveau roman writers, European dramatists and other experimental and historically important writers
Van Gageldonk’s expertise in researching and evaluating periodical publications comes to the fore in his appreciation of Evergreen Review. Evergreen Review was founded in 1957 by Rosset to showcase Grove Press authors, as well as publish verse, prose and articles covering literary, artistic, social and political topics by non-house authors. It published excerpts of Grove volumes and introduced new writers in order to test reception. “Partly because of [its] eclecticism, the magazine was able to cater to a large and coherent group of young Americans, interested not only in cultural developments within the U.S., but also abroad. Evergreen Review’s ideal reader would have been in his or her early twenties, with a college education and left-leaning political views.”
Van Gageldonk uses statistical analysis to present a picture of how Evergreen Review changed over the years. He presents Evergreen Review’s sales and distribution figures to demonstrate its rise to the position of America’s most influential literary periodical and how it eventually lost its way. Once the censorship battles of the 1950s and 1960s were won, Evergreen Review was no longer the gatekeeper to clandestine avant-garde literature; it was just another counter-cultural publication. Evergreen Review changed format a number of times. When printing technology evolved, it became economic to publish on coated paper which allowed reproduction of photographs, first in half-tone then, later, in colour. The larger format, proliferation of advertisements and increased photographic illustration marked a gradual change in direction, highlighted by its retitling as Evergreen. When the journal largely dropped poetry and translations of foreign-language texts – choosing instead to feature a mix of erotic stories, nude photography, radical social commentary and polemic – it came into competition with Playboy, a match it was unequal to. Evergreen ceased print publication in 1973.
Van Gageldonk considers Grove Press’s battles with various American censoring bodies over Lady Chatterley’s Lover, Tropic of Cancer and Naked Lunch, driven partly by idealism, partly by commercialism. Controversy over freedom-of-speech issues increased sales as well as earning Grove cultural cachet. In purely financial terms, Grove’s position on banned books was not quite justified by the costs of defending them against charges of obscenity – especially in the case of Lady Chatterley’s Lover, where pirated editions by rival publishers would compete for sales once the ban was lifted. Works deemed illegal were not covered by American copyright law, so competing houses eyed the breaking of fresh ground with the intention of launching their own editions as soon as new markets opened.
The author discusses aspects of Grove/Evergreen Review’s output in terms of Pierre Bourdieu’s theories of cultural production and Ulf Hannerz’s conception of creolization of culture through adaptation and interpretation of cultural material. A good example of the latter is Van Gageldonk’s discussion of the publication of texts by Alfred Jarry in a 1960 issue of Evergreen Review dedicated to ‘Pataphysics. At the time, Jarry was a writer obscure to English readers, known mostly by reputation, and little of his work had been translated. The presentation of Jarry was in a highly mediated form: a small selection of his texts in translation with works by others connected to the ‘Pataphysics movement. The editing was highly influenced by figures active in the Collège de ‘Pataphysique, Paris. In this example of creolization, Jarry’s texts was detached from their historical and cultural context and presented as harbingers of Surrealism and Absurdism. The presentation of Jarry as a forerunner of the counter-culture resistance to social conformity and as a debunker of scientific rationalism made him attractive to Grove American readers familiar with the Beats. Thus a relatively underappreciated historical author became pressed into service of a publisher keen to buttress its artistic credibility.
Grove’s stake in the success of the Theatre of the Absurd is clear if one studies its publishing list. In 1954 Grove published the English translation of Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot, a gamble on an author little-known to Anglophones. Despite huge success in Paris, the play had not been performed in English due to concerns over possible infringement of obscenity and blasphemy laws. Van Gageldonk observes that Grove went on to corner the American market for European Absurdist drama, including in its list Beckett, Eugène Ionesco, Jean Genet, Arthur Adamov, Harold Pinter and Václav Havel. Van Gageldonk explains the involvement Grove had in arranging productions and how the commercial rewards and – particularly – critical responses to debut stage productions in New York could make or break dramatists in America. “Comparing Ionesco and Adamov’s impact on the theatrical field first of all highlights the absolute dominance still held by the older New York drama critics, a position at the time still little eroded by a younger generation. When the three key New York drama critics walked out of Ping Pong, they reduced Adamov’s chances within the field to nil.” He points out how successful early productions of Ionesco established him as a major dramatist for American audiences while Adamov sank into obscurity.
In other chapters Van Gageldonk assesses Grove’s publication of literature from Russia, Eastern Bloc nations and Germany – a useful complement to the attention already given by other academics to Grove’s important ties to the French avant-garde. Even when dealing with highly theoretical matters in the methodological introduction, Van Gageldonk’s prose is clear and precise. Discussing Rosset, Grove, Evergreen Review and Rosset’s most important editors, Richard Seaver and Donald Allen, Van Gageldonk’s text is enjoyable and engaging, conveying the social and literary milieu as well as the substance of his subject. Transatlantic Mediators is an approachable, thoroughly researched and informative study of the contribution Grove/Evergreen Review made to literature in the mid-Twentieth Century. Let us hope it reaches a wider audience in the future.
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William S. Burroughs, The Art of Fiction
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Firecrackers and whistles sounded the advent of the New Year of 1965 in St. Louis. Stripteasers ran from the bars in Gaslight Square to dance in the street when midnight came. Burroughs, who had watched television alone that night, was asleep in his room at the Chase Park Plaza Hotel, St. Louis’s most elegant.
At noon the next day he was ready for the interview. He wore a gray lightweight Brooks Brothers suit with a vest, a blue-striped shirt from Gibraltar cut in the English style, and a deep-blue tie with small white polka dots. His manner was not so much pedagogic as didactic or forensic. He might have been a senior partner in a private bank, charting the course of huge but anonymous fortunes. A friend of the interviewer, spotting Burroughs across the lobby, thought he was a British diplomat. At the age of fifty, he is trim; he performs a complex abdominal exercise daily and walks a good deal. His face carries no excess flesh. His expression is taut, and his features are intense and chiseled. He did not smile during the interview and laughed only once, but he gives the impression of being capable of much dry laughter under other circumstances. His voice is sonorous, its tone reasonable and patient; his accent is mid-Atlantic, the kind of regionless inflection Americans acquire after many years abroad. He speaks elliptically, in short, clear bursts.
On the dresser of his room sat a European transistor radio; several science fiction paperbacks; Romance, by Joseph Conrad and Ford Madox Ford; The Day Lincoln Was Shot, by Jim Bishop; and Ghosts in American Houses, by James Reynolds. A Zeiss Ikon camera in a scuffed leather case lay on one of the twin beds beside a copy of Field & Stream. On the other bed were a pair of long shears, clippings from newspaper society pages, photographs, and a scrapbook. A Facit portable typewriter sat on the desk, and gradually one became aware that the room, although neat, contained a great deal of paper.
Burroughs smoked incessantly, alternating between a box of English Ovals and a box of Benson & Hedges. As the interview progressed, the room filled with smoke. He opened the window. The temperature outside was seventy degrees, the warmest New Year’s Day in St. Louis’s history; a yellow jacket flew in and settled on the pane. The bright afternoon deepened. The faint cries of children rose up from the broad brick alleys in which Burroughs had played as a boy.
INTERVIEWER
You grew up here?
WILLIAM S. BURROUGHS
Yes. I went to John Burroughs School and the Taylor School, and was out West for a bit, and then went to Harvard.
INTERVIEWER
Any relation to the adding-machine firm?
BURROUGHS
My grandfather. You see, he didn’t exactly invent the adding machine, but he invented the gimmick that made it work, namely, a cylinder full of oil and a perforated piston that will always move up and down at the same rate of speed. Very simple principle, like most inventions. And it gave me a little money, not much, but a little.
INTERVIEWER
What did you do at Harvard?
BURROUGHS
Studied English lit. John Livingston Lowes. Whiting. I sat in on Kittredge’s course. Those are the main people I recall. I lived in Adams House and then I got fed up with the food and I moved to Claverly Hall, where I lived the last two years. I didn’t do any writing in college.
INTERVIEWER
When and why did you start to write?
BURROUGHS
I started to write in about 1950; I was thirty-five at the time; there didn’t seem to be any strong motivation. I simply was endeavoring to put down in a more or less straightforward journalistic style something about my experiences with addiction and addicts.
INTERVIEWER
Why did you feel compelled to record these experiences?
BURROUGHS
I didn’t feel compelled. I had nothing else to do. Writing gave me something to do every day. I don’t feel the results were at all spectacular. Junky is not much of a book, actually. I knew very little about writing at that time.
INTERVIEWER
Where was this?
BURROUGHS
In Mexico City. I was living near Sears, Roebuck, right around the corner from the University of Mexico. I had been in the army four or five months and I was there on the GI Bill, studying native dialects. I went to Mexico partly because things were becoming so difficult with the drug situation in America. Getting drugs in Mexico was quite easy, so I didn’t have to rush around, and there wasn’t any pressure from the law.
INTERVIEWER
Why did you start taking drugs?
BURROUGHS
Well, I was just bored. I didn’t seem to have much interest in becoming a successful advertising executive or whatever, or living the kind of life Harvard designs for you. After I became addicted in New York in 1944, things began to happen. I got in some trouble with the law, got married, moved to New Orleans, and then went to Mexico.
INTERVIEWER
There seems to be a great deal of middle-class voyeurism in this country concerning addiction, and in the literary world, downright reverence for the addict. You apparently don’t share these points of view.
BURROUGHS
No, most of it is nonsense. I think drugs are interesting principally as chemical means of altering metabolism and thereby altering what we call reality, which I would define as a more or less constant scanning pattern.
INTERVIEWER
What do you think of the hallucinogens and the new psychedelic drugs—LSD-25?
BURROUGHS
I think they’re extremely dangerous, much more dangerous than heroin. They can produce overwhelming anxiety states. I’ve seen people try to throw themselves out of windows; whereas the heroin addict is mainly interested in staring at his own toe. Other than deprivation of the drug, the main threat to him is an overdose. I’ve tried most of the hallucinogens without an anxiety reaction, fortunately. LSD-25 produced results for me similar to mescaline. Like all hallucinogens, LSD gave me an increased awareness, more a hallucinated viewpoint than any actual hallucination. You might look at a doorknob and it will appear to revolve, although you are conscious that this is the result of the drug. Also, van Goghish colors, with all those swirls, and the crackle of the universe.
INTERVIEWER
Have you read Henri Michaux’s book on mescaline?
BURROUGHS
His idea was to go into his room and close the door and hold in the experiences. I had my most interesting experiences with mescaline when I got outdoors and walked around—colors, sunsets, gardens. It produces a terrible hangover, though, nasty stuff. It makes one ill and interferes with coordination. I’ve had all the interesting effects I need, and I don’t want any repetition of those extremely unpleasant physical reactions.
INTERVIEWER
The visions of drugs and the visions of art don’t mix?
BURROUGHS
Never. The hallucinogens produce visionary states, sort of, but morphine and its derivatives decrease awareness of inner processes, thoughts, and feelings. They are painkillers, pure and simple. They are absolutely contraindicated for creative work, and I include in the lot alcohol, morphine, barbiturates, tranquilizers—the whole spectrum of sedative drugs. As for visions and heroin, I had a hallucinatory period at the very beginning of addiction, for instance, a sense of moving at high speed through space. But as soon as addiction was established, I had no visions—vision—at all and very few dreams.
INTERVIEWER
Why did you stop taking drugs?
BURROUGHS
I was living in Tangier in 1957, and I had spent a month in a tiny room in the Casbah staring at the toe of my foot. The room had filled up with empty Eukodol cartons; I suddenly realized I was not doing anything. I was dying. I was just apt to be finished. So I flew to London and turned myself over to Dr. John Yerbury Dent for treatment. I’d heard of his success with the apomorphine treatment. Apomorphine is simply morphine boiled in hydrochloric acid; it’s nonaddictive. What the apomorphine did was to regulate my metabolism. It’s a metabolic regulator. It cured me physiologically. I’d already taken the cure once at Lexington, and although I was off drugs when I got out, there was a physiological residue. Apomorphine eliminated that. I’ve been trying to get people in this country interested in it, but without much luck. The vast majority—social workers, doctors—have the cop’s mentality toward addiction. A probation officer in California wrote me recently to inquire about the apomorphine treatment. I’ll answer him at length. I always answer letters like that.
INTERVIEWER
Have you had any relapses?
BURROUGHS
Yes, a couple. Short. Both were straightened out with apomorphine, and now heroin is no temptation for me. I’m just not interested. I’ve seen a lot of it around. I know people who are addicts. I don’t have to use any willpower. Dr. Dent always said there is no such thing as willpower. You’ve got to reach a state of mind in which you don’t want it or need it.
INTERVIEWER
You regard addiction as an illness but also a central human fact, a drama?
BURROUGHS
Both, absolutely. It’s as simple as the way in which anyone happens to become an alcoholic. They start drinking, that’s all. They like it, and they drink, and then they become alcoholic. I was exposed to heroin in New York—that is, I was going around with people who were using it; I took it; the effects were pleasant. I went on using it and became addicted. Remember that if it can be readily obtained, you will have any number of addicts. The idea that addiction is somehow a psychological illness is, I think, totally ridiculous. It’s as psychological as malaria. It’s a matter of exposure. People, generally speaking, will take any intoxicant or any drug that gives them a pleasant effect if it is available to them. In Iran, for instance, opium was sold in shops until quite recently, and they had three million addicts in a population of twenty million. There are also all forms of spiritual addiction. Anything that can be done chemically can be done in other ways, that is, if we have sufficient knowledge of the processes involved. Many policemen and narcotics agents are precisely addicted to power, to exercising a certain nasty kind of power over people who are helpless. The nasty sort of power: white junk, I call it—rightness; they’re right, right, right—and if they lost that power, they would suffer excruciating withdrawal symptoms. The picture we get of the whole Russian bureaucracy, people who are exclusively preoccupied with power and advantage, this must be an addiction. Suppose they lose it? Well, it’s been their whole life.
INTERVIEWER
Can you amplify your idea of junk as image?
BURROUGHS
It’s only a theory and, I feel, an inadequate one. I don’t think anyone really understands what a narcotic is or how it works, how it kills pain. My idea is sort of a stab in the dark. As I see it, what has been damaged in pain is, of course, the image, and morphine must in some sense replace this. We know it blankets the cells and that addicts are practically immune to certain viruses, to influenza and respiratory complaints. This is simple because the influenza virus has to make a hole in the cell receptors. When those are covered, as they are in morphine addiction, the virus can’t get in. As soon as morphine is withdrawn, addicts will immediately come down with colds and often with influenza.
INTERVIEWER
Certain schizophrenics also resist respiratory disease.
BURROUGHS
A long time ago I suggested there were similarities in terminal addiction and terminal schizophrenia. That was why I made the suggestion that they addict these people to heroin, then withdraw it and see if they could be motivated; in other words, find out whether they’d walk across the room and pick up a syringe. Needless to say, I didn’t get very far, but I think it would be interesting.
INTERVIEWER
Narcotics, then, disturb normal perception—
BURROUGHS
And set up instead a random craving for images. If drugs weren’t forbidden in America, they would be the perfect middle-class vice. Addicts would do their work and come home to consume the huge dose of images awaiting them in the mass media. Junkies love to look at television. Billie Holiday said she knew she was going off drugs when she didn’t like to watch TV. Or they’ll sit and read a newspaper or magazine, and by God, read it all. I knew this old junkie in New York, and he’d go out and get a lot of newspapers and magazines and some candy bars and several packages of cigarettes and then he’d sit in his room and he’d read those newspapers and magazines right straight through. Indiscriminately. Every word.
INTERVIEWER
You seem primarily interested in bypassing the conscious rational apparatus to which most writers direct their efforts.
BURROUGHS
I don’t know about where fiction ordinarily directs itself, but I am quite deliberately addressing myself to the whole area of what we call dreams. Precisely what is a dream? A certain juxtaposition of word and image. I’ve recently done a lot of experiments with scrapbooks. I’ll read in the newspaper something that reminds me of or has relation to something I’ve written. I’ll cut out the picture or article and paste it in a scrapbook beside the words from my book. Or, I’ll be walking down the street and I’ll suddenly see a scene from my book and I’ll photograph it and put it in a scrapbook. I’ll show you some of those. I’ve found that when preparing a page, I’ll almost invariably dream that night something relating to this juxtaposition of word and image. In other words, I’ve been interested in precisely how word and image get around on very, very complex association lines. I do a lot of exercises in what I call time travel, in taking coordinates, such as what I photographed on the train, what I was thinking about at the time, what I was reading, and what I wrote; all of this to see how completely I can project myself back to that one point in time.
INTERVIEWER
In Nova Express, you indicate that silence is a desirable state.
BURROUGHS
The most desirable state. In one sense a special use of words and pictures can conduce silence. The scrapbooks and time travel are exercises to expand consciousness, to teach me to think in association blocks rather than words. I’ve recently spent a little time studying hieroglyph systems, both the Egyptian and the Mayan. A whole block of associations—boonf!—like that! Words, at least the way we use them, can stand in the way of what I call nonbody experience. It’s time we thought about leaving the body behind.
INTERVIEWER
Marshall McLuhan said that you believed heroin was needed to turn the human body into an environment that includes the universe. But from what you’ve told me, you’re not at all interested in turning the body into an environment.
BURROUGHS
No, junk narrows consciousness. The only benefit to me as a writer (aside from putting me into contact with the whole carny world) came to me after I went off it. What I want to do is to learn to see more of what’s out there, to look outside, to achieve as far as possible a complete awareness of surroundings. Beckett wants to go inward. First he was in a bottle and now he is in the mud. I am aimed in the other direction—outward.
INTERVIEWER
Have you been able to think for any length of time in images, with the inner voice silent?
BURROUGHS
I’m becoming more proficient at it, partly through my work with scrapbooks and translating the connections between words and images. Try this. Carefully memorize the meaning of a passage, then read it; you’ll find you can actually read it without the words making any sound whatever in the mind’s ear. Extraordinary experience, and one that will carry over into dreams. When you start thinking in images, without words, you’re well on the way.
INTERVIEWER
Why is the wordless state so desirable?
BURROUGHS
I think it’s the evolutionary trend. I think that words are an around-the-world, oxcart way of doing things, awkward instruments, and they will be laid aside eventually, probably sooner than we think. This is something that will happen in the space age. Most serious writers refuse to make themselves available to the things that technology is doing. I’ve never been able to understand this sort of fear. Many of them are afraid of tape recorders and the idea of using any mechanical means for literary purposes seems to them some sort of a sacrilege. This is one objection to the cut-ups. There’s been a lot of that, a sort of a superstitious reverence for the word. My God, they say, you can’t cut up these words. Why can’t I? I find it much easier to get interest in the cut-ups from people who are not writers—doctors, lawyers, or engineers, any open-minded, fairly intelligent person—than from those who are.
INTERVIEWER
How did you become interested in the cut-up technique?
BURROUGHS
A friend, Brion Gysin, an American poet and painter, who has lived in Europe for thirty years, was, as far as I know, the first to create cut-ups. His cut-up poem, “Minutes to Go,” was broadcast by the BBC and later published in a pamphlet. I was in Paris in the summer of 1960; this was after the publication there of Naked Lunch. I became interested in the possibilities of this technique, and I began experimenting myself. Of course, when you think of it, The Waste Land was the first great cut-up collage, and Tristan Tzara had done a bit along the same lines. Dos Passos used the same idea in “The Camera Eye” sequences in U.S.A. I felt I had been working toward the same goal; thus it was a major revelation to me when I actually saw it being done.
INTERVIEWER
What do cut-ups offer the reader that conventional narrative doesn’t?
BURROUGHS
Any narrative passage or any passage, say, of poetic images is subject to any number of variations, all of which may be interesting and valid in their own right. A page of Rimbaud cut up and rearranged will give you quite new images. Rimbaud images—real Rimbaud images—but new ones.
INTERVIEWER
You deplore the accumulation of images and at the same time you seem to be looking for new ones.
BURROUGHS
Yes, it’s part of the paradox of anyone who is working with word and image, and after all, that is what a writer is still doing. Painter too. Cut-ups establish new connections between images, and one’s range of vision consequently expands.
INTERVIEWER
Instead of going to the trouble of working with scissors and all those pieces of paper, couldn’t you obtain the same effect by simply free-associating at the typewriter?
BURROUGHS
One’s mind can’t cover it that way. Now, for example, if I wanted to make a cut-up of this [picking up a copy of The Nation], there are many ways I could do it. I could read cross-column; I could say, “Today’s men’s nerves surround us. Each technological extension gone outside is electrical involves an act of collective environment. The human nervous environment system itself can be reprogrammed with all its private and social values because it is content. He programs logically as readily as any radio net is swallowed by the new environment. The sensory order.” You find it often makes quite as much sense as the original. You learn to leave out words and to make connections. [Gesturing] Suppose I should cut this down the middle here, and put this up here. Your mind simply could not manage it. It’s like trying to keep so many chess moves in mind, you just couldn’t do it. The mental mechanisms of repression and selection are also operating against you.
INTERVIEWER
You believe that an audience can be eventually trained to respond to cut-ups?
BURROUGHS
Of course, because cut-ups make explicit a psychosensory process that is going on all the time anyway. Somebody is reading a newspaper, and his eye follows the column in the proper Aristotelian manner, one idea and sentence at a time. But subliminally he is reading the columns on either side and is aware of the person sitting next to him. That’s a cut-up. I was sitting in a lunchroom in New York having my doughnuts and coffee. I was thinking that one does feel a little boxed in New York, like living in a series of boxes. I looked out the window and there was a great big Yale truck. That’s cut-up—a juxtaposition of what’s happening outside and what you’re thinking of. I make this a practice when I walk down the street. I’ll say, when I got to here I saw that sign; I was thinking this, and when I return to the house I’ll type these up. Some of this material I use and some I don’t. I have literally thousands of pages of notes here, raw, and I keep a diary as well. In a sense it’s traveling in time.
Most people don’t see what’s going on around them. That’s my principal message to writers: for God’s sake, keep your eyes open. Notice what’s going on around you. I mean, I walk down the street with friends. I ask, “Did you see him, that person who just walked by?” No, they didn’t notice him. I had a very pleasant time on the train coming out here. I haven’t traveled on trains in years. I found there were no drawing rooms. I got a bedroom so I could set up my typewriter and look out the window. I was taking photos, too. I also noticed all the signs and what I was thinking at the time, you see. And I got some extraordinary juxtapositions. For example, a friend of mine has a loft apartment in New York. He said, “Every time we go out of the house and come back, if we leave the bathroom door open, there’s a rat in the house.” I look out the window, there’s Able Pest Control.
INTERVIEWER
The one flaw in the cut-up argument seems to lie in the linguistic base on which we operate, the straight declarative sentence. It’s going to take a great deal to change that.
BURROUGHS
Yes, it is unfortunately one of the great errors of Western thought, the whole either/or proposition. You remember Korzybski and his idea of non-Aristotelian logic. Either/or thinking just is not accurate thinking. That’s not the way things occur, and I feel the Aristotelian construct is one of the great shackles of Western civilization. Cut-ups are a movement toward breaking this down. I should imagine it would be much easier to find acceptance of the cut-ups from, possibly, the Chinese, because you see already there are many ways that they can read any given ideograph. It’s already cut up.
INTERVIEWER
What will happen to the straight plot in fiction?
BURROUGHS
Plot has always had the definite function of stage direction, of getting the characters from here to there, and that will continue, but the new techniques such as cut-up will involve much more of the total capacity of the observer. It enriches the whole aesthetic experience, extends it.
INTERVIEWER
Nova Express is a cut-up of many writers?
BURROUGHS
Joyce is in there. Shakespeare, Rimbaud, some writers that people haven’t heard about, someone named Jack Stern. There’s Kerouac. I don’t know, when you start making these fold-ins (instead of cutting, you fold) and cut-ups you lose track. Genet, of course, is someone I admire very much. But what he’s doing is classical French prose. He’s not a verbal innovator. Also Kafka, Eliot, and one of my favorites is Joseph Conrad. My story, “They Just Fade Away,” is a fold-in from Lord Jim. In fact, it’s almost a retelling of the Lord Jim story. My Stein is the same Stein as in Lord Jim. Richard Hughes is another favorite of mine. And Graham Greene. For exercise, when I make a trip, such as from Tangier to Gibraltar, I will record this in three columns in a notebook I always take with me. One column will contain simply an account of the trip, what happened. I arrived at the air terminal, what was said by the clerks, what I overheard on the plane, what hotel I checked into. The next column presents my memories; that is, what I was thinking of at the time, the memories that were activated by my encounters; and the third column, which I call my reading column, gives quotations from any book that I take with me. I have practically a whole novel alone on my trips to Gibraltar. Besides Graham Greene, I’ve used other books. I used The Wonderful Country by Tom Lea on one trip. Let’s see, and Eliot’s The Cocktail Party; In Hazard by Richard Hughes. For example, I’m reading The Wonderful Country and the hero is just crossing the frontier into Mexico. Well, just at this point I come to the Spanish frontier, so I note that down in the margin. Or I’m on a boat or a train, and I’m reading The Quiet American. I look around and see if there’s a quiet American aboard. Sure enough, there’s a quiet sort of young American with a crew cut drinking a bottle of beer. It’s extraordinary, if you really keep your eyes open. I was reading Raymond Chandler, and one of his characters was an albino gunman. My God, if there wasn’t an albino in the room. He wasn’t a gunman.
Who else? Wait a minute, I’ll just check my coordinate books to see if there’s anyone I’ve forgotten—Conrad, Richard Hughes, science fiction, quite a bit of science fiction. Eric Frank Russell has written some very, very interesting books. Here’s one, The Star Virus; I doubt if you’ve heard of it. He develops a concept here of what he calls “Deadliners,” who have this strange sort of seedy look. I read this when I was in Gibraltar, and I began to find Deadliners all over the place. The story has a fishpond in it, and quite a flower garden. My father was always very interested in gardening.
INTERVIEWER
In view of all this, what will happen to fiction in the next twenty-five years?
BURROUGHS
In the first place, I think there’s going to be more and more merging of art and science. Scientists are already studying the creative process, and I think the whole line between art and science will break down and that scientists, I hope, will become more creative and writers more scientific. And I see no reason why the artistic world can’t absolutely merge with Madison Avenue. Pop art is a move in that direction. Why can’t we have advertisements with beautiful words and beautiful images? Already some of the very beautiful color photography appears in whiskey ads, I notice. Science will also discover for us how association blocks actually form.
INTERVIEWER
Do you think this will destroy the magic?
BURROUGHS
Not at all. I would say it would enhance it.
INTERVIEWER
Have you done anything with computers?
BURROUGHS
I’ve not done anything, but I’ve seen some of the computer poetry. I can take one of those computer poems and then try to find correlatives of it, that is, pictures to go with it. It’s quite possible.
INTERVIEWER
Does the fact that it comes from a machine diminish its value to you?
BURROUGHS
I think that any artistic product must stand or fall on what’s there.
INTERVIEWER
Therefore, you’re not upset by the fact that a chimpanzee can do an abstract painting?
BURROUGHS
If he does a good one, no. People say to me, “Oh, this is all very good, but you got it by cutting up.” I say that has nothing to do with it, how I got it. What is any writing but a cut-up? Somebody has to program the machine; somebody has to do the cutting up. Remember that I first made selections. Out of hundreds of possible sentences that I might have used, I chose one.
INTERVIEWER
Incidentally, one image in Nova Express keeps coming back to me and I don’t quite understand it: the gray room, “breaking through to the gray room.”
BURROUGHS
I see that as very much like the photographic darkroom where the reality photographs are actually produced. Implicit in Nova Express is a theory that what we call reality is actually a movie. It’s a film, what I call a biologic film. What has happened is that the underground and also the nova police have made a breakthrough past the guards and gotten into the darkroom where the films are processed, where they’re in a position to expose negatives and prevent events from occurring. They’re like police anywhere. All right, you’ve got a bad situation here in which the nova mob is about to blow up the planet. So The Heavy Metal Kid calls in the nova police. Once you get them in there, by God, they begin acting like any police. They’re always an ambivalent agency. I recall once in South America that I complained to the police that a camera had been stolen and they ended up arresting me. I hadn’t registered or something. In other words, once you get them on the scene they really start nosing around. Once the law starts asking questions, there’s no end to it. For nova police, read technology, if you wish.
INTERVIEWER
Mary McCarthy has commented on the carnival origins of your characters in Naked Lunch. What are their other derivations?
BURROUGHS
The carny world was the one I exactly intended to create—a kind of midwestern, small-town, cracker-barrel, pratfall type of folklore, very much my own background. That world was an integral part of America and existed nowhere else, at least not in the same form. My family was southern on my mother’s side. My grandfather was a circuit-riding Methodist minister with thirteen children. Most of them went up to New York and became quite successful in advertising and public relations. One of them, an uncle, was a master image maker, Ivy Lee, Rockefeller’s publicity manager.
INTERVIEWER
Is it true that you did a great deal of acting out to create your characters when you were finishing Naked Lunch?
BURROUGHS
Excuse me, there is no accurate description of the creation of a book, or an event. Read Durrell’s Alexandria novels for four different ways of looking at the same thing. Gysin saw me pasting pictures on the wall of a Paris hotel room and using a tape recorder to act out several voices. Actually, it was written mainly in Tangier, after I had taken the cure with Dr. Dent in London in 1957. I came back to Tangier and I started working on a lot of notes that I had made over a period of years. Most of the book was written at that time. I went to Paris about 1959, and I had a great pile of manuscripts. Girodias was interested and he asked if I could get the book ready in two weeks. This is the period that Brion is referring to when, from manuscripts collected over a period of years, I assembled what became the book from some thousand pages, something like that.
INTERVIEWER
But did you actually leap up and act out, say, Dr. Benway?
BURROUGHS
Yes, I have. Dr. Benway dates back to a story I wrote in 1938 with a friend of mine, Kells Elvins, who is now dead. That’s about the only piece of writing I did prior to Junky. And we did definitely act the thing out. We decided that was the way to write. Now here’s this guy, what does he say, what does he do? Dr. Benway sort of emerged quite spontaneously while we were composing this piece. Something I’ve been meaning to do with my scrapbooks is to have files on every character, almost like police files: habits, idiosyncrasies, where born, pictures. That is, if I ever see anyone in a magazine or newspaper who looks like Dr. Benway (and several people have played Dr. Benway, sort of amateur actors), I take their photographs. Many of my characters first come through strongly to me as voices. That’s why I use a tape recorder. They also carry over from one book to another.
INTERVIEWER
Do any have their origins in actual persons?
BURROUGHS
Hamburger Mary is one. There was a place in New York called Hamburger Mary’s. I was in Hamburger Mary’s when a friend gave me a batch of morphine syrettes. That was my first experience with morphine and then I built up a whole picture of Hamburger Mary. She is also an actual person. I don’t like to give her name for fear of being sued for libel, but she was a Scientologist who started out in a hamburger joint in Portland, Oregon, and now has eleven million dollars.
INTERVIEWER
What about The Heavy Metal Kid?
BURROUGHS
There again, quite complicated origins, partly based on my own experience. I felt that heavy metal was sort of the ultimate expression of addiction, that there’s something actually metallic in addiction, that the final stage reached is not so much vegetable as mineral. It’s increasingly inanimate, in any case. You see, as Dr. Benway said, I’ve now decided that junk is not green, but blue. Some of my characters come to me in dreams, Daddy Long Legs, for instance. Once, in a clinic, I had a dream in which I saw a man in this rundown clinic and his name in the dream was Daddy Long Legs. Many characters have come to me like that in a dream, and then I’ll elaborate from there. I always write down all my dreams. That’s why I’ve got that notebook beside the bed there.
INTERVIEWER
Earlier you mentioned that if junk had done nothing else, it at least put you in contact with the carny world.
BURROUGHS
Yes, the underworld, the old-time thieves, pickpockets, and people like that. They’re a dying race; very few of those old-timers left. Yeah, well, they were show business.
INTERVIEWER
What’s the difference between the modern junkie versus the 1944 junkie?
BURROUGHS
For one thing, all these young addicts; that was quite unknown in 1944. Most of the ones I knew were middle-aged men or old. I knew some of the old-time pickpockets and sneak thieves and shortchange artists. They had something called The Bill, a shortchange deal. I’ve never been able to figure out how it works. One man I knew beat all the cashiers in Grand Central with this thing. It starts with a twenty-dollar bill. You give them a twenty-dollar bill and then when you get the change you say, “Well, wait a minute, I must have been dreaming, I’ve got the change after all.” First thing you know, the cashier’s short ten dollars. One day this shortchange artist went to Grand Central, even though he knew it was burned down, but he wanted to change twenty dollars. Well, a guy got on the buzzer and they arrested him. When they got up in court and tried to explain what had happened, none of them could do it. I keep stories like this in my files.
INTERVIEWER
In your apartment in Tangier?
BURROUGHS
No, all of it is right here in this room.
INTERVIEWER
In case Tangier is blown up, it’s all safe?
BURROUGHS
Well, more than that. I need it all. I brought everything. That’s why I have to travel by boat and by train, because, well, just to give you an idea, that’s a photographic file [thud]. Those are all photographs and photographs. When I sit down to write, I may suddenly think of something I wrote three years ago which should be in this file over here. It may not be. I’m always looking through these files. That’s why I need a place where I can really spread them out, to see what’s what. I’m looking for one particular paper, it often takes me a long time and sometimes I don’t find it. Those dresser drawers are full of files. All those drawers in the closets are full of files. It’s pretty well organized. Here’s a file, “The 1920 Movie,” which partly contains some motion picture ideas. Here’s “All the Sad Old Showmen”; has some business about bank robbers in it. Here’s “The Nova Police Gazette.” This is “Analog,” which contains science fiction material. This is “The Captain’s Logbook.” I’ve been interested in sea stories, but I know so little about the sea, I hesitate to do much. I collect sea disasters such as the Mary Celeste. Here’s a file on Mr. Luce.
INTERVIEWER
Do you admire Mr. Luce?
BURROUGHS
I don’t admire him at all. He has set up one of the greatest word and image banks in the world. I mean, there are thousands of photos, thousands of words about anything and everything, all in his files. All the best pictures go into the files. Of course, they’re reduced to microphotos now. I’ve been interested in the Mayan system, which was a control calendar. You see, their calendar postulated really how everyone should feel at a given time, with lucky days, unlucky days, et cetera. And I feel that Luce’s system is comparable to that. It is a control system. It has nothing to do with reporting. Time, Life, Fortune is some sort of a police organization.
INTERVIEWER
You’ve said your next book will be about the American West and a gunfighter.
BURROUGHS
Yes, I’ve thought about this for years and I have hundreds of pages of notes on the whole concept of the gunfighter. The gun duel was a sort of Zen contest, a real spiritual contest like Zen swordsmanship.
INTERVIEWER
Would this be cut-up, or more a conventional narrative?
BURROUGHS
I’d use cut-ups extensively in the preparation, because they would give me all sorts of facets of character and place, but the final version would be straight narrative. I wouldn’t want to get bogged down in too much factual detail, but I’d like to do research in New Mexico or Arizona, even though the actual towns out there have become synthetic tourist attractions. Occasionally I have the sensation that I’m repeating myself in my work, and I would like to do something different—almost a deliberate change of style. I’m not sure if it’s possible, but I want to try. I’ve been thinking about the Western for years. As a boy I was sent to school in New Mexico, and during the war I was stationed in Coldspring, Texas, near Conroe. That’s genuine backwoods country, and I picked up some real characters there. For instance, a fellow who actually lived in East Texas. He was always having trouble with his neighbors, who suspected him of rustling their cattle, I think with good reason. But he was competent with a gun and there wasn’t anyone who would go up against him. He finally was killed. He got drunk and went to sleep under a tree by a campfire. The fire set fire to the tree, and it fell on him. I’m interested in extending newspaper and magazine formats to so-called literary materials. Here, this is one of my attempts. This is going to be published in a little magazine, The Sparrow.
INTERVIEWER
[Reading] “The Coldspring News, All the News That Fits We Print, Sunday, September 17, 1899, William Burroughs, Editor.” Here’s Bradly Martin again.
BURROUGHS
Yes, he’s the gunfighter. I’m not sure yet what’s going to happen after Clem accuses him of rustling cattle. I guess Clem goes into Coldspring and there’s gunplay between him and the gunfighter. He’s going to kill Clem, obviously. Clem is practically a dead man. Clem is going to get likkered up and think he can tangle with Bradly Martin, and Bradly Martin is going to kill him, that’s for sure.
INTERVIEWER
Will your other characters reappear? Dr. Benway?
BURROUGHS
He’d be the local doctor. That’s what I’d like to do, you see, use all these characters in a straight Western story. There would be Mr. Bradly, Mr. Martin, whose name is Bradly Martin; there would be Dr. Benway; and we’d have the various traveling carny and medicine shows that come through with the Subliminal Kid and all of the con men. That was the heyday for those old joes.
INTERVIEWER
Do you think of the artist at all as being a con man?
BURROUGHS
In a sense. You see, a real con man is a creator. He creates a set. No, a con man is more a movie director than a writer. The Yellow Kid created a whole set, a whole cast of characters, a whole brokerage house, a whole bank. It was just like a movie studio.
INTERVIEWER
What about addicts?
BURROUGHS
Well, there will be a lot of morphine addiction. Remember that there were a great many addicts at that time. Jesse James was an addict. He started using morphine for a wound in his lung, and I don’t know whether he was permanently addicted, but he tried to kill himself. He took sixteen grains of morphine and it didn’t kill him, which indicates a terrific tolerance. So he must have been fairly heavily addicted. A dumb, brutal hick; that’s what he was, like Dillinger. And there were so many genteel old ladies who didn’t feel right unless they had their Dr. Jones mixture every day.
INTERVIEWER
What about the Green Boy, Izzy the Push, Green Tony, Sammy the Butcher, and Willy the Fink?
BURROUGHS
See, all of them could be Western characters except lzzy the Push. The buildings weren’t high enough in those days. Defenestration, incidentally, is a very interesting phenomenon. Some people who are prone to it will not live in high buildings. They get near a window, someone in the next room hears a cry, and they’re gone. “Fell or jumped” is the phrase. I would add, “or was pushed.”
INTERVIEWER
What other character types interest you?
BURROUGHS
Not the people in advertising and television, nor the American postman or middle-class housewife; not the young man setting forth. The whole world of high finance interests me, the men such as Rockefeller who were specialized types of organisms that could exist in a certain environment. He was really a moneymaking machine, but I doubt that he could have made a dime today because he required the old laissez-faire capitalism. He was a specialized monopolistic organism. My uncle Ivy created images for him. I fail to understand why people like J. Paul Getty have to come on with such a stuffy, uninteresting image. He decides to write his life history. I’ve never read anything so dull, so absolutely devoid of any spark. Well, after all, he was quite a playboy in his youth. There must have been something going on. None of it’s in the book. Here he is, the only man of enormous wealth who operates alone, but there’s nobody to present the image. Well, yes, I wouldn’t mind doing that sort of job myself. I’d like to take somebody like Getty and try to find an image for him that would be of some interest. If Getty wants to build an image, why doesn’t he hire a first-class writer to write his story? For that matter, advertising has a long way to go. I’d like to see a story by Norman Mailer or John O’Hara which just makes some mention of a product, say, Southern Comfort. I can see the O’Hara story. It would be about someone who went into a bar and asked for Southern Comfort; they didn’t have it, and he gets into a long, stupid argument with the bartender. It shouldn’t be obtrusive; the story must be interesting in itself so that people read this just as they read any story in Playboy, and Southern Comfort would be guaranteed that people will look at that advertisement for a certain number of minutes. You see what I mean? They’ll read the story. Now, there are many other ideas; you could have serialized comic strips, serial stories. Well, all we have to do is have James Bond smoking a certain brand of cigarettes.
INTERVIEWER
Didn’t you once work for an advertising agency?
BURROUGHS
Yes, after I got out of Harvard in 1936. I had done some graduate work in anthropology. I got a glimpse of academic life and I didn’t like it at all. It looked like there was too much faculty intrigue, faculty teas, cultivating the head of the department, so on and so forth. Then I spent a year as a copywriter in this small advertising agency, since defunct, in New York. We had a lot of rather weird accounts. There was some device called the Cascade for giving high colonics, and something called Endocreme. It was supposed to make women look younger, because it contained some female sex hormones. The Interstate Commerce Commission was never far behind. As you can see, I’ve recently thought a great deal about advertising. After all, they’re doing the same sort of thing. They are concerned with the precise manipulation of word and image. Anyway, after the ad game I was in the army for a bit. Honorably discharged and then the usual strange wartime jobs—bartender, exterminator, reporter, and factory and office jobs. Then Mexico, a sinister place.
INTERVIEWER
Why sinister?
BURROUGHS
I was there during the Alemán regime. If you walked into a bar, there would be at least fifteen people in there who were carrying guns. Everybody was carrying guns. They got drunk and they were a menace to any living creature. I mean, sitting in a cocktail lounge, you always had to be ready to hit the deck. I had a friend who was shot, killed. But he asked for it. He was waving his little .25 automatic around in a bar and some Mexican blasted him with a .45. They listed the death as natural causes, because the killer was a political big shot. There was no scandal, but it was really as much as your life was worth to go into a cocktail lounge. And I had that terrible accident with Joan Vollmer, my wife. I had a revolver that I was planning to sell to a friend. I was checking it over and it went off—killed her. A rumor started that I was trying to shoot a glass of champagne from her head William Tell-style. Absurd and false. Then they had a big depistolization. Mexico City had one of the highest per capita homicide rates in the world. Another thing, every time you turned around there was some Mexican cop with his hand out, finding some fault with your papers or something, just anything he could latch on to. “Papers very bad, señor.” It really was a bit much, the Alemán regime.
INTERVIEWER
From Mexico?
BURROUGHS
I went to Colombia, Peru, and Ecuador, just looking around. I was particularly interested in the Amazon region of Peru, where I took a drug called yage, Bannisteria caapi, a hallucinogen as powerful as mescaline, I believe. The whole trip gave me an awful lot of copy. A lot of these experiences went into The Ticket That Exploded, which is sort of midway between Naked Lunch and The Soft Machine. It’s not a book I’m satisfied with in its present form. If it’s published in the United States, I would have to rewrite it. The Soft Machine, which will come out here in due time, is an expansion of my South American experiences, with surreal extensions. When I rewrote it recently, I included about sixty-five pages of straight narrative concerning Dr. Benway, and the Sailor, and various characters from Naked Lunch. These people pop up everywhere.
INTERVIEWER
Then from South America you went to Europe. Is the geographic switch as important as it once was to American writing?
BURROUGHS
Well, if I hadn’t covered a lot of ground, I wouldn’t have encountered the extra dimensions of character and extremity that make the difference. But I think the day of the expatriate is definitely over. It’s becoming more and more uncomfortable, more and more expensive, and less and less rewarding to live abroad, as far as I’m concerned. Now I’m particularly concerned with quiet writing conditions—being able to concentrate—and not so much interested in the place where I am. To me, Paris is now one of the most disagreeable cities in the world. I just hate it. The food is uneatable. It’s either very expensive, or you just can’t eat it. In order to get a good sandwich at three o’clock in the afternoon, I have to get into a taxi and go all the way over to the Right Bank. Here all I have to do is pick up the phone. They send me up a club sandwich and a glass of buttermilk, which is all I want for lunch anyway. The French have gotten so nasty and they’re getting nastier and nastier. The Algerian war and then all those millions of people dumped back into France and all of them thoroughly dissatisfied. I don’t know, I think the atmosphere there is unpleasant and not conducive to anything. You can’t get an apartment. You can’t get a quiet place to work. Best you can do is a dinky hotel room somewhere. If I want to get something like this, it costs me thirty dollars a day. The main thing I’ve found after twenty years away from St. Louis is that the standard of service is much better than New York. These are Claridge’s or Ritz accommodations. If I could afford it, keep it, this would be an ideal place for me. There’s not a sound in here. It’s been very conducive to work. I’ve got a lot of room here to spread out all my papers in all these drawers and shelves. It’s quiet. When I want something to eat, I pick up the phone. I can work right straight through. Get up in the morning, pick up the phone about two o’clock and have a sandwich, and work through till dinnertime. Also, it’s interesting to turn on the TV set every now and then.
INTERVIEWER
What do you find on it?
BURROUGHS
That’s a real cut-up. It flickers, just like the old movies used to. When talkies came in and they perfected the image, the movies became as dull as looking out the window. A bunch of Italians in Rabat have a television station and we could get the signal in Tangier. I just sat there open mouthed looking at it. What with blurring and contractions and visual static, some of their Westerns became very, very odd. Gysin has been experimenting with the flicker principle in a gadget he calls a “Dream Machine.” There used to be one in the window of The English Bookshop on the rue de Seine. Helena Rubenstein was so fascinated she bought a couple, and Harold Matson, the agent, thinks it’s a million-dollar idea.
INTERVIEWER
Describe a typical day’s work.
BURROUGHS
I get up about nine o’clock and order breakfast; I hate to go out for breakfast. I work usually until about two o’clock or two-thirty, when I like to have a sandwich and a glass of milk, which takes about ten minutes. I’ll work through until six or seven o’clock. Then if I’m seeing people or going out, I’ll go out, have a few drinks, come back, and maybe do a little reading and go to bed. I go to bed pretty early. I don’t make myself work. It’s just the thing I want to do. To be completely alone in a room, to know that there’ll be no interruptions and I’ve got eight hours is just exactly what I want—yeah, just paradise.
INTERVIEWER
Do you compose on the typewriter?
BURROUGHS
I use the typewriter and I use scissors. I can sit down with scissors and old manuscripts and paste in photographs for hours; I have hundreds of photographs. I usually take a walk every day. Here in St. Louis I’ve been trying to take 1920s photographs, alleys and whatnot. This [pointing] is a ghostly photograph of the house in which I grew up, seen back through forty-five years. Here’s a photo of an old ash pit. It was great fun for children to get out there in the alley after Christmas and build a fire in the ash pit with all the excelsior and wrappings. Here, these are stories and pictures from the society columns. I’ve been doing a cut-up of society coverage. I had a lot of fun piling up these names; you get some improbable names in the society columns.
INTERVIEWER
You recently said you would like to settle in the Ozarks. Were you serious?
BURROUGHS
I would like to have a place there. It’s a very beautiful area in the fall, and I’d like to spend periods of time, say every month or every two months, in complete solitude, just working, which requires an isolated situation. Of course, I’d have to buy a car, for one thing, and you run into considerable expense. I just have to think in terms of an apartment. I thought possibly an apartment here, but most likely I’ll get one in New York. I’m not returning to Tangier. I just don’t like it anymore. It’s become just a small town. There’s no life there, and the place has no novelty for me at all. I was sitting there, and I thought, my God, I might as well be in Columbus, Ohio, as here, for all the interest that the town has for me. I was just sitting in my apartment working. I could have a better apartment and better working conditions somewhere else. After ten o’clock at night, there’s no one on the streets. The old settlers like Paul Bowles and those people who have been there for years and years are sort of hanging on desperately, asking, “Where could we go if we left Tangier?” I don’t know, it just depresses me now. It’s not even cheap there. If I travel anywhere, it will be to the Far East, but only for a visit. I’ve never been east of Athens.
INTERVIEWER
That reminds me, I meant to ask you what’s behind your interest in the more exotic systems such as Zen, or Dr. Reich’s orgone theories?
BURROUGHS
Well, these nonconventional theories frequently touch on something going on that Harvard and MIT can’t explain. I don’t mean that I endorse them wholeheartedly, but I am interested in any attempt along those lines. I’ve used these orgone accumulators and I’m convinced that something occurs there, I don’t know quite what. Of course, Reich himself went around the bend, no question of that.
INTERVIEWER
You mentioned Scientology earlier. Do you have a system for getting on, or are you looking for one?
BURROUGHS
I’m not very interested in such a crudely three-dimensional manipulative schema as L. Ron Hubbard’s, although it’s got its points. I’ve studied it and I’ve seen how it works. It’s a series of manipulative gimmicks. They tell you to look around and see what you would have. The results are much more subtle and more successful than Dale Carnegie’s. But as far as my living by a system, no. At the same time, I don’t think anything happens in this universe except by some power—or individual—making it happen. Nothing happens of itself. I believe all events are produced by will.
INTERVIEWER
Then do you believe in the existence of God?
BURROUGHS
God? I wouldn’t say. I think there are innumerable gods. What we on Earth call God is a little tribal god who has made an awful mess. Certainly forces operating through human consciousness control events. A Luce writer may be an agent of God-knows-what power, a force with an insatiable appetite for word and image. What does this force propose to do with such a tremendous mound of image garbage? They’ve got a regular casting office. To interview Mary McCarthy, they’ll send a shy Vassar girl who’s just trying to get along. They had several carny people for me. “Shucks, Bill, you got a reefer?” Reefer? My God! “Certainly not,” I told them. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.” Then they go back and write a nasty article for the files.
INTERVIEWER
In some respects, Nova Express seems to be a prescription for social ailments. Do you see the need, for instance, of biologic courts in the future?
BURROUGHS
Certainly. Science eventually will be forced to establish courts of biologic mediation, because life-forms are going to become more incompatible with the conditions of existence as man penetrates further into space. Mankind will have to undergo biologic alterations ultimately, if we are to survive at all. This will require biologic law to decide what changes to make. We will simply have to use our intelligence to plan mutations, rather than letting them occur at random. Because many such mutations—look at the saber-toothed tiger—are bound to be very poor engineering designs. The future, decidedly, yes. I think there are innumerable possibilities, literally innumerable. The hope lies in the development of nonbody experience and eventually getting away from the body itself, away from three-dimensional coordinates and concomitant animal reactions of fear and flight, which lead inevitably to tribal feuds and dissension.
INTERVIEWER
Why did you choose an interplanetary war as the conflict in Nova Express, rather than discord between nations? You seem fascinated with the idea that a superterrestrial power is exercising an apparatus of control, such as the death dwarfs—
BURROUGHS
They’re parasitic organisms occupying a human host, rather like a radio transmitter, which direct and control it. The people who work with encephalograms and brain waves point out that technically it will someday be possible to install at birth a radio antenna in the brain which will control thought, feeling, and sensory perceptions, actually not only control thought, but make certain thoughts impossible. The death dwarfs are weapons of the nova mob, which in turn is calling the shots in the cold war. The nova mob is using that conflict in an attempt to blow up the planet, because when you get right down to it, what are America and Russia really arguing about? The Soviet Union and the United States will eventually consist of interchangeable social parts and neither nation is morally “right.” The idea that anyone can run his own factory in America is ridiculous. The government and the unions—which both amount to the same thing: control systems—tell him who he can hire, how much he can pay them, and how he can sell his goods. What difference does it make if the state owns the plant and retains him as manager? Regardless of how it’s done, the same kind of people will be in charge. One’s ally today is an enemy tomorrow. I have postulated this power—the nova mob—which forces us to play musical chairs.
INTERVIEWER
You see hope for the human race, but at the same time you are alarmed as the instruments of control become more sophisticated.
BURROUGHS
Well, whereas they become more sophisticated they also become more vulnerable. Time, Life, Fortune applies a more complex, effective control system than the Mayan calendar, but it also is much more vulnerable because it is so vast and mechanized. Not even Henry Luce understands what’s going on in the system now. Well, a machine can be redirected. One technical sergeant can fuck up the whole works. Nobody can control the whole operation. It’s too complex. The captain comes in and says, “All right, boys, we’re moving up.” Now, who knows what buttons to push? Who knows how to get the cases of Spam up to where they’re going, and how to fill out the forms? The sergeant does. The captain doesn’t know. As long as there’re sergeants around, the machine can be dismantled, and we may get out of all this alive yet.
INTERVIEWER
Sex seems equated with death frequently in your work.
BURROUGHS
That is an extension of the idea of sex as a biologic weapon. I feel that sex, like practically every other human manifestation, has been degraded for control purposes, or really for antihuman purposes. This whole Puritanism. How are we ever going to find out anything about sex scientifically, when a priori the subject cannot even be investigated? It can’t even be thought about or written about. That was one of the interesting things about Reich. He was one of the few people who ever tried to investigate sex—sexual phenomena, from a scientific point of view. There’s this prurience and this fear of sex. We know nothing about sex. What is it? Why is it pleasurable? What is pleasure? Relief from tension? Well, possibly.
INTERVIEWER
Are you irreconcilably hostile to the twentieth century?
BURROUGHS
Not at all, although I can imagine myself as having been born under many different circumstances. For example, I had a dream recently in which I returned to the family home and I found a different father and a different house from any I’d ever seen before. Yet in a dream sense, the father and the house were quite familiar.
INTERVIEWER
Mary McCarthy has characterized you as a soured utopian. Is that accurate?
BURROUGHS
I do definitely mean what I say to be taken literally, yes, to make people aware of the true criminality of our times, to wise up the marks. All of my work is directed against those who are bent, through stupidity or design, on blowing up the planet or rendering it uninhabitable. Like the advertising people we talked about, I’m concerned with the precise manipulation of word and image to create an action, not to go out and buy a Coca-Cola, but to create an alteration in the reader’s consciousness. You know, they ask me if I were on a desert island and knew nobody would ever see what I wrote, would I go on writing. My answer is most emphatically yes. I would go on writing for company. Because I’m creating an imaginary—it’s always imaginary—world in which I would like to live.
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https://thelesseroftwoequals.wordpress.com/tag/william-s-burroughs-jr/
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The Lesser of Two Equals
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Posts about William S. Burroughs Jr. written by Les Chappell
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The Lesser of Two Equals
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https://thelesseroftwoequals.wordpress.com/tag/william-s-burroughs-jr/
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William S. Burroughs, in looking back on his life, would often comment that the defining moment in his career was the tragic moment when he shot his wife Joan Vollmer in the head during a drunken game of William Tell. Being one of the rare times that his master aim failed him, as well as the impetus that sent him into Tangiers and to the realizations that led to “Naked Lunch” and the Nova Trilogy, saw it as a telepathic event. As he said in the introduction to “Queer,” “The death of Joan brought me into contact with the invader, the Ugly Spirit, and maneuvered me into a lifelong struggle, in which I had no choice except to write my way out.”
But if the death maneuvered him into a lifelong struggle, it also had vicious repercussions on the child he had with Joan, a son who bore his name. William S. Burroughs Jr. (known as Billy to friends and family) was four years old at the time, and the shooting not only drove him away from his father but also inflicted the same psychic aftershock of drug use and violent thoughts. He too sought to use writing as a way to escape the Ugly Spirit, with the autobiographical novels 1971’s “Speed” and 1973’s “Kentucky Ham” putting his addictions down on paper. Like his father, he too could write with uncommon skill – but unlike his father, he couldn’t write himself out of it.
David Ohle’s biography of Burroughs Jr. was titled “Cursed From Birth,” and looking at his roots it comes across as darkly appropriate. Joan used benzedrine constantly while pregnant and Billy was born addicted, and Burroughs was at the time going through a series of opium habits that would later fuel his book “Junky.” Shuttled from Texas to Mexico as a child he was eventually sent to live with his grandparents in St. Louis after his mother’s death, having little contact with his father and stifled in suburbia. Predictably, he acted out, skipping school and experimenting with drugs on random road trips.
Burroughs Jr.’s first novel “Speed” follows the most extensive of these trips with a look into the “speed freak” culture of 1960s New York City. Heading into the city with friends, Burroughs Jr. found himself exposed on a constant basis to methamphetamines and booze, seeking a fix and dodging the police cracking down on his friends. His devil-may-care nature leads him to try whatever he can get his hands on, but it also means he is constantly fighting off the vicious paranoia and physical breakdown of drug use to the point where his mind seems ready to break.
The original works of the Beat Generation seemed to portray their world as a sort of setting free of real danger, where there was always a bar willing to seat you or a way to scrape together drug money, but Burroughs Jr. isn’t going to have any of that. This isn’t the mad bar-hoppings of Jack Kerouac or Jan Kerouac’s free-flowing Southwest parties, these are flea-ridden flophouses and darkened streets at New York’s most dangerous hours. More than once he winds up in jail, and it’s regularly implied that without the generosity of his father’s friend Allen Ginsberg he would have been left there to rot.
Burroughs Jr.’s voice has a lot in common with his father’s, ranging from the sardonic off-the-cuff remarks (“He and Vinnie, another charmer, poured acid on the kid’s legs and he never walked again. But you can never tell, medical science is making great strides these days”) to the frightening visions that strike out in drug sickness (“The skyscrapers in the mist writhed like monster cobras, of course”). But unlike Burroughs the elder, whose autobiographical efforts come across as detached – owing to the anthropological view he took of his subject – Burroughs Jr. never stops being native, and his narrative reflects the rapid degenerating thought process that amphetamines wreak on the mind.
In many ways, “Speed” is reminiscent less of Burroughs the elder’s efforts and more of Anthony Burgess’ “A Clockwork Orange,” and its young narrator Alex DeLarge. Like “Clockwork Orange” the sentences have a cynical lilt and rarely seem to pause, mired in more reaction than reflection, as if the mix of youth and stimulants won’t permit the narrator to take any more time. Burroughs Jr. seems aware of this but seems either afraid or unable to stop, observing at one point “I’d been running in overdrive for so long that I was leery of really stopping to take notice of myself.” It’s a struggle that seems much more real than the original Beats, free of mystique and overwhelming visions.
While “Speed” evokes comparisons to Burgess and “A Clockwork Orange,” Burroughs Jr.’s second novel is more reminiscent of Ken Kesey and “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.” In this installment, his lifestyle of drug abuse has finally caught up with him and he has been arrested, forced to a rehabilitation facility in Kentucky and the almost anarchic system for dealing with him and legions of addicts. After being forced to exist in the hospital setting, he sets out for Alaska as part of a work release program, a cold and unflinching wilderness on par with “Speed’s” slums in terms of comfort.
Cut off from the addicts and city life of his first work, Burroughs Jr. goes deeper into himself, and his work takes on more of a novelistic observatory quality. He presents the inmates of the asylum – many half-crazy or locked up for years – as a cast of characters, and paints their exploits as such: starting a newspaper, eying the female visitors, scheming for an early release. Later in the book when sent to Alaska, his work takes on a journal format, presenting events in order and often sliding into stream-of-consciousness as if it was lifted from the pages.
“Kentucky Ham” also brings in Burroughs Jr.’s father as a cast member – flying in from London to assist with the trial, nursing his own junk habit and seeing his son for the first time in years. Showing him in Florida and memories of visiting him in Tangier, Burroughs Sr. (usually referred to as “Bill” or “the Old Man”) comes across as distant, spending less time looking after his son and more staring at the sunset or an orgone box for hours before dashing back to the typewriter to “transcribe” his Word Hoard. Jan Kerouac’s novels were peppered with evidence of how she longed to connect with her father, but Burroughs Jr. has few of these feelings, seemingly assuming such a connection would never happen.
Where he does share more similarity with his father is in an openness of thought, which takes over in the final chapter as Burroughs Jr. goes into an impassioned plea for the legalization of drugs. Waxing on the harmless nature of most stoned addicts, the culture of distrust and the reality of how prevalent heroin was at the time, he has the veteran’s voice seen at the end of “Junky.” Our narrator has come through the storm of drug use and seen the reality of its treatment, and as such sees the world in a different light.
Burroughs Jr. did manage to make his way out of the street and drug world he chronicled, but unfortunately his addictive nature wouldn’t allow him to move to full-time professional writer status. Replacing drugs with alcohol he shredded his liver, surviving only due to a series of coincidences that put a gifted doctor and donor liver in his hospital. He worked on a third novel about the experience, “Prakriti Junction,” but never finished it as he kept drinking and stopped taking his anti-rejection meds. He eventually died in 1981 in Florida at the age of 33, passed out in a ditch and estranged from all his loved ones.
Perhaps Burroughs Jr. was never able to be saved, caught in the mood he had seen on his father’s face after Joan’s shooting: “Over the yearning and pain that he felt for me I felt something heavier. Like lead, but molten and smelling of gunpowder and burnt copper. The Burroughs Curse.” That curse may have claimed his life, but it gave him the drive to send back reports from the trenches – works that earned their place in the best of drug memoirs, and worthy heirs of the Beat energy.
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Again, Dangerous Visions
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Read 124 reviews from the world’s largest community
for readers. All you need to know about this book: 1- It is the companion volume to the most influenti…
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June 2, 2017
Again, Dangerous Visions was split into two for its mass market paperback release in 1973. This first half contains a few knockout stories, some pretty good ones, and a lot of mediocre ones. At twice the length of the original Dangerous Visions, I can’t help but think that maybe Ellison should’ve trimmed the fat a little more here. One large book full of great stories beats two mediocre editions any day.
If I average my scores for each story, the collection ends up just slightly lower than 2.5 stars altogether. I’m rounding this up to 3, because the handful of terrific stories contained within—plus the unique opportunity for cultural examination of early 70s western social movements and politics through an SF lens—makes this a wholeheartedly worthwhile read, even in 2015.
The stories that either missed the mark for me, or don’t hold up anymore, seem to be those that valued shock over storytelling. What was shocking in the western world of 1972, isn’t always so 40+ years later. Good storytelling however, remains good storytelling.
Standouts:
The Word for World is Forest, by Ursula K. Le Guin
The Funeral, by Kate Wilhelm
When it Changed, by Joanna Russ
Monitored Dreams and Strategic Cremations, by Bernard Wolfe
Bottom of the Barrel:
Ching Witch, by Ross Rocklynne
Time Travel for Pedestrians, by Ray Nelson
King of the Hill, by Chad Oliver
Harry the Hare, by James B. Hemesath
Individual Story Reviews:
The Counterpoint of View, by John Heidenry: 1/5
Q: Who really wrote this story/essay, was it me The Author or you The Reader?
A: It was you, The (pretentious) Author. Somebody read Don Quixote recently. *sigh*
Ching Witch, by Ross Rocklynne: 1/5
Earth blows up, and it’s last remaining human goes to another planet to teach them various dances and live in luxury. Pointless, and meandering.
The Word for World is Forest: 5/5
Terrific novella, obviously influential to James Cameron's Avatar (which I now believe can be 100% constructed from elements of Old Man's War & The Word for World is Forest). Also very influential to the Ewoks in Return of the Jedi.
It's a moralistic story, and it had some insightful things to say about dangerous ideas entering the public consciousness. Basically, there is no going back. Here, specifically in relation to the concept of murder.
For Value Received, by Andrew J. Offutt: 3/5
A short little bit of absurdism, entertaining enough, but not particularly great.
Mathoms From the Time Closet, by Gene Wolfe: 2/5
I usually like Gene Wolfe a lot, but this was just two little pointless stories filled with pretentious bullshit, sandwiching one that was sort of fun, almost a mermaid tale in the sky.
Time Travel for Pedestrians, by Ray Nelson: 1/5
Weird little hallucination of a story.
Christ, Old Student in a New School, by Ray Bradbury: 3/5
A poem, not sure the meaning exactly but it seemed to allude to mankind imprisoning itself through religion.
King of the Hill, by Chad Oliver: 1/5
This story tried way, way too hard and failed absolutely to be dangerous or remotely visionary.
The 10:00 Report is Brought to you by..., by Edward Bryant: 4/5
While it was overly obvious from the first couple pages what was going on, it was still a deeply disturbing vision of the possible future of journalism in a society like ours that fetishizes suffering as a spectator sport.
The Funeral, by Kate Wilhelm: 5/5
Another deeply disturbing story, but it had a genuine point to make, and it made it well.
Harry the Hare, by James B. Hemesath: 1/5
Totally pointless. Soapbox opinion bullshit about cartoons and copyrights. Literary equivalent of Old Man Yells at Cloud.
When it changed, by Joanna Russ: 5/5
Terrific. I need to track down more of her work. Very impressed with this one.
The Big Space Fuck, by Kurt Vonnegut: 3/5
Yep, it's weird and Vonneguty all right.
Bounty, by T. L. Sherred: 2/5
Too self congratulatory. Not dangerous or visionary.
Still-life, by K. M. O'Donnell: 1/5
Terrible. Skip it.
Stoned Council, by H. H. Holis: 3/5
Lawyers do a ton of drugs and then battle their cases out with their minds. Sort of a proto cyberpunk story. Original at least.
Monitored Dreams and Strategic Cremations, by Bernard Wolfe: 5/5
This is really two stories, 1. The Bisquit Position, 2. The Girl with Rapid Eye Movements. They're both excellent, and exactly the kind of stories I was looking for in this collection. Vietnam social commentary, with some slight SF backings.
With a Finger in My I, by David Gerrold: 3/5
Very nearly a bedtime story; a comedy of errors and literal/figurative mix ups. Some social commentary about belief, and self fulfilling prophesy as well.
In The Barn, by Piers Anthony: 2/5
I get it, I do.. but it's cliche even by 70s standards.
Want to read
January 25, 2017
This copy is signed by Harlan Ellison .
October 18, 2019
Sometime between the first Dangerous Visions anthology and the second, Harlan Ellison jumped the shark. Perhaps in those four years, he started to believe his own hype. It is true that the first anthology did seem to set a fire under a number of writers, both old and new, to experiment and try new things, and it happened because Ellison championed it. But in the preparation of the second volume, Ellison took on much more than a simple championing role—he became a dangerous vision of himself.
But before I get to the real criticism of this volume, let me note that it still contains a couple of the greatest short fiction stories ever published: Ursula K. Le Guin’s “The Word for World is Forest,” a piece that merges environmentalism and racism in such a talented way that it’s as hard to read it as, Le Guin says in her afterword, it was easy for her to write it; and Joanna Russ’s “When It Changed,” one of the best feminist science fiction stories, posting a world where the men died off and the women did what they had to do to continue, then the ramifications of being “rediscovered” by the rest of humanity. Both of these stories are as powerful today as they were forty years ago, because the problems remain. To be entirely frank, I’ve never been a fan of either writer, some of whose other stories set my teach on edge. But there’s no disputing that these stories are worthy of being read by every reader, especially any reader who wants to understand the power of science fiction when it’s done well and done correctly.
There are some other good stories in this 46 story anthology as well. “Ching Witch” by Ross Rocklynne is one of the funniest stories that incorporates a cat. H. H. Hollis’ “Stoned Counsel” is an interesting idea of how legal work could be transformed in the future through hallucinogens. The two stories by Bernard Wolfe, “The Bisquit Position” and “The Girl With Rapid Eye Movements,” are unusual and strange in their mixture of 70s cultural themes (Vietnam war, sleep research) with 50s era style (world-weary protagonists caught up in weirdness). Gregory Benford’s “And the Sea Like Mirrors” predates Stephen King by a decade, containing much of what has become King’s stock-in-trade: a horrific world in which an “everyman” tries to survive.
But the majority of these stories are simply “meh,” and in some instances, downright awful. One story in particular, Richard Lupoff’s “With the Bentfin Boomer Boys on Little Old Alabama,” was so annoying (i.e., made-up language similar to Russell Hoban’s Riddley Walker), I skimmed it after the first section. And it’s not hard to discover why this may be, because the very process of putting this anthology together can be pieced together from the introductions and afterwords. The culprit: Ellison’s increasing need to grandstand, to puff up the book and himself. One of the earliest things you learn is that this huge volume comprises only half of what Ellison had accepted and bought, and that it became so large, he and the publisher agreed to release this volume and then one called The Last Dangerous Visions later—so much later that it never appeared.
Grandstanding? The best example of which can be read in the introduction and afterword to “Bed Sheets are White“ by Evelyn Lief, which is more of a story than the story itself. Basically, Ellison shows up at Clarion determined to be a holy terror to the students by tearing apart their stories on the first day of his week. In the afterword, Lief reports that Ellison said this about her story that first morning, "This story is trite and schoolgirlish. It's the perfect example of every single thing that can be done wrong, all in one piece of writing." She goes back to her room and writes “DAMN YOU, HARLAN ELLISON” on a sign and hangs it above her typewriter and then proceeds to write something that he will like. He likes it and immediately buys it for Again, Dangerous Visions.
And that would be a beautiful story if “Bed Sheets are White” was any good, but it’s not. It’s short enough that you can forgive it for being mediocre, but Ellison lauds it as on par with Le Guin or Russ or Benford? Sorry, not even close. What the foreword by Ellison and afterword by Lief depict is Ellison’s increasing role in the creation of not only the book, but the stories themselves, as he started to see himself as the great savior of literature, challenging both established authors and beginning students, and becoming their benefactor, muse, and daemon. It becomes all about him, both from his standpoint and the author’s. And thus, when it fails to be about the story, things fall apart.
Unlike others before me who’ve laid criticism at Ellison’s feet, his recent departure from this world means I have no fear of a late night phone call or sharply worded threat made in a public place. The thing is, I’ve always liked Ellison’s writing—his short story and essay collections were meat and potatoes to me in my formative years, and I loved his zeal and passion to champion perceived and real injustices in the world. In particular, his essays in The Glass Teat and The Other Glass Teat were early influences on how I viewed popular entertainment and the role of the critic. The Dangerous Visions anthologies were a great idea, and the two that were published had an impact that could be felt beyond the SFF world. Yet the warning signs for the project going off the rails could clearly be seen in A,DV even if Locus picked it as the best original anthology published in 1972.
It’s probably for the best that The Last Dangerous Visions never appeared, because it simply could not have lived up to its hype. What’s sad is that the stories got bumped into that stillborn volume never had the opportunity to feed their author’s careers aside from cover letters where they might have been listed as a sale. The other sad part of the whole debacle is how it continually cast a cloud over Ellison’s career, even until the very end.
June 19, 2014
Sometimes the worst thing that can happen is to be successful. Because your next thing has to surpass your first success. Just ask the guy who came up with the idea of pet rocks.
Harlan Ellison probably knows what I am talking about. Dangerous Visions was a raging success. It is still the definitive sci-fi anthology of the last half of the 20th century. It was a risk and a risk well taken. So of course there had to be a sequel.
But in Again, Dangerous Visions the writers know the score. Be ground-breaking. Be controversial. Be different. So what we get is 46 authors in 800 plus pages trying to out-innovate the others and trying too hard. The result is an uneven set of stories that pale to the original collection. That isn't to say there are not some nice tales here. It just isn't Dangerous Visions.
Update: Today I took this off my shelf and looked at the inscription Ellison wrote for me on the title page. It reads "I never wanted to edit this book!". Pretty much sums it up
January 11, 2015
Man, most of these stories are extremely bad. Some of the standouts include the Le Guin and the Tiptree and the Hollis and perhaps the Vonnegut, but even then, man, I don't know. There is one fun bagatelle about the legal implications of cryogenics that reads like droll sci-fi Thackeray, and H.H. Hollis' story about LSD lawyering was also spry, but these do not justify the many many bad stories you will read. Really, the only reason to read this collection is if you have any kind of fascination with the kinetic and utterly self-involved world of seventies sci-fi, a world that is rather dead now, and which was charming without ever actually being very relevant or producing any stand-out writers. I have such a fascination; reading this collection was my own fault.
There is a Piers Anthony story about a PARALLEL DIMENSION where all dairy products come from milking human women that is pretty jaw-dropping and would make a great short film for Lars Von Trier perhaps, but which cannot be taken seriously on its own merits at all, no matter what dimension you are from. Reading the explanation in the afterword of this piece, where it is explained that it is a parable about animal cruelty, I was uh...unpersuaded...that it was not just an elaborate, disturbing, specific, jolly fucked-up sex fantasy. I liked it on that level, I guess, but DAMN... who was this story for? Now we have Smashwords for such "dangerous visions," I guess.
I like reading bad books, but I cannot recommend this to anyone unless you like journeying into REALMS OF THE MISGUIDED AND CRANKY AND SELF-INDULGENT AND DEAD IN SPIRIT.
August 24, 2009
I watched a TV documentary on Harlan Ellison recently, a larger-than-life writer who seems to put Hemingway and Hefner to shame. His science fiction anthology Dangerous Visions was often mentioned in the program. I could not get the book at the library by instead found "Again, Dangerous Visions" - the sequel ( I believe even a third anthology was compiled due to its popularity at the time). I read a dozen stories from the 46 presented in the sequel, and it gave me my dose of speculative, edgy fiction that was termed the "new science fiction" of the time.
It was quaint reading SF written in the late sixties, where several of the predictions have now become "science fact" - including propositions that children would sue their parents for improper upbringing, the frustrations of navigating the labyrinthine confines of a super-department store in search of sexual aids (some of these aids haven't been invented yet, I believe), executing children after the maximum two-child limit had been reached (didn't many unoficial executions take place in parts of the world where "one child" was the limit, leaving us with the legacy today of a nation of spoilt children?)
Many of the writers -juxtaposed between a few heavyweights like Ray Bradbury and Kurt Vonnegut Jr. - were newbies at the time, in their twenties and thirties, some being published for the first time in this anthology. Ellison is generous in giving each writer a personally written copious introduction (the most revealing parts of the book, I think) and lots of praise, and affording each writer an afterword at the end of his/her story. Some writers needed the afterword as their stories were'nt very coherent to me. One writer actually said that he set out to confuse and frustrate the reader! What happened to entertaining, educating and enlightening us?
Nevertheless, in an era when the Internet was still a closely guarded military secret, and online forms of shameless self-promotion were not available to the writer, Ellison tirelessly goes out to beat the bushes on behalf of his authors, doing his bit to grow the next generation of SF writers, revealing frank stories about how he met his contributors, nutured them, browbeat them when required, and extracted their best work from them. One writer was so overcome that she wrote Harlan a note back saying "F... you Harlan Ellison you don't know so goddam much". She was still published and I'm sure that more than a few careers were made subsequently.
What threw me off was the rough writing - inelegant prose in exchange for mind bending premises. It was hard to find a writer, perhaps Vonnegut was the exception, who combined clear prose with an intriguing premise. Perhaps that is why 12 stories was enough for me.
November 27, 2016
It's been years since I've read this, and I'm still thinking about it. This really raised some potent and hard-hitting questions about gender roles and life in general. Really wish this had been a whole novel.
December 29, 2019
Wow. I set myself up to read 100 books this year and then give myself this doorstopper in December. Smart, self.
Some day I'll find a copy of "Dangerous Visions" which is what I was recommended to read and why I picked up its sequel. The introductions frequently reference a third volume called "Last Dangerous Visions" but it doesn't appear to have been made, or if made, didn't have that title.
The premise of the collection is "Stories too taboo for traditional markets." And I suppose taboos were pretty tight in 1972 because most of the stories just have a little sex in them and tons of misogyny but I sadly don't think that was taboo in 1972.
There are some gems in here. Joanna Russ' excellent "When It Changed" which is often reprinted, Monitored Dreams & Strategic Cremations"--really two stories by Bernard Wolfe, has a real literary feel, the first "Bisquit Position" is an excellent short play on the horrors on napalm, and I hope in the second story "The Girl With Rapid Eye Movements" the author meant for us to feel the misogyny internalized by said girl that she doesn't realize she's the smartest and most creative person in the story, however the author's afterword was pure bunk about 'the muse'.
"Eye of the Beholder" by Burt K. Filer had a good mix of cool invention and motorcycle chases, plus a female character who is competent at something --shockingly rare-- though of course the two women in the story are both marked for how they can't do something the men do. At this point in the collection I was wondering if men used to only use female characters when they wanted a character to fail at something, because gosh they couldn't bear to see a man do that.
"Moth Race" by Richard Hill was a good classic SF piece. For me it really captures the ineffable joy and madness of sports.
"In Re Glover" by Leonard Tushnet is pure hard sf for lawyers. Reads like a legal brief but fascinating!
"Zero Gee" by Ben Bova has moments of "hey maybe this is toxic masculinity" insight but I felt the ending robbed its meaning.
"With the Bentfin Boomer Boys on Little Old New Alabama" will stay with me but I'm not sure if for good or ill... military SF with New Haiti fighting New Alabama, and the Haitians are written in standard English and the New Alabamans in thick dialect. Problematical things all over the board. Are the Alabaman's being gay meant to be a slur against them or just an example of hypocrisy? Did I lose a character in there? Some of the people run together. It's a long piece and... yeah ok I see why this one is a dangerous vision, if only for all the use of the N-word.
"Ozymandias" by Terry Carr is lovely, one of those stories that says a lot that isn't on the page.
"The Milk of Paradise" is classic Tiptree, so beautiful writing, but the story itself felt a little weak and rapey. Mostly rapey.
Those are the ones I liked. Among the ones I didn't like there were a few that were so awful... I suppose Harlan would be glad to hear that. But not awful in the way he'd think. I love sex and drugs and taboo-breaking. I loathe flat characterizations and lack of structure.
Now about the introductions and afterwords. Like a good completionist, I read them all, and as is usual when I force myself to read things just because I can't bear to skip stuff, I regret almost every single one.
You know what the worst type of wedding toast is? The one that begins "I met Kevin when..." You know this wedding toast. It's a painful ten minutes of personal exposition saying nothing interesting but giving the toaster a chance to talk about himself. Almost all of Harlan's intros are like that. Also, more than half of the afterwards are "Harlan made me write an afterward and I hate afterwards my work should stand on its own." So skim those at will, my friends, or just read the ones for your favorite authors because you want to know more about them.
November 29, 2019
For a good part of my senior year of high school (1973) I carried a copy around with my notebook, sneaking reads when I could. It did more to prepare me for the future I would soon be living in than all my boring classes. It would deeply disturb today's high schoolers, but it would do them a lot of good. Age-appropriate is for losers.
July 4, 2009
I have to say that this massive anthology of science fiction novellas and short stories completely blew me away in the early 1970's. I read this one before the original "Dangerous Visions." Editor/author Harlan Ellison encouraged contributing writers to cut loose with their most daring and provocative ideas. In so doing, he not only pushed the boundaries of what was being published in those days, he expanded his readers' ideas of what was possible in the genre. This book helped to kick off what I would say was the third great era of science fiction in the 1970s. The first was its invention by Mary Shelley, Jules Verne, H. G. Wells, Doc Smith and Edgar Rice Burroughs, and the second period, known as the Golden Era, began in the 1940's with Heinlein, Asimov, Clarke, etc.
"Again, Dangerous Visions" was also my introduction to Ursula Le Guin, who wrote "The Word for the World is Forest." I thought this was one of the most amazingly well-written science fiction stories I had ever read.
March 24, 2024
The "Use Your Illusion" (or "The Fragile", you choose) of SF anthologies: a few timeless pieces of work surrounded by hectares of mediocrity and some outright garbage. There's no reason this book needed to be even half its length save for Ellison's metastatic ego. An extra star awarded for Le Guin's "The Word For World Is Forest", but you can get that one elsewhere.
November 1, 2021
Perhaps overall weaker than the predecessor, but probably because of the sheer amount of material. And also, because Ellison's introductions are less inspired (he doesn't have the same familiarity with these writers as the last group -- a ton of them he hadn't even met yet.) As with DV, most stories are middling to bad, a few particularly bad, and a small handful are absolutely worth reading.
The stories I found rewarding were:
-The Funeral by Kate Wilhelm, is hardly a great story, but it is an example of Wilhelm as a great writer -- approachable and entertaining.
-When It Changed by Joanna Russ, is a story I have read before and I will happily read it again -- perhaps right after I finish writing this -- because it is so immense. Masterfully composed, with such staggering weight despite being remarkably concise. It's known as a classic for a reason, and it's a rightful one.
-The Bisquit Position by Bernard Wolfe, is the better of Wolfe's two selections, and a total fucking barnstormer. It has nestled itself into my brain, and it just pops up as a nightmarish mental image fairly routinely. While it does (purposefully, I suppose) on tedium a bit, it sticks the ending so well it's something of a miracle. I quickly bought a copy of Wolfe's Limbo on the strength of this story alone.
-In the Barn by Piers Anthony, is laudable for just how far it manages to take the idea -- for the pure commitment to the shtick. Additionally, it delivers the supplemental brain-tickle of knowing as you read it that real people out there have most definitely masturbated while reading this absolutely nauseating piece of snickering body horror. Most people will hate this one, but I found it nothing but sickeningly delightful.
-Soundless Evening by Lee Hoffman, is hardly remarkable, but it is brief and effectively somber.
-And the Sea Like Mirrors by Gregory Benford, deals with less tired and familiar topics than so many of the other stories, and held my interest greatly. I found it smart and rousing.
-Moth Race by Richard Hill, is, to the contrary, very typical, but no less cute for that fact.
-Things Lost by Thomas Disch, is a delight. I've been meaning to read Disch forever, but this is the first time that I've actually done so. The story is confounding in a way that is highly gratifying, and exciting. It sparked my interest enough that I am sure I will be digging into his major works pronto.
-Lamia Mutable by M John Harrison, is a delight. I've been meaning to read Harrison forever, but this is the first time that I've actually done so. The story is confounding in a way that is highly gratifying, and exciting. It sparked my interest enough that I am sure I will be digging into his major works pronto.
(hehehe)
-The Milk of Paradise by James Tiptree Jr, is (along with the Russ) the collection's best story (Ellison claims this his favorite). Enormously powerful stuff that will knock around in my brain for a long time I'm sure. This is one of those rare, great science-fiction short stories that manages to build a world with compelling details while telling an engaging narrative in but a few clear and artful pages. It is a similar type of story (and something of a counter-part) to Delany's stand-out from DV, and it is of a similar caliber (and I fucking love the Delany).
Almost every other story I actively loathed or found completely unremarkable. Lupoff's novella is admirable for its prose experimentations (which I got a kick out of), but I didn't like much of anything about it besides that. Saxton, Sallis, Bernott, Oliver and Gene Wolfe offer stories that have some merit. I absolutely adore Gene Wolfe, so I was somewhat shocked that I didn't care all that much for his selections (although they are -- as with the Sallis pieces -- clearly the work of an immensely gifted writer).
I know the LeGuin novella is acclaimed, and I typically love LeGuin, but I found it trite and cliche and melodramatic in an unappealing way.
The Vonnegut story fucking sucks.
May 30, 2022
Harlan Ellison was the enfant terrible of the sf/f/h industry for most of his writing life. I often viewed him as the anti-Robert Silverberg. Both flooded the market because they wrote so much and submitted so much they couldn't help but be published as often as possible. Many markets now have a "no multiple submissions" policy and I wonder how either Ellison or Silverberg would fare.
It quickly became obvious to me why many of the stories in Dangerous Visions, Again made it. They hit all the historical Ellison buttons. When Ellison was good he was brilliant, but his other mode was WTF? I scratched my head in disbelief as often as I sat back wowed by his work.
There are some massive standouts in Again, Dangerous Visions (Le Guin's The Word for World is Forest is one, Russ' When It Changed is another. A blow-me-away standout is Bernard Wolfe's two-fer Monitored Dreams & Strategic Cremations, which is a graduate course (no pun intended if you've read it) on dialogue and character development (and would probably come with trigger warnings if published today)
I'd read the first two in other anthologies so, while still entertaining and good reads, they weren't revelatory. Some stories I really wondered about. Vonnegut's entry is pure Vonnegut; amusing and (to me) only included because Vonnegut was Vonnegut when this anthology came to be and if you didn't include Vonnegut you were a fool or an idiot (several stories are from authors in this category. SF/F was making it's mainstream push at this time. Specific to Vonnegut, the industry spent lots of time and money trying to make Vonnegut fit in the sf/f author category. He didn't accept it as anything sf/fish made up only a small part of his work).
Some stories are beautifully written but don't do anything or go anywhere. I read many purely on the strength of the writing only to finish them wondering "What was this about, again?"
The other side of this is remembering what the SF/F community was like during the period this anthology came to be; seeking validity, seeking recognition, wanting desperately to reach beyond its original audience of geeks and nerds (before such terms existed), and disenfranchised, pimply-faced teenage males. An example of this is a story about a third of the way through which has the following words in its first paragraph (of only seven lines): glissando, paroxysmal, deliquesce. I'm positive these words gave many original audience members pause.
But they do go a long way to establishing some kind of effetery, don't they?
David Gerrold's With a Finger in my I was, to me, well-written dreck.
A few stories later one finds "Eye of the Beholder" by Burt K. Filer. This one story is so standout I'm not sure what it's doing in the anthology. Brilliant, brilliant, brilliant.
The gem is, of course, James Tiptree, Jr.'s The Milk of Paradise and here I confess a bias. Everything I've ready by her is brilliant, amazing, breathtaking and The Milk of Paradise is no exception. She grabs you in the first sentence and doesn't let go or let you breathe until the end.
The book could easily have been a third shorter if Ellison didn't feel the need to introduce each story, something he recognizes in his intro to Tiptree's piece with "For those of you who hate my introductions, you'll have decided to forego them at this point, ..."
I read the stories and, as I always do when reading anthologies (including those in which my work appears), wonder what caught the editor's eye. About 4/5ths through, I began to notice an oft occurring thread of effete intelligence. Many of the stories (not all, simply a lot) were snarky smart, what I would call an in-your-face intelligent, almost an arrogance.
Yeah, well, nobody ever accused Ellison of that.
But that led me to "What was going on that such was the vogue?" and I remembered something my high school sophomore year English teacher, Mrs. Baraniak, told the class one day, "I love it when Time magazine comes in the mail because I know I'm going to have an afternoon's good reading and I'll need a dictionary, a thesaurus, and a couple of foreign language dictionaries to get me through."
Time magazine was muchly different than it is today. And she was exhilarated just from anticipating the next issue based on memories of past issues. It enlivened her. Being intellectually challenged excited her.
Such were the 1960's-70's. The world was in chaos (when isn't it? And most of it man made), we beat the Russians to the moon, we lost Jimmy and Janis, Nixon was a liar and a thief, ...
What a marvelous escape that must have been, escaping into arrogance (which is an alternate spelling of "ignorance" in my dictionary).
May 7, 2024
This was an extraordinarily chauvinist time in SF. I didn’t realize this when I was reading it when it came out, it was just the culture of the time, but now and then when I go back to read some stories from this time, it’s pretty shocking how one sided it is. The SF of the 50s and early 60s was quite chauvinist, but with the late 60s sexual revolution, male fantasy as the plot or subplot got seriously out of control. These are stories written by men for men where women are here to constantly please them sexually. Also, I’m using the term women merely to refer to the to the female sex as one of the stories features an older man and a ten year old “woman”. Beyond the sexual imbalance there is a lot story telling experimentation and it’s definitely worth reading to find the gems among the many fails. I will admit that even though I’m a big fan of Harlan Ellison, I did skip most of the story introductions. I did, however, read many of the afterwords by the authors. These are people playing around with things, experimenting with what is possible, and I appreciate that, but not all experiments are successful, and that’s fine too, because some are very successful. For what it’s worth, following are my ratings for each story, which run the gamut from DNF to 4 stars. How do you give a single rating to a collection of stories from different authors who are all trying to push the boundaries of late 1960’s SF? Also, I tried to rate the stories from the perspective of craft rather than my uncomfortableness with their treatment of women.
- THE COUNTERPOINT OF VIEW - 1
- CHING WITCH! - 2
- THE WORD FOR WORLD IS FOREST - 4
- FOR VALUE RECEIVED - 2
- MATHOMS FROM THE TIME CLOSET - 2
- TIME TRAVEL FOR PEDESTRIANS - 3
- CHRIST, OLD STUDENT IN A NEW SCHOOL - 2 1/2
- KING OF THE HILL - 3
- THE 10:00 REPORT IS
- BROUGHT TO YOU BY….. - 3
- THE FUNERAL - 4
- HARRY THE HARE - 2
- WHEN IT CHANGED - 3
- THE BIG SPACE FUCK - 2
- BOUNTY - 2
- STILL-LIFE - 3 1/2
- STONED COUNSEL - DNF
- MONITORED DREAMS & STRATEGIC CREMATIONS - Dreams 2, Cremations 3
- WITH A FINGER IN MY I - 3
- IN THE BARN - 3 1/2
- SOUNDLESS EVENING - 4
- GAHAN WILSON - 3
- THE TEST-TUBE CREATURE, AFTERWARD - 3
- AND THE SEA LIKE MIRRORS - 2 1/2
- BED SHEETS ARE WHITE - 2
- TISSUE - 1 1/2
- ELOUISE AND THE DOCTORS OF THE PLANET PERGAMON - 2
- CHUCK BERRY, WON'T YOU PLEASE COME HOME - DNF
- EPIPHANY FOR ALIENS - 3
- EYE OF THE BEHOLDER - 3
- MOTH RACE - 3
- IN RE GLOVER - 2 1/2
- ZERO GEE - 3
- A MOUSE IN THE WALLS OF THE GLOBAL VILLAGE - 3
- GETTING ALONG - 3
- TOTENBÜCH - 2
- THINGS LOST - 2 1/2
- WITH THE BENTFIN BOOMER BOYS ON LITTLE OLD NEW ALABAMA - 3
- LAMIA MUTABLE - 3
- LAST TRAIN TO KANKAKEE - 3
- EMPIRE OF THE SUN - 4
- OZYMANDIAS - 3 1/2
- THE MILK OF PARADISE - 3 1/2
Shelved as 'dnf'
August 2, 2023
- The Counterpoint of View (John Heidenry): ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
- Ching Witch! (Ross Rocklynne): 😶
- The Word for World Is Forest (Ursula K. Le Guin): 😶
- For Value Received (Andrew J. Offutt): ⭐️⭐️
- Mathoms from the Time Closet (Gene Wolfe): ⭐️⭐️?
- Time Travel for Pedestrians (Ray Nelson): 😶
- Christ, Old Student in a New School (Ray Bradbury): ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
- King of the Hill (Chad Oliver): ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
- The 10:00 Report is Brought to You By... (Edward Bryant): 😶
- The Funeral (Kate Wilhelm): 😶
- Harry the Hare (James B. Hemesath): ⭐️⭐️
- When It Changed (Joanna Russ): ⭐️⭐️ (R)
- The Big Space Fuck (Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.): ⭐️
- Bounty (T. L. Sherred): ⭐️✨?
- Still-Life (Barry N. Malzberg [as K.M. O'Donnell]): 😶
- Stoned Counsel (H.H. Hollis): 😶
- Monitored Dreams and Strategic Cremations (Bernard Wolfe): 😶
- With a Finger in My I (David Gerrold): ⭐️⭐️⭐️?
- In the Barn (Piers Anthony): 😶
- Soundless Evening (Lee Hoffman): ⭐️⭐️⭐️
- █ (Gahan Wilson): ?
- The Test-Tube Creature, Afterward (Joan Bernott): ⭐️⭐️?
- And the Sea Like Mirrors (Gregory Benford): 😶
- Bed Sheets Are White (Evelyn Lief): ⭐️⭐️?
- Tissue (James Sallis): 😶
- Elouise and the Doctors of the Planet Pergamon (Josephine Saxton): ⭐️⭐️?
- Chuck Berry, Won't You Please Come Home? (Ken McCullough): ⭐️⭐️?
- Epiphany for Aliens (David Kerr): 😶
- Eye of the Beholder (Burt K. Filer): 😶
- Moth Race (Richard Hill): 😶
- In re Glover (Leonard Tushnet): 😶
- Zero Gee (Ben Bova): 😶
- A Mouse in the Walls of the Global Village (Dean R. Koontz): 😶
- Getting Along (James Blish and Judith A. Lawrence): 😶
- Totenbüch (A. Parra (y Figueredo)): 😶
- Things Lost (Thomas M. Disch): 😶
- With the Bentfin Boomer Boys on Little Old New Alabama (Richard A. Lupoff): 😶
- Lamia Mutable (M. John Harrison): 😶
- Last Train to Kankakee (Robin Scott Wilson): 😶
- Empire of the Sun (Andrew Weiner): ⭐️⭐️?
- Ozymandias (Terry Carr): 😶
- The Milk of Paradise (James Tiptree, Jr.): 😶
September 7, 2023
Again, Dangerous Visions, published in 1972, was the follow up to the successful anthology Dangerous Visions. Each story has an introduction written by Ellison and an afterword written by the author. In some cases, the introduction and afterword are longer than the story itself.
In many of the introductions, Ellison tells us a third anthology in the series titled The Last Dangerous Visions is going to be published soon, and even shares the names of some of the authors who will appear. Alas, this third volume was never published during his lifetime. I get the impression Ellison wanted to include every prominent science fiction author of the time in these three volumes, but wasn't able to pull it off since new writers kept coming along. (Ellison's executor, J. Michael Straczynski, announced plans to publish a slimmed-down version of The Last Dangerous Visions in 2020, but it still hasn't seen the light of day as of this writing.)
With 46 stories, each with its own introduction and afterword, Again, Dangerous Visions is quite a hefty volume. The stories were written in the late 1960s and early 1970s and certainly show their age, especially in how female characters are treated. Male authors outnumber female authors about 5 to 1. The Dangerous Visions series was meant to showcase stories which couldn't get published in traditional venues due to shocking content, however, with a few exceptions, these read like normal sci-fi stories you could read anywhere. Maybe they were shocking by 1970s standards?
There's a lot of big name writers included. Some were big names at the time and others became big names later. I personally rank 17 of these stories as above average, 7 as average, and 22 as below average, but of course, your own rankings will vary. I won't review all 46 stories, just the ones that stood out to me.
One of the worst stories in the collection is "In the Barn" by Piers Anthony. A man travels to a parallel universe in which human woman are milked like cows. Our "hero" even has non-consensual sex with one of them. Charming.
Another of the worst stories is "And the Sea Like Mirrors" by Gregory Benford. A man and woman are adrift on a life raft surrounded by alien creatures in the water. The man routinely beats the woman for being stupid but he's supposed to be the hero of the story.
In his introduction to "Bed Sheets are White" by Evelyn Lief, Ellison tells us Lief was a writing student of his. After she wrote a bad story, he threatened to beat her and shove the story up her ass if she wrote another horrible story like it. She left the room crying and immediately wrote this story, which was so good he bought it. Was Ellison trying to be funny by telling us this or does he think threatening writing students is the best way to get them to write better? Ellison looks bad either way.
In Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.'s contribution, Earth is doomed due to pollution, overpopulation, and many extinct species. Swearing is no longer considered bad and everyone does it. The people of Earth fire a rocket full of jizzum into space in order to continue the human race. In this world, children can sue parents for not raising them right. It's kind of funny, I guess, but it reads like it was written by a twelve-year-old. Definitely one of the subpar stories in this collection.
K. M. O’Donnell's "Still-Life" focuses on the domestic problems of an astronaut. He has non-consensual sex with his wife and assaults the babysitter, but neither of these acts is portrayed as a bad thing. Overall, an average story.
Another average story, Leonard Tushnet's "In Re Glover", at least made me think. The Supreme Court tries to decide if a cryogenically frozen man should be considered alive or dead, but the case is rendered moot when a power outage kills him. I can't help wondering what would happen if this came up in real life. Should a person in suspended animation be considered legally dead or not?
Ben Bova's "Zero Gee" is another average story in which an astronaut assigned to go to space with a photographer is looking forward to being the first man to have sex in zero g. However, he first has to deal with a a second woman assigned to the mission who might stand in his way. It didn't end up being as bad as I thought it would be.
"Ching Witch!" by Ross Rocklynne was a fun story. The only man to survive the destruction of Earth travels to the planet Zephyrus where he's an instant celebrity. He doesn't tell them Earth has been destroyed, just that Earth doesn't hold a grudge against them anymore. The teenagers of the planet want to know the latest Earth slang and dances. They ride low gravity brooms for fun. There's a lot of funny parts. It's a bit creepy that he's into teenage girls, though.
"Time Travel for Pedestrians" by Ray Nelson is one of the few stories a traditional outlet wouldn't have published due to its sex, violence, cussing, and sacrilegious nature. I didn't think much of it until the end which made me like it. It's a reincarnation story. The narrator lives several lives. Mary Magdalene expressed the interesting idea that if Jesus wanted a book written about him, he would have written it himself. There's no need for a book when God can speak directly to us. Those who love a book more than God are able to justify committing all manner of atrocities.
H. H. Hollis is a lawyer and his story "Stoned Counsel" has a science fiction legal setting. The narrator's opponent is defending a company responsible for pollution. Hallucinogens are used in court to learn the truth. Opposing lawyers share a hallucination full of trippy images. Fascinating.
Bernard Wolfe provided two stories. "Biscuit Position" isn't a science fiction story at all, but rather literary fiction. In it, a war reporter flirts with a married woman and discusses the Vietnam War at a dinner party. A dog dies a gruesome, drawn-out death which will stick with you for a while. The characters exchange witty repartee throughout, but I thought it was poor taste when the narrator said something witty about the dead dog.
His second story, "The Girl With Rapid Eye Movements", features a creative writing teacher who has trouble relating to his stoner student who wants to write rock lyrics. Their discussions are reminiscent of the dialog in Philip K. Dick's Through a Scanner Darkly. It's really fun. Two characters have the ability to influence each other's dreams when they sleep in proximity to each other (I think a machine is also involved somehow). The author claims this isn't a science fiction story even though it clearly is. (What's realistic about two different people sharing the same dream?) In his afterword, the author bad mouths scientists and science fiction authors for being slaves to capitalism. It seems strange to bad mouth sci-fi in a sci-fi anthology.
I quite liked "Eye of the Beholder" by Burt K. Filer in which a sculptor's artistic work is used to achieve weightlessness. Art gets turned into science, which is a neat idea.
In "Moth Race" by Richard Hill, people are able to vicariously experience what celebrities eat and drink. They can even experience sex vicariously, but it's not exactly the same as the real thing. People take pills that keep them happy and also keep them from being prejudiced. Everyone in the world has enough to eat, a sexual partner, and a comfortable life, but not everyone gets to have children. Normal people's food is not as good as what celebrities get. People compete in a death race for a chance to become a celebrity, but only one man has ever lived through it. A good story.
James Blish (with Judith Ann Lawrence) wrote "Getting Along" which details the erotic adventures of a woman who visits various relatives who turn out to be a vampire, Dr. Frankenstein, Dr. Moreau, a Lovecraftian horror, etc. It's funny in places.
In his introduction to "The Milk of Paradise" by James Tiptree, Jr., Ellison says he saved the best story for last. (It's the last story in the collection, however I'm reviewing them out-of-order, saving my favorite stories for the end of my review.) Ellison says Tiptree is the man to beat, a shoo-in for the Hugo Award. (He didn't know at the time that Tiptree was a pseudonym for female writer Alice Sheldon, which amuses me.) The story itself is about a man raised by aliens who is disgusted by humans. However, he finds going home isn't what he remembered either. It's a pretty good story.
The title for Gahan Wilson's story is a picture of a spot or inkblot. A man discovers a stain in his house that disappears when you stop looking at it, but reappears somewhere else, bigger than it was before. It appears to be two dimensional, but actually has depth. Spooky.
"Chuck Berry, Won't You Please Come Home" by Ken McCullough has a narrator who keeps bugs as pets. He once walked a wasp around on a thread which, started a fad at his school. In the present, he's feeding a tick he named Chuck Berry from a cadaver which gave him a wink. He gives the tick drugs and it grows big. His writing style reminded me of William S. Burroughs.
I was surprised to find Dean R. Koontz had a story in this collection. It's titled "A Mouse in the Walls of the Global Village". In the story, empathy circuits installed in the brain make everyone telepathic, except for a few who are called Stunted. Even in utopia, some unfortunates will fall through the cracks and get discriminated against. It's really well written.
"Ozymandias" by Terry Carr is another one of the good stories. To protect against grave robbers, cryogenically frozen people are placed in tombs rigged with traps. Superstitious grave robbers think they need to dance in a certain way to avoid the traps. Great world building.
In "The Funeral" by Kate Wilhelm, 14-year-old Carla has never seen a male before and has no last name. She is considered property of the state. She is a student in a school, assigned to become a teacher. This story has really impressive world building, revealing how things work a little at a time. Creepy. In her afterword, Wilhelm complains that store clerks and soda jerks serve middle-aged people before teenagers who were waiting longer. I hadn't realized discrimination against teenagers like this was a thing.
Earthlings colonize a planet called New Tahiti in "The Word for World is Forest" by Ursula K. Le Guin. Many animals back on Earth have gone extinct and the colonists are cutting down trees and making animals go extinct on this new planet. Evolution on New Tahiti happened similarly to how it happened on Earth, but the humans died out on this planet. Green monkeys called creechies are the closest thing this planet has to humans. The creechies are used for slave labor and sex. They don't require sleep because they dream while they're awake. The story alternates between different points of view: a human in favor of colonization, a creechie, and a human opposed to colonization. Le Guin does a great job of writing from different points of view. The principle conflict, that humans don't have lumber on Earth, doesn't make a lot of sense, but I suppose lumber is just a stand in for resources in general. One of the best stories in this collection. Despite Ellison predicting a different story in this collection would get the award, this story won the Hugo Award for Best Novella.
"When it Changed" by Joanna Russ won the Nebula Award for Best Short Story. In the introduction to this story, Ellison admits that he was a male chauvinist in the past, calls out a fellow sci-fi writer for being a chauvinist, and declares "the best writers in sf today are the women." (Which makes you wonder why he included so few women in this collection.) He also praises the women's lib movement and declares, "I see more kindness and rationality in the average woman than in the average man." This surprised me, since every story in Ellison's collection "I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream" was quite sexist. Although, to be fair, that was written a few years before this.
Russ's story takes place on a planet in which all the men died 30 generations ago. The women live in a steam-powered, agricultural, honor-based society in which duels are common. A group of men from Earth arrive and want to reintroduce men to the planet. The narrator feels small for the first time in her life since the men are bigger than her. The men are clearly sexist, but claim sexual equality has been reestablished on Earth. This story has great characterization. I loved this line: "When one culture has the big guns and the other has none, there is a certain predictability about the outcome." In her afterword, Russ mentions that men get served on airplanes before women. It's easy to forget how many ways society has progressed over the years.
May 18, 2023
Overall grade: B+/A-
Video review: https://youtu.be/-V8QSmgXbek
I actually enjoyed this book more than I enjoyed Dangerous Visions. I think Dangerous Visions is still in print, while this one is not. I also think dangerous visions is more widely read today than its sequel, which is a shame. There are more big names in DV than in ADV but the overall quality of the stories was better and there was a higher percentage of enjoyable and actually dangerous stories.
DV really leaned in on being religiously blasphemous, while this one did not really have near as many stories with that focus. I think there were more big names in DV but ADV had some of my favorite authors like Gene Wolfe and Ursuka K Le Guin and Vonnegut, whereas the only author I am obsessive about from DV is JG Ballard.
Ellison’s introductions were again kinda annoying and presumptuous and pretentious. Some of them were somewhat useful but most of them were basically just filler and platforms for Ellison to brag about either being friends with the author or having taught the author.
There were more women included in this one. This is a good thing. I’m unsure of how many people of color were included but there are at least two stories written by Jewish authors.
Anthologies are always going to be somewhat hit or miss and I can’t think of an anthology where I enjoyed every single story.
Overall there are few very few misses in this book and a lot of solid stories. Some of the stories are spectacular, though, and the highs of this book are higher than DV or any other anthology I have read.
Favorites
1 the word for world is forest - Ursula k Le guin
2 With the Bentfin Boomer Boys on Little Old New Alabama", novella by Richard A. Lupoff
3 Time Travel for Pedestrians - Ray Nelson
4 [A spot], by Gahan Wilson
5 Bed Sheets Are White", by Evelyn Lief
6 The Big Space Fuck", by Kurt Vonnegut
7 For Value Received - Andy offutt
8 Stoned Counsel", by H. H. Hollis
9 When It Changed", by Joanna Russ
10 Still-Life", by Barry N. Malzberg (as K. M. O'Donnell)
Least favorites
1 "Christ, Old Student in a New School", poem by Ray Bradbury
2 Totenbüch", by Albert Parra, as A. Parra (y Figueredo)
3 In the Barn", by Piers Anthony
4 Chuck Berry, Won't You Please Come Home", by Ken McCullough
5 Harry the Hare", by James B. Hemesath
Individual stories
1 Keynote: The Counterpoint of View - John Heidenry - B/B+
Really just a Borges pastiche, which it wears on its sleeve. Too short to really have much of an impact. Kinda an odd keynote or intro given that there is only one other metafictional story in the book.
2 Ching-Witch by Ross Rocklynne - B/B+
Solid story. Seems like a commentary on youth culture in the late 60s and early 70s and how quickly fads pass. Kinda reads like old white guy wish fulfillment.
3 The Word for World is Forest - Ursula k Le guin - A/A+
I did a stand alone video for this novella. I had read it once before separate from ADV. at heart it’s a piece of protest literature that seems to condemn the Vietnam War. Basically a companion piece to Lathe of Heaven. Check out my other video for more about the book.
4 For Value Received - Andy offutt - A-/A
About a girl being born. she lives in the hospital until she is in her 20s because her parents found their hospital bill exorbitant. A send up of health insurance and non socialized health care and how ridiculous health care costs are in this country.
5 Mathoms From the Time Closet - Gene Wolfe - B+/A- - comprises "Robot's Story", "Against The Lafayette Escadrille", and "Loco Parentis"
3 flash fiction pieces all dealing with time travel in one way or another. That being said, the stories read like literary fiction rather than sci fi. Typical Wolfe: literary and inventive but not as spectacular as some of his other books and stories.
6 Time Travel for Pedestrians - Ray Nelson - A-/A
A fucking trip. Super trippy and very dangerous. I have to imagine that this one caused a stir. Seems to describe a drug trip caused by something like datura or morning glory seeds, which are both very strong deliriant. The narrator jumps around in time experiencing a variety of different scenarios, mainly focusing on various types of western mysticism. I’ve seen it described as past life regression but that’s not clear in the story. A mixture of druggy montage and spiritual exploration. I wish this one was a novel length story. Apparently Nelson wrote the story that They Live is based on.
7 "Christ, Old Student in a New School", poem by Ray Bradbury - F
Didnt even finish this one. Why was a poem even included? I didn’t understand this one or why it was included.
8 King of the Hill", by Chad Oliver - B/B+
Seems to predict climate change and some of its effects. Only somewhat prescient. The story concerns overpopulation and rampant extinction. The story does meander some. I found it inventive and well-executed.
9 "The 10:00 Report is Brought to You By...", by Edward Bryant - B/B+
The story is about a news station paying to be the first to report a story by paying criminals to commit crimes then documenting the crimes. There is a rape scene in this one, which is quite haunting. Seems like a precursor to stuff like Nightcrawler. One of the more dangerous visions in this book.
10 "The Funeral", by Kate Wilhelm - B+/A-
I found this story to be fairly mysterious and difficult to pin down. Seems like a reaction to the hippie youth movement and a parody of the 1950s in America. What I’ve read of Wilhelm seems like it was pretty influential in the sci fi genre.
11 "Harry the Hare", by James B. Hemesath - C+/B-
A flash fiction piece. Seems like an ode to cartoons, also a commentary on copyright law. I was kinda unsure of what was going on in this story. There is some gore and violence but it’s not a particularly dangerous vision.
12 "When It Changed", by Joanna Russ (Nebula Award for Best Short Story) - B+/A-
About a colonized planet where men have gone extinct and there have only been women for hundreds of years. Men from Earth show up and fuck up the status quo. The story kinda subverts the expectations of someone who has just heard the summary, though.
13 "The Big Space Fuck", by Kurt Vonnegut - A-/A
The tone and plot of this story are very Vonnegut. It’s like it is almost logical, but not quite. About earth going to shit and humanity trying to artificially inseminate the universe. The story reminded me of Ariana Grande’s song “NASA”.
14 "Bounty", by T. L. Sherred - B/B+
About vigilantism being legalized and rewarded monetarily, so people bait others into crimes that they can be rewarded for violently stopping. People also kill themselves so their families will get paid. Short and disturbing and misanthropic.
15 "Still-Life", by Barry N. Malzberg (as K. M. O'Donnell) - B+/A-
About an astronaut slowly going crazy and eventually leaving 2 other astronauts on the moon and going home. The main character rapes his wife in the story’s opening. The main character is basically a villain: short tempered and self centered. Seems like a commentary on how bureaucracy drives you crazy, as he really doesn’t like how nasa tells him not to swear during his mission to the moon.
16 "Stoned Counsel", by H. H. Hollis - B+/A-
This story is trippy and vivid and super inventive. It reminded me of an adult version of adventure time. It’s about 2 lawyers doing drugs and then mind melding as they fight over a legal case. It’s almost a climate fiction story as well.
17 "Monitored Dreams and Strategic Cremations", by Bernard Wolfe—comprises "The Bisquit Position" and "The Girl With Rapid Eye Movements" - B/B+
Two stories connected by them both having the same main character. The first story is about a rich journalist helping a woman with a husky cheat on her husband, who is heavily tied up in the military industrial complex. The dog accidentally dies in a demonstration of the effects of napalm. It reminded me of Joan Didion’s play it as it lays. The second story is concerned with incomprehensible rock lyrics and how dreams affect reality. Seems to parody songs like “In A Gadda Da Vida”. The story is much more playful and absurd than the first one. Both seem to protest the vietnam war and capitalism. Some parts are really funny.
18 "With A Finger in My I", by David Gerrold - B/B+
Maybe a B-/B. It’s a lot like Borges’ tlon uqbar story. Mass hysteria and hallucinations, how the quirks of our perceptions color the world around us. Too peculiar to be incisive and rather unfocused.
19 "In the Barn", by Piers Anthony - C+/B-
This one is a dangerous vision. It is also pretty damn disgusting. It’s basically about vegetarianism and veganism and how we would never treat humans like we treat people. Kinda reminded me of Michel Faber’s Under the Skin.
20 "Soundless Evening", by Lee Hoffman - B/B+
Solid and rather innocuous. Basically about a society with limits on how many children you can have. You can still have as many babies as you want but they are killed at the age of 5 if you have more than two. It’s too short and low stakes to really affect you emotionally.
21 [A spot], by Gahan Wilson - A-/A
Really fucking good. Inventive and silly and absurd. A simple idea but it’s very well executed. Basically about a spot on a wall growing and eventually consuming everything. Almost an A/A+ but just a bit too short to have that kind of impact on me.
22 "The Test-Tube Creature, Afterward", by Joan Bernott - B/B+
A piece of flash fiction. About a genetically engineered pet that other causing or stopping its owners suicide. It reeks of depression and anhedonia. Definitely a dangerous vision.
23 "And the Sea Like Mirrors", by Gregory Benford -B/B+
Pretty close to a B+/A- but way too misogynistic. stated to be a response to Heinlein’s competent man. Reminded me of the show Yellowjackets and the book the Kar Chee reign. A literary thriller, sf-lite. It explores madness and toxic masculinity.
24 "Bed Sheets Are White", by Evelyn Lief - A-/A
Reminded me of the long walk by Richard Bachman slash Stephen king. It is hallucinatory and very of its time. Some of it is about white nationalism, some of it seems like a dream sequence. Short and sweet and no excess language. Seems like it’s a memory but it couldn’t be, as the world of the story is completely alien,
25 "Tissue", by James Sallis—comprises "At the Fitting Shop" and "53rd American Dream" - B-/B
Thot these were just fine. The first story is about a teenage boy getting lost in a department store shopping for a new penis. The second story is about the highs and lows of parenting. Lot of shock value and subversion in this one.
26 Elouise And The Doctors of the Planet Pergamon", by Josephine Saxton - B+/A-
A haunting and and disgusting visceral story. Kinda ballardian, as it’s the closest thing to the atrocity exhibition I’ve ever read, besides gravitys rainbow. About a perfectly healthy woman on a planet where everyone has grotesque disabilities and horrible illnesses. Kinda like a Beckett play.
27 "Chuck Berry, Won't You Please Come Home", by Ken McCullough - C+/B-
Too low stakes for me. Not really dangerous and not really sci fi. It’s about a guy growing a tick to a humongous size. Very stylized and repetitive.
28 "Epiphany For Aliens", by David Kerr - B/B+
About a team of scientists that discover a group of Neanderthals that are still alive in Europe. It has its own logic. The woman who sacrifices herself for science seems like a stand in for bleeding heart liberal types. Perhaps somewhat racist.
29 "Eye of the Beholder", by Burt K. Filer - B/B+
About an artist who creates sculptures that are mathematically impossible, as they defy the rules of gravity. The cia and a female scientist are quite interested in creating an insterstellar engine from the sculptures. It reminded me of Ballard’s early stories and explores the differences between art and science,
30 Moth Race", by Richard Hill- B+/A-
This story is seemingly about a utopia where everyone is given everything they need by the government. A man goes to watch a race where the drivers have to survive racing around a track with randomly generated obstacles. The only one to ever conquer the track is called the champion and he lives like a modern celebrity. The main character is part of the race’s audience and drunkenly tries to participate in the race.
31 "In Re Glover", by Leonard Tushnet - B/B+
Solid and vaguely funny story, comedic but not hilarious. Somewhat kafkaesque, in that it portrays endless and convoluted bureaucracies. It is more or less about the legal ramifications of cryogenesis tech. Could’ve been more in depth.
32 "Zero Gee", by Ben Bova - B-/B
About a male astronaut trying to be the first human being to have sex in outer space. The woman he is supposed to fuck is a time life photographer, a civilian in a nasa space station. Too long and technical and meandering. Not very exciting as a story.
33 A Mouse in the Walls of the Global Village", by Dean R. Koontz - B/B+
This is the only thing I’ve ever read by Koontz. I didn’t realize he wrote sci fi. The story is about a world where almost everyone can communicate telepathically and centers on one of the few who has to communicate normally. His life is quite hellish, as he is beat up and abused for making sounds. The narrator sometimes can’t stop himself from screaming and crying. A visceral story.
34 Getting Along", by James Blish and Judith Ann Lawrence - B/B+
A series of 9 letters detailing a woman’s super odd family and her search for a home. It apparently parodies 9 or 10 different genre fiction authors, which I wouldn’t have realized if not for Ellison’s intro to the story. The concept and idea of the story are better than the actual execution. Seems somewhat random and weird for the sake of being weird.
35 Totenbüch", by Albert Parra, as A. Parra (y Figueredo) - D+/C-
I didn’t understand this story at all. I found it confusing and faux deep and random and unfocused. I had no idea what was going on or what I was supposed to take away.
36 Things Lost", by Thomas M. Disch - B+/A-
I didn’t understand what the point of the story was but I enjoyed it a lot. It’s about a generation ship populated by old immortal people. It’s ostensibly the journal of a scientist whose claim to fame is mapping the genome of mice. He is an amateur author who wants to start writing a novel. There’s a lot of references to Proust. Breezy and low stakes.
37 With the Bentfin Boomer Boys on Little Old New Alabama", novella by Richard A. Lupoff - A-/A
I really hated this story at first but I grew to love it. I didnt understand ellison comparing it to riders of the purple wage until a while into the story but that is actually a pretty good comparison. Parts of it are written in a mixture of good ol boy talk and phonetic spelling like in finnegans wake. It’s basically about a war between the planets New Alabama and New Haiti, although there’s a lot of more details than that, as there are zombies and some avatar type stuff. A supremely odd story but it is super inventive and consistently surprising.
38 "Lamia Mutable", by M John Harrison - B-/B
I’m not sure I understood this story. It seems somewhat random, also apocalyptic. Just okay, maybe too referential and reliant on allusions. Kinda disappointing as I have heard really good things about the author.
39 Last Train to Kankakee", by Robin Scott - B/B+
About a con artist who dies and gets frozen and then reincarnated. He can’t find a purpose and kills himself multiple times, and eventually succeeds. His cells are then spread into the universe. Solid and low stakes. Does mention rape and murder.
40 "Empire of the Sun", by Andrew Weiner - B+/A-
A hallucinatory montage that plays by its own rules. About a man drafted into a war on mars where he is really just fighting other conscripts from earth. The war might be meant to lower earths population. Parts of it are a dream sequence I think. Solid story.
41 "Ozymandias", by Terry Carr - B/B+
Post apocalyptic tomb robbers journey to an area like the valley of the kings in Egypt. Once there they loot a vault. I didn’t necessarily understand why this one was so long and why some stuff was included. There were some cool details tho. Pretty solid story.
42 "The Milk of Paradise", by James Tiptree, Jr B/B+
I feel similarly about this one as to how I felt about the story by the author included in nova 2 (and I have come upon this place by most ways). I felt it was solid and pretty good, not amazing, and I’m not sure I fully understood it. Think it’s about a human slave revealing the name and location of its home world. The people who got that info go to the home world and are disappointed, so they kill the slave. I felt like there should’ve been more description and more worldbuilding.
Overall grade: B+/A-
Same grade as DV but I liked this one more. More on the A- side while DV was more on the B+ side.
December 16, 2019
I won't write on everything in the collection. I wrote about "The Word for World is Forest" by Le Guin on the novella's own page, since it was so long and fantastic on its own. On an interesting side note, these stories are certainly of an era, with a good number of them concerned greatly by overpopulation and many also being environmentally focused. It makes sense, given the publication date and years during which the stories were written. Plenty also seem to comment on Vietnam, cryogenics, and other topics that were controversial or cutting-edge at the time.
Ellison's extensive intros to each piece are very hit or miss and often just feel like him bragging about how cool his friends are but mostly make me think these maybe aren't necessarily good stories, just good chances to give favors to some authors.
On an infuriating side note, the Kindle version of this collection screws you over on one piece that was meant to include, indeed shouldn't be read without, some drawings. It's a major bummer, because the story, by Gahan Wilson, is a very enjoyable horror story about a black dot that suddenly appears in a very fastidious man's home.
The first two stories, "The Counterpoint of View" by John Heidenry and "Ching Witch!" by Ross Rocklynne were good, enjoyable shorts, but nothing I care to write about extensively. Heidenry's is a very post modern, experimental short on writing and religion and more, just poking fun and asking questions of many things but offering nothing in way of answers. Rocklynne's story is a fun romp through a strange future where Earth explodes but a part-cat man survives and jets off to a new planet before it, going so fast he has a few years before this planet will know what happened. He enjoys a life there feeling like a king, as this planet loves Earth and those from it. Yet, in the end, he finds he has been lied to as he lied to them. He has been watched and around mostly beings from a third planet, who want to take him back to their planet as a pet. It's fun, but it doesn't really say much beyond portraying the levels of lies and the impacts of loneliness and isolation.
The first short in this collection I'd like to write about is "For Value Received" by andrew j. offutt. To begin, Ellison's extensive foreward to the short is as hilarious and wonderful as the story itself. offutt is a rebel against capitalism, bureaucracy, and American governance both in life and in writing. In the story, he tells of a man who puts his wife in a nice, private room for the birth of his third child. Upon time to check out, he decides he wants the bill mailed to him instead of settling it then and there. The hospital refuses, saying the patient cannot be discharged until he pays. He leaves the baby there, calling their bluff. Except they don't bluff; they keep her until she's 21 and a med school grad. She takes over her debts, works at the hospital as an intern to cover the costs of the original bill, and moves out. It appears it will work too, the hospital board happy to have a way out of the stalemate. Most speaking characters here idolize the father for sticking to his principles, calling him a hero. However, it's absurd for both a father and a hospital to refuse to bend on such small matters to such large consequences, which makes the satire. offutt tells the story with great humor throughout, reminding me of Vonnegut, one of my favorites. Both of these writers like to write satirically to question America, capitalism, and other aspects of life people usually assume are positive or neutral - if they ever consider them at all.
Next came three shorts overall titled "Mathoms from the Time Closet." Gene Wolfe writes them, and all three deal with odd timelines of some kind. First, "Robot's Story" has a time-travelling robot named Robot telling an odd story about a man landing on a grassy planet and quickly deciding to enslave himself to the first woman he meets. After the story, Robot is asked to go buy some weed for the kids he was just talking to. He's from a different time and thinking on a different level than the kids. The story he tells shows men being stupid for lust in a very predictable way. Robot himself shows similar issues but was made by man to serve. It shows how similar we are to what we make. Next comes "Against the Lafayette Escadrille," a nice little story about a hobbyist that made a nearly perfect replica of an old triplane. One day out flying it, he sees a woman in a balloon with everything perfectly replicated. He never finds her again though, so she's likely somehow time traveled. Nevertheless, he continues to dream of her. The last story is titled "Loco Parentis" and examines parenting in only script-style dialogue. The parents each question their son's reality: is he theirs? is he a genetically modified ape? is he a robot? These concerns flash forward throughout their life with him, likely the couple's shared anxiety dream. Then we're chucked back to them meeting their son. They both quickly agree that he is, in fact, fully theirs. This suggests, to me, that parents have their doubts about the alien things they raise, but just as surely take any and all signs that the child is theirs to heart, even if these signs are actually ambiguous and meaningless.
Bradbury's poem "Christ, Old Student in a New School" warrants much more time, thinking, and writing than I feel like giving it. To be as brief as I can, it's a poem in which Christ/man sees all the suffering, realizes it was done by himself/mankind, and decides to start again, renewed, in space. Something like that. A similar story follows, although not written in poetry: "King of the Hill" by Chad Oliver. Oliver's story brings us an Earth on the brink of collapse via overpopulation and environmental negligence. The richest man on Earth, though, spends years and billions finding the best place to send some animal DNA to start life somewhere else. He doesn't send humans. However, raccoons appear to begin taking humanity's place. It's somewhat hopeful for life and intelligent life, but also quite stark for mankind and even the hinted cyclical nature of life.
"The 10:00 Report Is Brought to You by..." comes next, written by Edward Bryant. It's a chilling take on how terribly humans are willing to be for money or fame or whatever enjoyment they seek. In the story, a news station pays a gang to violently destroy a town for their own ratings increase. People that work for the station do nothing. Even the guy that resigns over it asks for a job back. The men doing the violence enjoy it and the money. It's a sad little story, really.
Kate Wilhelm's "The Funeral" threw me for a loop. It's like Margaret Atwood, which means it's very good speculative fiction, often with a healthy dose of feminism. In this story, the matriarch of a school dies, aged 120 or more. She was instrumental in turning the education system into a rigid, system that actually controls most of society after some vague annihilation of the youth. The society has specific jobs that men and women are placed into by the schools. The protagonist thinks she wants to be a Lady, but later is shown what that means (presumably being used for sex). She is selected by the matriarch's protege to be a Teacher. During the extensive process of a funeral for the dead Teacher, the protagonist Carla learns more truths of society and finds a way to escape in a hidden room the same way the dead Teacher escaped from one of the annihilations. This story looks down on how we "mold" children in our own image out of our hate for them. It also suggests that young people have an innate moral compass that will guide them to rebel against adult BS no matter how strictly we attempt to control them.
Vonnegut's contribution to the collection, "The Big Space Fuck," is dark and satirical in deliciously Vonnegutian style. It's quite short, but lambastes overpopulation, pollution, materialism, and more. It's a fun one, which is strange to say because it's effectively about the end of the world due to humanity's horrors.
In T.L. Sherred's "Bounty," we get an interesting prophecy on how gun violence may finally end in America. An unnamed wealthy person or group places an ad in the paper, paying anyone that stops an armed robbery or that dies in said attempt. People start killing everyone with a visible gun. Vigilantes take over everything. Then, with a new President, guns are entirely outlawed, even for police. This seems to suggest we can end gun violence with greed and gun violence. Or something like that.
A later story in the collection, titled "In the Barn," kept me guessing. Written by Piers Anthony, the universe has multiple parallels and "Earth-Prime" - our Earth - is the only one able to go to and from these parallels. We follow an inspector's visit to #772, which is warless and also animal-less. The inspector goes into a barn, on the pretense of being a new farmhand. He finds cows and bulls of humans instead of cattle. He does the work only to finally break the rules and save a "calf" to bring back to EP. At first, I expected this to be a feminist story about women being oppressed. But the bull was male and the society also had non-cow women as well. This society drew the moral line at how terrible it would be to eat filthy creatures and decided using their own mammal kind is better, cleaner. When the inspector returns to EP, he's in a normal barn, and muses on whether or not he did the right thing and if EP is doing the better thing, subjecting a different species to tortures and slavery. The peace of the other world seems to suggest the "evils" of their domesticated-human farming system may be a better way to go than our own system. Chilling, thought-provoking stuff.
A quite short but quite thought-provoking romp was "The Test-Tube Creature, Afterward" by Joan Bernott. In this one, a man lives alone with a large cat that we learn is quite intelligent and capable of speech. It takes a turn toward a sad sort of isolation though, when a girlfriend calls him, but he declines and breaks up with her, preferring to spend the evening with his cat. He avoids human love because "Somehow, this, the easier way, was also better." Another chilling one!
Gregory Benford brings an interesting survivalist and psychological thriller type story with "And the Sea Like Mirrors." In this story, a man and woman are stranded on a raft in the Pacific with alien dolphin things attacking them. It's just their young forms though. The older forms are trying to communicate with and help them apparently. In the process of surviving and meeting aliens, the characters follow their gender stereotypes. The man takes charge, stays logical, and uses violence and intelligence to survive and adapt. The woman submits, becomes "hysterical," and irrationally seems to side with the murderous aliens. It's a cool concept all around, even in execution. The end leaves the woman dead after stupidly trying to swim to an island obviously covered with the carnivorous aliens, while the man happily ignores her screams and continues toward the older forms of alien life, leaving the only human behind.
At nearly the end of the collection comes Carr's "Ozymandias." This post-apocalyptic gem of a story tickled me in all the right ways. First, the subtle world building of the short teaches us that this world has vaults that robbers dance to in order to attain tools and food and such. Later, we learn that thinkers of this tribe were all just murdered, save one thinker-in-training that was spared as he was not technically a thinker yet. Once the unique, ritualized dance-ascent was completed, the robbers made the remaining thinker pick a vault. The thinkers said all vaults were empty, but robbers disagreed. The robbers also thought picking the wrong vault can kill you (and maybe everyone), so chose this dispensable thinker. The thinker, however, knows something the robbers do not, so picks an empty vault for safety. He gets them to open a secret bottom to the vault, which contains an Immortal. The immortal wakes up, giant of a man. The thinker, who has a special empath power, feels the immortal wants to be killed, so he kills him. This short manages to damn the rich and their hyper-modern cryogenic pyramids while also pointing to a human tendency toward violence and against knowledge, when that knowledge is inconvenient.
"The Milk of Paradise" by James Tiptree, Jr. ends the collection in style. Tiptree's story follows a man not named Timor and his struggles to rejoin humanity after living his first several years on a different planet with his father. Having been raised there, he learned to love and make love with these aliens, and finds humans repulsive. He is kidnapped by another human who wants to see "Paradise" like Timor describes. Timor is drugged and gives him enough information that they find it. It turns out that Timor's memory is greatly skewed by his being young and small at the time. To the kidnapper, these aliens are small, ugly gray blobs, not the tall, gorgeous beings that Timor remembers and, shortly, sees. Timor appears to then kill the kidnapper and is able to live happily from then on in "Paradise." Hidden a bit below the surface, it seems these beings may drug people with similar drugs that the kidnapper used on Timor, since their radio said something about a medical recall. It appears Timor is safe, the rest of the humans knowing enough to avoid the addictive aliens. It's a strange and delightful meditation on what true beauty and art and pleasure truly are, and how much of that is nature or nurture.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
August 20, 2017
Man, this was extremely disappointing. Now, I know it's been a lot of years, but I have a hard time believing most of these stories were particularly dangerous or compelling even at the time. There are a few standouts, but most of the stories are just vague, boring, or (worst) standard. And Harlan Ellison drives me absolutely batty with his introductions--there are a lot of sci-fi writers I would love to hear talk about things, but I've never read someone so full of grandiosity and empty promises.
I guess the most damning thing I can say is that I don't even remember most of the stories. I remember a lot of poor endings, particularly on stories that seemed to be building to something which didn't pay off. I remember a few stories that seemed like deep Borges-style stories, playing with reality somehow, but, upon examination, I couldn't make sense of them. I don't know if that's me or just a bad story.
Flipping back through the table of contents, here are the stories I can say something good about: le Guin's story, "The Word for World is Forest" is good, but too drawn out. offutt's "For Value Received" was excellently funny, although maybe not really sci-fi. Bryant's "The 10:00 Report is Brought to You By" was actually (conceivably) dangerous, telling about the exploitative nature of newscasting; this was a good one. Joanna Russ' "When It Changed" was a nice little story about a planet populated only by women, but it's really a story about gender roles; one of the few stories to really fit in such a volume. Sherred's "Bounty" about regular people's capacity for vengeance and violence. Hollis' "Stoned Council" at least has an interesting premise, even if it's written in a fairly standard drug-addled way that doesn't make it worth remembering, particularly. Bernard Wolfe has two nice stories in here, neither of which really fit in the volume, and a rather long afterword about how terrible science fiction is; this is, unfortunately, some of the best writing in the book. Anthony's "In the Barn" seemed much more dangerous when I read it a few years ago--now it didn't seem nearly so, but certainly interesting and worthy of inclusion. Gahan Wilson's story was original, at least in genre. Benford's "And the Sea Like Mirrors" was one of the first I read. It's well-written, extremely compelling, and appears to be missing the finale. Unfortunately, there's' a lot of that in this book. Burt Filer's "Eye of the Beholder" is probably the strongest entry, about a scientist and an artist who are studying the same thing, without realizing it. It's a discussion of the boundaries between art and science, and what happens if one wins. Tushnet's "In Re Glover" is a nice little story about the legal ramifications of cryogenics. Blish's "Getting Along" is an exercise in genre, mimicking the writing styles of some classic scifi authors. It's not a particularly excellent story, but it's fun to read and try to identify the authors in question. Lupoff's "With the Bentfin Boomer Boys on Little Old New Alabama" has an excellent setup, and an amazing use of language (reminiscent of Clockwork Orange), but the finale doesn't really do the story justice.
The rest of the stories are either entirely forgettable or bad. (And by forgettable, I mean that even picking up the book and skimming some sentences through the story, I can't remember it.) So that's like 15 stories worth mentioning out of a book of about 45. And, frankly, only a handful of those 15 are really worth remembering. Add in Ellison's annoying essays, and I've certainly read much better (and more dangerous!) collections.
September 3, 2014
As with the first volume, there are some very good stories, some average ones, and a whole lot that made me wonder what Ellison had in his pipe when he was assembling this anthology.
I'll just talk about some of the ones I liked.
A pair of stories by Bernard Wolfe, under the collective title "Monitored Dreams and Strategic Cremations." The first of these, "The Bisquit Position," is probably the most dangerous story in the volume, even today. Just try criticizing the military and see what happens. This story should disabuse the reader of any lingering notion that it has anything to do with honor.
"With a Finger in My I" by David Gerrold: An unsettling, surreal and funny story that takes place in a world where ideas can literally change the world. I've read this story several times and never get tired of it's wordplay and weirdness.
"█" by cartoonist Gahan Wilson: Another funny and slightly creepy story that plays with the prose format by introducing a graphical element (the title actually resembles an ink blot; the above is as close as I could come in text format.)
"The Word for World is Forest" by Ursula K. Le Guin: A story of planetary rape that I'm pretty sure James Cameron swiped for Avatar.
"The 10:00 Report is Brought to You by..." by Edward Bryant: A satire of news media as entertainment. Not far off these days, sadly.
"In the Barn" by Piers Anthony: An inter-dimensional traveler arrives on an alternate Earth where humans are bred as farm animals. Would have been better had it not been in Anthony's typical, leering tone. (Is it me or does he always sound like he's typing with one hand down his pants?)
"In Re Glover" by Leonard Tushnet: A humorous story examining the legalities of cryogenics.
Well, those are the ones I remember best.
Looking back over these, it seems like the better stories are mostly in the first half, but it might be that I had gotten so weary of the avant garde nature of many of the entries that my patience was wearing thinner the further I got. Still, it undoubtedly would have been a much stronger collection at half its length.
July 23, 2016
This book has stories from several of my favorite authors- so it pains me to say that it was absolutely awful.
Harlan Ellison's introductions are snarky, pompous, and condescending; and he wrote several page intros for each one. I was thinking about reading some of his own books after this, but now I'm not so sure.
Everything about this sounds like it was written on panes of acid; and not in a good or fascinating way. The stories in here were previously unpublished, and it's clear why. All good authors have throwaway stories....and Ellison has conveniently collected them in one giant volume.
I'm sorry, Kurt and Ray; I never thought I would dislike- so much- anything that you guys were involved in. I need an SF palate-cleanser
September 2, 2019
Note: Goodreads has merged my review of "When it Changed" by Joanna Russ with the larger anthology in which it once appeared.
Russ says it best in her afterword: stories about societies of women are often either power-mad, sexually insatiable male fantasies or boring, unrealistic utopias. Here Russ is mindful of the fact that women are people, and people build homes and families, make art, make love, get drunk and fight on Saturday night, piss off their neighbors, shelve their dreams to pay the bills, and every other activity on the spectrum of human possibility. And that human texture fuels a very interesting first contact story about two cultures with very different assumptions.
July 1, 2007
Still one the best original sf anthologies ever, with terrific stories by Ursula K. LeGuin and many others. My favorite is still Richard Lupoff's "With the Bentfin Boomer Boys on Little Old New Alabama." Ellison's long introductions are the best thing about it. In the introduction it is promised that THE LAST DANGEROUS VISIONS will appear six months after this volume; many people remain hopeful.
April 5, 2008
This is quite as good as Harlan Ellison's 1969 anthology, Dangerous Visions.
July 29, 2022
Mankind is a joke
but animals should be saved
shoot them into spaaaace!
May 18, 2023
Overall grade: B+/A-
Video review: https://youtu.be/-V8QSmgXbek
I actually enjoyed this book more than I enjoyed Dangerous Visions. I think Dangerous Visions is still in print, while this one is not. I also think dangerous visions is more widely read today than its sequel, which is a shame. There are more big names in DV than in ADV but the overall quality of the stories was better and there was a higher percentage of enjoyable and actually dangerous stories.
DV really leaned in on being religiously blasphemous, while this one did not really have near as many stories with that focus. I think there were more big names in DV but ADV had some of my favorite authors like Gene Wolfe and Ursuka K Le Guin and Vonnegut, whereas the only author I am obsessive about from DV is JG Ballard.
Ellison’s introductions were again kinda annoying and presumptuous and pretentious. Some of them were somewhat useful but most of them were basically just filler and platforms for Ellison to brag about either being friends with the author or having taught the author.
There were more women included in this one. This is a good thing. I’m unsure of how many people of color were included but there are at least two stories written by Jewish authors.
Anthologies are always going to be somewhat hit or miss and I can’t think of an anthology where I enjoyed every single story.
Overall there are few very few misses in this book and a lot of solid stories. Some of the stories are spectacular, though, and the highs of this book are higher than DV or any other anthology I have read.
Favorites
1 the word for world is forest - Ursula k Le guin
2 With the Bentfin Boomer Boys on Little Old New Alabama", novella by Richard A. Lupoff
3 Time Travel for Pedestrians - Ray Nelson
4 [A spot], by Gahan Wilson
5 Bed Sheets Are White", by Evelyn Lief
6 The Big Space Fuck", by Kurt Vonnegut
7 For Value Received - Andy offutt
8 Stoned Counsel", by H. H. Hollis
9 When It Changed", by Joanna Russ
10 Still-Life", by Barry N. Malzberg (as K. M. O'Donnell)
Least favorites
1 "Christ, Old Student in a New School", poem by Ray Bradbury
2 Totenbüch", by Albert Parra, as A. Parra (y Figueredo)
3 In the Barn", by Piers Anthony
4 Chuck Berry, Won't You Please Come Home", by Ken McCullough
5 Harry the Hare", by James B. Hemesath
Individual stories
1 Keynote: The Counterpoint of View - John Heidenry - B/B+
Really just a Borges pastiche, which it wears on its sleeve. Too short to really have much of an impact. Kinda an odd keynote or intro given that there is only one other metafictional story in the book.
2 Ching-Witch by Ross Rocklynne - B/B+
Solid story. Seems like a commentary on youth culture in the late 60s and early 70s and how quickly fads pass. Kinda reads like old white guy wish fulfillment.
3 The Word for World is Forest - Ursula k Le guin - A/A+
I did a stand alone video for this novella. I had read it once before separate from ADV. at heart it’s a piece of protest literature that seems to condemn the Vietnam War. Basically a companion piece to Lathe of Heaven. Check out my other video for more about the book.
4 For Value Received - Andy offutt - A-/A
About a girl being born. she lives in the hospital until she is in her 20s because her parents found their hospital bill exorbitant. A send up of health insurance and non socialized health care and how ridiculous health care costs are in this country.
5 Mathoms From the Time Closet - Gene Wolfe - B+/A- - comprises "Robot's Story", "Against The Lafayette Escadrille", and "Loco Parentis"
3 flash fiction pieces all dealing with time travel in one way or another. That being said, the stories read like literary fiction rather than sci fi. Typical Wolfe: literary and inventive but not as spectacular as some of his other books and stories.
6 Time Travel for Pedestrians - Ray Nelson - A-/A
A fucking trip. Super trippy and very dangerous. I have to imagine that this one caused a stir. Seems to describe a drug trip caused by something like datura or morning glory seeds, which are both very strong deliriant. The narrator jumps around in time experiencing a variety of different scenarios, mainly focusing on various types of western mysticism. I’ve seen it described as past life regression but that’s not clear in the story. A mixture of druggy montage and spiritual exploration. I wish this one was a novel length story. Apparently Nelson wrote the story that They Live is based on.
7 "Christ, Old Student in a New School", poem by Ray Bradbury - F
Didnt even finish this one. Why was a poem even included? I didn’t understand this one or why it was included.
8 King of the Hill", by Chad Oliver - B/B+
Seems to predict climate change and some of its effects. Only somewhat prescient. The story concerns overpopulation and rampant extinction. The story does meander some. I found it inventive and well-executed.
9 "The 10:00 Report is Brought to You By...", by Edward Bryant - B/B+
The story is about a news station paying to be the first to report a story by paying criminals to commit crimes then documenting the crimes. There is a rape scene in this one, which is quite haunting. Seems like a precursor to stuff like Nightcrawler. One of the more dangerous visions in this book.
10 "The Funeral", by Kate Wilhelm - B+/A-
I found this story to be fairly mysterious and difficult to pin down. Seems like a reaction to the hippie youth movement and a parody of the 1950s in America. What I’ve read of Wilhelm seems like it was pretty influential in the sci fi genre.
11 "Harry the Hare", by James B. Hemesath - C+/B-
A flash fiction piece. Seems like an ode to cartoons, also a commentary on copyright law. I was kinda unsure of what was going on in this story. There is some gore and violence but it’s not a particularly dangerous vision.
12 "When It Changed", by Joanna Russ (Nebula Award for Best Short Story) - B+/A-
About a colonized planet where men have gone extinct and there have only been women for hundreds of years. Men from Earth show up and fuck up the status quo. The story kinda subverts the expectations of someone who has just heard the summary, though.
13 "The Big Space Fuck", by Kurt Vonnegut - A-/A
The tone and plot of this story are very Vonnegut. It’s like it is almost logical, but not quite. About earth going to shit and humanity trying to artificially inseminate the universe. The story reminded me of Ariana Grande’s song “NASA”.
14 "Bounty", by T. L. Sherred - B/B+
About vigilantism being legalized and rewarded monetarily, so people bait others into crimes that they can be rewarded for violently stopping. People also kill themselves so their families will get paid. Short and disturbing and misanthropic.
15 "Still-Life", by Barry N. Malzberg (as K. M. O'Donnell) - B+/A-
About an astronaut slowly going crazy and eventually leaving 2 other astronauts on the moon and going home. The main character rapes his wife in the story’s opening. The main character is basically a villain: short tempered and self centered. Seems like a commentary on how bureaucracy drives you crazy, as he really doesn’t like how nasa tells him not to swear during his mission to the moon.
16 "Stoned Counsel", by H. H. Hollis - B+/A-
This story is trippy and vivid and super inventive. It reminded me of an adult version of adventure time. It’s about 2 lawyers doing drugs and then mind melding as they fight over a legal case. It’s almost a climate fiction story as well.
17 "Monitored Dreams and Strategic Cremations", by Bernard Wolfe—comprises "The Bisquit Position" and "The Girl With Rapid Eye Movements" - B/B+
Two stories connected by them both having the same main character. The first story is about a rich journalist helping a woman with a husky cheat on her husband, who is heavily tied up in the military industrial complex. The dog accidentally dies in a demonstration of the effects of napalm. It reminded me of Joan Didion’s play it as it lays. The second story is concerned with incomprehensible rock lyrics and how dreams affect reality. Seems to parody songs like “In A Gadda Da Vida”. The story is much more playful and absurd than the first one. Both seem to protest the vietnam war and capitalism. Some parts are really funny.
18 "With A Finger in My I", by David Gerrold - B/B+
Maybe a B-/B. It’s a lot like Borges’ tlon uqbar story. Mass hysteria and hallucinations, how the quirks of our perceptions color the world around us. Too peculiar to be incisive and rather unfocused.
19 "In the Barn", by Piers Anthony - C+/B-
This one is a dangerous vision. It is also pretty damn disgusting. It’s basically about vegetarianism and veganism and how we would never treat humans like we treat people. Kinda reminded me of Michel Faber’s Under the Skin.
20 "Soundless Evening", by Lee Hoffman - B/B+
Solid and rather innocuous. Basically about a society with limits on how many children you can have. You can still have as many babies as you want but they are killed at the age of 5 if you have more than two. It’s too short and low stakes to really affect you emotionally.
21 [A spot], by Gahan Wilson - A-/A
Really fucking good. Inventive and silly and absurd. A simple idea but it’s very well executed. Basically about a spot on a wall growing and eventually consuming everything. Almost an A/A+ but just a bit too short to have that kind of impact on me.
22 "The Test-Tube Creature, Afterward", by Joan Bernott - B/B+
A piece of flash fiction. About a genetically engineered pet that other causing or stopping its owners suicide. It reeks of depression and anhedonia. Definitely a dangerous vision.
23 "And the Sea Like Mirrors", by Gregory Benford -B/B+
Pretty close to a B+/A- but way too misogynistic. stated to be a response to Heinlein’s competent man. Reminded me of the show Yellowjackets and the book the Kar Chee reign. A literary thriller, sf-lite. It explores madness and toxic masculinity.
24 "Bed Sheets Are White", by Evelyn Lief - A-/A
Reminded me of the long walk by Richard Bachman slash Stephen king. It is hallucinatory and very of its time. Some of it is about white nationalism, some of it seems like a dream sequence. Short and sweet and no excess language. Seems like it’s a memory but it couldn’t be, as the world of the story is completely alien,
25 "Tissue", by James Sallis—comprises "At the Fitting Shop" and "53rd American Dream" - B-/B
Thot these were just fine. The first story is about a teenage boy getting lost in a department store shopping for a new penis. The second story is about the highs and lows of parenting. Lot of shock value and subversion in this one.
26 Elouise And The Doctors of the Planet Pergamon", by Josephine Saxton - B+/A-
A haunting and and disgusting visceral story. Kinda ballardian, as it’s the closest thing to the atrocity exhibition I’ve ever read, besides gravitys rainbow. About a perfectly healthy woman on a planet where everyone has grotesque disabilities and horrible illnesses. Kinda like a Beckett play.
27 "Chuck Berry, Won't You Please Come Home", by Ken McCullough - C+/B-
Too low stakes for me. Not really dangerous and not really sci fi. It’s about a guy growing a tick to a humongous size. Very stylized and repetitive.
28 "Epiphany For Aliens", by David Kerr - B/B+
About a team of scientists that discover a group of Neanderthals that are still alive in Europe. It has its own logic. The woman who sacrifices herself for science seems like a stand in for bleeding heart liberal types. Perhaps somewhat racist.
29 "Eye of the Beholder", by Burt K. Filer - B/B+
About an artist who creates sculptures that are mathematically impossible, as they defy the rules of gravity. The cia and a female scientist are quite interested in creating an insterstellar engine from the sculptures. It reminded me of Ballard’s early stories and explores the differences between art and science,
30 Moth Race", by Richard Hill- B+/A-
This story is seemingly about a utopia where everyone is given everything they need by the government. A man goes to watch a race where the drivers have to survive racing around a track with randomly generated obstacles. The only one to ever conquer the track is called the champion and he lives like a modern celebrity. The main character is part of the race’s audience and drunkenly tries to participate in the race.
31 "In Re Glover", by Leonard Tushnet - B/B+
Solid and vaguely funny story, comedic but not hilarious. Somewhat kafkaesque, in that it portrays endless and convoluted bureaucracies. It is more or less about the legal ramifications of cryogenesis tech. Could’ve been more in depth.
32 "Zero Gee", by Ben Bova - B-/B
About a male astronaut trying to be the first human being to have sex in outer space. The woman he is supposed to fuck is a time life photographer, a civilian in a nasa space station. Too long and technical and meandering. Not very exciting as a s
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And the Hippos Were Boiled in Their Tanks
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2017-04-06T21:12:00+00:00
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The legendary unpublished collaboration between William S. Burroughs and Jack Kerouac, a crime novel about a shocking murder at the dawn of the Beat Generation.
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en
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https://groveatlantic.com/core/wp-content/themes/groveatlantic/images/favicon.ico?ver=1713989674
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Grove Atlantic
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https://groveatlantic.com/book/and-the-hippos-were-boiled-in-their-tanks/
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Phillip Tourian is seventeen years old, half Turkish and half American. He has a choice of several names but prefers Tourian. His father goes under the name of Rogers. Curly black hair falls over his forehead, his skin is very pale, and he has green eyes. He was sitting down in the most comfortable chair with his leg over the arm before the others were all in the room.
This Phillip is the kind of boy literary fags write sonnets to, which start out, “O raven-haired Grecian lad …” He was wearing a pair of very dirty slacks and a khaki shirt with the sleeves rolled up showing hard muscular forearms.
Ramsay Allen is an impressive-looking gray-haired man of forty or so, tall and a little flabby. He looks like a down-at-the-heels actor, or someone who used to be somebody. Also he is a southerner and claims to be of a good family, like all southerners. He is a very intelligent guy but you wouldn’t know it to see him now. He is so stuck on Phillip he is hovering over him like a shy vulture, with a foolish sloppy grin on his face.
Al is one of the best guys I know, and you couldn’t find better company. And Phillip is all right too. But when they get together something happens, and they form a combination which gets on everybody’s nerves.
Agnes O’Rourke has an ugly Irish face and close-cropped black hair, and she always wears pants. She is straightforward, manly, and reliable. Mike Ryko is a nineteen-year-old, red-haired Finn, a sort of merchant seaman dressed in dirty khaki.
Well, that’s all there were, the four of them, and Agnes held up a bottle.
“Ah, Canadian Club,” I said. “Come right in and sit down,” which they all had anyway by this time, and I got out some cocktail glasses and everyone poured himself a straight shot. Agnes asked me for some water which I got for her.
Phillip had some philosophical idea he had evidently been developing in the course of the evening and now I was going to hear about it. He said, “I’ve figured out a whole philosophy on the idea of waste as evil and creation as good. So long as you are creating something it is good. The only sin is waste of your potentialities.”
That sounded pretty silly to me so I said, “Well of course I’m just a befuddled bartender, but what about Lifebuoy soap ads, they’re creations all right.”
And he said, “Yeah, but you see, that’s what you call wasteful creation. It’s all dichotomized. Then there’s creative waste, such as talking to you now.”
So I said, “Yeah, but where are your criteria to tell waste from creation? Anybody can say that what he’s doing is creation whereas what everybody else is doing is waste. The thing is so general, it don’t mean a thing.”
Well, that seemed to hit him right between the eyes. I guess he hadn’t been getting much opposition. At any rate he dropped the philosophy and I was glad to see it go because such ideas belong in the “I don’t want to hear about it” department as far as I’m concerned.
Phillip then asked me if I had any marijuana and I told him not much, but he insisted he wanted to smoke some, so I got it out of the desk drawer and we lit a cigarette and passed it around. It was very poor stuff and the one stick had no effect on anyone.
Ryko, who had been sitting on the couch all this time without saying anything, said, “I smoked six sticks in Port Arthur, Texas, and I don’t remember a thing about Port Arthur, Texas.”
I said, “Marijuana is very hard to get now, and I don’t know where I’ll get any more after this is gone,” but Phillip grabbed up another cigarette and started smoking it. So I filled my glass with Canadian Club.
Right then it struck me as strange, since these guys never have any money, where this Canadian Club came from, so I asked them.
Al said, “Agnes lifted it out of a bar.”
It seems Al and Agnes were standing at the end of the bar in the Pied Piper having a beer when Agnes suddenly said to Al, “Pick up your change and follow me. I’ve got a bottle of Canadian Club under my coat.” Al followed her out, more scared than she was. He hadn’t even seen her take it.
This took place earlier in the evening and the fifth was now about half gone. I congratulated Agnes and she smiled complacently.
“It was easy,” she said. “I’m going to do it again.”
Not when you’re with me, I said to myself.
Then there was a lull in the conversation and I was too sleepy to say anything. There was some talk I didn’t hear and then I looked up just in time to see Phillip bite a large piece of glass out of his cocktail glass and begin chewing it up, which made a noise you could hear across the room. Agnes and Ryko made faces like someone was scratching fingernails on a blackboard.
Phillip chewed up the glass fine and washed it down with Agnes’s water. So then Al ate a piece too and I got him a glass of water to wash it down with. Agnes asked if I thought they would die, and I said no, there was no danger if you chewed it up fine, it was like eating a little sand. All this talk about people dying from ground glass was hooey.
Right then I got an idea for a gag, and I said, “I am neglecting my duties as a host. Is anyone hungry? I have something very special I just got today.”
At this point Phillip and Al were picking stray pieces of glass out from between their teeth. Al had gone into the bathroom to look at his gums in the mirror, and they were bleeding.
“Yes,” said Al from the bathroom.
Phillip said he’d worked up an appetite on the glass.
Al asked me if it was another package of food from my old lady and I said, “As a matter of fact, yes, something real good.”
So I went into the closet and fooled around for a while and came out with a lot of old razor blades on a plate with a jar of mustard.
Phillip said, “You bastard, I’m really hungry,” and I felt pretty good about it and said, ‘some gag, hey?”
Ryko said, “I saw some guy eat razor blades in Chicago. Razor blades, glass, and light globes. He finally ate a porcelain plate.”
By this time everyone was drunk except Agnes and me. Al was sitting at Phillip’s feet looking up at him with a goofy expression on his face. I began to wish that everybody would go home.
Then Phillip got up, swaying a little bit, and said, “Let’s go up on the roof.”
And Al said, “All right,” jumping up like he never heard such a wonderful suggestion.
I said, “No, don’t. You’ll wake up the landlady. There’s nothing up there anyway.”
Al said, “To hell with you, Dennison,” sore that I should try to block an idea coming from Phillip.
So they lurched out the door and started up the stairs. The landlady and her family occupy the floor above me, and above them is the roof.
I sat down and poured myself some more Canadian Club. Agnes didn’t want any more and said she was going home. Ryko was now dozing on the couch, so I poured the rest in my own glass, and Agnes got up to go.
I could hear some sort of commotion on the roof and then I heard some glass break in the street. We walked over to the window and Agnes said, “They must have thrown a glass down on the street.”
This seemed logical to me, so I stuck my head out cautiously and there was a woman looking up and swearing. It was getting gray in the street.
“You crazy bastards,” she was saying. “What you wanta do, kill somebody?”
Now I am firm believer in the counterattack, so I said, ‘shut up. You’re waking everybody up. Beat it or I’ll call a cop,” and I shut off the lights as though I had gotten up out of bed and gone back again.
After a few minutes she walked away still swearing, and I was swearing myself, only silently, as I remembered all the trouble those two had caused me in the past. I remembered how they had piled up my car in Newark and got me thrown out of a hotel in Washington when Phillip pissed out the window. And there was plenty more of the same. I mean Joe College stuff, about 1910 style. This happened whenever they were together. Alone, they were all right.
I turned on the lights and Agnes left. Everything was quiet on the roof.
“I hope they don’t get the idea to jump off,” I said, to myself, because Ryko was asleep. “Well they can roost up there all night if they want to. I’m going to bed.”
I undressed and got into bed, leaving Ryko sleeping on the couch. It was about six o’clock.
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0
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https://www.3ammagazine.com/3am/william-burroughs-and-the-dreamscapes-of-the-dalai-lama/
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en
|
William Burroughs and the Dreamscapes of the Dalai Lama – 3:AM Magazine
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The dark satires of William S. Burroughs deal, above all, with overcoming the limits of ordinary consciousness through word-as-virus, drugs, magic, sex, telepathy, writing, and, of course, dream. Back in 1962, Burroughs was famously praised by Norman Mailer as ‘The only American novelist living today who may conceivably be possessed by genius.' Neither Mailer nor Burroughs is alive today. If Burroughs were alive, he would be a centenarian. He was born on February 5th, 1914. His writing intersected with my life in 1970, when I was sixteen: Naked Lunch was like a depth charge in the mind-stream.
An essay by Des Barry, to mark William Burroughs' 100th birthday.
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en
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https://www.3ammagazine.com/3am/william-burroughs-and-the-dreamscapes-of-the-dalai-lama/
|
By Des Barry.
Wrought iron railings ring the gallery of the Redmond Barry reading room in the State Library of Victoria and far below the green glass lights of the study carrels illuminate the pretty faces of the students cramming for exams while I sit up here above the vast space and wrestle with Time, my breathing troubled by dust mites that escape, invisible, from the 1927 Black edition of J. W. Dunne’s An Experiment with Time; and I struggle with a dream, the memory of dream, where William S. Burroughs, and a Time Bandit dwarf dressed in a dark jumpsuit and wraparound shades, tried to assassinate the Dalai Lama, a dream that terrified me when I had it, and still terrifies me now, thirty-three years later, though Burroughs and the dwarf have long since passed on.
The dark satires of William S. Burroughs deal, above all, with overcoming the limits of ordinary consciousness through word-as-virus, drugs, magic, sex, telepathy, writing, and, of course, dream. Back in 1962, Burroughs was famously praised by Norman Mailer as ‘The only American novelist living today who may conceivably be possessed by genius.’ Neither Mailer nor Burroughs is alive today. If Burroughs were alive, he would be a centenarian. He was born on February 5th, 1914. His writing intersected with my life in 1970, when I was sixteen: Naked Lunch was like a depth charge in the mind-stream.
No matter how Burroughs’ views might have transformed or evolved over his eighty-three years of life, his genius always included singular approaches to time, space and consciousness. He thought of his work as a practical exploration of dream travel, telepathy, and psychic possession; and post mortem experiences as recounted in the Books of the Dead of Mayans, Egyptians and Tibetans. Burroughs went where many other writers would be horrified to venture. These explorations in his writing were not just ironic satires of the human condition, but a speculative search for new forms of consciousness.
In The Place of Dead Roads (1984), Burroughs has this to say about his protagonist, Kim:
Kim knew he was in a state of Arrested Evolution: A.E. Kim knows that the first step towards space exploration is to examine the human artifact with biologic alterations in mind that will render our H.A. [Human Artifact] more suitable for space conditions and space travel… We are like water creatures looking up at the land and air and wondering how we can survive in that alien medium. The water we live in is Time. That alien medium we glimpse beyond time is Space. And that is where we are going. Kim reads all the science fiction he can find, and he is stunned to discover in all these writings the underlying assumption that there will be no basic changes involved in space travel.
Burroughs’ writing is not without a large dose of dark irony:
Kim has never doubted the possibility of an afterlife or the existence of gods. In fact, he intends to become a god, to shoot his way to immortality, to invent his way, to write his way.
But there is little doubt that Burroughs was serious about consciousness post mortem. In the foreword to the 1979 Calder edition of Ah Pook is Here, he writes:
The Mayan Codices are undoubtedly books of the dead; that is to say directions for time travel. If you see reincarnation as a fact then the question arises: how does one orient oneself with regard to future lives? Consider death as a dangerous journey in which all past mistakes will count against you. If you are not orientating yourself on sound factual data, you will not arrive at your destination, or in some cases you may arrive in fragments. What basic principles can be set forth? Perhaps the most important is relaxed alertness, and this is the point of the martial arts, and other systems of spiritual training – to inculcate a psychic and physical stance of alert passivity and focused attention. Suspicion, fear, self-assertion, rigid preconceptions of right and wrong, shrinking and flinching from what may seem monstrous in human terms – such attitudes of mind and body are disastrous. See yourself as the pilot of an elaborate spacecraft in unfamiliar territory. If you freeze, tense up, refuse to look at what is in front of you, you will crack up the ship. On the other hand, credulity and uncritical receptivity are almost as dangerous.
Apart from his extensive drug use, Burroughs investigated the nature and alteration of consciousness across a grand spectrum of systems – Aleister Crowley’s Magick, L. Ron Hubbard’s Scientology, Chogyam Trungpa’s Tibetan Buddhism – but he never became a devotee of any of them. While received wisdom would have it that, once inside the organization, Scientology is impossible to escape, Burroughs, it appears, was actually thrown out. Ever the independent investigator, Burroughs wrote an article for the Los Angeles Free Press in 1970 entitled ‘On Scientology.’ It opens like this:
In view of the fact that my articles and statements on Scientology may have influenced young people to associate themselves with the so-called Church of Scientology, I feel an obligation to make my present views on the subject quite clear.
Some of the techniques are highly valuable and warrant further study and experimentation. The E-meter is a useful device… (many variations of this device are possible). On the other hand, I am in flat disagreement with the organizational policy… Scientologists are not prepared to accept intelligent and sometimes critical evaluation. They demand unquestioning acceptance…
Burroughs reached the level in Scientology known as Operating Thetan, a spiritual state clear to some degree of emotional conditioning. He was, however, excluded from the organization, not for any rejection of the Science Fiction cosmology – indeed he was quite capable of creating his own Science Fiction cosmology in his Nova trilogy – but for wanting to make public Scientology’s techniques for clearing the residual effects of emotional trauma.
The Russian mystic G. I. Gurdjieff held that a significant shock is necessary to wake up human consciousness that usually wallows in a state that is dormant, or asleep. Burroughs sought out those shocks. And in his writing sought to dish them out. At the age of sixteen, Naked Lunch was the first of many Burroughs-induced shocks that I suffered. These shocks were to recur – albeit in different forms as shocks must – at different times in my life, as each of Burroughs’ books appeared in print, or as Burroughs-simulacra appeared in my dreams, and not always in the most pleasant of ways.
Picture this.
Summer, 1970, the sun slants through the front window of a house on what is to become one of the most notorious of British housing estates. This wallpapered room is immaculately clean. Against the far wall are a stereogram and a pile of LPs. A friend’s older brother, by the name of Jeff Thomas – long body, curly ginger hair, freckled skin – picks up a book, chooses a page. He pushes the book at me.
White cover, a smoky grey head with red eyes, letters that read The Naked Lunch. The Corgi paperback (with its extra ‘The’ in front of Naked Lunch) is open to a section three quarters of the way through: Johnny, Mark and Mary. A blue movie scene. The literary equivalent of a shot in the arm that lights up my brain with horror and desire and death and lust.
This routine of explicit sex between two boys and a girl, the homosexuality – the word ‘gay’ hasn’t been invented yet where I live – the drugs, the low-life lack of any kind of limitation, to me who grew up a strict Catholic, reveals The Naked Lunch as Hell and abomination, pure and simple: two-way whorehouse mirrors…. You ever see a hot shot hit, kid? … Man, it was tasty… Johnny, Mark and Mary. Johnny, Mark and Mary. Johnny, Mark and Mary. A blue movie conjured out of words: Mary riding Johnny as he hangs from a gibbet, lunching on the fallen corpse; lesbian strap-on sex with Steely Dan III from Yokohama. I journeyed through those infernal literary visions, hooked on the darkness, disease, un-ease, and the Mugwump cities, a landscape of abominations. Burroughs embraced abominations.
Reading these scenes excavated disturbing memories that I had kept hidden from everyone – friends, parents, teachers – since the age of seven. Back then, I was always playing pretend games: cowboys and Indians; British and Japs; the Three Musketeers; Fu Manchu. So, when a girl-playmate’s older brother asked me if I wanted to learn what boys do with girls when they’re grown-up, I said, ‘Yes! Great!’ And he took me inside his house. He showed me how to dance to rock and roll. He showed me how to smooch. He showed me how to kiss.
‘Come up to my bedroom,’ the boy said. ‘I’ll show you some pictures of naked girls.’
The middle and back part of the upstairs of the house had been separated into two rooms by wooden panels, so that he had the middle room and his little sister the back room. Pictures of naked women that he’d cut out of Parade, a British soft porn magazine, were pinned to the wooden walls. I was surprised that his parents allowed him to have them on the wall. My parents would have killed me if I even looked at the magazine. I thought his parents let him do this because they were Protestants.
In this boy’s bed, I enjoyed the sensations: the wetness of a tongue, the body scents, the pleasure in my groin. I was too young to realize that, for the older boy, this was a lot more than play. Or practice.
I fictionalized what happened with the boy, and how I got out of that situation, in a novel called A Bloody Good Friday, which was published by Jonathan Cape in 2002. It’s a short section of the book but these events had some major repercussions in my life… sometimes even today, in dreams, in nightmares.
Did reading Naked Lunch at the age of sixteen infect me with some kind of abominable virus? I’m convinced that I’m heterosexual, so why am I drawn to these stories of usually – or unusually – homosexual or extraterrestrial-sexual couplings that populate the pages of every Burroughs fiction I feel compelled to read.
In his essay ‘Ten Years and a Billion Dollars,’ from the 1985 Arcade book The Adding Machine, Burroughs wrote:
My general theory since 1971 has been that the Word is literally a virus, and that it has not been recognized as such because it has achieved a state of relatively stable symbiosis with its human host… the Word clearly bears the single identifying feature of virus: it is an organism with no internal function other than to replicate itself.
After that literary blue movie afternoon, I had to get my own copy of The Naked Lunch. Then, on a remainder rack in Woolworths on my hometown High Street, I found a copy of Dead Fingers Talk. Why among the new routines were there some that I’d already read in The Naked Lunch? No matter. Read on. It took a while to discover that Burroughs regularly recycled his written material as he developed his cut-up techniques. Enough has been written elsewhere about Brion Gysin and the origin of the cut-up and cut-in methods of writing, so I won’t go into the methods in any detail here. Those techniques are clearly laid out in Burroughs and Gysin’s collaboration The Third Mind. But Burroughs never tired of talking about them in interviews or writing about them in his essays.
Three years after reading Naked Lunch, I sat on a lumpy, scarred armchair in the long living room of a student house in Wanstead. I spent a lot of time there because the people who lived there had become a kind of surrogate family to me. In the lounge of the house, there were two other armchairs and a blue sofa bed that folded out so that four people could sit or lie on it and listen to music. It was here that I read The Wild Boys:
The wild boys make little pouches from human testicles in which they carry their hashish and Khat…
The boys spread out on rugs and lit hash pipes. The warriors were stripped by their attendants, massaged and rubbed with musk. The setting sun bathed their lean bodies in a red glow as the boys gave way to an orgy of lust.
What was missing in my life, I thought, was the orgy of lust. I was fascinated by The Wild Boy stories of anarchic dopers but… strange – and not so strange… even though my student friends and I would become wiser, or perhaps just less prejudiced in the future, at this hazy time in our lives, just like everyone else we knew, we professed a suspicion of gays. For me that homophobia originated in 1961 in that wood-paneled room adorned with pin-ups of naked women. In my teens, at school, I joined in the banter among my friends when we made jokes about queers and homos. I wondered whether what happened to me at the age of seven made me queer, too.
Without really being aware of it at the time, at the age of sixteen, William Burroughs with The Naked Lunch, and then at college with The Wild Boys, gave me some kind of secret acceptance of myself. I found a bizarre refuge in these imaginary worlds in which I didn’t run the risk of being a pariah among my friends for what had happened to me. I wanted to be a Wild Boy but I wanted to be a hetero Wild Boy. It got even more complicated when David Bowie and Lou Reed made queer chic.
I finally lost my virginity to a woman a few years older than me who I met in the college bar. She invited me to dinner and I burned the roof of my mouth with her scalding stuffed peppers; and then we had somewhat fraught sex, both full of desire, both a little disappointed by the feeling that neither of us really liked the other very much. The earth didn’t move. Anxiety and false bravado, but at least I’d got that first-time sex over with. In the morning, I declined her offer to have a shower and I never saw her again. I can’t even remember her name. It might have been Sue. I think it was Sue. She probably can’t remember mine. I’d probably prefer that.
*
Despite being the Wild Boys’ drug of choice, Burroughs was less enthused about hashish than opiates. But he was enamored of Hassan i Sabbah, the Old Man of the Mountain, whose assassins – the hashishin – set out from the mountain fastnesses of Alamout to kill Hassan’s enemies. The story originates in The Travels of Marco Polo. Such was Burroughs’ promotion of the story that it was included in Donald Cammel’s script for the film Performance. The rock star, Turner, played by Mick Jagger, recites the story of how the Old Man’s fortress was an earthly paradise, and his adepts were plied with hashish and all sensual delights before being sent off on an assassination mission. If they were successful and returned to Alamout, they were once again in an earthly paradise, whereas if they were killed in the service of the Old Man, they were promised a greeting in a heavenly Paradise.
When Hassan-i-Sabbah appears in the harsher, less romantic prose of the first pages of Nova Express, he is the hero of consciousness beyond the limitations of the human body:
What scared you into time? Into body? Into shit? I will tell you: “the word.” Alien word “the.” “The” word of Alien Enemy imprisons “thee” in Time. In Body. In Shit. Prisoner come out. The great skies are open. I Hassan i Sabbah rub out the word forever.
There’s a tremendous tension in the Nova trilogy. It’s often hard to work out whether Inspector J. Lee of the Nova Police wants to end addiction or give in to it. Perhaps there are parallels in Burroughs’ attraction to morphine that gets him off, and apomorphine that gets him off morphine. He wants to be Hassan-i-Sabbah, and he wants to destroy his Garden of Delights. That addictive tension existed throughout Burroughs’ life right until his bodily end in Lawrence, Kansas.
I found that The Nova trilogy of The Soft Machine, The Ticket that Exploded, and Nova Express didn’t make for easy reading, but I had to go on. This 1960s trilogy is heavily reliant on the cut-up method, although much of Burroughs’ writing whether fiction or nonfiction uses the cut-up method to varying degrees. It is through ‘rubbing out the words’ that ‘control’ can be undermined. The Nova trilogy is a fight with control: the control of addiction, the control by the ‘enemy’ – that could be the state, or some science fiction entity embodied in an Alien Insect Conspiracy with invisible agents who have possessed host bodies on Earth. It’s not always so terribly clear who is in control and who is being controlled.
Since the time of his wife Joan Vollmer’s death in 1951 – when, in Mexico City, Burroughs shot her in the forehead in a William Tell reenactment that went horribly wrong – Burroughs was convinced he was in a struggle with a psychic entity he called the Ugly Spirit: a struggle against possession and control. The Ugly Spirit was a psychic entity that provoked him into abominations. I often wondered whether Burroughs’ subsequent rejection of women that lasted for decades, and his obsession with guns, was some kind of psychological compensation for dealing with the guilt of his wife’s death. Is this why he identified with Hassan-i-Sabbah so strongly – identified with him and rejected him at the same time?
Burroughs and Brion Gysin employed Hassan-i-Sabbah, the hashishin/assassins, and Alamout as a kind of movable Orientalist myth. When Gysin ventured into prose writing with The Process, he transposed the legend from the Persia of the Marco Polo version to Morocco.
(Hamid) went on: “I’ll get them to cut you a green passport of keef to see you through everything. I’ll see that you’ll get the best of the crop from Ketama and I’ll bring it down from the mountain myself with the blessings of Hassan-i-Sabbah, the father of grass. On your way, you’re bound to run into some other Assassins.”
“But Hamid,” I laughed. “I am not an Assassin at all!”
“We are Assassins, all of us,” he gravely replied.
This Orientalism found its broader cultural expression in the sixties and seventies on the hippy trail to Morocco, Afghanistan, Swat, India and Nepal. Allen Ginsberg got as far as India and a connection with Tibetan Buddhism. Burroughs got as far as Morocco. I made my own journey to India and Nepal in 1981 to see what it was like to practice meditation in the places where the practice originated.
At that time, the drug experiments of luminaries like Timothy Leary, Richard Alpert, and Ken Kesey, and the journeys to the east, resulted in innumerable spiritual systems being imported into Europe and the United States where centres of Sufism, Hinduism, and Buddhism sprang up in cities and the countryside. There was a renaissance of interest in the occult and Aleister Crowley. When in London, Burroughs tried magical methods to obstruct the Scientologists who had declared him a Suppressive Person.
Growing up in the sixties and seventies, it was difficult not to be influenced by that consciousness-expanding culture. Burroughs certainly was influenced by it, though by then he was in his late fifties/early sixties. He brought these occult explorations of consciousness into the Red Night trilogy, Cities of the Red Night, The Place of Dead Roads, and The Western Lands. The Western Lands in particular is an exploration – even a deconstruction – of the seven souls said to travel the Egyptian version of the Land of the Dead.
All forms of orientalism rely on a cultural naivety, which can have some advantages as well as its limitations. Naivety can permit openness to other cultures even while unaware of a culturally imperialist projection. Certainly there was ignorance of the darker side of cultural complexities. It’s not hard in these troubled times to identify a parallel between Hassan-i-Sabbah and Osama bin Laden. This excerpt from The Western Lands has a prescient quality:
…So the training at Alamout was directed toward putting the student in contact with his death. Once contact has been made, the physical assassination is a foregone conclusion. His assassins did not even try to escape, though capture meant torture. By the act of assassination they had transcended the body and physical death. The operative has killed his death.
To modern political operatives, this is romantic hogwash. You gonna throw away an agent you spent years training? Yes, because he was trained for one target, for one kill. The modern operative, then, is doing something very different from the messengers of HIS. Modern agents are protecting and expanding political aggregates. HIS was training individuals for space conditions, for existence without the physical body. This is the logical evolutionary step. The physical body is not designed for space conditions in present form. Too heavy, since it is encumbered with a skeleton to maintain upright position in a gravity field.
Burroughs was ever of an anti-authoritarian bent, and as regards the Old Man of the Mountain, Burroughs imagined his assassins only disposed of tyrants. No doubt, Osama bin Laden would have argued the same goal for his assassins. What would Burroughs have thought of Osama bin Laden, had he lived to see the fall of the Twin Towers? Would he have recognized the parallels? It’s hard to believe that he wouldn’t have. But if the Hassan-i-Sabbah of Burroughs’ imagination had nothing to do with Osama Bin Laden, neither is it likely that Burroughs’ Old Man of the Mountain had anything to do with the Hassan-i-Sabbah described by Marco Polo. This again is from The Western Lands:
For the last forty years of his life, HIS (Hassan-i-Sabbah) occupied the mountain fortress of Alamout in what is now northern Iran. From Alamout the Old Man dispatched his assassins when he decided they were ready and their missions necessary… What little historical data survives tends to be misleading, such as the notorious account given by Marco Polo of a heaven of houris promised to the martyr, where he would be wafted when his work was done. There were no women in Alamout.
Barry Miles in his biography entitled William Burroughs: El Hombre Invisible traces the changes of Burroughs’ attitudes to women from outright misogyny in the early sixties to an acceptance of feminism that sought to free women from their traditional roles that Burroughs so despised. Miles writes that Burroughs ‘began to befriend some of the more independent women who entered into his circle. In the 70s he was happy to spend time with Patti Smith, Laurie Anderson, Kathy Acker, Debbie Harry and some others.’ This was a welcome change from 1961, where Burroughs – in another quote from the Miles book – ‘suspected (women) of being agents (from another galaxy) and Burroughs thought that maybe you had to exterminate all the women, or get rid of them one way or another. Evolve some sort of male that could give birth by parthenogenesis.’
After reading so many Burroughs’ novels where women are rare and never shown in a positive light – although neither are the men as Burroughs was wont to point out – I experienced a small glimmer of heterosexual relief in Cities of the Red Night, when Burroughs allowed some of his male and female characters at least token coition in the city of Port Roger, which lives under pirate articles. From the ‘Mother is the Best Bet’ chapter:
“Breeding is encouraged…is in fact a duty. I hope not too unpleasant. We expect that some of you will raise families. We need families to operate as intelligence agents in areas controlled by the enemy… And now there are some uh young ladies who have been waiting to meet you…”
The copulations which follow are hardly joyous: performances reenact the Jajouka Pan rites with a rape of the goddess Aïsha; the rape of a Valkyrie; a homosexual appearance of the spirit of Hassan-i-Sabbah; and a variation on the blue movie scene from Naked Lunch with Half-Hanged Kate and Half-Hanged Kelley. Noah – a Burroughs-like surrogate narrator – plays a Corn God to avoid heterosexual coupling. After the procreative orgy:
The girls will proceed to the remote island communes to await delivery. They will all receive a handsome dowry should they wish to marry and the children will be trained from childhood in the use of weapons and fitted to take their part in the task of liberation.
The chapter finishes with ‘Pages from the diary of Hirondelle de Mer,’ perhaps Burroughs’ first and maybe only feminist narrator, who complains of the pirate women’s lot:
I am a sorceress and a warrior. I do not relish being treated as a breeding animal. Would this occur to Skipper Nordenholz? No force, he says, has been applied – but I am forced by my circumstances, cast up here without a peso, and by my Indian blood which compels me to side with all the enemies of Spain. The child will be brought up as a sorcerer or sorceress… This is a sorcerers’ revolution. I must play my part as a sorceress.
Cities of the Red Night provided an altogether different kind of shock for me from Naked Lunch, and that shock was presaged by an equally disturbing dream. Throughout the seventies, as part of my own exploration of consciousness, I had been using the technique of trying to find my hands in my dreams that is recommended in Carlos Castaneda’s The Teachings of Don Juan. By finding the hands, it is possible to become aware of dreaming and so take control of the dream. Control or not, the effort produces some very vivid dreams.
Burroughs had a profound respect for Castaneda’s sorcerer, Don Juan. In ‘The Retreat Diaries’ section of the collection of writings published in 1984 by City Lights called The Burroughs File, Burroughs gives a very passable and simple explanation of Don Juan’s system based on Castaneda’s Tales of Power:
The aim of this training is to produce the impeccable warrior… He neither seeks nor admits a master… The tonal is the sum of any individual’s perception and knowledge, everything he can talk about and explain including his own physical being… The nagual is everything outside the tonal: the inexplicable, the unpredictable, the unknown… The teacher and the benefactor show the student how to reach the unknown, but they cannot predict what will happen when he does reach the nagual… The tonal tends to shut out and deny the nagual which takes over completely in the moment of death. If we see the nagual as the unknown, the unpredictable and unexplainable, the role of the artist is to make contact with the nagual and bring a part of it back into the tonal in paint or words, sculpture, film or music. The nagual is also the area of the so-called psychic phenomena, which the Buddhists consider as distractions from the way of enlightenment. Buddhism and the teachings of Don Juan are simply not directed toward the same goals. Don Juan does not offer any final solution or enlightenment. Neither does the artist. (pp.190-191)
(Allen Ginsberg – ever protective of Buddhist credentials in the face of Burroughs’ criticism – inserted a footnote at the end of the piece: ‘Outside the wheel of conditional karmic existence’ would be the Buddhist equivalent of ‘unpredictable, open-ended.’ p208).
William Burroughs appeared in a dream that I had early in 1980 not long after I had been introduced to Tibetan Buddhism – Easter 1979 – not the Chogyam Trungpa group to which Allen Ginsberg belonged, and to which Ginsberg had tried to introduce Burroughs – but another group taught by Tibetan lama based in the West. The dream itself was shock enough, but it contained an element of spooky prescience that came to fruition a year later. This is the dream:
Burroughs is crossing a lamp-lit parking lot of an auditorium where the Dalai Lama is about to give a public talk. Burroughs is accompanied by a dwarf who wears a black jumpsuit and wraparound shades – one of Terry Gilliam’s Time Bandits. Burroughs has the collar of his raincoat turned up toward a narrow-brimmed fedora. The pale surface of his raincoat writhes with the silhouettes of souls he has absorbed, the cloth like the skin of the dark necromancer, Septegundus, from the tales of Brak the Barbarian by John Jakes, a book that I read in 1973:
But what turned Brak’s body into a lumpy mass of terror was Septegundus’ very flesh. It was alive. It crawled. The skin was etched on every inch of its surface with human figures. Tiny, naked human figures, hundreds of them, intertwined and slowly writhing in postures of eternal torment. The figures were somehow prisoned within the thin layers of flesh and were crawling slowly there, crawling, moving, in a never ending pattern variation of bodies, arms, legs, torsos.
Burroughs, in the dream, holds a long-barreled, custom-made assassin’s pistol down by his side. I am nothing but a point of consciousness, aware, in that horrific moment, that Burroughs plans on assassinating the Dalai Lama. I am now embodied and in the auditorium’s security office watching the Burroughs and the dwarf on a CCTV monitor. I run to warn the Dalai Lama’s bodyguards that Burroughs and the dwarf are about to enter the building for their assassination attempt. The Dalai Lama is already on the stage, a huge crowd seated before him. His long frame in maroon robes leans over the lectern. From each side of the stage a bodyguard strides toward him. Burroughs and the dwarf step into the centre aisle between the seats in the auditorium. Burroughs raises his pistol. He fires at the very moment when one of the bodyguards steps in front of the Dalai Lama and takes a bullet in the shoulder for him. Now a whole group of bodyguards encircles the Dalai Lama.
The audience is shocked into immobility. Burroughs and the dwarf stride back up the aisle toward the rear exit that leads out into the parking lot.
Just before he leaves the auditorium, Burroughs calls out, ‘I’ll be back!’
The dream left me profoundly disturbed. I was appalled that a writer who was such a big influence on me could have tried in this dream to carry out the assassination of a man who was, to me, the embodiment of human kindness and compassion. To kill a teacher in Tibetan Buddhism is beyond unconscionable, and here was I dreaming an assassination attempt on the ultimate Tibetan teacher. I have no doubt now that this dream was illustrating a Dionysian/Apollonian psychological tension of Nietzschean proportions in my make-up. At the time I was simply horrified.
A year after that dream, in 1981, Cities of the Red Night was published. I bought it right away. I was reading it in my flat on Crouch Hill in London. On the cover is a scene from Pieter Brueghel the Elder’s The Triumph of Death. While the book could be seen as prescient of the AIDS epidemic to come, I was shaken by the discovery that in the Tamaghis Revisited chapter Burroughs has his character Audrey buy a copy of Brak the Barbarian (p234) and when Audrey has one of his dreams about one of the cities (p276), Burroughs cuts in a section from the John Jakes book. The coincidence left me very paranoid. Why did Burroughs cut in a section of John Jakes’ Brak the Barbarian? How was it possible that I dreamt Burroughs with a coat that’s like the human skin of the sorcerer Septegundus from Brak the Barbarian a year before Cities of the Red Night appears in print? What, in my mind, put the two books together long before I read the Burroughs novel? How was the connection made?
I thought: ‘What kind of psychic connection do I have with Burroughs?’
I thought: ‘Did my dream predict that Burroughs was going to try to assassinate the Dalai Lama?
I thought: ‘If I get to meet William Burroughs will these psychic connections that bind us provoke him – or his Ugly Spirit – into a desire to harm the Dalai Lama?’
I was as much a product of sixties’ and seventies’ thinking as was William Burroughs and all my consciousness expanding contemporaries. Magical thinking? Yes. But I knew how much Burroughs loved guns, perhaps a love increasingly fuelled by a displaced sense of guilt for the shooting of his wife Joan Vollmer, guilt which had resulted in Burroughs’ own sense of paranoia. Perhaps that paranoia was augmented by the urban crime of seventies and eighties New York, particularly present around his old living quarters, the Bunker, at 222 Bowery on the Lower East Side. I knew how Burroughs was fascinated by Hassan-i-Sabbah, the Old Man of the Mountain, and his society of assassins, the hashishin. I knew all about his Ugly Spirit and had a real fear of encountering it – the Ugly Spirit – if it hung around Burroughs so much.
At the time, putting all those elements together, I thought that maybe it would be better never to meet Burroughs in the flesh for fear of setting off a terrible psychic chain of inauspicious circumstances. A meeting with Burroughs would have been easy to arrange in the early 1990s when I became friends with Jacqueline Gens, who for many years was Allen Ginsberg’s secretary. I had been in the Bunker – Burroughs’ old home – more than once, after Burroughs had left for Kansas, when John Giorno had opened it up for a number of teachings by Tibetan lamas. But still I was a victim of that uncanny unease.
Crazy as I see it now – and with a great deal of regret that I didn’t get to meet a writer who has had such an influence on my life and on my writing – that unease is not far off how Burroughs himself might have thought, whether you glean his ideas about dream, possession, and telepathy from his fiction or from his essays.
‘The Retreat Diaries’ was written while Burroughs was in isolation for two weeks at the urging of Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche. In that work, Burroughs, definitely not a Buddhist, outlines a method of dream travel thus:
Now to contact Campbell Dalglish by the method outlined in Monroe’s Journeys Out of the Body. His instructions are to visit the place not a person. That is, you concentrate on where the person is. Now Campbell lives in a house outside Conifer, Colorado and he works in Denver. So in the dream I am on Wyoming Street and I find I am in the wrong house, since my home is on Denver Street… Point is, this out-of-body visiting is not a sequential matter. There is no time outside the body, or rather, past, present and future merge. So don’t expect a simple one-to-one visit; it doesn’t always work that way.
What kind of visit had I had in that dream in 1980? Had Burroughs inadvertently visited me to presage a possible future? In ‘The Technology of Writing’ in The Adding Machine, Burroughs writes of J.W. Dunne:
Dreams are a fertile source of material for writing. Years ago I read a book by John Dunne called An Experiment with Time (1924). Dunne was an English physicist, and he observed that his dreams referred not only to past but also to future events. However the future material, since it often seems trivial and irrelevant will not be remembered unless it is written down, and I have done this for about forty years. I began writing dreams down long before I started to write… and at least forty percent of my material derives from dreams.
Which is what brought me to the State Library of Victoria. I wanted to read Dunne’s book. The library holds the 1924 edition in its collection.
Consciousness, Dunne postulates in An Experiment with Time, is a continuum that can access future experience through the state of dream. His experiments concerned recognizing very mundane images of future events evidenced by the meticulous recording of dreams. The mundane nature of many experiences of recorded-dream futures, he says, proves that the phenomenon is not some extraordinary occult perception for which only an elite few have clairvoyant capacity, but is observable by any ordinary human being who is willing to record daily events and dreams, in order to recognize when dream has drawn on future experience. Dream, he says, draws on imagery from the past and the future in equal measure, so that, when we experience an event that we have already dreamt, it is not that we have predicted the future, but that we recognize an image from the future which dream consciousness has drawn upon. Consciousness therefore, he claims, is not limited to a ‘present moment’ but extends through time.
Among the most vivid examples he gives (pages 25-26) is that of his stay at a hotel in Aachensee, in Austria, in 1904. Dunne dreamed of a horse in a field, from which he was separated, by a high fence. The horse had gone mad and it escaped and chased Dunne down a narrow path until he escaped up some wooden steps. The next day, Dunne and his brother were fishing in a river near the hotel, when the scenario recurred with some changes in detail.
The horse was there, behaving just as it had done in the dream. The wooden steps at the end of the pathway were there… The beast had, inexplicably, just as in the dream, got out… it was thundering down the path towards the wooden steps. It swerved past these and plunged into the river, coming straight towards us.
Dunne states that these types of dreams are ‘ordinary, appropriate, expectable dreams; but they were occurring on the wrong nights… there was nothing unusual in any of these dreams as dreams. They were merely displaced in time.‘ (Dunne’s italics)
I feared that my dream of Burroughs and the Time Bandit was a dream ‘displaced in time.’ Yes, it was paranoid. But it’s too late now to do anything about visiting Burroughs. Burroughs has gone.
*
After all this delving into Burroughs and his writing, and its effect on me for forty years or more, early in 2013, I took a flight from Melbourne to London, and the train to Cardiff. On that first night in Wales, jet-lagged and delirious, I had a very vivid dream. Most of the elements of the Dalai Lama dream of 1980 recurred but in a transformed way. This is how I wrote it down in my dream diary:
Burroughs and the Time Bandit are back after thirty-three years. They’re attacking a closed-up building whose occupants are trying to keep them out. They are on some kind of benevolent mission. Burroughs has a boom box and the dwarf a weird gun that doesn’t fire bullets but somehow rearranges energy to knock people out. It looks like a big plastic water rifle. Burroughs is dressed in the same style as in the dream I had thirty-three years ago but now it has no silhouettes of souls writhing over it. Burroughs puts the boom box down next to the door. The dwarf climbs up onto the boom box. He fixes a purple plastic funnel to the door and somehow rearranges the molecules of the door’s surface so that a hole opens up in it. Behind the door is an armed guard. The dwarf places the muzzle of his rifle to the hole and he pulls the trigger. He wiggles the barrel around at all angles so that the guard is stunned. He can now work on opening the door and getting inside.
At this point I woke up.
I was pleased to have experienced Burroughs and the Time Bandit again and this time they were operating without violence. They were trying to open up a closed off part of my psyche, easing open the fortress that I had built against them. The images of the Dalai Lama dream that I had had in 1980 had transformed from malevolence to benevolence, as if my own immersion in Burroughs’s writing has been a constant revisiting of fantasies, obsessions and unpleasant emotions until, drained of their power, they had a lot less control over my life. The Job is never done of course.
Burroughs never shied away from darkness but his mission was always to free consciousness from its own limitations. A lot of people were hurt in his trajectory but it would be sanctimonious to judge a man’s life without knowing all the facts – without knowing the man. Burroughs was a fierce enemy of sanctimoniousness. He was a complex man who made appalling mistakes in his life. And then, like Becket, he went on: and produced a vast oeuvre of fiction, essays and recorded readings. He must have carried a heavy enormous burden for the loss of his wife. While I was in the throes of paranoia in 1981 about dream coincidences, Burroughs lost his son, Billy Junior, who died of cirrhosis of the liver at age thirty-three. Neither Billy Junior’s life nor that of his father William Burroughs Senior was without tragedy.
I only know William Burroughs through his writing that he used as a means to explore and go beyond the limits of consciousness. Burroughs once called the Scottish writer Alexander Trocchi an “explorer of psychic areas, a cosmonaut of inner space,” a description apt for Burroughs himself. The immortality that Burroughs sought was not some metaphor for the endurance of art – though he has that kind of immortality, too. And he has it through a major influence on writers as diverse as J.G. Ballard, Ben Marcus, David Shields and Roberto Bolaño. For Burroughs immortality meant a literal journey beyond the limitations of bodily-conditioned consciousness. Just like Kim, from The Place of Dead Roads, Burroughs intended ‘to become a god, to shoot his way to immortality, to invent his way, to write his way.’ Did he succeed? According to the writings of William S. Burroughs, and his psychic explorations and experiments, at some point, it should be possible to find out.
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January 2022 – Classics of Science Fiction
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10 posts published by jameswharris during January 2022
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Classics of Science Fiction
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Why did Alfred Bester write “5,271,009?” Is it merely a wild story, or does Bester have something to say? To rant? Sometimes, when I read old science fiction stories I wonder if science fiction writers weren’t satirizing science fiction and if that’s the case with “5,271,009.”
In the March 1954 issue of F&SF the editors give us a hint with their introduction:
Now, I’m not sure if Boucher and McComas aren’t misleading us, or misreading Bester’s story. I’ve never considered science fiction “pap for paranoids,” or that it’s read by people seeking stories that will free them from their responsibilities. “5,271,009” is one wild ride that begs to be explained.
The editors think the story is Bester’s reply to the critics of science fiction fans. I wonder if Bester isn’t criticizing science fiction too. That it’s a hyperkinetic parody of science fiction. I absolutely crave to hear this story read by a narrator that could do it justice, but the only readers I can imagine reading this story as Bester wrote it are dead. I picture either Robin Williams or Jonathan Winters reading it in their most manic moods.
Alfred Bester was only a part-time science fiction writer. He was also a magazine editor, scriptwriter for radio and television, and scripted comic books. In his introduction below, you can tell Bester has a real life. The over-the-top plot of “5,271,009” reminds me of comic books more than it does science fiction. In the 1950s science fiction was considered crapola-lit for geeky adolescent males, but comic books had even a worse reputation, fit only for the subliterate. Science fiction claimed to teach some science but it was damn little, but comics had no claim to redemption.
Actually, I wonder in “5,271,009” if Alfred Bester isn’t doing something like William Shanter did in the famous “Get a Life” skit on SNL. In the story, Mr. Solon Aquila is described as being two parts Beelzebub, two of Israfel, one of Monte Cristo, one of Cyrano, and mix violently. I believe Mr. Solon Aquila is Bester, Jeffrey Halsyon is either the science fiction genre, or the stand-in for all science fiction fans, or both. Just to give you a taste of Bester’s prose and the sound of Aquila:
Is Aquila just an over-the-top character, or is he a bit more?
This time when I read “5,271,009” I had an introduction by Bester to give me more clues. This copy is from Starlight: The Great Short Fiction of Alfred Bester which reprints a 2-volume collection from 1976.
We learn that “5,271,009” was written on assignment to fictionalize the cover artwork. Bester thought the art was obvious camp, and at first didn’t want to take on the project. He felt the story would have to be mad camp. I’ve been seeing that cover since the 1970s and I’ve never once considered it mad camp. Have you? I love the covers on F&SF, especially the ones from the 1950s. If I had to describe what was happening on the cover, I would say a convict was left to die out in space and given enough air to make it torture. But then, that might be exactly what Bester is making fun of.
Of course, we know what the writer imagines doesn’t have to be what the reader reimagines. The basic setup for “5,271,009” is Jeffrey Halsyon, an artist who has gone insane and has quit painting. Solon Aquila is a collector of Halsyon’s work wants him cured so he’ll return to painting. How that’s achieved is a story that feels like a collaboration by Robert Sheckley, Philip K. Dick, and Douglas Adams. But then, this is 1954, and well before those writers showed us just how far out science fiction could get.
It’s interesting that Solon Aquila takes on the job of curing Jeffrey Halsyon. And doesn’t the name Halsyon sound like halcyon? One definition of halcyon is “Often used to describe an idyllic time in the past that is remembered as better than today.” Another confession, that’s exactly how I look back on old science fiction.
Aquila drugs Halsyon and puts him through a series of hallucinations where Halsyon plays out adolescent fantasies often found in science fiction stories, and the number 5,271,009 shows up again and again in these fantasies. The first is a sex fantasy:
Of course, like stories about three wishes, this fantasy breaks apart when Halsyon is told all the women hate him and consider his duty rape. The next hallucination involves the space adventure pictured on the cover of F&SF. Bester is suggesting that science fiction fans imagine themselves as this kind of hero.
In each fantasy, Judith shows up. She is the fantasy girlfriend of all science fiction fans. After Jeffrey makes his escape he is the vile anti-hero that is blamed for the alien invasion by the Grssh. But at the last minute, Halsyon saves the planet. But that fantasy doesn’t work out either.
His next fantasy is my favorite, one I’ve often entertained in my daydreaming, and the plot of favorite stories. Jeffrey returns to being his 10-year old self but retains his 33-year-old mind.
But damn, this fantasy crashes and burns too. The next fantasy is most unpleasant, where Jeffery is in a time loop, like a bad Groundhog Day. Bester makes allusions to Shakespeare and Dante. Slowly, he’s bringing the story around to a meaningful message.
Next up, is another favorite science fiction fantasy I love to daydream about, being the last man on Earth. By the way, I just read Bester’s story, “They Don’t Make Life Like They Used To” which uses the same fantasy. In both cases, Bester or Mr. Aquila ruins the fantasy.
Finally, Jeffrey Halsyon escapes the fantasies, or so he thinks and confronts Mr. Aquila.
The answer to that question is 5,271,009. Halsyon is not out of the nightmare yet, he still has millions to go.
The ending is very much like the red pill-blue pill of The Matrix. But the choice isn’t between living in reality or living in fantasy. Instead, it’s much like Hindu or Buddhist philosophy. We evolve through many lives of reincarnation. We can grow faster if we live hard lives. Yeah, it’s that old what doesn’t kill us that makes us stronger.
Now, is this just a neat story that Alfred Bester wrote for Boucher and McComas? Or is it Bester telling science fiction, or science fiction fans, “Get a life!” To be more precise to the story, “Grow up!”
James Wallace Harris, 1/24/22
Group Read 27: The Big Book of Science Fiction
Story #77 of 107: “Snow” by John Crowley
We can learn quite a bit about writing from reading “Snow” by John Crowley. It’s a lovely story that most readers admire. Understanding why reveals those writing lessons. You can read/listen to the story here.
The setup is simple. Beautiful blonde Georgie marries a rich man who buys her everything, including a “wasp” that follows her filming 8,000 hours of her life. The film is destined for a funeral memorial, so it’s a rather odd gift. The rich man dies, Georgie becomes rich, marries Charlie for his looks, and eventually dies herself. Charlie loves Georgie, misses her, and after two years of grieving goes to the cemetery to see the films the wasp took. However, things don’t work out like he thought they would.
First, “Snow” zeroes in on everyone’s deep-rooted feelings for departed loved ones. This has nothing to do with science fiction. William Faulkner said in his 1950 Nobel Prize acceptance speech “…problems of the human heart in conflict with itself which alone can make good writing…” is exactly why “Snow” works.
In Kurt Vonnegut’s Rules for Writing, he advises “Be a sadist. No matter how sweet and innocent your leading characters, make awful things happen to them, in order that the reader may see what they are made of.” What really makes “Snow” work as a story is all the ways the “wasp” fails to work with Charlie’s expectations. Or even to what we readers want and expect. But more than that, chasing memories causes Charlie to learn through the slow suffering of aging, desire, and looking backward.
I expected Charlie would go to the cemetery and request to see certain days that he fondly remembered being with Georgie. That’s what he expected too. But the wasp system didn’t work that way. There are two buttons: Access and Reset. The first shows one scene, randomly. Reset shows another random scene. Charlie goes to the caretaker disappointed. He learns the recording technology used by the wasp is at the molecular level so they can squeeze in 8,000 hours of film, but there is no ordering and no time/date stamps. Just momentary glimpses from the past.
Charlie keeps coming back, addicted to those random scenes, learning about himself and Georgie. Eventually, Charlie notices that the memory clips are fading over time, turning snowy. He complains to the director, who tells him an interesting story about being a film archivist in his old job for the movie studios. He tells Charlie that in the oldest film clips, people’s faces looked pinched, cars and streets looked black, and things felt wintery.
Charlie never goes back to the cemetery. The last paragraphs are about what Charlie has learned about human memory. He believes there are two kinds, one that worsens over time, and another that can grow more intense.
Charlie is a character we can root for, we can feel and empathize. That’s another of Vonnegut’s rules. His number one rule is, “Use the time of a total stranger in such a way that he or she will not feel the time was wasted.” My time was not wasted. This is the second time I’ve read this story, and both times I felt a powerful sense of resonance with the John Crowley gives us. It made me think about my own life and wants. The time it took to read it produce worthwhile insights for me. “Snow” made me contemplate the nature of memory, recognizing how much our memories are like the memories collected by the wasp. Yet, what I wouldn’t give for a film library of my life.
Vonnegut also says, “Every character should want something, even if it is only a glass of water.” Charlie wants Georgie, either in real life or in memories. This is something everyone feels, so does that make this story more powerful? More powerful than say a story about someone wanting to save Earth from alien invaders? I think it does. I think the most powerful science fiction stories are the ones that make us think about people. Remember Charlie Gordon? Or Kip Russell?
Another piece of advice from Vonnegut is, “Start as close to the end as possible.” Crowley doesn’t spend any time when Georgie was alive. He gets right to the heart of the story and only spends a bit over six thousand words in storytelling. I think that’s another plus for this story. Short, sweet, and POW! That’s why Bob Shaw’s “Light of Other Days” was so effective.
Finally, and this is the hardest to judge, “Every sentence must do one of two things—reveal character or advance the action,” but I believe Crowley adhered to this advice very well indeed. In the end, Charlie says, “I wanted to go, get out, not look back. I would not stay watching until there was only snow.” One for action, one to tell us all about Charlie.
Main Page of Group Read
James Wallace Harris, 1/23/22
I’ve read over a thousand science fiction short stories in the last three years and I’ve decided I have an anthology problem. This is different from the anthology problem Szymon Szott solved for me in “The SF Anthology Problem – Solved.” No, my current problem is finding anthologies with a higher percentage of great stories to read.
I and other members of our science fiction short story reading group never can find anthologies where we love all the stories. Of course, that’s asking too much from editors but we still crave 24k carat gold anthologies. Even the Gold Standard of science fiction anthologies, volume one of The Science Fiction Hall of Fame had stories I didn’t enjoy (“The Weapon Shop”) and it was created by polling science fiction writers for their all-time favorite stories.
One of our members, Austin Beeman, has a useful website that reviews science fiction anthologies. He has a nifty infographic that measures the percentage of great/good/average/poor/DNF stories. Here’s his chart for The Hugo Winners: Volume One. Austin considers it has a 94% positive rating, but then that’s for a book of all award-winning stories. Austin tends to be generous by including stories he rates Good in that figure. I wouldn’t.
Most science fiction anthologies never get anywhere near that percentage of good and great stories. Why?
I just finished reading The Great SF Stories 25 (1963) edited by Isaac Asimov and Martin H. Greenberg. Even though I enjoyed most of the stories to varying degrees, I thought only 5 of the 13 were worth my time.
And isn’t time the essential yardstick here? I only have so much time for reading. I only have so many years left in life. And the number of books I want to read will take more time than I have left. From a different time perspective, many of these stories are supposed to be the best of one year, and often the anthologies I read are assumed to be the best of all time.
There is the problem that some stories are extremely time-worthy to some members of our group, while other members complain those same stories were a waste of their time. I’m realistic enough to know that no editor can ever satisfy every reader one hundred percent, but I believe there are stories that a good majority of readers will admire. Is it possible for editors to pick more of them?
I’ve known many people who say they don’t read science fiction magazines because they don’t find enough good stories in each issue. And I think that’s true. Magazines have the lowest hit rate. And now that most of the print magazines are bi-monthly, they are fat with stories, but instead of feeling I’m getting my money’s worth, it just makes me hesitant to start reading because I dread all the disappointing stories.
Many old-timers complain that the print magazines aren’t fairly represented at award time or in the best-of-the-year anthologies, but is that actually true? I tend to only read online stories when someone recommends a story, and that makes me avoid the filler stories. But also, if I was a writer, I think I’d prefer to have my stories online so they were easy to be read. I generally only read stories published online when they are anthologized by best-of-the-year volumes, so that makes me think online publishers have a higher hit rate. I don’t know if that’s true.
Original anthologies often do much better than magazines, probably because they pay more. You can tell their hit rate by how many of their stories get anthologized in the best-of-the-year volumes.
For the annual best-of-the-year volumes, our group has found that the success rate depends on the editor. But I also think size matters. Gardner Dozois’ giant yearly anthologies with over thirty stories often had more hits in them than his competitors with fewer pages. But his percentage of hits was probably lower.
To be honest, some of Dozois’ competitors mixed fantasy with science fiction, and for me, that automatically lowers the hit rate. Could the success rate of an anthology depend on the type of story?
Our group is currently reading the gigantic anthology The Big Book of Science Fiction and it has many stories generally loved, as well as many stories generally disliked. We were considering four other giant 21st century SF anthologies that look back on the 20th century but I doubt we’ll vote to read them as a group. Some of our members have promised to read and review them on their own and let us all know.
Again, I think size is a factor. If these giant retrospective volumes had been smaller, they might have forced their editors to be pickier about what they anthologized. I have many giant science fiction anthologies on my shelves, and I’m becoming leery of reading them. I think somewhat smaller retrospective anthologies like The World Turned Upside Down edited by David Drake, Eric Flint, and Jim Baen, and Masterpieces edited by Orson Scott Card are much more solid with hits. I’m more likely to buy that size anthology in the future.
Theme anthologies are a bit different. I’m more forgiving. I still expect good stories, but I don’t expect great stories simply because I’m reading to be entertained by how an idea is used.
Giant anthologies are great for writers because more stories are preserved and given a chance to find readers. Yet, is such noble efforts fair to readers? Few readers want to be slush pile readers.
That suggests another possibility. I do think too many stories are being published each year, but what if it’s a theme distribution issue? Allan Kaster has switched from general best-of-the-year SF anthologies to best-of-the-year theme volumes. The Year’s Top Hard Science Fiction Stories and The Year’s Top Robot and AI Stories might be the solution. This opens up a whole new avenue for editors, and maybe readers.
I guess what I want is retrospective science fiction anthologies aimed at science fiction fans who came of age in the 1960s who don’t like fantasy and who are somewhat nostalgic for 1950s science fiction. However, I am willing to try new things. Rich Horton gave our group a list of stories he liked best among the two decades of stories he reviewed for Locus Magazine. I’d buy them as an anthology, even though many of them were fantasy stories. I don’t entirely live in the past, or focus exclusively on SF. And I hope our group finds more anthologies that cover contemporary SF/F to read. I just wished they weren’t too big and had mostly great stories.
The reality is no anthology is going to be perfect, except for the editor who assembled it. Subjective tastes vary. But as readers, I think we all love it when we can find an anthology that has a high percentage of stories that wow us. And I assume editors love it when they create an anthology that gets praise for having a lot of great stories. Perfect anthologies are impossible, but I think we all hope to find them.
James Wallace Harris, 1/21/22
Isaac Asimov died on April 6, 1992. The Great SF Stories 25 (1963) was published in July 1992 and was the last volume in the series. On the last page Greenberg let us know:
I had assumed all along that Martin H. Greenberg (who died June 25, 2011) had been doing most of the editorial work for The Great SF Stories series, but felt that hunch confirmed when Isaac Asimov’s introductory comments went missing from volumes 24 and 25. I’ve now read volumes 1-18 and 25. I love this series. I read volume 25 out of order because my short story discussion group voted to group read it after Christmas.
This series has always been unique because Asimov and Greenberg were reevaluating the best stories of the year with many decades of hindsight. Here are the stories they picked as the best of 1963 from 1992:
Back in 1964, Judith Merril picked these stories as her favorites for 1963:
For some reason, Merril included “A Rose for Ecclesiastes” in her 10th Annual in 1965.
In 2022 the Classics of Science Fiction Short Stories list remembers 41 titles from 1963 in its database, but here are the stories that got at least two citations. 1963 wasn’t a remarkable year, especially since it takes eight citations to get on the final list. Meaning, only “A Rose for Ecclesiastes” is really remembered today.
After all these years, “A Rose for Ecclesiastes” is the obvious best SF story for 1963, and the one most remembered. Most science fiction fans discover it today in The Science Fiction Hall of Fame v1. “They Don’t Make Life Like They Use To” is another favorite, but it’s mostly forgotten in 2022, as is “New Folks’ Home.” “No Truce With Kings” won the Hugo for short fiction that year but I just don’t think it holds up or is remembered, even though the ideas within it are interesting. The more remembered Poul Anderson story should be “The Man Who Came Early.” The surprise story is “Turn Off the Sky” by Ray Nelson, however, it will probably only appeal to fans of the Beat writers.
I doubt many of these stories will get reprinted in the future. It’s a shame that The Great SF Stories 1-25 (1939-1963) hasn’t stayed in print. They are becoming collector items and can be a bit expensive to collect. Scans were available on the internet, but they’ve been taken down from the obvious places.
Below are my stories notes for the group discussion:
Story 01 of 13 – “Fortress Ship” by Fred Saberhagen
If Magazine (January 1963)
Retitled for collections as “Without a Thought”
1st story in the Berserker series
In not a very auspicious beginning to the Berserker series, “Fortress Ship” introduces us to the idea of alien intelligent robotic spaceships programmed to destroy all life in the galaxy — a doomsday weapon. This story was interesting because it proposed programming a game of checkers with boxes of colored beads and a set of cards for specific moves. The first computer checker game was in 1952. I wonder if Saberhagen knew about computers? The Berserker series is about AI minds, but I don’t know if that concept was known in 1963.
In “Fortress Ship” a Berserker ship the size of New Jersey is destroyed by three small human spaceships. I haven’t read the series, but I bet Saberhagen made it more difficult in later stories. Berserker minds understand human minds and can use our languages. I’ve read on Wikipedia that other alien species also fight the Berserkers. I’d like to read more in this series.
Rating: ***
Story 02 of 13 – “Not in the Literature” by Christopher Anvil
Analog (March 1963)
Anvil imagines a world where people haven’t discovered electricity but are still trying to orbit a satellite. Not sure if the story takes place on an alternative history Earth or on another planet. But at the beginning of the story, the attack of a wasp-like creature called a drill on Alarik Kade suggested another world to me. On first reading, I thought the drill was some kind of assassin’s drone device. Rereading it makes me think it was only some kind of insect. That means it could be an alternate Earth story I suppose, where a wasp is called a drill.
I found the whole beginning of the story odd. It was a kind of slapstick physical comedy. It doesn’t match the tone in the second part of the story.
I assume Asimov and Greenberg liked this one because of the chemical-engineered world that couldn’t conceive of electricity. And that’s a neat idea. Especially trying to imagine how they could build a rocket with telemetry without electricity. On the other hand, the storytelling was disjointed at best.
Rating: ***+
Story 03 of 13 – “The Totally Rich” – John Brunner
Wor
The setup for “The Totally Rich” reminded me slightly of “Vintage Season” or “Sailing to Byzantium” with Brunner imagining a class of rich people who live undetected by us ordinary folks. It reminded me of those classic stories because of the elite vacationers in time, and the elite far future citizens who party at one recreated city after another, are like the elite rich in this story, who can have nearly anything they want.
Derek Cooper is tricked by Naomi, one of the elusive rich in Brunner’s story. She’s had a whole picturesque village built with actors playing all the citizens just to fool Derek into working for her. That’s the power of her wealth. But she wants something impossible, something her money can’t even buy. She hopes Derek, given enough time and money can invent what she needs.
This is a great setup for a science fiction story. I thought it was going to be at least a 4-star story. But then, Brunner doesn’t satisfy my expectations, leaving me with a 3-star story.
I tend to think it would have taken a full novel to play out the idea Brunner began, and he didn’t want to do that. The quick tragic ending just didn’t work for me.
Rating: ***+
Story 04 of 13 – “No Truce With Kings” – Poul Anderson
F&SF (June 1963) (Hugo Award – Best Short Fiction)
I was really looking forward to reading “No Truce With Kings” after enjoying Anderson’s “The Man Who Came Early” so much a couple weeks ago. Plus, Kings had won a Hugo, even though I find it impossible to believe it beat “A Rose for Ecclesiastes.”
Unfortunately, my expectations were misplaced. “No Truce with Kings” is too long, too muddled, and just too damn political. Did Poul Anderson really believe humans were better off living under feudal societies? Did he really want to downsize the government that much?
I thought “No Truce With Kings” was murky because I never could picture the battles, or even know which side to sympathize with. I wanted to side with the aliens, the nation builders, and even the feudalists.
If anything, this story made me feel humans are too stupid to deserve to survive. It glorifies war in the worst ways.
On the other hand, there’s lots of good writing in this story.
Rating: ***
Story 05 of 13 – “New Folks’ Home” – Clifford D. Simak
Analog (July 1963)
“New Folks’ Home” is a lovely little tale that reminds me of WAY STATION, another Simak story about a human serving as a contact on Earth for an alien interstellar community. I identified with Frederick Gray because I’m seventy. It’s interesting that Simak was only 59 when he wrote this story. I guess it was his fantasy for old age.
Rating: ****+
Story 06 of 13 – “The Faces Outside” – Bruce McAllister
If (July 1963)
Odd story about humans kept in a giant aquarium. As I read it I thought it would be a story that would fit in the VanderMeer anthology. Then I noticed that Merril had included it in her 9th Annual, which reinforces that thought. Not my cuppa tea.
Rating: ***
Story 07 of 13 – “Hot Planet” – Hal Clement
Galaxy (August 1963)
“Hot Planet” by Hal Clement reminded me of “Brightside Crossing” by Alan E. Nourse, another hard SF story about surviving on Mercury. Both stories have been invalidated by time and newer science, but both still present good old fashion science fiction adventure.
What was significant about “Hot Planet” was Clement’s use of women scientists.
Rating: ***+
Story 08 of 13 – “The Pain Peddlers” – Robert Silverberg
Galaxy (August 1963) (2nd story from this issue)
Silverberg’s writing in “The Pain Peddlers” is what I consider great hack writing. He’s obviously mastered the technique of writing short stories for the pulp/digest markets. This isn’t a great story, but it’s very readable and competently entertaining, and a solid addition to the magazine, even a worthy entry for an anthology, but to be honest, not one that will be remembered.
Rating: ***+
Story 09 of 13 – “Turn Off the Sky” – Ray Nelson
F&SF (August 1963)
Wikipedia says Nelson was the guy who invented the propeller beany as a symbol for science fiction fans. It also says he gave LSD to Philip K. Dick. The F&SF intro said he was working on a book about beatniks in Chicago. I’d like to read that.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ray_Nelson_(author)
“Turn Off the Sky” was quite an interesting read, especially if it was written four years before it was published. Mainly for the satire on radicals and beatniks. It appears to be pro-capitalist, but I’m not sure. I thought it funny with its quip about arguing over Marx and Robert Heinlein.
The story was readable and fun, but it was more impressive in its dealing with the 1950s subculture, especially, anticipating a lot of stuff that happened in the 1960s counter-culture. It even has a sitar being played years before George Harrison made it famous.
Rating: ****
Story 10 of 13 – “They Don’t Make Life Like They Used To” by Alfred Bester
F&SF (October 1963)
Linda Nielsen thinks she’s the last person on Earth. Like Ralph Burton, played by Harry Belafonte in the 1959 film THE WORLD, THE FLESH, AND THE DEVIL, Linda is fixing up her apartment by taking whatever she wants from a deserted New York City. I mention this movie because it’s a favorite movie and I pictured it as I read “They Don’t Make Life Like They Use To.” I love the last person on Earth stories. My all-time favorite novel is this type is EARTH ABIDES by George R. Stewart.
However, I’ve always thought it would be neat if the last person on Earth was actually the last person, but in these stories, someone else always shows up. In the movie, it was Sarah Crandall, played by Ingar Stevens. Since Bester describes Linda as Nordic, I wondered if he saw the movie with the Nordic Stevens and decided to just start with a blonde. Also, in the last people on Earth stories, the second person is generally of the opposite sex, so the plot develops sexual tension. In a number of these stories, a third person shows up. Usually, it’s two males fighting over one female. Another movie example of this is THE QUIET EARTH (1985).
Bester brings about an interesting twist in the end that finally convinces Jim Mayo and Linda Nielsen to get it on. This satisfies us readers who have been waiting for that action, but it wraps up the story too quickly, at least for me.
Rating: ****+
However, the ending reminds me of another last Adam and Eve story, “Quietus” by Ross Rocklynne. It’s in THE WORLD TURNED UPSIDE DOWN. Read it here:
http://baencd.freedoors.org/…/The…/0743498747__17.htm
Story 11 of 13 – “Bernie the Faust” – William Tenn
Playboy (November 1963)
“Bernie the Faust” captures a certain time and place in New York City that I’ve only learned about indirectly from plays, movies, and books. It reminds me of stories about Seventh Avenue such as I CAN GET IT FOR YOU WHOLESALE, and makes me wonder if Willian Tenn was intentionally trying to create Jewish humor science fiction?
“Bernie the Faust” has a kind of funniness that needs to be acted out in a play or episode of the old TWILIGHT ZONE, or at least heard in an audiobook.
Rating: ***+
My favorite book by Tenn is OF MEN AND MONSTERS, which isn’t humorous. It’s a wonderful adventure tale that if you haven’t read, please don’t read about, not even the blurbs on the book cover. Everyone gives too much away.
Story 12 of 13 – “A Rose for Ecclesiastes” – Roger Zelazny
F&SF (November 1963)
I’ve forgotten how many times I’ve read “A Rose for Ecclesiastes” over the past fifty years. I wish I could find the words to explain how much I admire this tale. This time as I read the story, I was noticing how effective Zelazny was using short and medium-length sentences to convey information but imply a great deal more. My own prose is too verbose. Zelazny isn’t Shakespeare, or even particularly literary, but he moves the story along without wasting words.
Rating: *****
Story 13 of 13 – “If There Were No Benny Cemoli” – Philip K. Dick
Galaxy (December 1963)
As I read this story, I marveled that Philip K. Dick even imagined this story. What a creative mind. Earth has been through an atomic war. Human colonists from Mars have returned to rebuild civilization, but their work is interrupted by another faction of human colonists from Proxima Centauri returning to Earth to rebuild civilization. There is political strife between the two groups. A neat invention in this story is a kind of AI that produces The New York Times. It seems to know everything going on in the world and influences the rebuilding of civilization.
Rating: ****+
James Wallace Harris, 1/20/22
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J.G. Ballard – Jumbled Thoughts of a Fake Geek Boy
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Jumbled Thoughts of a Fake Geek Boy
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Here it is – the end of my survey of J.G. Ballard’s short stories, with his The Complete Short Stories as my source text but each of these articles focusing on one of the individual UK short story collections the tales were derived from. This time around I’ll cover his final pre-Complete Stories collection, War Fever, and three 1992 stories which went unanthologised until they were assembled in The Complete Short Stories.
Turning to 1989’s War Fever first, the title story posits a near future where war, like smallpox, has been largely eradicated – but a small sample is allowed to survive (in this case, in a rebuilt version of Beirut) for the purposes of study and examination of mutations. It’s a rather glib and simplistic concept; though it’s inspired by 1980s headlines, in execution it feels more like a second-tier dystopia from Ballard’s early era.
This is followed up with The Secret History of World War 3, Ballard’s parting shot at Ronald Reagan written to mark the end of Reagan’s second term in office. It presents an account of a hypothetical third term for Reagan – the necessary Constitutional tweaks having been rammed through after his successor (unnamed, presumably because the 1988 election hadn’t been called when Ballard was writing) proved to be less-than-inspirational. This an era in which news reportage on the President’s health ends up displacing stories of far greater importance – such as the brief outbreak of World War 3, swiftly nixed.
In predicting that Reagan would have succumbed to a form of dementia almost entirely soon after leaving office, Ballard might simply be being cheeky about Reagan’s public image – in retrospect, it seems like the signs were evident, though how much of Reagan’s public failures of recollection were sincere and how many were a bid to evade scrutiny over the Iran-Contra affair is an open question. Nonetheless, this last twisting of the knife is wild to read knowing what we know now, especially given Ballard’s long-standing hostility towards Reagan as enunciated in The Atrocity Exhibition.
What feels particularly prophetic here – though, again, this is likely extrapolating from trends already extant during Reagan’s presidency – was how the then-new medium of 24/7 news would rapidly become consumed by irrelevancy, and in the depiction of a gerontocracy in the United States as stagnant and moribund as that in the late Soviet Union or China in the time Ballard was writing.
(The story unfortunately includes a crack about radical Islamism and feminism finding common cause; this is an ugly take, and whilst I suspect it’s specifically a jab at some of the more sex-negative expressions of second wave feminism the lack of specificity is still galling.)
Continue reading “Ballard’s Short Story Ceasefire” →
Myths of the Near Future is the first of J.G. Ballard’s two major late-career short story collections. In terms of the chronology of when the stories emerged, the anthology spans 1976-1982 – a narrower span of years than any Ballard collection since The Terminal Beach – and so covers much of Ballard’s late flowering of short story output from this period. From 1984 onwards, his short story output would be more sporadic, but as in Low-Flying Aircraft we find Ballard here using his well-matured talents to provide both somewhat more refined takes on earlier ideas and toying with a few new ones.
The title story is a phantasmagoric blend of a massive number of distinctive Ballard themes and images from across his entire career, combined together in a single narrative that reaches a Messianic culmination. Light aircraft… abandoned beachside resorts occupied by transients and hangers on… a long-decommissioned Cape Kennedy… the failure of the Space Age… empty swimming pools… people on the verge of turning into birds… new life forms emerging in a zone where the future is just a little closer than elsewhere… jeweled animals… obsessive blends of pornography and geometry… strange ritualistic behaviour… a world winding down into slow disaster, or perhaps preparing for a massive evolutionary leap… accreted time… a man chasing his wife, who may be dead… a renegade neurosurgeon… a strange sort of time-sickness which may be a transformation of how we see perceive the universe itself…
All these Ballard ideas and more besides crop up in the story, making it a sort of Platonic ideal of his writing and the keystone through which everything fits together. Look through it in this direction and you can see The Crystal World; rotate it a little, like a multifaceted gemstone, and you might see glimpses of The Cage of Sand, The Atrocity Exhibition, The Dead Astronaut, Low-Flying Aircraft, The Voices of Time, Storm-Bird, Storm Dreamer, and more besides.
What’s startling is just how well all these ideas blend together; it’s like this is the story which Ballard has been working towards, and he needed to master all the individual ideas in it before he could bring them all together in one bizarre vision. Whereas one of Ballard’s earliest stories, Passport To Eternity, fell down because it was trying to do too many things at once and Ballard was still honing his skills, here Ballard is able to throw in even more at once and make it all work beautifully.
Continue reading “Ballard’s Millennial Legends” →
Among the clutch of J.G. Ballard collections that came out in the 1960s, there was a set I’ve not covered yet called The Overloaded Man. After the publication of the Vermilion Sands collection, later revisions of The 4-Dimensional Nightmare/The Voices of Time would drop the stories Studio 5, The Stars and Prima Belladonna so as to keep the Vermilion Sands stories exclusive to their own collection, and substitute in Thirteen To Centaurus and The Overloaded Man (the story) from The Overloaded Man (the collection).
This left the remaining stories from The Overloaded Man rather orphaned; eventually, the collection was revised and reissued in 1980 under the title of The Venus Hunters (after all, The Overloaded Man was no longer in the collection) with three otherwise-uncollected stories tacked on to fill the gap.
The resulting collection is therefore a bit of a weird grab-bag. On one level, it’s the most wide-ranging of Ballard’s main UK anthologies (other than The Complete Short Stories, of course), since the stories in it span from 1956 to 1976. On the other hand, the distribution in that timespan is far from even. You have the seven stories orphaned from The Overloaded Man, which span from 1956 to 1963 but err towards the earlier part of that (there’s more 1950s stories here than in any of the other Ballard collections I’ve covered), and then the added-in stories come from 1969, 1976, and 1978.
The overall impression, looking at the collection from this perspective is of a grab-bag of stories which didn’t quite make the cut for any other collection – including sets like The Terminal Beach or The Day of Forever, which I already felt were a tier below other collections published at around the same time of them. Is that fair, or are there overlooked treasures here?
Continue reading “Scavenging For Deep Space Scraps” →
Collecting stories spanning from 1966 to 1976, Low-Flying Aircraft is a J.G. Ballard collection which represents a significant step forward from the various short stories collections I’ve covered so far as I’ve been working my way through his Complete Short Stories.
The collections I’ve covered so far – The Voices of Time, The Terminal Beach, The Disaster Area, The Day of Forever, and Vermilion Sands – have all essentially centred on Ballard’s work from the 1950s to the mid-1960s. (Vermilion Sands includes some stories set after this, but rooted sufficiently in the approach of the earlier tales in the collection to feel like all the segments are in the same general style.) Likewise The Atrocity Exhibition, if you take it as a short story selection rather than a novel, is more the product of an intense burst of experimental writing on Ballard’s part spanning 1966-1969, and each of the experiments were so thematically tied to each other that the tales there constitute its own little anomaly.
The end of the 1960s, however, saw Ballard’s short fiction output tailing off. After he broke into the market in the 1950s, the 1960s was really the main flowering of his short story writing; even if you set aside the components of The Atrocity Exhibition, comfortably over half his short story output took place then, with the bulk of it from 1960-1966 or so. Following The Atrocity Exhibition, Ballard’s short story output tailed off as he placed a greater focus on his novels, with Crash, Concrete Island, and High-Rise finding him shift his novel-writing in a direction which shifted away from both the different flavours of post-apocalyptic fiction he explored in The Wind From Nowhere, The Drowned World, The Burning World, and The Crystal World, whilst stepping back from the high-experimentation approach of The Atrocity Exhibition.
As a result, despite containing stories separated by a decade or so, Low-Flying Aircraft actually contains all of Ballard’s short story output of 1970 to 1974 and (again, if you don’t account the components of The Atrocity Exhibition as short stories) the majority of his output from 1968 to 1975. This means that as well as catching some of the last fruits of Ballard’s major run of short stories ending in the late 1960s, Low-Flying Aircraft also captures the start of the burst of new short stories he produced from 1976 to the early 1980s which would be the focus of collections like Myths of the Near Future.
Continue reading “Ballard Glides Into the 1970s” →
Though I’ve been looking over J.G. Ballard’s short stories as collected in The Complete Short Stories of late, I’m switching tracks here to tackle The Atrocity Exhibition, since I think I’ve now hit an appropriate point to consider that and, according to some schools of thought, it’s a collection of short stories instead of a novel, since each individual chapter of it was published separately somewhere in 1966-1969 before it was all brought together in the book.
On rereading it, I don’t agree. Although each chapter can be taken as its own self-contained thing, the mosaic Ballard creates when putting them together like this reveals a kind of narrative arc spanning the entire book, from its opening chapter (The Atrocity Exhibition) to its conclusion, The Assassination of John Fitzgerald Kennedy Considered As a Downhill Motor Race, which had been originally devised by Ballard as his contribution to Dangerous Visions before an interfering publisher decided to reject the story before it even reached Harlan Ellison for consideration.
This was not the only censorious response to the book’s contents. In the UK, a booklet publication of the penultimate chapter/story, Why I Want To Fuck Ronald Reagan, was one of the subjects of obscenity charges brought against the Unicorn Bookshop in Brighton; Ballard was in the end not called as a witness by the defence because in an interview with the defence attorneys he stated that yes, obviously the story was obscene, the whole point of it was to present a grotesque obscenity as a means of taking a stab at then-Governor Reagan and the far-right tone of his policies at the time. (In Ballard’s assessment, Reagan toned things down a notch by the time he was President, but that’s perhaps more a measure of how extreme Reagan was in the late 1960s than how mellow he was in the 1980s.)
Its original US publication by Doubleday had the entire print run pulped when Nelson Doubleday Jr. decided that there was too much risk of legal action taken by the real-life celebrities named in the book. Doubleday’s worries are interesting here because the book doesn’t actually depict any of those celebrities doing anything which they have not been demonstrably shown to do – it merely depicts a very, very strange way of looking at and interpreting those people – and so it feels like a defamation action would have struggled, but such was the offense that publishers feared would be caused by the book.
Grove Press would issue the book in 1972 under the alternate title of Love and Napalm: Export USA; though this was one of the chapter titles in the book, Ballard objected to using it as the name of the entire novel because he thought it implied that the whole thing was exclusively an anti-American polemic, when in fact he thought that the sort of mass media assault on the public psyche the book obsesses about was as present in Britain as it was in America, and had probably been taken further and become more sophisticated.
Continue reading “Ballard’s Obscene Display” →
I’ve been looking forward to this one. Over the course of my coverage of Ballard’s short stories – working through his Collected Short Stories based on the contents of individual short story collections (so far: The Voices of Time, The Terminal Beach, The Disaster Area, The Day of Forever), I’ve hit the point where I have now covered the majority of his short stories of his first decade or so as a writer, from 1956 to 1966. (A few odds and sods remain, but they’ll end up covered when I tackle The Venus Hunters.)
There is, however, a really major exception, and it’s not any of the component stories which went into The Atrocity Exhibition (written 1966-1969, and arguably a novel originally issued as a scattered cloud of short stories before Ballard drew them all together to reveal the hideous pattern lurking underneath). So far, I have not covered any of Ballard’s stories about the strange artistic enclave of Vermilion Sands. This means so that I’ve not talked about an entire dimension of Ballard’s early writing which was extraordinarily important – there’s a particular atmosphere to the Vermilion Sands stories that is unique to them and which, at least at this phase of his career, he largely restricted to them, and so isn’t really reflected in his larger body of work from the era.
The reason I’ve not looked at them yet is that they live in their own collection, Vermilion Sands, originally emerging in a slightly truncated US version in 1971 before Jonathan Cape put out the full version in the UK in 1973. It was subsequent to this that his early UK collection The 4-Dimensional Nightmare – later retitled the much more appropriate The Voices of Time – was revised to remove the two Vermilion Sands stories from it and insert two other tales, and for good reason: Vermilion Sands is something special, and the stories gain something from being read together.
Continue reading “J.G. Ballard’s Ultimate Resort” →
I’m back on my J.G. Ballard nonsense. This time, I’m going to cover (most of) the stories in his collection The Day of Forever, released near-simultaneously with The Disaster Area, as well as his contribution to Dangerous Visions.
The title story depicts a quintessentially Ballardian apocalypse: the Earth’s rotation has ceased (or rather, come to a near-standstill), and a small number of survivors rattle around in the depopulated world that remains, sticking to the slowly drifting habitable strip of dusk and dawn. Where North Africa is in dusk, the protagonist finds himself drawn by dreams into a strange revenge plan. What does it all mean? I haven’t the foggiest – but it has this distinctive nightmare quality to it (particularly with the grim turn things take at the end) which feels like something drawn out of dream, and which one has perhaps dreamed too. Perhaps this is the intention – the Surrealists were big on dreams, and Delvaux’s The Echo is specifically cited in the story as a specific image haunting the protagonist’s dreams.
The brief Prisoner of the Coral Deep was included in The Starry Wisdom anthology, and though it is not specifically a Cthulhu Mythos story I can see the logic there since it’s a dreamlike horror-fantasy piece about a mysterious encounter with a mysterious woman on a mysterious coastline, and emphasises the ocean as a link to primal, ancient times. We’ve seen a bunch of those themes in the Ballad readthrough so far – think The Gioconda of the Twilight Noon and Now Wakes the Sea in particular, which this might be read as forming a triptych with.
Tomorrow Is a Million Years feels like Ballard riffing on Moorcock; the hallucinatory imagery as a result of the “timewinds” experienced on a distant planet feels like an intrusion of Moorcockian fantasy, whilst the central guilt trip that has resulted in the main character’s extraterrestrial isolation kind of put me in mind of The Black Corridor. The story is comparatively heavy-handed by Ballard’s standards – as is The Man On the 99th Floor, which is basically a hypnosis story with a rather obvious twist, and feels less interesting than some of Ballard’s more subtle psychological explorations, and The Gentle Assassin, a time travel story which, though competently executed, is based on such an over-used concept that it ends up feeling rather obvious.
A somewhat more involved hypnosis story is The Sudden Afternoon, in which a man having a lazy day at home finds his mind invaded by someone else’s memories – specifically, the memories of a murderer using hypnotic power to hijack his life. Unfortunately the hypnotist in question is Indian, his Indian-ness is fairly heavily emphasised as being exotic and unusual and a little threatening by the text, and his powers are described as arising from yogic practices. As a result, it ends up essentially offering a story which could have come out of the Victorian period in terms of the values expressed.
The Waiting Grounds, meanwhile, feels like a dry run of The Voices of Time – set in space rather than Earth, being as it is a fairly early Ballard work written before he seems to have settled on dilapidated areas of Earth as a better venue for his work. Much as with that story it culminates in a meditation on the long-term meaning or meaninglessness of existence, but it takes a more hopeful, Olaf Stapledon-tinged view of things.
The Last World of Mr. Goddard, a fantasy which presents a protagonist who exercises a strange sort of supervision over his little world and is increasingly resented for it, feels like one of Ballard’s many exercises in highlighting the artificiality of British society as it existed at the time. Having had his comfortable colonial childhood entirely upended by World War II, Ballard took an interest going forwards in the idea of polite society as an artificial veneer which can go away at any time, and this plugs directly into that concept.
The Insane Ones depicts a future dystopia in which psychiatry and mental health assistance is banned outright – ostensibly in the name of “mental freedom”, but in practice as a means of furthering an authoritarian crackdown. The concerns seem plausible, but the story could be read as a slam on the concept of “neurodiversity” and the like; it is perhaps best to regard it as a pushback of the tendency in science fiction (including some of Ballard’s own work) to have excessive psychologically-driven intrusion and control being a regular theme, and a warning against the excesses of the anti-psychiatry movement of the time (from the fringes of which emerged Dianetics and Scientology). Yes, mid-20th Century psychiatry made some bad mistakes – the excessive use of lobotomy being a particularly gruesome case in point – but Ballard recognises that an excessive backlash risks creating a world where people are outright refused the help they are crying out for.
The last story in the collection is The Assassination of John Fitzgerald Kennedy Considered As a Downhill Motor Race, but this was later integrated into The Atrocity Exhibition so I think it is better covered in relation to that. In its place, I may as well take this chance to look at Ballard’s 1967 story The Recognition, which was his contribution to Dangerous Visions. (In fact, The Assassination… was Ballard’s original submission to Dangerous Visions, but was rejected; Ellison claims that the publishers didn’t even forward the story to him but decided to punt it back to Ballard immediately.) This sets up an almost Thomas Ligotti-esque atmosphere in its creepy story of a decrepit little animal exhibit setting itself up on the fringe of a more typical funfair, but somewhat blows it by being somewhat too coy in the very end; that coyness may be the point, but it’s still somewhat deflating and anticlimatic in execution, especially if you’ve already sussed out where the story is going.
It’s notable that The Disaster Area came out via Jonathan Cape, The Day of Forever via Panther; Jonathan Cape was a bit more upmarket at the time, Panther less so, and I think this had an influence on the selection of material; the stories here seem to veer more towards more traditional genre stuff rather than the more literary SF style of many of the tales in The Disaster Area. As such, it does feel like The Day of Forever consists of Ballard throwing Panther the scraps left behind after Jonathan Cape got the meat; it’s alright as far as 1960s science fiction and fantasy material goes, but it’s not peak Ballard.
After harkening to The Voices of Time and lounging on The Terminal Beach, I’m moving on to the next port of call in my journey through J.G. Ballard’s short stories. The Disaster Area is one of two Ballard anthologies which came out in rapid succession in 1967, the other one being The Day of Forever; I’ll tackle this one first since, collecting stories that emerged from 1957-1966, its chronological centre of gravity is slightly earlier than The Day of Forever‘s.
The collection leads off with Storm-Bird, Storm-Dreamer, one of the 1966 pieces. By this point, Ballard had honed his particular style of psychological science fiction to the level where he could meaningfully parody it, as I kind of think he does here. On the coast of Norfolk a volunteer militiaman is assigned to a picket boat to keep watch for giant birds – mutants resulting from an agrichemical accident a la H.G. Wells’ The Food of the Gods. He observes a woman in the bird-blighted wasteland acting strangely; he comes up with a typically Ballardian armchair psychology diagnosis of what’s going on with her, tries to play along, and comes to bad end because her actual obsession is not what he expected.
As well as a warning to readers not to jump the gun when diagnosing Ballard’s characters, this also strikes me as an acknowledgement that stories of his based around the observation of the psychological quirks and fixations of characters are inevitably also an exploration of the psychology of the characters observing and reacting to these quirks, and of Ballard himself.
The first 1957 here is The Concentration City, sometimes published as Build-Up, in which a man who lives in a hyper-populated city of the far future goes on an expedition to attempt to find the edge of it; internal evidence suggests that the area is, in fact, significantly larger than the Earth itself, and some sort of warping of space and time occurs if you attempt to travel far enough.
What seemed at first to be a fairly generic “overpopulation of Earth” story (like Billennium from The Terminal Beach) dissolves to reveal a much stranger enigma, which the central character has no way to meaningfully interrogate and so the story stops at that point, Ballard early on in his career finding a place where science fictional speculation and fantastic allegory end up bleeding into each other and settling down there to make it his own.
The Subliminal Man, likewise, at first looks like it is going to be a simplistic “advertising bad” story, but is able to move beyond this by putting the subliminal adverts that are its subject in the midst of a much broader depiction of consumerism and capitalism run wild, a future where the subliminal ads have become necessary because the capacity of innovation to drive economic growth has reached its limit and the economic system can’t cope with a slowdown; here, the use of such tactics is characteristic of a system desperately trying a last-ditch attempt to keep itself upright before it becomes terminally disrupted.
Any parallels to today’s social media data-harvesting and targeted advertising are coincidental, but flattering to Ballard’s reputation as a prognosticator; whilst science fiction isn’t really about predicting the future, Ballard’s worlds often seem like places where we could plausibly end up, which is why the consumerism of the 1960s he was skewering here feels so much like the consumerism of the 2020s (since the root causes have not changed). Moreover, in its depiction of the media landscape invading both the exterior landscape of the city and the interior landscape of people’s minds, it’s another stop on the route to The Atrocity Exhibition.
Now Wakes the Sea is almost horror; a man dreams of the ocean which once existed where his home currently is, and finds himself translated through time. It feels like another take on a similar concept to The Gioconda of the Twilight Noon from The Terminal Beach – right down to the visions of a mysterious coastline with a mysterious woman on it. Another fantasy-horror story is Mr F. is Mr F., in which a man discovers that he is suffering a kind of sudden onset Benjamin Button syndrome and aging in reverse under the influence his wife, who is intent on infantilising him. This feels like the sort of writing men like Ballard or Dick did about emasculating women who were out to infantilise their husbands, when in my experience the last thing women want is to feel like they’ve taken the place of their husband’s mother when it comes to housework/feeding/etc.
Other psychological stories with a more science fictional bent include Zone of Terror, in which a man’s displaced sense of self manifests as actual visions of himself as he was a few minutes ago, and Manhole 69 (hurr), which is probably most interesting as a precursor to that “sleep deprivation experiment” creepypasta, and The Impossible Man, which expresses reservations about the rise of transplant surgery which look a bit implausible in the wake of decades of experience. All three of these feel like they are let down by a little too much armchair psychology and an over-reliance on concepts the field has moved beyond since.
On the other hand, Minus One‘s psychological message is a bit more timeless, since it’s as much a spoof on psychological theorising as it is an exercise in doing so oneself: faced with the potentially disastrous escape of a patient, the staff of a mental hospital persuade themselves that the patient never existed, adopting avoidant behaviour on an institutional level.
By and large, The Disaster Area is a less patchy collection than The Terminal Beach, and is at least on the level of The Voices of Time when it comes to anthologies of Ballard’s early work.
J.G. Ballard was a good buddy of Michael Moorcock and a regular contributor to New Worlds even before Moorcock took over the editorship of that organ, and as such his early writing career established him as a cornerstone of British New Wave science fiction. Between Moorcock’s childhood in a bombed-out London and Ballard’s stint in a Japanese prison camp, both men’s lives saw them emerging from the traumas of the Second World War to confront the future with, perhaps, a little more caution than the more gung-ho visions of most American SF authors of their generation.
J.G. Ballard’s novels have ranged from straight-ahead postapocalyptic fiction to William Burroughs-esque fever dreams to bizarre explorations of imaginary fetishes to satirical takedowns of modern excess, but in his early career his short stories were as important as his novels, so I’ve decided to start an exploration of his short fiction. Fortunately for me, the vast majority of it is collected in his Complete Short Stories, which I am the happy owner of a 2001 edition of.
Despite the title it is not quite complete – it skips over his “surgical fictions” which just consisted of surgical reports with celebrity’s names substituted in for the names of the patients, some juvenilia, a couple of brief and not particularly notable pieces penned after The Complete Short Fiction was published, pieces later expanded into full novels, and Journey Across a Crater, an attempt to address the ideas of Crash in the “condensed novel” style Ballard infamously used in The Atrocity Exhibition which Ballard later declared didn’t really work. I don’t think we lose anything if we skip those, however. I am also going to skip over the stories which later became integral parts of The Atrocity Exhibition, since whether that is a novel or a collection of connected stories is a debate in its own right which I’ll address if and when I get around to reviewing it. (Indeed, it’s notable that only two of them appear in the Complete Short Stories).
I am also going to apply a bit of structure to the review process. Rather than trying to consume the entire Complete Short Stories at once, I am going to address it by covering the subsets of the stories in question that appear in each of Ballard’s major UK anthologies of his work. Happily, the final versions of these anthologies (some of them had stories removed and added and titles tweaks over their publication history) yield a collection of Ballard’s stories in which no stories are redundantly covered in two anthologies at once, so by taking each of those anthologies in turn I should cover the vast majority of the collection, and also each article will be a more or less complete review of the smaller anthology in question, which may benefit those of you who don’t want to dive in with the whole Complete Short Stories but would prefer to have thoughts on smaller, more digestible delivery mechanisms for Ballard fiction. I will save for the end of this series a consideration of the tales in the Complete Short Stories which hadn’t previously been collected in a Ballard anthology – three brief 1992 pieces plus The Recognition, his contribution to Dangerous Visions.
The Voices of Time is a Ballard anthology with a complicated publishing history. A collection called The Voices of Time was released in the US in 1962 as the first anthology of Ballard’s works to be published; the contents of that collection overlap with this one but are not the same. The UK version of The Voices of Time was Ballard’s first UK collection, and was released in 1963 under the title of The 4-Dimensional Nightmare.
A 1974 edition revised the collection, removing two stories – Prima Belladonna and Studio 5, the Stars – belonging to the Vermilion Sands setting, since those stories were being anthologised in a single book (called, unsurprisingly, Vermilion Sands), and substituting in two other stories, The Overloaded Man and Thirteen to Centaurus. All subsequent releases of the collection have used this revised set of contents, and from 1984 onwards have used the title The Voices of Time, since The 4-Dimensional Nightmare probably sounds a bit more pulpy and sensational than Ballard’s writing actually is.
Continue reading “Echoes From the Aeons” →
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"Semiotext(e) SF" edited by Rudy Rucker and others (Book Review)
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https://ifearthosebigwords.wordpress.com/2016/06/15/on-the-road-with-don-delillo/
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On the Road with Don DeLillo
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I think Don DeLillo is a pretty cool guy. He writes stuff that some might consider pretty wanky; achingly postmodern stuff about the emptiness at the heart of modern capitalist living and an anxiety about death that stops you living meaningfully. I love this kind of stuff, and when I was young and trawling through…
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en
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James Farson
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https://ifearthosebigwords.wordpress.com/2016/06/15/on-the-road-with-don-delillo/
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I think Don DeLillo is a pretty cool guy. He writes stuff that some might consider pretty wanky; achingly postmodern stuff about the emptiness at the heart of modern capitalist living and an anxiety about death that stops you living meaningfully. I love this kind of stuff, and when I was young and trawling through Wikipedia filling my head with a list of Old White Dudes that sounded like they had similar concerns and anxieties to me (a Young White Dude), DeLillo was near the top of the list. I hated being a Young White Dude a lot. I often felt the kind of pain only people who grew up (mostly, in my case) securely and safely can feel, a pain about pretty much nothing and then, also, everything. See what I mean about wanky? I read White Noise about the same time I read Camus’ The Stranger and I was deeply effected/affected and was miserable for quite a while. That I found the first fifty or so pages of Americana dreadfully boring probably says more about my growth than it does about the novel’s quality. I ended up coming back though. I wish I’d spent more time with Conan Doyle than Camus when I was younger.
Mostly I thought Americana was a really boring version of American Psycho. For the first few chapters it was the same kind of narcissistic assholes sexually harassing their secretaries and listing brand names and feeling *very* despondent about their incredibly easy, well-paying jobs. There was none of the interest of the Pure Evil lurking below, though. Maybe I want more human novels, now? In all likelihood I didn’t get the joke, being a working class person who lives in East Anglia. That I realised this means I probably have grown up. A bit.
I put the book down for a few months. I wrote a bit about it here. I went back to Americana because I don’t like leaving books unfinished (he says, about 20 to 30 pages in to twenty or so different books). I wasn’t exactly gripped, but I wasn’t repulsed, and that was enough to keep me reading pretty much straight through until I finished it. Yep, it certainly was a book about the emptiness of modern life and the need to strike out in some unconventional way and create your own meaning. Once David Bell’s family came in to it there was a bit more to hang on to. His parents, at least, faced problems that were actually problems, and DeLillo does a neat little job of telling a family drama in weirdly framed flashbacks and monologues. The jokes get funnier. The one about the zippo surviving the Bataan death march was particularly funny. He also writes the truest representation of being a young boy and feeling the gaping emptiness at the heart of a summer evening I have ever read. There is some truly impassioned writing, if you can slog through the fifty or so pages that really don’t do much, but I guess were necessary all the same.
As David Bell gets in to his road trip and the novel descends in to weirdness, the book I thought of was On the Road. Americana exposes the vacuousness of that book, or at least the solutions it offers. This is what On the Road *really* is, drinking and drugging oneself in the heart of the American weirdness, beatific visions exposed as art that is representational because it is incomprehensible. DeLillo attacks the kind of consumerism that On the Road promotes even as it disparages it. There is a reason Burroughs said that On the Road sold Levi’s and espresso machines. I love the beats, but they were full of it, and DeLillo roundly calls them on it here.
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https://crimereads.com/wild-in-the-streets/
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Rock & Roll Apocalypse: 'Wild in the Streets'
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2022-10-14T09:09:52+00:00
|
As a boy growing-up in the 1960s and ‘70s, my idea of science fiction usually revolved around alien invaders, fire breathing monsters destroying major cities or friendly Earth men exploring the gal…
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en
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CrimeReads
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https://crimereads.com/wild-in-the-streets/
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As a boy growing-up in the 1960s and ‘70s, my idea of science fiction usually revolved around alien invaders, fire breathing monsters destroying major cities or friendly Earth men exploring the galaxy before losing contact with home and crash-landing on some strange planet. My imagination was fueled by doses of DC comics, reruns of Flash Gordon/Buck Rogers serials on PBS and Godzilla Week on the 4:30 Movie. While I was an avid reader, my sci-fi/fantasy foundation was the many TV programs and films I devoured years before discovering the fictions of Robert A. Heinlein or Ray Bradbury.
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It was during one of my Saturday night movie marathons that I first saw the politically charged sci-fi satire Wild in the Streets (1968), a flick about a bugged-out alternative America guided by an insane pop star named Max Frost, his band mates The Troops and the millions of fans. Twenty-two-year-old Max despised anyone over 30, and throughout the film worked hard to get rid of mature adults who were “stiff with age.” Played with crazed charisma by method actor Christopher Jones, a southern mumbler who critics compared to James Dean, Max Frost began his mission by partnering with a youngish (thirty-seven years old) congressman who helped him by getting the voting age lowered to fourteen.
With the impressionable youth of the country already in Frost’s fat pockets (it’s established from the beginning that he’s a multi-millionaire who first made loot making and selling acid), he soon went power mad and preached that American kids “never trust anyone over 30.” Though Frost had zero experience as politician, his wealth and fame made him believable to the masses.
Using the powerful medium of television that had become a political tool a few years before when pretty boy John F. Kennedy debated ugly Richard Nixon in 1960, Frost’s message was basically “the younger, the better,” reasoning that older elected officials had lost touch with the real needs of the country. Without irony he declared, “I have nothing against our current President…that’s like running against my own grandfather. I mean, what do you ask a 60-year-old man? You ask him if he wants his wheelchair FACING the sun, or facing AWAY from the sun. But running the country? FORGET IT, babies!”
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Later, he and the Troops spiked the water supply with LSD, held mass demonstrations on Sunset Boulevard, and encouraged his followers to storm the White House. Police fired on civilians, which created martyrs for Max’s corrupt cause. He’s helped by his acid head girlfriend Sally LeRoy (Diane Varsi), who believes Frost’s far-out philosophies. “America’s greatest contribution has been to teach the world that getting old is such a drag,” she says. “Youth is America’s secret weapon.”
At twenty-four she was elected to congress, worked to amend the laws of the land and paved the way for Frost to become president. Eventually, Max, who gave a few passionate speeches, but spent most of his time lounging in his mansion, became the youngest president ever elected.
Released in 1968, Wild in the Streets was directed by the underrated Barry Shear, who four years later made the neo-noir classic Across 110th Street. Wild didn’t take place in the past or future, but in crazed present day of the election year of 1968, mere months after the so-called “Summer of Love.” That same year America dealt with Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy’s assassinations, civil unrest in major cities, Nixon winning the Presidential election and a raging war in Vietnam that drove many young men mad and sent them home damaged.
“When I saw this movie, it changed my societal perspective completely,” recalled writer Bonz Malone. “Wild in the Streets is one of a kind. It’s even out of its own mind, but in a very smart way.”
A few years after its initial release, Wild in the Streets was shown on the ABC Saturday night movie which aired weekly at 11:30 pm. As a ten year old lying on the Banana Splits bed sheets staring at a black and white television set, I was completely fascinated by the film as I watched a once nice little boy (played with sweet innocence by pre-Brady Bunch Barry Williams) whose last name was Flatow, grew into a teen terror drug dealer, ran away from a shrill mother (played with annoying pizzazz by Shelly Winters) and a passive poppa who had no control over his family, changed his last name to Frost and became a pop star (he bought his first guitar from selling acid) before taking over the country.
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Co-star Hal Holbrook played Congressman Johnny Fergus, who is running for the Senate with a campaign based on the promise of giving the vote to 18-year-olds. It was after inviting Frost to perform at a rally that the rock star decided to try politics. His lust for power, that included lowering the voting age to 14, opened the door for Frost’s ageist extremism that led to putting people over thirty-five into concentration camps and dosing them daily with LSD.
From the beginning, the real enemy was age; there was no such concept as “too young.” As Max proudly stated, “I don’t want to live to be 30…30 is death, baby.”
***
Actor Christopher Jones, who played the wealthy pop president, was born into poverty in 1941. A native of Jackson, Tennessee he’d had his share of hard times since childhood. His mother was institutionalized when Jones was a boy, and he spent time living at Boy’s Town with his younger brother. He ran away and enlisted in the Army when he was 16, went A.W.O.L. days later and soon fell in with an artsy crowd that guided him towards New York City and acting.
World Cinema Paradise contributor Peter Winkler wrote a brilliant essay on Jones in 2014 and cited a Quentin Tarantino interview from a 1999 episode of E! True Hollywood Story where the director said, “He (Jones) had excitement. He was a movie star. He looked like James Dean, but Chris Jones didn’t take himself seriously like James Dean. He had the same exact sensuality and appeal as Jim Morrison. He was a big comer at that point, as big as anybody!” The actor as Max Frost channeled a charming, yet disturbing persona that became scarier as the film progressed.
During my first viewing, the only actor I recognized was the boyish Richard Pryor in his first film role playing Stanley X. Despite the militant name and credentials (twenty-one, Black Muslim, anthropologist, drummer, author of Aborigine Cookbook), Stanley was just another cog in machine of Frost’s fame factory that led to eventual takeover of the country. For a Black Muslim, he doesn’t talk much, and, one of the few times he does, he encourages Frost to become a Republican and run on their ticket. No self-respecting Black Power rebel would’ve done that, which made me think Stanley X might’ve been a former Jack and Jill kid from the Midwest.
Late comedian Paul Mooney, who was Pryor’s best friend (he also wrote material with and for him) and hung out with him on set, claimed the comic got the role with help from Shelly Winters. In Mooney’s autobiography Black is the New White (2009) he wrote that Winters was allegedly, “one of the most cock hungry actresses in Hollywood… Richard is happy to pay the price of admission…they get wild in the sheets.” Co-star Larry Bishop (The Hook) told an interviewer that Pryor once appeared on set naked and freaked Winters out. Pryor also met his second wife Shelley R. Bonus, who was an extra in the movie.
Winters was also a friend of Christopher Jones’ and helped him with his career. Their closeness began with their association with the famed Actors Studio, where they both studied. Winters also, against her better judgment, introduced Jones to his first wife Susan Strasberg, daughter of their famed acting coach Lee Strasberg. She was also an actress and they were married for three years (1965–1968); their daughter Jennifer Robin was born in 1966.
Although Winters won an Oscar three years before, Wild in the Streets was the beginning of her long relationship with B-movie makers American International Pictures (AIP). The B-movie studio specialized in grindhouse/drive-in beach party, horror, science fiction and teen-exploitation flicks. Wild in the Streets fit in nicely beside their other crazed youth movies including The Wild Angels and Riot on Sunset Strip. Her later films with the company included Bloody Mama, Who Slew Auntie Roo and Cleopatra Jones.
In Wild, she played Daphne Flatow, the worst mother and wife on the planet. Though the character never wanted a baby and scolded Max often when he was a boy, she did become overly excited after seeing her him on television years after he deserted the family. “I’m somebody. I’m the mother of a famous man. I’m a celebrity!” she screamed. So desperate was she to be in her son’s limelight, after their reunion, it’s as though she’d forgotten that her precious baby boy had killed the dog and blown-up his father’s car before leaving home.
Daphne too started wilding out and even ran over an innocent kid while speeding in Max’s car. Of course, there were no repercussions and her behavior only became worse. “Ever since the accident, I’ve been under care of an LSD therapist and I understand my son now. I understand him completely.” None of this stops the age police from coming for her too. “No, no, no, I’m young! I’m young! I’m VERY young! I’m VERY YOUNG!” she screamed as they dragged her away.
***
Wild in the Streets was based on the Esquire short story “The Day It All Happened, Baby!” by Robert Thom, who also wrote the script. “Cool was on its way out,” the story began, swiftly moving on to Max’s “doomed parents” and the havoc he caused as a youngster. Thom, like Max, once had the surname Flatow, which he changed in college. Published in 1966, “The Day It All Happened, Baby!” was released at the beginning of the “new wave science fiction” movement when some younger authors began writing tales that featured issues that took place on Earth.
As noted in the award-winning Dangerous Visions and New Worlds: Radical Science Fiction, 1950-1985, “This shift in focus was as much aesthetic as political. Influenced by modernist prose and poetry, William S. Burroughs and the Beats, New Journalism, psychedelics, and the quest for consciousness expansion became modes of expression more disjointed and experimental and topics shifted to the state of inner rather than outer space.”
Yale graduate, poet, playwright (The Minotaur, Bicycle Ride to Nevada) and screenwriter Robert Thom wasn’t as prolific in the short fiction department as J.G. Ballard, Barry Malzberg, Michael Moorcock or Harlan Ellison (who was a friend). Style wise, Thom was no match for those literary word slingers. “The Day It All Happened, Baby!”reads like a cross between a news piece for an underground newspaper and a movie treatment, but dude’s prophetic ideas in that single speculative story, as well as his screenplay for Death Race 2000 (1975), should be enough to gain him admission into the canon.
While Esquire didn’t publish much science fiction, editor Robert Brown, himself an alumnus of Yale, took a chance on Thom’s story. “We weren’t locked into any structure,” Brown recalled It Wasn’t Pretty, Folks, but Didn’t We Have Fun?: Esquire in the Sixties by Carol Polsgrove. “Mostly any magazine then and now, if you came up with some great idea, the editor would say, ‘That’s an interesting idea, but it’s not the sort of thing we do.’ At Esquire, there was no sort of thing we do.”
“The Day It All Happened, Baby!” was featured in the December, 1966 issue and predicted the soon come youth riots (1968 Democratic National Convention), musical mayhem (Altamont) and end of decade discord. Optioned a few months later by (AIP), Thom, who had written screenplays previously for young adult angst films All the Fine Young Cannibals and The Subterraneans (both released in 1960), was hired to do the script.
According to The History of Hollywood by Stephen Tropiano, the film was budgeted at $700,000, which for the penny pinching AIP was a kingly sum, and shot in 20 days. Apparently the studio had had another feature in production called Wild in the Streets that was shelved, so they changed the name of “The Day It All Happened, Baby!” so they could use the marketing artwork they’d already commissioned.
Originally the studio wanted to cast folk singer Phil Ochs to portray Max Frost, but the singer’s manager turned it down. “Arthur Gorson had disapproved of the movie’s right-wing message, and had discouraged Phil from accepting the part,” Michael Schumacher reported in There But for Fortune: The Life of Phil Ochs. “Twenty-five years after the fact, Michael Ochs still stewed about his brother’s rejecting the opportunity to star in the film.”
The role instead went to relative newcomer Jones, who had done theater in New York City and starred in the ABC western series The Legend of Jesse James (1965-1966), produced by Don Siegel. When the show was cancelled after one year, Jones made a smooth transition to the big screen. Jones’ evolution from funky folklore outlaw to smooth criminal rock star was seamless, with a few scenes highlighting the persuasive power of pop with the folksy “Fourteen Or Fight” and the more psychedelic “The Shape of Things to Come.” The lyrics for the latter were the perfect theme for a revolution: “There are changes lyin’ ahead in every road/And there are new thoughts ready and waitin’ to explode.”
Both songs, as well as others on the soundtrack, were written by Brill Building pioneers (wife & husband songwriting team) Cynthia Weil and Barry Mann, who had penned tracks for many artists including The Animals (“We Gotta Get Out of This Place”) and The Righteous Brothers (“You’ve Lost That Lovin’ Feelin'”). Though the work of Weil and Mann was later used in many movies including An American Tale and A.I., Wild in the Streets was their first.
“The Shape of Things to Come” was released on Tower Records (not to be confused with the record store chain, the label was a subsidiary of Capitol Records) and credited to the 13th Floor aka Max Frost & The Troopers. Former Tower Records executive Mike Curb said in a 2010 interview with Forgotten Hits, “The reason we changed the name of The 13th Power to Max Frost & The Troopers was because the lead actor Christopher Jones played the role of Max Frost and we felt that we would have a better chance of breaking the record under the name of Max Frost & The Troopers. The record was a big hit and actually reached the 20s of the Billboard Hot 100 chart.”
Jones’ first three films-Chubasco, Wild in the Streets, and Three in the Attic—were all released in 1968. He later became known as a troubled actor who allegedly beat-up his first wife, raped his actress girlfriend Olivia Hussey and claimed to be having an affair with her friend Sharon Tate when she was murdered in 1969. That same year, he went overseas to make three European projects, with starring roles in Una breve stagione (1969), The Looking Glass War (1970), based on a John le Carré novel, and director David Lean’s film Ryan’s Daughter (1970). On the set of Ryan’s Daughter, Jones got a rep for being difficult to work with and was bad mouthed by the director and his co-stars, including Robert Mitchum and Sarah Miles.
Jones stepped away from acting and disappeared from the screen for thirty-six years. Some speculated that he had a nervous breakdown and became a drug addict after Sharon Tate’s brutal murder. Mental issues did run in his Jones’ family, with his mother being institutionalized when he was a boy. Quentin Tarantino wanted to cast him in Reservoir Dogs (1992) and Pulp Fiction (1994), but Jones never replied to his queries.
“I didn’t return Quentin’s calls because I didn’t know who he was,” Jones told the Chicago Tribune in the 2000 article Life After Fame, “and I wasn’t interested. When he did find me with the ‘Pulp Fiction’ script, I had no interest in acting or in the part he was offering.” “My girlfriend at the time read it and said: ‘You’re not doing this––it’s disgusting,’” he told another interviewer. Tarantino wanted him to play Zed. “So I didn’t.”
Jones later appeared in Mad Dog Time (1996) directed by Larry Bishop, a Wild in the Streets co-star who played one-handed horn player The Hook. The film opened to terrible reviews including Roger Ebert’s brilliant bombing: “’Mad Dog Time’ is the first movie I have seen that does not improve on the sight of a blank screen viewed for the same length of time. Oh, I’ve seen bad movies before. But they usually made me care about how bad they were. Watching ‘Mad Dog Time’ is like waiting for the bus in a city where you’re not sure they have a bus line.”
Granted, Ebert didn’t much care much for Wild in the Streets either, giving it two stars, but in that case he was in the minority.
As a contrast, New York Times reviewer Renata Adler wrote, “By far the best American film of the year so far––and this has been the worst year in a long time for, among other things, movies––is ‘Wild in the Streets.’ It is a very blunt, bitter, head-on but live and funny attack on the problem of the generations. And it is more straight and thorough about the times than any science fiction or horror movie in a while…It is a brutally witty and intelligent film.” Meanwhile, Pauline Kael liked it more than she did 2001: A Space Odyssey, which came out the same year. She called Wild in the Streets, “smart in a lot of ways that better made pictures aren’t.” Those sorts of reviews were rare for a studio like AIP as was the “blockbuster” status the film eventually achieved.
Decades later, critic John Greco from “Twenty Four Frames: Notes on Film” compared Max Frost, minus the ageism, to Donald Trump. In a 2016 essay, Greco wrote, “Wild in the Streets and its egotistical rock star are like our egotistical reality star of today, a frightening horror show all being played out with the potential to turn the country from the greatest democracy in the world into a totalitarian state filled with hate and fear.”
***
While some might view Wild in the Streets as silly, for others it was as powerful as It Can’t Happen Here, 1984 or Animal Farm. Though written as a cautionary tale, the ultimate message of Wild in the Streets wasn’t that “power corrupts,” but a democracy built on lies and bullshit shoveled to the gullible masses, whose blind faith keeps them from questioning The Truth, will eventually collapse into chaos. Thinking back to my ten year old self watching Wild in the Streets, I was riveted by the sheer daring of the entire film’s premise that, while being absurd, felt as though it could really happen.
In 1969, a sequel starring Christopher Jones and written by Robert Thom was supposed to go into production at AIP bearing the name The Day of the Micro-Boppers, which changed to “The Day It All Happened, Baby,” the title of the original Esquire story, and finally “We Outnumber You.” Unfortunately, the project never happened.
Thom later wrote a 15,800 word novella “Son of Wild in the Streets,” that was originally to be included in the infamous Harlan Ellison science fiction collection The Last Dangerous Visions. Though announced in the 1979, but the anthology was never published. J. Michael Straczynski, executor of the Harlan Ellison estate has taken over the project, but “Son of Wild in the Streets” is no longer included.
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https://ask.metafilter.com/54110/Books-that-are-easy-to-read-for-those-with-attention-problems
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Books that are easy to read for those with attention problems?
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What are some good books for people with mild ADD? By this I do not mean, books about attention deficit disorder, I mean books that are short, or easy to read.
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https://ask.metafilter.com/54110/Books-that-are-easy-to-read-for-those-with-attention-problems
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About Ask MetaFilter
Ask MetaFilter is a question and answer site that covers nearly any question on earth, where members help each other solve problems. Ask MetaFilter is where thousands of life's little questions are answered.
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wrong_mix_random_publicationDate_00046
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https://www.sffchronicles.com/threads/536730/
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Any good psychedelic science fiction out there?
|
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2012-06-09T03:29:53+01:00
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It's hard for me to put my finger on this, but I'm looking for some really bizarre, surreal stuff with wacked out imagery and creatures. It doesn't...
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/data/assets/logo/pwa-192.jpg
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Science Fiction & Fantasy forum
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https://www.sffchronicles.com/threads/536730/
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Rather unlikely about Cordwainer Smith (Dr. Paul Linebarger), but an interesting thought. As for the two "purple" references... "Riders of the Purple Wage" is actually a central piece in The Purple Book, and the "purple" here is an ironic reference to being "born to the purple"....
Not necessarily featuring strange creatures, etc., but a fair amount of what emerged from the "New Wave" was connected to psychedelia, and could at times be quite... odd. (Also frequently very good.) Take, for instance, Brian Aldiss' Barefoot in the Head, dealing with events of "the Acid Head War"... certainly a stylistic tour-de-force where language is stretched to its limits on a variety of levels. J. G. Ballard's novels (and short stories, for the matter of that) often have a lot of surrealistic imagery and ideation: The Drowned World being the most "normal", perhaps, becoming increasingly surrealistic with The Drought, The Crystal World, several of the pieces in The Voices of Time. Vermilion Sands, etc.... And then there's always that extreme example, The Atrocity Exhibition....
You might also find several of the stories in Dangerous Visions, and Again. Dangerous Visions, of interest (in fact, DV was the original place of publication of Farmer's "Riders of the Purple Wage"), not to mention Judith Merrill's England Swings SF, and Langdon Jones' The New SF. (Speaking of Farmer... I would think Strange Relations would be precisely the sort of thing you're looking for... sf alien encounters as seen through the lenses of Freud and Jung.) Some of Moorcock's works might also appeal, such as the five-volume-plus (the "plus" being occasional short stories, such as the recent "Sumptuous Dress") Dancers at the End of Time sequence, or The Time Dweller, The Rituals of Infinity, The Black Corridor, The Shores of Death, and some of the tales in Moorcock's Book of Martyrs... also known as Dying for Tomorrow in American editions.
I've been mentioning him a lot, but some of Ellison's works have always been viewed as being rather psychedelic, especially those written from ca. 1962-1980... ironic, as they come from a man who has an extreme antipathy to putting any such substance, including alcohol, into his system. (Ted Sturgeon's piece in I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream has something to say about this.) And even some of Sturgeon's work has its elements of the psychedelic, from "The Golden Helix" to "The [Widget], the [Wadget], and Boff"....
If the great mix-master in my head isn't going full blast it seems to me the last story in Jack Vance's THE DYING EARTH was s one of the most bizarre I remember reading. Don't remember the exact details but I could hardly believe what I was reading. Reality turning upside down in his short story "The Men Return" shouldn't fail to entertain the psychedelically inclined. And William Burroughs's THE NAKED LUNCH might spark you plug.
You mean DE collection or the Dying Earth omnibus that ends with Rhialto the Marvelous stories. The last story was the weirdest in the omnibus to me.
"Morreion"
Rhialto and his associates journey to the edge of the Universe to seek their erstwhile colleague Morreion, sent away in the distant past to locate the source of the valuable, magic-anulling IOUN stones.
Jack Vance Treasury collection have: The Men Return, The Secret, The New Prime that fit in very well with this thread.
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Jim's book catalog
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All Jim's books
Listed alphabetically by title.
Groff Conklin 13 Great Stories of Science-Fiction 2nd printing Gold Medal k1243 September 1962 short stories US $.40 ISBN 0123000060 Last modified May 16 01 Donald Wollheim, Ed. Illustrated by Frank Frazetta The 1972 Annual World's Best SF Hardbound New York: Daw, 1972 short stories ISBN 0123000058 Last modified May 16 01 Donald A. Wollheim, ed. 1973 Annual World's Best SF Daw Books, 1973 short stories US $.95 ISBN 0123000054 Last modified May 15 01 Donald A. Wollheim Editor The 1978 World's Best SF Stories by: John Varley, Edward Bryant, Joe Haldeman, John Brunner, Harlan Ellison and Others. New York: Daw Books, 1978 Mass Market Paperback short stories US $1.95 ISBN 0879973765 Last modified May 15 01 Houghton Mifflin The 1988 Information Please Alamanc Paperback, 960pp. Houghton Mifflin Company, December 1987 Almanac US $5.95 ISBN 0395446104 Last modified Dec 9 00 Consumer Guide , , 1998 Used Car Book: Paperback, 1998th ed., 160pp. N A L, February 1998 Cars US$ 9.99 ISBN 0451194381 Last modified Nov 28 00 Arthur C. Clarke 2001: A Space Odyssey Sigent, July 1968 Cover torn US $1.95 ISBN 0451077652 Last modified Dec 6 00 Arthur C. Clarke 2061: Odyssey three In 2061, Heywood Floyd must once again confront Dave Bowman, a newly independent HAL, and the limitless power of an unseen alien race that has decided that Mankind is to play a role in the evolution of the galaxy--whether it wants to or not. Continuing the spellbinding excitement begun in 2001: A Space Odyssey. Mass Market Paperback, 271pp. Ballantine Books, Inc., April 1989 US$ 4.95 ISBN 0345358791 Last modified Dec 6 00 Robert J. Brown 333 Science Tricks and Experiments Paperback,1st ed.,199pp. McGraw-Hill Companies, The, November 1984 science, science fair I have a different cover. ISBN 0830618252 Last modified May 16 01 Craig Hartglass 551 Survival Tips for Men: Making Your Way in a World Full of Women Paperback,308pp. Carol Publishing Group, August 1995 humor US$ 9.95 ISBN 0806516801 Last modified May 27 01 Judith Merril, ed. 6th Annual Edition The Year's Best S-F incl. F. Brown, R. Bradbury Paperback Dell Books 9772, 1962 short stories US $.50 ISBN 0123000082 Last modified May 20 01 Judith Merril, ed. 8th Annual Edition the Years Best S-F Dell Publishing Co. 1964 short stories 2 copies. US $.75 ISBN 0123000053 Last modified May 15 01 Douglass C. North Roger Leroy Miller Abortion, Baseball, & Weed: Economic Issues of Our Times Paperback NY: Harper & Row, 1973 economics ISBN 0608027588 Last modified May 16 01 Alford Eugene Brown H. A. Jeffcott Absolutely Mad Inventions Paperback, 125pp. Dover Publications, Incorporated, November 1990 humor, inventions US $1.50 ISBN 0486225968 Last modified Dec 9 00 Larry Niven Steven Barnes Achilles' Choice Mass Market Paperback, 249pp. Tor Books, March 1992 US$ 4.99 ISBN 0812510836 Last modified Nov 25 00 Gregory Benford Across the Sea of Suns (Galactic Center #2) Mass Market Paperback, 368pp. Bantam Books, Incorporated, June 1987 I have a differeent cover. US$ 4.50 ISBN 0553282115 Last modified Nov 24 00 Bob Schieffer Gary P. Gates The Acting President Hardcover,397pp. Dutton/Plume, July 1989 politics, history US $18.95 ISBN 0525247521 Last modified May 26 01 Steven Holzner Advanced Assembly Language on the IBM PC Paperback January 1987 computers, programming Outdated ISBN 0893036331 Last modified May 26 01 Erwin Kreyszig Advanced Engineering Mathematics ohn Wiley & Sons, Ny. 1962 Math ISBN 0123000020 Last modified Nov 28 00 Harry Harrison The Adventures Of The Stainless Steel Rat Berkley, 4th, 1978 Stainless Steel Rat series. US $2.25 ISBN 042503819X Last modified May 5 01 Harlan Ellison, ed. Again, Dangerous Visions Ellison, Harlan/ Heidenry, John/ Rocklynne, Ross/ Le Guin, Ursula K./ Offutt, Andrew J./ Wolfe, Gene/ Nelson, Ray/ Bradbury, Ray/ Oliver, Chad/ Bryant, Edward/ Wilhelm, Kate/ Hemesath, James B./ Russ, Joanna/ Vonnegut, Kurt Jr./ Sherred, T.L./ O'Donnell, K.M./ Hollis, H.H./ Wolfe, Bernard/ Gerrold, David/ Anthony, Piers Again Dangerous Visions #1: An Assault of New Dreamers/ The Counterpoint of View/ Ching Witch!/ The Word for World is Forest/ For Value Received/ Mathoms from the Time Closet/ Time Travel for Pedestrians/ Christ, Old Student in a New School/ King of the Hill/ The 10:00 Report is Brought to You By .../ The Funeral/ Harry the Hare/ When It Changed/ The Big Space Fuck/ Bounty/ Still-Life/ Stoned Counsel/ Monitored Dreams & Strategic Cremations/ With a Finger in My I/ In the Barn New York: Doubleday, 1972 short stories ISBN 0123000125 Last modified May 28 01 Gregory Benford Against Infinity Mass Market Paperback, 256pp. Bantam Books, Incorporated, January 1991 US$ 4.95 ISBN 0553290053 Last modified Nov 19 00 Norman Spinrad Agent Of Chaos 222 Pgs. FD. Poplar, 1978 Paperback US $1.50 ISBN 0445041641 Last modified May 15 01 Gregory Benford In Alien Flesh Mass Market Paperback, 288pp. Tor Books, December 1987 US$ 3.95 ISBN 0812531760 Last modified Nov 25 00 Clifford D. Simak All Flesh Is Grass Berkeley, 1965 US $.75 ISBN 0425024202 Last modified May 28 01 Harlan Ellison All the Lies That Are My Life Hardcover January 1989 short stories US $19.95 ISBN 0887330967 Last modified May 28 01 HArlan Ellison All the Sounds of Fear Panther Books, 1973 UK 30p ISBN 058603899X Last modified Nov 25 00 William Gibson All Tomorrow's Parties Hardcover,304pp. Putnam Publishing Group, The, October 1999 US $24.95 ISBN 0399145796 Last modified May 5 01 Harlan Ellison Alone Against Tomorrow NY The Macmillan Company 1971. short stories ISBN 78127465 Last modified May 2 01 Harlan Ellison Alone Against Tomorrow Macmillan, 1971 short stories ISBN 0123000122 Last modified May 28 01 Scott Adams Always Postpone Meetings With Time-Wasting Morons: A Dilbert Book One of Scott Adams' biggest pet peeves are managers who mask their incompetence by using popular office buzzwords like "restructuring," and schedule useless meetings on issues that face little to no importance. "Dilbert" was born out of Adams' own bored doodling at endless office meetings while he worked in the corporate world. In this collection of cartoons, the cubicle-resigned engineer expounds on survival tactics to be used daily from 9-5. Paperback,112pp. Andrews & McMeel, April 1994 humor, cartoons US$ 7.95 ISBN 0836217586 Last modified May 27 01 Analog Magazine Analog:The Best of Science Fiction Hardcover,621pp. Budget Book Service, Inc., September 1994 short stories I have a different cover. ISBN 088365637X Last modified May 10 01 Stanley Schmidt, ed. Laszlo Gal,(Illustrator) Analog's Golden Anniversary Anthology Hardcover, 380pp. Dial Press 1980 short stories US $10.95 ISBN 0803702175 Last modified May 20 01 Grant R. Fowles Analytical Mechanics Textbook Hardcover, 4th ed., 32 Saunders College Publishing, January 1986 Math, Physics US $40.00 ISBN 0030041244 Last modified Nov 28 00 Garry B. Trudeau And That's My Final Offer! Paperback January 1980 humor, cartoons US $5.25 ISBN 0030491916 Last modified May 27 01 Michael Crichton The Andromeda Strain Mass Market Paperback New York: Dell Publishing, 1971 US $1.25 ISBN 044000199 Last modified Dec 6 00 Walter Jon Williams Angel Station Mass Market Paperback Doherty, Tom Associates, LLC, April 1990 US$ 4.95 ISBN 0812557875 Last modified May 16 01 Harlan Ellison Angry Candy Sixteen stories by the passionate, uncompromising, and extraordiary Harlan Ellsion. Paperback,372pp. Dutton/Plume, December 1989 short stories US $8.95 ISBN 0452263352 Last modified May 28 01 Harlan Ellison Angry Candy Sixteen stories by the passionate, uncompromising, and extraordiary Harlan Ellsion. Hardcover,224pp. Houghton Mifflin Company, September 1988 short stories US $18.95 ISBN 0395483077 Last modified May 28 01 Frederik Pohl DELR,DELR The Annals of the Heechee Just outside the Milky Way lurked the would-be destroyers of the universe. Humans called them the Foe. Heechee called them Assassins. No one who had ever seen them had lived to tell the tale. The thrilling conclusion to the ground-breaking Heechee saga! "The Heechee are one of the greatest creations of science fiction."--Jack Williamson. Mass Market Paperback,352pp. Ballantine Books, Inc., April 1988 #4 HeeChee series. 2 copies. US$ 4.95 ISBN 0345325664 Last modified May 2 01 Greg Bear Anvil of stars Warner Books, Incorporated, New York , 1993 Planet killer series. ISBN 0123000110 Last modified May 26 01 Garry B. Trudeau Any Grooming Hints for Your Fans, Rollie? Paperback January 1978 humor, cartoons US $5.95 ISBN 0030448611 Last modified May 27 01 Robert Kanigel Apprentice to Genius: The Making of a Scientific Dynasty Inside story of scientists working at the National Institutes of Health & Johns Hopkins University. Paperback, 1st ed., 281pp. Johns Hopkins University Press, October 1993 Science history, biography US $14.95 ISBN 0801847575 Last modified Dec 9 00 Harlan Ellison Approaching Oblivion Signet, January 1976 Short stories US $1.25 ISBN 0123000002 Last modified Nov 25 00 Harlan Ellison Illustrated by Leo and Diane Dillon Approaching Oblivion Walker, 1974 short stories 2 copies. ISBN 0123000126 Last modified May 28 01 Ellison, Harlan ApproachHarlan Ellison Approaching Oblivion: Road Signs on the Treadmill Toward Tomorrow 1st Signet, 1976 US $1.25 ISBN 4516848 Last modified May 2 01 Elaine Morgan The Aquatic Ape: A Theory of Human Evolution Hardcover January 1982 Biology, evolutio ISBN 0812828739 Last modified Dec 9 00 Barbara Hambly The Armies of Daylight (The Darwath Trilogy #3) Mass Market Paperback,309pp. Ballantine Books, Inc., April 1983 #3 Dark series. I have a different cover. US$ 2.95 ISBN 0345296710 Last modified May 28 01 Donald E. Knuth The Art of Computer Programming: Textbook Hardcover, 2nd ed., 780pp. Addison Wesley Longman, Inc., March 1998 US $49.95 ISBN 0201896850 Last modified Nov 27 00 Sun Tzu Ralph D. Sawyer,(Translator) The Art of War The writings of the ancient warrior Sun Tzu have provided tremendous wisdom to generations through the ages. Now these philosophies are available with anecdotal extracts by the author of Shogun and Noble House. Hardcover,384pp. Barnes & Noble Books, January 1994 military, war ISBN 1566192978 Last modified May 16 01 Patrick H. Winston Artificial Intelligence Hardcover Textbook January 1984 Computer Science US $41.23 ISBN 0201082594 Last modified Nov 27 00 William Faulkner Noel Polk,(Editor) As I Lay Dying: The Corrected Text As I Lay Dying Paperback,1st ed.,256pp. Vintage Books, May 1976 fiction US$ 4.95 ISBN 0394747453 Last modified May 16 01 Garry B. Trudeau As the Kid Goes for Broke Paperback January 1977 humor, cartoons US $1.95 ISBN 0030226767 Last modified May 27 01 Frank Herbert Bill Ransom The Ascension Factor Hardcover January 1988 US $18.95 ISBN 0399132244 Last modified May 26 01 Isaac Asimov Asimov on Physics Mass Market Paperback Morrow,William & Co, January 1979 Physics US$ 3.95 ISBN 0380418487 Last modified Nov 28 00 Garry B. Trudeau Ask for May, Settle for June Paperback January 1982 humor, cartoons US $5.25 ISBN 0030615224 Last modified May 27 01 Robert A. Heinlein Assignment in Eternity 4th printing Signet, 1953 US $.60 ISBN 0123000035 Last modified May 2 01 Martin Harwit Astrophysical Concepts Wiley, 1973 phsics, astrophysics ISBN 0471358207 Last modified May 26 01 Richard L. Bowers Terry Deeming Astrophysics, Vol. 1 Textbook Paperback, 1st ed., 384pp. Jones & Bartlett Publishers, Inc., January 1984 Physics, astrophysics US $33.75 ISBN 0867200189 Last modified Dec 9 00 Richard L. Bowers Terry Deeming Astrophysics, Vol. 2 Textbook Paperback, 1st ed., 288pp. Jones & Bartlett Publishers, Inc., January 1984 Physics, astrophysics ISBN 0867200472 Last modified Dec 9 00 Tom Toles (Illustrator), , , At Least Our Bombs Are Getting Smarter: What will the world be like between now and the next millennium? Pulitzer Prize-winning editorial cartoonist Tom Toles provides Paperback, 133pp. Prometheus Books, September 1991 Humor ISBN 0879757094 Last modified Nov 28 00 Robert Silverberg At Winter's End Millions of years in the future, a small tribe of humans emerge from an underground cocoon to reclaim the planet for themselves. Paperback,416pp. Warner Books, Incorporated, March 1989 US $5.95 ISBN 0446353973 Last modified May 15 01 John Brunner The Atlantic Abomination Ace 03300, 1960 US $.60 ISBN 0441033008 Last modified May 21 01 Samuel R. Delany Atlantis: Three Tales Hardcover,224pp. University Press of New England, March 1995 ISBN 0819552836 Last modified Dec 3 01 Kate Chopin Marilynne Robinson,(Introduction) The Awakening An American classic of sexual expression that paved the way for the modern novel, The Awakening is both a remarkable novel in its own right and a startling reminder of how far women in this century have come. The story of a married woman who pursues love outside a stuffy, middle-class marriage, the novel portrays the mind of a woman seeking fulfillment of her essential nature. Mass Market Paperback,208pp. Bantam Books, Incorporated, July 1981 fiction I have a different cover. US$ 3.95 ISBN 055321330X Last modified May 16 01 Daniel Da Cruz Daniel The Ayes of Texax Mass Market Paperback Del Rey, June 1983 Texas series. US $2.25 ISBN 0345296028 Last modified Nov 27 00 Samuel R. Delany The Ballad of Beta-2 / Empire Star Ace 20571, 1965 2 copies. US $1.25 ISBN 0441205712 Last modified May 28 01 Keith Taylor Bard, Vol. 2 Mass Market Paperback Ace Books, April 1984 #2 Bard series. US$ 2.75 ISBN 0441049095 Last modified May 28 01 Brian Aldiss Barefoot in the Head After the Acidhead War, most of Earth's population is stumbling through an endless acid trip caused by nerve gas. Colin Charteris, in headlong flight from Serbia and the refugee camps where he was exposed, finds everyday objects like Metz cathedral ominous and portentous. A vision of the future catapults him into the company of more-advanced acid cases who call him a messiah for his concept of Man the Driver, resulting in his leading a mad exodus by car across a blasted Europe into a life of complete incomprehensibility. As birds build twisted nests, dogs wear neckties and the new animal slinks through the shrubbery, Charteris forges a new vision of reality, but drops out before the crucifixion. Inside every sane citizen is a madman waiting to run free.... PAnther Books, 1979 Great! I have a different cover. ISBN 0586049886 Last modified May 2 01 David Crystal, ed. Min Lee, ed. The Barnes & Noble Encyclopedia Hardcover, 1334pp. Barnes & Noble Books, October 1993 encyclopedia ISBN 1566193184 Last modified Dec 9 00 Larry Niven Steven Barnes Barsoom Project (Dream Park #2) Nothing is what it seems at Dream Park, the state-of-the-art amusement park of the future, where customers live out the adventures of a lifetime. What nobody counts on are double agents and live ammunition in the place where dreams and death come true. Original. Mass Market Paperback Ace Books, August 1989 #2 Dream Park series. US $4.50 ISBN 0441167128 Last modified May 1 01 George Siegel Basic Neurochemistry: Molecular, Cellular, & Medical Aspects Hardcover Textbook, 4th ed. January 1989 Biology, neurochemistry ISBN 0881673439 Last modified Dec 9 00 Katherine Kurtz The Bastard Prince (Heirs of Saint Camber #3) With the malleable Rhys Michael as new king, the power-hungry regents were certain control of Gwynedd was theirs. But Rhys Michael--with the help of the Deryni--had other plans. This is the conclusion to The Heirs of Saint Camber series. Paperback,1st ed.,448pp. Ballantine Books, Inc., June 1995 #3 Heirs of Camber series. US$ 5.99 ISBN 0345391772 Last modified May 28 01 Harlan Ellison The Beast That Shouted Love at the Heart of the World Mass Market Paperback, 256pp. N A L, April 1974 Short stories US $1.25 ISBN 0451085906 Last modified Nov 25 00 Nancy Kress Beggar's Ride Hardcover,1st ed. Doherty, Tom Associates, LLC, October 1996 Sleepless series. US$ 23.95 ISBN 0312858175 Last modified May 2 01 Nancy Kress Beggars in Spain Leisha Camden, the product of genetic manipulation, is a genius and a misfit--she never sleeps, giving her a time advantage over the rest of the world. Resented by the world, the outcasts draw together for self-protection. Then the next, even stranger, generation of mutations comes along. Mass Market Paperback,438pp. Morrow,William & Co, February 1994 Sleepless series. US$ 6.99 ISBN 0380718774 Last modified May 2 01 Nancy Kress David G. Hartwell,(Editor) Beggars and Choosers Hardcover,1st ed.,316pp. Doherty, Tom and Associates, Incorporated, August 1994 Sleepless series. ISBN 0312857497 Last modified May 2 01 Neal Stephenson In the Beginning...Was the Command Line Paperback,160pp. Morrow,William & Co, November 1999 computers, politics US$ 10.00 ISBN 0380815931 Last modified May 5 01 Peter Woll Behind the Scenes inAmerican Government: Personalities and Politics 6th ed. Little, Brown, and Co. 1987 politics, history ISBN 0316951773 Last modified May 27 01 Piers Anthony Being a Green Mother 1st Edition Del Rey Book/Ballantine New York, 1987 #5 Immortality series. US $16.95 ISBN 0345322223 Last modified May 28 01 Larry Niven Jerry Pournelle,Steven Barnes Beowulf's Children (Heorot #2) A new generation is growing up on the island paradise of Camelot, ignorant of the Great Grendel Wars fought when their parents first arrived from Earth. Setting out for the mainland, this group of rebels feels ready to fight any Grendels that get in their way. On Avalon, however, there are monsters which dwarf the ones their parents fought. Hardcover,382pp. Tom Doherty Associates Inc., September 1995 #2 Heorot series. US$ 23.95 ISBN 0312855222 Last modified May 8 01 Fred Saberhagen Berserker Kill In the cold reaches of space, the Berserkers--killer machines whose sole purpose is to destroy all living things--attack a floating laboratory, dumping stored human zygotes for a future colonization project--a billion potential lives--into an interstellar dust cloud. Three centuries later, humans pursuing Berserkers uncover what this deed has wrought. Hardcover,448pp. Doherty, Tom Associates, LLC, August 1993 Berserker series. US$ 24.95 ISBN 0312852665 Last modified May 10 01 Fred Saberhagen Berserker Lies Mass Market Paperback,224pp. Doherty, Tom Associates, LLC, August 1991 Berserker series. US$ 3.99 ISBN 0812505638 Last modified May 28 01 Fred Saberhagen The Berserker Wars Mass Market Paperback Doherty, Tom Associates, LLC, September 1981 Berserker series. US$ 2.95 ISBN 0812553209 Last modified May 28 01 Damon Knight The Best of Damon Knight Hardcover January 1978 short stories US $9.95 ISBN 0800807219 Last modified May 10 01 Charles Brooks Best Editorial Cartoons of the Year: 1988 Edition Paperback,160pp. Pelican Publishing Company, Incorporated, November 1987 humor, cartoons, politics ISBN 0882896873 Last modified May 27 01 Ben Bova, ed. The Best of the Nebulas Paperback,593pp. Doherty, Tom Associates, LLC, April 1989 short stories US $14.95 ISBN 0312931751 Last modified Dec 4 01 Ben Bova The Best of the Nebulas Hardcover,1st ed.,593pp. St. Martin's Press, Inc., April 1989 short stories The best! US$ 22.95 ISBN 0312931840 Last modified May 8 01 Harry Harrison, ed. Brian W Aldiss, ed. Best SF: 1967 Berkeley 1968 short stories US $.75 ISBN 0123000056 Last modified May 15 01 Terry Carr, ed. The Best of Science Fiction of the Year #1 2nd printing Ballantine 1976 short stories US $1.95 ISBN 0345249224 Last modified May 20 01 Terry Carr, ed. Best Science Fiction of the Year, Vol. 12 Paperback,179pp. Pocket Books, July 1983 short stories US$ 3.95 ISBN 0671466801 Last modified May 20 01 Terry Carr (Editor) Best Science Fiction Novellas of the Year, Vol. 1 Mass Market Paperback Ballantine Publishing Group, August 1979 short stories US $2.25 ISBN 0345280849 Last modified May 15 01 Terry Carr, ed. The Best Science Fiction Novellas of Rthe Year #2 Mass Market Paperback Ballantine Books, 1980 short stories US $2.50 ISBN 0345287924 Last modified May 16 01 Terry Carr, ed. Best Science Fiction of the Year #3 2nd ed. Paperback Ballantine 1976 short stories US $1.95 ISBN 034525015X Last modified May 20 01 Terry Carr, ed. The Best of Science Fiction of the Year #5 NY Del Rey July, 1976 short stories US $1.95 ISBN 0345250648 Last modified May 20 01 Terry Carr, ed. The Best of Science Fiction of the Year #6 NY Del Rey July, 1977 short stories US $1.95 ISBN 0345257588 Last modified May 20 01 Terry Carr The Best Science Fiction of the Year (1972) Ballantine Books, 1972 Mass Market Paperback short stories 2 copies. US $1.25 ISBN 0345026713 Last modified May 20 01 The Best Science Fiction of the Year, No. 13 Paperback January 1984 short stories US$ 3.50 ISBN 067155901X Last modified May 20 01 Lester del Rey Best Science Fiction Stories of The Year (1st Annual collection) Ace #05477, 1973 short stories US $1.25 ISBN 0123000084 Last modified May 20 01 Terry Carr, ed. Best Science Fiction of the Year, Vol. 11 Paperback Pocket Books, July 1982 short stories US$ 3.95 ISBN 0671444832 Last modified May 20 01 The Best and the Brightest Now in its 20th anniversary edition, this 1973 classic is an unforgettable chronicle of John Kennedy's Camelot and its legacy--featuring remarkable portraits of the men who conceived and executed the Vietnam War, including Robert McNamara, McGeorge Bundy, Dean Rusk, and Presidents Kennedy and Johnson. Hardcover, 688pp. Random House, Incorporated, October 1972 history US $10.00 ISBN 0394461630 Last modified Dec 4 00 James Baen The Best from Galaxy: Volume III 1st printing Paperback Award Book, 1975 short stories US $1.50 ISBN 0123000055 Last modified May 15 01 Charles Sheffield Between the Strokes of Night The author of Sight of Proteus and The Selkie brings a unique brand of sci-fi to this riveting story. To long-established worlds of starfaring humans come the Immortals--beings with strange ties to ancient Earth, who seem to live forever, who can travel light years in a day--and who use their strange powers to control the existence of ordinary mortals. Reissue. Mass Market Paperback,352pp. Baen Books, September 1989 US$ 3.50 ISBN 067155977X Last modified May 28 01 Gary Larson Beyond the Far Side Paperback,104pp. Andrews & McMeel, August 1983 humor, cartoons US $5.95 ISBN 0836211499 Last modified May 26 01 John A. Paulos Beyond Numeracy: An Uncommon Dictionary of Mathematics Hardcover April 1991 Math US$ 22.00 ISBN 0394586409 Last modified Dec 4 00 Robert A. Heinlein Beyond This Horizon New York, NY: Signet Books US $.75 ISBN 451T4211 Last modified May 2 01 Robert A. Heinlein Beyond This Horizon Signet T4211 US $.75 ISBN 0123000041 Last modified May 5 01 Carl Sifakis (et al) The Big Book of Hoaxes: True Tales of the Greatest Lies Ever Told Paperback,1st ed.,191pp. DC Comics, October 1996 humor, skeptic US $14.95 ISBN 1563892529 Last modified May 27 01 Robert Adams Bili the Axe Signet. January 1983 #10 Horseclans series. US $2.50 ISBN 0451120213 Last modified Nov 26 00 Harry Harrison David Bischoff Bill, the Galactic Hero: On the Planet of Ten Thousand Bars Mass Market Paperback, 208pp. Morrow,William & Co, August 1991 US$ 3.99 ISBN 0380756668 Last modified Nov 19 00 Brian ALDISS Billion Year Spree 363pp Corgi Books 1975 London sf criticism, sf history UK 75p ISBN 0552098051 Last modified May 5 01 Carl Sagan Billions and Billions: Thoughts on Life and Death at the Brink of the Millennium Hardcover, 1st ed., 241pp. Random House, Incorporated, June 1997 Science, essays US$ 24.00 ISBN 0679411607 Last modified Dec 9 00 Berke Breathed Billy and the Boingers Bootleg With the release of this new Bloom County book and the newly chosen Billy and the Boingers Theme Song, chosen from the most bone-shaking, kidney-curdling entries from rock bands nationwide, Springsteen and Van Halen will become as distant a memory as Michael Jackson. 300 black-and-white and 44 color comic strips. Paperback,1st ed.,128pp. Little, Brown & Company, July 1987 humor,cartoons US $7.95 ISBN 0316107298 Last modified May 12 01 Piers Anthony Bio of a Space Tyrant:Mercenary (#2), Vol. 2 Mass Market Paperback,384pp. Morrow,William & Co, March 1984 #2 Bio of a Space Tyrant series. US$ 3.50 ISBN 0380872218 Last modified May 2 01 Piers Anthony Bio of a Space Tyrant:Politcian (#3), Vol. 3 Mass Market Paperback,352pp. Morrow,William & Co, January 1985 #3 Bio of a Space Tyrant series. US$ 2.95 ISBN 0380896850 Last modified May 5 01 Piers Anthony Bio of a Space Tyrant: Vol. 1 Mass Market Paperback, 320pp. Morrow,William & Co, July 1983 Fantasy Vol. 1, Space Tyrant series. US$ 3.50 ISBN 0380841940 Last modified Nov 25 00 Albert L. Lehninger Bioenergetics, 2nd Ed. Paperback, 2nd ed., 245pp. Benjamin-Cummings Publishing Company, January 1971 Biology, biochemistry ISBN 0805361030 Last modified Dec 9 00 Jack L. Chalker Birth of Flux and Anchor (Soul Rider #4) Mass Market Paperback,295pp. Doherty, Tom Associates, LLC, September 1985 #4 Soul Rider series. US$ 3.50 ISBN 0812532848 Last modified May 21 01 Katherine Kurtz The Bishop's Heir Mass Market Paperback Ballantine Books, Inc., May 1985 #1 Kelson series. US$ 3.50 ISBN 0345300971 Last modified May 28 01 Saul A. Teukolsky Black Holes, White Dwarfs, and Neutron Stars: The Physics of Compact Objects Hardcover,645pp. Wiley, John & Sons, Incorporated, May 1983 phsics, astrophysics ISBN 0471873179 Last modified May 26 01 Stephen W. Hawking S. W. Hawking Black Holes and Baby Universes and Other Essays The bestselling follow-up to Hawking's phenomenal million-copy hardcover bestseller A Brief History of Time is now available in trade paperback. These 14 pieces reveal Hawking variously as the scientist, the man, the concerned world citizen, and--always--the rigorous and imaginative thinker. Paperback,1st ed.,192pp. Bantam Books, Incorporated, August 1994 science, physics, astrophysics US$ 14.95 ISBN 0553374117 Last modified May 16 01 Frederik Pohl Black Star Rising Mass Market Paperback,304pp. Ballantine Books, Inc., January 1986 US$ 3.50 ISBN 0345319028 Last modified May 2 01 Marion Zimmer Bradley Andre Norton,Julian May Black Trillium (Trillium Series) Hardcover,416pp. Doubleday & Company, Incorporated, July 1990 US$ 19.95 ISBN 0385261853 Last modified May 28 01 John Brunner Illustrated by Jeff Jones Black is the Color Paperback, 189 pp. New York: Pyramid Books, 1969 US $.60 ISBN 0511019556 Last modified May 21 01 L. Sprague De Camp, ed. The Blade of Conan Mass Market Paperback Ace 11670, 1979 Conan series. 2 copies. US $1.95 ISBN 0441116701 Last modified May 28 01 Roger Zelazny HC: ABRH Blood of Amber (Amber #7) Mass Market Paperback,224pp. Morrow,William & Co, June 1987 #7 Amber series. US$ 3.50 ISBN 0380896362 Last modified May 16 01 Greg Bear Blood Music 1st Ed. Arbor House, 1985 cyberpunk ISBN 0123000090 Last modified May 22 01 Greg Bear Blood Music Paperback January 1986 cyberpunk US$ 2.95 ISBN 0441067972 Last modified Nov 28 00 Marion Zimmer Bradley The Bloody Sun Paperback Ace 06854, 1979 Darkover series. US $2.25 ISBN 0441068642 Last modified May 21 01 Marion Zimmer Bradley The Bloody Sun Ace 06854-5, 1979 US $2.25 ISBN 0441068545 Last modified May 21 01 Berke Breathed Contribution by,Michael J. Binkley Bloom County Babylon: Five Years of Bask Naughtiness Paperback,1st ed.,224pp. Little, Brown & Company, August 1986 humor, cartoons US $12.95 ISBN 0316103098 Last modified May 27 01 Berke Breathed Steve Dallas,(Introduction) Bloom County: Loose Tails Paperback,1st ed.,148pp. Little, Brown & Company, April 1983 humor, cartoons US $6.95 ISBN 0316107107 Last modified May 26 01 John Varley Blue Champagne Mass Market Paperback Ace Books, January 1986 short stories US$ 3.95 ISBN 0441068685 Last modified May 15 01 Kim Stanley Robinson Blue Mars The electrifying finale to the most award-winning and bestselling SF trilogy to appear in years--the sequel to Red Mars and Green Mars. The colonists on Mars have nearly succeeded in transforming or "terraforming" the red planet to produce a liveable Earth-like atmosphere, when a new ice age imperils the Martian civilization. Hardcover,624pp. Bantam Doubleday Dell Publishing Group, May 1996 Mars series. US$ 22.95 ISBN 0553101447 Last modified May 8 01 Paul Anderson The Boat of a Million Years Mass Market Paperback Tor Books, December 1990 US$ 4.95 ISBN 0812502701 Last modified Nov 19 00 Tanith Lee Derek Jarman The Book of the Damned (Secret Books of Paradys Series #1) Paperback,229pp. Overlook Press, January 1997 #1 Secret Books of Paradys series US $13.95 ISBN 0879516976 Last modified Dec 3 01 C. J. Cherryh The Book Of Morgaine Hardcover Daw 1979 Contains the 3 book Morgaine trilogy. ISBN 0123000044 Last modified May 8 01 Nancy Springer The Book of Suns Paperback New York: Pocket, 1977 Isle series. US $1.95 ISBN 06718092 Last modified May 1 01 Lois McMaster Bujold Borders of Infinity Bujold again offers tales of Miles Vorkosigan, a clever and outlandish science fiction hero for the modern era. Reissue. Paperback,320pp. Baen Books, September 1989 Miles Vorkosigan series. US$ 3.95 ISBN 0671698419 Last modified May 1 01 Henry N Beard Douglas C. Kenney of the Harvard Lampoon, Kenney Bored of the Rings Cover art by Michael K. Frith. Spoof of The Lord of the Rings. Signet E9441 Mass Market Paperback US $1.00 ISBN 0451094417 Last modified Nov 25 00 Robert Silverberg Born With the Dead: Three Novellas about the Spirit of Man. Random House, 1974 short stories US $5.95 ISBN 0394488458 Last modified May 26 01 Tony Hendra Born to Run Things: An Utterly Unauthorized Biography of George Bush Paperback,96pp. Random House, Incorporated, August 1992 humor, politics US $10.00 ISBN 0679741992 Last modified May 26 01 Ron Goulart Brainz, Inc. Paperback May 1985 US $2.75 ISBN 0886770424 Last modified Nov 27 00 Mike Resnick The Branch Paperback,192pp. N A L, February 1984 US$ 2.50 ISBN 0451127781 Last modified May 5 01 Aldous Huxley Brave New World NY: Harper Perennial 2 copies. US $1.95 ISBN 0060804661 Last modified May 16 01 Kurt Vonnegut Jr. Breakfast of Champions Or Goodbye Blue Monday 2nd printing Delacorte Press 1974 US $7.95 ISBN 0123000048 Last modified May 10 01 Gary Larson Bride of the Far Side Paperback,104pp. Andrews & McMeel, April 1985 humor, cartoons US $5.95 ISBN 0836220668 Last modified May 26 01 Stephen W. Hawking Carl Sagan,(Introduction) A Brief History of Time: This account of the history of the universe was written for the layman by one of the most renowned physicists of the 20th century. Hardcover, 208pp. Bantam Books, Incorporated, April 1988 US$ 26.95 ISBN 055305340X Last modified Nov 28 00 James Tiptree, Jr. Brightness Falls from the Air Mass Market Paperback,384pp. Doherty, Tom Associates, LLC, January 1986 US$ 3.50 ISBN 0812556259 Last modified May 15 01 David Brin Brightness Reef (New Uplift Trilogy #1) The vast civilization of Five Galaxies has roled out its security arsenal to prevent resettlement on Jijo until it is revitalized. Over the centuries, groups of sentient beings have eluded the laws and made Jijo a home--but what will happen when the Five Galaxies catch on? A strange ship in Jijo's skies may hold the answer. Hardcover,512pp. Bantam Books, Incorporated, August 1995 #1 New Uplift series 3 copies. US$ 22.95 ISBN 0553100343 Last modified May 28 01 Scott Adams Bring Me the Head of Willy the Mail Boy Yet another right-on-target collection of comic strips from "Dilbert," the world-renowned fictional cubicle worker of engineer-turned-cartoonist Scott Adams. Rarely is there an office these days that doesn't have at least oneDilbert strip tacked up somewhere that employees gather to either laugh off or lament the sometimes inane practices of top-level management. Think you're surrounded by morons at work? Dilbert, and his canine companion Dogbert, are the consultants you should visit next. Paperback,128pp. Andrews & McMeel, March 1995 humor, cartoons US$ 8.95 ISBN 0836217799 Last modified May 27 01 Carl Sagan Broca's Brain: Reflections on the Romance of Science Hardcover April 1979 Biology, history, essays US $12.95 ISBN 0394501691 Last modified Dec 9 00 Lois McMaster Bujold Brothers in Arms Paperback,352pp. Baen Books, September 1989 Miles Vorkosigan series. US$ 5.99 ISBN 0671697994 Last modified May 1 01 Norman Spinrad Bug Jack Barron Mass Market Paperback,368pp. Bantam Books, Incorporated, June 1992 US $5.99 ISBN 0553297953 Last modified May 16 01 Scott Adams Build a Better Life by Stealing Office Supplies: Dogbert's Big Book of Business From Scott Adams, creator of the incredibly popular "Dilbert" cartoon series, comes a book of savvy, spiteful, and hilarious cartoons and essays from the point of view of Dilbert's canine counterpart, the tyrannical Dogbert. The dog will have no part of the grind that cubicle-dwellers put up with out of fear of being singled out for downsizing; instead, Dogbert offers techniques designed to take full advantage of clueless employers and strike back at the company for its moronic practices. Paperback, 112pp. Andrews & McMeel, April 1994 humor, cartoons US$ 7.95 ISBN 0836217578 Last modified Dec 9 00 Stephen Jay Gould Bully for Brontosaurus: Reflections in Natural History The many fans who have come to expect a uniquely broad range of subject and elegant, discerning prose from Stephen Jay Gould will be delighted with this new collection, which the author considers by far his best. These essays record a sixty-year battle against creationism, the bicentennial of the French Revolution, the triumph of Voyager's fly-by of Neptune, and other wonders of the world. Drawings. Hardcover, 1st ed., 540pp. Norton,Ww, April 1991 Biology, natural history US$ 22.95 ISBN 0393029611 Last modified Dec 9 00 Jonathan Bines Andrew Sullivan,Jacob Weisberg Bushisms: The Unedited, Unexpuragated George Bush Paperback,87pp. Workman Publishing Company, Inc., May 1992 humor, politics US$ 4.95 ISBN 1563053187 Last modified May 26 01 Gary B. Trudeau But the Pension Fund Was Just Sitting There Paperback,128pp. Henry Holt & Company, Incorporated, March 1979 humor, cartoons US $5.95 ISBN 0030491762 Last modified May 27 01 Pierre-Henri Cousin COLLINS FRENCH-ENG/ENG-FRENCH DICTIONARY Berkley, 1983 Dictionary US$ 2.95 ISBN 0425054497 Last modified Dec 9 00 Texas Instruments Calculator Decision-Making Soursebook 2nd ed. US $6.95 ISBN 10411293 Last modified Nov 27 00 Abe Mizrahi Calculus & Analytic Geometry Textbook, 6th ed. January 1986 Math US $50.00 ISBN 0534054544 Last modified Nov 27 00 Douglas F. Riddle Calculus & Analytic Geometry Hardcover Textbook January 1979 Math ISBN 0534006264 Last modified Nov 27 00 Larry Niven Steven Barnes The California Voodoo Game (Dream Park #3) The third and most dazzling adventure in the hugely succesful Dream Park series, in which people match wits in spectacular, live fantasy role-playin g games. Making or breaking gaming careers, the California Voodoo Game is the greatest challenge of them all. No matter what, the Game must go on . . . even if one of the players is a murderer. Mass Market Paperback, 352pp. Ballantine Books, Inc., December 1992 US$ 5.99 ISBN 0345381483 Last modified Nov 24 00 Gary B. Trudeau Garry B. Trudeau Call Me when You Find America Paperback,128pp. Henry Holt & Company, Incorporated, October 1973 humor, cartoons 2 copies. US $1.50 ISBN 0030110319 Last modified May 27 01 Garry B. Trudeau Calling Dr. Whoopee Paperback January 1987 humor, cartoons US $5.95 ISBN 0805006427 Last modified May 27 01 Bill Watterson The Calvin and Hobbes: Tenth Anniversary Book In November 1985, the magic of Calvin and Hobbes first appeared on the funny pages, introducing the world to a wondrous pair of friends. To celebrate the tenth anniversary of this distinguished partnership between a six-year-old boy and his (sometimes) stuffed tiger, Watterson has prepared a special book, which shares his thoughts on cartooning and is illustrated throughout with black-and-white and color cartoons. Paperback,10th ed.,208pp. Andrews & McMeel, September 1995 humor, cartoons US$ 14.95 ISBN 0836204387 Last modified May 28 01 Katherine Kurtz Camber of Culdi (Legends of Camber #1) This is Volume I in the Legends of Camber of Culdi, the greatest of all the magical Deryni. Mass Market Paperback Ballantine Books, Inc., May 1976 #1 Camber series. US$ 2.95 ISBN 0345312961 Last modified May 28 01 Katherine Kurtz Camber the Heretic (Legends of Camber #3) Mass Market Paperback Ballantine Books, Inc., August 1981 #3 Camber series. US$ 2.95 ISBN 0345277848 Last modified May 28 01 Walter M. Miller, Jr. A Canticle for Leibowitz Bantam Books US $1.25 ISBN 0553068831 Last modified Nov 19 00 Terry Pratchett Carpe Jugulum:A Novel of Discworld Hardcover,1st ed.,304pp. HarperCollins Publishers, Incorporated, August 1999 Discworld series. US$ 24.00 ISBN 0061051586 Last modified May 5 01 Scott Adams Casual Day Has Gone Too Far Dilbert--the world's fastest growing comic strip, read by 60 million fans in 32 countries--deals with the frustrations of everyday corporate life, as the title character struggles to maintain his identity and happiness in a world where attacks can come from everyone from his boss down to his dog. 128 pp. Web site promo. 400,000 print. Paperback,128pp. United Feature Syndicate, Inc., March 1997 humor, cartoons US$ 9.95 ISBN 0836228995 Last modified May 27 01 Sheldon L. Gerstenfeld The Cat Care Book:All You Need to Know to Keep Your Cat Healthy and Happy Paperback,2nd ed.,280pp. Perseus Publishing, June 1989 cats, medicine US$ 1J.95 ISBN 0201095696 Last modified May 5 01 Robert Adams A Cat of Silvery Hue Mass Market Paperback Signet, August 1979 #4 Horseclans series. A bit battered. US $1.75 ISBN 045188360 Last modified Nov 26 00 Robert A. Heinlein The Cat Who Could Walk Through Walls:A Comedy of Manners Mass Market Paperback,400pp. Berkley Publishing Group, October 1986 US$ 3.95 ISBN 0425093328 Last modified May 2 01 John Brunner Catch a Falling Star Paperback January 1982 US$ 2.75 ISBN 0345306813 Last modified May 21 01 Catherine Asaro Catch the Lightning Hardcover,1st ed.,352pp. Tom Doherty Associates, Inc., November 1996 US$ 24.95 ISBN 0312860439 Last modified May 26 01 Carl Jensen Jessica Mitford,(Introduction) Censored: The News That Didn't Make the News: The Project Censored Yearbook Author Carl Jensen has been called "the Ralph Nader of the media" for his annual list of the year's most underreported stories. Each year, Jensen and his 40 watchdogs, called Project Censored, find the top 25 stories conspicuously missing from mainstream media. This book contains all those stories, now fully reported. 20 line drawings. Paperback, 318pp. Four Walls Eight Windows, March 1994 censorship US$ 14.95 ISBN 1568580126 Last modified Dec 9 00 Carl Jensen Project Censored Staff, cartoons by Tom Tomorrow Censored: The News that didn't Make the News and Why Paperback, 356pp. Seven Stories Press, March 1996 censorship US$ 14.95 ISBN 1888363010 Last modified Dec 8 00 Damon Knight, ed. A Century of Great Short Science Fiction Novels Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde by Robert Louis Stevenson, The Invisible Man by H.G. Wells, The Absolute at Large by Karel Capek, Gulf by Robert A. Heinlein, E for Effort by T.L. Sherred Hunter, Come Home by Richard McKenna Dell Publishing 1158 short stories US $.75 ISBN 0123000077 Last modified May 16 01 Robert Adams Champion of the Last Battle Sigent. May, 1983 #11 Horseclans series. US$ 2.50 ISBN 0451122852 Last modified Nov 26 00 C.J. J. Cherryh Chanur's Homecoming (Chanur #4) Mass Market Paperback, 400pp. D A W Books, Incorporated, January, 1987 #4 Chanur series. ISBN 0886771773 Last modified Nov 27 00 C. J. Cherryh (Illustrator),Michael Whelan,(Illustrator) Chanur's Legacy (Chanur #5) In this intrigue- and adventure-packed work, Cherryh takes readers back to Compact space, home territory of the advanced catlike race the hani. Here is the story of the next generation of hani and specifically of Hilfy, the new captain of the spaceship Chanur's Legacy. First time in paperback. Hardcover,320pp. D A W Books, Incorporated, July 1992 #5 Chanur series. ISBN 0886775191 Last modified May 26 01 James Gleick Chaos: the Making of a New Science Paperback, 317pp. Viking Penguin, November 1988 Math, history, science US $11.95 ISBN 0140092501 Last modified Nov 28 00 Garry B. Trudeau Check Your Egos at the Door Paperback January 1985 humor, cartoons US $5.95 ISBN 0030056276 Last modified May 27 01 William L. Jolly Chemistry of the Non-metals Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, Inc. (1966) Chemistry ISBN 0123000018 Last modified Nov 28 00 Edgar Rice Burroughs Chessmen Of Mars , John Carter series. US $1.25 ISBN 0345235827 Last modified May 28 01 Norman Spinrad Child of Fortune Paperback January 1986 US$ 4.50 ISBN 0553256904 Last modified May 16 01 Frank Herbert Children of Dune Berkley, 1976 #3 Dune series. 2 copies. US$ 1.95 ISBN 0425033104 Last modified May 28 01 Jack L. Chalker Children of Flux & Anchor (Soul Rider #5) Mass Market Paperback,352pp. Doherty, Tom Associates, LLC, August 1986 #5 Soul Rider series. US$ 3.50 ISBN 0812532864 Last modified May 21 01 Kate Wilhelm Children of the Wind Paperback St. Martin's Press, Inc., January 1991 short stories US$ 8.95 ISBN 0312054009 Last modified May 28 01 Jerry Pournelle With,S. M. Stirling The Children's Hour The fastest way to get ahead in Kzin society is to cut through the endless challenges and duels to the death--and take on your father. But Chuut-Riit, Planetary Governor of occupied planet Wunderland, is teaching his kits a new way--the way of the humans. And the humans don't like it, at all. Expanded from parts of Man-Kzin Wars II and Man-Kzin Wars III. Mass Market Paperback Baen Books, October 1991 Man-Kzin wars series US$ 4.99 ISBN 0671720899 Last modified May 1 01 J. H. Haynes Robert Maddox,Larry Warren Chrysler Mid-Size Front Wheel Drive: Paperback, 320pp. Haynes Publications Inc, November 1994 Auto repair ISBN 1563921960 Last modified Nov 27 00 James Blish Cities in Flight, Vol. 1 Paperback January 1991 US$ 4.50 ISBN 0671720503 Last modified Nov 24 00 Ben Bova Performed by,Harlan Ellison City of Darkness (2 Cassettes) y Audio,3pp. New Star Media, Incorporated, May 1998 Audio cassette. US$ 18.00 ISBN 0787117269 Last modified May 1 01 Lois McMaster Bujold A Civil Campaign Hardcover,405pp. Simon & Schuster Trade, August 1999 Miles Vorkosigan series. US$ 24.00 ISBN 0671578278 Last modified May 2 01 A. N. Roquelaure Anne Rice The Claiming of Sleeping Beauty Paperback,272pp. Dutton/Plume, January 1991 #1 Sleeping beuty series. I have a different cover. US $10.00 ISBN 0452266564 Last modified May 28 01 Robert Adams Clans of the Cats Paperback Signet. June, 1988 #18 Horseclans series. US$ 3.50 ISBN 0451152298 Last modified Nov 26 00 Berke Breathed Breathed Classics of Western Literature A retrospective of the Bloom County comic strip from 1986 until its conclusion in 1989. One of the most beloved and avidly read comic strips of all time, Bloom County not only became a part of, but helped define, the popular culture of a decade. This collection is destined to become a classic. Paperback,1st ed.,250pp. Little, Brown & Company, August 1990 humor, cartoons US $12.95 ISBN 0316107549 Last modified May 27 01 Richard Dawkins Climbing Mount Improbable The metaphor of Mount Improbable represents the combination of perfection and improbability, which is epitomized in the seemingly "designed" perfection of living things. In this book, Dawkins skillfully guides the reader on a breathtaking journey through the mountain's passes and up its many peaks to demonstrate that following the improbable path to perfection takes time. of photos. 120 illustrations. Hardcover, 288pp. Norton,Ww, August 1996 Biology, evolution ISBN 0393039307 Last modified May 5 01 Paul Slansky The Clothes Have No Emperor: A Chronicle of the American 80s Paperback January 1989 humor I'm still afraid. US$ 12.95 ISBN 0671673394 Last modified May 27 01 James P. Hogan John Berky,(Artist) Code of the Lifemaker The classic hard SF adventure from the author of the acclaimed "Giants" novels. Arriving for the first time on Saturn's moon Titan, humans discover a race of robot-like beings of mysterious origin--and are soon at odds over enslaving the creatures or coexisting peacefully with them. Reissue. Mass Market Paperback,405pp. Ballantine Books, Inc., March 1984 I have a different cover. US$ 2.95 ISBN 0345305493 Last modified May 5 01 Charles Sheffield Cold as Ice This hard science fiction novel opens 25 years after the great war between the Inner Planets (Earth and Mars) and the millions who had colonized the asteroid belt and the moons of Jupiter. Nine billion people were killed by the terrible weapons created and used. The rivalries that lead to the war are not gone--and a few of those deadly weapons remain. . . . Mass Market Paperback,384pp. Doherty, Tom Associates, LLC, May 1993 Great! US$ 4.99 ISBN 0812511638 Last modified May 28 01 Charles Sheffield Cold as Ice NY Tom Doherty Assoc. 1992 Great! ISBN 0123000107 Last modified May 26 01 Jack Cohen Ian Stewart The Collapse of Chaos: Discovering Simplicity in a Complex World The first half of this book is a witty primer, a guided tour of the Islands of Truth that maps out everything you need to know about science from Newton to the present. The second half dives into the Oceans of Ignorance that surround what is known. Filled with anecdotes, diagrams, and colorful everyday examples, it is certain to make people look at the world in a new way. Paperback,482pp. Viking Penguin, March 1995 science, math, choas US $13.95 ISBN 0140178740 Last modified Dec 4 01 Harlan Ellison Jill Bauman,(Illustrator) The Collected Ellison:The City on the Edge of Forever, Vol. 1 Hardcover,399pp. White Wolf, Incorporated, April 1996 short stories US$ 21.99 ISBN 1565049608 Last modified May 8 01 James Tiptree Michael Bishop Color of Neanderthal Eyes / Strange at Ecbatan the Trees (double) Paperback Doherty, Tom Associates, LLC, March 1991 Double book. US$ 3.50 ISBN 0812559649 Last modified May 15 01 Terry Pratchett The Colour of Magic Mass Market Paperback,240pp. HarperCollins Publishers, Incorporated, January 2000 Diskworld series. US $3.99 ISBN 0061020710 Last modified Dec 3 01 Robert Adams The Coming of the Horseclans Paperback Reissue edition (July 1982) Signet. July, 1982 #1 GHorseclans series. US$ 2.75 ISBN 0451131428 Last modified Nov 26 00 Robert Adams The Coming of the Horseclans After 200 yrs. of searching for other immortals, the Undying High Lord Milo Morai has returned to the Horseclans to fulfill an ancient prophecy & lead them to their destined homeland by the sea. But in their path wait the armed might of the Ehleenee & an enemy even more treacherous--the Witchmen. The Witchmen--preHolocaust scientists who have survived the centuries by stealing other men's bodies to house their evil minds & who have in their hidden stronghold the means of destroying all who will not beome their willing slaves. Can even Milo save the Horseclans from the bloodthirsty Ehleenee & the malevolent Witchmen who would rip him to shreds to discover his secret of immortality? c1975, 1982, 200 pgs. New York: Signet Book, New American Library, 1982 Paperback #1 Horseclans series. US$ 2.50 ISBN 0451116526 Last modified May 2 01 Robert Adams The Coming of the Horseclans Pinnacle Books. Jun, 1980. Horseclans series. US$1.95 ISBN 0523409192 Last modified Nov 26 00 Noam Chomsky As Told to David Barsamian The Common Good Paperback, 1st ed., 192pp. Odonian Press, October 1997 Politics, history US $12.00 ISBN 1878825089 Last modified Dec 3 01 Wiliam Shakespeare Introduction by Sir Ernest Barker The Complete Plays of William Shakespeare Chatham River Press, 1984 plays ISBN 051743623X Last modified May 16 01 Ruel Vance Churchill With,James W. Brown Complex Variables and Applications Textbook Hardcover, 5th ed., 36 McGraw-Hill Companies, The, November 1990 Math US $48.25 ISBN 0070109052 Last modified Oct 5 00 Robert E. Howard Conan #08: Usurper Mass Market Paperback Berkley Publishing Group, July 1984 Conan series. US$ 2.75 ISBN 0441114598 Last modified May 28 01 Robert E. Howard L. Sprague de Camp Conan #08 the Usurper Mass Market Paperback Berkley Publishing Group, January 1981 Conan series. US $2.25 ISBN 044111637X Last modified May 28 01 Robert E. Howard With L. Sprague de Camp Conan The Adventurer Lancer Books #75-102, 1966 Conan series. US $.95 ISBN 0123000129 Last modified May 28 01 L. Sprague & Carter DeCamp Lin Conan of Aquilonia Ace, 1977 Mass Market Paperback Conan series. US $1.95 ISBN 0441116825 Last modified May 28 01 L. Sprague De Camp Conan the Barbarian Paperback January 1982 Conan series. US$ 2.50 ISBN 0553225448 Last modified May 28 01 L. Sprague & Carter DeCamp Lynn Conan the Buccaneer #6 Ace Mass Market Paperback Conan series. US $1.95 ISBN 0441116760 Last modified May 28 01 L. Sprague deCamp Lin Carter Conan the Buccaneer N Lancer 1971 Signed by Lin Carter US $.95 ISBN 0447751816 Last modified May 28 01 Robert E Howard with L. Sprague de Camp and Lin Carter Conan of Cimmeria Lancer 75072, 1969 Conan series. US $.95 ISBN 0447750720 Last modified May 28 01 Robert E. Howard L. Sprague de Camp, ed. Conan the Conqueror Lancer 73-572, 1967 Conan series. US $.60 ISBN 0123000130 Last modified May 28 01 L. Sprague De Camp Lin Carter Conan of the Isles Lancer, 1968 Signed by Lin Carter US $.95 ISBN 0447751360 Last modified May 28 01 L. Sprague De Camp Conan the Liberator, No. 2 Paperback January 1979 Conan series. 2 copies. US $1.95 ISBN 0553127063 Last modified May 28 01 Robert E. Howard L. Sprague De Camp, Lin Carter Conan the Wanderer New York: Ace Mass Market Paperback Conan series. US $1.95 ISBN 0441116744 Last modified May 28 01 Keith Whittles Concise Dictionary Of Biology HARDCOVER Tiger Books,1993 Dictionary UK $6.99 ISBN 1855013665 Last modified Dec 9 00 Gary B. Trudeau Confirmed Bachelors Are Just so Fascinating Mass Market Paperback,128pp. Fawcett Book Group, July 1984 humor, politics US $2.25 ISBN 0449202003 Last modified May 26 01 Rich Binsacca John M. Rickard,(Photographer) Container Gardening:Creating Style and Beauty with Containers Paperback,128pp. Creative Publishing International, November 1999 gardening US $14.95 ISBN 0865734437 Last modified May 5 01 Michael Moorcock The Cornelius Chronicles Vol. III Mass Market Paperback,272pp. Ace Books, November 1987 US$ 3.50 ISBN 0441166105 Last modified May 28 01 Amit Goswami Maggie Goswami Cosmic Dancers: Exploring the Physics of Science Fiction Hardcover, 288pp. HarperTrade, January 1983 Science, physics ISBN 0060150831 Last modified Dec 4 00 Clifford D. Simak Cosmic Engineers 4th printing Paper Back Library, 1970 US $.60 ISBN 0123000050 Last modified May 15 01 R. S. Morland A Course in Higher National Certificate Mathematics 2nd ed. London, 1969 math ISBN 0340051604 Last modified May 26 01 Reginald Bretnor (Editor) Craft of Science Fiction Mass Market Paperback HarperCollins Publishers, Incorporated, August 1986 writing US $3.95 ISBN 0064634574 Last modified May 28 01 Penn Jillette Teller Cruel Tricks for Dear Friends Penn & Teller impart their priceless secrets for conning, scamming and fooling your closest personal friends. Paperback,1st ed.,203pp. Random House, Incorporated, June 1989 humor,magic US$ 19.95 ISBN 0394753518 Last modified May 12 01 Bruce Sterling Crystal Express Mass Market Paperback Ace Books, November 1990 short stories US$ 4.50 ISBN 0441124232 Last modified May 2 01 Isaac Asimov The Currents of Space Doubleday, New York, 1953 US $1.25 ISBN 044902495 Last modified Dec 8 00 Victor Milan The Cybernetic Samurai Mass Market Paperback, 352pp. Ace Books, November 1986 US$ 3.50 ISBN 0441132340 Last modified Nov 19 00 Hal Clement Cycle of Fire Ballantine Books 1975 US $1.50 ISBN 0345243684 Last modified Dec 6 00 Ursula K. Le Guin Dancing at the Edge of the World:Thoughts on Words, Women, Places Hardcover,320pp. Grove/Atlantic, Inc., January 1989 essays ISBN 080211105X Last modified Dec 3 01 Harlan Ellison Dangerous Visions #1 Berkley Medallion. May, 1969 US $0.95 ISBN 0123000006 Last modified Nov 27 00 Harlan Ellison, ed. Dangerous Visions New York: Doubleday, 1967 short stories ISBN 0123000124 Last modified May 28 01 Harlan Ellison, Ed. Dangerous Visions #3 Berkeley. July, 1969 Short stories. Many authors. 2 copies. US $0.95 ISBN 0123000008 Last modified Nov 27 00 Garry B. Trudeau Dare to Be Great, Ms. Caucus Paperback January 1975 humor, cartoons US $5.25 ISBN 0030138663 Last modified May 27 01 Mike Resnick The Dark Lady Mass Market Paperback,288pp. Doherty, Tom Associates, LLC, October 1987 US$ 3.50 ISBN 0812551168 Last modified May 2 01 Marion Zimmer Bradley Darkover Landfall (The Foundling), Vol. 0 Mass Market Paperback, 160pp. D A W Books, Incorporated, May 1976 US$ 3.95 ISBN 0886772346 Last modified Oct 4 00 Glen Cook Darkwar Trilogy, No. 3 Paperback January 1986 #3 Darkwar series. US$ 3.50 ISBN 0445200316 Last modified May 28 01 Wendy Northcutt The Darwin Awards:Evolution in Action Hardcover,256pp. Dutton, October 2000 humor US$ 16.95 ISBN 0525945725 Last modified May 5 01 Daniel Clement Dennett Darwin's Dangerous Idea:Evolution and the Meanings of Life In a beautifully written tour de force, the author of Consciousness Explained demonstrates the power of the theory of natural selection and shows how Darwin's great idea transforms and illuminates our traditional view of our place in the universe. 40 line drawings. Paperback,586pp. Simon & Schuster Trade Paperbacks, May 1996 science, evolution US$ 16.00 ISBN 068482471X Last modified May 10 01 Greg Bear Darwin's Radio Hardcover, 1st ed., 430pp. Ballantine Books, Inc., September 1999 US $24.00 ISBN 034542333X Last modified Dec 4 00 Frederik Pohl The Day the Martians Came Henry Steegman is hardly "Mr. Personality" aboard the Mars-bound Algonquin 9. Yet it is he who bungles upon the spectacular Macy's-like city beneath the Red Planet's crust. For better or worse, the name Steegman will be immortalized by a discovery that will transform millions of lives. Mass Market Paperback St. Martin's Press, Inc., November 1989 US $3.95 ISBN 0312917813 Last modified Dec 4 01 Andre Norton Daybreak 2250 A.D. Original Title: Starman's Son New York: Ace, 1952 ISBN 0123000128 Last modified May 28 01 David Gerrold Day for Damnation (War Against the Chtorr #2), Vol. 2 McCarthy was drafted from his college biology studies and became a member of the Special Forces. Then he is given the opportunity to contact the Chtorr, but when a helicopter crash leaves him and his companions stranded in enemy territory, he must decide whether to communicate with the Chtorr--or kill them! Mass Market Paperback, 1st ed., 448pp. Bantam Books, Incorporated, March 1989 #2 War Against the Chtorr series. I have a different cover. Complete and uncut edition. US$ 4.50 ISBN 0553277650 Last modified Nov 27 00 Harlan Ellison The Deadly Streets Paperback, 208pp. Ace Books, September, 1983 US$ 2.95 ISBN 0441142184 Last modified Nov 27 00 Harlan Ellison Death Bird Stories Paperback First Collier Books Edition, January 1990 Short stories US $4.95 ISBN 002028361X Last modified Nov 27 00 Robert Adams The Death of a Legend Paperback Signet. November, 1981. #8 Horseclans series. US $2.50 ISBN 0451111265 Last modified Nov 26 00 Gary B. Trudeau Death of a Party Animal Paperback,128pp. Henry Holt & Company, Incorporated, August 1986 humor, cartoons US $5.95 ISBN 0805000739 Last modified May 27 01 Harlan Ellison Deathbird Stories Dell. September, 1976. Short stories I have a different cover. ISBN 0123000005 Last modified Nov 27 00 Vernor Vinge A Deepness in the Sky Hardcover,606pp. Doherty, Tom Associates, LLC, February 1999 US$ 27.95 ISBN 0312856830 Last modified May 2 01 Erica L. Rothstein, ed. Magazine Editors Dell,Dell Magazine The Dell Book of Logic Problems #5, Vol. 5 Dell's new volume of never-before-published puzzles goes beyond the typical requirements for brain-teasing fun. Paperback, 1st ed., 176pp. Dell Publishing Company, Incorporated, October 1992 Puzzles US$ 9.99 ISBN 0440502985 Last modified Dec 9 00 John Varley Demon (Gaia Trilogy #3) Mass Market Paperback,480pp. Berkley Publishing Group, August 1985 #3 Gaia series. US$ 3.50 ISBN 0425082717 Last modified May 15 01 Carl Sagan The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark Are we on the brink of a new Dark Age of irrationality and superstition? In this stirring, brilliantly argued book, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Dragons of Eden and Cosmos shows how scientific thinking can cut through prejudice and hysteria and uncover the truth, and how it is necessary to safeguard our democratic institutions and our technical civilization. Hardcover, 457pp. Random House, Incorporated, December 1995 Science US $25.95 ISBN 039453512X Last modified Dec 6 00 Katherine Kurtz Deryni Checkmate (Chronicles of the Deryni #2) Mass Market Paperback Ballantine Books, Inc., July 1975 #2 Deryni series. US$ 2.95 ISBN 0345317912 Last modified May 28 01 Katherine Kurtz Deryni Checkmate - Vol 2 of the Chronicles of the Deryni Volume 2 of the Chronicles of Deryni. 302 pp New York, NY: Ballantine/Fantasy, 1974 Mass Market Paperback #2 Deryni series. US $1.50 ISBN 0345244966 Last modified May 28 01 Katherine Kurtz Deryni Rising (Chronicles of the Deryni #1) Mass Market Paperback Ballantine Books, Inc., March 1975 #1 Deryni series. US$ 2.95 ISBN 0345319877 Last modified May 28 01 Larry Niven Steven Barnes The Descent of Anansi Tor 1982; 1st prt; g Softcover US$ 2.95 ISBN 0523485425 Last modified Nov 25 00 Elaine Morgan The Descent of the Child: Human Evolution from a New Perspective Hardcover,1st ed.,197pp. Oxford University Press, Incorporated, February 1995 science, biology, evolution US $19.95 ISBN 0195098951 Last modified May 16 01 Ian MacDonald Desolation Road Mass Market Paperback,368pp. Bantam Books, Incorporated, January 1988 US$ 3.95 ISBN 0553270575 Last modified May 5 01 Frank Herbert Destination: Void revised ed. Berkley Books, 1978 US $1.95 ISBN 0425039226 Last modified May 28 01 Larry Niven Destiny's Road Almost 250 years ago the Starcruiser Argos reached the planet Destiny with a payload of interstellar pioneers. In the first tumultuous years on Destiny, two events changed forever the lives and futures of these colonists: the desertion of the Argos, an event that severed all hope of ever contacting Earth, and the disappearance of its fusion-powered landing craft, the Cavorite. For the settlers of Spiral Town, the largest known remaining colony, Cavorite is a name that conjures awe and wonder still, for its final voyage left behind a dominant and lasting mark on the planet's surface and a key to their survival: the Road. Wide and smooth, it was seared into a flow of molten lava by the fusion drive of the Cavorite as the landing craft hovered a meter above the planet's rocky surface. Some say the Road crosses the whole planet. Others are sure the Cavorite exploded or the crew was killed by undiscovered Destiny creatures. No settler who has gone down the Road has ever returned. For Jemmy Bloocher, a young farm boy, the questions burn too hot, he yearns to leave the mind-numbing work in his father's fields and follow the Road. The course of Jemmy's life is decided for him when he accidentally kills a caravan worker in a tavern fight. Leaving Spiral Town, he flees certain retribution, and his flight becomes a quest to discover what happened to the Cavorite and its crew - and uncover the many mysteries on Destiny's Road. 352 pp Tor Books, June 1997 US$ 24.95 ISBN 0312851227 Last modified May 8 01 George M. Malacinski, ed. Developmental Genetics of Higher Organisms: A Primer in Developmental Biology Hardcover January 1987 biology, developmental biology ISBN 0029487307 Last modified Jun 2 00 Neal Stephenson The Diamond Age Paperback,464pp. Bantam Books, Incorporated, May 2000 US$ 12.95 ISBN 0553380966 Last modified May 5 01 W. G. Hale J. P. Margham Dictionary of Biology Paperback, 569pp. Addison-Wesley Educational Publishers, Inc., December 1991 Dictionary US $13.00 ISBN 006501037X Last modified Dec 9 00 Tom Burnam Dictionary of Misinformation Hardcover, 302pp. HarperCollins Children's Books, January 1975 Dictionary, errors ISBN 0690001479 Last modified Dec 9 00 Martin Gardner Did Adam and Eve Have Navels?: Discourses on Reflexology, Numerology, Urine Therapy, and Other Dubious Subjects Hardcover,320pp. Norton, W. W. & Company, Inc., September 2000 science, skepticism, pseudoscience US$ 26.95 ISBN 0393049639 Last modified Jun 16 01 William Gibson Bruce Sterling The Difference Engine In 1855 London, a steam driven calculator heralds a new age of information as everything from fast food to credit cards turns the Victorian Era into a bizarre modern-day world. "Bursting with the kind of demented speculation and obsessive detailing that has made both Gibson's and Sterling's work stand out in the past."--San Francisco Chronicle. Paperback,429pp. Bantam Books, Incorporated, December 1991 US$ 5.99 ISBN 055329461X Last modified May 2 01 William Gibson Bruce Sterling The Difference Engine In 1855 London, a steam driven calculator heralds a new age of information as everything from fast food to credit cards turns the Victorian Era into a bizarre modern-day world. "Bursting with the kind of demented speculation and obsessive detailing that has made both Gibson's and Sterling's work stand out in the past."--San Francisco Chronicle. Hardcover, 448pp. Bantam Books, Incorporated, March 1991 US$ 19.95 ISBN 0553070282 Last modified Dec 4 00 Leonard Krishtalka Dinosaur Plots & Other Intrigues in Natural History Paperback April 1990 Science, Natural history US $8.95 ISBN 0380709988 Last modified Dec 8 00 Greg Bear Dinosaur Summer Mass Market Paperback, 389pp. Warner Books, Incorporated, January 1999 US $6.99 ISBN 0446606669 Last modified Dec 4 00 Douglas Adams Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency (Dirk Gently #1) Two wildly inventive novels by this superselling master of wit, zaniness, mystery, time-travel, and more. In these inspired stories detective Dirk Gently tries to solve the mysteries of the universe and the human soul. Includes Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency and The Long Dark Tea Time of Soul. Mass Market Paperback, 320pp. Pocket Books, April 1988 #1 Dirk Gently series. US $4.95 ISBN 0671692674 Last modified May 2 01 Ian Stewart Does God Play Dice?: Mathematicians and scientists have now discovered that systems obeying precise laws can behave in a random fashion. And perhaps Hardcover, 320pp. Blackwell Publishers, May 1989 Math, Science Ripped jacket. US $19.95 ISBN 0631168478 Last modified Nov 28 00 Garry B. Trudeau The Doonesbury Chronicles Paperback January 1995 humor, cartoons US $10.95 ISBN 0030152569 Last modified May 27 01 Gary B. Trudeau Doonesbury Deluxe: Selected Glances Askance In his fifth major Doonesbury anthology, Garry Trudeau gives us America in the '80s, from Star Wars and Iranscam to Rick and Joanie struggling with parenthood. With over 500 daily strips and 80 full-color Sunday pages, this is satire, and Doonesbury, at its best. Paperback,1st ed.,88pp. Henry Holt & Company, Incorporated, August 1987 humor, cartoons ISBN 080500596X Last modified May 27 01 Gary B. Trudeau Designed by Gloria Steinem Doonesbury Dossier: The Reagan Years Paperback,1st ed.,224pp. Henry Holt & Company, Incorporated, September 1984 humor, cartoons US $12.95 ISBN 0030000726 Last modified May 27 01 Gary B. Trudeau , G.B. Trudeau, Doonesbury Nation While millions of pilgrims flock to upstate New York for the 25th anniversary of Woodstock, Zonker flashes back to the original Paperback, 96pp. Andrews & McMeel, June 1995 US$ 7.95 ISBN 0836217845 Last modified Oct 2 00 Garry Trudeau Music by Elizabeth Swados Doonesbury a New Musical Samuel French, Inc., 1986 humor, musical A play. ISBN 0573681082 Last modified May 27 01 Gary B. Trudeau Doonesbury: The Original Yale Cartoons Contains the first of Garry Trudeau's work that appeared as "Bull Tales" in the Yale Daily News. This work led to national syndication as "Doonesbury." Paperback,96pp. Andrews & McMeel, November 1973 humor, cartoons US $1.95 ISBN 0836205502 Last modified May 26 01 Garry B. Trudeau The Doonesbury Stamp Album, 1990 Paperback January 1990 humor, cartoons Stamps. US $8.95 ISBN 0140128093 Last modified May 27 01 G. B. Trudeau Doonesbury: Wouldn't A Gremlin Have Been More Sensible? FD. Bantam Books, 1976 Paperback humor, cartoons US $1.25 ISBN 0553027336 Last modified May 27 01 Gary B. Trudeau Doonesbury's Greatest Hits Paperback Harcourt Brace College Publishers, September 1978 humor, cartoons 2 copies. US $8.95 ISBN 0030448565 Last modified May 27 01 Roger Zelazny Doorways in the Sand Mass Market Paperback,192pp. Morrow,William & Co, November 1976 US $1.50 ISBN 0380009498 Last modified May 16 01 Gordon Rupert R. Dickson The Dorsai Companion Paperback,256pp. Ace Books, June 1986 Dorsai series. US$ 5.95 ISBN 0441160263 Last modified May 1 01 Frank Herbert The Dosadi Experiment NY: BERKLEY BOOKS, 1978 2 copies. US $2.25 ISBN 0425038343 Last modified May 28 01 James D. Watson The Double Helix Signet NAL, 1969 Science, history US $0.95 ISBN 0123000026 Last modified Dec 8 00 C. J. Cherryh Downbelow Station DAW, February, 1981. US$ 3.50 ISBN 0879979879 Last modified Nov 27 00 Michael Moore Downsize This!:Random Threats from an Unarmed American Paperback,317pp. HarperTrade, September 1997 politics US$ 12.00 ISBN 0060977337 Last modified May 2 01 Gary B. Trudeau Downtown Doonesbury Paperback Henry Holt & Company, Incorporated, February 1987 humor, cartoons US $5.95 ISBN 0805003541 Last modified May 27 01 Brian Wilson Aldiss Dracula Unbound Hardcover,196pp. HarperTrade, December 1990 US $18.95 ISBN 0060165936 Last modified May 10 01 Anne McCaffrey Dragondrums: The Harper Hall Trilogy, Part 3 (Dragonriders of Pern Series #6) When his boy soprano voice begins to change, Piemur is drafted by Masterharper Robinton to help with political work and is sent on missions that lead him into unusual and sometimes dangerous adventures. Mass Market Paperback Bantam Doubleday Dell Publishing Group, November 1979 #6 Pern series. US$ 2.95 ISBN 0553238159 Last modified May 28 01 Carl Sagan The Dragons of Eden: Speculations on the Evolution of Human Intelligence BALLANTINE, 1977 PAPERBACK science, evolution US $2.25 ISBN 0345260317 Last modified May 5 01 Anne McCaffrey Dragonsdawn (Dragonriders of Pern Series #9) Mass Market Paperback,367pp. Ballantine Books, Inc., August 1989 #3 Pern series. US$ 4.95 ISBN 0345362861 Last modified May 28 01 Glen Cook Dread Empire # 1 -- A Shadow of All Night Falling Mass Market Paperback First Berkley printing December 1979 #1 Dread Empire series US $1.95 ISBN 042504260X Last modified Dec 6 00 Janet Morris Dream Dancer February 1982 US$ 2.75 ISBN 042505232X Last modified Nov 19 00 Roger Zelazny The Dream Master Mass Market Paperback Ace US $.95 ISBN 0441167020 Last modified May 16 01 Larry Niven Steven Barnes Dream Park (Dream Park #1) Mass Market Paperback, 448pp. Ace Books, August 1989 cyberpunk US$ 3.95 ISBN 0441167306 Last modified Nov 19 00 Harlan Ellison Illustrated by Sam Raffa Dreams with Sharp Teeth "I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream", "Deathbird Stories", and "Shatterday". New York: Quality Paperback Book Club, 1991 short stories ISBN 0123000123 Last modified May 28 01 Samuel R. Delany Drift Glass Signet Q4834, 1971 short stories US $.95 ISBN 045148345 Last modified May 28 01 Tim Nyberg Jim Berg The Duct Tape Book Paperback Pfeifer-Hamilton Publishers, September 1994 humor US$ 6.95 ISBN 1570250421 Last modified May 26 01 Frank Herbert Dune Messiah Mass Market Paperback Berkley Publishing Group, May 1983 #2 Dune series. US$ 3.50 ISBN 0425064360 Last modified May 28 01 Harlan Ellison Earthman, Go Home! Paperback Library, Inc., 1962 US $0.60 ISBN 061053727 Last modified Nov 25 00 Thomas M. Disch Echo Round His Bones Berkley, 1967 US $0.60 ISBN 0123000010 Last modified Nov 27 00 Jack L. Chalker Echoes of the Well of Souls: A Well World Novel Paperback January 1993 #6 Well World series. US$ 10.00 ISBN 0345362012 Last modified May 28 01 Harlan Ellison Kay Reynolds, Ed. An Edge in My Voice Paperback,54th ed.,548pp. Donning Company Publishers, September 1986 essays US $10.95 ISBN 089865341X Last modified May 28 01 Harlan Ellison Jill Bauman The Edgeworks 3: The Harlan Ellison Hornbook & Harlan Ellison's Movie, Vol. 3 Hardcover White Wolf, Incorporated, April 1997 US$ 21.99 ISBN 1565049624 Last modified May 28 01 Harlan Ellison John K. Snyder III Edgeworks: The Collected Ellison, Vol. 4 Hardcover White Wolf, Incorporated, October 1997 US$ 21.99 ISBN 1565049632 Last modified May 28 01 Harlan Ellison John K. Snyder,III,(Illustrator) Edgeworks, Vol. 2 Hardcover,350pp. White Wolf, Incorporated, October 1996 short stories US$ 21.99 ISBN 1565049616 Last modified May 8 01 Stephen Jay Jay Gould Eight Little Piggies Reflections in Natural History Acclaimed science writer Gould explores continuity in relation to environmental deterioration and the potential massive extinction of the earth's species. The sixth volume in a series of essays begun in 1974 and first published in Natural History magazine. Author lectures. Hardcover, 479pp. Norton,Ww, December 1992 Biology, natural history 2 copies. US $22.95 ISBN 039303416X Last modified May 16 01 Sidney Harris Einstein Simplified:Cartoons on Science "What's so funny about science? Sidney Harris, that's what!"--Isaac Asimov Paperback Rutgers University Press, March 1989 humor, cartoons 3 copies. US $9.95 ISBN 081351410X Last modified May 27 01 H. Alex Romanowitz Electrical Fundamentals and Circuit Analysis New York, John Wiley & Sons 1966 electronics, physics, circuits ISBN 0123000111 Last modified May 26 01 Munir H. Nayfeh Morton K. Brussel Electricity and Magnetism Hardcover,619pp. Wiley, John & Sons, Incorporated, March 1985 phsics ISBN 047187681X Last modified May 26 01 Z. H. Meiksin Philip C. Thackray Electronic Design with off-the-Shelf Integrated Circuits Hardcover, 2nd ed., 448pp. Prentice Hall, January 1984 electronics Torn jacket ISBN 0132502917 Last modified Dec 9 00 Radio Shack Electronics Data Book 1st ed. 1972 Electronics US $1.25 ISBN 0123000012 Last modified Nov 27 00 Chung Laung Liu Elements of Discrete Mathematics 2nd ed Textbook Hardcover,2nd ed.,433pp. McGraw-Hill Higher Education, December 1985 computers, math, algorithms Great! ISBN 007038133X Last modified Jun 2 00 William Strunk Jr. E. B. White The Elements of Style 3rd edition , US $1.95 ISBN 0024182206 Last modified Nov 14 00 Harsen Ellison Ellison Wonderland ISBN 0123000003 Last modified Nov 26 00 Harlan Ellison Ellison Wonderland Signet. August, 1974 Short stories US $1.25 ISBN 0123000009 Last modified Nov 27 00 Michael Moorcock The Elric Saga Part I: Eric of Melnibone, The Sailor on the Seas of Fate, The Weird of the White Wolf Bookc Club Edition, Hardcover Nelson Doubleday, 1983 Elric series. ISBN 0123000047 Last modified May 10 01 Daniel Keys Moran Emerald Eyes Mass Market Paperback, 192pp. Bantam Books, Incorporated, July 1988 cyberpunk US$ 3.50 ISBN 0553273477 Last modified Nov 19 00 Jack L. Chalker Empires of Flux and Anchor (Soul Rider #2) Mass Market Paperback Doherty, Tom Associates, LLC, May 1984 #2 Soul Rider series. US$ 2.95 ISBN 0812532775 Last modified May 21 01 David Eddings Enchanters' End Game (The Belgariad #5), Vol. 5 Mass Market Paperback Ballantine Books, Inc., September 1984 #5 Belgariad series. US$ 3.50 ISBN 0345300785 Last modified May 28 01 Orson Scott Card Ender's Shadow Hardcover,5th ed.,379pp. , August 1999 Ender series. US$ 24.95 ISBN 031286860X Last modified May 5 01 Jerry Pournelle, ed. Endless Frontier, Vol. 1 Paperback,384pp. Ace Books, August 1979 space, future US$ 3.50 ISBN 0441206697 Last modified May 16 01 David J. McGill King Engineering Mechanics: Statics and an Introduction to Dynamics Hardcover PWS Publishing, April 1985 physics, mechanics ISBN 0534029299 Last modified May 26 01 Eric K. Drexler K. Eric Drexler,(Afterword),Foreword by,Marvin Minsky Engines of Creation:The coming era of nanotechnology Paperback,298pp. Doubleday & Company, Incorporated, September 1987 science, nanotechnology US$ 13.95 ISBN 0385199732 Last modified May 5 01 Barry N. Malzberg Engines of the Night: Science Fiction in the Eighties Hardcover January 1982 essays, writing, criticism US $10.95 ISBN 0385175418 Last modified May 28 01 English-Russion Dictionary (in Russian) 1975 dictionary ISBN 0123000135 Last modified Jun 2 00 Robert Zubrin Entering Space :Creating a Spacefaring Civilization Hardcover,305pp. Penguin Putnam Inc., August 1999 space US$ 24.95 ISBN 0874779758 Last modified May 8 01 Martin Gardner Entertaining Science Experiments with Everyday Objects Paperback,1st ed.,127pp. Dover Publications, Incorporated, October 1986 science, teaching US $2.95 ISBN 0486242013 Last modified May 5 01 Keith Laumer Envoy To New Worlds Ace 20730, 1963 US $.50 ISBN 0123000042 Last modified May 5 01 Terry Pratchett Equal Rites Mass Market Paperback,240pp. HarperCollins Publishers, Incorporated, January 2000 US $3.99 ISBN 0061020699 Last modified May 5 01 Mike Resnick Eros Ascending Paperback January 1984 US$ 2.95 ISBN 0451132556 Last modified Nov 19 00 Gary B. Trudeau An Especially Tricky People Relates the experiences of Uncle Duke when he becomes America's envoy to China and follows Virginia Slade's campaign for a Congressional seat from California. Paperback,128pp. Henry Holt & Company, Incorporated, April 1977 humor, cartoons US $5.25 ISBN 0030206812 Last modified May 27 01 Harlan Ellison Richard Delap,(Editor),Terry Dowling,(Editor) The Essential Ellison Paperback,2nd ed.,1017pp. Morpheus International, October 1991 short stories US $19.95 ISBN 0962344745 Last modified May 28 01 John Cohen Essential Lenny Bruce , humor US $1.50 ISBN 0345241487 Last modified May 26 01 M. C. Brown R. D. Keynes, W. G. Hopkins Essentials of Neural Development, 2nd Ed. Textbook Paperback, 1st ed., 200pp. Cambridge University Press, March 1991 Biology, development US $19.15 ISBN 052137698X Last modified Dec 9 00 C. J. Cherryh Exile's Gate (Gate #4), Vol. 0 Morgaine must meet her greatest challenge--Gault, who is both human and alien, and also seeks control of the world and its Gate Paperback, 414pp. D A W Books, Incorporated, December 1987 SF #4 Gate series. US$ 3.95 ISBN 0886772540 Last modified Nov 28 00 Marion Zimmer Bradley Exile's Song (Second Age #6) 1st ed., Hardcover,435pp. D A W Books, Incorporated, May 1996 Darkover series. US $21.95 ISBN 0886777054 Last modified May 8 01 Jack L. Chalker Exiles at the Well of Souls Ballantine, September 1978 Well of Souls series US $1.95 ISBN 0345277015 Last modified Dec 6 00 Jack L. Chalker Exiles at the Well of Souls (Well World #2) Mass Market Paperback Ballantine Books, Inc., June 1978 #2 Well World series US $2.95 ISBN 0345324374 Last modified Dec 6 00 Martin Caidin Exit Earth Paperback January 1987 US$ 4.50 ISBN 0671656309 Last modified May 5 01 Robert A. Heinlein Expanded Universe Mass Market Paperback Berkley Publishing Group, December 1981 short stories US$ 3.50 ISBN 0441218881 Last modified May 2 01 John M. Clark Robert L. Switzer Experimental Biochemistry 2d ed Textbook Paperback, 2nd ed., 335pp. W. H. Freeman Company, November 1990 biochemistry US $24.95 ISBN 0716701790 Last modified Dec 9 00 Michael P. Doyle William S. Mungall Experimental Organic Chemistry 1980 Chemistry ISBN 0471033839 Last modified Nov 28 00 Howard Shrobe, ed. American Association on Artificial Intel,(Editor) Exploring Artificial Intelligence: Paperback, 720pp. Morgan Kaufmann Publishers, November 1990 ISBN 0934613672 Last modified Nov 27 00 Charles Mackay Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds Paperback, 464pp. NTC Publishing Group, 1995 pseudo-science, history ISBN 1853263494 Last modified Dec 8 00 Frank Herbert Eyes of Heisenberg Mass Market Paperback Berkley Publishing Group, February 1984 US$ 2.50 ISBN 0425073149 Last modified May 28 01 C. J. Cherryh The Faded Sun: Shon'jir (#2) Mass Market Paperback,256pp. D A W Books, Incorporated, December 1990 #2 Faded Sun series. US$ 4.50 ISBN 0886774489 Last modified May 21 01 Martin Gardner Fads and Fallacies in the Name of Science. New York Dover Publications, Inc. 1957 Math, puzzles US $1.50 ISBN 486203948 Last modified Dec 8 00 Ray Bradbury Fahrenheit 451 First published in 1953, Fahrenheit 451 is a classic novel set in the future when books forbidden by a totalitarian regime are burned. The hero, a book burner, suddenly discovers that books are flesh and blood ideas that cry out silently when put to the torch. Mass Market Paperback Ballantine Books, Inc., July 1972 US$ 2.50 ISBN 0345320328 Last modified Nov 24 00 Robert Lindsey The Falcon And The Snowman Pocket, 1980 Mass Paperback fiction US $2.95 ISBN 0671411608 Last modified May 16 01 Jerry Pournelle Falkenberg's Legion Mass Market Paperback,432pp. Baen Publishing Enterprises, September 1990 Falkenberg series. US$ 4.95 ISBN 067172018X Last modified May 2 01 Dan Simmons The Fall of Hyperion In the continuation of the epic adventure begun in Hyperion, the far future is resplendent with drama and invention. On the world of Hyperion, the mysterious Time Tombs are opening. And the secrets they contain mean that nothing--nothing anywhere in the universe--will ever be the same. Reissue. Paperback,1st ed.,517pp. Bantam Books, Incorporated, January 1991 Hyperion series. US$ 6.50 ISBN 0553288202 Last modified May 2 01 Samuel R. Delany The Fall Of The Towers Trilogy in one book: "Out of the Dead city", "The Towers of Toron" 1964, "City of a Thousand Suns" 1966 Ace, 1966 US $1.95 ISBN 0441226426 Last modified May 28 01 Barry N Malzberg Falling Astronauts London: Arrow, 1975 Mass Market Paperback UK 40p ISBN 0099109506 Last modified Nov 24 00 Isaac Asimov Fantastic Voyage Four men and a woman are reduced to a microscopic fraction of their original size, sent in a miniaturized atomic sub through a dying man's carotid artery to destroy a blood clot in his brain. If they fail, the entire world will be doomed. Reissue. Mass Market Paperback, 192pp. Bantam Books, Incorporated, May 1976 US $3.50 ISBN 0553271512 Last modified Dec 8 00 Isaac Asimov Fantastic Voyage 2: Destination Brain Hardcover,332pp. Doubleday & Company, Incorporated, September 1987 #2 Voyage series. US$ 18.95 ISBN 0385239262 Last modified May 26 01 Jerry Pournelle, ed. Jim Baen, ed. Far Frontiers Baen 1985 space, science fiction US$ 2.95 ISBN 0671559354 Last modified Jun 2 00 Gary Larson The Far Side Collection of the syndicated cartoon panel "The Far Side." Paperback,104pp. Universal Press Syndicate, September 1982 humor, cartoons 2 copies. US $5.95 ISBN 0836212002 Last modified May 26 01 Gary Larson The Far Side Observer Collection of the syndicated cartoon panel "The Far Side." Paperback,104pp. Andrews & McMeel, October 1987 humor, cartoons US $5.95 ISBN 0836220986 Last modified May 26 01 James Gleick Faster: the Acceleration of Just About Everything Little, Brown, 30 September 1999 UK 16.99 ISBN 0316883352 Last modified Dec 3 01 Terry Pratchett Feet of Clay Hardcover,256pp. HarperCollins Publishers, Incorporated, September 1996 humor, fantasy Discworld series. US$ 20.00 ISBN 0061052507 Last modified May 26 01 J. R. R. Tolkien The Fellowship of the Ring (Lord of the Rings #1) Mass Market Paperback Ballantine Books, Inc., January 1981 Fantasy The Lord of the Rings series. Cover missing US $2.95 ISBN 0345296052 Last modified Nov 25 00 Paul Davies The Fifth Miracle:The Search for the Origin and Meaning of Life Paperback,304pp. Simon & Schuster Trade, February 2000 science, cosmology US$ 14.00 ISBN 068486309X Last modified May 10 01 Edgar Rice Burroughs Fighting Man Of Mars ,Ballantine 23584, 1964 John Carter series. US $1.25 ISBN 0345235843 Last modified May 28 01 George Alec Effinger A Fire in the Sun Paperback,304pp. Broadway Books, June 1989 US$ 6.95 ISBN 038526349X Last modified May 5 01 George A. Effinger A Fire in the Sun Paperback January 1990 US$ 3.95 ISBN 0553274074 Last modified May 5 01 Vernor Vinge A Fire Upon the Deep A rescue mission races against time to save a pair of children being held captive by a medieval lupine race, and recover the weapon that will keep the universe from being changed forever. Paperback,640pp. Doherty, Tom Associates, LLC, January 1993 US $5.99 ISBN 0812515285 Last modified May 15 01 Briggs, John, 1945- Fire in the crucible : the self-creation of creativity and genius 1st ed., xiii, 382 p. : ill ; 21 cm. Los Angeles : J.P. Tarcher ; New York : Distributed by St. Martin's Press, c1990. Genius. Creative ability. 153.3/5 20 Includes bibliographical references (p. 334-373) and index. BF412.B824 1990 1510107 US $6.99 ISBN 0874775477 Last modified Dec 8 00 C. J. Cherryh Fires of Azeroth (Gate #3) There was a star Gate in Azeroth marked by alien fires that Morgaine must seal. But Morgaine and Vanye have brought devastation to the peaceful land. For the hordes of Shiuan were on their heels, determined to conquer a new land for themselves and to avenge their lost planet. Mass Market Paperback Penguin USA, June 1979 #3 Gate series. US $1.95 ISBN 0879974664 Last modified May 21 01 Robert J. Wagman First Amendment Book Paperback January 1991 law, politics US$ 6.95 ISBN 088687517X Last modified Dec 9 00 Ursula K. Le Guin Michael Storrings,(Illustrator) A Fisherman of the Inland Sea The only SF writer to win the National Book Award, not to mention the Hugo, Nebula and World Fantasy awards, Ursula K. Le Guin has created a profound and transformational literature. These stories range from the everyday to the outer limits of experience, where the quantum uncertainties of space and time are resolved only in the depths of the human heart. Hardcover,191pp. HarperCollins Publishers, Incorporated, September 1994 US $19.99 ISBN 0061052000 Last modified May 26 01 Michael Guillen Five Equations That Changed the World: The Power and Poetry of Mathematics From the popular science editor of ABC's Good Morning America, this is the story behind five mathematical equations that have shaped the modern world. As told by Dr. Guillen, the stories behind the creation of these formulas are not only chronicles of science, but also gripping dramas of jealousy, fame, war, and discovery. Author media. Paperback, 1st ed., 266pp. Hyperion, May 1996 Math, Science, history US$ 12.95 ISBN 0786881879 Last modified Dec 4 00 Jack Vance The Five Gold Bands Paperback January 1980 US $1.95 ISBN 0879975180 Last modified May 15 01 Mack Reynolds The Five Way Secret Agent and Mercenary From Tomorrow 1969 US $1.25 ISBN 044124035 Last modified Nov 19 00 James Randi Introduction by Isaac Asimov Flim-Flam!: Psychics, ESP, Unicorns and other Delusions Brilliant expose of ESP, levitation, UFOlogy, dowsing, psychic detectives, psychic surgery, psychokinesis, and other so-called paranormal phenomena. Textbook Paperback, 1st ed., 358pp. Prometheus Books, August 1982 Pseudo-science ISBN 0879751983 Last modified Dec 6 00 Douglas R. Hofstadter Fluid Concepts and Creative Analogies:Computer Models of the Fundamental Mechanisms of Thought Since 1977, Hofstadter, the author of Godel, Escher, Bach, and his students have been developing computer models of discovery, creation, and analogical thought. What has emerged is a sophisticated and unorthodox vision of the mind in which perception, at an abstract level, is the key: perception of situations, of patterns, of patterns among patterns. This book conveys this bold vision to a broad public. Illustrations. Hardcover,518pp. Basic Books, February 1994 cs, artificial intelligence US $30.00 ISBN 0465051545 Last modified May 5 01 Marion Zimmer Bradley The Forbidden Tower (The First Age #4) Mass Market Paperback Penguin USA, August 1990 Darkover series. US$ 3.95 ISBN 0886770297 Last modified May 21 01 Thomas Hager Force of Nature: The Life of Linus Pauling In this thoroughly researched biography of one of the greatest American scientists of this century--the only person ever to win two unshared Nobel Prizes--Hager had the full cooperation of his subject, plus unrestricted access to Pauling's personal papers. of photos. Hardcover, 721pp. Simon & Schuster Trade, November 1995 biography US $35.00 ISBN 0684809095 Last modified Dec 9 00 John Brunner Foreign Constellations: The Fantastic Worlds of John Brunner Hardcover January 1980 US $8.95 ISBN 0896960943 Last modified May 26 01 Greg Bear The Forge of God Mass Market Paperback St. Martin's Press, Inc., June 1988 US$ 4.50 ISBN 0812531671 Last modified Nov 25 00 Isaac Asimov Forward the Foundation (Foundation Series #7) Hardcover,32pp. Doubleday & Company, Incorporated, September 1992 #7 Foundation series. US$ 23.50 ISBN 0385247931 Last modified May 28 01 Scott Weidensaul Fossil identifier 1992 fossils, archeology ISBN 1573353116 Last modified May 28 01 Isaac Asimov Foundation and Earth (Foundation Series #5) Mass Market Paperback, 512pp. Ballantine Books, Inc., September 1987 US$ 4.95 ISBN 0345339967 Last modified Nov 24 00 Isaac Asimov Foundation and Empire (Foundation Series) When the Empire sent an Imperial fleet toward the Foundation, the only hope lay in the prophecies of Hari Seldon. Paperback, 282pp. Bantam Books, Incorporated, November 1991 Foundation series US $6.99 ISBN 0553293370 Last modified Nov 27 00 Gregory Benford Isaac Asimov Foundation's Fear (The Second Foundation Trilogy #1) Hardcover,400pp. HarperCollins Publishers, Incorporated, March 1997 #1 Second Foundation Trilogy series. US$ 23.00 ISBN 0061052434 Last modified May 26 01 Frank Herbert Four Complete Novels: Whipping Star / The Dosadi Experiment / Soulcatcher / The Santaroga Barrier ISBN 0517403013 Last modified May 22 01 Marion Zimmer Bradley Free Amazons of Darkover ISBN 0886770963 Last modified Nov 28 00 Robert Adams Friends of the Horseclans Paperback April, 1987 Horseclans series. US$ 3.50 ISBN 0451147898 Last modified Nov 27 00 Harlan Ellison Illustrated by The Dillons From The Land Of Fear Paperback. 1st Edition Belmont B60-069, 1967 short stories US $.60 ISBN B06069 Last modified May 5 01 Martin Gardner From Penrose Tiles to Trapdoor Ciphers Hardcover W. H. Freeman Company, October 1988 MAth, puzzles US $19.95 ISBN 071671986X Last modified Dec 8 00 Ian Fleming From Russia With Love Mass Market Paperback Signet 1957 fiction James Bond series. US $.60 ISBN 0123000075 Last modified May 16 01 Scott Adams Fugitive From the Cubicle Police: A Dilbert Book Are you a cubicle-dweller? Fed up with the often asinine practices of management and the useless buzzwords and fluff that seem to float around the office? Ever plotted a revolt at the fax machine? A revolution orchestrated over e-mail? Scott Adams' "Dilbert" character has, along with his army of counterparts, and for it he has been hailed as "the hero of the workplace." This collection of cartoons acutely collars the clueless practices of office superiors who all too often have no idea what's going on. Paperback,224pp. Andrews & McMeel, September 1996 humor, cartoons US$ 1J.95 ISBN 0836221192 Last modified May 27 01 Roger R. Bate Donald D. Mueller, Jerry E. White Fundamentals of Astrodynamics Paperback, 448pp. Dover Publications, Incorporated, December 1977 Space, Math, Physics 2 copies. US $7.95 ISBN 0486600610 Last modified May 16 01 Bernard Rosner Fundamentals of Biostatistics Includes case study on lead exposure in children/outlier detection techniques/one-way ANOVA random effects model/etc. Paperback,2nd ed.,584pp. PWS Publishing, March 1986 math, statistics ISBN 0871509814 Last modified May 16 01 Robert M. Eisberg Fundamentals of Modern Physics Hardcover, 744pp. Krieger Publishing Company, January 1961 Physics US $64.50 ISBN 047123463X Last modified Dec 9 00 Gregory Benford Furious Gulf (Galactic Center #5) With the hostile "mechs" drawing ever closer in their campaign to exterminate all humanity, Captain Killeen pilots the spaceship Argo toward an uncertain destiny--just as his son Toby faces the mysterious journey into adulthood with his race's entire history implanted within him. Hardcover,304pp. Bantam Books, Incorporated, June 1994 #5 Galactic Center series. US$ 22.95 ISBN 0553096613 Last modified May 8 01 Sunset Books, Inc. , , Furniture Finishing Paperback, 3rd ed., 96pp. Sunset Books, Incorporated, May 1992 Woodworking US $9.99 ISBN 0376011661 Last modified Nov 28 00 Peter Haining, ed. The Future Makers Paperback Belmont, May 1971 short stories US $.75 ISBN 0123000083 Last modified May 20 01 Alvin Toffler Future Shock 1972 Future US $1.95 ISBN 055306700 Last modified Nov 28 00 Stanislaw Lem The Futurological Congress Paperback May 1976 US $1.50 ISBN 0380005840 Last modified Nov 27 00 Wayland Drew The Gaian Expedient Paperback June 1985 #2 Erthring series. US$ 2.95 ISBN 0345308883 Last modified Nov 27 00 Keith Laumer Galactic Diplomat 223 pages N. Y. : Berkley Medallion 1966 Retief series. US $.60 ISBN X1240 Last modified May 2 01 Stewart, Ian, 1945- Game, set, and math : enigmas and conundrums viii, 191 p. : ill. ; 23 cm. Oxford [England] ; Cambridge, Mass, USA : B. Blackwell, 1989. Math, puzzles, Mathematical recreations. 793.7/4 20 Includes bibliographical references. QA95.S725 1989 4817348 ISBN 0631171142 Last modified Dec 8 00 Charles Sheffield The Ganymede Club Set among the moons of Jupiter, this imaginative, near-future SF saga weaves the aftermath of a war--which destroyed half the human race and made half of planet Earth uninhabitable--strange scientific discoveries, and underground politics into a compelling and suspenseful tale of danger. Hardcover,352pp. Doherty, Tom Associates, LLC, October 1995 US$ 23.95 ISBN 0312856628 Last modified Dec 3 01 Jim Davis The Garfield how to Party Book Paperback Ballantine Books, Inc., May 1988 humor Comes with party favors. US$ 8.95 ISBN 0345357248 Last modified May 27 01 Frederick Pohl Illustrated by Frank Kelly Freas The Gateway Trip : Tales and Vignettes of the Heechee Del Rey 1990 Gateway series. ISBN 0123000101 Last modified May 22 01 Sheri S. Tepper The Gateway to Women's Country Pocket Books, NY, 1988 ISBN 0385416881 Last modified May 28 01 Charles Piller Keith R. Yamamoto Gene Wars: Military Control Over the New Genetic Technologies Hardcover January 1988 Science, war, government US $22.95 ISBN 0688070507 Last modified Dec 6 00 Steven S. Zumdahl General Chemistry Problem Solving II Paperback Textbook January 1984 Chemistry ISBN 0669082155 Last modified Nov 28 00 Bernard D. Davis, ed. The Genetic Revolution: Scientific Prospects & Public Perceptions Hardcover Textbook January 1991 Science, politics, history Jecket torn. ISBN 0801842352 Last modified Dec 6 00 Robert F. Schleif Genetics and Molecular Biology Integrated trmt of prolaryotic & eukaryotic molecular biology/problems/etc. Textbook Paperback, 2nd ed., 698pp. Johns Hopkins University Press, September 1993 Biology ISBN 0801846749 Last modified Dec 9 00 James Gleick Genius: The Life and Science of Richard Feynman Paperback,1st ed.,531pp. Random House, Incorporated, October 1993 biography, science, history US$ 14.00 ISBN 0679747044 Last modified May 16 01 James P Hogan (author) The Gentle Giants of Ganymede March 1982 US$ 2.25 ISBN 0345298128 Last modified Nov 19 00 Susan B. Anthony Illustrated by Todd Doney Geraldine Ferraro Coloring Book Paperback Turnbull & Willoughb, September 1984 humor, politics US $3.95 ISBN 0943084202 Last modified May 26 01 Art Buchwald Getting High in Government Circles New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1971 politics, humor ISBN 0123000118 Last modified May 27 01 James P. Hogan The Giants' Star July 1981 US$ 2.50 ISBN 0345287711 Last modified Nov 19 00 Larry Niven Gift from Earth Mass Market Paperback Ballantine Books, Inc., May 1976 US$ 2.95 ISBN 0345319753 Last modified Nov 19 00 Gary B. Trudeau Give Those Nymphs Some Hooters! Collection of the syndicated cartoon strip "Doonesbury." Paperback,96pp. Andrews & McMeel, October 1989 humor,cartoons,politics US$ 6.95 ISBN 0836218582 Last modified May 12 01 Harlan Ellison The Glass Teat: Essays of Opinion on the Subject of Television Paperback January 1975 Essays US $1.25 ISBN 051503701X Last modified Nov 25 00 David Brin Glory Season In a high-caste society led by genetically-engineered females cloned from their mothers, Maia sets out to win a place for herself in a divided world--and finds adventure and excitement as she traverses the strange and beautiful planet of Stratos. An unforgettable new universe from the bestselling author of Startide Rising. Hardcover,576pp. Bantam Books, Incorporated, June 1993 Great! US$ 22.95 ISBN 0553076450 Last modified May 26 01 Jerry Pournelle S.M. Stirling Go Tell the Spartans Mass Market Paperback,352pp. Baen Books, May 1991 Falkenberg series. US$ 4.95 ISBN 0671720619 Last modified May 2 01 Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. God Bless You Mr.Rosewater or Pearls Before Swine Dell Publishing #2929 US $1.25 ISBN 0123000079 Last modified May 16 01 Frank Herbert God Emperor of Dune Berkeley, 1981 #4 Dune series. US $3.50 ISBN 0425053393 Last modified May 28 01 Frank Herbert God Emperor of Dune Mass Market Paperback Berkley Publishing Group, November 1984 #4 Dune series. US$ 3.95 ISBN 042508003X Last modified May 28 01 Martin Caidin The God Machine Paperback January 1989 US$ 3.50 ISBN 0671698273 Last modified May 5 01 Edgar Rice Burroughs The Gods of Mars New York: Ballantine Books U2032, 1967 John Carter series. US $.50 ISBN 0123000131 Last modified May 28 01 Isaac Asimov The Gods Themselves Fawcett Crest Books, 1972 Nebula and Hugo for Best Science Fiction novel of the Year, 1972 US $1.75 ISBN 0449028883 Last modified Nov 24 00 Kim Stanley Robinson The Gold Coast (Three Californias #1) From the author of the award-winning Red Mars comes the second book in the groundbreaking "Three Californias Trilogy." The Gold Coast presents a nightmarish urban future of uncontrolled, ruthless development which "celebrates . . . the persistent joyful survival of human persons in the interstices of the American juggernaut" (Washington Post Book World). Mass Market Paperback,416pp. Doherty, Tom Associates, LLC, October 1988 #1 Three Californias series. US$ 3.95 ISBN 0812552393 Last modified May 28 01 Theodore Sturgeon The Golden Helix New York Dell Publishing 1980 short stories ISBN 0123000092 Last modified May 22 01 Nancy Springer The Golden Swan Paperback January 1983 US$ 2.50 ISBN 0671452533 Last modified May 28 01 Mary Gentle Golden Witchbreed Hardcover January 1984 US $16.95 ISBN 0688031617 Last modified May 26 01 Bruce Sterling A Good Old-Fashioned Future Mass Market Paperback,279pp. Random House, Incorporated, June 1999 US$ 6.99 ISBN 0553576429 Last modified May 2 01 Niel Gaime Terry Pratchett Good Omens: The Nice and Accurate Prophesies of Agnes Nutter, Witch 1st Edition. NY: WORKMAN. 1990 Diskworld series. ISBN 0123000043 Last modified May 5 01 Neil Gaiman Terry Pratchett Good Omens: The Nice and Accurate Prophecies of Agnes Nutter, Witch Hardcover,384pp. Workman Publishing Company, Inc., August 1990 humor, fantasy US$ 18.95 ISBN 0894808532 Last modified May 26 01 Berke Breathed Goodnight Opus In this riotous new picture book, Opus--the extraordinarily popular penguin--discovers that life can be much more exciting when Hardcover, 1st ed., 1pp. Little, Brown & Company, September 1993 Cartoon, humor US $15.95 ISBN 0316108537 Last modified Nov 28 00 Steven Barnes Gorgon Child A virtual superman, a streetfighter trained by the Mob, Knight turns his awesome powers on those who created him. Fighting alongside his beautiful mate, he takes on a corrupt television evangelist who schemes to enslave America. The action-packed, near-future adventure sequel to Streetlethal. Mass Market Paperback, 352pp. Tor Books, November 1989 Cyberpunk US$ 3.95 ISBN 0812531523 Last modified Nov 25 00 Anne M.R. Agur John N. Gardner,(Editor) Grant's Atlas of Anatomy "...features regional organization presented in a sequence based on how the reader would perform an actual laboratory dissection...with new muscle tables, larger reproductions, increased coverage of neuroanatomy, and chapter subtitles." Appropriate for: Medical Students, Anatomy Students. Textbook Paperback, 9th ed., 628pp. Williams & Wilkins, September 1991 Biology, anatomy ISBN 0683037013 Last modified Dec 9 00 Eberhardt K. Sauerland Grants Dissector Paperback Textbook, 10th January 1991 Biology, Aaatomy ISBN 0683037072 Last modified Dec 9 00 Kim Stanley Robinson Green Mars Red Mars garnered a Hugo nomination and rave reviews across the country with its sweeping story of Martian colonization. Packed with scientific detail, compelling characters, and a thrilling story of humankind living at its newest frontier, this second volume in the epic promises to become a classic. Paperback,624pp. Bantam Books, Incorporated, April 1995 #3 Mars series. US$ 6.50 ISBN 0553572393 Last modified May 28 01 Matt Groening Greetings from Hell Need to send a special message to that certain someone? Here are 32 ready-to-mail postcards selected from the four bestselling "Hell" books, featuring America's favorite rabbits. Two-color cartoons. Paperback Pantheon Books, October 1989 humor, cartoons Postcards. US $7.95 ISBN 0679726780 Last modified May 26 01 Tom Tomorrow Bill Griffith,(Introduction) Greetings from This Modern World Paperback,1st ed.,103pp. St. Martin's Press, Inc., August 1992 humor, cartoons US$ 9.95 ISBN 0312082037 Last modified May 27 01 Jerry Pournelle The Gripping Hand Hardcover January 1993 Mote series. US$ 22.00 ISBN 0671795732 Last modified May 26 01 Larry Niven Jerry Pournelle The Gripping Hand (Mote #2) The long-awaited sequel to the landmark novel The Mote in God's Eye. A quarter century after humanity quarantined the aliens known as the Moties within the confines of their own solar system, the wall between them and the galaxy beyond is beginning to crumble. "Worth waiting eighteen years for!"--Tom Clancy. Mass Market Paperback,432pp. Pocket Books, December 1993 #2 Mote series. US$ 5.99 ISBN 0671795740 Last modified May 5 01 Paul Goodman Growing Up Absurd Vintage Books, 1960 fiction ISBN 0123000076 Last modified May 16 01 John M. Ford Growing up Weightless Mass Market Paperback, 272pp. Bantam Books, Incorporated, June 1994 Juvenile US $4.99 ISBN 0553568140 Last modified Nov 24 00 G. B. Trudeau Guilty, Guilty, Guilty! Bantam, 1976 humor, cartoons ISBN 0123000117 Last modified May 27 01 Gary B. Trudeau Garry B. Trudeau Guilty, Guilty, Guilty! Paperback,1pp. Henry Holt & Company, Incorporated, August 1974 humor, cartoons US $3.95 ISBN 0030125111 Last modified May 27 01 Jared Diamond Guns, Germs and Steel:The Fates of Human Societies Paperback,457pp. Norton, W. W. & Company, Inc., April 1999 science, history, anthropology US$ 15.95 ISBN 0393317552 Last modified May 5 01 Orson Scott Card Illustrated by Gray Morrow HOT SLEEP The Worthing Chronicle Ace, 1979 US $2.25 ISBN 0441343457 Last modified May 28 01 Alan John Percivale Taylor The Habsburg Monarchy, 1809-1918: A History of the Austrian Empire and Austria-Hungary Textbook Paperback, 279pp. University of Chicago Press, June 1987 history US $5.50 ISBN 0226791459 Last modified Dec 9 00 Bruce Sterling The Hacker Crackdown: Law and Disorder on the Electronic Frontier Hardcover, 352pp. Bantam Books, Incorporated, September 1992 Computers, history US $23.00 ISBN 055308058X Last modified Dec 8 00 Arthur C. Clarke The Hammer of God Clarke's first major solo novel in years--a national bestseller--tells the compelling story of the race to protect Earth from imminent destruction. An asteroid is on a collision course with Earth, and while a starship tries to redirect it, religious fanatics engage in sabotage to ensure that their predicted Apocalypse will come. Hardcover,240pp. Bantam Books, Incorporated, May 1993 US $19.95 ISBN 0553095579 Last modified May 8 01
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Philip José Farmer Books In Order
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[] |
[] |
[
""
] | null |
[
"Editorial"
] |
2022-03-24T20:23:12-07:00
|
The Tiers series chronicles the adventures of both Robert Wolff, a man from our world transported through space time to a cosmos with dimensions and laws
|
en
|
Books In Order
|
https://www.addall.com/books-in-order/philip-jose-farmer/
|
World Of Tiers Books In Publication Order
Herald Childe Books In Publication Order
Doc Caliban and Lord Grandrith Books In Publication Order
Opar Books In Publication Order
Dayworld Books In Publication Order
Riverworld Books In Publication Order
Tarzan Books In Publication Order
Doc Savage (Bantam) Books In Publication Order
Philip Jose Farmer’s The Dungeon Books In Publication Order
SF Authors Choice Books In Publication Order
The Further Adventures Of Sherlock Holmes Books In Publication Order
Thieves’ World Books In Publication Order
Weird Heroes Books In Publication Order
Standalone Novels In Publication Order
Short Story Collections In Publication Order
Short Stories/Novellas In Publication Order
Oz-Story Magazine Books In Publication Order
Anthologies In Publication Order
World Of Tiers Book Covers
Herald Childe Book Covers
Doc Caliban and Lord Grandrith Book Covers
Opar Book Covers
Dayworld Book Covers
Riverworld Book Covers
Tarzan Book Covers
Doc Savage (Bantam) Book Covers
Philip Jose Farmer’s The Dungeon Book Covers
SF Authors Choice Book Covers
The Further Adventures Of Sherlock Holmes Book Covers
Thieves’ World Book Covers
Weird Heroes Book Covers
Standalone Novels Book Covers
Short Story Collections Book Covers
Short Stories/Novellas Book Covers
Oz-Story Magazine Book Covers
Anthologies Book Covers
Philip José Farmer Books Overview
Related Authors
|
|||||
wrong_mix_random_publicationDate_00046
|
FactBench
|
1
| 4
|
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_S._Burroughs
|
en
|
William S. Burroughs
|
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[] |
[] |
[
""
] | null |
[
"Contributors to Wikimedia projects"
] |
2001-09-27T03:25:24+00:00
|
en
|
/static/apple-touch/wikipedia.png
|
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_S._Burroughs
|
American writer and visual artist (1914–1997)
For other people named William Burroughs, see William Burroughs (disambiguation).
William Seward Burroughs II ( ; February 5, 1914 – August 2, 1997) was an American writer and visual artist. He is widely considered a primary figure of the Beat Generation and a major postmodern author who influenced popular culture and literature.[2][3][4] Burroughs wrote eighteen novels and novellas, six collections of short stories and four collections of essays, and five books have been published of his interviews and correspondences; he was initially briefly known by the pen name William Lee. He also collaborated on projects and recordings with numerous performers and musicians, made many appearances in films, and created and exhibited thousands of visual artworks, including his celebrated "shotgun art".[5]
Burroughs was born into a wealthy family in St. Louis, Missouri. He was a grandson of inventor William Seward Burroughs I, who founded the Burroughs Corporation, and a nephew of public relations manager Ivy Lee. Burroughs attended Harvard University, studied English, studied anthropology as a postgraduate, and attended medical school in Vienna. In 1942, Burroughs enlisted in the U.S. Army to serve during World War II. After being turned down by the Office of Strategic Services and the Navy, he developed a heroin addiction that affected him for the rest of his life, initially beginning with morphine. In 1943, while living in New York City, he befriended Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac. Their mutual influence became the foundation of the Beat Generation, which was later a defining influence on the 1960s counterculture. Burroughs found success with his confessional first novel, Junkie (1953), but is perhaps best known for his third novel, Naked Lunch (1959). Naked Lunch became the subject of one of the last major literary censorship cases in the United States after its US publisher, Grove Press, was sued for violating a Massachusetts obscenity statute.
Burroughs killed his second wife, Joan Vollmer, in 1951 in Mexico City. Burroughs initially claimed that he shot Vollmer while drunkenly attempting a "William Tell" stunt.[6] He later told investigators that he had been showing his pistol to friends when it fell and hit the table, firing the bullet that killed Vollmer.[7] After Burroughs fled back to the United States, he was convicted of manslaughter in absentia and received a two-year suspended sentence.
While heavily experimental and featuring unreliable narrators, much of Burroughs' work is semiautobiographical, and was often drawn from his experiences as a heroin addict. He lived variously in Mexico City, London, Paris and the Tangier International Zone near Morocco, and traveled in the Amazon rainforest, with these locations featuring in many of his novels and stories. With Brion Gysin, Burroughs popularized the cut-up, an aleatory literary technique, featuring heavily in works such as The Nova Trilogy (1961–1964). Burroughs' work also features frequent mystical, occult, or otherwise magical themes, which were a constant preoccupation for Burroughs, both in fiction and in real life.[4][8]
In 1983, Burroughs was elected to the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters. In 1984, he was awarded the Ordre des Arts et des Lettres by France.[9] Jack Kerouac called Burroughs the "greatest satirical writer since Jonathan Swift";[10] he owed this reputation to his "lifelong subversion"[11] of the moral, political, and economic systems of modern American society, articulated in often darkly humorous sardonicism. J. G. Ballard considered Burroughs to be "the most important writer to emerge since the Second World War", while Norman Mailer declared him "the only American writer who may be conceivably possessed by genius".[10]
Burroughs was born in 1914, the younger of two sons born to Mortimer Perry Burroughs (June 16, 1885 – January 5, 1965) and Laura Hammon Lee (August 5, 1888 – October 20, 1970). His family was of prominent English ancestry in St. Louis, Missouri. His grandfather, William Seward Burroughs I, founded the Burroughs Adding Machine company, which evolved into the Burroughs Corporation. Burroughs' mother was Laura Hammond Lee Burroughs, whose brother, Ivy Lee, was an advertising pioneer later employed as a publicist for the Rockefellers. His father ran an antique and gift shop, Cobblestone Gardens in St. Louis, and later in Palm Beach, Florida, when they relocated. Burroughs would later write of growing up in a "family where displays of affection were considered embarrassing".[8]: 26
It was during his childhood that Burroughs' developed a lifelong interest in magic and the occult – topics which would find their way into his work repeatedly across the years.[a] Burroughs later described how he saw an apparition of a green reindeer in the woods as a child, which he identified as a totem animal,[b] as well as a vision of ghostly grey figures at play in his bedroom.[c]
As a boy, Burroughs lived on Pershing Avenue (now Pershing Place) in St. Louis' Central West End. He attended John Burroughs School in St. Louis, where his first published essay – "Personal Magnetism", which revolved around telepathic mind-control – was printed in the John Burroughs Review in 1929.[15] He then attended the Los Alamos Ranch School in New Mexico, which was stressful for him. The school was a boarding school for the wealthy, "where the spindly sons of the rich could be transformed into manly specimens".[8]: 44 Burroughs kept journals documenting an erotic attachment to another boy. According to his own account, he destroyed these later, ashamed of their content.[16] He kept his sexual orientation concealed from his family well into adulthood. A common story says[17] that he was expelled from Los Alamos after taking chloral hydrate in Santa Fe with a fellow student. Yet, according to his own account, he left voluntarily: "During the Easter vacation of my second year I persuaded my family to let me stay in St. Louis."[16]
Burroughs finished high school at Taylor School in Clayton, Missouri, and in 1932 left home to pursue an arts degree at Harvard University, where he was affiliated with Adams House. During the summers, he worked as a cub reporter for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, covering the police docket. He disliked the work, and refused to cover some events, like the death of a drowned child. He lost his virginity in an East St. Louis, Illinois, brothel that summer with a female prostitute whom he regularly patronized.[8]: papers, p.62 While at Harvard, Burroughs made trips to New York City and was introduced to the gay subculture there. He visited lesbian dives, piano bars, and the Harlem and Greenwich Village homosexual underground with Richard Stern, a wealthy friend from Kansas City. They would drive from Boston to New York in a reckless fashion. Once, Stern scared Burroughs so badly that he asked to be let out of the vehicle.[8]: 611
Burroughs graduated from Harvard in 1936. According to Ted Morgan's Literary Outlaw,[8]
His parents, upon his graduation, had decided to give him a monthly allowance of $200 out of their earnings from Cobblestone Gardens, a substantial sum in those days. It was enough to keep him going, and indeed it guaranteed his survival for the next twenty-five years, arriving with welcome regularity. The allowance was a ticket to freedom; it allowed him to live where he wanted to and to forgo employment.[8]: 69–70
Burroughs' parents sold the rights to his grandfather's invention and had no share in the Burroughs Corporation. Shortly before the 1929 stock market crash, they sold their stock for $200,000 (equivalent to approximately $3,500,000 in today's funds[18]).[19]
After Burroughs graduated from Harvard, his formal education ended, except for brief flirtations with graduate study of anthropology at Columbia and medicine in Vienna, Austria. He traveled to Europe and became involved in Austrian and Hungarian Weimar-era LGBT culture; he picked up young men in steam baths in Vienna and moved in a circle of exiles, homosexuals, and runaways. There, he met Ilse Klapper, born Herzfeld (1900–1982), a Jewish woman fleeing the country's Nazi government.[1] The two were never romantically involved, but Burroughs married her, in Croatia, against the wishes of his parents, to allow her to gain a visa to the United States. She made her way to New York City, and eventually divorced Burroughs, although they remained friends for many years.[8]: 65–68
After returning to the United States, he held a string of uninteresting jobs. In 1939, his mental health became a concern for his parents, especially after he deliberately severed the last joint of his left little finger at the knuckle to impress a man with whom he was infatuated.[20] This event made its way into his early fiction as the short story "The Finger".
Burroughs enlisted in the U.S. Army early in 1942, shortly after the bombing of Pearl Harbor brought the United States into World War II. But when he was classified as a 1-A infantry, not an officer, he became dejected. His mother recognized her son's depression and got Burroughs a civilian disability discharge – a release from duty based on the premise that he should have not been allowed to enlist due to previous mental instability. After being evaluated by a family friend, who was also a neurologist at a psychiatric treatment center, Burroughs waited five months in limbo at Jefferson Barracks outside St. Louis before being discharged. During that time he met a Chicago soldier also awaiting release, and once Burroughs was free, he moved to Chicago and held a variety of jobs, including one as an exterminator. When two of his friends from St. Louis – University of Chicago student Lucien Carr and his admirer, David Kammerer – left for New York City, Burroughs followed.
In 1945, Burroughs began living with Joan Vollmer Adams in an apartment they shared with Jack Kerouac and Edie Parker, Kerouac's first wife.[21] Vollmer Adams was married to a G.I. with whom she had a young daughter, Julie Adams.
Burroughs and Kerouac got into trouble with the law for failing to report a murder involving Lucien Carr, who had killed David Kammerer in a confrontation over Kammerer's incessant and unwanted advances. This incident inspired Burroughs and Kerouac to collaborate on a novel titled And the Hippos Were Boiled in Their Tanks, completed in 1945. The two fledgling authors were unable to get it published, but the manuscript was eventually published in November 2008 by Grove Press and Penguin Books.
During this time, Burroughs began using morphine and became addicted. He eventually sold heroin in Greenwich Village to support his habit. Vollmer also became an addict, but her drug of choice was Benzedrine, an amphetamine sold over the counter at that time. Because of her addiction and social circle, her husband immediately divorced her after returning from the war. With urging from Allen Ginsberg, and also perhaps Kerouac, Burroughs became intellectually and emotionally linked with Vollmer and by summer 1945, had moved in with Vollmer and her daughter. In spring 1946, Burroughs was arrested for forging a narcotics prescription. Vollmer asked her psychiatrist, Lewis Wolberg, to sign a surety bond for Burroughs' release. As part of his release, Burroughs returned to St. Louis under his parents' care, after which he left for Mexico to get a divorce from Ilse Klapper. Meanwhile, Vollmer's addiction led to a temporary psychosis that resulted in her admission to Bellevue Hospital, which endangered the custody of her child. Upon hearing this, Burroughs immediately returned to New York City to gain her release, asking her to marry him. Their marriage was never formalized, but she lived as his common-law wife.
They returned to St. Louis to visit Burroughs' parents and then moved with her daughter to Texas.[22] Vollmer soon became pregnant with Burroughs' child. Their son, William S. Burroughs Jr., was born in 1947. The family moved briefly to New Orleans in 1948.[23]
In New Orleans, police stopped Burroughs' car one evening. They found an unregistered handgun belonging to him as well as a letter from Ginsberg that contained details about the sale of marijuana. The police then searched Burroughs’s home, where they discovered his stash of drugs and half a dozen or more firearms.[24] Burroughs fled to Mexico to escape possible detention in Louisiana's Angola State Prison. Vollmer and their children followed him. Burroughs planned to stay in Mexico for at least five years, the length of his charge's statute of limitations. Burroughs also attended classes at the Mexico City College in 1950, studying Spanish, as well as Mesoamerican manuscripts (codices) and the Mayan language with R. H. Barlow.
Their life in Mexico was by all accounts an unhappy one.[25] Without heroin and suffering from Benzedrine abuse, Burroughs began to pursue other men as his libido returned, while Vollmer, feeling abandoned, started to drink heavily and mock Burroughs openly.[22]
One night, while drinking with friends at a party above the Bounty Bar in Mexico City,[26] a drunk Burroughs allegedly took his handgun from his travel bag and told his wife, "It's time for our William Tell act." There is no indication that they had performed such an action previously.[25] Vollmer, who was also drinking heavily and undergoing amphetamine withdrawal, allegedly obliged him by putting a highball glass on her head. Burroughs shot Vollmer in the head, killing her almost immediately.[27]
Soon after the incident, Burroughs changed his account, claiming that he had dropped his gun and it had accidentally fired.[28] Burroughs spent 13 days in jail before his brother came to Mexico City and bribed Mexican lawyers and officials to release Burroughs on bail while he awaited trial for the killing, which was ruled culpable homicide.
Vollmer's daughter, Julie Adams, went to live with her grandmother, and William S. Burroughs Jr. went to St. Louis to live with his grandparents. Burroughs reported every Monday morning to the jail in Mexico City while his prominent Mexican attorney worked to resolve the case. According to James Grauerholz, two witnesses had agreed to testify that the gun had fired accidentally while he was checking to see if it was loaded, with ballistics experts bribed to support this story.[8]: 202 Nevertheless, the trial was continuously delayed and Burroughs began to write what would eventually become the short novel Queer while awaiting his trial. Upon Burroughs' attorney fleeing Mexico in light of his own legal problems, Burroughs decided, according to Ted Morgan, to "skip" and return to the United States. He was convicted in absentia of homicide and was given a two-year suspended sentence.[8]: 214
Although Burroughs was writing before his murder of Joan Vollmer, this event marked him and, biographers argue, his work for the rest of his life.[8]: 197–198 Vollmer's death also resonated with Allen Ginsberg, who wrote of her in Dream Record: June 8, 1955, "Joan, what kind of knowledge have the dead? Can you still love your mortal acquaintances? What do you remember of us?" In Burroughs: The Movie, Ginsberg claimed that Vollmer had seemed possibly suicidal in the weeks leading up to her death, and he suggested that this may have been a factor in her willingness to take part in the risky William Tell stunt.[29]
After leaving Mexico, Burroughs drifted through South America for several months, seeking out a drug called yagé, which promised to give the user telepathic abilities. A book composed of letters between Burroughs and Ginsberg, The Yage Letters, was published in 1963 by City Lights Books. In 2006, a re-edited version, The Yage Letters Redux, showed that the letters were largely fictionalised from Burroughs' notes.
Burroughs described Vollmer's death as a pivotal event in his life, and one that provoked his writing by exposing him to the risk of possession by a malevolent entity he called "the Ugly Spirit":
I am forced to the appalling conclusion that I would never have become a writer but for Joan's death, and to a realization of the extent to which this event has motivated and formulated my writing. I live with the constant threat of possession, and a constant need to escape from possession, from Control. So the death of Joan brought me in contact with the invader, the Ugly Spirit, and maneuvered me into a life long struggle, in which I have had no choice except to write my way out.[30]
As Burroughs makes clear, he meant this reference to "possession" to be taken absolutely literally, stating: "My concept of possession is closer to the medieval model than to modern psychological explanations ... I mean a definite possessing entity."[30] Burroughs' writing was intended as a form of "sorcery", in his own words[31] – to disrupt language via methods such as the cut-up technique, and thus protect himself from possession.[d][e][f][g] Later in life, Burroughs described the Ugly Spirit as "Monopolistic, acquisitive evil. Ugly evil. The ugly American", and took part in a shamanic ceremony with the explicit aim of exorcising the Ugly Spirit.[36]
Oliver Harris has questioned Burroughs' claim that Vollmer's death catalysed his writing, highlighting the importance for Queer of Burroughs' traumatic relationship with the boyfriend fictionalized in the story as Eugene Allerton, rather than Burroughs' shooting of Vollmer. In any case, he had begun to write in 1945. Burroughs and Kerouac collaborated on And the Hippos Were Boiled in Their Tanks, a mystery novel loosely based on the Carr–Kammerer situation and that at the time remained unpublished. Years later, in the documentary What Happened to Kerouac?, Burroughs described it as "not a very distinguished work". An excerpt of this work, in which Burroughs and Kerouac wrote alternating chapters, was finally published in Word Virus,[37] a compendium of William Burroughs' writing that was published by his biographer after his death in 1997. The complete novel was finally published by Grove Press in 2008.
Before killing Vollmer, Burroughs had largely completed his first novel, Junkie, which he wrote at the urging of Allen Ginsberg, who was instrumental in getting the work published as a cheap mass-market paperback.[38] Ace Books published the novel in 1953 as part of an Ace Double under the pen name William Lee, retitling it Junkie: Confessions of an Unredeemed Drug Addict (it was later republished as Junkie, then in 1977 as Junky, and finally in 2003 as Junky: the definitive text of 'Junk', edited by Oliver Harris).[38]
During 1953, Burroughs was at loose ends. Due to legal problems, he was unable to live in the cities toward which he was most inclined. He spent time with his parents in Palm Beach, Florida, and in New York City with Allen Ginsberg. When Ginsberg refused his romantic advances,[39] Burroughs went to Rome to meet Alan Ansen on a vacation financed from his parents' continuing support. He found Rome and Ansen's company dreary and, inspired by Paul Bowles' fiction, he decided to head for the Tangier International Zone,[8]: 232–234 where he rented a room and began to write a large body of text that he personally referred to as Interzone.[40]
To Burroughs, all signs directed a return to Tangier, a city where drugs were freely available and where financial support from his family would continue. He realized that in the Moroccan culture he had found an environment that synchronized with his temperament and afforded no hindrances to pursuing his interests and indulging in his chosen activities. He left for Tangier in November 1954 and spent the next four years there working on the fiction that would later become Naked Lunch, as well as attempting to write commercial articles about Tangier. He sent these writings to Ginsberg, his literary agent for Junkie, but none were published until 1989 when Interzone, a collection of short stories, was published. Under the strong influence of a marijuana confection known as majoun and a German-made opioid called Eukodol, Burroughs settled in to write. Eventually, Ginsberg and Kerouac, who had traveled to Tangier in 1957, helped Burroughs type, edit, and arrange these episodes into Naked Lunch.[8]: 238–242
Further information: Naked Lunch
Whereas Junkie and Queer were conventional in style, Naked Lunch was his first venture into a nonlinear style. After the publication of Naked Lunch, a book whose creation was to a certain extent the result of a series of contingencies, Burroughs was exposed to Brion Gysin's cut-up technique at the Beat Hotel in Paris in October 1959. He began slicing up phrases and words to create new sentences.[41] At the Beat Hotel, Burroughs discovered "a port of entry" into Gysin's canvases: "I don't think I had ever seen painting until I saw the painting of Brion Gysin."[42] The two would cultivate a long-term friendship that revolved around a mutual interest in artworks and cut-up techniques. Scenes were slid together with little care for narrative.
Excerpts from Naked Lunch were first published in the United States in 1958. The novel was initially rejected by City Lights Books, the publisher of Ginsberg's Howl; and Olympia Press publisher Maurice Girodias, who had published English-language novels in France that were controversial for their subjective views of sex and antisocial characters. Nevertheless, Ginsberg managed to get excerpts published in Black Mountain Review and Chicago Review in 1958. Irving Rosenthal, student editor of Chicago Review, a quarterly journal partially subsidized by the university, promised to publish more excerpts from Naked Lunch, but he was fired from his position in 1958 after Chicago Daily News columnist Jack Mabley called the first excerpt obscene. Rosenthal went on to publish more in his newly created literary journal Big Table No. 1; however, the United States Postmaster General ruled that copies could not be mailed to subscribers on the basis of obscenity laws. John Ciardi did get a copy and wrote a positive review of the work, prompting a telegram from Allen Ginsberg praising the review.[43] This controversy made Naked Lunch interesting to Girodias again, and he published the novel in 1959.[44]
After the novel was published, it became notorious across Europe and the United States, garnering interest from not just members of the counterculture of the 1960s, but also literary critics such as Mary McCarthy. Once published in the United States, Naked Lunch was prosecuted as obscene by the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, followed by other states. In 1966, the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court declared the work "not obscene" on the basis of criteria developed largely to defend the book. The case against Burroughs' novel still stands as the last obscenity trial against a work of literature – that is, a work consisting of words only, and not including illustrations or photographs – prosecuted in the United States.
The Word Hoard, the collection of manuscripts that produced Naked Lunch, also produced parts of the later works The Soft Machine (1961), The Ticket That Exploded (1962), and Nova Express (1964). These novels feature extensive use of the cut-up technique that influenced all of Burroughs' subsequent fiction to a degree. During Burroughs' friendship and artistic collaborations with Gysin and Ian Sommerville, the technique was combined with images, Gysin's paintings, and sound, via Somerville's tape recorders. Burroughs was so dedicated to the cut-up method that he often defended his use of the technique before editors and publishers, most notably Dick Seaver at Grove Press in the 1960s[8]: 425 and Holt, Rinehart & Winston in the 1980s. The cut-up method, because of its random or mechanical basis for text generation, combined with the possibilities of mixing in text written by other writers, deemphasizes the traditional role of the writer as creator or originator of a string of words, while simultaneously exalting the importance of the writer's sensibility as an editor.[citation needed] In this sense, the cut-up method may be considered as analogous to the collage method in the visual arts.[citation needed] New restored editions of The Nova Trilogy (or Cut-Up Trilogy), edited by Oliver Harris (President of the European Beat Studies Network) and published in 2014, included notes and materials to reveal the care with which Burroughs used his methods and the complex histories of his manuscripts.
Burroughs moved into a rundown hotel in the Latin Quarter of Paris in 1959 when Naked Lunch was still looking for a publisher. Tangier, with its political unrest, and criminals with whom he had become involved, became dangerous to Burroughs.[45] He went to Paris to meet Ginsberg and talk with Olympia Press. He left behind a criminal charge which eventually caught up with him in Paris. Paul Lund, a British former career criminal and cigarette smuggler whom Burroughs met in Tangier, was arrested on suspicion of importing narcotics into France. Lund gave up Burroughs, and evidence implicated Burroughs in the importation of narcotics into France. When the Moroccan authorities forwarded their investigation to French officials, Burroughs faced criminal charges in Paris for conspiracy to import opiates. It was during this impending case that Maurice Girodias published Naked Lunch; its appearance helped to get Burroughs a suspended sentence, since a literary career, according to Ted Morgan, is a respected profession in France.
The "Beat Hotel" was a typical European-style boarding house hotel, with common toilets on every floor, and a small place for personal cooking in the room. Life there was documented by the photographer Harold Chapman, who lived in the attic room. This shabby, inexpensive hotel was populated by Gregory Corso, Ginsberg and Peter Orlovsky for several months after Naked Lunch first appeared.
Burroughs' time at the Beat Hotel was dominated by occult experiments – "mirror-gazing, scrying, trance and telepathy, all fuelled by a wide variety of mind-altering drugs".[46] Later, Burroughs would describe "visions" obtained by staring into the mirror for hours at a time – his hands transformed into tentacles,[h] or his whole image transforming into some strange entity,[i] or visions of far-off places,[48] or of other people rapidly undergoing metamorphosis.[j] It was from this febrile atmosphere that the famous cut-up technique emerged.
The actual process by which Naked Lunch was published was partly a function of its "cut-up" presentation to the printer. Girodias had given Burroughs only ten days to prepare the manuscript for print galleys, and Burroughs sent over the manuscript in pieces, preparing the parts in no particular order. When it was published in this authentically random manner, Burroughs liked it better than the initial plan. International rights to the work were sold soon after, and Burroughs used the $3,000 advance from Grove Press to buy drugs (equivalent to approximately $31,000 in today's funds[18]).[8]: 316–326 Naked Lunch was featured in a 1959 Life magazine cover story, partly as an article that highlighted the growing Beat literary movement. During this time Burroughs found an outlet for material otherwise rendered unpublishable in Jeff Nuttall's My Own Mag.[49] Also, poetry by Burroughs' appeared in the avant garde little magazine Nomad at the beginning of the 1960s.
Burroughs left Paris for London in 1960 to visit Dr. Dent, a well-known English medical doctor who spearheaded a reputedly painless heroin withdrawal treatment using the drug apomorphine.[50] Dent's apomorphine cure was also used to treat alcoholism, although it was held by several people who undertook it to be no more than straightforward aversion therapy. Burroughs, however, was convinced. Following his first cure, he wrote a detailed appreciation of apomorphine and other cures, which he submitted to The British Journal of Addiction (Vol. 53, 1956) under the title "Letter From A Master Addict To Dangerous Drugs"; this letter is appended to many editions of Naked Lunch.
Though he ultimately relapsed, Burroughs ended up working out of London for six years, traveling back to the United States on several occasions, including one time escorting his son to the Lexington Narcotics Farm and Prison after the younger Burroughs had been convicted of prescription fraud in Florida. In the "Afterword" to the compilation of his son's two previously published novels Speed and Kentucky Ham, Burroughs writes that he thought he had a "small habit" and left London quickly without any narcotics because he suspected the U.S. customs would search him very thoroughly on arrival. He claims he went through the most excruciating two months of opiate withdrawal while seeing his son through his trial and sentencing, traveling with Billy to Lexington, Kentucky from Miami to ensure that his son entered the hospital that he had once spent time in as a volunteer admission.[51] Earlier, Burroughs revisited St. Louis, Missouri, taking a large advance from Playboy to write an article about his trip back to St. Louis, one that was eventually published in The Paris Review, after Burroughs refused to alter the style for Playboy’s publishers. In 1968 Burroughs joined Jean Genet, John Sack, and Terry Southern in covering the 1968 Democratic National Convention for Esquire magazine. Southern and Burroughs, who had first become acquainted in London, would remain lifelong friends and collaborators. In 1972, Burroughs and Southern unsuccessfully attempted to adapt Naked Lunch for the screen in conjunction with American game-show producer Chuck Barris.[52]
Burroughs supported himself and his addiction by publishing pieces in small literary presses. His avant-garde reputation grew internationally as hippies and college students discovered his earlier works. He developed a close friendship with Antony Balch and lived with a young hustler named John Brady who continuously brought home young women despite Burroughs' protestations. In the midst of this personal turmoil, Burroughs managed to complete two works: a novel written in screenplay format, The Last Words of Dutch Schultz (1969); and the traditional prose-format novel The Wild Boys (1971).
It was during his time in London that Burroughs began using his "playback" technique in an attempt to place curses on various people and places who had drawn his ire, including the Moka coffee bar[53][k] and the London HQ of Scientology.[l] Burroughs himself related the Moka coffee bar incident:
Here is a sample operation carried out against the Moka Bar at 29 Frith Street, London, W1, beginning on August 3, 1972. Reverse Thursday. Reason for operation was outrageous and unprovoked discourtesy and poisonous cheesecake. Now to close in on the Moka Bar. Record. Take pictures. Stand around outside. Let them see me. They are seething around in there ... Playback would come later with more pictures ... Playback was carried out a number of times with more pictures. Their business fell off. They kept shorter and shorter hours. October 30, 1972, the Moka Bar closed. The location was taken over by the Queen's Snack Bar.[56]
In the 1960s, Burroughs joined and then left the Church of Scientology. In talking about the experience, he claimed that the techniques and philosophy of Scientology helped him and that he felt that further study of Scientology would produce great results.[57] He was skeptical of the organization itself, and felt that it fostered an environment that did not accept critical discussion.[58] His subsequent critical writings about the church and his review of Inside Scientology by Robert Kaufman led to a battle of letters between Burroughs and Scientology supporters in the pages of Rolling Stone magazine.
In 1974, concerned about his friend's well-being, Allen Ginsberg gained for Burroughs a contract to teach creative writing at the City College of New York. Burroughs successfully withdrew from heroin use and moved to New York. He eventually found an apartment, affectionately dubbed "The Bunker", on the Lower East Side of Manhattan at 222 Bowery.[59] The dwelling was a partially converted YMCA gym, complete with lockers and communal showers. The building fell within New York City rent control policies that made it extremely cheap; it was only about four hundred dollars a month until 1981 when the rent control rules changed, doubling the rent overnight.[60] Burroughs added "teacher" to the list of jobs he did not like, as he lasted only a semester as a professor; he found the students uninteresting and without much creative talent. Although he needed income desperately, he turned down a teaching position at the University at Buffalo for $15,000 a semester. "The teaching gig was a lesson in never again. You were giving out all this energy and nothing was coming back."[8]: 477 His savior was the newly arrived twenty-one-year-old bookseller and Beat Generation devotee James Grauerholz, who worked for Burroughs part-time as a secretary as well as in a bookstore. Grauerholz suggested the idea of reading tours. Grauerholz had managed several rock bands in Kansas and took the lead in booking for Burroughs reading tours that would help support him throughout the next two decades. It raised his public profile, eventually aiding in his obtaining new publishing contracts. Through Grauerholz, Burroughs became a monthly columnist for the noted popular culture magazine Crawdaddy, for which he interviewed Led Zeppelin's Jimmy Page in 1975. Burroughs decided to relocate back to the United States permanently in 1976. He then began to associate with New York cultural players such as Andy Warhol, John Giorno, Lou Reed, Patti Smith, and Susan Sontag, frequently entertaining them at the Bunker; he also visited venues like CBGB to watch the likes of Patti Smith perform.[61] Throughout early 1977, Burroughs collaborated with Southern and Dennis Hopper on a screen adaptation of Junky. It was reported in The New York Times that Burroughs himself would appear in the film. Financed by a reclusive acquaintance of Burroughs, the project lost traction after financial problems and creative disagreements between Hopper and Burroughs.[62][63]
In 1976, he appeared in Rosa von Praunheim's New York documentary Underground & Emigrants.
Organized by Columbia professor Sylvère Lotringer, Giorno, and Grauerholz, the Nova Convention was a multimedia retrospective of Burroughs' work held from November 30 to December 2, 1978, at various locations throughout New York. The event included readings from Southern, Ginsberg, Smith, and Frank Zappa (who filled in at the last minute for Keith Richards, then entangled in a legal problem), in addition to panel discussions with Timothy Leary and Robert Anton Wilson and concerts featuring The B-52's, Suicide, Philip Glass, and Debbie Harry and Chris Stein.
In 1976, Burroughs was having dinner with his son, William S. "Billy" Burroughs Jr., and Allen Ginsberg in Boulder, Colorado, at Ginsberg's Buddhist poetry school (Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics) at Chogyam Trungpa's Naropa University when Billy began to vomit blood. Burroughs Sr. had not seen his son for over a year and was alarmed at his appearance when Billy arrived at Ginsberg's apartment. Although Billy had successfully published two short novels in the 1970s and was deemed by literary critics like Ann Charters as a bona fide "second generation beat writer",[64] his brief marriage to a teenage waitress had disintegrated. Billy was a constant drinker, and there were long periods when he was out of contact with any of his family or friends. The diagnosis was liver cirrhosis so complete that the only treatment was a rarely performed liver transplant operation. Fortunately, the University of Colorado Medical Center was one of two places in the nation that performed transplants under the pioneering work of Dr. Thomas Starzl. Billy underwent the procedure and beat the thirty-percent survival odds. His father spent time in 1976 and 1977 in Colorado, helping Billy through additional surgeries and complications. Ted Morgan's biography asserts that their relationship was not spontaneous and lacked real warmth or intimacy. Allen Ginsberg was supportive to both Burroughs and his son throughout the long period of recovery.[8]: 495–536
In London, Burroughs had begun to write what would become the first novel of a trilogy, published as Cities of the Red Night (1981), The Place of Dead Roads (1983), and The Western Lands (1987). Grauerholz helped edit Cities when it was first rejected by Burroughs' long-time editor Dick Seaver at Holt Rinehart, after it was deemed too disjointed. The novel was written as a straight narrative and then chopped up into a more random pattern, leaving the reader to sort through the characters and events. This technique differed from the author's earlier cut-up methods, which were accidental from the start. Nevertheless, the novel was reassembled and published, still without a straight linear form, but with fewer breaks in the story. The trilogy featured time-travel adventures in which Burroughs' narrators rewrote episodes from history to reform mankind.[8]: 565 Reviews were mixed for Cities. Novelist and critic Anthony Burgess panned the work in Saturday Review, saying Burroughs was boring readers with repetitive episodes of pederast fantasy and sexual strangulation that lacked any comprehensible world view or theology; other reviewers, like J. G. Ballard, argued that Burroughs was shaping a new literary "mythography".[8]: 565
In 1981, Billy Burroughs died in Florida. He had cut off contact with his father several years before, even publishing an article in Esquire magazine claiming his father had poisoned his life and claiming that he had been molested as a fourteen-year-old by one of his father's friends while visiting Tangier. The liver transplant had not cured his urge to drink, and Billy suffered from serious health complications years after the operation. After he had stopped taking his transplant rejection drugs, he was found near the side of a Florida highway by a stranger. He died shortly afterward. Burroughs was in New York when he heard from Allen Ginsberg of Billy's death.
Burroughs, by 1979, was once again addicted to heroin. The cheap heroin that was easily purchased outside his door on the Lower East Side "made its way" into his veins, coupled with "gifts" from the overzealous if well-intentioned admirers who frequently visited the Bunker. Although Burroughs would have episodes of being free from heroin, from this point until his death he was regularly addicted to the drug. In an introduction to Last Words: The Final Journals of William S. Burroughs, James Grauerholz (who managed Burroughs' reading tours in the 1980s and 1990s) mentions that part of his job was to deal with the "underworld" in each city to secure the author's drugs.[65]
Burroughs moved to Lawrence, Kansas, in 1981, taking up residence at 1927 Learnard Avenue where he would spend the rest of his life. He once told a Wichita Eagle reporter that he was content to live in Kansas, saying, "The thing I like about Kansas is that it's not nearly as violent, and it's a helluva lot cheaper. And I can get out in the country and fish and shoot and whatnot."[66] In 1984, he signed a seven-book deal with Viking Press after he signed with literary agent Andrew Wylie. This deal included the publication rights to the unpublished 1952 novel Queer. With this money he purchased a small bungalow for $29,000.[8]: 596 He was finally inducted into the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters in 1983 after several attempts by Allen Ginsberg to get him accepted. He attended the induction ceremony in May 1983. Lawrence Ferlinghetti remarked the induction of Burroughs into the Academy proved Herbert Marcuse's point that capitalistic society had a great ability to incorporate its one-time outsiders.[8]: 577
By this point, Burroughs was a counterculture icon. In his final years, he cultivated an entourage of young friends who replaced his aging contemporaries. In the 1980s he collaborated with performers ranging from Bill Laswell's Material and Laurie Anderson to Throbbing Gristle. Burroughs and R.E.M. collaborated on the song "Star Me Kitten" on the Songs in the Key of X: Music from and Inspired by the X-Files album. A collaboration with musicians Nick Cave and Tom Waits resulted in a collection of short prose, Smack My Crack, later released as a spoken-word album in 1987. In 1989, he appeared with Matt Dillon in Gus Van Sant's film, Drugstore Cowboy. In 1990, he released the spoken word album Dead City Radio, with musical backup from producers Hal Willner and Nelson Lyon, and alternative rock band Sonic Youth. He collaborated with Tom Waits and director Robert Wilson on The Black Rider, a play that opened at the Thalia Theatre in Hamburg in 1990 to critical acclaim, one that was later performed across Europe and the U.S. In 1991, with Burroughs' approval, director David Cronenberg adapted Naked Lunch into a feature film, which opened to critical acclaim.
During 1982, Burroughs developed a painting technique whereby he created abstract compositions by placing spray paint cans in front of blank surfaces, and then shooting at the paint cans with a shotgun. These splattered and shot panels and canvasses were first exhibited in the Tony Shafrazi Gallery in New York City in 1987. By this time he had developed a comprehensive visual art practice, using ink, spray paint, collage and unusual things such as mushrooms and plungers to apply the paint. He created file-folder paintings featuring these mediums as well as "automatic calligraphy" inspired by Brion Gysin. He originally used the folders to mix pigments before observing that they could be viewed as art in themselves. He also used many of these painted folders to store manuscripts and correspondence in his personal archive[67] Until his last years, he prolifically created visual art. Burroughs' work has since been featured in more than fifty international galleries and museums including Royal Academy of the Arts, Centre Pompidou, Guggenheim Museum, ZKM Karlsruhe, Sammlung Falckenberg, New Museum, Irish Museum of Modern Art, Los Angeles County Museum, and Whitney Museum of American Art.[68]
According to Ministry frontman Al Jourgensen, "We hung out at Burroughs's house one time in '93. So he decides to shoot up heroin and he takes out this utility belt full of syringes. Huge, old-fashioned ones from the '50s or something. Now, I have no idea how an 80 year old guy finds a vein, but he knew what he was doing. So we're all laying around high and stuff and then I notice in the pile of mail on the coffee table that there's a letter from the White House. I said 'Hey, this looks important.' and he replies 'Nah, it's probably just junk mail.' Well, I open the letter and it's from President Clinton inviting Burroughs to the White House for a poetry reading. I said 'Wow, do you have any idea how big this is!?' So he says 'What? Who's president nowadays?' and it floored me. He didn't even know who our current president was."[69]
In 1990, Burroughs was honored with a star on the St. Louis Walk of Fame.[70]
In June 1991, Burroughs underwent triple bypass surgery.[71]
He became a member of a chaos magic organization, the Illuminates of Thanateros, in 1993.[72]
He was a voice actor in the 1995 video game The Dark Eye based on the works of Edgar Allan Poe, in which he recites "Annabel Lee".
Burroughs' last filmed performance was in the music video for "Last Night on Earth" by Irish rock band U2, filmed in Kansas City, Missouri, directed by Richie Smyth and also featuring Sophie Dahl.[73]
The only newspaper columnist Burroughs admired was Westbrook Pegler, a right-wing opinion shaper for the William Randolph Hearst newspaper chain.[8]: 170 Burroughs believed in frontier individualism, which he championed as "our glorious frontier heritage on minding your own business." Burroughs came to equate liberalism with bureaucratic tyranny, viewing government authority as a collective of meddlesome forces legislating the curtailment of personal freedom. According to his biographer Ted Morgan, his philosophy for living one's life was to adhere to a laissez-faire path, one without encumbrances – in essence a credo shared with the capitalist business world.[8]: 55 His abhorrence of the government did not prevent Burroughs from using its programs to his own advantage. In 1949 he enrolled in Mexico City College under the GI Bill, which paid for part of his tuition and books and provided him with a seventy-five-dollar-per-month stipend. He maintained, "I always say, keep your snout in the public trough."[8]: 173
Burroughs was a gun enthusiast and owned several shotguns, a Colt .45 and a .38 Special. Sonic Youth vocalist Thurston Moore recounted meeting Burroughs: "he had a number of Guns and Ammo magazines laying about, and he was only very interested in talking about shooting and knifing ... I asked him if he had a Beretta and he said: 'Ah, that's a ladies' pocket-purse gun. I like guns that shoot and knives that cut.'" Hunter S. Thompson gave him a one-of-a-kind .454 caliber pistol.[74] Burroughs was also a staunch supporter of the Second Amendment, being quoted as saying: "I sure as hell wouldn't want to live in a society where the only people allowed guns are the police and the military."[75]
Burroughs had a longstanding preoccupation with magic and the occult, dating from his earliest childhood, and was insistent throughout his life that we live in a "magical universe".[76] As he himself explained:
In the magical universe there are no coincidences and there are no accidents. Nothing happens unless someone wills it to happen. The dogma of science is that the will cannot possibly affect external forces, and I think that's just ridiculous. It's as bad as the church. My viewpoint is the exact contrary of the scientific viewpoint. I believe that if you run into somebody in the street it's for a reason. Among primitive people they say that if someone was bitten by a snake he was murdered. I believe that.[77]
Or, speaking in the 1970s:
Since the word "magic" tends to cause confused thinking, I would like to say exactly what I mean by "magic" and the magical interpretation of so-called reality. The underlying assumption of magic is the assertion of "will" as the primary moving force in this universe – the deep conviction that nothing happens unless somebody or some being wills it to happen. To me this has always seemed self evident ... From the viewpoint of magic, no death, no illness, no misfortune, accident, war or riot is accidental. There are no accidents in the world of magic.[78]
This was no idle passing interest – Burroughs also actively practiced magic in his everyday life: seeking out mystical visions through practices like scrying,[79][80][48] taking measures to protect himself from possession,[81][82][35][36] and attempting to lay curses on those who had crossed him.[53][54][83] Burroughs spoke openly about his magical practices, and his engagement with the occult is attested from a multitude of interviews,[m][n][85] as well as personal accounts from those who knew him.[53][54][35]
Biographer Ted Morgan has argued that: "As the single most important thing about Graham Greene was his viewpoint as a lapsed Catholic, the single most important thing about Burroughs was his belief in the magical universe. The same impulse that led him to put out curses was, as he saw it, the source of his writing ... To Burroughs behind everyday reality there was the reality of the spirit world, of psychic visitations, of curses, of possession and phantom beings."[8][86]
Burroughs was unwavering in his insistence that his writing itself had a magical purpose.[o][p][q][r][91] This was particularly true when it came to his use of the cut-up technique. Burroughs was adamant that the technique had a magical function, stating "the cut ups are not for artistic purposes".[92] Burroughs used his cut-ups for "political warfare, scientific research, personal therapy, magical divination, and conjuration"[92] – the essential idea being that the cut-ups allowed the user to "break down the barriers that surround consciousness".[93] As Burroughs himself stated:
I would say that my most interesting experience with the earlier techniques was the realization that when you make cut-ups you do not get simply random juxtapositions of words, that they do mean something, and often that these meanings refer to some future event. I've made many cut-ups and then later recognized that the cut-up referred to something that I read later in a newspaper or a book, or something that happened ... Perhaps events are pre-written and pre-recorded and when you cut word lines the future leaks out.[93]
In the final decade of his life, Burroughs became heavily involved in the chaos magic movement. Burroughs' magical techniques – the cut-up, playback, etc. – had been incorporated into chaos magic by such practitioners as Phil Hine,[94][95][96] Dave Lee[97] and Genesis P-Orridge.[98][53] P-Orridge in particular had known and studied under Burroughs and Brion Gysin for over a decade.[53] This led to Burroughs contributing material to the book Between Spaces: Selected Rituals & Essays From The Archives Of Templum Nigri Solis[99] Through this connection, Burroughs came to personally know many of the leading lights of the chaos magic movement, including Hine, Lee, Peter J. Carroll, Ian Read and Ingrid Fischer, as well as Douglas Grant, head of the North American section of chaos magic group the Illuminates of Thanateros (IOT).[76][100] Burroughs' involvement with the movement further deepened, as he contributed artwork and other material to chaos magic books,[101] addressed an IOT gathering in Austria,[102] and was eventually fully initiated into the Illuminates of Thanateros.[s][103][76] As Burroughs' close friend James Grauerholz states: "William was very serious about his studies in, and initiation into the IOT ... Our longtime friend, Douglas Grant, was a prime mover."[100]
Burroughs died August 2, 1997, at age 83, in Lawrence, Kansas, from complications of a heart attack he had suffered the previous day.[19] He was interred in the family plot in Bellefontaine Cemetery in St. Louis, Missouri,[105] with a marker bearing his full name and the epitaph "American Writer". His grave lies to the right of the white granite obelisk of William Seward Burroughs I (1857–1898).
Since 1997, several posthumous collections of Burroughs' work have been published. A few months after his death, a collection of writings spanning his entire career, Word Virus, was published (according to the book's introduction, Burroughs himself approved its contents prior to his death). Aside from numerous previously released pieces, Word Virus also included what was promoted as one of the few surviving fragments of And the Hippos Were Boiled in Their Tanks, a novel by Burroughs and Kerouac. The complete Kerouac/Burroughs manuscript And the Hippos Were Boiled in Their Tanks was published for the first time in November 2008.[106]
A collection of journal entries written during the final months of Burroughs' life was published as the book Last Words in 2000. Publication of a memoir by Burroughs entitled Evil River by Viking Press has been delayed several times; after initially being announced for a 2005 release, online booksellers indicated a 2007 release, complete with an ISBN (ISBN 0-670-81351-6), but it remains unpublished.[107]
New enlarged or unexpurgated editions of numerous texts have been published in recent years as "Restored Text" or "Redux" editions all containing additional material and essays on the works or incorporating material edited out of previous versions. Beginning with Barry Miles and James Grauerholz's 2003 edition of Naked Lunch, followed by Oliver Harris's reconstructions of three trilogies of writings. The first of these are the early writings: Junky:the definitive text of "Junk" (2003), Queer: 25th-Anniversary Edition (2010) and The Yage Letters Redux (2006). Following the publication of the latter in December 2007, Ohio State University Press released Everything Lost: The Latin American Journals of William S. Burroughs also edited by Harris, the book contains transcriptions of journal entries made by Burroughs during the time of composing Queer and The Yage Letters, with cover art and review information. There followed "restored text" versions of some of Burroughs' best known novels The Soft Machine, The Ticket that Exploded and Nova Express (styled "the Cut Up Trilogy" officially here for the first time) from Penguin in 2014, and of Burroughs' more obscure collaborative poetic experiments of 1960 Minutes to Go: Redux and The Exterminator: Redux by Moloko Press in 2020. These books, originally pamphlets, are bulked out to three times their original size and the "trilogy" is complete with the completely new BATTLE INSTRUCTIONS an allied experimental collaboration, composited by Harris from unpublished drafts and recordings of the same period.
Burroughs' major works can be divided into four different periods. The dates refer to the time of writing, not publication, which in some cases was not until decades later:
Early work (early 1950s)
Junkie, Queer and The Yage Letters are relatively straightforward linear narratives, written in and about Burroughs' time in Mexico City and South America.
The cut-up period (mid-1950s to mid-1960s)
Although published before Burroughs discovered the cut-up technique, Naked Lunch is a fragmentary collection of "routines" from The Word Hoard – manuscripts written in Tangier, Paris, London, as well as of other texts written in South America such as "The Composite City", blending into the cut-up and fold-in fiction also partly drawn from The Word Hoard: The Soft Machine, Nova Express, The Ticket That Exploded, also referred to as "The Nova Trilogy" or "The Cut-Up Trilogy", self-described by Burroughs as an attempt to create "a mythology for the space age". Interzone also derives from the mid-1950s.
Experiment and subversion (mid-1960s to mid-1970s)
This period saw Burroughs continue experimental writing with increased political content and branching into multimedia such as film and sound recording. Perhaps the defining and most important of which works is The Third Mind (with Brion Gysin) announced in 1966 and not published until the late '70s. The only major novels written in this period are The Wild Boys, and Port of Saints (republished in a different rewritten form in 1980, in the style Burroughs would adopt at that time). However, he also wrote dozens of published articles, short stories, scrap books and other works, several in collaboration with Brion Gysin. The major anthologies representing work from this period are The Burroughs File, The Adding Machine and Exterminator!.
The Red Night trilogy (mid-1970s to mid-1980s)
The books Cities of the Red Night, The Place of Dead Roads and The Western Lands came from Burroughs in a final, mature stage, creating a complete mythology.
Burroughs also produced numerous essays and a large body of autobiographical material, including a book with a detailed account of his own dreams (My Education: A Book of Dreams).
Several literary critics treated Burroughs' work harshly. For example, Anatole Broyard and Philip Toynbee wrote devastating reviews of some of his most important books. In a short essay entitled "A Review of the Reviewers", Burroughs answers his critics in this way:
Critics constantly complain that writers are lacking in standards, yet they themselves seem to have no standards other than personal prejudice for literary criticism. ... such standards do exist. Matthew Arnold set up three criteria for criticism: 1. What is the writer trying to do? 2. How well does he succeed in doing it? ... 3. Does the work exhibit "high seriousness"? That is, does it touch on basic issues of good and evil, life and death and the human condition. I would also apply a fourth criterion ... Write about what you know. More writers fail because they try to write about things they don't know than for any other reason.
— William S. Burroughs, "A Review of the Reviewers"[108]
[unreliable source?]
Burroughs clearly indicates here that he prefers to be evaluated against such criteria over being reviewed based on the reviewer's personal reactions to a certain book. Always a contradictory figure, Burroughs nevertheless criticized Anatole Broyard for reading authorial intent into his works where there is none, which sets him at odds both with New Criticism and the old school as represented by Matthew Arnold.
Burroughs used photography extensively throughout his career, both as a recording medium in planning his writings, and as a significant dimension of his own artistic practice, in which photographs and other images feature as significant elements in cut-ups. With Ian Sommerville, he experimented with photography's potential as a form of memory-device, photographing and rephotographing his own pictures in increasingly complex time-image arrangements.[109]
Burroughs is often called one of the greatest and most influential writers of the 20th century, most notably by Norman Mailer whose quote on Burroughs, "The only American novelist living today who may conceivably be possessed by genius", appears on many Burroughs publications. Others consider his concepts and attitude more influential than his prose. Prominent admirers of Burroughs' work have included British critic and biographer Peter Ackroyd, the rock critic Lester Bangs, the philosopher Gilles Deleuze and the authors Michael Moorcock. J. G. Ballard, Angela Carter, Jean Genet, William Gibson, Alan Moore, Kathy Acker and Ken Kesey. Burroughs had an influence on the German writer Carl Weissner, who in addition to being his German translator was a novelist in his own right and frequently wrote cut-up texts in a manner reminiscent of Burroughs.[110]
Burroughs continues to be named as an influence by contemporary writers of fiction. Both the New Wave and, especially, the cyberpunk schools of science fiction are indebted to him. Admirers from the late 1970s – early 1980s milieu of this subgenre include William Gibson and John Shirley, to name only two. First published in 1982, the British slipstream fiction magazine Interzone (which later evolved into a more traditional science fiction magazine) paid tribute to him with its choice of name. He is also cited as a major influence by musicians Roger Waters, David Bowie, Patti Smith, Genesis P-Orridge,[111] Ian Curtis, Lou Reed, Laurie Anderson, Todd Tamanend Clark, John Zorn, Tom Waits, Gary Numan and Kurt Cobain.[112]
In the film William S. Burroughs: A Man Within, Ira Silverberg commented on Burroughs' development as a writer:
Usually, the most radical work tends to come from the upper classes, because they're trying so hard to shop so hard to get away from their roots. So he's a fascinating character uniquely American in that regard. I don't think that work could have existed had he not been breaking away from an incredibly patrician Midwestern background.
Drugs, homosexuality, and death, common among Burroughs' themes, have been taken up by Dennis Cooper, of whom Burroughs said, "Dennis Cooper, God help him, is a born writer".[113] Cooper, in return, wrote, in his essay 'King Junk', "along with Jean Genet, John Rechy, and Ginsberg, [Burroughs] helped make homosexuality seem cool and highbrow, providing gay liberation with a delicious edge". Splatterpunk writer Poppy Z. Brite has frequently referenced this aspect of Burroughs' work. Burroughs' writing continues to be referenced years after his death; for example, a November 2004 episode of the TV series CSI: Crime Scene Investigation included an evil character named Dr. Benway (named for an amoral physician who appears in a number of Burroughs' works.) This is an echo of the hospital scene in the movie Repo Man, made during Burroughs' life-time, in which both Dr. Benway and Mr. Lee (a Burroughs pen name) are paged.
Burroughs had an impact on twentieth-century esotericism and occultism as well, most notably through disciples like Peter Lamborn Wilson and Genesis P-Orridge. Burroughs is also cited by Robert Anton Wilson as the first person to notice the "23 Enigma":
I first heard of the '23 Enigma' from William S. Burroughs, author of Naked Lunch, Nova Express, etc. According to Burroughs, he had known a certain Captain Clark, around 1960 in Tangier, who once bragged that he had been sailing 23 years without an accident. That very day, Clark's ship had an accident that killed him and everybody else aboard. Furthermore, while Burroughs was thinking about this crude example of the irony of the gods that evening, a bulletin on the radio announced the crash of an airliner in Florida, USA. The pilot was another Captain Clark and the flight was Flight 23.
— Robert Anton Wilson, Fortean Times[114]
Some research[115] suggests that Burroughs is arguably the progenitor of the 2012 phenomenon, a belief of New Age Mayanism that an apocalyptic shift in human consciousness would occur at the end of the Mayan Long Count calendar in 2012. Although never directly focusing on the year 2012 himself, Burroughs had an influence on early 2012 proponents such as Terence McKenna and Jose Argüelles, and as well had written about an apocalyptic shift of human consciousness at the end of the Long Count as early as 1960's The Exterminator.[116]
Main article: William S. Burroughs bibliography
Burroughs, William S. (2012). The Job: Interviews with William S. Burroughs. Penguin UK. ISBN 978-0-14-190358-3.
Grant, Douglas (2015). "Magick and Photography". Ashé Journal .
Harris, Oliver (2017). "William S. Burroughs: Beating Postmodernism". In Belletto, Steven (ed.). The Cambridge Companion to the Beats. Cambridge University Press. ISBN 978-1-107-18445-9.
Grauerholz, James; Silverberg, Ira; Douglas, Ann, eds. (2000). Word Virus: The William S. Burroughs Reader. New York: Grove Press. ISBN 0-8021-3694-X. OCLC 57590795, ISBN 978-0-8021-3694-7.
Lee, Dave (1989). "Cut Up and Collage in Magic". Chaotopia!. Archived from the original on June 12, 2018 .
Morgan, Ted (1988). Literary Outlaw: The Life and Times of William S. Burroughs. New York: Avon. ISBN 0-8050-0901-9.
P-Orridge, Genesis Breyer (2003). "Magick Squares and Future Beats". In Metzger, Richard (ed.). Book of Lies: The Disinformation Guide to Magick and the Occult. Red Wheel Weiser. ISBN 978-0-9713942-7-8.
P-Orridge, Genesis Breyer (2010). Thee Psychick Bible: Thee Apocryphal Scriptures ov Genesis Breyer P-Orridge and Thee Third Mind ov Thee Temple ov Psychick Youth. Feral House. ISBN 978-1-932595-94-9.
Wason, Thomas (February 15, 1951). "William Burroughs" (PDF). Mexico City Collegian. Vol. 4. p. 6.
Burroughs, William S. (2001). Burroughs Live: The Collected Interviews of William S. Burroughs, 1960–1997. Zone Books. ISBN 978-1-58435-010-1.
Stevens, Matthew Levi (2014). The Magical Universe of William S. Burroughs. Mandrake of Oxford. ISBN 978-1-906958-64-0.
Allmer, Patricia and John Sears (ed.) Taking Shots: The Photography of William S. Burroughs, London: Prestel and The Photographers' Gallery, 2014.
Charters, Ann (ed.). The Portable Beat Reader. New York: Penguin Books, 1992. ISBN 0-670-83885-3 (hc); ISBN 0-14-015102-8 (pbk).
Gilmore, John. Laid Bare: A Memoir of Wrecked Lives and the Hollywood Death Trip. Searching for Rimbaud. Amok Books, 1997.
Harris, Oliver. William Burroughs and the Secret of Fascination. Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 2003.
Johnson, Robert Earl. The Lost Years of William S. Burroughs: Beats in South Texas. Texas A&M University Press, 2006.
Kashner, Sam, When I Was Cool, My Life at the Jack Kerouac School. New York: HarperCollins Perennial, 2005.
Miles, Barry. William Burroughs: El Hombre Invisible: A Portrait. New York: Hyperion, 1993.
Sargeant, Jack. Naked Lens: Beat Cinema. New York: Soft Skull Press, 2008 [1997] [2001].
Schneiderman, Davis and Philip Walsh. Retaking the Universe: William S. Burroughs in the Age of Globalization. London: Pluto Press, 2004.
Stevens, Mathew Levi. The Magical Universe of William S. Burroughs. Mandrake of Oxford, 2014.
Stevens, Michael. The Road to Interzone: Reading William S. Burroughs Reading. Suicide Press, Archer City, Texas, 2009.
Weidner, Chad. The Green Ghost: William Burroughs and the Ecological Mind. Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 2016.
Wills, David S. Scientologist! William S. Burroughs and the Weird Cult. Beatdom Books, London, 2013.
Bernhard Valentinitsch, Hoch hinauf strebend und doch geerdet - über den Schriftsteller Harald Sommer, den steirischen William S. Burroughs. In: Denken und Glauben.Nr.199.Graz 2021.Nr.199, p. 22-24.
William S. Burroughs papers (17 linear feet – 94 boxes) are held by the Berg Collection of the New York Public Library.
William Seward Burroughs Papers, 1957–1976 (2 linear feet) are held in the Columbia University Libraries.
William S. Burroughs Papers, SPEC.CMS.40 (ca. 1945-ca. 1984, 55 boxes plus additions) are held in the Ohio State University libraries.
William S. Burroughs Papers, SPEC.CMS.85 (ca. 1945-ca. 1984, 6 boxes) are held in the Ohio State University libraries.
William S. Burroughs Papers, SPEC.CMS.87 (ca. 1945-ca. 1984, 58 boxes) are held in the Ohio State University libraries.
William S. Burroughs Papers, SPEC.CMS.90 (ca. 1945-ca. 1984, 29 boxes) are held in the Ohio State University libraries.
William S. Burroughs collection (3 linear feet) are held in the Manuscript, Archives, and Rare Book Library at Emory University.
William S. Burroughs Collection, MS 63 and James Grauerholz Collection of William S. Burroughs, MS 319, are held at the Kenneth Spencer Research Library, University of Kansas
William S. Burroughs Internet Database, edited by postmodern American scholar Michael Gurnow, hosted on the servers of Southeast Missouri State University from 2000 to 2012.
[1], Taking Shots: The Photography of William S. Burroughs, The Photographers' Gallery exhibition website.
[2], William S. Burroughs and Photography Lecture Series
William S. Burroughs at IMDb
William S. Burroughs at the Internet Speculative Fiction Database
William S. Burroughs audio documentary narrated by Iggy Pop [3]
William S. Burroughs Internet Database at Southeast Missouri State University
International festivities for 50th anniversary of Naked Lunch
A gallery of Burroughs book cover designs
William Burroughs and Tom Waits
Allen Ginsberg & William S. Burroughs, Last Public Appearance November 2, 1996, Lawrence, KS
European Beat Studies Network
William S. Burroughs: A Man Within site for Independent Lens on PBS
William S. Burroughs: A Man Within at IMDb
Anything but Routine: A Selectively Annotated Bibliography of William S. Burroughs v 2.0 by Brian E.C. Schottlaender, UC San Diego, 2010
Burroughs 101 by This American Life, January 30, 2015
A finding aid to the William Burroughs and Brion Gysin writings, 1963–1973, 1997 in the Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution
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Note: This post is the thirty-fifth installment in my author’s commentary for Eternal Empire, covering Chapter 34. You can read the previous installments here.
Umberto Eco once said that he wrote The Name of the Rose because he felt like poisoning a monk. For William Faulkner, The Sound and the Fury began with a mental picture:
I didn’t realize at the time it was symbolical. The picture was of the muddy seat of a little girl’s drawers in a pear tree, where she could see through a window where her grandmother’s funeral was taking place and report what was happening to her brothers on the ground below. By the time I explained who they were and what they were doing and how her pants got muddy, I realized it would be impossible to get all of it into a short story and that it would have to be a book.
Joseph Heller started writing Something Happened with two sentences that came to him out of nowhere: “In the office in which I work, there are four people of whom I am afraid. Each of these four people is afraid of five people.” And E.L. Doctorow, in the middle of a bad case of writer’s block, began Ragtime by staring at the wall of his office, writing about it and the surrounding house, and then trying to imagine the period in which it was built—”In desperation,” Doctorow told The Paris Review, “to those few images.”
One of the subtle privileges of the writer’s craft is that while a reader generally reads a story from first page to last, the initial seed from which it grew in the author’s mind can occur at any point in the narrative, and it often isn’t clear, when you look at the finished result, which part came first. The idea of an author beginning with an inciting incident and following its implications to the very last page is an attractive one, and many writers start their apprentice efforts in much the same way. Usually, though, after the writer learns more about structure and the logistics of finishing a major project, the germ that gives rise to the rest of it turns out to be a moment that lies somewhere in the middle, with the writer working in either direction to lead toward and away from that first spark of inspiration. And this approach can work enormously in the story’s favor. We’re all hoping to come up with an arresting beginning, but we’re less likely to discover it from first principles than to derive it, almost mathematically, from a scene to which it leads a hundred pages down the line. The more rigorously you work out that logic, following what I’ve elsewhere called the anthropic principle of fiction, the more likely you are to arrive at an opening—as well as a setting and a cast of characters—that never would have occurred to you if you had tried to invent a grabber from scratch. (If you do, the strain often shows, and the reader may rightly wonder if you’ll be able to sustain that level of intensity to the end.)
Even novels or stories that unfold along fairly conventional lines often benefit from originating in an odd, intensely personal seed of obsession. The Icon Thief and its sequels were written to honor, rather than to undermine, the conventions of the thriller, but each one grew out of an eccentric core that had little to do with the plot summary you see on the back cover. For The Icon Thief, the real inciting factor—aside from a vague ambition to write a suspense novel about the art world—was my discovery of Marcel Duchamp’s Étant Donnés and my determination to be the first writer to build a novel around what Jasper Johns called “the strangest work of art in any museum.” For City of Exiles, it was my longstanding interest in the vision of Ezekiel, which I’d tried on and off to incorporate into a novel for almost two decades before finding a place for it here. And for Eternal Empire, it was my desire to write a novel about a megayacht. I’m not sure if this comes through in text of the book itself: the yacht in question, the Rigden, doesn’t make an appearance until halfway through the story, and maybe a quarter of the book as a whole is set on or around it. But I knew before I’d figured out anything else about the plot that I wanted a yacht like this to be at the center, which, in turn, implied much of the rest. You don’t write a novel about a megayacht, especially one owned by a Russian oligarch at the heart of what looks to be a vast conspiracy, without being prepared to sink it with everyone on board.
The moment when the yacht goes down—and I don’t think I’m spoiling much by saying this—won’t occur for another hundred pages or so, and I’ll deal with those scenes when I come to them. (To my eyes, the yacht’s destruction and the ensuing showdown onshore are the best extended sequences I’ve ever written, and they’re among the few sections that I’m likely to read again for my own pleasure.) But I want to focus for now on the first time we see the Rigden, in Chapter 34, after a few dozen pages’ worth of buildup. Aside from Titanic, my inspiration here was the obligatory scene in the early Star Trek films in which Kirk first approaches the Enterprise, allowing for a few minutes of awed tracking shots of the starship’s exterior—a convention that J.J. Abrams, alas, is too busy to honor. It slows down the narrative incrementally, but it also provides a sense of scale that strengthens much of what follows. And since this is more or less the reason I wanted to write the entire book, I felt justified in lingering on it. When Maddy gets her first glimpse of the yacht, the metaphorical implications are obvious, as is the impact of the ship’s existence on the shape of the story itself: a book about a yacht also has to be about a journey, and figuring out the start and end points was half the fun. Even if most of the book takes place on land, the events that unfold there are largely designed to get us onto and off that ship. And even if the destination remains unknown, we know that we’ll get there in style…
Note: This post is the thirty-first installment in my author’s commentary for Eternal Empire, covering Chapter 30. You can read the previous installments here.
Aside from a handful of striking exceptions, a novel is a linear form of storytelling, designed to be read in sequence from first page to last. Yet writers are irresistibly drawn to metaphors from the visual arts to describe what they do, in part because they naturally think in terms of the shape of the work as a whole. As readers, when we refer to a novel as a tapestry or a mosaic, it’s less about our experience of it in the moment than the impression it creates over time. This shape is impossible to describe, but when we’re finished with the story, we can sort of hold it in our heads, at least temporarily. It reminds me a little of Borges’s definition of the divine mind:
The steps a man takes from the day of his birth until that of his death trace in time an inconceivable figure. The divine mind intuitively grasps that form immediately, as men do a triangle.
One of the pleasures of a perfectly constructed work of fiction is that it allows us to feel, however briefly, what it might be like to see life as a whole. And although the picture grows dim once we’ve put down the book and picked up another, we’re often left with a sense of the book as a complex shape that somehow exists all at once.
It’s tempting to divide books into groups based on the visual metaphors that come most readily to mind. There are stories that feel like a seamless piece of fabric, which may be the oldest analogy for fiction that we have: the words text and textile emerge from the same root. Other stories gain most of their power from the juxtaposition of individual pieces. They remind us of a mosaic, or, in modern terms, a movie assembled from many distinct pieces of film, so that the combination of two shots creates information that neither one had in isolation. The choice between one strategy or another is often a function of length or point of view. A short novel told with a single strong voice will often feel like a continuous whole, as The Great Gatsby does, while a story that shifts between perspectives and styles, like one of Faulkner’s novels, seems more like a collection of pieces. And it’s especially interesting when one mode blurs into the other. Ian McEwan’s Atonement begins as a model of seamless storytelling, with a diverse cast of characters united by a smooth narrative voice, but it abruptly switches to the juxtaposition strategy halfway through. And sometimes a mosaic can be rendered so finely that it comes back around to fabric again. In his review of Catch-22, which is essentially a series of comic juxtapositions, Norman Mailer observed: “It reminds one of a Jackson Pollock painting eight feet high, twenty feet long. Like yard goods, one could cut it anywhere.”
My own work can be neatly categorized by length: my short stories do their best to unfold as a continuous stream of action, while my novels proceed by the method of juxtaposition, intercutting between three or more stories. I’ve spoken before of how deeply influenced I’ve been by the book and movie of L.A. Confidential, which cut so beautifully between multiple protagonists, and I’ve followed that model almost to a fault. From a writer’s point of view, this approach offers clear advantages, as well as equally obvious pitfalls. Each subplot should be compelling in itself, but they all gain an additional level of interest by being set against the others, and the ability to cut between stories allows you to achieve effects of rhythm or contrast that would be hard to achieve with a single narrative thread. At the same time, there’s a danger that the structure of the overall story—with its logic of intercutting—will produce scenes that don’t justify their existence on their own. You can see both extremes on television shows with big ensemble casts. Mad Men handled those changes beautifully: within each episode’s overarching plot, there were numerous self-contained scenes that could have been presented in any order, and much of their fun and power emerged from Matthew Weiner’s arrangement of those vignettes. Conversely, on Game of Thrones, there are countless scenes that seem to be there solely to remind us that a certain character exists. The show grasps the grammar of intercutting, but not the language, and it’s no accident that many of its best episodes were the ones that focused exclusively on one location.
And I haven’t been immune to the hazards of multiple plots, or the way they can impose themselves on the logic of the story. When I read Chapter 30 of Eternal Empire, for instance, I have trouble remembering why it seemed necessary. Nothing much happens here: Wolfe interrogates a suspect, but gets no useful information, and you could lift out the entire chapter without affecting the rest of the plot whatsoever. It’s been a long time since I wrote it, but I have the uneasy feeling that I inserted a chapter here solely for structural reasons—I needed a pause in Maddy and Ilya’s stories, and Wolfe hadn’t had a scene for a while, so I had to give her something to do without advancing the story past the point where the other subplots had to be. (I can almost see myself with a stack of notecards, shuffling and rearranging them only to realize that I needed a chapter here to avoid upsetting the structure elsewhere.) I did my best to inject the scene with whatever interest I could, mostly by making the interrogation scene as amusing as possible, but frankly, it doesn’t work. In the end, the best thing I can say about this chapter is that it’s short, and if I had the chance to write this novel all over again, I’d either find a way to cut it or, more likely, revise it to advance the story in a more meaningful way. There’s nothing wrong with having a chapter serve as a pause in the action, and if nothing else, the next stretch of chapters is pretty strong. But as it stands, this is less a real chapter than a blank space created by the places where the other parts meet. And I wish I’d come up with a slightly better piece…
When you love books, and especially if you like to think of yourself as a voracious reader, there’s always the temptation to pretend to be familiar with authors you haven’t read. We’ve all experienced that moment at a cocktail party, during an otherwise harmless conversation, when someone mentions a writer—George Saunders, say, or Alice Munro—whose work you’ve been meaning to check out for a long time, but who still remains untouched on your bookshelf, or in a blur of good intentions. If you’re anything like me, you always pause for a fraction of a second, wondering how to play it. Do you confess and say that you’ve only skimmed the latest Saunders story in The New Yorker on the way to the cartoons? Do you try to get away with repeating something clever you vaguely remember about Munro from the writeup you saw in the Times? Maybe it’s best just to smile and nod, hoping that the problem will go away. Or, if you’re particularly shameless, you can just fake it and agree that Saunders is great. (I admit to doing this on more than one occasion, although it usually involves feigning familiarity with movies I haven’t seen.)
Yet unless you’re Harold Bloom or James Wood or Michiko Kakutani, you’re always going to have blind spots in your literary education. In my case, these authors fall into three categories: those I haven’t read at all, those I’ve attempted and abandoned, and those I’ve read to various degrees, but who leave me with a nagging sense that I haven’t read enough. The writers in the first category include—deep breath now—William Faulkner, Toni Morrison, Virginia Woolf, D.H. Lawrence, Henrik Ibsen, Thomas Wolfe, Tennessee Williams, John Dos Passos, Eugene O’Neill, William S. Burroughs, Theodore Dreiser, Ralph Ellison, E.M. Forster, Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler, Edith Wharton, and a library’s worth of others. Authors I’ve tried but never managed to finish include Victor Hugo, Salman Rushdie, David Foster Wallace, Gabriel García Márquez, William Gaddis, Don DeLillo, and a lot, lot more. And in the last, most insidious category are writers I know fairly well but not well enough: I may never get past the sense that I need to read more Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Kafka, Austen, Chekhov, Vonnegut, or Roth.
And this rankles me, because I love reading, and I don’t have much of an excuse. There are times when I feel like a birder grimly trying to check off all the sightings in a big year, and I’m always looking for loopholes. White Noise is a lot shorter than Underworld, so maybe I’ll make that my DeLillo, and maybe seeing Brando in A Streetcar Named Desire counts as reading Tennessee Williams. Part of me worries that by approaching it as if I were crossing items off a list, I’m losing touch with the whole purpose of reading: you should pick up a book because it calls to you, not because it allows you to feel smart in some hypothetical conversation, and it certainly shouldn’t feel like homework. Yet I also feel strongly that canons matter as a guide to books that otherwise wouldn’t leap off the shelves, and I know from my own experience that many novels I approached with a sense of dutifulness—The Magic Mountain comes to mind—became treasured companions. After a certain point, you find that moving randomly from one book to the next only leads you in circles, and you need a nudge from outside to push you in directions that so far have only been trodden by others.
But if there’s one thing I’ve learned along the way, it’s that the list of unread books doesn’t diminish over time. If anything, it expands, and whenever you tackle a new author, the list seems to double in size. Every great writer points to others, or forces you to revisit books you thought you knew, and the more you read, the more deeply you understand how much remains unexplored. The goal of a lifetime’s reading isn’t to be smugly reassured that you’ve traversed the Great Books of the Western World, but to gain perspective on the tracts of territory that you still haven’t experienced. And there’s something oddly comforting in the thought that so many great works of art are patiently waiting their turn. In his Biographical Dictionary of Film, David Thomson, who has probably seen more movies than anyone else alive, writes of the Japanese director Mikio Naruse:
Naruse sounds wonderful…I will see [his work] one day. But like all lifelong filmgoers, I know the allure of films unseen…There is nothing like knowing that one has still to see a body of great work. And no gamble as interesting as pushing the desire to its limit.
In a later edition, Thomson confesses that he’s finally seen Naruse, whom he finds “ineffable.” So I may as well admit that I’ve also picked up my copy of The Portable Faulkner. There’s a world full of books that I still need to read, and there’s no better time to start than today.
Yesterday’s posting on the lure of bad movies, like Birdemic, raises the obvious question of whether the same allure clings to certain trashy books. At first glance, it might seem that the answer is no, at least not the same way: while a bad movie can be polished off in ninety minutes, even the junkiest novel usually requires a somewhat greater commitment, which raises the question of whether this is really the best use of one’s time. Life, it seems, is too short to knowingly waste on bad books, especially when so much good stuff remains unread. (Whenever I read a bad book, I feel as if I need to apologize personally to William Faulkner.) And yet I’ve learned a lot from bad fiction as well. As a writer, it’s useful to know something about every kind of literature, especially when you’re trying to make your mark in a genre that has generated its share of junk. And if you don’t read some trash, as well as better books, you’ll have no way of knowing if you can tell the difference.
The trouble, of course, is that one man’s trashy novel is another man’s masterpiece. The early novels of Thomas Harris, for instance, are hugely important to me, but diminishing returns set in about halfway through Hannibal, and by Hannibal Rising, there’s barely a single interesting page. But this, of course, is a judgment call, and some might draw the line much earlier or later. The same is true of Frederick Forsyth, Stephen King, Michael Crichton, or any other prolific popular novelist. Discriminating between the good (The Day of the Jackal) and the bad (The Negotiator) in a single writer’s body of work is an important part of developing one’s own taste. And sometimes a novelist will surprise you. I’ve repeatedly tried and failed to get into Tom Clancy—The Cardinal of the Kremlin nearly put me to sleep on a recent long bus trip—but I was delighted to discover that Without Remorse is a real novel, vicious, compelling, and with bravura set pieces that recall Forsyth, or even James Ellroy.
And sometimes even literary fiction can benefit from a touch of trash. I love John Updike, and believe that the Rabbit novels are among the essential cultural documents of the last century, but if I could own only one Updike novel, it would be Couples, which even his greatest fans seem to think he wrote at least partly for the money. And yet there’s something weirdly exhilarating about seeing Updike’s extraordinary prose and observational skills applied to blatantly commercial material. Updike can’t help being an artist, even when he’s writing a big sexy novel, and I’d argue that Couples, which isn’t that far removed from Peyton Place, was the novel he was born to write. (His later attempt at a “thriller,” in the form of Terrorist, is much less satisfying, and only comes to life whenever Updike revisits his old adulterous territory.)
But have I ever deliberately set out to read a novel that I knew was bad? Sure. While I haven’t managed to make it through Still Missing, for one, I love reading the bestsellers of yesteryear, embodied in the rows of yellowing paperbacks that line the shelves of thrift stores. The 1970s was a particularly rich era for trash. During my move from New York last year, the only book I kept in my empty apartment was a battered copy of Arthur Hailey’s Hotel, which I enjoyed immensely, especially when I mentally recast all the characters with actors from Mad Men. And I’m a little embarrassed to admit how quickly I plowed through Irving Wallace’s The Fan Club—a terrible book, and much less interesting than Wallace himself, but remarkably evocative of its era in popular fiction. Such books may not be great, but they’re an undeniable part of a writer’s education. (As long as they aren’t all you read.)
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The Library will cooperate with C-SPAN in its new production of "Books That Shaped America," scheduled for Fall 2003. The new series was inspired by a list of 100 "Books that Shaped America" and exhibition curated at the Library of Congress in 2012 based on the results of a public survey about books that provoked thought, controversy and change throughout American history. Viewers of the series this fall will be able to weigh in with their own thoughts about books that had an impact on the nation.
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At today’s National Book Festival, the Library of Congress and C-SPAN announced “Books That Shaped America,” a 10-part joint original feature production that will begin airing this fall, starting Sept. 18. The series will trace America’s history by exploring masterpieces in literature that have had, and still have today, a major impact on society. Here’s more information on the new series.
The C-SPAN series was inspired by a list of 100 “Books that Shaped America” and exhibition curated at the Library of Congress a decade ago, based on the results of a public survey about books that provoked thought, controversy and change throughout American history.
These titles (described below, all by American authors) have had a profound effect on American life, but they are by no means the only influential ones. And they are certainly not a list of the “best” American books, because that, again, is a matter of strong and diverse opinion. Curators and experts from throughout the Library of Congress contributed their choices and the final list was informed by a public survey. Those books were:
Stephen Daye, “The Bay Psalm Book” (1640). This hymnal was printed in 1640 in Cambridge, Massachusetts, by Stephen Daye, first printer of the Massachusetts Bay Colony. It is the very first book printed in what is now the United States. Known as The Bay Psalm Book, it represents what was most sacred to the Puritans–a faithful translation of God’s Word, to be sung in worship by the entire congregation.
Benjamin Franklin, “Experiments and Observations on Electricity” (1751). In 1751, Peter Collinson, president of the Royal Society, arranged for the publication of a series of letters from Benjamin Franklin, written between 1747 and 1750, describing his experiments with electricity. Through the publication of these experiments, Franklin became the first American to gain an international reputation for his scientific work. In 1753 he received the Copley Medal of the Royal Society for his contributions.
Benjamin Franklin, “Poor Richard Improved” (1758) and “The Way to Wealth.” As a writer, Benjamin Franklin was best known for the wit and wisdom he shared with the readers of his popular almanac, “Poor Richard,” under the pseudonym “Richard Saunders.” In 1758, Franklin created a clever preface that repeated a number of his maxims, framed as an event in which Father Abraham advises that those seeking prosperity and virtue should diligently practice frugality, honesty and industry. It was reprinted as “Father Abraham’s Speech” and “The Way to Wealth.”
Thomas Paine, “Common Sense” (1776). Published anonymously in Philadelphia in January 1776, “Common Sense” appeared at a time when both separation from Great Britain and reconciliation were being considered. Through simple rational arguments, Thomas Paine focused blame for Colonial America’s troubles on the British king and pointed out the advantages of independence. This popular pamphlet had more than a half-million copies in 25 editions appearing throughout the colonies within its first year of printing.
Noah Webster, “A Grammatical Institute of the English Language” (1783). Believing that a distinctive American language was essential to creating cultural independence for the new nation, Noah Webster sought to standardize rules for spelling and pronunciation. His “Grammatical Institute” became the popular “blue-backed speller” used to teach a century of American children how to spell and pronounce words. Its royalties provided Webster with the economic independence to develop his American dictionary.
“The Federalist” (1787). Now considered to be the most significant American contribution to political thought, “The Federalist” essays supporting the ratification of the new Constitution first appeared in New York newspapers under the pseudonym “Publius.” Although it was widely known that the 85 essays were the work of Alexander Hamilton, James Madison and John Jay, the initial curious speculation about authorship of specific essays gradually developed into heated controversy. Hamilton left an authorship list with his lawyer before his fatal duel. In his copy, Madison identified the author of each essay with their initials. Thomas Jefferson penned a similar authorship list in his copy. None of these attributions exactly match, and the authorship of several essays is still being debated by scholars.
“A Curious Hieroglyphick Bible” (1788). Hieroglyphic Bibles were popular in the late 18th century as an effective and entertaining way to teach children biblical passages. Isaiah Thomas, the printer of this 1788 edition, is widely acclaimed as America’s first enlightened printer of children’s books and is often compared to John Newbery of London, with whom he shared the motto “Instruction with delight.”
Christopher Colles, “A Survey of the Roads of the United States of America” (1789). Irish-born engineer and surveyor Christopher Colles produced what is considered the first road map or guidebook of the United States. It uses a format familiar to modern travelers with each plate consisting of two to three strip maps arranged side by side, covering approximately 12 miles. Colles began this work in 1789 but ended the project in 1792 because few people purchased subscriptions. But he compiled an atlas covering approximately 1,000 miles from Albany, New York, to Williamsburg, Virginia.
Benjamin Franklin, “The Private Life of the Late Benjamin Franklin, LL.D.” (1793). Benjamin Franklin was 65 when he wrote the first part of his autobiography, which focused on his early life to 1730. During the 1780s he added three briefer parts that advanced his story to his 50th year (1756) and revised the first part. The first book-length edition was published in Paris in 1791. The first English edition, a retranslation of this French edition, was published in London in 1793. Franklin’s autobiography still is considered one of the most influential memoirs in American literature.
Amelia Simmons, “American Cookery” (1796). This cornerstone in American cookery is the first cookbook of American authorship to be printed in the United States. Numerous recipes adapting traditional dishes by substituting native American ingredients, such as corn, squash and pumpkin, are printed here for the first time. Simmons’ “Pompkin Pudding,” baked in a crust, is the basis for the classic American pumpkin pie. Recipes for cake-like gingerbread are the first known to recommend the use of pearl ash, the forerunner of baking powder.
“New England Primer” (1803). Learning the alphabet went hand in hand with learning Calvinist principles in early America. The phrase “in Adam’s fall, we sinned all,” taught children the first letter of the alphabet and the concept of original sin at the same time. More than 6 million copies in 450 editions of the “New England Primer” were printed between 1681 and 1830 and were a part of nearly every child’s life.
Meriwether Lewis, “History of the Expedition Under the Command of the Captains Lewis and Clark” (1814). After Meriwether Lewis’s death in September 1809, William Clark engaged Nicholas Biddle to edit the expedition papers. Using the captains’ original journals and those of Sergeants Gass and Ordway, Biddle completed a narrative by July 1811. After delays with the publisher, a two-volume edition of the Corps of Discovery’s travels across the continent was finally available to the public in 1814. More than 20 editions appeared during the 19th century, including German, Dutch and several British editions.
Washington Irving, “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow” (1820). One of the first works of fiction by an American author to become popular outside the United States, Washington Irving’s “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow” was first published as part of “The Sketchbook” in 1820. Irving’s vivid imagery involving the wild supernatural pursuit by the Headless Horseman has sustained interest in this popular folktale through many printed editions, as well as film, stage and musical adaptations.
“The Book of Mormon” (1830). This text, sacred to adherents of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, lays out the essential tenets of a religion – founded by Joseph Smith when America was young – that spurred controversy and migration early on but has become a mainstream arm of Christianity today.
William Holmes McGuffey, “McGuffey’s Newly Revised Eclectic Primer” (1836). William Holmes McGuffey was hired in the 1830s by Truman and Smith, a Cincinnati publishing firm, to write schoolbooks appropriate for children in the expanding nation. His eclectic readers were graded, meaning a student started with the primer and, as his reading abilities improved, moved from the first through the sixth reader. Religious instruction is not included, but a strong moral code is encouraged with stories in which hard work and virtue are rewarded and misdeeds and sloth are punished.
Samuel Goodrich, “Peter Parley’s Universal History” (1837). Samuel Goodrich, using the pseudonym Peter Parley, wrote children’s books with an informal and friendly style as he introduced his young readers to faraway people and places. Goodrich believed that fairy tales and fantasy were not useful and possibly dangerous to children. He entertained them instead with engaging tales from history and geography. His low regard for fiction is ironic in that his accounts of other places and cultures were often misleading and stereotypical, if not completely incorrect.
Frederick Douglass, “The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass” (1845). Frederick Douglass’s first autobiography is one of the best-written and most widely read narratives of a formerly enslaved person. It was boldly published less than seven years after Douglass had escaped and before his freedom was purchased. Prefaced by statements of support from his abolitionist friends, William Garrison and Wendell Phillips, Douglass’s book relates his experiences growing up as an enslaved person in Maryland and describes the strategies he used to learn to read and write. More than just a personal story of courage, Douglass’s account became a strong testament for the need to abolish slavery.
Edgar Allan Poe, “Tales” (1845). This selection of classic stories by the forefather of the horror genre includes several classics that use psychological development in conjunction with suspense and terrifying plotline to lay the groundwork for an entire genre of American literature – mystery – and, arguably, for the later genre of science fiction.
Nathaniel Hawthorne, “The Scarlet Letter” (1850). “The Scarlet Letter” was the first important novel by Nathaniel Hawthorne, one of the leading authors of 19th-century romanticism in American literature. Like many of his works, the novel is set in Puritan New England and examines guilt, sin and evil as inherent human traits. The main character, Hester Prynne, is condemned to wear a scarlet “A” (for adultery) on her chest because of an affair that resulted in an illegitimate child. Meanwhile, her child’s father, a Puritan pastor who has kept their affair secret, holds a high place in the community.
Herman Melville, “Moby-Dick,” or, “The Whale” (1851). Herman Melville’s tale of the Great White Whale and the crazed Captain Ahab who declares he will chase it “’round perdition’s flames before I give him up” has become an American myth. Even people who have never read Moby-Dick know the basic plot, and references to it are common in other works of American literature and in popular culture, such as the Star Trek film “The Wrath of Khan” (1982).
Harriet Beecher Stowe, “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” (1852). With the intention of awakening sympathy for oppressed enslaved people and encouraging Northerners to disobey the Fugitive Slave Law of 1850, Harriet Beecher Stowe began writing her vivid sketches of sufferings and family separations of enslaved people. The first version of “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” appeared serially between June 1851 and April 1852 in the National Era, an antislavery paper published in Washington, D.C. The first book edition appeared in March 1852 and sold more than 300,000 copies in the first year. This novel fueled antislavery sentiment during the decade preceding the Civil War.
Henry David Thoreau, “Walden,” or, “Life in the Woods” (1854). While living in solitude in a cabin on Walden Pond in Concord, Mass., Henry David Thoreau wrote his most famous work, “Walden,” a paean to the idea that it is foolish to spend a lifetime seeking material wealth. In his words, “I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.” Thoreau’s love of nature and his advocacy of a simple life have had a large influence on modern conservation and environmental movements.
Walt Whitman, “Leaves of Grass” (1855). The publication of the first slim edition of Walt Whitman’s “Leaves of Grass” in 1855 was the debut of a masterpiece that shifted the course of American literary history. Refreshing and bold in both theme and style, the book underwent many revisions during Whitman’s lifetime. Over almost 40 years Whitman produced multiple editions of “Leaves of Grass,” shaping the book into an ever-transforming kaleidoscope of poems. By his death in 1892, “Leaves” was a thick compendium that represented Whitman’s vision of America over nearly the entire last half of the 19th century. Among the collection’s best-known poems are “I Sing the Body Electric,” “Song of Myself,” and “O Captain! My Captain!,” a metaphorical tribute to the slain Abraham Lincoln.
Louisa May Alcott, “Little Women,” or, “Meg, Jo, Beth and Amy” (1868). This first edition of Louisa May Alcott’s “Little Women” was published in 1868 when Louisa was 35 years old. Based on her own experiences growing up as a young woman with three sisters — and illustrated by her youngest sister, May — the novel was an instant success, selling more than 2,000 copies immediately. Several sequels were published, including “Little Men” (1871) and “Jo’s Boys” (1886). Although “Little Women” is set in a very particular place and time in American history, the characters and their relationships have touched generations of readers and still are beloved.
Horatio Alger Jr., “Mark, the Match Boy” (1869). The formulaic juvenile novels of Horatio Alger Jr., are best remembered for the “rags-to-riches” theme they championed. In these stories, poor city boys rose in social status by working hard and being honest. Alger preached respectability and integrity, while disdaining the idle rich and the growing chasm between the poor and the affluent. The villains in Alger’s stories were almost always rich bankers, lawyers or country squires.
Catharine E. Beecher and Harriet Beecher Stowe, “The American Woman’s Home” (1869). This classic domestic guide by sisters Catharine E. Beecher and Harriet Beecher Stowe is dedicated to “the women of America, in whose hands rest the real destinies of the Republic.” It includes chapters on healthful cookery, home decoration, exercise, cleanliness, good air ventilation and heat, etiquette, sewing, gardening and care of children, the sick, the aged and domestic animals. Intended to elevate the “woman’s sphere” of household management to a respectable profession based on scientific principles, it became the standard domestic handbook.
Oliver Wendell Holmes, “The Common Law” (1881). This book is acknowledged as a classic of American jurisprudence, bringing forth a concept quite new at the time of its publication – that the law of a place develops and is interpreted not only based on what is written in legislation but also based on practice and past experience. To quote Holmes: “We must alternately consult history and existing theories of legislation. But the most difficult labor will be to understand the combination of the two into new products at every stage.”
Mark Twain, “Adventures of Huckleberry Finn” (1884). Novelist Ernest Hemingway famously said, “All modern American literature comes from one book by Mark Twain called ‘Huckleberry Finn’ … All American writing comes from that. There was nothing before. There has been nothing as good since.” During their trip down the Mississippi on a raft, Twain depicts in a satirical and humorous way Huck and Jim’s encounters with hypocrisy, racism, violence and other evils of American society. His use in serious literature of a lively, simple American language full of dialect and colloquial expressions paved the way for many later writers, including Hemingway and William Faulkner.
Emily Dickinson, “Poems” (1890). Very few of the nearly 1,800 poems that Emily Dickinson wrote were published during her lifetime and, even then, they were heavily edited to conform to the poetic conventions of their time. A complete edition of her unedited work was not published until 1955. Her idiosyncratic structure and rhyming schemes have inspired later poets.
Jacob Riis, “How the Other Half Lives” (1890). An early example of photojournalism as vehicle for social change, Riis’s book demonstrated to the middle and upper classes of New York City the slum-like conditions of the tenements of the Lower East Side. Following the book’s publication (and the resulting public uproar), proper sewers, plumbing and trash collection eventually came to the Lower East Side.
Frederick Jackson Turner, “The Frontier in American History” (1893). Historian Turner influenced generations of students and other historians with his theory laid out in this book. He argued that the existence of a frontier, and U.S. denizens’ interaction with it, made Americans a new people rather than a set of displaced Europeans.
Stephen Crane, “The Red Badge of Courage” (1895). One of the most influential works in American literature, Stephen Crane’s “The Red Badge of Courage” has been called the greatest novel about the American Civil War. The tale of a young recruit who learns the cruelty of war made Crane an international success. The work is notable for its vivid depiction of the internal conflict of its main character – most war novels until that time focused more on the battles.
L. Frank Baum, “The Wonderful Wizard of Oz” (1900). “The Wonderful Wizard of Oz,” published in 1900, is the first fantasy written by an American to enjoy an immediate success upon publication. So powerful was its effect on the American imagination, so evocative its use of the forces of nature in its plots, so charming its invitation to children of all ages to look for the element of wonder in the world around them that author L. Frank Baum was forced by demand to create book after book about Dorothy and her friends – including the Scarecrow, the Tin Woodman, the Cowardly Lion and Glinda the Good Witch.
Sarah H. Bradford, “Harriet, the Moses of Her People” (1901). Harriet Tubman is celebrated for her courage and skill in guiding many escaping slavery northward along the Underground Railroad to freedom. She also served as a scout and a nurse during the Civil War. In order to raise funds for Tubman’s support in 1869 and again in 1886, Sarah Hopkins Bradford published accounts of Tubman’s experiences as a young enslaved woman and her daring efforts to rescue family and friends from slavery.
Jack London, “The Call of the Wild” (1903). Jack London’s experiences during the Klondike gold rush in the Yukon were the inspiration for “The Call of the Wild.” He saw the way dogsled teams behaved and how their owners treated (and mistreated) them. In the book, the dog Buck’s comfortable life is upended when gold is discovered in the Klondike. From then on, survival of the fittest becomes Buck’s mantra as he learns to confront and survive the harsh realities of his new life as a sled dog.
W.E.B. Du Bois, “The Souls of Black Folk” (1903). “Few books make history and fewer still become foundational texts for the movements and struggles of an entire people. The ‘Souls of Black Folk’ occupies this rare position,” said Du Bois biographer Manning Marable. Du Bois’s work was so influential that it is impossible to consider the civil rights movement’s roots without first looking to this groundbreaking work.
Ida Tarbell, “The History of Standard Oil” (1904). Journalist Ida Tarbell wrote her exposé of the monopolistic practices of John D. Rockefeller’s Standard Oil Company as a serialized work in McClure’s Magazine. The breakup of Standard Oil in 1911 into 34 “baby Standards” can be attributed in large part to Tarbell’s masterly muckraking.
Upton Sinclair, “The Jungle” (1906). An early example of investigative journalism, this graphic exposé of the Chicago meat-packing industry presented as a novel was one of the first works of fiction to lead directly to national legislation. The federal meat-inspection law and the Pure Food and Drug Act of 1906 established the agency that eventually became the Food and Drug Administration in 1930.
Henry Adams, “The Education of Henry Adams” (1907). The dawn of the 20th century and the changes it brought are the subjects of Henry Adams’ “education.” Adams lived through the Civil War and died just before World War I. During that time, he witnessed cataclysmic transformations in technology, society and politics. Adams believed that his traditional education left him ill-prepared for these changes and that his life experiences provided a better education. One survey called it the greatest nonfiction English-language book of the last century.
William James, “Pragmatism” (1907). “Pragmatism” was America’s first major contribution to philosophy, and it is an ideal rooted in the American ethos of no-nonsense solutions to real problems. Although James did not originate the idea, he popularized the philosophy through his voluminous writings.
Zane Grey, “Riders of the Purple Sage” (1912). “Riders of the Purple Sage,” Zane Grey’s best-known novel, was originally published in 1912. The Western genre had just evolved from the popular dime novels and penny dreadfuls of the late 19th century. This story of a gun-slinging avenger who saves a young and beautiful woman from marrying against her will played a significant role in shaping the formula of the popular Western genre begun by Owen Wister in “The Virginian” (1904).
Edgar Rice Burroughs, “Tarzan of the Apes” (1914). “Tarzan of the Apes” is the first in a series of books about the popular man who was raised by and lived among the apes. With its universal themes of honesty, heroism and bravery, the series has never lost popularity. Countless Tarzan adaptations have been filmed for television and the silver screen, including an animated version.
Margaret Sanger, “Family Limitation” (1914). While working as a nurse in the New York slums, Margaret Sanger witnessed the plight of poor women suffering from frequent pregnancies and self-induced abortions. Believing that these women had the right to control their reproductive health, Sanger published this pamphlet that simply explained how to prevent pregnancy. Its distribution through the mails was blocked by enforcement of the Comstock Law, which banned mailing of materials judged to be obscene. However, several hundred thousand copies were distributed through the first family-planning and birth control clinic Sanger established in Brooklyn in 1916 and by networks of active women at rallies and political meetings.
Willa Cather, “My Antonia” (1918). This novel explores both the immigrant experience and the issues facing women in the move west across the continent. Narrated by a character named Jim Burden, who grows up near a Bohemian family including Antonia Shimerda, we view Antonia’s life over many years through his affectionate and sometimes judgmental eyes.
William Carlos Williams, “Spring and All” (1923). A practicing physician for more than 40 years, William Carlos Williams became an experimenter, innovator and revolutionary figure in American poetry. In reaction against the rigid, rhyming format of 19th-century poets, Williams, his friend Ezra Pound and other early-20th-century poets formed the core of what became known as the “Imagist” movement. Their poetry focused on verbal pictures and moments of revealed truth, rather than a structure of consecutive events or thoughts and was expressed in free verse rather than rhyme.
Robert Frost, “New Hampshire” (1923). Frost received his first of four Pulitzer Prizes for this anthology, which contains some of his most famous poems, including “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening” and “Fire and Ice.” One of the best-known American poets of his time, Frost became principally associated with the life and landscape of New England. Although he employed traditional verse forms and metrics and remained aloof from the poetic movements and fashions of his day, poems featured language as it is actually spoken as well as psychological complexity and layers of ambiguity and irony.
F. Scott Fitzgerald, “The Great Gatsby” (1925). F. Scott Fitzgerald, one of the major American writers of the 20th century, is a figure whose life and works embody powerful myths about the American Dream of success. “The Great Gatsby,” considered by many to be Fitzgerald’s finest work and the book for which he is best known, is a portrait of the Jazz Age (1920s) in all its decadence and excess. Exploring the themes of class, wealth and social status, Fitzgerald takes a cynical look at the pursuit of wealth among a group of people for whom pleasure is the chief goal. “The Great Gatsby” captured the spirit of the author’s generation and earned a permanent place in American mythology.
Langston Hughes, “The Weary Blues” (1925). Langston Hughes was one of the greatest poets of the Harlem Renaissance, a literary and intellectual flowering that fostered a new Black cultural identity in the 1920s and 1930s. His poem “The Weary Blues,” also the title of this poetry collection, won first prize in a contest held by Opportunity magazine. After the awards ceremony, the writer and photographer Carl Van Vechten approached Hughes about putting together a book of verse and got him a contract with his own publisher, Alfred A. Knopf. Van Vechten contributed an essay, “Introducing Langston Hughes,” to the volume. The book laid the foundation for Hughes’s literary career, and several poems remain popular with his admirers.
William Faulkner, “The Sound and the Fury” (1929). “The Sound and the Fury,” William Faulkner’s fourth novel, was his own favorite, and many critics believe it is his masterpiece. Set in the fictional county of Yoknapatawpha, Mississippi, as are most of Faulkner’s novels, “The Sound and the Fury” uses the American South as a metaphor for a civilization in decline. Depicting the post-Civil War decline of the once-aristocratic Compson family, the novel is divided into four parts, each told by a different narrator. Much of the novel is told in a stream-of-consciousness style, in which a character’s thoughts are conveyed in a manner roughly equivalent to the way human minds actually work. Faulkner was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1950 and France’s Legion of Honor in 1951.
Dashiell Hammett, “Red Harvest” (1929). Dashiell Hammett’s first novel introduced a wide audience to the so-called “hard-boiled” detective thriller with its depiction of crime and violence without any hint of sentimentality. The creator of classics such as “The Maltese Falcon” and “The Thin Man,” shocked readers with such dialogue as “We bumped over dead Hank O’Meara’s legs and headed for home.”
Irma Rombauer, “Joy of Cooking” (1931). Until Irma Rombauer published “Joy of Cooking,” most American cookbooks were little more than a series of paragraphs that incorporated ingredient amounts (if they were provided at all) with some vague advice about how to put them all together to achieve the desired results. Rombauer changed all that by beginning her recipes with ingredient lists and offering precise directions along with her own personal and friendly anecdotes. A modest success initially, the book went on to sell nearly 18 million copies in its various editions.
Margaret Mitchell, “Gone With the Wind” (1936). The most popular romance novel of all time was the basis for the most popular movie of all time (in today’s dollars). Margaret Mitchell’s book, set in the South during the Civil War, won both the Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award, and it remains popular, despite charges that its author had a blind eye regarding the horrors of slavery.
Dale Carnegie, “How to Win Friends and Influence People” (1936). The progenitor of all self-help books, Dale Carnegie’s volume has sold 15 million copies and been translated into more than 30 languages. “How to Win Friends and Influence People” has also spawned hundreds of other books, many of them imitators, written to advise on everything from improving one’s relationships to beefing up one’s bank account. Carnegie acknowledged that he was inspired by Benjamin Franklin, a young man who proclaimed that “God helps them that help themselves” as a way to get ahead in life.
Zora Neale Hurston, “Their Eyes Were Watching God” (1937). Although it was published in 1937, it was not until the 1970s that “Their Eyes Were Watching God” became regarded as a masterwork. It had initially been rejected by African American critics as facile and simplistic, in part because its characters spoke in dialect. Alice Walker’s 1975 Ms. magazine essay, “Looking for Zora,” led to a critical reevaluation of the book, which is now considered to have paved the way for younger Black writers such as Alice Walker and Toni Morrison.
Federal Writers’ Project, “Idaho: A Guide in Word and Pictures” (1937). “Idaho” was the first in the popular American Guide Series of the Federal Writers’ Project, which ended in 1943. The project employed more than 6,000 writers and was one of the many programs of the Works Progress Administration, a Depression-era federal government employment program. These travel guides cover the lower 48 states plus the Alaska Territory, Puerto Rico and the District of Columbia. Each volume details a state’s history, geography and culture and includes photographs, maps and drawings.
Thornton Wilder, “Our Town: A Play” (1938). Winner of the 1938 Pulitzer Prize, “Our Town” is among the most-performed plays of the 20th century. Those who see it relate immediately to its universal themes of the importance of everyday occurrences, relationships among friends and family and an appreciation of the brevity of life.
“Alcoholics Anonymous” (1939). The famous 12-step program for stopping an addiction has sold more than 30 million copies. Millions of men and women worldwide have turned to the program co-founded by Bill Wilson and Dr. Bob Smith to recover from alcoholism. The “Big Book,” as it is known, spawned similar programs for other forms of addiction.
John Steinbeck, “The Grapes of Wrath” (1939). Few novels can claim that their message led to actual legislation, but “The Grapes of Wrath” did just that. Its story of the travails of Oklahoma migrants during the Great Depression ignited a movement in Congress to pass laws benefiting farmworkers. When Steinbeck won the Nobel Prize in 1962, the committee specifically cited this novel as one of the main reasons for the award.
Ernest Hemingway, “For Whom the Bell Tolls” (1940). Ernest Hemingway’s novel about the horrors of the Spanish Civil War (1936–1939) depicts war not as glorious but as disillusioning. Hemingway used his experiences as a reporter during the war as the background for his best-selling novel, which was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize and became a literary triumph. Based on his achievement in this and other noted works, he received the Nobel Prize for literature in 1954.
Richard Wright, “Native Son” (1940). Among the first widely successful novels by an African American, “Native Son” boldly described a racist society that was unfamiliar to most Americans. As literary critic Irving Howe said in his 1963 essay “Black Boys and Native Sons,” “The day ‘Native Son’ appeared, American culture was changed forever. No matter how much qualifying the book might later need, it made impossible a repetition of the old lies.”
Betty Smith, “A Tree Grows in Brooklyn” (1943). “A Tree Grows in Brooklyn” is the account of a girl growing up in the tenements of turn-of-the-20th-century Brooklyn. An early socially conscious novel, the book examines poverty, alcoholism, gender roles, loss of innocence and the struggle to live the American Dream in an urban neighborhood of Irish American immigrants. The book was enormously popular and became a film directed by Elia Kazan.
Benjamin A. Botkin, “A Treasury of American Folklore” (1944). Benjamin Botkin headed the Library of Congress Archive of American Folksong (now the American Folklife Center) between 1943 and 1945 and previously served as national folklore editor of the Federal Writers’ Project (1938–39), a program of President Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal during the Depression. Botkin was one of the New Deal folklorists who persuasively argued that folklore was relevant in the present and that it was not something that should be studied merely for its historical value. This book features illustrations by Andrew Wyeth, one of America’s foremost realist painters.
Gwendolyn Brooks, “A Street in Bronzeville” (1945). “A Street in Bronzeville” was Brooks’ first book of poetry. It details, in stark terms, the oppression of Black residents in a Chicago neighborhood. Critics hailed the book, and in 1950 Brooks became the first African American to win the Pulitzer Prize for poetry. She was also appointed as U.S. Poet Laureate by the Librarian of Congress in 1985.
Benjamin Spock, “The Common Sense Book of Baby and Child Care” (1946). Dr. Spock’s guidebook turned common wisdom about child-rearing on its head. Spock argued that babies did not have to be on a rigid schedule, that children should be treated with a great deal of affection, and that parents should use their own common sense when making child-rearing decisions. Millions of parents worldwide have followed his advice.
Eugene O’Neill, “The Iceman Cometh” (1946). Nobel Prize winner Eugene O’Neill’s play about anarchism, socialism and pipe dreams is one of his most-admired but least-performed works, probably because of its more than four-and-a-half-hour running time. Set in 1912 in the seedy Last Chance Saloon in New York City, the play depicts the bar’s drunk and delusional patrons bickering while awaiting the arrival of Hickey, a traveling salesman whose visits are the highlight of their hopeless lives. However, Hickey’s arrival throws them into turmoil when he arrives sober, wanting them to face their delusions.
Margaret Wise Brown, “Goodnight Moon” (1947). This bedtime story has been a favorite of young people for generations, beloved as much for its rhyming story as for its carefully detailed illustrations by Clement Hurd. Millions have read it (and had it read to them). “Goodnight Moon” has been referred to as the perfect bedtime book.
Tennessee Williams, “A Streetcar Named Desire” (1947). A landmark work, which won the 1948 Pulitzer Prize for Drama, “A Streetcar Named Desire” thrilled and shocked audiences with its melodramatic look at a clash of cultures. These cultures are embodied in the two main characters – Blanche DuBois, a fading Southern belle whose genteel pretensions thinly mask alcoholism and delusions of grandeur, and Stanley Kowalski, a representative of the industrial, urban working class. Marlon Brando’s portrayal of the brutish and sensual Stanley in both the original stage production and the film adaptation has become an icon of American culture.
Alfred C. Kinsey, “Sexual Behavior in the Human Male” (1948). Alfred Kinsey created a firestorm when he published this volume on men in 1948 and a companion on women five years later. No one had ever reported on such taboo subjects before and no one had used scientific data in such detail to challenge the prevailing notions of sexual behavior. Kinsey’s openness regarding human sexuality was a harbinger of the 1960s sexual revolution in America.
J.D. Salinger, “The Catcher in the Rye” (1951). Since his debut in 1951 as the narrator of “The Catcher in the Rye,” 16-year-old Holden Caulfield has been synonymous with adolescent alienation and angst. The influential story concerns three days after Holden has been expelled from prep school. Confused and disillusioned, he wanders New York City searching for truth and rails against the phoniness of the adult world. Holden is the first great American antihero, and his attitudes influenced the Beat generation of the 1950s as well as the hippies of the 1960s. “The Catcher in the Rye” is one of the most translated, taught and reprinted books and has sold some 65 million copies.
Ralph Ellison, “Invisible Man” (1952). Ralph Ellison’s “Invisible Man” is told by an unnamed narrator who views himself as someone many in society do not see, much less pay attention to. Ellison addresses what it means to be an African-American in a world hostile to the rights of a minority, on the cusp of the emerging civil rights movement that was to change society irrevocably.
E.B. White, “Charlotte’s Web” (1952). According to Publishers Weekly, “Charlotte’s Web” is the best-selling paperback for children of all time. One reason may be that, although it was written for children, reading it is just as enjoyable for adults. The book is especially notable for the way it treats death as a natural and inevitable part of life in a way that is palatable for young people.
Ray Bradbury, “Fahrenheit 451” (1953). “Fahrenheit 451” is Ray Bradbury’s disturbing vision of a future United States in which books are outlawed and burned. Even though interpretations of the novel have primarily focused on the historical role of book-burning as a means of censorship, Bradbury has said that the novel is about how television reduces knowledge to factoids and destroys interest in reading. The book inspired a 1966 film by Francois Truffaut and a subsequent BBC symphony. Its name comes from the minimum temperature at which paper catches fire by spontaneous combustion.
Allen Ginsberg, “Howl” (1956). Allen Ginsberg’s poem “Howl” (first published as the title poem of a collection) established him as an important poet and the voice of the Beat Generation of the 1950s. Because of the boldness of the poem’s language and subject matter, it became the subject of an obscenity trial in San Francisco in which it was exonerated after witnesses testified to its redeeming social value. Ginsberg’s work had great influence on later generations of poets and on the youth culture of the 1960s.
Ayn Rand, “Atlas Shrugged” (1957). Although mainstream critics reacted poorly to “Atlas Shrugged,” it was a popular success. Set in what novelist and philosopher Rand called “the day after tomorrow,” the book depicts a United States caught up in a crisis caused by a corrupt establishment of government regulators and business interests. The book’s negative view of government and its support of unimpeded capitalism as the highest moral objective have influenced libertarians and those who advocate a smaller government.
Dr. Seuss, “The Cat in the Hat” (1957). Theodore Seuss Geisel was removed as editor of the campus humor magazine while a student at Dartmouth College after too much reveling with fellow students. In spite of this Prohibition-era setback to his writing career, he continued to contribute to the magazine pseudonymously, signing his work “Seuss.” This is the first known use of his pseudonym, which became famous in children’s literature when it evolved into “Dr. Seuss.” “The Cat in the Hat” is considered the most important book of his career. More than 200 million Dr. Seuss books have been sold around the world.
Jack Kerouac, “On the Road” (1957). The defining novel of the 1950s Beat Generation (which Kerouac named), “On the Road” is a semiautobiographical tale of a bohemian cross-country adventure, narrated by character Sal Paradise. Kerouac’s odyssey has influenced artists such as Bob Dylan, Tom Waits and Hunter S. Thompson and films such as “Easy Rider.” “On the Road” has achieved a mythic status in part because it portrays the restless energy and desire for freedom that makes people take off to see the world.
Philip Roth, “Goodbye, Columbus” (1959). This early set of short stories, including the title story, won the National Book Award for Fiction for Roth, whose oeuvre largely chronicles Jewish Americans and their varied lifestyles and psychological issues.
Harper Lee, “To Kill a Mockingbird” (1960). This 1960 Pulitzer Prize winner was an immediate critical and financial success for its author, with more than 30 million copies in print to date. Harper Lee created one of the most enduring and heroic characters in all of American literature in Atticus Finch, the small-town lawyer who defended a wrongly accused Black man. The book’s importance was recognized by the 1961 Washington Post reviewer: “A hundred pounds of sermons on tolerance, or an equal measure of invective deploring the lack of it, will weigh far less in the scale of enlightenment than a mere 18 ounces of new fiction bearing the title ‘To Kill a Mockingbird.’”
Joseph Heller, “Catch-22” (1961). This irreverent World War II novel, a satiric treatment of military bureaucracy, has had such a penetrating effect that its title has become synonymous with “no-win situation.” Heller’s novel is a black comedy, filled with orders from above that make no sense and a main character, Yossarian, who just wants to stay alive. He pleads insanity but is caught in the famous catch: “Anyone who wants to get out of combat duty isn’t really crazy.” The novel became a cult classic for its biting indictment of war.
Robert Heinlein, “Stranger in a Strange Land” (1961). The first science fiction novel to become a bestseller, “Stranger in a Strange Land” is the story of Valentine Michael Smith, a human raised on Mars by Martians (his parents were on the first expedition to Mars and he was orphaned when the crew perished) who returns to Earth about 20 years later. Smith has psychic powers but complete ignorance of human mores. The book is considered a classic in its genre.
Rachel Carson, “Silent Spring” (1962). A marine biologist and writer, Rachel Carson is considered a founder of the contemporary environmental protection movement. She drew attention to the adverse effects of pesticides, especially that of DDT on bird populations, in her book “Silent Spring,” a 1963 National Book Association Nonfiction Finalist. At a time when technological solutions were the norm, she pointed out that man-made poisons introduced into natural systems can harm not only nature, but also humans. Her book met with great success and because of heightened public awareness, DDT was banned.
Ezra Jack Keats, “The Snowy Day” (1962). Ezra Jack Keats’s “The Snowy Day” was the first full-color picture book with an African-American as the main character. The book changed the field of children’s literature forever, and Keats was recognized by winning the 1963 Caldecott Medal (the most prestigious American award for children’s books) for his landmark effort.
Maurice Sendak, “Where the Wild Things Are” (1963). “It is my involvement with this inescapable fact of childhood – the awful vulnerability of children and their struggle to make themselves King of All Wild Things – that gives my work whatever truth and passion it may have,” Maurice Sendak said in his Caldecott Medal acceptance speech on June 30, 1964. Sendak called Max, the hero of “Where the Wild Things Are,” his “bravest and therefore my dearest creation.” Max, who is sent to his room with nothing to eat, sails to where the wild things are and becomes their king.
James Baldwin, “The Fire Next Time” (1963). One of the most important books ever published on race relations, Baldwin’s two-essay work comprises a letter written to his nephew on the role of race in United States history and a discussion of how religion and race influence each other. Baldwin’s angry prose is balanced by his overall belief that love and understanding can overcome strife.
Betty Friedan, “The Feminine Mystique” (1963). By debunking the “feminine mystique” that middle-class women were happy and fulfilled as housewives and mothers, Betty Friedan inspired the second-wave feminist movement of the 1960s and 1970s. Friedan advocates that women need meaningful work and encourages them to avoid the trap of the “feminine mystique” by pursuing education and careers. By 2000 this touchstone of the women’s movement had sold 3 million copies and was translated into several languages.
Malcolm X and Alex Haley, “The Autobiography of Malcolm X” (1965). When “The Autobiography of Malcolm X” (born Malcolm Little) was published, The New York Times called it a “brilliant, painful, important book,” and it has become a classic American autobiography. Written in collaboration with Alex Haley (author of “Roots”), the book expressed for many African-Americans what the mainstream civil rights movement did not: their anger and frustration with the intractability of racial injustice.
Ralph Nader, “Unsafe at Any Speed” (1965). Nader’s book was a landmark in the field of auto safety and made him a household name. It detailed how automakers resisted putting safety features, such as seat belts, in their cars and resulted in the federal government’s taking a lead role in the area of auto safety.
Truman Capote, “In Cold Blood” (1966). A 300-word article in The New York Times about a murder led Truman Capote to travel with his childhood friend Harper Lee to Holcomb, Kansas, to research his nonfiction novel, which is considered one of the greatest true-crime books ever written. Capote said the novel was an attempt to establish a serious new literary form, the “nonfiction novel,” a narrative form that employed all the techniques of fictional art but was nevertheless entirely factual. The book was an instant success and was made into a film.
James D. Watson, “The Double Helix” (1968). James D. Watson’s personal account of the structure of DNA and the history of its discovery changed the way Americans regarded the genre of the scientific memoir and set a new standard for first-person accounts. Dealing with personalities, controversies and conflicts, the book also changed the way the public thought about how science and scientists work, showing that scientific enterprise can at times be a messy and cutthroat business.
Kurt Vonnegut, “Slaughterhouse-Five” (1969). A satirical novel based on the experiences of a military chaplain’s assistant during World War II, this fantastical tale involves extraterrestrials, a differential space/time continuum, and much absurdity.
Dee Brown, “Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee” (1970). Until librarian Dee Brown wrote his history of Native Americans in the West, few Americans knew the details of the unjust treatment of American Indians. Brown scoured both well-known and little-known sources for his documentary on the massacres, broken promises and other atrocities suffered by Native Americans. The book has never gone out of print and has sold more than 4 million copies.
Boston Women’s Health Book Collective, “Our Bodies, Ourselves” (1971). In the early 1970s a dozen Boston feminists collaborated in this groundbreaking publication that presented accurate information on women’s health and sexuality based on their own experiences. Advocating improved doctor-patient communication and shared decision-making, “Our Bodies, Ourselves” explored ways for women to take charge of their own health issues and to work for political and cultural change that would ameliorate women’s lives.
Rudolfo Anaya, “Bless Me Ultima” (1972). A story of a Hispanic boy’s awakening to learning, spirituality and his need to resolve the dissonances of culture – including the subcultures within his own family.
Maxine Hong Kingston, “The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood Among Ghosts” (1975). This book uses the interplay of Chinese and American cultures to explore the identity of Chinese-Americans. Making powerful use of Chinese folklore and family history, it examines several women and the tension between their adherence to cultural expectations and the expression of their individualism.
Alex Haley, “Roots” (1976). This tale of an African named Kunta Kinte, who was kidnapped, enslaved and brought to America – and the story of his descendants – spent 46 weeks on the New York Times bestseller list and was made into a popular television series.
Milton and Rose Friedman, “Free to Choose: A Personal Statement” (1980). Economists Milton and Rose Friedman published this book in conjunction with their PBS series that espoused the virtues of capitalism versus other economic approaches.
Carl Sagan, “Cosmos” (1980). Carl Sagan’s classic, bestselling science book accompanied his avidly followed television series, “Cosmos.” In an accessible way, Sagan covered a broad range of scientific topics and made the history and excitement of science understandable and enjoyable for Americans and then for an international audience. The book offers a glimpse of Sagan’s personal vision of what it means to be human.
Toni Morrison, “Beloved” (1987). Toni Morrison won the 1988 Pulitzer Prize for fiction for her post-Civil War novel based on the true story of an escaped enslaved person and the tragic consequences when a posse comes to reclaim her. The author won the Nobel Prize for literature in 1993, and in 2006 The New York Times named “Beloved” “the best work of American fiction of the past 25 years.”
Randy Shilts, “And the Band Played On” (1987). “And the Band Played On” is the story of how the AIDS epidemic spread and how the government’s initial indifference to the disease allowed its spread and gave urgency to devoting government resources to fighting the virus. Shilts’s investigation has been compared to other works that led to increased efforts toward public safety, such as Upton Sinclair’s “The Jungle.”
César Chávez, “The Words of César Chávez” (2002). César Chávez, founder of the United Farm Workers’ union, was as impassioned as he was undeterred in his quest for better working conditions for farm workers. He was a natural communicator whose speeches and writings led to many improvements in wages and working conditions.
The Library sponsored an exhibition of these books from June–September 2012.
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J.G. Ballard – Jumbled Thoughts of a Fake Geek Boy
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Jumbled Thoughts of a Fake Geek Boy
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Here it is – the end of my survey of J.G. Ballard’s short stories, with his The Complete Short Stories as my source text but each of these articles focusing on one of the individual UK short story collections the tales were derived from. This time around I’ll cover his final pre-Complete Stories collection, War Fever, and three 1992 stories which went unanthologised until they were assembled in The Complete Short Stories.
Turning to 1989’s War Fever first, the title story posits a near future where war, like smallpox, has been largely eradicated – but a small sample is allowed to survive (in this case, in a rebuilt version of Beirut) for the purposes of study and examination of mutations. It’s a rather glib and simplistic concept; though it’s inspired by 1980s headlines, in execution it feels more like a second-tier dystopia from Ballard’s early era.
This is followed up with The Secret History of World War 3, Ballard’s parting shot at Ronald Reagan written to mark the end of Reagan’s second term in office. It presents an account of a hypothetical third term for Reagan – the necessary Constitutional tweaks having been rammed through after his successor (unnamed, presumably because the 1988 election hadn’t been called when Ballard was writing) proved to be less-than-inspirational. This an era in which news reportage on the President’s health ends up displacing stories of far greater importance – such as the brief outbreak of World War 3, swiftly nixed.
In predicting that Reagan would have succumbed to a form of dementia almost entirely soon after leaving office, Ballard might simply be being cheeky about Reagan’s public image – in retrospect, it seems like the signs were evident, though how much of Reagan’s public failures of recollection were sincere and how many were a bid to evade scrutiny over the Iran-Contra affair is an open question. Nonetheless, this last twisting of the knife is wild to read knowing what we know now, especially given Ballard’s long-standing hostility towards Reagan as enunciated in The Atrocity Exhibition.
What feels particularly prophetic here – though, again, this is likely extrapolating from trends already extant during Reagan’s presidency – was how the then-new medium of 24/7 news would rapidly become consumed by irrelevancy, and in the depiction of a gerontocracy in the United States as stagnant and moribund as that in the late Soviet Union or China in the time Ballard was writing.
(The story unfortunately includes a crack about radical Islamism and feminism finding common cause; this is an ugly take, and whilst I suspect it’s specifically a jab at some of the more sex-negative expressions of second wave feminism the lack of specificity is still galling.)
Continue reading “Ballard’s Short Story Ceasefire” →
Myths of the Near Future is the first of J.G. Ballard’s two major late-career short story collections. In terms of the chronology of when the stories emerged, the anthology spans 1976-1982 – a narrower span of years than any Ballard collection since The Terminal Beach – and so covers much of Ballard’s late flowering of short story output from this period. From 1984 onwards, his short story output would be more sporadic, but as in Low-Flying Aircraft we find Ballard here using his well-matured talents to provide both somewhat more refined takes on earlier ideas and toying with a few new ones.
The title story is a phantasmagoric blend of a massive number of distinctive Ballard themes and images from across his entire career, combined together in a single narrative that reaches a Messianic culmination. Light aircraft… abandoned beachside resorts occupied by transients and hangers on… a long-decommissioned Cape Kennedy… the failure of the Space Age… empty swimming pools… people on the verge of turning into birds… new life forms emerging in a zone where the future is just a little closer than elsewhere… jeweled animals… obsessive blends of pornography and geometry… strange ritualistic behaviour… a world winding down into slow disaster, or perhaps preparing for a massive evolutionary leap… accreted time… a man chasing his wife, who may be dead… a renegade neurosurgeon… a strange sort of time-sickness which may be a transformation of how we see perceive the universe itself…
All these Ballard ideas and more besides crop up in the story, making it a sort of Platonic ideal of his writing and the keystone through which everything fits together. Look through it in this direction and you can see The Crystal World; rotate it a little, like a multifaceted gemstone, and you might see glimpses of The Cage of Sand, The Atrocity Exhibition, The Dead Astronaut, Low-Flying Aircraft, The Voices of Time, Storm-Bird, Storm Dreamer, and more besides.
What’s startling is just how well all these ideas blend together; it’s like this is the story which Ballard has been working towards, and he needed to master all the individual ideas in it before he could bring them all together in one bizarre vision. Whereas one of Ballard’s earliest stories, Passport To Eternity, fell down because it was trying to do too many things at once and Ballard was still honing his skills, here Ballard is able to throw in even more at once and make it all work beautifully.
Continue reading “Ballard’s Millennial Legends” →
Among the clutch of J.G. Ballard collections that came out in the 1960s, there was a set I’ve not covered yet called The Overloaded Man. After the publication of the Vermilion Sands collection, later revisions of The 4-Dimensional Nightmare/The Voices of Time would drop the stories Studio 5, The Stars and Prima Belladonna so as to keep the Vermilion Sands stories exclusive to their own collection, and substitute in Thirteen To Centaurus and The Overloaded Man (the story) from The Overloaded Man (the collection).
This left the remaining stories from The Overloaded Man rather orphaned; eventually, the collection was revised and reissued in 1980 under the title of The Venus Hunters (after all, The Overloaded Man was no longer in the collection) with three otherwise-uncollected stories tacked on to fill the gap.
The resulting collection is therefore a bit of a weird grab-bag. On one level, it’s the most wide-ranging of Ballard’s main UK anthologies (other than The Complete Short Stories, of course), since the stories in it span from 1956 to 1976. On the other hand, the distribution in that timespan is far from even. You have the seven stories orphaned from The Overloaded Man, which span from 1956 to 1963 but err towards the earlier part of that (there’s more 1950s stories here than in any of the other Ballard collections I’ve covered), and then the added-in stories come from 1969, 1976, and 1978.
The overall impression, looking at the collection from this perspective is of a grab-bag of stories which didn’t quite make the cut for any other collection – including sets like The Terminal Beach or The Day of Forever, which I already felt were a tier below other collections published at around the same time of them. Is that fair, or are there overlooked treasures here?
Continue reading “Scavenging For Deep Space Scraps” →
Collecting stories spanning from 1966 to 1976, Low-Flying Aircraft is a J.G. Ballard collection which represents a significant step forward from the various short stories collections I’ve covered so far as I’ve been working my way through his Complete Short Stories.
The collections I’ve covered so far – The Voices of Time, The Terminal Beach, The Disaster Area, The Day of Forever, and Vermilion Sands – have all essentially centred on Ballard’s work from the 1950s to the mid-1960s. (Vermilion Sands includes some stories set after this, but rooted sufficiently in the approach of the earlier tales in the collection to feel like all the segments are in the same general style.) Likewise The Atrocity Exhibition, if you take it as a short story selection rather than a novel, is more the product of an intense burst of experimental writing on Ballard’s part spanning 1966-1969, and each of the experiments were so thematically tied to each other that the tales there constitute its own little anomaly.
The end of the 1960s, however, saw Ballard’s short fiction output tailing off. After he broke into the market in the 1950s, the 1960s was really the main flowering of his short story writing; even if you set aside the components of The Atrocity Exhibition, comfortably over half his short story output took place then, with the bulk of it from 1960-1966 or so. Following The Atrocity Exhibition, Ballard’s short story output tailed off as he placed a greater focus on his novels, with Crash, Concrete Island, and High-Rise finding him shift his novel-writing in a direction which shifted away from both the different flavours of post-apocalyptic fiction he explored in The Wind From Nowhere, The Drowned World, The Burning World, and The Crystal World, whilst stepping back from the high-experimentation approach of The Atrocity Exhibition.
As a result, despite containing stories separated by a decade or so, Low-Flying Aircraft actually contains all of Ballard’s short story output of 1970 to 1974 and (again, if you don’t account the components of The Atrocity Exhibition as short stories) the majority of his output from 1968 to 1975. This means that as well as catching some of the last fruits of Ballard’s major run of short stories ending in the late 1960s, Low-Flying Aircraft also captures the start of the burst of new short stories he produced from 1976 to the early 1980s which would be the focus of collections like Myths of the Near Future.
Continue reading “Ballard Glides Into the 1970s” →
Though I’ve been looking over J.G. Ballard’s short stories as collected in The Complete Short Stories of late, I’m switching tracks here to tackle The Atrocity Exhibition, since I think I’ve now hit an appropriate point to consider that and, according to some schools of thought, it’s a collection of short stories instead of a novel, since each individual chapter of it was published separately somewhere in 1966-1969 before it was all brought together in the book.
On rereading it, I don’t agree. Although each chapter can be taken as its own self-contained thing, the mosaic Ballard creates when putting them together like this reveals a kind of narrative arc spanning the entire book, from its opening chapter (The Atrocity Exhibition) to its conclusion, The Assassination of John Fitzgerald Kennedy Considered As a Downhill Motor Race, which had been originally devised by Ballard as his contribution to Dangerous Visions before an interfering publisher decided to reject the story before it even reached Harlan Ellison for consideration.
This was not the only censorious response to the book’s contents. In the UK, a booklet publication of the penultimate chapter/story, Why I Want To Fuck Ronald Reagan, was one of the subjects of obscenity charges brought against the Unicorn Bookshop in Brighton; Ballard was in the end not called as a witness by the defence because in an interview with the defence attorneys he stated that yes, obviously the story was obscene, the whole point of it was to present a grotesque obscenity as a means of taking a stab at then-Governor Reagan and the far-right tone of his policies at the time. (In Ballard’s assessment, Reagan toned things down a notch by the time he was President, but that’s perhaps more a measure of how extreme Reagan was in the late 1960s than how mellow he was in the 1980s.)
Its original US publication by Doubleday had the entire print run pulped when Nelson Doubleday Jr. decided that there was too much risk of legal action taken by the real-life celebrities named in the book. Doubleday’s worries are interesting here because the book doesn’t actually depict any of those celebrities doing anything which they have not been demonstrably shown to do – it merely depicts a very, very strange way of looking at and interpreting those people – and so it feels like a defamation action would have struggled, but such was the offense that publishers feared would be caused by the book.
Grove Press would issue the book in 1972 under the alternate title of Love and Napalm: Export USA; though this was one of the chapter titles in the book, Ballard objected to using it as the name of the entire novel because he thought it implied that the whole thing was exclusively an anti-American polemic, when in fact he thought that the sort of mass media assault on the public psyche the book obsesses about was as present in Britain as it was in America, and had probably been taken further and become more sophisticated.
Continue reading “Ballard’s Obscene Display” →
I’ve been looking forward to this one. Over the course of my coverage of Ballard’s short stories – working through his Collected Short Stories based on the contents of individual short story collections (so far: The Voices of Time, The Terminal Beach, The Disaster Area, The Day of Forever), I’ve hit the point where I have now covered the majority of his short stories of his first decade or so as a writer, from 1956 to 1966. (A few odds and sods remain, but they’ll end up covered when I tackle The Venus Hunters.)
There is, however, a really major exception, and it’s not any of the component stories which went into The Atrocity Exhibition (written 1966-1969, and arguably a novel originally issued as a scattered cloud of short stories before Ballard drew them all together to reveal the hideous pattern lurking underneath). So far, I have not covered any of Ballard’s stories about the strange artistic enclave of Vermilion Sands. This means so that I’ve not talked about an entire dimension of Ballard’s early writing which was extraordinarily important – there’s a particular atmosphere to the Vermilion Sands stories that is unique to them and which, at least at this phase of his career, he largely restricted to them, and so isn’t really reflected in his larger body of work from the era.
The reason I’ve not looked at them yet is that they live in their own collection, Vermilion Sands, originally emerging in a slightly truncated US version in 1971 before Jonathan Cape put out the full version in the UK in 1973. It was subsequent to this that his early UK collection The 4-Dimensional Nightmare – later retitled the much more appropriate The Voices of Time – was revised to remove the two Vermilion Sands stories from it and insert two other tales, and for good reason: Vermilion Sands is something special, and the stories gain something from being read together.
Continue reading “J.G. Ballard’s Ultimate Resort” →
I’m back on my J.G. Ballard nonsense. This time, I’m going to cover (most of) the stories in his collection The Day of Forever, released near-simultaneously with The Disaster Area, as well as his contribution to Dangerous Visions.
The title story depicts a quintessentially Ballardian apocalypse: the Earth’s rotation has ceased (or rather, come to a near-standstill), and a small number of survivors rattle around in the depopulated world that remains, sticking to the slowly drifting habitable strip of dusk and dawn. Where North Africa is in dusk, the protagonist finds himself drawn by dreams into a strange revenge plan. What does it all mean? I haven’t the foggiest – but it has this distinctive nightmare quality to it (particularly with the grim turn things take at the end) which feels like something drawn out of dream, and which one has perhaps dreamed too. Perhaps this is the intention – the Surrealists were big on dreams, and Delvaux’s The Echo is specifically cited in the story as a specific image haunting the protagonist’s dreams.
The brief Prisoner of the Coral Deep was included in The Starry Wisdom anthology, and though it is not specifically a Cthulhu Mythos story I can see the logic there since it’s a dreamlike horror-fantasy piece about a mysterious encounter with a mysterious woman on a mysterious coastline, and emphasises the ocean as a link to primal, ancient times. We’ve seen a bunch of those themes in the Ballad readthrough so far – think The Gioconda of the Twilight Noon and Now Wakes the Sea in particular, which this might be read as forming a triptych with.
Tomorrow Is a Million Years feels like Ballard riffing on Moorcock; the hallucinatory imagery as a result of the “timewinds” experienced on a distant planet feels like an intrusion of Moorcockian fantasy, whilst the central guilt trip that has resulted in the main character’s extraterrestrial isolation kind of put me in mind of The Black Corridor. The story is comparatively heavy-handed by Ballard’s standards – as is The Man On the 99th Floor, which is basically a hypnosis story with a rather obvious twist, and feels less interesting than some of Ballard’s more subtle psychological explorations, and The Gentle Assassin, a time travel story which, though competently executed, is based on such an over-used concept that it ends up feeling rather obvious.
A somewhat more involved hypnosis story is The Sudden Afternoon, in which a man having a lazy day at home finds his mind invaded by someone else’s memories – specifically, the memories of a murderer using hypnotic power to hijack his life. Unfortunately the hypnotist in question is Indian, his Indian-ness is fairly heavily emphasised as being exotic and unusual and a little threatening by the text, and his powers are described as arising from yogic practices. As a result, it ends up essentially offering a story which could have come out of the Victorian period in terms of the values expressed.
The Waiting Grounds, meanwhile, feels like a dry run of The Voices of Time – set in space rather than Earth, being as it is a fairly early Ballard work written before he seems to have settled on dilapidated areas of Earth as a better venue for his work. Much as with that story it culminates in a meditation on the long-term meaning or meaninglessness of existence, but it takes a more hopeful, Olaf Stapledon-tinged view of things.
The Last World of Mr. Goddard, a fantasy which presents a protagonist who exercises a strange sort of supervision over his little world and is increasingly resented for it, feels like one of Ballard’s many exercises in highlighting the artificiality of British society as it existed at the time. Having had his comfortable colonial childhood entirely upended by World War II, Ballard took an interest going forwards in the idea of polite society as an artificial veneer which can go away at any time, and this plugs directly into that concept.
The Insane Ones depicts a future dystopia in which psychiatry and mental health assistance is banned outright – ostensibly in the name of “mental freedom”, but in practice as a means of furthering an authoritarian crackdown. The concerns seem plausible, but the story could be read as a slam on the concept of “neurodiversity” and the like; it is perhaps best to regard it as a pushback of the tendency in science fiction (including some of Ballard’s own work) to have excessive psychologically-driven intrusion and control being a regular theme, and a warning against the excesses of the anti-psychiatry movement of the time (from the fringes of which emerged Dianetics and Scientology). Yes, mid-20th Century psychiatry made some bad mistakes – the excessive use of lobotomy being a particularly gruesome case in point – but Ballard recognises that an excessive backlash risks creating a world where people are outright refused the help they are crying out for.
The last story in the collection is The Assassination of John Fitzgerald Kennedy Considered As a Downhill Motor Race, but this was later integrated into The Atrocity Exhibition so I think it is better covered in relation to that. In its place, I may as well take this chance to look at Ballard’s 1967 story The Recognition, which was his contribution to Dangerous Visions. (In fact, The Assassination… was Ballard’s original submission to Dangerous Visions, but was rejected; Ellison claims that the publishers didn’t even forward the story to him but decided to punt it back to Ballard immediately.) This sets up an almost Thomas Ligotti-esque atmosphere in its creepy story of a decrepit little animal exhibit setting itself up on the fringe of a more typical funfair, but somewhat blows it by being somewhat too coy in the very end; that coyness may be the point, but it’s still somewhat deflating and anticlimatic in execution, especially if you’ve already sussed out where the story is going.
It’s notable that The Disaster Area came out via Jonathan Cape, The Day of Forever via Panther; Jonathan Cape was a bit more upmarket at the time, Panther less so, and I think this had an influence on the selection of material; the stories here seem to veer more towards more traditional genre stuff rather than the more literary SF style of many of the tales in The Disaster Area. As such, it does feel like The Day of Forever consists of Ballard throwing Panther the scraps left behind after Jonathan Cape got the meat; it’s alright as far as 1960s science fiction and fantasy material goes, but it’s not peak Ballard.
After harkening to The Voices of Time and lounging on The Terminal Beach, I’m moving on to the next port of call in my journey through J.G. Ballard’s short stories. The Disaster Area is one of two Ballard anthologies which came out in rapid succession in 1967, the other one being The Day of Forever; I’ll tackle this one first since, collecting stories that emerged from 1957-1966, its chronological centre of gravity is slightly earlier than The Day of Forever‘s.
The collection leads off with Storm-Bird, Storm-Dreamer, one of the 1966 pieces. By this point, Ballard had honed his particular style of psychological science fiction to the level where he could meaningfully parody it, as I kind of think he does here. On the coast of Norfolk a volunteer militiaman is assigned to a picket boat to keep watch for giant birds – mutants resulting from an agrichemical accident a la H.G. Wells’ The Food of the Gods. He observes a woman in the bird-blighted wasteland acting strangely; he comes up with a typically Ballardian armchair psychology diagnosis of what’s going on with her, tries to play along, and comes to bad end because her actual obsession is not what he expected.
As well as a warning to readers not to jump the gun when diagnosing Ballard’s characters, this also strikes me as an acknowledgement that stories of his based around the observation of the psychological quirks and fixations of characters are inevitably also an exploration of the psychology of the characters observing and reacting to these quirks, and of Ballard himself.
The first 1957 here is The Concentration City, sometimes published as Build-Up, in which a man who lives in a hyper-populated city of the far future goes on an expedition to attempt to find the edge of it; internal evidence suggests that the area is, in fact, significantly larger than the Earth itself, and some sort of warping of space and time occurs if you attempt to travel far enough.
What seemed at first to be a fairly generic “overpopulation of Earth” story (like Billennium from The Terminal Beach) dissolves to reveal a much stranger enigma, which the central character has no way to meaningfully interrogate and so the story stops at that point, Ballard early on in his career finding a place where science fictional speculation and fantastic allegory end up bleeding into each other and settling down there to make it his own.
The Subliminal Man, likewise, at first looks like it is going to be a simplistic “advertising bad” story, but is able to move beyond this by putting the subliminal adverts that are its subject in the midst of a much broader depiction of consumerism and capitalism run wild, a future where the subliminal ads have become necessary because the capacity of innovation to drive economic growth has reached its limit and the economic system can’t cope with a slowdown; here, the use of such tactics is characteristic of a system desperately trying a last-ditch attempt to keep itself upright before it becomes terminally disrupted.
Any parallels to today’s social media data-harvesting and targeted advertising are coincidental, but flattering to Ballard’s reputation as a prognosticator; whilst science fiction isn’t really about predicting the future, Ballard’s worlds often seem like places where we could plausibly end up, which is why the consumerism of the 1960s he was skewering here feels so much like the consumerism of the 2020s (since the root causes have not changed). Moreover, in its depiction of the media landscape invading both the exterior landscape of the city and the interior landscape of people’s minds, it’s another stop on the route to The Atrocity Exhibition.
Now Wakes the Sea is almost horror; a man dreams of the ocean which once existed where his home currently is, and finds himself translated through time. It feels like another take on a similar concept to The Gioconda of the Twilight Noon from The Terminal Beach – right down to the visions of a mysterious coastline with a mysterious woman on it. Another fantasy-horror story is Mr F. is Mr F., in which a man discovers that he is suffering a kind of sudden onset Benjamin Button syndrome and aging in reverse under the influence his wife, who is intent on infantilising him. This feels like the sort of writing men like Ballard or Dick did about emasculating women who were out to infantilise their husbands, when in my experience the last thing women want is to feel like they’ve taken the place of their husband’s mother when it comes to housework/feeding/etc.
Other psychological stories with a more science fictional bent include Zone of Terror, in which a man’s displaced sense of self manifests as actual visions of himself as he was a few minutes ago, and Manhole 69 (hurr), which is probably most interesting as a precursor to that “sleep deprivation experiment” creepypasta, and The Impossible Man, which expresses reservations about the rise of transplant surgery which look a bit implausible in the wake of decades of experience. All three of these feel like they are let down by a little too much armchair psychology and an over-reliance on concepts the field has moved beyond since.
On the other hand, Minus One‘s psychological message is a bit more timeless, since it’s as much a spoof on psychological theorising as it is an exercise in doing so oneself: faced with the potentially disastrous escape of a patient, the staff of a mental hospital persuade themselves that the patient never existed, adopting avoidant behaviour on an institutional level.
By and large, The Disaster Area is a less patchy collection than The Terminal Beach, and is at least on the level of The Voices of Time when it comes to anthologies of Ballard’s early work.
J.G. Ballard was a good buddy of Michael Moorcock and a regular contributor to New Worlds even before Moorcock took over the editorship of that organ, and as such his early writing career established him as a cornerstone of British New Wave science fiction. Between Moorcock’s childhood in a bombed-out London and Ballard’s stint in a Japanese prison camp, both men’s lives saw them emerging from the traumas of the Second World War to confront the future with, perhaps, a little more caution than the more gung-ho visions of most American SF authors of their generation.
J.G. Ballard’s novels have ranged from straight-ahead postapocalyptic fiction to William Burroughs-esque fever dreams to bizarre explorations of imaginary fetishes to satirical takedowns of modern excess, but in his early career his short stories were as important as his novels, so I’ve decided to start an exploration of his short fiction. Fortunately for me, the vast majority of it is collected in his Complete Short Stories, which I am the happy owner of a 2001 edition of.
Despite the title it is not quite complete – it skips over his “surgical fictions” which just consisted of surgical reports with celebrity’s names substituted in for the names of the patients, some juvenilia, a couple of brief and not particularly notable pieces penned after The Complete Short Fiction was published, pieces later expanded into full novels, and Journey Across a Crater, an attempt to address the ideas of Crash in the “condensed novel” style Ballard infamously used in The Atrocity Exhibition which Ballard later declared didn’t really work. I don’t think we lose anything if we skip those, however. I am also going to skip over the stories which later became integral parts of The Atrocity Exhibition, since whether that is a novel or a collection of connected stories is a debate in its own right which I’ll address if and when I get around to reviewing it. (Indeed, it’s notable that only two of them appear in the Complete Short Stories).
I am also going to apply a bit of structure to the review process. Rather than trying to consume the entire Complete Short Stories at once, I am going to address it by covering the subsets of the stories in question that appear in each of Ballard’s major UK anthologies of his work. Happily, the final versions of these anthologies (some of them had stories removed and added and titles tweaks over their publication history) yield a collection of Ballard’s stories in which no stories are redundantly covered in two anthologies at once, so by taking each of those anthologies in turn I should cover the vast majority of the collection, and also each article will be a more or less complete review of the smaller anthology in question, which may benefit those of you who don’t want to dive in with the whole Complete Short Stories but would prefer to have thoughts on smaller, more digestible delivery mechanisms for Ballard fiction. I will save for the end of this series a consideration of the tales in the Complete Short Stories which hadn’t previously been collected in a Ballard anthology – three brief 1992 pieces plus The Recognition, his contribution to Dangerous Visions.
The Voices of Time is a Ballard anthology with a complicated publishing history. A collection called The Voices of Time was released in the US in 1962 as the first anthology of Ballard’s works to be published; the contents of that collection overlap with this one but are not the same. The UK version of The Voices of Time was Ballard’s first UK collection, and was released in 1963 under the title of The 4-Dimensional Nightmare.
A 1974 edition revised the collection, removing two stories – Prima Belladonna and Studio 5, the Stars – belonging to the Vermilion Sands setting, since those stories were being anthologised in a single book (called, unsurprisingly, Vermilion Sands), and substituting in two other stories, The Overloaded Man and Thirteen to Centaurus. All subsequent releases of the collection have used this revised set of contents, and from 1984 onwards have used the title The Voices of Time, since The 4-Dimensional Nightmare probably sounds a bit more pulpy and sensational than Ballard’s writing actually is.
Continue reading “Echoes From the Aeons” →
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William S. Burroughs
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William Seward Burroughs II (/ˈbʌroʊz/; February 5, 1914 – August 2, 1997) was an American writer, visual artist, spoken word performer and chaos magician[2] credited as a primary figure of the Beat Generation and a major postmodern author who influenced popular culture and literature. Burroughs...
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For other people named William Burroughs, see William Burroughs (disambiguation).
William Seward Burroughs II (//; February 5, 1914 – August 2, 1997) was an American writer, visual artist, spoken word performer and chaos magician[2] credited as a primary figure of the Beat Generation and a major postmodern author who influenced popular culture and literature. Burroughs wrote eighteen novels and novellas, six collections of short stories and four collections of essays, and five books have been published of his interviews and correspondences. He also collaborated on projects and recordings with numerous performers and musicians and made many appearances in films. He was also briefly known by the pen name William Lee. Burroughs created and exhibited thousands of paintings and other visual artworks, including his celebrated 'Shotgun Art'.[3]
Burroughs was born into a wealthy family in St. Louis, Missouri. He was a grandson of inventor William Seward Burroughs I, who founded the Burroughs Corporation, and a nephew of public relations manager Ivy Lee. Burroughs attended Harvard University, studied English, studied anthropology as a postgraduate, and attended medical school in Vienna. In 1942, Burroughs enlisted in the U.S. Army to serve during World War II. After being turned down by the Office of Strategic Services and the Navy, he picked up the drug addiction that affected him for the rest of his life. In 1943, while living in New York City, he befriended Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac. Their mutual influence became the foundation of the Beat Generation, which was later a defining influence on the 1960s counterculture.
Burroughs killed his second wife, Joan Vollmer, in 1951 in Mexico City. Burroughs initially claimed that he shot Vollmer while drunkenly attempting a "William Tell" stunt.[4] He later told investigators that he had been showing his pistol to friends when it fell and hit the table, firing the bullet that killed Vollmer.[5] After Burroughs returned to the United States, he was convicted of manslaughter in absentia and received a two-year suspended sentence.
Much of Burroughs' work is semiautobiographical, and is primarily drawn from his experiences as a heroin addict. He lived in Mexico City, London, Paris and the Tangier International Zone near Morocco, and also traveled in the South American Amazon rainforest. His work features frequent mystical, occult, or otherwise magical themes – a constant preoccupation for Burroughs, both in fiction and in real life.[2][6] Burroughs found success with his confessional first novel, Junkie (1953), but is perhaps best known for his third novel, Naked Lunch (1959). Naked Lunch became the subject of one of the last major literary censorship cases in the United States after its US publisher, Grove Press, was sued for violating a Massachusetts obscenity statute. With Brion Gysin, Burroughs also popularized the literary cut-up technique in works such as The Nova Trilogy (1961–1964).
In 1983, Burroughs was elected to the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters. In 1984, he was awarded the Ordre des Arts et des Lettres by France.[7] Jack Kerouac called Burroughs the "greatest satirical writer since Jonathan Swift";[8] he owed this reputation to his "lifelong subversion"[9] of the moral, political, and economic systems of modern American society, articulated in often darkly humorous sardonicism. J. G. Ballard considered Burroughs to be "the most important writer to emerge since the Second World War", while Norman Mailer declared him "the only American writer who may be conceivably possessed by genius".[8]
Early life and education[]
Burroughs was born in 1914, the younger of two sons born to Mortimer Perry Burroughs (June 16, 1885 – January 5, 1965) and Laura Hammon Lee (August 5, 1888 – October 20, 1970). His was a prominent family of English ancestry in St. Louis, Missouri. His grandfather, William Seward Burroughs I, founded the Burroughs Adding Machine company, which evolved into the Burroughs Corporation. Burroughs' mother was Laura Hammond Lee Burroughs, whose brother, Ivy Lee, was an advertising pioneer later employed as a publicist for the Rockefellers. His father ran an antique and gift shop, Cobblestone Gardens in St. Louis; and later in Palm Beach, Florida when they relocated.
It was during his childhood that Burroughs' developed a lifelong interest in magic and the occult – topics which would find their way into his work repeatedly across the years.[lower-alpha 1] Burroughs later described how he saw an apparition of a green reindeer in the woods as a child, which he identified as a totem animal,[lower-alpha 2] as well as a vision of ghostly grey figures at play in his bedroom.[lower-alpha 3]
As a boy, Burroughs lived on Pershing Avenue (now Pershing Place) in St. Louis' Central West End. He attended John Burroughs School in St. Louis where his first published essay, "Personal Magnetism" – which revolved around telepathic mind-control – was printed in the John Burroughs Review in 1929.[13] He then attended the Los Alamos Ranch School in New Mexico, which was stressful for him. The school was a boarding school for the wealthy, "where the spindly sons of the rich could be transformed into manly specimens".[6](p44) Burroughs kept journals documenting an erotic attachment to another boy. According to his own account, he destroyed these later, ashamed of their content.[14] He kept his sexual orientation concealed from his family well into adulthood, due to the context in which he grew up and from which he fled – that is, a "family where displays of affection were considered embarrassing".[6](p26) He became a well-known homosexual writer after the publication of Naked Lunch in 1959. A common story says [15] that he was expelled from Los Alamos after taking chloral hydrate in Santa Fe with a fellow student. Yet, according to his own account, he left voluntarily: "During the Easter vacation of my second year I persuaded my family to let me stay in St. Louis."[14]
Harvard University[]
Burroughs finished high school at Taylor School in Clayton, Missouri, and in 1932 left home to pursue an arts degree at Harvard University, where he was affiliated with Adams House. During the summers, he worked as a cub reporter for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, covering the police docket. He disliked the work, and refused to cover some events, like the death of a drowned child. He lost his virginity in an East St. Louis, Illinois brothel that summer with a female prostitute whom he regularly patronized.[6](papers, p.62) While at Harvard, Burroughs made trips to New York City and was introduced to the gay subculture there. He visited lesbian dives, piano bars, and the Harlem and Greenwich Village homosexual underground with Richard Stern, a wealthy friend from Kansas City. They would drive from Boston to New York in a reckless fashion. Once, Stern scared Burroughs so badly that he asked to be let out of the vehicle.[6](p611)
Burroughs graduated from Harvard in 1936. According to Ted Morgan's Literary Outlaw,[6]
His parents, upon his graduation, had decided to give him a monthly allowance of $200 out of their earnings from Cobblestone Gardens, a substantial sum in those days. It was enough to keep him going, and indeed it guaranteed his survival for the next twenty-five years, arriving with welcome regularity. The allowance was a ticket to freedom; it allowed him to live where he wanted to and to forgo employment.[6](pp69–70)
Burroughs' parents sold the rights to his grandfather's invention and had no share in the Burroughs Corporation. Shortly before the 1929 stock market crash, they sold their stock for $200,000 (equivalent to approximately $2,746,899 in today's funds[16]).[17]
Europe[]
After Burroughs graduated from Harvard, his formal education ended, except for brief flirtations with graduate study of anthropology at Columbia and medicine in Vienna, Austria. He traveled to Europe and became involved in Austrian and Hungarian Weimar-era LGBT culture; he picked up young men in steam baths in Vienna and moved in a circle of exiles, homosexuals, and runaways. There, he met Ilse Klapper, née Herzfeld (1900–1982), a Jewish woman fleeing the country's Nazi government.[1] The two were never romantically involved, but Burroughs married her, in Croatia, against the wishes of his parents, to allow her to gain a visa to the United States. She made her way to New York City, and eventually divorced Burroughs, although they remained friends for many years.[6](pp65–68) After returning to the United States, he held a string of uninteresting jobs. In 1939, his mental health became a concern for his parents, especially after he deliberately severed the last joint of his left little finger at the knuckle to impress a man with whom he was infatuated.[18] This event made its way into his early fiction as the short story "The Finger."
Beginning of the Beats[]
Burroughs enlisted in the U.S. Army early in 1942, shortly after the bombing of Pearl Harbor brought the United States into World War II. But when he was classified as a 1-A infantry, not an officer, he became dejected. His mother recognized her son's depression and got Burroughs a civilian disability discharge – a release from duty based on the premise that he should have not been allowed to enlist due to previous mental instability. After being evaluated by a family friend, who was also a neurologist at a psychiatric treatment center, Burroughs waited five months in limbo at Jefferson Barracks outside St. Louis before being discharged. During that time he met a Chicago soldier also awaiting release, and once Burroughs was free, he moved to Chicago and held a variety of jobs, including one as an exterminator. When two of his friends from St. Louis – University of Chicago student Lucien Carr and his admirer, David Kammerer – left for New York City, Burroughs followed.
Joan Vollmer[]
In 1944, Burroughs began living with Joan Vollmer Adams in an apartment they shared with Jack Kerouac and Edie Parker, Kerouac's first wife.[19] Vollmer Adams was married to a G.I. with whom she had a young daughter, Julie Adams. Burroughs and Kerouac got into trouble with the law for failing to report a murder involving Lucien Carr, who had killed David Kammerer in a confrontation over Kammerer's incessant and unwanted advances. This incident inspired Burroughs and Kerouac to collaborate on a novel titled And the Hippos were Boiled in their Tanks, completed in 1945. The two fledgling authors were unable to get it published, but the manuscript was eventually published in November 2008 by Grove Press and Penguin Books.
During this time, Burroughs began using morphine and became addicted. He eventually sold heroin in Greenwich Village to support his habit. Vollmer also became an addict, but her drug of choice was Benzedrine, an amphetamine sold over the counter at that time. Because of her addiction and social circle, her husband immediately divorced her after returning from the war. With urging from Allen Ginsberg, and also perhaps Kerouac, Burroughs became intellectually and emotionally linked with Vollmer and by summer 1945, had moved in with Vollmer and her daughter. In spring 1946, Burroughs was arrested for forging a narcotics prescription. Vollmer asked her psychiatrist, a Dr. Wollberg, to sign a surety bond for Burroughs' release. As part of his release, Burroughs returned to St. Louis under his parents' care, after which he left for Mexico to get a divorce from Ilse Klapper. Meanwhile, Vollmer's addiction led to a temporary psychosis that resulted in her admission to Bellevue Hospital, which endangered the custody of her child. Upon hearing this, Burroughs immediately returned to New York City to gain her release, asking her to marry him. Their marriage was never formalized, but she lived as his common-law wife. They returned to St. Louis to visit Burroughs' parents and then moved with her daughter to Texas.[20] Vollmer soon became pregnant with Burroughs' child. Their son, William S. Burroughs Jr., was born in 1947. The family moved briefly to New Orleans in 1948.[21]
Mexico and South America (1950–1952)[]
Burroughs fled to Mexico to escape possible detention in Louisiana's Angola state prison. Vollmer and their children followed him. Burroughs planned to stay in Mexico for at least five years, the length of his charge's statute of limitations. Burroughs also attended classes at the Mexico City College in 1950, studying Spanish, as well as "Mexican picture writing" (codices) and the Mayan language with R. H. Barlow.
Vollmer's death[]
Their life in Mexico was by all accounts an unhappy one.[22] Without heroin and suffering from Benzedrine abuse, Burroughs began to pursue other men as his libido returned, while Vollmer, feeling abandoned, started to drink heavily and mock Burroughs openly.[20] One night while drinking with friends at a party above the American-owned Bounty Bar in Mexico City,[23] a drunk Burroughs allegedly took his handgun from his travel bag and told his wife, "It's time for our William Tell act." There is no indication that they had performed such an action previously.[22] Vollmer, who was also drinking heavily and undergoing amphetamine withdrawal, allegedly obliged him by putting a highball glass on her head. Burroughs shot Vollmer in the head, killing her almost immediately.[24]
Soon after the incident, Burroughs changed his account, claiming that he had dropped his gun and it had accidentally fired.[25] Burroughs spent 13 days in jail before his brother came to Mexico City and bribed Mexican lawyers and officials to release Burroughs on bail while he awaited trial for the killing, which was ruled culpable homicide. Vollmer's daughter, Julie Adams, went to live with her grandmother, and William S. Burroughs Jr. went to St. Louis to live with his grandparents. Burroughs reported every Monday morning to the jail in Mexico City while his prominent Mexican attorney worked to resolve the case. According to James Grauerholz, two witnesses had agreed to testify that the gun had fired accidentally while he was checking to see if it was loaded, with ballistics experts bribed to support this story.[6](p202) Nevertheless, the trial was continuously delayed and Burroughs began to write what would eventually become the short novel Queer while awaiting his trial. Upon Burroughs' attorney fleeing Mexico in light of his own legal problems, Burroughs decided, according to Ted Morgan, to "skip" and return to the United States. He was convicted in absentia of homicide and was given a two-year suspended sentence.[6](p214)
Although Burroughs was writing before the shooting of Joan Vollmer, this event marked him and, biographers argue, his work for the rest of his life.[6](pp197–198) Vollmer's death also resonated with Allen Ginsberg, who wrote of her in Dream Record: June 8, 1955, "Joan, what kind of knowledge have the dead? Can you still love your mortal acquaintances? What do you remember of us?" In Burroughs: the Movie, Ginsberg said that Vollmer had seemed possibly suicidal in the weeks leading up to her death, and he suggested that this may have been a factor in her willingness to take part in the risky William Tell stunt.[26]
The Yage Letters[]
After leaving Mexico, Burroughs drifted through South America for several months, seeking out a drug called yagé, which promised to give the user telepathic abilities. A book composed of letters between Burroughs and Ginsberg, The Yage Letters, was published in 1963 by City Lights Books. In 2006, a re-edited version, The Yage Letters Redux, showed that the letters were largely fictionalised from Burroughs' notes.
Beginning of literary career[]
Burroughs described Vollmer's death as a pivotal event in his life, and one which provoked his writing by exposing him to the risk of possession by a malevolent entity he called "the Ugly Spirit":
I am forced to the appalling conclusion that I would never have become a writer but for Joan's death, and to a realization of the extent to which this event has motivated and formulated my writing. I live with the constant threat of possession, and a constant need to escape from possession, from Control. So the death of Joan brought me in contact with the invader, the Ugly Spirit, and maneuvered me into a life long struggle, in which I have had no choice except to write my way out.[27]
As Burroughs makes clear, he meant this reference to "possession" to be taken absolutely literally, stating: "My concept of possession is closer to the medieval model than to modern psychological explanations ... I mean a definite possessing entity."[27] Burroughs' writing was intended as a form of "sorcery", in his own words[28] – to disrupt language via methods such as the cut-up technique, and thus protect himself from possession.[lower-alpha 4][lower-alpha 5][lower-alpha 6][lower-alpha 7] Later in life, Burroughs described the Ugly Spirit as "Monopolistic, acquisitive evil. Ugly evil. The ugly American", and took part in a shamanic ceremony with the explicit aim of exorcising the Ugly Spirit.[33]
Oliver Harris has questioned Burroughs' claim that Vollmer's death catalysed his writing, highlighting the importance for Queer of Burroughs' traumatic relationship with the boyfriend fictionalized in the story as Eugene Allerton, rather than the shooting of Vollmer. In any case, he had begun to write in 1945. Burroughs and Kerouac collaborated on And the Hippos Were Boiled in Their Tanks, a mystery novel loosely based on the Carr–Kammerer situation and that at the time remained unpublished. Years later, in the documentary What Happened to Kerouac?, Burroughs described it as "not a very distinguished work". An excerpt of this work, in which Burroughs and Kerouac wrote alternating chapters, was finally published in Word Virus,[34] a compendium of William Burroughs' writing that was published by his biographer after his death in 1997.
Before killing Vollmer, Burroughs had largely completed his first novel, Junkie, which was written at the urging of Allen Ginsberg, who was instrumental in getting the work published, even as a cheap mass-market paperback.[35] Ace Books published the novel in 1953 as part of an Ace Double under the pen name William Lee, retitling it Junkie: Confessions of an Unredeemed Drug Addict (it was later republished as Junkie, then in 1977 as Junky, and finally in 2003 as Junky: the definitive text of 'Junk', edited by Oliver Harris').[35]
Overseas[]
During 1953, Burroughs was at a loose end. Due to legal problems, he was unable to live in the cities toward which he was most inclined. He spent time with his parents in Palm Beach, Florida, and New York City with Allen Ginsberg. When Ginsberg refused his romantic advances,[36] Burroughs went to Rome to meet Alan Ansen on a vacation financed from his parents' continuing support. He found Rome and Ansen's company dreary and, inspired by Paul Bowles' fiction, he decided to head for the Tangier International Zone,[6](pp232–234) where he rented a room and began to write a large body of text that he personally referred to as Interzone.[37]
To Burroughs, all signs directed a return to Tangier, a city where drugs were freely available and where financial support from his family would continue. He realized that in the Moroccan culture he had found an environment that synchronized with his temperament and afforded no hindrances to pursuing his interests and indulging in his chosen activities. He left for Tangier in November 1954 and spent the next four years there working on the fiction that would later become Naked Lunch, as well as attempting to write commercial articles about Tangier. He sent these writings to Ginsberg, his literary agent for Junkie, but none was published until 1989 when Interzone, a collection of short stories, was published. Under the strong influence of a marijuana confection known as majoun and a German-made opioid called Eukodol, Burroughs settled in to write. Eventually, Ginsberg and Kerouac, who had traveled to Tangier in 1957, helped Burroughs type, edit, and arrange these episodes into Naked Lunch.[6](pp238–242)
Naked Lunch[]
Further information: Naked Lunch
Whereas Junkie and Queer were conventional in style, Naked Lunch was his first venture into a nonlinear style. After the publication of Naked Lunch, a book whose creation was to a certain extent the result of a series of contingencies, Burroughs was exposed to Brion Gysin's cut-up technique at the Beat Hotel in Paris in October 1959. He began slicing up phrases and words to create new sentences.[38] At the Beat Hotel Burroughs discovered "a port of entry" into Gysin's canvases: "I don't think I had ever seen painting until I saw the painting of Brion Gysin."[39] The two would cultivate a long-term friendship that revolved around a mutual interest in artworks and cut-up techniques. Scenes were slid together with little care for narrative. Perhaps thinking of his crazed physician, Dr. Benway, he described Naked Lunch as a book that could be cut into at any point. Although not considered science fiction, the book does seem to forecast AIDS, liposuction, and the crack pandemic.[6](p355)
Excerpts from Naked Lunch were first published in the United States in 1958. The novel was initially rejected by City Lights Books, the publisher of Ginsberg's Howl; and Olympia Press publisher Maurice Girodias, who had published English-language novels in France that were controversial for their subjective views of sex and antisocial characters. But Allen Ginsberg managed to get excerpts published in Black Mountain Review and Chicago Review in 1958. Irving Rosenthal, student editor of Chicago Review, a quarterly journal partially subsidized by the university, promised to publish more excerpts from Naked Lunch, but he was fired from his position in 1958 after Chicago Daily News columnist Jack Mabley called the first excerpt obscene. Rosenthal went on to publish more in his newly created literary journal Big Table No. 1; however, the United States Postmaster General ruled that copies could not be mailed to subscribers on the basis of obscenity laws. John Ciardi did get a copy and wrote a positive review of the work, prompting a telegram from Allen Ginsberg praising the review.[40] This controversy made Naked Lunch interesting to Girodias again, and he published the novel in 1959.[41]
After the novel was published, it slowly became notorious across Europe and the United States, garnering interest from not just members of the counterculture of the 1960s, but also literary critics such as Mary McCarthy. Once published in the United States, Naked Lunch was prosecuted as obscene by the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, followed by other states. In 1966, the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court declared the work "not obscene" on the basis of criteria developed largely to defend the book. The case against Burroughs' novel still stands as the last obscenity trial against a work of literature – that is, a work consisting of words only, and not including illustrations or photographs – prosecuted in the United States.
The Word Hoard, the collection of manuscripts that produced Naked Lunch, also produced parts of the later works The Soft Machine (1961), The Ticket That Exploded (1962), and Nova Express (1964). These novels feature extensive use of the cut-up technique that influenced all of Burroughs' subsequent fiction to a degree. During Burroughs' friendship and artistic collaborations with Brion Gysin and Ian Sommerville, the technique was combined with images, Gysin's paintings, and sound, via Somerville's tape recorders. Burroughs was so dedicated to the cut-up method that he often defended his use of the technique before editors and publishers, most notably Dick Seaver at Grove Press in the 1960s[6](p425) and Holt, Rinehart & Winston in the 1980s. The cut-up method, because of its random or mechanical basis for text generation, combined with the possibilities of mixing in text written by other writers, deemphasizes the traditional role of the writer as creator or originator of a string of words, while simultaneously exalting the importance of the writer's sensibility as an editor. In this sense, the cut-up method may be considered as analogous to the collage method in the visual arts. New restored editions of The Nova Trilogy (or Cut-Up Trilogy), edited by Oliver Harris (President of the European Beat Studies Network) and published in 2014, included notes and materials to reveal the care with which Burroughs used his methods and the complex histories of his manuscripts.
Paris and the "Beat Hotel"[]
Burroughs moved into a rundown hotel in the Latin Quarter of Paris in 1959 when Naked Lunch was still looking for a publisher. Tangier, with its political unrest, and criminals with whom he had become involved, became dangerous to Burroughs.[42] He went to Paris to meet Ginsberg and talk with Olympia Press. He left behind a criminal charge which eventually caught up with him in Paris. Paul Lund, a British former career criminal and cigarette smuggler whom Burroughs met in Tangier, was arrested on suspicion of importing narcotics into France. Lund gave up Burroughs, and evidence implicated Burroughs in the importation of narcotics into France. When the Moroccan authorities forwarded their investigation to French officials, Burroughs faced criminal charges in Paris for conspiracy to import opiates. It was during this impending case that Maurice Girodias published Naked Lunch; its appearance helped to get Burroughs a suspended sentence, since a literary career, according to Ted Morgan, is a respected profession in France.
The "Beat Hotel" was a typical European-style boarding house hotel, with common toilets on every floor, and a small place for personal cooking in the room. Life there was documented by the photographer Harold Chapman, who lived in the attic room. This shabby, inexpensive hotel was populated by Gregory Corso, Ginsberg and Peter Orlovsky for several months after Naked Lunch first appeared.
Burroughs' time at the Beat Hotel was dominated by occult experiments – "mirror-gazing, scrying, trance and telepathy, all fuelled by a wide variety of mind-altering drugs".[43] Later, Burroughs would describe "visions" obtained by staring into the mirror for hours at a time – his hands transformed into tentacles,[lower-alpha 8] or his whole image transforming into some strange entity,[lower-alpha 9] or visions of far-off places,[45] or of other people rapidly undergoing metamorphosis.[lower-alpha 10] It was from this febrile atmosphere that the famous cut-up technique emerged.
The actual process by which Naked Lunch was published was partly a function of its "cut-up" presentation to the printer. Girodias had given Burroughs only ten days to prepare the manuscript for print galleys, and Burroughs sent over the manuscript in pieces, preparing the parts in no particular order. When it was published in this authentically random manner, Burroughs liked it better than the initial plan. International rights to the work were sold soon after, and Burroughs used the $3,000 advance from Grove Press to buy drugs (equivalent to approximately $24,000 in today's funds[16]).[6](pp316–326) Naked Lunch was featured in a 1959 Life magazine cover story, partly as an article that highlighted the growing Beat literary movement. During this time Burroughs found an outlet for material otherwise rendered unpublishable in Jeff Nuttall's My Own Mag.[46] Also, poetry by Burroughs' appeared in the avant garde little magazine Nomad at the beginning of the 1960s.
The London years[]
Burroughs left Paris for London in 1960 to visit Dr. Dent, a well-known English medical doctor who spearheaded a reputedly painless heroin withdrawal treatment using the drug apomorphine.[47] Dent's apomorphine cure was also used to treat alcoholism, although it was held by several people who undertook it to be no more than straightforward aversion therapy. Burroughs however was convinced. Following his first cure, he wrote a detailed appreciation of apomorphine and other cures, which he submitted to The British Journal of Addiction (Vol. 53, 1956) under the title "Letter From A Master Addict To Dangerous Drugs"; this letter is appended to many editions of Naked Lunch.
Though he ultimately relapsed, Burroughs ended up working out of London for six years, traveling back to the United States on several occasions, including one time escorting his son to the Lexington Narcotics Farm and Prison after the younger Burroughs had been convicted of prescription fraud in Florida. In the "Afterword" to the compilation of his son's two previously published novels Speed and Kentucky Ham, Burroughs writes that he thought he had a "small habit" and left London quickly without any narcotics because he suspected the U.S. customs would search him very thoroughly on arrival. He claims he went through the most excruciating two months of opiate withdrawal while seeing his son through his trial and sentencing, traveling with Billy to Lexington, Kentucky from Miami to ensure that his son entered the hospital that he had once spent time in as a volunteer admission.[48] Earlier, Burroughs revisited St. Louis, Missouri, taking a large advance from Playboy to write an article about his trip back to St. Louis, one that was eventually published in The Paris Review, after Burroughs refused to alter the style for Playboy’s publishers. In 1968 Burroughs joined Jean Genet, John Sack, and Terry Southern in covering the 1968 Democratic National Convention for Esquire magazine. Southern and Burroughs, who had first become acquainted in London, would remain lifelong friends and collaborators. In 1972, Burroughs and Southern unsuccessfully attempted to adapt Naked Lunch for the screen in conjunction with American game-show producer Chuck Barris.[49]
Burroughs supported himself and his addiction by publishing pieces in small literary presses. His avant-garde reputation grew internationally as hippies and college students discovered his earlier works. He developed a close friendship with Antony Balch and lived with a young hustler named John Brady who continuously brought home young women despite Burroughs' protestations. In the midst of this personal turmoil, Burroughs managed to complete two works: a novel written in screenplay format, The Last Words of Dutch Schultz (1969); and the traditional prose-format novel The Wild Boys (1971).
It was during his time in London that Burroughs began using his "playback" technique in an attempt to place curses on various people and places who had drawn his ire, including the Moka coffee bar[50][lower-alpha 11] and the London HQ of Scientology.[lower-alpha 12] Burroughs himself related the Moka coffee bar incident:
Here is a sample operation carried out against the Moka Bar at 29 Frith Street, London, W1, beginning on August 3, 1972. Reverse Thursday. Reason for operation was outrageous and unprovoked discourtesy and poisonous cheesecake. Now to close in on the Moka Bar. Record. Take pictures. Stand around outside. Let them see me. They are seething around in there ... Playback would come later with more pictures ... Playback was carried out a number of times with more pictures. Their business fell off. They kept shorter and shorter hours. October 30, 1972, the Moka Bar closed. The location was taken over by the Queen's Snack Bar.[53]
In the 1960s, Burroughs joined and then left the Church of Scientology. In talking about the experience, he claimed that the techniques and philosophy of Scientology helped him and that he felt that further study of Scientology would produce great results.[54] He was skeptical of the organization itself, and felt that it fostered an environment that did not accept critical discussion.[55] His subsequent critical writings about the church and his review of Inside Scientology by Robert Kaufman led to a battle of letters between Burroughs and Scientology supporters in the pages of Rolling Stone magazine.
Return to United States[]
In 1974, concerned about his friend's well-being, Allen Ginsberg gained for Burroughs a contract to teach creative writing at the City College of New York. Burroughs successfully withdrew from heroin use and moved to New York. He eventually found an apartment, affectionately dubbed "The Bunker", on the Lower East Side of Manhattan at 222 Bowery.[56] The dwelling was a partially converted YMCA gym, complete with lockers and communal showers. The building fell within New York City rent control policies that made it extremely cheap; it was only about four hundred dollars a month until 1981 when the rent control rules changed, doubling the rent overnight.[57] Burroughs added "teacher" to the list of jobs he did not like, as he lasted only a semester as a professor; he found the students uninteresting and without much creative talent. Although he needed income desperately, he turned down a teaching position at the University at Buffalo for $15,000 a semester. "The teaching gig was a lesson in never again. You were giving out all this energy and nothing was coming back."[6](p477) His savior was the newly arrived twenty-one-year-old bookseller and Beat Generation devotee James Grauerholz, who worked for Burroughs part-time as a secretary as well as in a bookstore. Grauerholz suggested the idea of reading tours. Grauerholz had managed several rock bands in Kansas and took the lead in booking for Burroughs reading tours that would help support him throughout the next two decades. It raised his public profile, eventually aiding in his obtaining new publishing contracts. Through Grauerholz, Burroughs became a monthly columnist for the noted popular culture magazine Crawdaddy, for which he interviewed Led Zeppelin's Jimmy Page in 1975. Burroughs decided to relocate back to the United States permanently in 1976. He then began to associate with New York cultural players such as Andy Warhol, John Giorno, Lou Reed, Patti Smith, and Susan Sontag, frequently entertaining them at the Bunker; he also visited venues like CBGB to watch the likes of Patti Smith perform.[58] Throughout early 1977, Burroughs collaborated with Southern and Dennis Hopper on a screen adaptation of Junky. It was reported in The New York Times that Burroughs himself would appear in the film. Financed by a reclusive acquaintance of Burroughs, the project lost traction after financial problems and creative disagreements between Hopper and Burroughs.[59][60]
In 1976 he appeared in Rosa von Praunheims New York documentary Underground & Emigrants.
Organized by Columbia professor Sylvère Lotringer, Giorno, and Grauerholz, the Nova Convention was a multimedia retrospective of Burroughs' work held from November 30 to December 2, 1978, at various locations throughout New York. The event included readings from Southern, Ginsberg, Smith, and Frank Zappa (who filled in at the last minute for Keith Richards, then entangled in a legal problem), in addition to panel discussions with Timothy Leary and Robert Anton Wilson and concerts featuring The B-52's, Suicide, Philip Glass, and Debbie Harry and Chris Stein.
In 1976, Burroughs was having dinner with his son, William S. "Billy" Burroughs Jr., and Allen Ginsberg in Boulder, Colorado, at Ginsberg's Buddhist poetry school (Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics) at Chogyam Trungpa's Naropa University when Billy began to vomit blood. Burroughs Sr. had not seen his son for over a year and was alarmed at his appearance when Billy arrived at Ginsberg's apartment. Although Billy had successfully published two short novels in the 1970s and was deemed by literary critics like Ann Charters as a bona fide "second generation beat writer",[61] his brief marriage to a teenage waitress had disintegrated. Billy was a constant drinker, and there were long periods when he was out of contact with any of his family or friends. The diagnosis was liver cirrhosis so complete that the only treatment was a rarely performed liver transplant operation. Fortunately, the University of Colorado Medical Center was one of two places in the nation that performed transplants under the pioneering work of Dr. Thomas Starzl. Billy underwent the procedure and beat the thirty-percent survival odds. His father spent time in 1976 and 1977 in Colorado, helping Billy through additional surgeries and complications. Ted Morgan's biography asserts that their relationship was not spontaneous and lacked real warmth or intimacy. Allen Ginsberg was supportive to both Burroughs and his son throughout the long period of recovery.[6](pp495–536)
In London, Burroughs had begun to write what would become the first novel of a trilogy, published as Cities of the Red Night (1981), The Place of Dead Roads (1983), and The Western Lands (1987). Grauerholz helped edit Cities when it was first rejected by Burroughs' long-time editor Dick Seaver at Holt Rinehart, after it was deemed too disjointed. The novel was written as a straight narrative and then chopped up into a more random pattern, leaving the reader to sort through the characters and events. This technique differed from the author's earlier cut-up methods, which were accidental from the start. Nevertheless, the novel was reassembled and published, still without a straight linear form, but with fewer breaks in the story. The trilogy featured time-travel adventures in which Burroughs' narrators rewrote episodes from history to reform mankind.[6](p565) Reviews were mixed for Cities. Novelist and critic Anthony Burgess panned the work in Saturday Review, saying Burroughs was boring readers with repetitive episodes of pederast fantasy and sexual strangulation that lacked any comprehensible world view or theology; other reviewers, like J. G. Ballard, argued that Burroughs was shaping a new literary "mythography".[6](p565)
In 1981, Billy Burroughs died in Florida. He had cut off contact with his father several years before, even publishing an article in Esquire magazine claiming his father had poisoned his life and revealing that he had been molested as a fourteen-year-old by one of his father's friends while visiting Tangier. The liver transplant had not cured his urge to drink, and Billy suffered from serious health complications years after the operation. After he had stopped taking his transplant rejection drugs, he was found near the side of a Florida highway by a stranger. He died shortly afterward. Burroughs was in New York when he heard from Allen Ginsberg of Billy's death.
Burroughs, by 1979, was once again addicted to heroin. The cheap heroin that was easily purchased outside his door on the Lower East Side "made its way" into his veins, coupled with "gifts" from the overzealous if well-intentioned admirers who frequently visited the Bunker. Although Burroughs would have episodes of being free from heroin, from this point until his death he was regularly addicted to the drug. In an introduction to Last Words: The Final Journals of William S. Burroughs, James Grauerholz (who managed Burroughs' reading tours in the 1980s and 1990s) mentions that part of his job was to deal with the "underworld" in each city to secure the author's drugs.[62]
Later years in Kansas[]
Burroughs moved to Lawrence, Kansas in 1981, taking up residence at 1927 Learnard Avenue where he would spend the rest of his life. He once told a Wichita Eagle reporter that he was content to live in Kansas, saying, "The thing I like about Kansas is that it's not nearly as violent, and it's a helluva lot cheaper. And I can get out in the country and fish and shoot and whatnot."[63] In 1984, he signed a seven-book deal with Viking Press after he signed with literary agent Andrew Wylie. This deal included the publication rights to the unpublished 1952 novel Queer. With this money he purchased a small bungalow for $29,000.[6](p596) He was finally inducted into the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters in 1983 after several attempts by Allen Ginsberg to get him accepted. He attended the induction ceremony in May 1983. Lawrence Ferlinghetti remarked the induction of Burroughs into the Academy proved Herbert Marcuse's point that capitalistic society had a great ability to incorporate its one-time outsiders.[6](p577)
By this point, Burroughs was a counterculture icon. In his final years, he cultivated an entourage of young friends who replaced his aging contemporaries. He inspired 1970s proto-punk rock band Doctors of Madness. In the 1980s he collaborated with performers ranging from Bill Laswell's Material and Laurie Anderson to Throbbing Gristle, The Disposable Heroes of Hiphoprisy and Ministry, and in Gus Van Sant's 1989 film Drugstore Cowboy, playing a character based on a short story he published in Exterminator!, "The "Priest" They Called Him", featuring a guitar track supplied by Kurt Cobain of Nirvana. Burroughs and R.E.M. collaborated on the song "Star Me Kitten" on the Songs in the Key of X: Music From and Inspired By The X-Files album. A collaboration with musicians Nick Cave and Tom Waits resulted in a collection of short prose, Smack My Crack, later released as a spoken word album in 1987. In 1990, he released the spoken word album Dead City Radio, with musical back-up from producers Hal Willner and Nelson Lyon, and alternative rock band Sonic Youth. He collaborated with Tom Waits and director Robert Wilson on The Black Rider, a play which opened at the Thalia Theatre in Hamburg in 1990 to critical acclaim, and that was later performed all over Europe and the U.S. In 1991, with Burroughs' approval, director David Cronenberg adapted Naked Lunch into a feature film, which opened to critical acclaim.
During 1982, Burroughs developed a painting technique whereby he created abstract compositions by placing spray paint cans in front of blank surfaces, and then shooting at the paint cans with a shotgun. These splattered and shot panels and canvasses were first exhibited in the Tony Shafrazi Gallery in New York City in 1987. By this time he had developed a comprehensive visual art practice, using ink, spray paint, collage and unusual things such as mushrooms and plungers to apply the paint. He created file-folder paintings featuring these mediums as well as "automatic calligraphy" inspired by Brion Gysin. He originally used the folders to mix pigments before observing that they could be viewed as art in themselves. He also used many of these painted folders to store manuscripts and correspondence in his personal archive[64] Until his last years, he prolifically created visual art. Burroughs' work has since been featured in more than fifty international galleries and museums including Royal Academy of the Arts, Centre Pompidou, Guggenheim Museum, ZKM Karlsruhe, Sammlung Falckenberg, New Museum, Irish Museum of Modern Art, Los Angeles County Museum, and Whitney Museum of American Art.[65]
According to Ministry frontman Al Jourgensen, "We hung out at Burroughs's house one time in '93. So he decides to shoot up heroin and he takes out this utility belt full of syringes. Huge, old-fashioned ones from the '50s or something. Now, I have no idea how an 80 year old guy finds a vein, but he knew what he was doing. So we're all laying around high and stuff and then I notice in the pile of mail on the coffee table that there's a letter from the White House. I said 'Hey, this looks important.' and he replies 'Nah, it's probably just junk mail.' Well, I open the letter and it's from President Clinton inviting Burroughs to the White House for a poetry reading. I said 'Wow, do you have any idea how big this is!?' So he says 'What? Who's president nowadays?' and it floored me. He didn't even know who our current president was."[66]
In 1990, Burroughs was honored with a star on the St. Louis Walk of Fame.[67]
In June 1991, Burroughs underwent triple bypass surgery.[68]
He became a member of a chaos magic organization, the Illuminates of Thanateros, in 1993.[69]
Burroughs' last filmed performance was in the music video for "Last Night on Earth" by Irish rock band U2, filmed in Kansas City, Missouri, directed by Richie Smyth and also featuring Sophie Dahl.[70]
Political beliefs[]
The only newspaper columnist Burroughs admired was Westbrook Pegler, a right-wing opinion shaper for the William Randolph Hearst newspaper chain.[6](p170) Burroughs believed in frontier individualism, which he championed as "our glorious frontier heritage on minding your own business." Burroughs came to equate liberalism with bureaucratic tyranny, viewing government authority as a collective of meddlesome forces legislating the curtailment of personal freedom. According to his biographer Ted Morgan, his philosophy for living one's life was to adhere to a laissez-faire path, one without encumbrances – in essence a credo shared with the capitalist business world.[6](p55) His abhorrence of the government did not prevent Burroughs from using its programs to his own advantage. In 1949 he enrolled in Mexico City College under the GI Bill, which paid for part of his tuition and books and provided him with a seventy-five-dollar-per-month stipend. He maintained, "I always say, keep your snout in the public trough."[6](p173)
Burroughs was a gun enthusiast and owned several shotguns, a Colt .45 and a .38 special. Sonic Youth vocalist Thurston Moore recounted meeting Burroughs: "he had a number of Guns and Ammo magazines laying about, and he was only very interested in talking about shooting and knifing ... I asked him if he had a Beretta and he said: 'Ah, that's a ladies' pocket-purse gun. I like guns that shoot and knives that cut." Hunter S. Thompson gave him a one-of-a-kind .454 caliber pistol.[71]
Despite being a fan of a right-wing columnist, many in his entourage such as Genesis P-Orridge and Al Jourgensen are notable for far-left, anti-capitalist, and anti-fascist politics. He was also a fan of the left-wing Dadaist movement. His overall views can generally be seen as anti-establishment, anti-conditioning, and anti-control.
Magical beliefs[]
Burroughs had a longstanding preoccupation with magic and the occult, dating from his earliest childhood, and was insistent throughout his life that we live in a "magical universe".[72] As he himself explained:
In the magical universe there are no coincidences and there are no accidents. Nothing happens unless someone wills it to happen. The dogma of science is that the will cannot possibly affect external forces, and I think that's just ridiculous. It's as bad as the church. My viewpoint is the exact contrary of the scientific viewpoint. I believe that if you run into somebody in the street it's for a reason. Among primitive people they say that if someone was bitten by a snake he was murdered. I believe that.[73]
Or, speaking in the 1970s:
Since the word "magic" tends to cause confused thinking, I would like to say exactly what I mean by "magic" and the magical interpretation of so-called reality. The underlying assumption of magic is the assertion of "will" as the primary moving force in this universe – the deep conviction that nothing happens unless somebody or some being wills it to happen. To me this has always seemed self evident ... From the viewpoint of magic, no death, no illness, no misfortune, accident, war or riot is accidental. There are no accidents in the world of magic.[74]
This was no idle passing interest – Burroughs also actively practiced magic in his everyday life: seeking out mystical visions through practices like scrying,[45][75][76] taking measures to protect himself from possession,[32][33][77][78] and attempting to lay curses on those who had crossed him.[50][51][79] Burroughs spoke openly about his magical practices, and his engagement with the occult is attested from a multitude of interviews,[lower-alpha 13][lower-alpha 14][81] as well as personal accounts from those who knew him.[32][50][51]
Biographer Ted Morgan has argued that: "As the single most important thing about Graham Greene was his viewpoint as a lapsed Catholic, the single most important thing about Burroughs was his belief in the magical universe. The same impulse that led him to put out curses was, as he saw it, the source of his writing ... To Burroughs behind everyday reality there was the reality of the spirit world, of psychic visitations, of curses, of possession and phantom beings."[6][82]
Burroughs was unwavering in his insistence that his writing itself had a magical purpose.[lower-alpha 15][lower-alpha 16][lower-alpha 17][lower-alpha 18][87] This was particularly true when it came to his use of the cut-up technique. Burroughs was adamant that the technique had a magical function, stating "the cut ups are not for artistic purposes".[88] Burroughs used his cut-ups for "political warfare, scientific research, personal therapy, magical divination, and conjuration"[88] – the essential idea being that the cut-ups allowed the user to "break down the barriers that surround consciousness".[89] As Burroughs himself stated:
I would say that my most interesting experience with the earlier techniques was the realization that when you make cut-ups you do not get simply random juxtapositions of words, that they do mean something, and often that these meanings refer to some future event. I've made many cut-ups and then later recognized that the cut-up referred to something that I read later in a newspaper or a book, or something that happened ... Perhaps events are pre-written and pre-recorded and when you cut word lines the future leaks out.[89]
In the final decade of his life, Burroughs became heavily involved in the chaos magic movement. Burroughs' magical techniques – the cut-up, playback, etc. – had been incorporated into chaos magic by such practitioners as Phil Hine,[90][91][92] Dave Lee[93] and Genesis P-Orridge.[50][94] P-Orridge in particular had known and studied under Burroughs and Brion Gysin for over a decade.[50] This led to Burroughs contributing material to the book Between Spaces: Selected Rituals & Essays From The Archives Of Templum Nigri Solis[95] Through this connection, Burroughs came to personally know many of the leading lights of the chaos magic movement, including Hine, Lee, Peter J. Carroll, Ian Read and Ingrid Fischer, as well as Douglas Grant, head of the North American section of chaos magic group The Illuminates of Thanateros (IOT).[72][96] Burroughs' involvement with the movement further deepened, as he contributed artwork and other material to chaos magic books,[97] addressed an IOT gathering in Austria,[98] and was eventually fully initiated into The Illuminates of Thanateros.[lower-alpha 19][72][99] As Burroughs' close friend James Grauerholz states: "William was very serious about his studies in, and initiation into the IOT ... Our longtime friend, Douglas Grant, was a prime mover."[96]
Death[]
Burroughs died August 2, 1997 in Lawrence, Kansas, from complications of a heart attack he had suffered the previous day.[17] He was interred in the family plot in Bellefontaine Cemetery in St. Louis, Missouri,[101] with a marker bearing his full name and the epitaph "American Writer". His grave lies to the right of the white granite obelisk of William Seward Burroughs I (1857–1898).
Posthumous works[]
Since 1997, several posthumous collections of Burroughs' work have been published. A few months after his death, a collection of writings spanning his entire career, Word Virus, was published (according to the book's introduction, Burroughs himself approved its contents prior to his death).[34] Aside from numerous previously released pieces, Word Virus also included what was promoted as one of the few surviving fragments of And the Hippos Were Boiled in Their Tanks, a novel by Burroughs and Kerouac (later published in 2008). A collection of journal entries written during the final months of Burroughs' life was published as the book Last Words in 2000. Publication of a memoir by Burroughs entitled Evil River by Viking Press has been delayed several times; after initially being announced for a 2005 release, online booksellers indicated a 2007 release, complete with an ISBN number (ISBN 0670813516), but it remains unpublished.[102] In December 2007, Ohio State University Press released Everything Lost: The Latin American Journals of William S. Burroughs. Edited by Oliver Harris, the book contains transcriptions of journal entries made by Burroughs during the time of composing Queer and The Yage Letters, with cover art and review information. In addition, restored editions of numerous texts have been published in recent years, all containing additional material and essays on the works. The complete Kerouac/Burroughs manuscript And the Hippos Were Boiled in Their Tanks was published for the first time in November 2008.[103] Several of Burroughs early novels, including Junky and Naked Lunch, have been republished in posthumous "Restored Text" editions, incorporating material edited out of previous versions.
Literary style and periods[]
Burroughs' major works can be divided into four different periods. The dates refer to the time of writing, not publication, which in some cases was not until decades later:
Early work (early 1950s)
Junkie, Queer and The Yage Letters are relatively straightforward linear narratives, written in and about Burroughs' time in Mexico City and South America.
The cut-up period (mid-1950s to mid-1960s)
Although published before Burroughs discovered the cut-up technique, Naked Lunch is a fragmentary collection of "routines" from The Word Hoard – manuscripts written in Tangier, Paris, London, as well as of other texts written in South America such as "The Composite City", blending into the cut-up and fold-in fiction also partly drawn from The Word Hoard: The Soft Machine, Nova Express, The Ticket That Exploded, also referred to as "The Nova Trilogy" or "The Cut-Up Trilogy", self-described by Burroughs as an attempt to create "a mythology for the space age". Interzone also derives from the mid-1950s.
Experiment and subversion (mid-1960s to mid-1970s)
This period saw Burroughs continue experimental writing with increased political content and branching into multimedia such as film and sound recording. The only major novel written in this period was The Wild Boys, but he also wrote dozens of published articles, short stories, scrap books and other works, several in collaboration with Brion Gysin. The major anthologies representing work from this period are The Burroughs File, The Adding Machine and Exterminator!.
The Red Night trilogy (mid-1970s to mid-1980s)
The books Cities of the Red Night, The Place of Dead Roads and The Western Lands came from Burroughs in a final, mature stage, creating a complete mythology.
Burroughs also produced numerous essays and a large body of autobiographical material, including a book with a detailed account of his own dreams (My Education: A Book of Dreams).
Reaction to critics and view on criticism[]
Several literary critics treated Burroughs' work harshly. For example, Anatole Broyard and Philip Toynbee wrote devastating reviews of some of his most important books. In a short essay entitled "A Review of the Reviewers", Burroughs answers his critics in this way:
Critics constantly complain that writers are lacking in standards, yet they themselves seem to have no standards other than personal prejudice for literary criticism. ... such standards do exist. Matthew Arnold set up three criteria for criticism: 1. What is the writer trying to do? 2. How well does he succeed in doing it? ... 3. Does the work exhibit "high seriousness"? That is, does it touch on basic issues of good and evil, life and death and the human condition. I would also apply a fourth criterion ... Write about what you know. More writers fail because they try to write about things they don't know than for any other reason.
—William S. Burroughs, "A Review of the Reviewers"[104]
Burroughs clearly indicates here that he prefers to be evaluated against such criteria over being reviewed based on the reviewer's personal reactions to a certain book. Always a contradictory figure, Burroughs nevertheless criticized Anatole Broyard for reading authorial intent into his works where there is none, which sets him at odds both with New Criticism and the old school as represented by Matthew Arnold.
Photography[]
Burroughs used photography extensively throughout his career, both as a recording medium in planning his writings, and as a significant dimension of his own artistic practice, in which photographs and other images feature as significant elements in cut-ups. With Ian Sommerville, he experimented with photography's potential as a form of memory-device, photographing and rephotographing his own pictures in increasingly complex time-image arrangements.[105]
Legacy[]
Burroughs is often called one of the greatest and most influential writers of the 20th century, most notably by Norman Mailer whose quote on Burroughs, "The only American novelist living today who may conceivably be possessed by genius", appears on many Burroughs publications. Others consider his concepts and attitude more influential than his prose. Prominent admirers of Burroughs' work have included British critic and biographer Peter Ackroyd, the rock critic Lester Bangs, the philosopher Gilles Deleuze and the authors J. G. Ballard, Angela Carter, Jean Genet, William Gibson, Alan Moore, Kathy Acker and Ken Kesey. Burroughs had an influence on the German writer Carl Weissner, who in addition to being his German translator was a novelist in his own right and frequently wrote cut-up texts in a manner reminiscent of Burroughs.[106]
Burroughs continues to be named as an influence by contemporary writers of fiction. Both the New Wave and, especially, the cyberpunk schools of science fiction are indebted to him. Admirers from the late 1970s – early 1980s milieu of this subgenre include William Gibson and John Shirley, to name only two. First published in 1982, the British slipstream fiction magazine Interzone (which later evolved into a more traditional science fiction magazine) paid tribute to him with its choice of name. He is also cited as a major influence by musicians Roger Waters, David Bowie, Patti Smith, Genesis P-Orridge, Ian Curtis, Lou Reed, Laurie Anderson, Tom Waits and Kurt Cobain.[107]
Drugs, homosexuality, and death, common among Burroughs' themes, have been taken up by Dennis Cooper, of whom Burroughs said, "Dennis Cooper, God help him, is a born writer".[108] Cooper, in return, wrote, in his essay 'King Junk', "along with Jean Genet, John Rechy, and Ginsberg, [Burroughs] helped make homosexuality seem cool and highbrow, providing gay liberation with a delicious edge". Splatterpunk writer Poppy Z. Brite has frequently referenced this aspect of Burroughs' work. Burroughs' writing continues to be referenced years after his death; for example, a November 2004 episode of the TV series CSI: Crime Scene Investigation included an evil character named Dr. Benway (named for an amoral physician who appears in a number of Burroughs' works.) This is an echo of the hospital scene in the movie Repo Man, made during Burroughs' life-time, in which both Dr. Benway and Mr. Lee (a Burroughs pen name) are paged.
Burroughs had an impact on twentieth-century esotericism and occultism as well, most notably through disciples like Peter Lamborn Wilson and Genesis P-Orridge. Burroughs is also cited by Robert Anton Wilson as the first person to notice the "23 Enigma":
I first heard of the '23 Enigma' from William S. Burroughs, author of Naked Lunch, Nova Express, etc. According to Burroughs, he had known a certain Captain Clark, around 1960 in Tangier, who once bragged that he had been sailing 23 years without an accident. That very day, Clark's ship had an accident that killed him and everybody else aboard. Furthermore, while Burroughs was thinking about this crude example of the irony of the gods that evening, a bulletin on the radio announced the crash of an airliner in Florida, USA. The pilot was another Captain Clark and the flight was Flight 23.
—Robert Anton Wilson, Fortean Times[109]
Some research[110] suggests that Burroughs is arguably the progenitor of the 2012 phenomenon, a belief of New Age Mayanism that an apocalyptic shift in human consciousness would occur at the end of the Mayan Long Count calendar in 2012. Although never directly focusing on the year 2012 himself, Burroughs had an influence on early 2012 proponents such as Terence McKenna and Jose Argüelles, and as well had written about an apocalyptic shift of human consciousness at the end of the Long Count as early as 1960's The Exterminator.[111]
Appearances in media[]
In music[]
Burroughs appears on the cover of The Beatles' eighth studio album, Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band. Burroughs participated on numerous album releases by Giorno Poetry Systems, including The Nova Convention (featuring Frank Zappa, John Cage, and Philip Glass) and You're the Guy I Want to Share My Money With (with John Giorno and Laurie Anderson).
He is featured in a spoken word piece entitled "Sharkey's Night" on Laurie Anderson's 1984 album Mister Heartbreak, but the longer version of this track, with additional dialogue from Burroughs, was released only on a promotional 4-track 12" Ep (Warner Bros PRO-A-2123). In addition, Burroughs provided vocal samples for the soundtrack of Anderson's 1986 concert film, Home of the Brave, and made a cameo appearance in it.
Burroughs reads a passage from his novel Nova Express during the bridge of the title song from Todd Tamanend Clark's 1984 album Into The Vision, which also features Cheetah Chrome from The Dead Boys on guitar.
Bill Laswell's Material collaborated with Burroughs to produce the 1989 album Seven Souls, wherein Burroughs recites passages from his book The Western Lands to musical accompaniment. The album was reissued in 1997 with 3 bonus remixes. In 1998, an additional unreleased six remixes (plus one previously released) were introduced on the album The Road To The Western Lands. Spring Heel Jack's remix of the track '"The Road to the Western Lands" from this album was also included on their Oddities album from 2000.
In 1990, Island Records released Dead City Radio, a collection of readings set to a broad range of musical compositions. It was produced by Hal Willner and Nelson Lyon, with musical accompaniment from John Cale, Donald Fagen, Lenny Pickett, Chris Stein, Sonic Youth, and others. The remastered edition of Sonic Youth's album Goo includes a longer version of "Dr. Benway's House", which had appeared, in shorter form, on Dead City Radio.
In 1992 he recorded "Quick Fix" with Ministry, which appeared on their single for "Just One Fix". The single featured cover art by Burroughs and a remix of the song dubbed the "W.S.B. mix". Burroughs also made an appearance in the video for "Just One Fix". The same year he also recorded the EP The "Priest" They Called Him; Burroughs reads the short story of the same name, while Kurt Cobain creates layers of guitar feedback and distortion. Nirvana bassist Krist Novoselic is featured on the cover as the titular "Priest". The track on the 13th Ministry album "Thanx but No Thanx" makes use of William S. Burroughs' poem "A Thanksgiving Prayer", as read by Sgt. Major.
In 1992 Burroughs worked with The Disposable Heroes of Hiphoprisy on Spare Ass Annie and Other Tales, with the duo providing musical background and accompaniment to Burroughs' spoken readings from several of his books. A 12" EP was released with five different remixes of the Spare Ass Annie track "Words of Advice for Young People", all done by Bill Laswell.
Burroughs appears on two songs from Technodon, the 1993 reunion album by the Japanese electronic group Yellow Magic Orchestra. The opening track, "Be a Superman", begins with a sample of Burroughs proclaiming, "Be a man! Be a human animal... be a superman! Be a superman." The latter part of the sample reappears throughout. "I Tre Merli" features a longer reading taken from The Job.
Burroughs recites the lyrics of R.E.M.'s "Star Me Kitten" for a special version of the song on the Songs in the Key of X: Music from and Inspired by the X-Files soundtrack.
Burroughs appears in a seven-second scene of the Arcadia's music video "Election Day",[112] sitting in the dark near a stairway and throwing a double-numbered crystal on the pavement. And also appears near the end of U2's music video "Last Night on Earth", pushing a shopping cart with a large spotlight positioned inside it. The video ends with a close up of his eyes.
Burroughs is featured on the 2000 compilation tribute album, Stoned Immaculate, on the track "Is Everybody In?" which pairs Jim Morrison yelping and groaning with Burroughs reading Morrison's poetry. The music was recorded by the surviving Doors members in 2000 specifically for this album.[113]
A Burroughs quote from a visualisation exercise called 'Take Nirvana'[114] was used by director Shane Meadows in the final scene of The Stone Roses' 2013 concert DVD, Made of Stone.[115]
Band names[]
Numerous bands have found their names in Burroughs' work. The most widely known of these is Steely Dan, a group named after a dildo in Naked Lunch.[116] Also from Naked Lunch came the names Clarknova, The Mugwumps and The Insect Trust. The novel Nova Express inspired the names of Grant Hart's post-Hüsker Dü band Nova Mob, as well as Australian 1960s R&B band Nova Express.[117] British band Soft Machine took its moniker from the Burroughs novel of the same name. Alt-country band Clem Snide is named for a Burroughs character. Thin White Rope took their name from Burroughs' euphemism for ejaculation.[118]
The American extreme metal band Success Will Write Apocalypse Across the Sky took their name from the 1989 text "Apocalypse",[119] in which Burroughs describes "art and creative expression taking a literal and physical form".[120]
In film and television[]
Burroughs played Opium Jones in the 1966 Conrad Rooks cult film Chappaqua, which also featured cameo roles by Allen Ginsberg, Moondog, and others.
In 1968, an abbreviated – 77 minutes as opposed to the original's 104 minute – version of Benjamin Christensen's 1922 film Häxan was released, subtitled Witchcraft Through The Ages. This version, produced by Antony Balch, featured an eclectic jazz score by Daniel Humair and expressionist narration by Burroughs.[121] He also appeared alongside Brion Gysin in a number of short films in the 1960s directed by Balch.[122] Jack Sargeant's book Naked Lens: Beat Cinema details Burroughs' film work at length, covering his collaborations with Balch and Burroughs' theories of film.
Burroughs narrated part of the 1980 documentary Shamans of the Blind Country by anthropologist and filmmaker Michael Oppitz.[123] He gave a reading on Saturday Night Live on November 7, 1981, in an episode hosted by Lauren Hutton.
In 1983 director Howard Brookner released Burroughs: the Movie. The film is perhaps the definitive account of Burroughs' life, and Brookner and Burroughs maintained a very close collaboration during the shooting process. The film features interviews with many of Burroughs' friends and collaborators including Allen Ginsberg, Brion Gysin, Francis Bacon, Herbert Huncke, Patti Smith and Terry Southern.
Burroughs subsequently made cameo appearances in a number of other films and videos, such as David Blair's Wax or the Discovery of Television Among the Bees, an elliptic story about the first Gulf War in which Burroughs plays a beekeeper, and Decoder by Klaus Maeck. He played an aging junkie priest in Gus Van Sant's 1989 film Drugstore Cowboy. He also appears briefly at the beginning of Van Sant's Even Cowgirls Get the Blues (based on the Tom Robbins novel), in which he is seen crossing a city street; as the noise of the city rises around him he pauses in the middle of the intersection and speaks the single word "ominous". Van Sant's short film "Thanksgiving Prayer" features Burroughs reading the poem "Thanksgiving Day, Nov. 28, 1986", from Tornado Alley, intercut with a collage of black and white images.
Burroughs was portrayed by Kiefer Sutherland in the 2000 film Beat, written and directed by Gary Walkow. Loosely biographical, the plot involves a car trip to Mexico City with Vollmer, Kerouac, Ginsberg, and Lucien Carr, and includes a scene of Vollmer's shooting.
Burroughs is portrayed by Ben Foster in the 2013 film Kill Your Darlings, directed by John Krokidas and written by Krokidas and Austin Bunn. The film tells the story of Lucien Carr (Dane DeHaan) and David Kammerer (Michael C. Hall), with appearances by actors playing Ginsberg (Daniel Radcliffe) and Kerouac (Jack Huston).[124]
Near the end of his life, recordings of Burroughs reading his short stories "A Junky's Christmas" and "Ah Pook is Here" were used on the soundtracks of two highly acclaimed animated films.[125]
Filmmakers Lars Movin and Steen Moller Rasmussen used footage of Burroughs taken during a 1983 tour of Scandinavia in the documentary Words of Advice: William S. Burroughs on the Road. A 2010 documentary, William S. Burroughs: A Man Within, was made for Independent Lens on PBS.
Good Will Hunting (released in December 1997) was dedicated to Burroughs, as well as Ginsberg, who died four months earlier.[126]
Burroughs was played by Viggo Mortensen as the character 'Old Bill Lee' from Jack Kerouac's novel On the Road in the 2012 movie adaptation of the novel, On the Road (2012 film)
As a fictional character[]
Burroughs was fictionalized in Jack Kerouac's autobiographical novel On the Road as "Old Bull Lee". He also makes an appearance in J. G. Ballard's semi-autobiographical 1991 novel The Kindness of Women. In the 2004 novel Move Under Ground, Burroughs, Kerouac, and Neal Cassady team up to defeat Cthulhu.
Burroughs appears in the first part of The Illuminatus! Trilogy by Robert Shea and Robert Anton Wilson during the 1968 Democratic National Convention riots and is described as a person devoid of anger, passion, indignation, hope, or any other recognizable human emotion. He is presented as a polar opposite of Allen Ginsberg, as Ginsberg believed in everything and Burroughs believed in nothing. Wilson would recount in his Cosmic Trigger II: Down to Earth having interviewed both Burroughs and Ginsberg for Playboy the day the riots began, as well as his experiences with Shea during the riots, providing details on the creation of the fictional sequence.[127]
[]
References[]
Sources[]
Burroughs, William S. (2012). The Job: Interviews with William S. Burroughs. Penguin UK. ISBN 9780141903583. https://books.google.com/books?id=DivGjW-qEv8C.
Grant, Douglas (2015). "Magick and Photography". http://ashejournal.com/2015/03/16/magick-and-photography/.
Belletto, Steven, ed (2017). "William S. Burroughs: Beating postmodernism". The Cambridge Companion to the Beats. Cambridge University Press. ISBN 9781107184459. https://books.google.com/books?id=NYXuDQAAQBAJ.
Grauerholz, James; Silverberg, Ira; Douglas, Ann, eds (2000). Word Virus: The William S. Burroughs reader. New York: Grove Press. ISBN 0-8021-3694-X. OCLC 57590795, ISBN 9780802136947.
Lee, Dave Republic of Égyptien Q42 user:mgbtrust0 ®™✓©§∆∆∆€¢£ (1989). "Cut up and collage in magic". https://chaotopia.co.uk/cutupcoll.html.
Morgan, Ted (1988). Literary Outlaw: The life and times of William S. Burroughs. New York: Avon. ISBN 0-8050-0901-9.
P-Orridge, Genesis Breyer (2003). "Magick Squares and Future Beats". In Metzger, Richard. Book of Lies: The disinformation guide to Magick and the Occult. Red Wheel Weiser. ISBN 9780971394278. https://books.google.com/books?id=1zMENGdUSoEC.
P-Orridge, Genesis Breyer (2010). Thee Psychick Bible: Thee apocryphal scriptures ov Genesis Breyer P-Orridge and thee Third Mind ov thee Temple ov Psychick Youth. Feral House. ISBN 9781932595949. https://books.google.com/books?id=X1FjCwAAQBAJ.
Wason, Thomas (February 15, 1951). "William Burroughs". Mexico City Collegian. p. 6. http://catarina.udlap.mx/u_dl_a/acervos/mcc/volumen_04/1951_02_15.pdf.
Burroughs, William S. (2001). Burroughs Live: The collected interviews of William S. Burroughs, 1960-1997. Zone Books. ISBN 9781584350101. https://books.google.com/books?id=qUhaAAAAMAAJ.
Stevens, Matthew Levi (2014). The Magical Universe of William S. Burroughs. Mandrake of Oxford. ISBN 978-1906958640.
Published materials[]
Allmer, Patricia and John Sears (ed.) Taking Shots: The Photography of William S. Burroughs, London: Prestel and The Photographers' Gallery, 2014.
Charters, Ann (ed.). The Portable Beat Reader. New York: Penguin Books, 1992. ISBN 0-670-83885-3 (hc); ISBN 0-14-015102-8 (pbk).
Gilmore, John. Laid Bare: A Memoir of Wrecked Lives and the Hollywood Death Trip. Searching for Rimbaud. Amok Books, 1997.
Harris, Oliver. William Burroughs and the Secret of Fascination. Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 2003.
Johnson, Robert Earl. The Lost Years of William S. Burroughs: Beats in South Texas. Texas A&M University Press, 2006.
Kashner, Sam, When I Was Cool, My Life at the Jack Kerouac School, New York: HarperCollins Perennial, 2005.
Miles, Barry. William Burroughs: El Hombre Invisible, A Portrait. New York: Hyperion, 1992.
Sargeant, Jack. "Naked Lens: Beat Cinema" New York: Soft Skull Press, 2009 (third edition).
Schneiderman, Davis and Philip Walsh. Retaking the Universe: William S. Burroughs in the Age of Globalization. London: Pluto Press, 2004.
Stevens, Mathew Levi. The Magical Universe of William S. Burroughs. Mandrake of Oxford, 2014.
Stevens, Michael. The Road to Interzone: Reading William S. Burroughs Reading. suicide press, Archer City, Texas, 2009.
Weidner, Chad. The Green Ghost: William Burroughs and the Ecological Mind. Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 2016.
Wills, David S. Scientologist! William S. Burroughs and the Weird Cult. Beatdom Books, London, 2013.
Archival sources[]
William S. Burroughs papers (17 linear feet – 94 boxes) are held by the Berg Collection of the New York Public Library.
William Seward Burroughs Papers, 1957–1976 (2 linear feet) are held in the Columbia University Libraries.
William S. Burroughs Papers, SPEC.CMS.40 (ca. 1945-ca. 1984, 55 boxes plus additions) are held in the Ohio State University libraries.
William S. Burroughs Papers, SPEC.CMS.85 (ca. 1945-ca. 1984, 6 boxes) are held in the Ohio State University libraries.
William S. Burroughs Papers, SPEC.CMS.87 (ca. 1945-ca. 1984, 58 boxes) are held in the Ohio State University libraries.
William S. Burroughs Papers, SPEC.CMS.90 (ca. 1945-ca. 1984, 29 boxes) are held in the Ohio State University libraries.
William S. Burroughs collection (3 linear feet) are held in the Manuscript, Archives, and Rare Book Library at Emory University.
William S. Burroughs Collection, MS 63 and James Grauerholz Collection of William S. Burroughs, MS 319, are held at the Kenneth Spencer Research Library, University of Kansas
William S. Burroughs Internet Database, edited by postmodern American scholar Michael Gurnow, hosted on the servers of Southeast Missouri State University from 2000 to 2012.
[1], Taking Shots: The Photography of William S. Burroughs, The Photographers' Gallery exhibition website.
[2], William S. Burroughs and Photography Lecture Series
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A blog about science fiction, fantasy, and horror fiction books published during 1968 to 1988
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http://theporporbooksblog.blogspot.com/favicon.ico
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http://theporporbooksblog.blogspot.com/2023/11/book-review-crystal-express.html
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Book Review: 'Crystal Express' by Bruce Sterling
5 / 5 Stars
'Crystal Express' (278 pp.) was issued by Ace Books in December 1990. The cover illustration (fractals were very 'in' as a design theme in the early 1990s) is by Ian Entwistle.
This book is an anthology of short stories Sterling published over the interval from 1982 to 1987, in magazines and books such as Isaac Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine, Interzone, and Universe.
The initial five entries in 'Crystal' are stories set in Sterling's far-future Shaper / Mechanist universe, in which mankind - split into two adversarial factions - tries to find a place in a galaxy dominated by alien races and their advanced technologies. 'Swarm' (1982), the inaugural story in the Shaper franchise, features an imaginative treatment of an alien hive society, while 'Spider Rose' (1982) pits the eponymous protagonist, who possesses a unique alien artifact, against malevolent Shapers.
The 1983 novelette 'Cicada Queen' deals with political intrigues between the factions, with a project to terraform Mars hanging in the balance. The terraforming project is the topic of the 1984 story 'Sunken Gardens'. 'Twenty Evocations' (1984) uses a series of vignettes to recount the life and times of a Shaper named Nikolai Leng.
I find the Shaper stories to be interesting, if over-written, science fiction pieces. There are simply too many concepts, wordsmithings, and story beats competing for limited text space.
That said, these stories are as good as, if not better than, contemporaneous material from more recognized writers like John Varley. The early 1980s were a relentlessly staid period when it came to 'hard' science fiction, with editors and publishers focusing on churning out duds from bankable authors like Arthur C. Clarke, Robert Heinlein, Frederik Pohl, and Asimov. So Sterling's contributions to the field certainly injected a degree of innovation into the scene.
Moving on through 'Crystal', there are three stories, although not labeled as such, that represent what now is regarded as cyberpunk.
'Green Days in Brunei' (1985) is a very readable novelette, set in a near-future southeast Asia, where engineer and hacker Turner Choi is charged with reviving the national economy of an impoverished Brunei. 'Spook' (1983) is about a political operative sent to destroy an anti-globalist rebellion. It has a cynical edge to it that places the story in the harder-edged realm of cyberpunk, and thus can be said to lie in William Gibson territory.
'The Beautiful and the Sublime' (1986) resides firmly in Sterling's more genial approach to plotting and characters. There are no casualties, but much drawing-room machinations by social butterflies who like manipulating the wealthy.
The collection closes with stories set in past eras. These tend to have a subdued, ruminative quality. 'Telliamed' (1984) is about an 18th century French 'natural philosopher' who triggers the final conflict between the Age of Myth and Legend, and the Age of Enlightenment. 'The Little Magic Shop' (1987) comes across as a Roald Dahl-ish story in its treatment of an age-defying entrepreneur named James Abernathy.
'Flowers of Edo' (1987) relates the adventures of two Japanese men coping with the disruption to their society caused by the arrival of new technologies and ideas from the West. 'Dinner in Audoghast' (1985) sees a group of dissipated merchants and traders, residing in what at that time was the prosperous city of Aoudaghost in 11th century Mauritania, confronting a prophecy of doom and desolation.
In his zine Cheap Truth, Sterling had this to say about science fiction in the early 1980s: "American sf lies in a reptilian torpor". It was a depressing, but accurate statement.
When comparing the short stories in 'Crystal Express' with those published by the more well-publicized mainstream science fiction authors in the 1980s, it's clear that Sterling and the cyberpunks were updating and improving the genre, sometimes in small ways, sometimes in larger ways. The contents of 'Crystal Express' can be seen as examples of the storytelling the cyberpunks used to revitalize science fiction.
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https://classicsofsciencefiction.com/2022/07/
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July 2022 – Classics of Science Fiction
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2022-07-30T14:41:39+00:00
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4 posts published by jameswharris during July 2022
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en
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Classics of Science Fiction
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My aim is to review a time travel novel, Time’s Last Gift, by Philip José Farmer, but I need to explain my attitude towards time travel stories before I can pass judgment. I bought Time’s Last Gift because I read on the cover blurb that four scientists from the year 2070 travel back to 12,000 BC to study the Magdalenian culture. Since I’ve recently read a number of books on prehistory that plot appealed to me. I even read a large book just on locating the origin of the people who produced the proto-Indo-European language.
Within Time’s Last Gift, one character, Robert von Billmann is obsessed with finding the people who created the Proto-Indo-Hittite language. If you’re not interested in pre-history or the origins of language you might not want to bother with Time’s Last Gift – unless another factor appeals to you, but I want to wait and mention that after the spoilers warning. Let’s just say that John Gribardson, who was made leader of the expedition at the last minute has a very interesting backstory.
Does Time’s Last Gift stand on its own as a solid story and as a good addition to the time travel theme despite any details related to actual history or literary plot gimmicks? To me, a worthy time travel story has to add something different to the theme, otherwise, it’s just a romance, thriller, or historical novel that jumps around in time.
There have been countless science fiction books about time travel, but for me, I find very few of them worthy of using the theme. Most throw their characters into the past or the future and develop a story about that new setting. What I love is a time travel adventure that also explores the wonder of time and time travel. H. G. Wells set the bar very high with The Time Machine in 1895. I’m not sure any work has ever surpassed it for its sense of wonder.
There are so many time travel stories that Michael Main has created The Internet Time Travel Database. Town & Country Magazine listed their top 35 time travel books but only three of my top favorites make their list. Read This Twice found 92 favorite time travel books, and they do list many of my favorites. About Great Books lists 30-time travel books they think are great, and seven of my favorites are there, but I don’t consider many of those books really time travel stories. But that brings up another issue.
What is time travel? Replay by Ken Grimwood is one of my all-time favorite novels, but does Jeff Winston time travel? He repeats his life over and over. I call such fiction time loop stories. Stories such as The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August by Claire North, and The Midnight Library by Matt Haig are really time loop stories too, which I consider a different theme than time travel stories. I’ve written about it before.
Are such literary classics as The Time Traveler’s Wife, Kindred, Slaughterhouse-Five, A Christmas Carol, and Woman on the Edge of Time really about time travel? Don’t they just use the gimmick of time travel to reveal deep characterization or explore social issues in a clever way? These are great novels, but I don’t really want to lump them into the kind of science fiction novel I’m pointing to. Nor do I want to consider all the novels that use time travel to hook people up romantically.
Real science fiction about time travel should make us think about the nature of time travel. Time’s Last Gift does do this. Time travel has always been plagued by paradoxes, but I believe Farmer has found a neat way around them. If a time traveler goes into the past and changes the future, it’s already happened. Whatever exists now, whether affected by time travel or not, is what is. Speculations about what might be changed are no different from what was changed. If a time traveler shows up in 12,000 BCE there was never a 12,000 BCE without a time traveler. Of course, that means everything that happens is fixed. Or is it? Does this theory about time travel require predestination? It could mean everyone has free will, but whichever way history plays out it only plays out once.
Most of Time’s Last Gift is about living in 12,000 BCE. The four scientists immediately befriend a small tribe of humans and learn their language. John Gribardsun even wears their clothing and hunts with their weapons, although he often uses his rifle when necessary to help feed the tribe. The main conflict of the story deals with the two scientists who are married, Rachel and Drummond Silverstein, and their breakup. Farmer suggests that time travel has a psychological effect, like a larger case of jet lag, and it wears on three of the scientists. Gribardsun seems immune. In fact, he thrives in the past, and his vitality attracts both Rachel and the young women of the tribe. Much of the novel is about whether or not Drummond is out to kill Gribardsun because of jealousy. I didn’t care for this part of the story. It felt like a contrived conflict to move the novel along. However, the story is very readable and kept me reading.
Beyond Here Lie Spoilers
In the 1950s Philip José Farmer wrote some very innovative science fiction stories – “The Lovers,” “The Alley Man,” “Sail On! Sail On!” and others. Then he created two series that were fairly successful, the Riverworld series and The World of Tiers. Farmer won the Hugo award for best novel for the first Riverworld story, To Your Scattered Bodies Go (1971). I loved that novel when it came out because the main character was Sir Richard Francis Burton, the 19th-century explorer, and translator. And I loved the second book, The Fabulous Riverboat (1971) because it featured Mark Twain. I had read biographies of both men and that made me partial to those Farmer’s novels.
Over the decades I have come to feel that using a famous historical person as a character in a novel is a cheat, a way to sell books. But I also consider writing book series as a crutch for writers. For the rest of his life Farmer mostly churned out books for various series, and they were just so-so. He later refined the famous person gimmick by switching to writing about famous fictional characters, and this is where Time’s Last Gift comes in. John Gribardsun is Tarzan. It’s never said within the novel, but I guess it fairly quickly. If you’ve ever read a Tarzan novel, Time’s Last Gift feels like one and could have been Tarzan’s Time Machine.
There’s nothing wrong with book series, they do help writers to pay bills, but each book feels like just another episode in a TV series to me. If you love a series, that’s great. But for me, usually, only stand-alone novels can be great.
I assume Farmer didn’t use the name Tarzan in the book because of being sued by the Edgar Rice Burroughs estate, but ISFDB even lists Time’s Last Gift among the Tarzan novels. Philip José Farmer wasn’t the only writer to continue the character. More importantly, it’s part of Farmer’s Wold Newton series where he brings many famous characters from literature into the real world. If you really like this kind of publishing gimmick, then Time’s Last Gift might excite you.
I find the Wold Newton idea fascinating in conception, but lackluster in execution. It capitalizes on the readers’ love of famous books and characters and I consider that exploitation. Heinlein did the same thing in his later books bringing back his own favorite characters and tieing them into his favorite fictional worlds. The idea is neat, but again, the execution was horrible.
As a time travel novel, Time’s Last Gift is mediocre – readable and somewhat interesting. The plot moves along well enough. The John Gribardsun character is appealing but his adventures back in 12,000 BCE aren’t that significant. If you enjoy the idea that it’s an alternate origin story for Tarzan, and Farmer makes him immortal, then you might enjoy the book more.
I judge time travel stories by how creative they are at dealing with time travel. For example, Heinlein’s “All You Zombies—” uses time travel and gender reassignment in a unique way. David Gerrold uses The Man Who Folded Himself to allow a time traveler to really get to know himself. Jack Finney in Time and Again used historical photographs to enhance his novel. Kurt Vonnegut combined memoir and fiction brilliantly. Connie Willis has explored both drama and comedy in her time travel novels. Of course, Wells illustrated both evolution and cosmology to his 19th-century readers. Wells inspired the Dying Earth genre and the idea that humanity will spin off different new species. Olaf Stapledon ran away with that idea with his novel Last and First Men.
With time travel stories, writers need to go big or go home. Philip José Farmer knew this. This is why he tacked on the Wold Newton afterward in a 1977 later edition. If you think Wold Newton is cool, then that might make Time’s Last Gift a good time travel story. If not, you might want to pass on it.
Here's a list of my favorite time travel stories. 1895 - THE TIME MACHINE by H. G. Wells 1934 - "Twilight" by John W. Campbell 1935 - "Night" by John W. Campbell 1941 - "Time Wants a Skeleton" by Ross Rocklynne 1941 - "By His Bootstraps" by Robert A. Heinlein 1943 - "Mimsy Were the Borogoves" by Henry Kuttner and C. L. Moore 1946 - "Vintage Season" by Henry Kuttner and C. L. Moore 1951 - "I'm Scared" by Jack Finney 1952 - "A Sound of Thunder" by Ray Bradbury 1952 - "Hobson's Choice" by Alfred Bester 1953 - "Who's Cribbing" by Jack Lewis 1956 - "A Gun for Dinosaur" by L. Sprague de Camp 1956 - "The Man Who Came Early" by Poul Anderson 1957 - THE DOOR INTO SUMMER by Robert A. Heinlein 1957 - "Soldier from Tomorrow" by Harlan Ellison 1958 - THE TIME TRADERS by Andre Norton 1958 - "Poor Little Warrior!" by Brian Aldiss 1958 - "The Ugly Little Boy by Isaac Asimov 1958 - "The Men Who Murdered Mohammed" by Alfred Bester 1959 - "All You Zombies---" by Robert A. Heinlein 1964 - FARNHAM'S FREEHOLD by Robert A. Heinlein 1964 - "When Time Was New" by Robert F. Young 1965 - "Traveller's Rest" by David I. Masson 1966 - "Behold the Man" by Michael Moorcock and BEHOLD THE MAN (1969) 1967 - "Hawksbill Station" by Robert Silverberg 1968 - THE LAST STARSHIP FROM EARTH by John Boyd 1969 - SLAUGHTERHOUSE-FIVE by Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. 1970 - TIME AND AGAIN by Jack Finney 1970 - THE YEAR OF THE QUIET SUN by Wilson Tucker 1971 - DINOSAUR BEACH by Keith Laumer 1973 - THE MAN WHO FOLDED HIMSELF by David Gerrold 1976 - "The Hertford Manuscript" by Richard Cowper 1967 - "Infinite Summer" by Christopher Priest 1980 - TIMESCAPE by Gregory Benford 1982 - "Firewatch" by Connie Willis 1985 - "Sailing to Byzantium" by Robert Silverberg 1988 - "Ripples in the Dirac Sea" by Geoffrey A. Landis 1992 - DOOMSDAY BOOK by Connie Willis 1995 - THE TIME SHIPS by Stephen Baxter 1995 - FROM TIME TO TIME by Jack Finney 1998 - TO SAY NOTHING OF THE DOG by Connie Willis 2003 - THE TIME TRAVELER'S WIFE by Audrey Niffenegger
Time Travel Anthologies
The Best Time Travel Stories of All Time (2003) edited by Barry N. Malzberg
The Best Time Travel Stories of the 20th Century (2005) edited by Harry Turtledove and Martin H. Greenberg (Kindle)
The Mammoth Book of Time Travel SF (2013) edited by Mike Ashley (Kindle)
The Time Travel MEGAPACK (2013) (Kindle)
The Time Traveler’s Almanac (2014) edited by Ann and Jeff VanderMeer (Kindle)
The Mammoth Book of Time Travel SF and The Time Travel MEGAPACK is currently 99 cents at Amazon for the Kindle edition.
James Wallace Harris, 7/30/22
What if our pleasure in life is wallowing in the minutiae of our favorite subject? I follow a lot of YouTubers and most of their channels are about going deeper and deeper into a beloved special interest. When we are young we pursue pleasures of the flesh, but as we get older we follow our Alice of interest down a rabbit hole. This lets us find our true tribe, our people.
I feel like I’m among a few survivors of a tribe that is dying out. I lament that our culture and language are disappearing. My tribe is those beings who grew up reading science fiction magazines in the mid-20th century. I know that tribe was never very large and that all the various tribes of pop culture eventually fade from the collective memory of the present. But this sense of passing is why I find myself enjoying recursive science fiction so much now. Recursive science fiction is science fiction about science fiction, and quite often it remembers the genre’s past. And to enjoy such stories requires either a direct experience of the past or a good education about that past.
One of the funniest recursive science fiction stories I’ve ever read is one that seems to parody/remember more of the genre than any other recursive science fiction story I’ve read. The story is “The Curse of the Mhondoro Nkabele” by Eric Norden (Eric Pelletier 1899-1979). Unfortunately, it’s been a long time since this story has been reprinted, meaning if you want to legally read it, it will require tracking down a used copy of F&SF for September 1980, The Best from Fantasy and Science Fiction 24th Series edited by Edward L. Ferman in 1982, or Inside the Funhouse: 17 SF Stories about SF edited by Mike Resnick in 1992. If you have a free account with the Internet Archive you can check out The Best of F&SF 24th for one hour. Since this story hasn’t been reprinted in 30 years, and its author has been dead for 43 years, I hope their heirs won’t mind me offering you a pdf copy. (If you do, let me know and I’ll take it down, but I doubt if six people will read it.)
Of course, not everyone will find this story funny or meaningful. It depends on you knowing a good deal about the genre’s history. I thought I’d review the story by providing links to the pertinent bits of history that knowing will let the reader appreciate the story.
The story is an exchange of letters between Oginga Nkabele, a young man from Africa studying in America, and Edward L. Ferman, the editor of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction (F&SF). Nkabele, from the tribe of Diolas in Senegal, Africa, was educated by French and Belgian missionaries who he refers to as the Holy Ghost Fathers. One of his teachers, Father Devlin brought three steamer trunks containing over five hundred pulp science fiction magazines from 1936-1952. Nkabele has read these magazines so thoroughly that he’s even memorized some of his favorite stories. Nkabele feels he’s an expert on science fiction and decides to become a rich science fiction writer while in America.
Unfortunately, the stories he submits to Ed Ferman are modeled on the writing styles that were heavily criticized for bad writing when they were new and are now so out of fashion as to be glaringly awful. Ferman is appalled by Nkabele’s stories and rejects them immediately. Nkabele feels the rejection letter is a mistake and keeps pestering Ferman with more letters. In fact, he never accepts any rejection and keeps trying to convince Ferman his stories are brilliant and will make him famous and promises they’ll help sell more copies of F&SF.
Through the exchange of letters, two fun plots emerged. One is a horror tale for SF magazine editors which is hilarious if you’re not an editor, and the other is about how the genre has changed drastically from its past which is still wistfully nostalgic for some.
First, it’s important to know the magazines Nkabele admires. It’s notable that Father Devlin did not subscribe to Astounding Science-Fiction, the magazine revered until recent decades (another irony of this tale). Nkabele’s favorites are:
Amazing Stories
Famous Fantastic Mysteries
Planet Stories
Startling Stories
Super Science Stories
Thrilling Wonder Stories
Nkabele’s favorite writers are Richard Shaver, L. Ron Hubbard, and Stanley G. Weinbaum, but is also a fan of Robert Moore Williams, E. E. “Doc” Smith, Nelson Bond, Ray Cummings, Eric Frank Russell, P. Schuyler Miller, and Raymond Z. Gallum. Although not specific to this story, if you know about The Shaver Mystery you’ll have a sense of the kind of thinking fans of these magazines pursued.
Most telling of all is that Nkabele’s favorite editor is Raymond A. Palmer. That’s quite revealing. Young science fiction writers today want to erase the memory of John W. Campbell, but when I was growing up, science fiction fans wanted to forget Ray Palmer’s impact on the genre.
To understand Nkabele’s taste in science fiction, even more, is to know the names of the three stories he keeps submitting:
“Astrid of the Asteroids”
“Slime Slaves of G’Harn”
“Ursula of Uranus”
The magazines Nkabele loved were the ones that appealed most to adolescents featuring exotic interplanetary adventure stories told in purple prose. The exact kind of science fiction John W. Campbell was fighting against in our Golden Age of Science Fiction. But Nkabele considers his science fiction the actual Golden Age of Science Fiction. Over the decades, different generations have defined their own Golden Age of Science Fiction. Youth always reject the past. Nkabele can’t fathom why Ferman is rejecting his Golden Age.
It helps to know a little about Edward L. Ferman since he’s a major character, but it’s very important to know about Harlan Ellison. Ferman panics and gives Nkabele Ellison’s address and phone number to get rid of him. Ferman tells Nkabele about Ellison’s legendary SF anthology Dangerous Visions. Now Harlan Ellison starts writing letters and Eric Norden parodies Ellison’s writing style in an over-the-top style that wasn’t far from Ellison’s own. They even rope in Isaac Asimov. Norden does a great job of making each letter writer sound like a distinct personality. Sometimes the epistolary caricatures aren’t so flattering and it’s a wonder Norden didn’t get sued by Ellison who was known for his litigious wrath.
It also helps to know about BEMs – Bug Eye Monsters – especially SF covers that showed BEMs running off with mostly naked Earth women. BEMs in SF anticipated the whole abductee theme of UFO fanatics. And Ray Palmer turned his SF magazines into UFO fanaticism.
Parodying science fiction has been around for a long time, and Norden mentions a classic, Venus on a Half Shell by Kilgore Trout. Kilgore Trout is a character in many of Kurt Vonnegut’s novels. But I’ll have more to say about such other fun novels and stories soon.
I’m not sure how many current SF readers will enjoy “The Curse of the Mhondoro Nkabele” by Eric Norden. Is the pop culture that it skewers too oldy moldy? I tend to think the people who will enjoy it most are the people of my tribe.
James Wallace Harris, 7/24/22
I’ve been reading recursive science fiction lately, and one of the most famous recursive science fiction stories is Barry N. Malzberg’s “A Galaxy Called Rome.” Recursive science fiction is science fiction about science fiction. Sometimes this is a story that mentions science fiction, sometimes it’s a story about science fiction writers, their fans, and science fiction conventions, and sometimes it’s in-jokes about the genre, other times recursive science fiction is about the writing of science fiction, and that’s the case with “A Galaxy Called Rome.”
“A Galaxy Called Rome” has been reprinted often you can find it in these anthologies and collections. I read it in the anthology Inside the Funhouse: 17 SF Stories About SF edited by Mike Resnick in 1992. I highly recommend that volume if you can find it, but it was only published once by Avon. Probably the cheapest collection of Malzberg’s stories is The Very Best of Barry N. Malzberg because the Kindle edition is only $4.99. However, Malzberg expanded “A Galaxy Called Rome” into a short novel, Galaxies, and it’s available for $1.99 for the Kindle edition at Amazon.
Malzberg is known for his recursive science fiction, especially since he seems to have experienced a great deal of existential angst over being a science fiction writer. NESFA even came out with a collection of his recursive SF called The Passage of the Light: The Recursive Science Fiction of Barry N. Malzberg.
“A Galaxy Called Rome” is a novelette composed of 14 short chapters. It first appeared in the July 1975 issue of F&SF and has been anthologized a number of times. It is probably Malzberg’s most famous work of short science fiction.
Malzberg expanded the same story into 49 chapters for a 1975 short novel version retitled Galaxies. Malzberg gained attention for a handful of science fiction novels in the first half of the 1970s. He won the John W. Campbell Award for Beyond Apollo but got a fair amount of recognition for Galaxies, The Falling Astronauts, and Herovit’s World. He went on to publish prolifically in and outside of the genre
“A Galaxy Called Rome” and Galaxies are also works of what the literary world calls metafiction – fiction about fiction. I prefer the novelette version of the story because the novelette is my favorite length for science fiction. However, the longer version of the story, Galaxies, lets Malzberg dig deeper into the nature of writing science fiction.
I want to recommend this story, but with carefully considered restrictions. If you read science fiction for escape this story isn’t for you. Well, if you want to know why you read science fiction for escape, then you might want to read it. This story is for people who like to intellectually examine everything and take things apart. This story is for readers who love academic exercises in cleverness. This story is for readers who want to know how magic tricks work.
I alternated reading Galaxies with listening to Red Rising by Pierce Brown. It was an excellent contrast. Red Rising is exactly what most science fiction readers want to read. The story immediately sucks the reader into a fantasy reality. It’s designed for your mind to forget the real world and immerse yourself in a fantasy about Mars. The reader is expected to buy into its make-believe. Galaxies on the other hand constantly remind the reader of our reality while describing how a science fiction writer goes about their business of fooling the reader.
Reading “A Galaxy Called Rome” or Galaxies could ruin your love of science fiction. Or it could make you appreciate escapist literature all the more. I know when I would switch to Red Rising after reading a dozen chapters of Galaxies I felt like that guy in The Matrix, Cypher, who wanted to take the blue pill and enjoy the juicy steak. And that might be a good analogy. Reading Malzberg is like taking the red pill and seeing an ugly reality. It might be philosophically enlightening to know the realness of reality, but it’s still grim and gritty.
This is probably why Malzberg never became a popular sci-fi writer, he was too hung up on reality. Most of the recursive science fiction I read in Inside the Funhouse was big fun. Recursive science fiction comes in many flavors but they can be roughly divided into two kinds. One kind celebrates our addiction, and the other makes you feel like you’re withdrawing from heroin. Reading “A Galaxy Called Rome” is like learning about Santa Claus as a kid, it hurts but makes you feel grown up. Reading Galaxies can feel like the agony of soul searching before deciding on becoming an atheist.
I ended up highlighting almost ten percent of Galaxies when reading the Kindle version. I won’t show all these quotes because that would probably be a copyright violation, but I do want to show enough of them to give people a chance to understand what Malzberg is doing. Malzberg is very open and straightforward with his intentions as stated in this first section.
It’s rather interesting that Malzberg tells us how the idea of the story within a story came to him. Well, the idea for the story he’s going to use to discuss writing. In the course of reading a novel about writing a novel, we will develop a whole story with characters, setting, plot, and conflict. However, we won’t experience that story like we normally do. Imagine being served a meal and instead of enjoying eating it, we put it under scientific analysis.
One thing Malzberg doesn’t do is try to imagine what we readers think while reading all of this. We readers are also part of the process. As I read Galaxies I got the idea that Malzberg both loved and hated science fiction. I got the impression he wanted to be a respected writer of hard SF, but his sense of reality conflicted with the fantasy nature of writing escapist literature.
These early sections are quite seductive, but I must warn anyone considering buying Galaxies that the going will get tough. “A Galaxy Called Rome” is the light fluffy version to read for those who aren’t ready to climb a mountain. Even though Galaxies is only 154 pages long, it’s a Ph.D. dissertation on deconstructing science fiction novel writing.
The story within this novel is about Lena Thomas who is the only living crew member of an FTL spaceship, Skipstone, that carries a cargo of 515 dead people in cryonic suspension. The year is 3902. Like in Heinlein’s novel, The Door Into Summer, rich people with diseases invest their estates and freeze their bodies in the hopes of one day being revived and cured. Those estates pay for the development of interstellar travel. Those dead people will eventually communicate with Lena like the dead in PKD’s Ubik when Lena and the Skipstone get trapped in the black galaxy. This allows Malzberg to explore metaphysical and religious themes in writing a novel. The ship also has robots programmed with human minds that help Malzberg explore other science fictional themes. His story notes get more and more extensive while getting more and more complicated. This also allows Malzberg to show how worldbuilding and plotting are developed as a writer tells their story.
Malzberg uses all this exploration in writing a science fiction novel to also speculate about the future. He imagines our civilization collapsing and being completely forgotten and a new world civilization rising in the following nineteen centuries. Malzberg imagines we’ll face limitations we can’t overcome and wild possibilities that far exceed today’s limitations.
Much of this novel is about being a writer, and specifically a writer of science fiction. You get hints along the way that Malzberg might be jealous of famous literary writers like Cheever and Updike, at other times you might feel his resentment at not being more successful at being a science fiction writer. But Malzberg is confident of his own gifts too.
In some of the actual passages of the novel, the dialog reminds me of Sheckley or Adams, or maybe even PKD, and even then Malzberg keeps making digs at science fiction.
Over time, the conflicts Malzberg provides for Lena’s story become repetitious. He knows he’s padding this novel, and even talks about how writers do pad their novels. The second half of Lena’s story becomes one long dark night of her soul struggling to escape the black galaxy. I have to wonder if such soul searching also plagues Malzberg.
Eventually, you wonder if Malzberg can find an ending to Lena’s story. Chapter after chapter he tortures the poor woman, and we can’t imagine any possible happy ending. Yet, Malzberg gives us a very strange ending that I was quite happy to read. I guess he took pity on us.
Reading Galaxies makes me doubt reading science fiction, but then I’ve doubted my addiction to our genre for decades. As a young person back in the 1960s and 1970s I thought science fiction was a wonderful tool for thinking about all the possibilities of the future, both good and bad. But after living to the year 2022, which was a very futuristic sounding year back in 1965, I know the future is everything we never imagined.
Contrasting Galaxies with Red Rising it’s quite obvious that science fiction’s purpose is escape. And the genius of writing science fiction is creating stories set in fictional worlds that are so compelling we forget this one. By Malzberg intruding into his novel and telling us everything only shows we don’t want the author intruding into our stories. Some philosophers have speculated that God invented our reality and walked away from his creation and that’s a great thing. That knowing God’s intention would ruin his/her/its art. I always felt Heinlein destroyed his career after he started poking his nose into his stories.
“A Galaxy Called Rome” and Galaxies were written as the New Wave in science fiction was fading and postmodernism fiction in the literary world was becoming old hat. It was an impressive experiment of the times, but as far as I know, readers have lost interest in such experiments. The Post Moderns of our times demand wokeness in fiction but not the metafictional kind. If anything, modern SF readers want longer voyages of fictional escape with far greater feats of worldbuilding.
It would be interesting to see someone write a version of Galaxies today that reveals what today’s SF writers go through to entertain their readers in the 2020s.
James Wallace Harris, 7/23/22
Emily St. John Mandel’s Sea of Tranquility is straight-ahead science fiction but it doesn’t feel like a genre novel. Explaining why will be hard. Science fiction has always avoided clear definition and trying to discern the difference between hardcore genre science fiction and literary science fiction might prove equally elusive. For most readers, it doesn’t even matter.
Sea of Tranquility was both entertaining and well-written. I liked it quite a lot. Many readers at Goodreads loved this short novel and gave the story five stars. However, the story was missing something for me. It lacked the intense impact I get from classic genre science fiction I love, even ones not as well told as Sea of Tranquility.
Most modern science fiction aims to be as dashing as Hans Solo but Sea of Tranquility was as mundane as a computer programmer. I considered that a positive but I have to admit the story had a certain blandness even though it dealt with many big science fictional concepts.
I do not want to tell you about those concepts because the way Mandel rolls them out makes it fun to explore the plot clue by clue. If you don’t want to read the novel but want to know a precise summary, Wikipedia has a blow-by-blow overview. However, I do want to tell you enough to want to read it. In the year 2401 Gaspery-Jacques learns about three anomalies in history. In the years 1912 a man named Edwin, in 2020 a woman named Mirella, and in 2203 a woman named Olive had the same bizarre experience that they’ve recorded in various ways in their own times. Historians in the 25th century find those records and decide they might be clues to an amazing hypothesis. Gaspery-Jacques decides he wants to be the person that solves the mystery even though he’s only an uneducated house detective for a hotel in a colony on the Moon. Lucky for Gaspery-Jacques, his sister is a brilliant scientist with connections.
BEWARE – Spoilers Ahead
To get into my discussion of mainstream science fiction versus genre science fiction will require giving away the story. The structure of Sea of Tranquility is much like another mainstream science fiction novel, Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell. Cloud Atlas was far richer and more intense than Sea of Tranquility, more like a genre novel. Both deal with epic concepts, but only Cloud Atlas felt epic in the storytelling. Mandel gives us a much quieter story and that’s often a trait of mainstream science fiction. Its tone is like two other recent mainstream science fiction novels, Klara and the Sun by Kazuo Ishiguro and Machines Like Me by Ian McEwan.
Sea of Tranquility explores the idea that our reality is a simulation. In the 25th century, scientists have a very carefully controlled type of time travel. They theorize the anomalies experienced by Edwin, Mirella, and Olive might be glitches in the simulation software. After five years of training, they send Gaspery-Jacques back to interview each of these people. We don’t know that right away, because Mandel at first tells each of their stories chronologically in time. I’m thinking of reading the book again to see if knowing that they are being interviewed by a time traveler changes how I experience the story. I guessed this might be happening because loose-lips by some reviewers said the book is a time travel novel. It would have been more fun not knowing that.
That’s another difference between mainstream science fiction and genre science fiction. Their stories often begin ordinarily and feel mundane and the science-fictional concepts creep into the tale. Genre science fiction often begins like the opening of a heavy metal concert, while mainstream science fiction begins with a quiet chamber quartet before a cerebral symphony.
Genre science fiction writers love to crank the volume to 11 and keep it there, while mainstream science fiction unfolds gently at volume 4 and politely increases to 6 or 7 at carefully chosen moments. If you compare Hyperion by Dan Simmons to Sea of Tranquility you’ll know what I mean.
Sea of Tranquility is science fiction for PBS Masterpiece. Station Eleven was Mandel’s polar opposite of Mad Max: Fury Road. Even though Sea of Tranquility explores such a deafening concept as the simulation hypothesis it does so in a whisper. A genre novelist writing the same story would have had epic rents in the fabric of reality, killing millions while its heroes save the universe at the last minute. Mandel’s hero eerily validates the hypothesis with a kind of “Ummm, that’s weird.”
Sea of Tranquility is also a pandemic novel about a writer writing a novel about a pandemic just before a pandemic hits. Olive Llewellyn is a novelist who lives on the Moon but tells of her publicity tour on Earth just before a brutal plague spreads across Earth in 2203. I assume Olive’s details and feelings about promoting a book came from Mandel’s own experience. Some of the characters in this novel were in Mandel’s previous novel, The Glass Hotel, and Edwin’s full name is Edwin St. John St. Andrew. Since he shares a middle name with Mandel I have to wonder if he was an ancestor of hers? Now I have to read The Glass Hotel. One of my favorite writers, Larry McMurty liked to recycle characters in other novels.
Finally, I wonder if fans of science fiction by Margaret Atwood, Hilary St. John Mandel, or Kazuo Ishiguro would also be fans of Dan Simmons, Iain M. Banks, and James S. A. Corey? Or vice versa? Let me know how you feel.
James Wallace Harris, 7/4/22
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2024-06-08T23:46:46+00:00
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Remembering the Best Short Science Fiction
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en
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Classics of Science Fiction
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https://classicsofsciencefiction.com/
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I read a 1901 short story the other day, “The Lady Automaton” by E.E. Kellett, that felt up to date regarding AI but Victorian in its setting. I discovered it at the web site Forgotten Futures, where you can read old science fiction online, or download a CD of over four hundred megabytes of public domain fiction.
Since the story is in the public domain, I thought I’d copy it here for y’all to read. It doesn’t use terms like artificial intelligence or robots because they hadn’t been coined yet, but the story does cover those subjects. It even suggests a kind of Turing Test, and like most early AI studies, proposed creating a chess playing program first. Absurdly, the technology proposed to back the idea of artificial intelligence is the phonograph.
This story made me ask a lot of questions, the main one being: “What’s the deal with wanting android women?” In some ways this story reminds me of Shaw’s Pygmalion or My Fair Lady. But that story is about shaping a woman’s behavior. AI girlfriend stories about building women to exact specifications. That should say a lot about the authors of these stories.
There is even an earlier story of this type, “A Wife Manufactured to Order” by Alice W. Fuller, from 1895. I read that in Frankenstein Dreams: A Connoisseur’s Collection of Victorian Science Fiction edited by Michael Sims. Sims says Fuller’s story might be the first to describe robot that looks perfectly human. Of course, creating an artificial woman comes up again in 1927 with Fritz Lang’s Metropolis. And we shouldn’t forget “Helen O’Loy,” a 1938 short story by Lester del Rey about creating the perfect wife.
So, what’s the deal here? I have a theory that all science fictional ideas go way to the dawn of humanity. We know Shaw’s play is based on the Greek myth about Pygmalion who sculpted a statue of a woman who came to life — but I bet the idea wasn’t even new then.
What’s different today is AI girlfriends are becoming closer to reality. What happens when something is no longer myth or fiction?
The Lady Automaton
By E.E. Kellett
From Pearson’s Magazine, June 1901
“YES,” said Arthur, “I feel very much inclined to try it.”
The speaker, Arthur Moore was a man whom I was proud to call my friend. Early in life he had distinguished himself by many wonderful inventions. When a boy he had adorned his bedroom with all sorts of curious mechanical contrivances; pulleys for lifting unheard-of weights; rattraps which, by cunning devices, provided the captured animal with a silent and painless end; locomotives which, when once wound up, would run for a day; and numberless other treasures, which, if hardly useful or even ornamental, had yet the effect of inspiring the housemaid who made the bed with a mortal terror of everything in the room.
As he grew older he lost none of his skill. At the age of fifteen he had successfully emulated most of the feats of Vaucanson; his mechanical ducks gobbled and digested their food so naturally that even the famous scientist, the Rev. Henry Forest, was for a moment taken in. He had been to College, but, after a year of University life, he had wearied of the dull routine, and had begged his father to let him start life on his own account.
His father need have had no fear for the result. Within a year young Moore’s automatic chess player, that had played a draw with Steinitz himself, had attracted the awe-struck attention of the civilised world by the simplicity and daring of its mechanism. The chess player was followed in two years by a whist player, still more simply and boldly conceived; and after that time scarcely a year passed without being signalised by the appearance of new wonders from Moore’s fertile brain and dexterous hand.
His last achievement had been a phonograph so perfectly constructed that people began to think that even Edison must soon begin to look to his laurels, or he would be eclipsed by the rising fame of this young man of thirty.
I had known him since he was a boy; and had kept my acquaintance with him in spite of the ever-widening difference between our paths and our beliefs. I had chosen the medical profession, and was already a fashionable doctor, pretty well known by the public.
It was just after the new phonograph had appeared that I had with Arthur the memorable and unfortunate conversation which I shall regret to the very end of my life.
“Well,” I said, “a new and great success again. You will be one of the greatest benefactors of the century in a few years.”
“Yes,” he answered, for he had no false modesty. “I believe the phonograph is about as perfect as I can make it. Suppose we listen to it now.” He produced the instrument, and I had the pleasure of listening to a speech of Lord Rosebery with the familiar tones and inflections of the great orator reproduced to the life. I could have believed I saw the President before me.
“Wonderful,” I said. ” It is indeed perfect. What a strange and almost uncanny thing it is! We shall soon have to be very careful what we say; for a bird of the air shall carry the voice, and that which hath wings shall tell the matter. Fancy what a preventive of crime a phonograph fastened on every lamp-post would be! It would be a kind of Magic Flute, forcing people to tell the truth whether they would or no. Jones might say, ‘I said this,’ but the phonograph would say ‘You said that.’ Mere human fallible creatures will soon be banished from the witness box; judges and juries will content themselves with taking the evidence of unerring, unlying phonographs.”
“Heaven save us,” Moore replied; ” all of us say many things that will hardly bear repeating; and if they are all to be recorded how dreadful it would be.”
“Yes, you see you are after all but a doubtful benefactor of the human race; it is not everybody, who, like Job, can wish that his words were now written.”
“Nor Job himself at all times,” he answered; “perhaps he would hardly have wished to have recorded the words he used when he cursed his day.”
“In fact,” I said, ” what is a phonograph after all but a tattling old woman, repeating whatever it hears without discrimination or tact?”
“Exactly, he said; “but with this difference; that the phonograph repeats what it hears without alteration or addition, whereas the old woman repeats it just as it suits her.”
At this moment the fatal idea struck me, which now I would give worlds to have forgotten or suppressed before it came to the birth. Alas, we know not the result of our least words.
“Why,” I said, “don’t you try to make a kind of complement of a phonograph?”
“What do you mean?”
“Why, this. Your phonograph only repeats what it hears. Why not make an instrument which should not repeat words, but speak out the suitable answer to them? If, for instance, I were to say to it ‘ Good morning; have you used So-and-so’s Soap? ‘ then why should it not answer ‘ No, I use somebody else’s,’ instead of merely reiterating my words? At present your machine is nothing but an echo; glorious, I grant; a triumph of civilisation; but what an achievement it would be to contrive a sort of anti-phonograph, that should give the appropriate answer to each question I like to put!”
“Why, a thing that could do that would be nothing less than man.”
“Well,” I said, ” what is man but a bundle of sensations — a machine that answers pretty accurately to the questions daily put to it?” For I was, or pretended to be, a full-blown materialist.
“It may be so,” he answered, ” yet it seems to me that he is a very complex machine for all that. He has taken thousands of years to evolve, if what Darwin in says is true; you ask me to make him in at most a year or two.”
“Listen to me,” I said, half in irony, half in earnest. “When you made your whist player, what did you do but calculate on a certain number of actions, all theoretically possible, and arrange that the machine should give the proper answer to them? “
“True.”
“And with your chess player, was it not the same ? “
“Exactly.”
“Well, then, the general principle is granted. Are there not practically infinite varieties of hands at whist? Yet your automaton never made a mistake. Are there not infinite varieties of number? Yet did that puzzle Babbage’s calculating machine?
“You may be right, Phillips,” he said, smiling at my earnestness. ” I will think of it.”
I took my leave, little dreaming that I had set in motion a mighty force which would bring misery to more than a few. Indeed, I completely forgot the whole conversation. It was not till several months later that, happening to meet Moore in the street, I was suddenly startled by hearing the words I have already mentioned.
“Yes, I feel very much inclined to try it.”
“To try what?” I said, completely bewildered.
“Why, the thing we were talkingg of some months ago. Listen. Words are nothing but air-vibrations, are they? “
“Nothing,” I answered.
“Well, then, it follows that words, if put in the proper positions, can generate motion.”
“I follow you; a molecular windmill.”
“Well,” he said, “this is the idea of my machine. Words are spoken into the ear of my automaton. Passing through the ear they enter a machine you would call an antiphonograph, and set in motion various processes which in a very short time produce the words constituting the proper answer.”
“Wonderful,” I said, “if true.”
“Come and see then,” he rejoined, “if you will be so sceptical.”
I followed him to his workshop, and saw a small instrument, in its main external details exactly like a phonograph.”
This,” said Moore, ” is the centre of my automaton. Try it yourself. Ask it a question–anything you like.”
Wondering, I did as he suggested. There was a tube on each side of the instrument, communicating with its centre, which I supposed would form the ” ear ” of the automaton when finished. I was at a loss how to begin the conversation, so called the weather to my aid.
“A very cold day,” I remarked.
A sweet and beautifully modulated feminine voice answered.
“Yes; but hardly so cold as yesterday.” I started, as though I had seen a ghost. Had I not been a doctor, old as I was, I should have precipitately fled. But it takes a good deal to shake the nerves of a physician. In an instant I recovered myself.
“Moore,” I said, ” you can’t play with me. You are ventriloquising.”
He was very indignant. “What do you think of me? ” he said. ” I to go playing the tricks of a strolling mountebank!
“Try it again. I will not open my mouth.”
I tried again, a certain uncanny feeling still possessing me. Oh, for the inventive powers of a Frenchman, in order to begin the conversation naturally!
“That was a fine speech by Mr. Chamberlain yesterday evening.”
“Yes,” the delicate feminine voice again replied; “I didn’t read it all, but the beginning and the end were very good, weren’t they?”
Again the same eerie feeling came over me, followed as before by the conviction that some trickery must be at the bottom of this most unparalleled experience.
I tried yet a third time, determined to watch Moore’s face during the whole operation.
“It looks as if there’ll be war between China and Japan,” I said rather inanely.
“Yes, and I fancy Japan will win,” replied the voice, precisely at the same moment as Moore was saying:
“Two to one on the little ‘un.”
I was convinced by that. No human being ever spoke two sentences precisely at the same instant. Either there was somebody else in the room, or Moore had succeeded, marvellously succeeded. He had made an instrument that could not only imitate the tones of the human voice, but could keep up a conversation as constantly, if not as wittily, as Miss Notable and Mr. Neverout in Swift’s “Polite Conversation.”
“Satisfied, old fellow? ” said Moore, rising from his chair and coming toward me.
“My dear fellow,” I said, “I know you are incapable of deception. But this is extraordinary. I never heard anything like it.”
“No more did I,” he replied with pardonable vanity, “until a week or so ago. I had tried all kinds of devices to make the thing answer sensibly; she would answer, of course, long ago, but I wanted her to behave like a lady, not like a lunatic.”
“So you mean your automaton to be a lady, do you?”
“Yes,” he replied, drawing closer. “And I want her to be a lady that would deceive anyone. Not a thing that can only act when lifted into a chair, or stuck up on a platform; but a creature that will guide herself, answer questions, talk and eat like a rational being — in fact, perform the part of a society lady as well as the best bred of them all.”
“Moore,” I said, “you must be mad.”
“Mad or not, I mean to try it. See here. Here is another automaton that can walk, eat, turn its head, shut its eyes. That is common enough. Here is the brain power, the ‘antiphonograph’ that can speak and hear–indeed, do anything but think. What is wanted but that the two should be combined ?”
“My dear fellow,” I answered, “it is easy to talk like that. I am a materialist, and would grant you more than most; but even in my view the brain is more than a mere machine. A man guides himself; you have to guide this automaton. How are you to get inside her and make her do all these things together at the proper time?
“Take a very simple example; your thing has to be sure to open its mouth when it speaks. How are you to insure that the process which causes it to open its mouth, and the process which causes certain words to be uttered, shall take place simultaneously? Suppose the thing to say, ‘I will sit down,’ how are you to insure that, at the proper moment, she shall go through the proper motions involved in sitting down? Remember, an error of half a second in y our mysterious clockwork may make all the difference between your lady occupying a dignified position in a chair and sprawling ingloriously on the floor.
“Why, think of the actions of but five minutes. She rises from a chair, she avoids the toes of the ladies and gentlemen in the room, she bows to a gentleman, she smiles — more or less hypocritically — at a lady, she makes a bon-mot, she laughs at somebody else’s bon-mots; she even blows her nose. What countless simultaneous processes, not one of which must go wrong!”
Moore heard me through.
“Plausible enough,” he said, when I had finished; ” we shall soon see who is right.”
“Who was it,” he went on, “who lectured so vigorously on the folly of certain women of our time, and talked so largely about their utter inanity? ‘The Society woman of our time,’ you proclaimed, ‘what is she but a doll? Her second-hand opinions, so daintily expressed, would not a parrot speak them as well?’ You meant that for metaphor and eloquence, old fellow, and yet you object to my proving that it is all literal truth.”
“Prove it first,” I said.
“Only give me time,” he answered. “But before you go,” he said, with a sudden impulse, as he saw me nearing the door, “for Heaven’s sake not a word of this until I give you leave.”
“Make your mind easy,” I replied, “a doctor knows how to keep a secret. When your lady goes out of order, send for a bottle of my emulsion, and I’ll engage she’ll trouble you no more.”
During the next few months, I often thought of Moore and his hallucination; the picture of the poor fellow engaged on a hopelessly mad task often rose before my mind. I pitied him greatly. “Another fine brain wasted,” I used to say. “A man that more than rivalled Edison spending the best years of his life over a mad chimera!”
I urged rest, a sea voyage, anything to cure him of his brain-sick folly. But he met me always with one reply: ” Rest then; not before.” Rest in the grave, poor fellow, I thought, as I noted his hectic cheek and staring bones. His fiery soul was fretting his body to decay.
At last, more than a year after our last conversation, amid the heap of letters Iying on my table at breakfast, I came upon one that startled me. It was from Arthur Moore, short, but to the point.
” Success at last; come when you can.”
As soon as my round of visits was finished, I drove to his rooms. Mounting the stairs, I was ushered into the room by the most beautiful girl I had ever seen; a creature with fair hair, bright eyes, and a doll-like childishness of expression.
“Can he have married?” I thought, as I looked at her. ” How is Mr. Moore? ” I said aloud.
“Poorly to-day,” she replied. “He will be here in a minute.”
Where and when had I heard that voice before? I seemed to know it, and yet I could not associate it with anybody. But I had no time to be perplexed, for in two or three seconds Moore appeared, looking ghastly and deathlike in his pallor.
“You are ill,” I said, when the first greeting was over. ” You have been overstraining yourself. You must really rest, or you will kill yourself.”
“Yes, I must,” he replied; ” and I think I shall. It has been toilsome work. But I think it was worth it, don’t you?”
“How should I know? ” I answered. ” I haven’t seen it yet.” ” Yes, you have,” he said, smiling in spite of the pain that he must have been feeling.
I looked around, bewildered. I could see nothing but the same old room, and the strange girl sitting in an easy chair in the corner.
“You are mysterious,” I said.
“Wait a moment,” said Moore. Then, turning to the girl, he spoke a little louder.
“It looks as if there has been war between China and Japan,” he said.
Again those clear, distinct, delicate tones, as the answer came.
“Yes, and I fancy Japan has won.”
I saw it all now. That beautiful, lady-like girl that had ushered me into the room, whom I had taken for his wife, was an automaton! That doll-like expression was due to the fact that she was a doll. I was utterly astounded. Moore sat by, enjoying my bewilderment; for a moment his weakness left him.
“Come here,” he said to the automaton.
The lady arose, after one second of apparent indecision, and approached him.
“Let me introduce to you Dr. Phillips,” he said.
The lady smiled approval. (To this day I have never understood how Moore had managed to produce that smile — that fatal monotonous, fascinating smile.)
“Dr. Phillips, Miss Amelia Brooke.”
The lady bowed, and extended her hand.
“I am most happy to meet one of whom I have so often heard,” she said.
Could it be a reality? I felt more and more staggered. The lady stood perfectly still, her hands clasped before her. This fair creature not of flesh and blood? Impossible!
“You may go,” said Moore.
The thing moved back to her place, and sat down.
” What do you think of her? ” he said aloud.
Before answering, I looked round to see where she was.
“Don’t mind,” he said laughing; ” she can’t hear. I often have that feeling myself. You may discuss her as you please, and she won’t be offended. She has one merit other women haven’t; she is not touchy; but she has a failing the best of them have not ; she can’t blush. On the whole, however, I prefer her.”
” I am still almost incredulous,” I replied; ” indeed, until I have dissected her, and found pulleys instead of a liver, and eccentrics instead of a spleen, I shall hardly believe she isn’t a woman in reality.”
” You can easily do so,” he said. ” Come here, Amelia.’ The creature rose, and came forward. ” Let Dr. Phillips see your arm,” he said. The lady showed me her arm, and turned up her sleeve. It did not need a moments inspection to show me that this was not an arm of flesh and blood. What it actually was made of Moore would not tell me.
“Better than a waxwork figure, isn’t it? ” he said.
“Much better,” I replied. ” Might deceive anyone but a doctor.”
Passing my hand down to her wrist, I noted an exactly-moving pulse. So wonderfully was the human pulse imitated, that I believe anybody but one, like myself, trained to accurate discrimination would have been deluded. I could not refrain from expressing my admiration.
“Yes,” said Moore, ” she will often have her arms bare, and there may be a good deal of hand-pressing and that sort of thing; so that I thought I ought to have everything right.”
“Does her heart beat, too? ” I asked.
“No,” he said; “I wanted the space for other mechanism, so she has to do without a heart altogether. Besides,” he added, smilingly, “I wanted her to be a Society lady.”
“The thing will be worth thousands to you,” I said, when I had finished the examination of the creature’s cutaneous covering. It is uncanny enough, and I can’t say I like it, but it will draw. What a pity Barnum has gone! He would have given you a million pounds for it.”
Moore rose angrily.
“Do you think I will sell my own lifepower for money? ” he cried. ” That thing has cost me at least ten years of my life, and she shall never be exhibited like a twoheaded nightingale, or a creature with its legs growing out of its pockets! She shall walk drawing-rooms like a lady, or I will break her to pieces myself! “
” My dear fellow,” I said, ” you are overexcited and ill. Surely you cannot know what you are saying? “
” I know well enough,” he answered doggedly. ” I have made a lady, you can’t deny it; and a lady she shall be.
“Phillips,” he went on, all the force of his character coming out in his face, “I am determined that she shall be the beauty of the season. She shall eclipse them all! I tell you. What are they but dolls? and she is more than a doll; she is ME. I have breathed into her myself, and she all but lives; she understands and knows! Come, promise me you will not betray me.”
” Of course I will not,” I said; ” but you must give up this mad scheme. Consider, as an automaton she will make you for life; as a lady she will be found out in five minutes, and you will be laughed at. For your own sake pause.”
” Listen,” he said fiercely. ” You call her an automaton. I tell you she is alive. See!”
He called the thing to him.
“Amelia,” he said, ” I have made you, and you are mine. Are you grateful?”
The creature smiled — the one smile she possessed, which she had, as I knew afterwards, for prince or peasant, man or maid.
” I can never forget what I owe you,” she replied.
“Kiss me, then,” he said. The thing bent down and kissed him obediently.
“You see,” he cried, “is that an automaton? Now, will you introduce her to Society as a lady?
“For the present she is perfect. I have taught her French — drawing- room French, I mean — and three songs. She can enter a room, bow, smile, and dance. If, with these accomplishments, she can’t oust the other dolls and turn them green with jealousy for one season, 1 am much surprised. Now, will you help me?”
I tried to enter a feeble protest, but he overbore me. You ask how; I cannot tell. Call it magic — anything you like; but it overbore me. I yielded; I promised my assistance.
We sat like two mischief-making children far into the small hours of the night, plotting how we could carry out the plan best. Moore had enslaved me, body and mind; I was carried away in a kind of drunken enthusiasm and almost as feverishly excited as Moore himself. Nothing would now have stopped me. Would Frankenstein have paused the very hour before his creature took life? As for Moore, I believe he would have gone on with his designs in the very midst of the thunders of the Judgment Day itself.
Why should I linger over the early triumphs of our Phantasm? I was a fashionable doctor; I brought Miss Amelia Brooke out as a niece of mine. The Countess of Lorimer, one of my patients, undertook to pilot her through the first shoals of real life.
Never shall I forget that first evening. Scarcely had she entered the room — it was at Mrs. Vandeleur’s when the eyes of all seemed, as if by magic, to be turned towards her. Exquisitely dressed, with a proud demeanour, with the step of a queen, she swept into the ball-room. She was my niece; I ought to have been proud of her, but I hated her with an intense loathing. Moore could do much with me, but he could not make me like this creature. Yet I was bound in nature to do all I could for her.
“Who is she? ” said young Harry Burton to me. “By Jove, she looks like a born queen.”
“You flatter me,” I replied. “She is my niece. Good Heavens,” I went on to myself, “would that she were a born anything, instead of a made doll!”
“Oh,” rejoined Burton, ” lucky man that you are! Introduce me, will you?”
“With pleasure,” I answered. I took him up and introduced him. During the ceremony I watched the creature carefully. No, there was no doubt about it. Such acting would deceive the Master of the Ceremonies in the Court of Louis XIV. himself. Every motion, every word, was exactly as it should be. How on earth had Moore managed it? I was almost deceived myself. Could this be after all a real creature of flesh and blood, substituted for the Phantasm? No; that detestable, beautiful smile was there — a smile which no woman ever wore, yet which none the less would be the bane of more than one man’s existence.
Harry Burton danced many dances with her that night. When it closed, he was head over ears in love.
“Phillips,” he said in a brief interval, “she is divine.”
“Fiendish, rather,” I thought. “Yes,” I said aloud, ” I think she is good looking.
“Good looking!” he cried. “What are all these painted dolls to her? They have nothing to say for themselves, they are mere bundles of conventionality; but she — she is all soul.”
“My boy,” I said warningly, ” you are evidently all heart. Be careful. Don’t do anything rash. Dance with her, talk to her –do anything but fall in love with her.”
“Who talked of falling in love? ” he said, astonished at my earnestness. ” I said nothing but that she was the finest girl in the room, and so she is, by Jove!”
At this moment a new dance began, and Burton ran off to claim his partner. I remained, absorbed in not very pleasant reflections. Things were getting involved already. Moore had only told me he was making a woman; I had never calculated that he would make a coquette. What would come of it? I sat and watched her as she danced, dancing beautifully but a little mechanically, I thought, saying always the right things, answering questions always in the same way, and wearing at pretty regular intervals the same detestable smile.
If I hated her before, I hated her tenfold now. I would speak to Moore, and put an end to it. A sudden cold — ordered to the South of France — and never let her come back. Good Heavens, this creature never had a cold, never had a headache, never felt out of sorts; yet Moore said he had made a woman.
Slowly the evening dragged to its close-the most wearisome evening I had ever spent. The creature did not seem to tire; one dance or twenty was the same to her. The monotony of it all became at length intolerable to me. At the earliest decent opportunity I took my leave.
Moore had never been a Society man. Even to witness his own triumph he had refused to be drawn out of his retirement. and it was with a feverish eagerness that he waited for the story of her successes from my lips.
“How did it go off? ” he said anxiously, as I made my promised call to tell him.
“As an experiment, very well,” I answered. ” There was no hitch, no failure. The success was only too monotonous. Human beings sometimes put their foot in it; she never. Would to Heaven she might show now and then a little proneness to error!”
“You are queer,” Moore answered. ” Why should you grudge her her victories? “
“Arthur,” I said, ” the joke has gone quite far enough. Put a stop to it. Why go further? Think of the chances of detection — no, think of the far worse chances of success! Can’t you see that the more skilful the deception the more dangerous will its consequences be? Already, more than one young fellow has fallen head over ears in love with her. It is horrible to think of!”
“The fools !” he said, with a rather cynical smile. “That is just the way with young fellows — never looking below the surface, looking only at the face. Why, Phillips, if they are taken in in that way they deserve to be taken in. I shall do nothing.”
So the thing went on, new developments constantly arising. I hasten to the fatal ending.
Among the many deserters from the shrines of other goddesses who thronged to pay their court to this new and strange divinity, two seemed to hold the divided first place in her favour. One was my young friend Harry Burton; the other was handsome, impulsive, universally-liked Dick Calder. These two had been firm friends before, in spite of the fact that they had often flirted with the same girl. But it was impossible for two young fellows to love Amelia and continue to love each other.
To do Amelia justice, she was rigidly impartial between Burton and Calder. For both she had the same silvery tones, for both the same fascinating smile. To both, if they asked the same questions, she returned identically the same answers. To both she sang the same songs, with the crescendo on the same passages, and both, at the conclusion of the songs, received the same languishing, irresistible smile over the right shoulder, which made them her slaves on the spot.
One evening, a curious incident happened. Burton and Calder were as usual basking in the rays of their divinity, when by some mischance Amelia’s brooch fell to the ground. Both the swains stooped to pick it up, but Burton was successful. Delighted at his triumph over his rival he solicited the honour of refastening it. Calder watched him with jealous eyes. Suddenly a clumsy pair of waltzers, not looking where they were going, came hard into Burton. The brooch pin was driven deep into the fair throat of Amelia. Burton started in horror; he began a savage oath, but stopping in time he pulled out the pin. Amelia had not uttered a sound.
Burton, speechless with dismay, was taking out his handkerchief to staunch the blood; a little crowd was gathering round them; when I, suddenly recollecting myself, rushed in. With the speed of lightning I slipped out my handlierchief and tied it round Amelia’s neck.
“Stand back, all of you!” I said in a tone of command. Even Burton and Calder fell back a little. ” My niece is very sensitive,” I said. “The hurt is not great, but it would be as well that she should go home at once.” A terror had possessed me; an overmastering fear of detection held me as in a vice.
“I assure you, uncle, that I am not hurt at all,” said Amelia.
“Come along,” I said sternly.
I hurried her off, finding just time to bid my adieus to my hostess, and to console the dumfounded Burton by saying there was no danger.
We drove, not home, but direct to Moore’s lodgings. Hurriedly we went upstairs. Moore was still up. He seemed surprised to see us.
“What do you want,” he said.
“Fools that we are,” I answered. “Why, we were within a hair’s breadth of detection. The creature can’t bleed.”
“Why, what need has she to bleed?” he said.
“Every need,” I answered. “Doesn’t a girl bleed when a pin is driven a good inch into her throat?”
“What do you mean?”
I explained the circumstances, and how I hoped I had for this once staved off discovery. I had been just in time.
“No,” he said, when I had finished. “I never thought she would need to bleed. Strange that I should have forgotten that. They say that murderers always forget just one thing, just one little thing. But they take pains to get rid of the blood, and I ought to take pains to have it there.”
“Give it up, Moore,” I said.
“Give it up! Never! ” he shouted. “Give it up for a few drops of blood! Rather would I drain my own veins into hers. Rather go out and kill somebody. What did Mephistopheles say? ‘Blood is a peculiar sort of juice.’ But I will make it.”
Miss Brooke was “ill” for a few weeks from “shock to the system.” At the end of that time I saw Moore again. He and the Phantasm were in the room together. He gave me a pin.
“Prick her,” he said. I obeyed, not unwillingly; and to my horror something very like bleeding began. ” Yes,” said Moore! ” I have done it. I have looked up Shakespeare. Do you remember what Shylock says, to prove that a Jew is, after all, a man? ‘ Hath not a Jew eyes? Hath not a Jew hands, organs, dimensions, senses, affections, passions? Fed with the same food! hurt with the same weapons! subject to the same diseases, healed by the same means, warmed and cooled by the same winter and summer, as a Christian is? If you prick us, do we not bleed? If you tickle us, do we not laugh? If you poison us, do we not die? ‘ Now every one of these marks my Amelia has; so I say she is a genuine woman. Why, if you tickle her, she will laugh!”
“No one is likely to tickle her,” I said.
“No; but after our last experience it is well to be prepared for all emergencies.”
In this case, however, I did not make an experiment. Moore’s word was enough. If the creature’s smile was so detestable! what must her laugh be like?
After her time of seclusion, Amelia again appeared in Society, and was again the cynosure of all eyes, chiefly, however, of the four owned by Burton and Calder. These latter had never ceased to make inquiries after her health.
I had often wondered whether Burton had noticed that the scratch of the pin had drawn no blood; but his conduct afterwards set me at ease. If he had seen it he had probably thought that his Venus was too ethereal to bleed even the thinnest celestial ichor.
Though Amelia certainly could not feel, yet there was no doubt that in the future she would bleed if pricked, and I was free from anxiety on that score. But there was one thing which caused me considerable uneasiness. She was a girl of originality — indeed, I venture to think that there has never been a girl quite like her — yet there was a sameness, an artificiality. about her which puzzled and alarmed me. To the same question she always and inevitably returned the same answer. On topics of the day she always had the same opinion, expressed in the same words. My rival, Sir John Bolas, who didn’t like her for some reason or other, used to say that in her company he always felt as if talking to a very well-trained parrot. She uttered her opinions as if they had been learnt verbatim from someone else.
The time drew near for Calder and Burton to declare themselves. I need not say that, closely as I watched the doings of Amelia! I was not present on these auspicious occasions. But I can distinctly assert, nevertheless, from my knowledge of human nature! that the language of Calder, who came second, was almost precisely the same as that of Burton, who had the first chance. Hence it followed, with mathematical certainty, that Amelia’s reply would be the same to both.
Here was a pretty predicament! What I had blamed in her was her unwomanly constancy; but this very constancy had led — as I was sure both a priori and from the happy faces of the two young men — to a display of fickleness unparalleled in the whole history of womankind. Within an hour after accepting Burton the faithless creature accepted Calder in almost identically the same terms. Even the most heartless of coquettes had surely never been guilty of such conduct as this.
All this, however, was for the present merely a plausible conjecture, based upon a more or less certain knowledge of character. To make sure of it, I determined to ask. The result but too sadly confirmed my fears. Burton was almost delirious with joy.
“She is mine,” he said; “and that beast Calder was never in it with her. To think that I should ever have been afraid of a cad like that!”
I congratulated him, as in duty bound, and spent an hour with him, which may have been pleasant to him, but became very tedious to me, so difficult was it to get him off his one eternal topic and induce him to talk like a rational being. At last, however, I managed to effect my escape, and made y way to Calder. He also received me very graciously.
“Old man,” he said, ” I have good news to tell you. Amelia has just consented to be engaged to me!”
“Indeed! ” I replied; ” I am very pleased to hear it. You are a happy man, Dick.”
“Yes!” he said! ” happier than I deserve. But what delights me almost as much as having won her is that she never gave a thought to that fellow Burton. If I had had any sense I must have seen that a girl like her could never be taken in by a wretched fellow like him; but somehow I managed to be jealous of him. Well, that’s all over! thank goodness. I really believe I shall get to like him now I’m sure he can do me no harm.”
And so the young fellow chatted on, cutting me to the heart with almost every sentence that he uttered. What a dreadful awakening I was preparing for him! For of course! the awful truth must be told him, that he and his rival had fallen in love with a sham. It would be an awkward moment for both of us. Should I tell him now, and get it over? On lhe whole I preferred to put it off, and consult Moore first. His fertile brain would suggest a way out of the difficulty. Perhaps he would make a second automaton that would do for one of the rival suitors, while the other kept to Amelia. At any rate! I preferred to get his advice before acting. He had made the Phantasm bleed; might he not get us out of this still more unpleasant position?
I told him of the new complication. To my surprise he made light of it.
“Well?” he said, when I had finished my recital.
“Well?” I replied, “I should think that was enough.”
“Why,” he said, ” I can see nothing wonderful in that. The wonder would be if they hadn’t proposed to her. Women have had offers before now.”
“But you can’t intend to let things go on as they are?” I cried.
“That’s exactly what I do intend,” he answered. “Why should I interfere?”
“But think of it for one moment,” I said. ” Two men in love with the same automaton; two men in the position of accepted lovers at the same moment! Think of even one man in that position! How awful it is–why, it is too dreadful to think of!”
“Then I shan’t think of it,” he answered coolly. “My dear fellow, what is there so strange in it all? Men have been in love with stone-like women before this. Men have given themselves up to heartless and soulless abstractions before this. Anyone who gets my Amelia will get something, at any rate, not a mere doll.”
The plain fact dawned on me that Moore’s extraordinary success had turned his brain. He had put so much of himself into his automaton that he had positively begun to regard her as a real living being, in whose veins flowed his own blood, in whose nostrils was his own breath. Eve was not more truly bone of Adam’s bone than this Amelia was part and parcel of Moore’s life.
There was a mysterious union between them which gave me an uncanny feeling of sorcery. Could it be that by some unholy mealls Moore had succeeded in conveying some portion of his own life to this creature of his brain? I tried to dismiss the thought, for I am a man of science; yet it recurred again and again.
Burton and Calder were engaged to Amelia. It may be easily understood that now and then they came into collision. Sometimes things looked strange to them. Calder once demanded an explanation of his fiancée as to the frequency of Burton’s visits. She gave him an account that satisfied him, and sealed it with a smile and a kiss that made him feel like a villain forever doubting her. People wondered at the confidence with which both the young men asserted that they were the favoured suitors, and admired the daring skill with which Amelia played off one against the other. No one warned the young men; it was none of our business to interfere with them.
In such matters one young man is remarkably similar to another. Their very modes of speech tend to become the same. In asking Amelia to fix the day, need it be wondered at that they used precisely the same terms as have been used by all young rnen from the dav when that nameless suitor of “pretty Jane” promised to buy the ring for his beloved? The result may be easily foreseen. Amelia, by some hidden law of her being, for which not she but perhaps Moore was to blame, could not help fixing the same day for both. Had a third candidate appeared on the scene, she would have fixed the same day for him also.
When I had heard this fatal dénouement, I confess that even Moore’s influence could not keep me from taking a step on my own account. I would not destroy Amelia, much as I hated her for the trouble she had caused me. Something seemed to tell me that her death would be the certain death of Moore, whose life was bound up in hers as closely as the life of Jacob was bound up in that of Benjamin.
By some subtle process, every time danger threatened Amelia, Moore’s spirits seemed to sink; every time she surmounted the danger his spirits rose again. He had put himself into her. I would not destroy her; but I went to Calder and I gave him a pretty plain hint as to the position of affairs between her and Burton. He would not believe me.
“If I thought she was false,” he said, ” I would stab her where she stood, were it at the very altar. But it cannot be. She has pledged herself to me, and mine she is!”
“I know it for a fact,” I answered, ” that she has promised to marry Burton on the 29th of February.”
“The twenty-ninth,” he cried. ” Why, that is my day, the day on which she promised to marry me.”
“Precisely so,” I said. ” What she means to do I don’t know.”
“But I know what I mean to do,” he answered gloomily. ” I will have it out with her.”
“No violence.”
” None at all. Don’t fear me. By Heaven, what a heartless creature. But it can’t be true. You are deceiving me.”
“Too true. But find out for yourself.” I took my leave, and went home. I afterwards ascertained what Calder’s plan was. He made no inquiry from Amelia; he simply went and begged her to put off the day of his marriage a month, from the twenty-ninth of February to the last day of March. She readily agreed. He then went off and bought a sharp Spanish dagger.
The day of the marriage drew near, and nearer. Every preparation was completed. It was to be fashionable. The church was got ready in expectation of a large assemblage of people. At length the eventful morning dawned. I was to give the bride away to Burton, as after the postponement of Calder’s wedding he was the only bridegroom left in the race. We came out and stood before the altar.
As I passed along I noticed two figures in different parts of the building, both familiar to me. They were Moore and Calder. The former was untidy, evidently excited and restless. The latter was scrupulously neat; but he had a strangely determined look on his face. One hand was hidden under the breast of his frock coat.
The service proceeded. Fancy a girl like this being told she was a daughter of Abraham, so long as she was not afraid with any amazement! Certainly a cooler, less perturbed daughter of the patriarch I never saw. She gave the response in a clear, musical voice. They came to the fatal question–” Wilt thou have this man to be thy husband?”
Before she could answer “I will,” there was a sudden confusion; a man rushed forward, drew forth a dagger from his breast and shouting, “You shall not!” stabbed Amelia to the heart — or rather through the left side of her bodice. She fell to the ground, striking her head heavily as she fell against the rail. There was a whirr, a rush. The anti-phonograph was broken. I bent over her, and opened her dress to staunch the wound. Moore had made no provision for her bleeding there. As I drew out the dagger, it was followed by a rush of sawdust.
In the confusion of the strange discovery, no one noticed that a real death was taking place not twenty feet away. As the sexton was clearing out the church, he noticed a man asleep in one of the pews, leaning against a pillar. He went up and touched him; but there was no answer. He shook him; but the man was as heedless as Baal. It was Arthur Moore, and he was dead. He had put his life into his masterpiece; his wonderful toy was broken, and the cord of Moore’s life was broken with it.
And as for me, why, I am no longer a fashionable physician. As I write, there are men about me, who talk of me as a patient.
The End
James Wallace Harris, 6/23/24
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3
| 45
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https://www.theguardian.com/books/booksblog/2018/mar/28/top-10-books-based-in-tangier
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en
|
Top 10 books based in Tangier
|
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2018-03-28T00:00:00
|
From William Burroughs’s Naked Lunch to Paul Bowles’s translations of Moroccan authors, here are the best novels set in the city
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en
|
the Guardian
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https://www.theguardian.com/books/booksblog/2018/mar/28/top-10-books-based-in-tangier
|
Mark Twain. Edith Wharton. Patricia Highsmith. The Beats. At one time or another, these literary figures passed through Tangier, and were inspired by the places they saw and people they met. Then there is the wealth of great writers born there: traveller Ibn Battutah, storyteller Driss ben Hamed Charhadi, writer Mohamed Choukri.
Despite this literary link, finding stories set in Tangier is a difficult feat, particularly ones by Arabic writers. The problem lies in language; in Morocco, which language you decide to write in – Arabic or French – is crucial, and while some work will eventually be translated into English, this is not always the case. There also appears to be fewer women writing about Tangier – my list features an almost exclusively male perspective of the city. There are, in fact, female Moroccan writers: Fatema Mernissi, an Arab Islamic feminist whose most well-known work was Beyond the Veil; Leila Abouzeid, whose novella Year of the Elephant was the first work by a Moroccan woman to be translated from Arabic to English; and Leïla Slimani, a Franco-Moroccan writer who won the Prix Goncourt for her novel Lullaby. Here is my selection of books by authors from Tangier, who passed through, or who even adopted the city as their home.
1. Street of Thieves by Mathias Énard, translated by Charlotte Mandell
A coming-of-age narrative set against the backdrop of the 2011 Arab spring uprisings, Street of Thieves follows young Moroccan narrator Lakhdar after he is expelled from his family home following an indiscretion with his cousin. Resorting to begging and prostitution to survive, his journey takes him across the Straits to the shores of Spain and the streets of Barcelona, where memories of his childhood friend, Bassam – who may have been involved in violence connected to the uprisings – haunt him.
2. Leaving Tangier by Tahar Ben Jelloun, translated by Linda Coverdale
Leaving Tangier follows the story of Azel and his desire to swap the city of his birth for the sparkling lights of Spain, which he often watches in the distance from Cafe Hafa. What unfolds is an account of his misadventures, as he and his sister fail to adapt to their new life in Spain.
3. A Life Full of Holes by Driss ben Hamed Charhadi, recorded and translated by Paul Bowles
A collaboration between an illiterate Moroccan storyteller and American author Paul Bowles in 1964, this unusual novel follows Ahmed from childhood to the beginning of adulthood. The story details Ahmed’s life as he struggles to maintain hope in the face of the Tangier’s grim realities.
4. Let It Come Down by Paul Bowles
It is impossible to write about literary Tangier without mentioning Bowles, one of Tangier’s most famous expats. Let It Come Down is set in the Tangier International Zone, where American Nelson Dyer attempts to start a new life. Taking its name from Macbeth, the novel details Dyer’s misadventures, which lead him down a path of self-destruction.
5. Hope and Other Dangerous Pursuits by Laila Lalami
Lalami’s novel isn’t strictly about Tangier, though the city binds the novel’s characters together. Determined to make it to Spain, several strangers attempt to enter Europe by crossing the Strait of Gibraltar. This is just the prologue however, with the remainder of the book delving into how each character made their way to the lifeboat.
6. Naked Lunch by William Burroughs
Burroughs wrote Naked Lunch while living in the city. The result is a collection of vignettes inspired by the author’s experiences there, the novel follows the adventures of William Lee, a drug addict fleeing arrest.
7. For Bread Alone by Mohamed Choukri, translated by Paul Bowles
Choukri is one of Tangier’s most celebrated authors, and his memoir For Bread Alone charts the story of his family as they trade the Rif mountains for the hard streets of Tangier in pursuit of a better life. Paul Bowles admitted that “although exact, the translation is far from literal”.
8. Whitefly by Abdelilah Hamdouchi, translated by Jonathan Smolin
Detective Laafrit is investigating several bodies that have washed up on the shores of Tangier. Expecting them all to be harraga – a term for those who try to illegally cross the Strait, burning their identification to conceal their past – Laafrit is surprised to find one of the bodies has several gunshot wounds.
9. Si Yussef by Anouar Majid
Tangier-born author Majid’s novella sees university student Lamin have a chance encounter with the elderly Si Yussef in Achab’s Cafe. For the next 12 days, they continue to meet as Si Yussef regales the younger man with stories of his life. It is a work that raises questions of identity, home and how Tangier’s history has been somewhat idealised.
10. The Lemon by Mohammed Mrabet, translated by Paul Bowles
Mrabet was born in Tangier and befriended Bowles, the latter taking it upon himself to translate Mrabet’s oral fiction into written word. Here, Mrabet’s narrative tells about a young boy who runs away from his family home in the Rif mountains. What ensues is an account of his time in Tangier, along with the loss of his childhood innocence.
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wrong_mix_random_publicationDate_00046
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2
| 3
|
https://www.forbes.com/sites/robsalkowitz/2016/01/12/david-bowies-dangerous-visions-sf-touchpoints-for-the-thin-white-duke/
|
en
|
David Bowie's Dangerous Visions: Sci-Fi Touchpoints For The Thin White Duke
|
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"Rob Salkowitz"
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2016-01-12T00:00:00
|
David Bowie influenced and was influenced by some of the most imaginative science fiction of his era.
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en
|
Forbes
|
https://www.forbes.com/sites/robsalkowitz/2016/01/12/david-bowies-dangerous-visions-sf-touchpoints-for-the-thin-white-duke/
|
It’s not exactly a secret that David Bowie was influenced by science fiction. From the very beginning, many of his songs were love letters to visionary authors from Arthur C. Clarke (2001: A Space Oddity… er, Odyssey) to George Orwell (1984’s “Big Brother”) to Robert Heinlein (“The Man Who Sold the World,” or “Moon,” as in Heinlein’s 1951 short story). The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars (1973) was a standalone work of science fiction masquerading as a collection of irresistible pop songs.
But Bowie was more than a fan. I’d argue he was a major figure in the science fiction movement of the 1960s and 70s known as New Wave, which he drew inspiration from and inspired in turn. New Wave attempted to rescue the genre from the clichés of bug eyed monsters and space wars by injecting social relevance, literary style, and lots and lots of sex and drugs. By the time Bowie burst on the scene with “Space Oddity” in 1969, most of the bedrock of the New Wave canon had already appeared in print, with highlights collected in the best-selling anthology Dangerous Visions (1967), edited by Harlan Ellison.
Much of Bowie’s work throughout his career is a dialogue with New Wave SF, refracting it through his own sensibility and bringing the concepts to a mass audience via the medium of rock and roll. As I’ve been listening to the Bowie catalog for the past day, I’m reminded of a few specific connections and patterns of inspiration.
The Jerry Cornelius Novels (Michael Moorcock). Moorcock, the quintessential New Wave author, is better known for his sword and sorcery character Elric, but in 1968, he unleashed the sexually ambiguous secret agent Jerry Cornelius on an unsuspecting public in a novel called The Final Programme. An acid-drenched mashup of James Bond and Doctor Who, the dapper Cornelius hopscotches around space and time foiling plots against reality, assuming new identities and dazzling people with his avant gard aesthetics as he goes. Three further novels followed, each stranger than the next. Jerry Cornelius is less a specific inspiration for Bowie’s work than a template for his entire persona.
The Ticket That Exploded, The Soft Machine and The Nova Mob (William S. Burroughs). The great godfather of the Beat Generation William S. Burroughs wrote several visionary – and barely intelligible – works of science fiction in the early 1960s, including these three that feature a cosmic cops-and-robbers story of Agent Lee and his attempts to stop the Nova Mob’s schemes to control the minds of humanity. When Bowie said he used the “cut-up technique” for doing the lyrics to some of his more surreal songs, he is speaking of the method invented by Burroughs and Bryon Gysin and used in these novels.
Valis, The Divine Invasion and The Transmigration of Timothy Archer. (Philip K. Dick). Philip K. Dick, best known today as the author of The Man in the High Castle and the stories that inspired Blade Runner and Total Recall, wrote this trilogy involving alien invasions, Gnostic Christianity and Nixon-age political paranoia in the mid-70s, when his years of drug use were taking their toll. They were not published until the early 1980s. In the novels, a character called Eric Lampton is based on Bowie, and another, Brent Mini, on his then-producer/collaborator Brian Eno, operating under the assumption that the events depicted in “The Man Who Fell to Earth” were real. According to Bowie’s son Duncan, the admiration between Dick and Bowie was mutual.
Dhalgren (Samuel R. Delaney, 1975). Delaney’s inscrutable novel takes place in Bellona, a mythic Midwestern city cut off from the rest of the world, where gangs of polysexual anarchists, poets and biker gangs have taken over. I find it impossible to listen to Bowie’s “Panic in Detroit” (released in 1973, around the time that Delaney was working on his novel) without thinking of this book. Something tells me The Kid, Dhalgren’s nameless protagonist, looked a lot like Che Guevara.
Canopus in Argos (Doris Lessing, 1979-83). Though perhaps too late to be considered part of the main New Wave movement, this set of five novels by Nobel Prize winning author Doris Lessing stakes out some of the same turf as Dick’s Valis trilogy. Using science fiction themes as a metaphor to explore gender, war, sex, art and power dynamics, all five books – but especially The Marriages Between Zones Three, Four and Five (1979) and The Sirian Experiments (1980) – echo the lyrical concerns of much of Bowie’s work from the same period, the otherworldly electronica of Low, Lodger and Scary Monsters.
Bowie's influence could be felt on more mainstream science fiction as well. His appearances in films of the 80s like Labyrinth and The Hunger, as well as ones he seems to have directly inspired, like 1982's Liquid Sky (about aliens stalking androgynous fashion models in downtown New York) and 1984's The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the 8th Dimension (featuring a rock-star superhero and his glam posse), use his established persona(s) as shorthand for "cool hero/villain." The time-displaced 2005 BBC series Life on Mars (and its sequel Ashes to Ashes) bring together overtones of his science fiction-themed work and his cultural impact on the 1970s and 80s. And, my personal favorite, the hilarious animated sci-fi/adventure series The Venture Bros., which is full of Bowie references and even a couple of cameo appearances.
All of those are homages that reflect the influence Bowie enjoyed once his reputation was established. However it's worth noting that when it came to creating his own art during the phases of his career where he was really kicking down cultural boundaries, Bowie was not afraid to engage with some of the most dense and challenging imaginative fiction of his era.
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FactBench
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3
| 44
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https://sf-encyclopedia.com/entry/new_wave
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en
|
SFE: New Wave
|
https://sf-encyclopedia.com/entry/favicon.ico
|
https://sf-encyclopedia.com/entry/favicon.ico
|
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Welcome to the fourth edition of The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction.
|
en
|
favicon.ico
| null |
New Wave
Entry updated 1 May 2023. Tagged: Theme.
This term, as applied to sf, is borrowed from film criticism, where it was much used in the early 1960s as a translation of the French nouvelle vague to refer to the experimental cinema associated with Jean-Luc Godard (1930- ), François Truffaut (1932-1984) and others. (It was also later applied to music around 1977 as a synonym for Punk.) The term was first used with reference to UK sf writers by P Schuyler Miller in his regular book-review column "The Reference Library" (November 1961 Analog), though in a sense fairly remote from its eventual import (Brian Aldiss and John Brunner were identified as "new wave" but so too were Kenneth Bulmer and E C Tubb). Jim Linwood in "The Fanalytic Eye" (January 1964 Les Spinge #12) used "new wave" to point in general terms to the aspirations of young UK writers and critics like Charles Platt; Avram Davidson reviewed Donald Barthelme's collection Come Back, Dr Caligari (coll 1964) in F&SF (October 1964) and disparaged its avant-garde aspects as belonging "to the New Wave, or New Ripple, or perhaps New Drip, school of short story writing"; Christopher Priest – in "New Wave – Prozines" (March 1965 Zenith-Speculation 8) (see Speculation) – associated the term specifically with the sort of fiction being published in New Worlds, where – as with the French film makers and critics of a decade earlier – a combination of critical advocacy and illustrations of that advocacy through works of art soon made the term descriptive of an actual movement; and Judith Merril in an somewhat perplexed book review (May 1965 F&SF) remarked on William S Burroughs's popularity in "the new wave of avant garde 'fanzine' publishing". The term soon came to be used more by sf proselytizers than by the writers concerned – especially by Judith Merril, now a major advocate, in her anthology England Swings SF (anth 1968; cut vt The Space-Time Journal 1972) and elsewhere.
The kind of story to which the term refers is in fact rather older than the (late-1960s) term, which anyway has never been defined with any precision. The first writers whose work was later subsumed under the New Wave label were British, notably Brian W Aldiss and J G Ballard. These two were publishing stories in New Worlds while it was still under the editorship of John Carnell, but it was not until Michael Moorcock took over with the May/June 1964 issue that the kind of imagistic, highly metaphoric story, inclined more towards Psychology and the Soft Sciences than to Hard SF, that both men wrote (in quite different styles) was given a setting where it seemed at home.
Traditional Genre SF had reached a crisis point in both the UK and the USA by the middle 1960s; too many writers were working with the same few traditional sf themes, and both the style and content of sf were becoming generally overpredictable. Many young writers entering the field came to feel, either instantly, like Thomas M Disch, or after some years' slogging away at conventional commercial sf, like Harlan Ellison and Robert Silverberg, that genre sf had become a straitjacket; though widely supposed to emphasize change and newness, sf had somehow become conservative. Young Turks, of course, conventionally exaggerate the sins of their seniors, but this time they had a real case. It was not as if the market were shrinking; on the contrary, hardcover publishers were more willing than ever to add sf to their lists. There was no reason to suppose that publishers would not be grateful for sf becoming rather more flexible in style and content.
By 1965, then, sf was ripe for change. In fact, many of the so-called sf experiments of the period were not experiments at all, but merely an adoption of narrative strategies, and sometimes ironies, that had long been familiar in the Mainstream novel (see Modernism). Thus Philip José Farmer's "Riders of the Purple Wage" (in Dangerous Visions, anth 1967, ed Harlan Ellison) echoed the manner of the "Aeolus/Cave of the Winds" segment of Ulysses (1922) by James Joyce (1882-1941), while John Brunner's Stand on Zanzibar (1968) homaged the narrative and Infodump techniques used by John Dos Passos (1896-1970) in USA (1930-1936 3vols); both Joyce and Dos Passos are mentioned, along with marihuana and Salvador Dalí (1904-1989), in Avram Davidson's above-cited grumbling "New Wave" review. In the event, some of the sf writers who felt they now had the freedom to experiment, especially Ballard and perhaps (rather later) Moorcock, were to add something new to the protocols of prose fiction generally; the New Wave may have taken from the Mainstream, but it gave something back in return (this is now a truism of Postmodernist criticism, but it was by no means clear at the time), and certainly New-Wave sf did more than any other kind of sf to break down the barriers between sf and mainstream fiction.
Because it was never a formal literary movement – perhaps more a state of mind than anything else – New-Wave writing is difficult to define. Perhaps the fundamental element was the belief that sf could and should be taken seriously as literature. Much of it shared the qualities of the late-1960s counterculture, including an interest in mind-altering Drugs and oriental Religions, a satisfaction in violating Taboos, a marked interest in Sex, a strong involvement in Pop Art and in the Media Landscape generally, and a pessimism about the future that ran strongly counter to genre sf's traditional Optimism, often focused on the likelihood of Disaster caused by Overpopulation and interference with the Ecology, as well as by War, and a general cynicism about the Politics of the US and UK governments (notably the US involvement in Southeast Asia and elsewhere). The element of Dystopia in New-Wave writing was particularly dramatic in the case of John Brunner, much of whose earlier work had been relatively cheerful Space Opera. New-Wave sf often concerned itself with the Near Future; but it often turned inward, too, and one of the buzzwords of the period was Inner Space.
Moorcock's New Worlds published most of the notable figures of the New Wave at one time or another, including the work of several US writers who lived for a time in the UK, such as Samuel R Delany, Disch, James Sallis, John T Sladek and Pamela Zoline. Other US New Worlds contributors often subsumed under the New-Wave label were Ellison, Norman Spinrad and Roger Zelazny; other UK contributors were Barrington J Bayley, M John Harrison, Langdon Jones and Charles Platt, and one would add Christopher Priest, although he was less closely associated with New Worlds.
Despite the various excesses of New Worlds, whose stories sometimes embraced Entropy with a fervour reminiscent of Edgar Allan Poe's "The Masque of the Red Death" (May 1842 Graham's Lady's and Gentleman's Magazine as "The Mask of the Red Death"), there is no doubt that it was influential on sf Publishing generally, and it was not long at all before various US markets were adopting a far less exclusive attitude to what they would or would not publish, a symptom being the appearance of Original-Anthology series like Dangerous Visions, New Dimensions, Orbit and QUARK/, which included a good quota of experimental work – indeed, they demonstrated clearly (though the point hardly needed to be made) that as much US sf as UK had come to be New Wave in style and content.
All this naturally horrified some of sf's more conservative spokesmen, as a glance at sf histories written by David Kyle, Sam Moskowitz and Donald A Wollheim will demonstrate. Wollheim commented, in The Universe Makers (1971), that "the readers and writers that used to dream of galactic futures now got their kicks out of experimental styles of writing, the free discussion of sex, the overthrow of all standards and morals (since, if the world is going to end, what merit had these things?)". It is easy to feel some sympathy with the conservative viewpoint in one respect; with few exceptions the New-Wave writers avoided Hard SF, and it must have seemed to some observers of the scene as if the very thing that most centrally defined sf by its presence – the science (to simplify) – was disappearing.
But in fact the battle was quickly over (though hard sf never quite regained its former position of prominence). The better New-Wave sf writers were soon accepted by sf readers generally, and often found an audience outside sf as well; the bad writers (and it must be said that some were terrible) mostly fell by the wayside. By the 1970s there no longer seemed very much point to the term, although newly prominent figures like Gardner Dozois, Barry N Malzberg, Joanna Russ, James Tiptree Jr and Gene Wolfe clearly wrote in styles or modes that would have been called New Wave only a year or so earlier. Later in the decade all sorts of quite different new writers emerged who had clearly absorbed the positive lessons of the New Wave, along with some of its attitudes, ranging from Michael Bishop and John Varley in the USA to Ian Watson in the UK.
There can be no doubt that during the late 1960s genre sf found new freedoms, while the market showed a greater readiness to accept sophisticated writing. As with all ideological arguments, one uses whatever ammunition comes conveniently to hand, and it suited many friends (and foes) to see the New Wave as a kind of homogeneous, monolithic politico-literary movement. It was never that in the minds of most of its writers, many of whom resented being categorized. Disch commented, in an open letter published in 1978: "I have no opinion of the 'New Wave' in sf, since I don't believe that that was ever a meaningful classification. If you mean to ask – do I feel solidarity with all writers who have ever been lumped together under that heading – certainly I do not."
It was common during the 1970s and 1980s, especially for those (like Disch) who resisted stereotyping, to dismiss the importance of the New Wave, or even to deny that it ever existed. From the perspective of the 1990s and the second edition of this encyclopedia, however, it seemed and still seems fair to say that the New Wave was real and liberating. New-Wave excesses – including its sometimes miasmic gloom – have largely dropped away in subsequent sf, while the New Wave's grasp of the complexities of the world has remained. The 1960s were indeed a maturing period for genre sf; if we see the 1960s as sf's puberty, then we also have an explanation of why some of it, at the time, was so irritating (especially in its tone of voice): most adolescents are. One reason why the particular perspective of the 1990s was useful is that we had, meanwhile, been able to observe yet another New Wave in action: the Cyberpunk movement.
Four of the many Anthologies of New Wave sf are England Swings SF: Stories of Speculative Fiction (anth 1968; vt The Space-Time Journal 1972) edited by Judith Merril, The New SF (anth 1969) edited by Langdon Jones, The New Tomorrows (anth 1971) edited by Norman Spinrad and New Worlds: An Anthology (1983) edited by Michael Moorcock. Also of note are Moorcock's various Best of New Worlds anthologies published from 1965 to 1974. A nonfiction study of the subject is The Entropy Exhibition: Michael Moorcock and the UK "New Wave" (1983) by Colin Greenland. [PN/DRL]
see also: Arts; New Weird; SF Music.
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Again, Dangerous Visions edited by Harlan Ellison
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Again, Dangerous Visions, published in 1972, was the follow up to the successful anthology Dangerous Visions. Each story has an introduction written by Ellison and an afterword written by the author. In some cases, the introduction and afterword are longer than the story itself. In many of the introductions, Ellison tells us a third anthology…
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https://s1.wp.com/i/favicon.ico
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Mania Delight
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https://maniadelight.com/2023/09/07/again-dangerous-visions-edited-by-harlan-ellison/
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Again, Dangerous Visions, published in 1972, was the follow up to the successful anthology Dangerous Visions. Each story has an introduction written by Ellison and an afterword written by the author. In some cases, the introduction and afterword are longer than the story itself.
In many of the introductions, Ellison tells us a third anthology in the series titled The Last Dangerous Visions is going to be published soon, and even shares the names of some of the authors who will appear. Alas, this third volume was never published during his lifetime. I get the impression Ellison wanted to include every prominent science fiction author of the time in these three volumes, but wasn’t able to pull it off since new writers kept coming along. (Ellison’s executor, J. Michael Straczynski, announced plans to publish a slimmed-down version of The Last Dangerous Visions in 2020, but it still hasn’t seen the light of day as of this writing.)
With 46 stories, each with its own introduction and afterword, Again, Dangerous Visions is quite a hefty volume. The stories were written in the late 1960s and early 1970s and certainly show their age, especially in how female characters are treated. Male authors outnumber female authors about 5 to 1. The Dangerous Visions series was meant to showcase stories which couldn’t get published in traditional venues due to shocking content, however, with a few exceptions, these read like normal sci-fi stories you could read anywhere. Maybe they were shocking by 1970s standards?
There’s a lot of big name writers included. Some were big names at the time and others became big names later. I personally rank 17 of these stories as above average, 7 as average, and 22 as below average, but of course, your own rankings will vary. I won’t review all 46 stories, just the ones that stood out to me.
One of the worst stories in the collection is “In the Barn” by Piers Anthony. A man travels to a parallel universe in which human woman are milked like cows. Our “hero” even has non-consensual sex with one of them. Charming.
Another of the worst stories is “And the Sea Like Mirrors” by Gregory Benford. A man and woman are adrift on a life raft surrounded by alien creatures in the water. The man routinely beats the woman for being stupid but he’s supposed to be the hero of the story.
In his introduction to “Bed Sheets are White” by Evelyn Lief, Ellison tells us Lief was a writing student of his. After she wrote a bad story, he threatened to beat her and shove the story up her ass if she wrote another horrible story like it. She left the room crying and immediately wrote this story, which was so good he bought it. Was Ellison trying to be funny by telling us this or does he think threatening writing students is the best way to get them to write better? Ellison looks bad either way.
In Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.’s contribution, Earth is doomed due to pollution, overpopulation, and many extinct species. Swearing is no longer considered bad and everyone does it. The people of Earth fire a rocket full of jizzum into space in order to continue the human race. In this world, children can sue parents for not raising them right. It’s kind of funny, I guess, but it reads like it was written by a twelve-year-old. Definitely one of the subpar stories in this collection.
K. M. O’Donnell’s “Still-Life” focuses on the domestic problems of an astronaut. He has non-consensual sex with his wife and assaults the babysitter, but neither of these acts is portrayed as a bad thing. Overall, an average story.
Another average story, Leonard Tushnet’s “In Re Glover”, at least made me think. The Supreme Court tries to decide if a cryogenically frozen man should be considered alive or dead, but the case is rendered moot when a power outage kills him. I can’t help wondering what would happen if this came up in real life. Should a person in suspended animation be considered legally dead or not?
Ben Bova’s “Zero Gee” is another average story in which an astronaut assigned to go to space with a photographer is looking forward to being the first man to have sex in zero g. However, he first has to deal with a second woman assigned to the mission who might stand in his way. It didn’t end up being as bad as I thought it would be.
“Ching Witch!” by Ross Rocklynne was a fun story. The only man to survive the destruction of Earth travels to the planet Zephyrus where he’s an instant celebrity. He doesn’t tell them Earth has been destroyed, just that Earth doesn’t hold a grudge against them anymore. The teenagers of the planet want to know the latest Earth slang and dances. They ride low gravity brooms for fun. There’s a lot of funny parts. It’s a bit creepy that he’s into teenage girls, though.
“Time Travel for Pedestrians” by Ray Nelson is one of the few stories a traditional outlet wouldn’t have published due to its sex, violence, cussing, and sacrilegious nature. I didn’t think much of it until the end which made me like it. It’s a reincarnation story. The narrator lives several lives. Mary Magdalene expressed the interesting idea that if Jesus wanted a book written about him, he would have written it himself. There’s no need for a book when God can speak directly to us. Those who love a book more than God are able to justify committing all manner of atrocities.
H. H. Hollis is a lawyer and his story “Stoned Counsel” has a science fiction legal setting. The narrator’s opponent is defending a company responsible for pollution. Hallucinogens are used in court to learn the truth. Opposing lawyers share a hallucination full of trippy images. Fascinating.
Bernard Wolfe provided two stories. “Biscuit Position” isn’t a science fiction story at all, but rather literary fiction. In it, a war reporter flirts with a married woman and discusses the Vietnam War at a dinner party. A dog dies a gruesome, drawn-out death which will stick with you for a while. The characters exchange witty repartee throughout, but I thought it was poor taste when the narrator said something witty about the dead dog.
His second story, “The Girl With Rapid Eye Movements”, features a creative writing teacher who has trouble relating to his stoner student who wants to write rock lyrics. Their discussions are reminiscent of the dialog in Philip K. Dick’s Through a Scanner Darkly. It’s really fun. Two characters have the ability to influence each other’s dreams when they sleep in proximity to each other (I think a machine is also involved somehow). The author claims this isn’t a science fiction story even though it clearly is. (What’s realistic about two different people sharing the same dream?) In his afterword, the author bad mouths scientists and science fiction authors for being slaves to capitalism. It seems strange to bad mouth sci-fi in a sci-fi anthology.
I quite liked “Eye of the Beholder” by Burt K. Filer in which a sculptor’s artistic work is used to achieve weightlessness. Art gets turned into science, which is a neat idea.
In “Moth Race” by Richard Hill, people are able to vicariously experience what celebrities eat and drink. They can even experience sex vicariously, but it’s not exactly the same as the real thing. People take pills that keep them happy and also keep them from being prejudiced. Everyone in the world has enough to eat, a sexual partner, and a comfortable life, but not everyone gets to have children. Normal people’s food is not as good as what celebrities get. People compete in a death race for a chance to become a celebrity, but only one man has ever lived through it. A good story.
James Blish (with Judith Ann Lawrence) wrote “Getting Along” which details the erotic adventures of a woman who visits various relatives who turn out to be a vampire, Dr. Frankenstein, Dr. Moreau, a Lovecraftian horror, etc. It’s funny in places.
In his introduction to “The Milk of Paradise” by James Tiptree, Jr., Ellison says he saved the best story for last. (It’s the last story in the collection, however I’m reviewing them out-of-order, saving my favorite stories for the end of my review.) Ellison says Tiptree is the man to beat, a shoo-in for the Hugo Award. (He didn’t know at the time that Tiptree was a pseudonym for female writer Alice Sheldon, which amuses me.) The story itself is about a man raised by aliens who is disgusted by humans. However, he finds going home isn’t what he remembered either. It’s a pretty good story.
The title for Gahan Wilson’s story is a picture of a spot or inkblot. A man discovers a stain in his house that disappears when you stop looking at it, but reappears somewhere else, bigger than it was before. It appears to be two dimensional, but actually has depth. Spooky.
“Chuck Berry, Won’t You Please Come Home” by Ken McCullough has a narrator who keeps bugs as pets. He once walked a wasp around on a thread which started a fad at his school. In the present, he’s feeding a tick he named Chuck Berry from a cadaver which gave him a wink. He gives the tick drugs and it grows big. His writing style reminded me of William S. Burroughs.
I was surprised to find Dean R. Koontz had a story in this collection. It’s titled “A Mouse in the Walls of the Global Village”. In the story, empathy circuits installed in the brain make everyone telepathic, except for a few who are called Stunted. Even in utopia, some unfortunates will fall through the cracks and get discriminated against. It’s really well written.
“Ozymandias” by Terry Carr is another one of the good stories. To protect against grave robbers, cryogenically-frozen people are placed in tombs rigged with traps. Superstitious grave robbers think they need to dance in a certain way to avoid the traps. Great world building.
In “The Funeral” by Kate Wilhelm, 14-year-old Carla has never seen a male before and has no last name. She is considered property of the state. She is a student in a school, assigned to become a teacher. This story has really impressive world building, revealing how things work a little at a time. Creepy. In her afterword, Wilhelm complains that store clerks and soda jerks serve middle-aged people before teenagers who were waiting longer. I hadn’t realized discrimination against teenagers like this was a thing.
Earthlings colonize a planet called New Tahiti in “The Word for World is Forest” by Ursula K. Le Guin. Many animals back on Earth have gone extinct and the colonists are cutting down trees and making animals go extinct on this new planet. Evolution on New Tahiti happened similarly to how it happened on Earth, but the humans died out on this planet. Green monkeys called creechies are the closest thing this planet has to humans. The creechies are used for slave labor and sex. They don’t require sleep because they dream while they’re awake. The story alternates between different points of view: a human in favor of colonization, a creechie, and a human opposed to colonization. Le Guin does a great job of writing from different points of view. The principle conflict, that humans don’t have lumber on Earth, doesn’t make a lot of sense, but I suppose lumber is just a stand in for resources in general. One of the best stories in this collection. Despite Ellison predicting a different story in this collection would get the award, this story won the Hugo Award for Best Novella.
“When it Changed” by Joanna Russ won the Nebula Award for Best Short Story. In the introduction to this story, Ellison admits that he was a male chauvinist in the past, calls out a fellow sci-fi writer for being a chauvinist, and declares “the best writers in sf today are the women.” (Which makes you wonder why he included so few women in this collection.) He also praises the women’s lib movement and declares, “I see more kindness and rationality in the average woman than in the average man.” This surprised me, since nearly every story in Ellison’s collection I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream was quite sexist. Although, to be fair, that was written a few years before this.
Russ’s story takes place on a planet in which all the men died 30 generations ago. The women live in a steam-powered, agricultural, honor-based society in which duels are common. A group of men from Earth arrive and want to reintroduce men to the planet. The narrator feels small for the first time in her life since the men are bigger than her. The men are clearly sexist, but claim sexual equality has been reestablished on Earth. This story has great characterization. I loved this line: “When one culture has the big guns and the other has none, there is a certain predictability about the outcome.” In her afterword, Russ mentions that men get served on airplanes before women. It’s easy to forget how many ways society has progressed over the years.
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https://openlab.citytech.cuny.edu/elliseng2420sp2020/2020/04/19/assignment-lecture-10-on-new-wave-science-fiction/
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Assignment: Lecture 10 on New Wave Science Fiction – ENG2420 E573 Science Fiction, Spring 2020
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2020-04-19T00:00:00
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https://openlab.citytech.cuny.edu/elliseng2420sp2020/2020/04/19/assignment-lecture-10-on-new-wave-science-fiction/
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https://www.blackgate.com/2019/12/21/the-golden-age-of-science-fiction-the-1973-hugo-award-for-best-novella-the-word-for-world-is-forest-by-ursula-k-le-guin/
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The Golden Age of Science Fiction: The 1973 Hugo Award for Best Novella: “The Word for World is Forest,” by Ursula K. Le Guin – Black Gate
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2019-12-21T00:00:00
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https://www.blackgate.com/2019/12/21/the-golden-age-of-science-fiction-the-1973-hugo-award-for-best-novella-the-word-for-world-is-forest-by-ursula-k-le-guin/
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The Word for World Is Forest (Berkley Medallion, 1976). Cover by Richard Powers
The great Ursula K. Le Guin won the Hugo Award for Best Novella in 1973, for “The Word for World is Forest,” which first appeared in Harlan Ellison’s anthology Again, Dangerous Visions. The story had been written several years earlier, and there exists a letter from Le Guin expressing her frustration with the time it took Ellison to get the story into print.
“The Word for World is Forest” has been a somewhat polarizing tale in Le Guin’s oeuvre for a long time. The conventional view seems to me, at this remove, that Le Guin missed the mark with this story: its tone is too shrill, the story is too preachy. It’s “Bad Ursula,” in a common formulation. And that’s been my position for a long time.
Let’s begin with the obvious: I’ve already discussed the 1972 novellas, in my post about Arthur C. Clarke’s Nebula winner, “A Meeting With Medusa.” Here’s what I wrote:
So, did it deserve its Nebula? Well, in many years it would have. But not this year. Because this year there were two magnificent Frederik Pohl novellas: “The Gold at the Starbow’s End” and “The Merchants of Venus,” perhaps his two best stories ever. Add Joe Haldeman’s “Hero,” the first of the stories that became The Forever War. And even then, we haven’t come to the clear-cut best novella of 1972, one of the very greatest SF novellas of all time: “The Fifth Head of Cerberus,” by the late, incomparable, Gene Wolfe.
Does “The Word for World is Forest” stand with “The Fifth Head of Cerberus”? Ummm – no, not even close. I think it’s fair to say that the 1973 awards, both Nebula and Hugo, missed the boat completely. But, eh, that’s happened before. Perhaps not so often so clearly, but there are relatively few SF stories as great as “The Fifth Head of Cerberus.”
The fairer question is, does “The Word for World is Forest” stand up on its own terms?
Covers by Peter Elson (Panther, 1980), Richard Courtney (Berkley, 1981), Christopher Gibbs (SF Masterworks, 2015)
That’s a split decision, in my mind, on this latest rereading. The opening is unpromising. We’re on another world, the New Tahiti Colony, and Colonel Davidson is thinking about the recent arrival of a new batch of “breeding females”; as well as about the news that attempts to grow Earth crops on “Dump Island” are a failure. We gather (over time) that humans are attempting to colonize “New Tahiti,” but also that they are aggressively logging the world, and that they send the wood back to a ruined Earth. I was bothered by the economic implausibility of that last bit, and by the social implausibility (in a future context) of the “batch of breeding females.” This is caricature.
The other main point of view character is one of the world’s natives, called “creechies” by many of the humans. They are fully intelligent (indeed, as we would know anyway from the background to Le Guin’s Hainish stories, they are closely related to humans, and to the many other intelligent species in the “League of Worlds,” or “Ekumen.”) However, due to their small stature, and their low technology lifestyle deep in the forests of their world, they have been classified as animals, which makes the world open to colonization. (It’s possible this classification was originally an honest mistake, but it’s clear that knowledge of the natives’ true intelligent status is now being purposely suppressed by the humans.)
The natives have been enslaved by the humans for logging labor. One of them, Selver, had attacked Davidson after Davidson raped and killed Selver’s wife. Davidson nearly killed Selver, but the one somewhat sympathetic human, Captain Lyubov, intervened. Lyubov has learned the native language (from Selver). But Selver is determined to drive humans from the world.
Covers and inside flap text for the Berkley/Putnam hardcover first edition (1976)
The main action is precipitated by the arrival of a League ship. They quickly discover the intelligence of the natives, and they negotiate an agreement for the humans to free all the slaves, and to cease logging except in a narrow area already essentially ruined for native life. But Davidson defies his orders, and murders some natives, and in retaliation Selver leads an attack on a human encampment. By this time the League ship is gone, and the remaining humans end up repudiating their agreement (on the grounds that Selver’s raid violated the previous truce). Selver becomes regarded as a god (a term with a somewhat different meaning in the native culture), and he leads a further movement to force humans from his world.
The ending is inevitable, and in some ways anticlimactic. I have, however, failed to mention perhaps the best part of the story – the description of the natives’ matriarchal culture, their peaceful ways, their “dreaming.” And, by the end, there is some power in the realization that even with humans gone, Selver’s actions have permanently changed their culture, and likely not in a good way.
Cover by Darrell Gulin (Tor, 2010)
It’s Le Guin, so it’s eminently readable, with some powerful passages and some interesting ideas. But the depiction of Colonel Davidson, and indeed most of the humans, is simply too cartoonish to convince. This would have been a far more powerful story with less grotesque humans, still acting in bad faith, and willful ignorance, and ending up in the same place.
Famously Le Guin intended this as a commentary on US involvement in Vietnam. I think its message here is at once too obvious, and marred by the preachiness and exaggerations of the narrative and characterization. It is also reputedly (and quite plausibly) an influence on James Cameron’s film Avatar.
The story is a very long novella, about 38,000 words by my count. As such it can be classified with several other “short novels” by Le Guin, including her first two “novels,” Rocannon’s World, and Planet of Exile; and, later, The Eye of the Heron. And, indeed, eventually The World for World is Forest was published as a standalone book, in 1976.
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https://classicsofsciencefiction.com/2022/01/
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January 2022 – Classics of Science Fiction
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2022-01-29T14:59:07+00:00
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10 posts published by jameswharris during January 2022
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Classics of Science Fiction
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Why did Alfred Bester write “5,271,009?” Is it merely a wild story, or does Bester have something to say? To rant? Sometimes, when I read old science fiction stories I wonder if science fiction writers weren’t satirizing science fiction and if that’s the case with “5,271,009.”
In the March 1954 issue of F&SF the editors give us a hint with their introduction:
Now, I’m not sure if Boucher and McComas aren’t misleading us, or misreading Bester’s story. I’ve never considered science fiction “pap for paranoids,” or that it’s read by people seeking stories that will free them from their responsibilities. “5,271,009” is one wild ride that begs to be explained.
The editors think the story is Bester’s reply to the critics of science fiction fans. I wonder if Bester isn’t criticizing science fiction too. That it’s a hyperkinetic parody of science fiction. I absolutely crave to hear this story read by a narrator that could do it justice, but the only readers I can imagine reading this story as Bester wrote it are dead. I picture either Robin Williams or Jonathan Winters reading it in their most manic moods.
Alfred Bester was only a part-time science fiction writer. He was also a magazine editor, scriptwriter for radio and television, and scripted comic books. In his introduction below, you can tell Bester has a real life. The over-the-top plot of “5,271,009” reminds me of comic books more than it does science fiction. In the 1950s science fiction was considered crapola-lit for geeky adolescent males, but comic books had even a worse reputation, fit only for the subliterate. Science fiction claimed to teach some science but it was damn little, but comics had no claim to redemption.
Actually, I wonder in “5,271,009” if Alfred Bester isn’t doing something like William Shanter did in the famous “Get a Life” skit on SNL. In the story, Mr. Solon Aquila is described as being two parts Beelzebub, two of Israfel, one of Monte Cristo, one of Cyrano, and mix violently. I believe Mr. Solon Aquila is Bester, Jeffrey Halsyon is either the science fiction genre, or the stand-in for all science fiction fans, or both. Just to give you a taste of Bester’s prose and the sound of Aquila:
Is Aquila just an over-the-top character, or is he a bit more?
This time when I read “5,271,009” I had an introduction by Bester to give me more clues. This copy is from Starlight: The Great Short Fiction of Alfred Bester which reprints a 2-volume collection from 1976.
We learn that “5,271,009” was written on assignment to fictionalize the cover artwork. Bester thought the art was obvious camp, and at first didn’t want to take on the project. He felt the story would have to be mad camp. I’ve been seeing that cover since the 1970s and I’ve never once considered it mad camp. Have you? I love the covers on F&SF, especially the ones from the 1950s. If I had to describe what was happening on the cover, I would say a convict was left to die out in space and given enough air to make it torture. But then, that might be exactly what Bester is making fun of.
Of course, we know what the writer imagines doesn’t have to be what the reader reimagines. The basic setup for “5,271,009” is Jeffrey Halsyon, an artist who has gone insane and has quit painting. Solon Aquila is a collector of Halsyon’s work wants him cured so he’ll return to painting. How that’s achieved is a story that feels like a collaboration by Robert Sheckley, Philip K. Dick, and Douglas Adams. But then, this is 1954, and well before those writers showed us just how far out science fiction could get.
It’s interesting that Solon Aquila takes on the job of curing Jeffrey Halsyon. And doesn’t the name Halsyon sound like halcyon? One definition of halcyon is “Often used to describe an idyllic time in the past that is remembered as better than today.” Another confession, that’s exactly how I look back on old science fiction.
Aquila drugs Halsyon and puts him through a series of hallucinations where Halsyon plays out adolescent fantasies often found in science fiction stories, and the number 5,271,009 shows up again and again in these fantasies. The first is a sex fantasy:
Of course, like stories about three wishes, this fantasy breaks apart when Halsyon is told all the women hate him and consider his duty rape. The next hallucination involves the space adventure pictured on the cover of F&SF. Bester is suggesting that science fiction fans imagine themselves as this kind of hero.
In each fantasy, Judith shows up. She is the fantasy girlfriend of all science fiction fans. After Jeffrey makes his escape he is the vile anti-hero that is blamed for the alien invasion by the Grssh. But at the last minute, Halsyon saves the planet. But that fantasy doesn’t work out either.
His next fantasy is my favorite, one I’ve often entertained in my daydreaming, and the plot of favorite stories. Jeffrey returns to being his 10-year old self but retains his 33-year-old mind.
But damn, this fantasy crashes and burns too. The next fantasy is most unpleasant, where Jeffery is in a time loop, like a bad Groundhog Day. Bester makes allusions to Shakespeare and Dante. Slowly, he’s bringing the story around to a meaningful message.
Next up, is another favorite science fiction fantasy I love to daydream about, being the last man on Earth. By the way, I just read Bester’s story, “They Don’t Make Life Like They Used To” which uses the same fantasy. In both cases, Bester or Mr. Aquila ruins the fantasy.
Finally, Jeffrey Halsyon escapes the fantasies, or so he thinks and confronts Mr. Aquila.
The answer to that question is 5,271,009. Halsyon is not out of the nightmare yet, he still has millions to go.
The ending is very much like the red pill-blue pill of The Matrix. But the choice isn’t between living in reality or living in fantasy. Instead, it’s much like Hindu or Buddhist philosophy. We evolve through many lives of reincarnation. We can grow faster if we live hard lives. Yeah, it’s that old what doesn’t kill us that makes us stronger.
Now, is this just a neat story that Alfred Bester wrote for Boucher and McComas? Or is it Bester telling science fiction, or science fiction fans, “Get a life!” To be more precise to the story, “Grow up!”
James Wallace Harris, 1/24/22
Group Read 27: The Big Book of Science Fiction
Story #77 of 107: “Snow” by John Crowley
We can learn quite a bit about writing from reading “Snow” by John Crowley. It’s a lovely story that most readers admire. Understanding why reveals those writing lessons. You can read/listen to the story here.
The setup is simple. Beautiful blonde Georgie marries a rich man who buys her everything, including a “wasp” that follows her filming 8,000 hours of her life. The film is destined for a funeral memorial, so it’s a rather odd gift. The rich man dies, Georgie becomes rich, marries Charlie for his looks, and eventually dies herself. Charlie loves Georgie, misses her, and after two years of grieving goes to the cemetery to see the films the wasp took. However, things don’t work out like he thought they would.
First, “Snow” zeroes in on everyone’s deep-rooted feelings for departed loved ones. This has nothing to do with science fiction. William Faulkner said in his 1950 Nobel Prize acceptance speech “…problems of the human heart in conflict with itself which alone can make good writing…” is exactly why “Snow” works.
In Kurt Vonnegut’s Rules for Writing, he advises “Be a sadist. No matter how sweet and innocent your leading characters, make awful things happen to them, in order that the reader may see what they are made of.” What really makes “Snow” work as a story is all the ways the “wasp” fails to work with Charlie’s expectations. Or even to what we readers want and expect. But more than that, chasing memories causes Charlie to learn through the slow suffering of aging, desire, and looking backward.
I expected Charlie would go to the cemetery and request to see certain days that he fondly remembered being with Georgie. That’s what he expected too. But the wasp system didn’t work that way. There are two buttons: Access and Reset. The first shows one scene, randomly. Reset shows another random scene. Charlie goes to the caretaker disappointed. He learns the recording technology used by the wasp is at the molecular level so they can squeeze in 8,000 hours of film, but there is no ordering and no time/date stamps. Just momentary glimpses from the past.
Charlie keeps coming back, addicted to those random scenes, learning about himself and Georgie. Eventually, Charlie notices that the memory clips are fading over time, turning snowy. He complains to the director, who tells him an interesting story about being a film archivist in his old job for the movie studios. He tells Charlie that in the oldest film clips, people’s faces looked pinched, cars and streets looked black, and things felt wintery.
Charlie never goes back to the cemetery. The last paragraphs are about what Charlie has learned about human memory. He believes there are two kinds, one that worsens over time, and another that can grow more intense.
Charlie is a character we can root for, we can feel and empathize. That’s another of Vonnegut’s rules. His number one rule is, “Use the time of a total stranger in such a way that he or she will not feel the time was wasted.” My time was not wasted. This is the second time I’ve read this story, and both times I felt a powerful sense of resonance with the John Crowley gives us. It made me think about my own life and wants. The time it took to read it produce worthwhile insights for me. “Snow” made me contemplate the nature of memory, recognizing how much our memories are like the memories collected by the wasp. Yet, what I wouldn’t give for a film library of my life.
Vonnegut also says, “Every character should want something, even if it is only a glass of water.” Charlie wants Georgie, either in real life or in memories. This is something everyone feels, so does that make this story more powerful? More powerful than say a story about someone wanting to save Earth from alien invaders? I think it does. I think the most powerful science fiction stories are the ones that make us think about people. Remember Charlie Gordon? Or Kip Russell?
Another piece of advice from Vonnegut is, “Start as close to the end as possible.” Crowley doesn’t spend any time when Georgie was alive. He gets right to the heart of the story and only spends a bit over six thousand words in storytelling. I think that’s another plus for this story. Short, sweet, and POW! That’s why Bob Shaw’s “Light of Other Days” was so effective.
Finally, and this is the hardest to judge, “Every sentence must do one of two things—reveal character or advance the action,” but I believe Crowley adhered to this advice very well indeed. In the end, Charlie says, “I wanted to go, get out, not look back. I would not stay watching until there was only snow.” One for action, one to tell us all about Charlie.
Main Page of Group Read
James Wallace Harris, 1/23/22
I’ve read over a thousand science fiction short stories in the last three years and I’ve decided I have an anthology problem. This is different from the anthology problem Szymon Szott solved for me in “The SF Anthology Problem – Solved.” No, my current problem is finding anthologies with a higher percentage of great stories to read.
I and other members of our science fiction short story reading group never can find anthologies where we love all the stories. Of course, that’s asking too much from editors but we still crave 24k carat gold anthologies. Even the Gold Standard of science fiction anthologies, volume one of The Science Fiction Hall of Fame had stories I didn’t enjoy (“The Weapon Shop”) and it was created by polling science fiction writers for their all-time favorite stories.
One of our members, Austin Beeman, has a useful website that reviews science fiction anthologies. He has a nifty infographic that measures the percentage of great/good/average/poor/DNF stories. Here’s his chart for The Hugo Winners: Volume One. Austin considers it has a 94% positive rating, but then that’s for a book of all award-winning stories. Austin tends to be generous by including stories he rates Good in that figure. I wouldn’t.
Most science fiction anthologies never get anywhere near that percentage of good and great stories. Why?
I just finished reading The Great SF Stories 25 (1963) edited by Isaac Asimov and Martin H. Greenberg. Even though I enjoyed most of the stories to varying degrees, I thought only 5 of the 13 were worth my time.
And isn’t time the essential yardstick here? I only have so much time for reading. I only have so many years left in life. And the number of books I want to read will take more time than I have left. From a different time perspective, many of these stories are supposed to be the best of one year, and often the anthologies I read are assumed to be the best of all time.
There is the problem that some stories are extremely time-worthy to some members of our group, while other members complain those same stories were a waste of their time. I’m realistic enough to know that no editor can ever satisfy every reader one hundred percent, but I believe there are stories that a good majority of readers will admire. Is it possible for editors to pick more of them?
I’ve known many people who say they don’t read science fiction magazines because they don’t find enough good stories in each issue. And I think that’s true. Magazines have the lowest hit rate. And now that most of the print magazines are bi-monthly, they are fat with stories, but instead of feeling I’m getting my money’s worth, it just makes me hesitant to start reading because I dread all the disappointing stories.
Many old-timers complain that the print magazines aren’t fairly represented at award time or in the best-of-the-year anthologies, but is that actually true? I tend to only read online stories when someone recommends a story, and that makes me avoid the filler stories. But also, if I was a writer, I think I’d prefer to have my stories online so they were easy to be read. I generally only read stories published online when they are anthologized by best-of-the-year volumes, so that makes me think online publishers have a higher hit rate. I don’t know if that’s true.
Original anthologies often do much better than magazines, probably because they pay more. You can tell their hit rate by how many of their stories get anthologized in the best-of-the-year volumes.
For the annual best-of-the-year volumes, our group has found that the success rate depends on the editor. But I also think size matters. Gardner Dozois’ giant yearly anthologies with over thirty stories often had more hits in them than his competitors with fewer pages. But his percentage of hits was probably lower.
To be honest, some of Dozois’ competitors mixed fantasy with science fiction, and for me, that automatically lowers the hit rate. Could the success rate of an anthology depend on the type of story?
Our group is currently reading the gigantic anthology The Big Book of Science Fiction and it has many stories generally loved, as well as many stories generally disliked. We were considering four other giant 21st century SF anthologies that look back on the 20th century but I doubt we’ll vote to read them as a group. Some of our members have promised to read and review them on their own and let us all know.
Again, I think size is a factor. If these giant retrospective volumes had been smaller, they might have forced their editors to be pickier about what they anthologized. I have many giant science fiction anthologies on my shelves, and I’m becoming leery of reading them. I think somewhat smaller retrospective anthologies like The World Turned Upside Down edited by David Drake, Eric Flint, and Jim Baen, and Masterpieces edited by Orson Scott Card are much more solid with hits. I’m more likely to buy that size anthology in the future.
Theme anthologies are a bit different. I’m more forgiving. I still expect good stories, but I don’t expect great stories simply because I’m reading to be entertained by how an idea is used.
Giant anthologies are great for writers because more stories are preserved and given a chance to find readers. Yet, is such noble efforts fair to readers? Few readers want to be slush pile readers.
That suggests another possibility. I do think too many stories are being published each year, but what if it’s a theme distribution issue? Allan Kaster has switched from general best-of-the-year SF anthologies to best-of-the-year theme volumes. The Year’s Top Hard Science Fiction Stories and The Year’s Top Robot and AI Stories might be the solution. This opens up a whole new avenue for editors, and maybe readers.
I guess what I want is retrospective science fiction anthologies aimed at science fiction fans who came of age in the 1960s who don’t like fantasy and who are somewhat nostalgic for 1950s science fiction. However, I am willing to try new things. Rich Horton gave our group a list of stories he liked best among the two decades of stories he reviewed for Locus Magazine. I’d buy them as an anthology, even though many of them were fantasy stories. I don’t entirely live in the past, or focus exclusively on SF. And I hope our group finds more anthologies that cover contemporary SF/F to read. I just wished they weren’t too big and had mostly great stories.
The reality is no anthology is going to be perfect, except for the editor who assembled it. Subjective tastes vary. But as readers, I think we all love it when we can find an anthology that has a high percentage of stories that wow us. And I assume editors love it when they create an anthology that gets praise for having a lot of great stories. Perfect anthologies are impossible, but I think we all hope to find them.
James Wallace Harris, 1/21/22
Isaac Asimov died on April 6, 1992. The Great SF Stories 25 (1963) was published in July 1992 and was the last volume in the series. On the last page Greenberg let us know:
I had assumed all along that Martin H. Greenberg (who died June 25, 2011) had been doing most of the editorial work for The Great SF Stories series, but felt that hunch confirmed when Isaac Asimov’s introductory comments went missing from volumes 24 and 25. I’ve now read volumes 1-18 and 25. I love this series. I read volume 25 out of order because my short story discussion group voted to group read it after Christmas.
This series has always been unique because Asimov and Greenberg were reevaluating the best stories of the year with many decades of hindsight. Here are the stories they picked as the best of 1963 from 1992:
Back in 1964, Judith Merril picked these stories as her favorites for 1963:
For some reason, Merril included “A Rose for Ecclesiastes” in her 10th Annual in 1965.
In 2022 the Classics of Science Fiction Short Stories list remembers 41 titles from 1963 in its database, but here are the stories that got at least two citations. 1963 wasn’t a remarkable year, especially since it takes eight citations to get on the final list. Meaning, only “A Rose for Ecclesiastes” is really remembered today.
After all these years, “A Rose for Ecclesiastes” is the obvious best SF story for 1963, and the one most remembered. Most science fiction fans discover it today in The Science Fiction Hall of Fame v1. “They Don’t Make Life Like They Use To” is another favorite, but it’s mostly forgotten in 2022, as is “New Folks’ Home.” “No Truce With Kings” won the Hugo for short fiction that year but I just don’t think it holds up or is remembered, even though the ideas within it are interesting. The more remembered Poul Anderson story should be “The Man Who Came Early.” The surprise story is “Turn Off the Sky” by Ray Nelson, however, it will probably only appeal to fans of the Beat writers.
I doubt many of these stories will get reprinted in the future. It’s a shame that The Great SF Stories 1-25 (1939-1963) hasn’t stayed in print. They are becoming collector items and can be a bit expensive to collect. Scans were available on the internet, but they’ve been taken down from the obvious places.
Below are my stories notes for the group discussion:
Story 01 of 13 – “Fortress Ship” by Fred Saberhagen
If Magazine (January 1963)
Retitled for collections as “Without a Thought”
1st story in the Berserker series
In not a very auspicious beginning to the Berserker series, “Fortress Ship” introduces us to the idea of alien intelligent robotic spaceships programmed to destroy all life in the galaxy — a doomsday weapon. This story was interesting because it proposed programming a game of checkers with boxes of colored beads and a set of cards for specific moves. The first computer checker game was in 1952. I wonder if Saberhagen knew about computers? The Berserker series is about AI minds, but I don’t know if that concept was known in 1963.
In “Fortress Ship” a Berserker ship the size of New Jersey is destroyed by three small human spaceships. I haven’t read the series, but I bet Saberhagen made it more difficult in later stories. Berserker minds understand human minds and can use our languages. I’ve read on Wikipedia that other alien species also fight the Berserkers. I’d like to read more in this series.
Rating: ***
Story 02 of 13 – “Not in the Literature” by Christopher Anvil
Analog (March 1963)
Anvil imagines a world where people haven’t discovered electricity but are still trying to orbit a satellite. Not sure if the story takes place on an alternative history Earth or on another planet. But at the beginning of the story, the attack of a wasp-like creature called a drill on Alarik Kade suggested another world to me. On first reading, I thought the drill was some kind of assassin’s drone device. Rereading it makes me think it was only some kind of insect. That means it could be an alternate Earth story I suppose, where a wasp is called a drill.
I found the whole beginning of the story odd. It was a kind of slapstick physical comedy. It doesn’t match the tone in the second part of the story.
I assume Asimov and Greenberg liked this one because of the chemical-engineered world that couldn’t conceive of electricity. And that’s a neat idea. Especially trying to imagine how they could build a rocket with telemetry without electricity. On the other hand, the storytelling was disjointed at best.
Rating: ***+
Story 03 of 13 – “The Totally Rich” – John Brunner
Wor
The setup for “The Totally Rich” reminded me slightly of “Vintage Season” or “Sailing to Byzantium” with Brunner imagining a class of rich people who live undetected by us ordinary folks. It reminded me of those classic stories because of the elite vacationers in time, and the elite far future citizens who party at one recreated city after another, are like the elite rich in this story, who can have nearly anything they want.
Derek Cooper is tricked by Naomi, one of the elusive rich in Brunner’s story. She’s had a whole picturesque village built with actors playing all the citizens just to fool Derek into working for her. That’s the power of her wealth. But she wants something impossible, something her money can’t even buy. She hopes Derek, given enough time and money can invent what she needs.
This is a great setup for a science fiction story. I thought it was going to be at least a 4-star story. But then, Brunner doesn’t satisfy my expectations, leaving me with a 3-star story.
I tend to think it would have taken a full novel to play out the idea Brunner began, and he didn’t want to do that. The quick tragic ending just didn’t work for me.
Rating: ***+
Story 04 of 13 – “No Truce With Kings” – Poul Anderson
F&SF (June 1963) (Hugo Award – Best Short Fiction)
I was really looking forward to reading “No Truce With Kings” after enjoying Anderson’s “The Man Who Came Early” so much a couple weeks ago. Plus, Kings had won a Hugo, even though I find it impossible to believe it beat “A Rose for Ecclesiastes.”
Unfortunately, my expectations were misplaced. “No Truce with Kings” is too long, too muddled, and just too damn political. Did Poul Anderson really believe humans were better off living under feudal societies? Did he really want to downsize the government that much?
I thought “No Truce With Kings” was murky because I never could picture the battles, or even know which side to sympathize with. I wanted to side with the aliens, the nation builders, and even the feudalists.
If anything, this story made me feel humans are too stupid to deserve to survive. It glorifies war in the worst ways.
On the other hand, there’s lots of good writing in this story.
Rating: ***
Story 05 of 13 – “New Folks’ Home” – Clifford D. Simak
Analog (July 1963)
“New Folks’ Home” is a lovely little tale that reminds me of WAY STATION, another Simak story about a human serving as a contact on Earth for an alien interstellar community. I identified with Frederick Gray because I’m seventy. It’s interesting that Simak was only 59 when he wrote this story. I guess it was his fantasy for old age.
Rating: ****+
Story 06 of 13 – “The Faces Outside” – Bruce McAllister
If (July 1963)
Odd story about humans kept in a giant aquarium. As I read it I thought it would be a story that would fit in the VanderMeer anthology. Then I noticed that Merril had included it in her 9th Annual, which reinforces that thought. Not my cuppa tea.
Rating: ***
Story 07 of 13 – “Hot Planet” – Hal Clement
Galaxy (August 1963)
“Hot Planet” by Hal Clement reminded me of “Brightside Crossing” by Alan E. Nourse, another hard SF story about surviving on Mercury. Both stories have been invalidated by time and newer science, but both still present good old fashion science fiction adventure.
What was significant about “Hot Planet” was Clement’s use of women scientists.
Rating: ***+
Story 08 of 13 – “The Pain Peddlers” – Robert Silverberg
Galaxy (August 1963) (2nd story from this issue)
Silverberg’s writing in “The Pain Peddlers” is what I consider great hack writing. He’s obviously mastered the technique of writing short stories for the pulp/digest markets. This isn’t a great story, but it’s very readable and competently entertaining, and a solid addition to the magazine, even a worthy entry for an anthology, but to be honest, not one that will be remembered.
Rating: ***+
Story 09 of 13 – “Turn Off the Sky” – Ray Nelson
F&SF (August 1963)
Wikipedia says Nelson was the guy who invented the propeller beany as a symbol for science fiction fans. It also says he gave LSD to Philip K. Dick. The F&SF intro said he was working on a book about beatniks in Chicago. I’d like to read that.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ray_Nelson_(author)
“Turn Off the Sky” was quite an interesting read, especially if it was written four years before it was published. Mainly for the satire on radicals and beatniks. It appears to be pro-capitalist, but I’m not sure. I thought it funny with its quip about arguing over Marx and Robert Heinlein.
The story was readable and fun, but it was more impressive in its dealing with the 1950s subculture, especially, anticipating a lot of stuff that happened in the 1960s counter-culture. It even has a sitar being played years before George Harrison made it famous.
Rating: ****
Story 10 of 13 – “They Don’t Make Life Like They Used To” by Alfred Bester
F&SF (October 1963)
Linda Nielsen thinks she’s the last person on Earth. Like Ralph Burton, played by Harry Belafonte in the 1959 film THE WORLD, THE FLESH, AND THE DEVIL, Linda is fixing up her apartment by taking whatever she wants from a deserted New York City. I mention this movie because it’s a favorite movie and I pictured it as I read “They Don’t Make Life Like They Use To.” I love the last person on Earth stories. My all-time favorite novel is this type is EARTH ABIDES by George R. Stewart.
However, I’ve always thought it would be neat if the last person on Earth was actually the last person, but in these stories, someone else always shows up. In the movie, it was Sarah Crandall, played by Ingar Stevens. Since Bester describes Linda as Nordic, I wondered if he saw the movie with the Nordic Stevens and decided to just start with a blonde. Also, in the last people on Earth stories, the second person is generally of the opposite sex, so the plot develops sexual tension. In a number of these stories, a third person shows up. Usually, it’s two males fighting over one female. Another movie example of this is THE QUIET EARTH (1985).
Bester brings about an interesting twist in the end that finally convinces Jim Mayo and Linda Nielsen to get it on. This satisfies us readers who have been waiting for that action, but it wraps up the story too quickly, at least for me.
Rating: ****+
However, the ending reminds me of another last Adam and Eve story, “Quietus” by Ross Rocklynne. It’s in THE WORLD TURNED UPSIDE DOWN. Read it here:
http://baencd.freedoors.org/…/The…/0743498747__17.htm
Story 11 of 13 – “Bernie the Faust” – William Tenn
Playboy (November 1963)
“Bernie the Faust” captures a certain time and place in New York City that I’ve only learned about indirectly from plays, movies, and books. It reminds me of stories about Seventh Avenue such as I CAN GET IT FOR YOU WHOLESALE, and makes me wonder if Willian Tenn was intentionally trying to create Jewish humor science fiction?
“Bernie the Faust” has a kind of funniness that needs to be acted out in a play or episode of the old TWILIGHT ZONE, or at least heard in an audiobook.
Rating: ***+
My favorite book by Tenn is OF MEN AND MONSTERS, which isn’t humorous. It’s a wonderful adventure tale that if you haven’t read, please don’t read about, not even the blurbs on the book cover. Everyone gives too much away.
Story 12 of 13 – “A Rose for Ecclesiastes” – Roger Zelazny
F&SF (November 1963)
I’ve forgotten how many times I’ve read “A Rose for Ecclesiastes” over the past fifty years. I wish I could find the words to explain how much I admire this tale. This time as I read the story, I was noticing how effective Zelazny was using short and medium-length sentences to convey information but imply a great deal more. My own prose is too verbose. Zelazny isn’t Shakespeare, or even particularly literary, but he moves the story along without wasting words.
Rating: *****
Story 13 of 13 – “If There Were No Benny Cemoli” – Philip K. Dick
Galaxy (December 1963)
As I read this story, I marveled that Philip K. Dick even imagined this story. What a creative mind. Earth has been through an atomic war. Human colonists from Mars have returned to rebuild civilization, but their work is interrupted by another faction of human colonists from Proxima Centauri returning to Earth to rebuild civilization. There is political strife between the two groups. A neat invention in this story is a kind of AI that produces The New York Times. It seems to know everything going on in the world and influences the rebuilding of civilization.
Rating: ****+
James Wallace Harris, 1/20/22
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0
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https://www.pw.org/content/william_s_burroughs_2
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en
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Video: William S. Burroughs
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2014-02-19T10:02:45-05:00
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Fifty years ago Norman Mailer asserted, "William Burroughs is the only American novelist living today who may conceivably be possessed by genius." Acclaimed biographer
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en
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https://www.pw.org/favicon.ico
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Poets & Writers
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https://www.pw.org/content/william_s_burroughs_2
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Find details about every creative writing competition—including poetry contests, short story competitions, essay contests, awards for novels, grants for translators, and more—that we’ve published in the Grants & Awards section of Poets & Writers Magazine during the past year. We carefully review the practices and policies of each contest before including it in the Writing Contests database, the most trusted resource for legitimate writing contests available anywhere.
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Since our founding in 1970, Poets & Writers has served as an information clearinghouse of all matters related to writing. While the range of inquiries has been broad, common themes have emerged over time. Our Top Topics for Writers addresses the most popular and pressing issues, including literary agents, copyright, MFA programs, and self-publishing.
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https://amazingstories.com/2013/08/interview-with-award-winning-editor-ellen-datlow/
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Winning Editor Ellen Datlow
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2013-08-21T14:00:20+00:00
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For more than 30 years, Ellen has edited speculative fiction with a discerning eye, helping to shape the stories and authors we all love to read.
|
en
|
Amazing Stories
|
http://amazingstoriesmag.com/?p=25826
|
Today we are joined by award-winning editor Ellen Datlow. For more than 30 years, Ellen has edited speculative fiction with a discerning eye, helping to shape the stories and authors we all love to read. Her red pen has explored every corner of speculative fiction, including science fiction, fantasy, and especially horror. Over her career she has edited both novels and short fiction but has developed a stronger passion for short fiction. In 1981, Ellen was promoted to Fiction Editor of OMNI Magazine and held that position for seventeen years, until the magazine, which had evolved into a webzine, folded. She subsequently edited Event Horizon with her former OMNI online colleagues, then edited SCIFICTION, and, currently, acquires and edits short fiction for Tor.com. She edited her first of more than fifty anthologies, The First OMNI Book of Science Fiction in 1984 for Zebra books.
The names of authors she has worked with could fill up your library. Her list of awards includes nine World Fantasy Awards, eight Locus Awards, five Hugo Awards, three Bram Stoker Awards, two International Horror Guild Awards, two Shirley Jackson Awards, the Karl Edward Wagner Award, and the Life Achievement Award from the Horror Writers Association. Ellen will be Guest of Honor at the 71st Annual World Science Fiction Convention that will be held in August 2013. When not peering at her inbox for overdue stories, Ellen spends her time running through the shadows of New York, staking vampires and taunting zombies.
R. K. TROUGHTON FOR AMAZING STORIES: Welcome to Amazing Stories, Ellen. Many editors come to the profession as a byproduct of their writing, but you are counted amongst the group that has no desire to write. Before you started editing at OMNI Magazine, you pursued your calling by enduring a challenging climb through difficult work environments. Please share with us how you first started in publishing and what you experienced along the journey to editor at OMNI.
ELLEN DATLOW: Until I got my first job in publishing I really had no idea how the industry worked or what “editing” meant other than picking stories. I applied for my first publishing job by going through the NYC yellow pages, sending out resumes to any publisher (magazine or book) that I’d heard of or that interested me. I was lucky in that my resume happened to land at Little, Brown & Company’s New York office the day the secretary to the New York salesman was promoted to full time “slush reader”. The office was small enough that I could see what everyone did. The woman I replaced as secretary had so much to read, she let me read some of it in my spare time. So that was my first exposure to anything editorial.
After about nine months I was offered a job (through someone at LB who knew of an opening) at Charterhouse as editorial assistant to Carol Rinzler. Unfortunately, even as she hired me I think she was aware that Charterhouse imprint was going to be absorbed by its parent company. But James Wade, a senior editor at the parent company, David McKay, took me on as his assistant. Unfortunately, a few months later the founders/publishers — Kennett and Eleanor Rawson — plus Jim all walked out, leaving me without a job (while in the hospital with pneumonia)
After several other miserable/or non-productive work-experiences in various editorial departments, I got my first magazine job –with Omni, where I started as Associate Fiction editor for Bob Sheckley. When he left, I was promoted by Ben Bova to Fiction Editor.
ASM: Your career at OMNI spanned about nineteen years (1979-1998). During your time at one of the most widely read science/science fiction magazines in the world, you worked with many famous authors. What was it like to work at OMNI, and how did you develop as an editor during your tenure?
ED: I loved working at OMNI. I initially was Associate Fiction Editor under Bob Sheckley from late 1979, for about one and half years. Because neither of us knew the inherent hierarchy of an editorial staff (I doubt that Bob had ever worked in an office before, let alone as an editor.) we worked more as a partnership than we should have. Neither of us knew that the way it usually works is that the editor reads the agented submissions or submissions by already published writers and the assistant (or associate, as I was) generally reads the slush. Instead I read all incoming manuscripts first (or most—once in awhile a friend of Bob’s would hand him a manuscript directly), did all the rejecting, and passed on the works that I liked–deciding with him which stories to buy, and editing most of them. This is the heavy duty period when I learned how to edit on the job.
Bob took a leave of absence over the summer of 1981 in order to write (he’d been blocked, which is why he took the job in the first place) and during those two months I was in charge. When he wanted to take another month off, Ben said no and Bob quit. Ben was hesitant about promoting me because as far as he knew I didn’t have that much experience, but more importantly, I’d be the first non-writer helming the fiction department. Bob and Kathy hired Ben and then Ben hired Bob because their respected names in the sf field would automatically provide an air of respectability to an enterprise funded by Penthouse magazine. However, by 1981, it was clear that OMNI was being embraced by the field (George R. R. Martin’s “The Way of Cross and Dragon” and “Sandkings” both won Hugos in 1980) so I pointed out that having a “big name writer/editor” was no longer necessary. Initially, all my acquisitions had to go through Ben, but that changed shortly before Ben left the magazine in 1981, only several months after I’d been promoted to Fiction Editor.
From the beginning, I went after writers I wanted to publish. I read Roy Torgeson’s Chrysalis series and the Berkley Showcase anthology series, contacting newer writers in them whose work impressed me. I also contacted non-genre writers, some of whom I eventually did publish in OMNI—writers like Joyce Carol Oates, Julio Cortazar, William S. Burroughs, Patricia Highsmith, William Kotzwinkle (pre-ET), and T. Coraghessan Boyle.
As time went on, I became more confident, buying all kinds of stories: sf/f/h and the occasionally story on the edge of genre, feeling that readers would be willing to follow me, even if the occasional story had a minimal fantastic/horrific element; even if they didn’t love every story I published.
ASM: Over your career you have edited more than fifty anthologies by yourself or with co-editors. Why did you begin creating all these anthologies that have brought us so many memorable stories?
ED: I started editing half original/half reprint anthologies while at OMNI, because I wanted to buy and edit more fiction. As time went on I could only buy a few stories a month—sometimes one or two. I tried to avoid a conflict of interest by starting with a vampirism anthology and an anthology about sexuality and gender, using as the reprints favorite stories, or stories that I wanted to buy for OMNI but couldn’t.
But relatively recently, I’ve come to realize that all the sf/f/h stories I read growing up were in anthologies. I never knew sf magazines existed. So I think that editing anthologies was part of my natural evolution as a short story editor.
ASM: Some might suggest that editors develop a voice through the fiction they accept and how they coach their authors. How would you describe your editing style?
ED: My taste is eclectic, my style hands-on. I’m always willing to work with a writer on a story that I think is almost there with some work (which may involve everything from major revisions or merely some tweaking by the writer).
ASM: This year you successfully ventured into the world of Kickstarter with your anthology Fearful Symmetries, which will hit stores in 2014. Please tell us about the inspiration for using Kickstarter to fund your book and what we can look forward to in the anthology?
ED: Non-theme anthologies in any genre have always been a hard-sell. I’ve previously edited three: Salon Fantastique (fantasy, with Terri Windling) (Thunder’s Mouth); The Del Rey Book of Science Fiction and Horror (Del Rey); and Inferno (horror) (Tor). None did well compared to my other themed, original anthologies. So that was its inspiration.
I’ve so far acquired stories by Terry Dowling, Helen Marshall, Brian Evenson, and Pat Cadigan, all of which were solicited. A few of the writers who had committed to writing stories have had to back out (which is why I always solicit about one third more stories than I know I’ll need). I’m currently reading some of the stories from the open reading period. I’m hoping to include a variety of types and tones. I won’t know how it’ll come out until I’m done reading.
ASM: Snow White, Blood Red edited by you and Terri Windling gave birth to the notion of an adult fairytale. You subsequently co-edited five other anthologies in the series. For those who are not familiar with the concept of adult fairytales, please tell us about the sub-genre and what we can find inside Snow White, Blood Red.
ED: The fairy tale as an adult literary form wasn’t a new idea when Terri thought up the first book. Tanith Lee, Angela Carter, Robert Coover, and other writers were retelling the classic tales in the 1970s. Snow White, Blood Red was first published in 1993. In addition, many original fairy tales were not written for children. They were bowdlerized later. So one could say that with our series we returned fairy tales to their roots, while often providing a contemporary take on a very old story. There’s sex and violence and humor and beauty and ugliness and poetry. There are stories and poetry by Tanith Lee, Neil Gaiman, Jane Yolen, Charles deLint, Steve Rasnic Tem, Melanie Tem, Nancy Kress. Patricia McKillip, Gregory Frost, and eleven other authors.
The book has been my most successful anthology by far, rarely being out of print. It’s currently available in hardcover from the B&N proprietary imprint Fall River Press, and will be available as an e-book for the first time this fall.
ASM: Many in the world still have not stumbled upon science fiction, fantasy, or horror. What was your first exposure to speculative fiction, and what hooked you for life?
ED: My mother read me fairy tales as a child, then I read Eleanor Cameron’s Mushroom planet books, superhero and monster comic books (well, actually all comic books). The Odyssey, Bullfinch’s Mythology, and Nathaniel Hawthorne’s stories. Later I read Richard Matheson, Ray Bradbury, and Harlan Ellison (the latter’s anthologies, as well as his short fiction). So I was hooked from the get-go. Even though I’ve read “realistic” novels and stories throughout my life, I much prefer those with an edge of otherworldliness, darkness, or outright science fiction, fantasy/supernatural horror.
ASM: Over your career, you have helped authors sculpt manuscripts into gripping stories. You have read perhaps thousands of tales written by hundreds of authors, witnessing firsthand the very best and the very worst the genre has to offer. You have even spent time instructing writers at the Clarion workshops. For the writers reading this interview, what advice would you give them?
ED: Rewrite before you submit anything, but don’t rewrite too much. At some point you must let go and get your fiction out into the world.
Never throw anything away. You can always cannibalize bits of unsuccessful stories or novels.
You’re not a writer unless you write. By this I mean you must make time for your writing no matter what.
ASM: What advice do you have for aspiring editors that would like to break into the industry and learn the fine art of editing?
ED: Volunteer to read some slush piles to see what’s out there and you’ll quickly discern what’s publishable and what’s not (the finer points of selection are a separate issue).
I don’t believe editing can be taught. It’s an innate ability you may not realize you have, and that ability/skill develops over time as you do more and more of it. Much of it is learned on the job.
But the most important thing to remember is that a story submitted to you is not your story. It is the writer’s. Do not impose your voice or ever dictate what the writer must do. This is one reason that I think it’s trickier to be a writer/editor than an editor.
ASM: You have been in the speculative publishing industry for over thirty years across four decades. How has the industry changed since you accepted your first job with OMNI?
ED: A few things I’ll shall throw out here:
The obvious: The number of book publishers and stores have shrunk but more books are being published. Magazines have folded, webzines have come and gone. Print on demand and desktop publishing have made it far easier and cheaper to publish books but the distribution systems are screwed up so it’s harder to get the books out there into stores. E-readers have changed the way some people think about reading.
Fantasy has surpassed science fiction in the number of titles being published. This may be because The future is here, so perhaps it’s more difficult to speculate about it. Or because “big idea” discoveries in technology and science have slowed down.
In horror, Stephen King opened the doors for horror for a time—taking it out of the mainstream stacks as he, Anne Rice, and Dean Koontz ascended into their own bestsellerdom genre then closed the door again for everyone else. Now a lot of horror is being published by mainstream publishers, not announcing the works as “horror.”
J.K. Rowling opened the door to something called “young adult fiction”, something that always existed but had no specific name and made it into a “thing.” And the publishing world “discovered it” so thus, marketed the hell out of it, which it’s still doing.
And probably a half dozen other things I just haven’t thought of.
ASM: The speculative fiction industry seems to give more acknowledgment to editors than any other type of fiction. The history of science fiction is filled with iconic figures like John W. Campbell and Hugo Gernsback. Some might say that Gernsback gave birth to science fiction, while Campbell gave it life. The influence of editors is frequently understated and occasionally overblown. Which editors would you point towards as being the most influential in the industry, and what impact did they make?
ED: There are many in both the novel and short fiction forms, but I’ll mention only three short story editors:
Michael Moorcock for launching a new era of the British Magazine New Worlds, which heralded a brief but shining moment that encouraged science fiction to be more literary (in a good way) and experimental (sometimes in a bad way); Judith Merril because of her annual Best of the Year, which breezily mixed genre and non-genre (and who I’ve taken as one of my inspirations); Shawna McCarthy, who during her brief two year editorship of Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine shoved the magazine into adulthood, publishing brilliant new writers and powerful, provocative stories.
ASM: As an editor, what things do authors do that inspire you to pull the most hair from your head?
ED: Ignoring instructions/trying to make major changes in their manuscript during the production stages of the publication process.
ASM: For someone who has not read any of your anthologies, where should they start?
ED: That depends on what they’re looking for. Sf/f/h…reprints or new stories, themed anthologies or un-themed.
If they’re interested in checking out what/who is new in horror they might try my Best Horror of the Year. If they’re into fairy tales, they can pick up one of the adult fairy tales series. If they’re interested in young adult fiction they might want to try one of Terri and my mythic series: The Green Man, The Faery Reel, The Coyote Road, or The Beastly Bride. Of Teeth, our anti-sparkly vampire anthology. We’ve also co-edited three middle grade fairy tales books. Off Limits, the follow up to Alien Sex is available as an ebook (both are).
ASM: What can your fans expect to see from you in the future?
ED: The Best Horror of the Year Volume Five is almost out and I’m currently working on The Best Horror of the Year Volume Six for Skyhorse (under its Night Shade imprint).
Early next year Tachyon will publish Lovecraft’s Monsters, a reprint anthology (including one original story) with illustrations by John Coulthart for each Lovecraftian critter in the book.
Chizine will be publishing Fearful Symmetries in 2014. I’ve just finished another reprint anthology, this one on movies –most of the stories exceedingly dark– for Tachyon called The Cutting Room. It’ll be out in early 2015. I’m working on a couple of other horror anthologies which will be out in 2015, I think.
Terri and I have a few ideas for new anthologies and we’re hoping to sell them.
In addition, I’ve recently acquired a Christmas story plus several other stories for Tor.com, all of which will be published next spring.
ASM: Thank you for joining us today. We have long enjoyed your contributions to the industry and eagerly anticipate your next anthology. We look forward to sampling even more of your insights at the 71st Annual WorldCon. Before you go, is there anything else you would like to share with the readers of Amazing Stories?
ED: You’re very welcome-I look forward to seeing everyone at LoneStarCon.
Please take a moment to support Amazing Stories with a one-time or recurring donation via Patreon. We rely on donations to keep the site going, and we need your financial support to continue quality coverage of the science fiction, fantasy, and horror genres as well as supply free stories weekly for your reading pleasure. https://www.patreon.com/amazingstoriesmag
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https://maniadelight.com/2023/09/07/again-dangerous-visions-edited-by-harlan-ellison/
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Again, Dangerous Visions edited by Harlan Ellison
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2023-09-07T00:00:00
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Again, Dangerous Visions, published in 1972, was the follow up to the successful anthology Dangerous Visions. Each story has an introduction written by Ellison and an afterword written by the author. In some cases, the introduction and afterword are longer than the story itself. In many of the introductions, Ellison tells us a third anthology…
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https://s1.wp.com/i/favicon.ico
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Mania Delight
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https://maniadelight.com/2023/09/07/again-dangerous-visions-edited-by-harlan-ellison/
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Again, Dangerous Visions, published in 1972, was the follow up to the successful anthology Dangerous Visions. Each story has an introduction written by Ellison and an afterword written by the author. In some cases, the introduction and afterword are longer than the story itself.
In many of the introductions, Ellison tells us a third anthology in the series titled The Last Dangerous Visions is going to be published soon, and even shares the names of some of the authors who will appear. Alas, this third volume was never published during his lifetime. I get the impression Ellison wanted to include every prominent science fiction author of the time in these three volumes, but wasn’t able to pull it off since new writers kept coming along. (Ellison’s executor, J. Michael Straczynski, announced plans to publish a slimmed-down version of The Last Dangerous Visions in 2020, but it still hasn’t seen the light of day as of this writing.)
With 46 stories, each with its own introduction and afterword, Again, Dangerous Visions is quite a hefty volume. The stories were written in the late 1960s and early 1970s and certainly show their age, especially in how female characters are treated. Male authors outnumber female authors about 5 to 1. The Dangerous Visions series was meant to showcase stories which couldn’t get published in traditional venues due to shocking content, however, with a few exceptions, these read like normal sci-fi stories you could read anywhere. Maybe they were shocking by 1970s standards?
There’s a lot of big name writers included. Some were big names at the time and others became big names later. I personally rank 17 of these stories as above average, 7 as average, and 22 as below average, but of course, your own rankings will vary. I won’t review all 46 stories, just the ones that stood out to me.
One of the worst stories in the collection is “In the Barn” by Piers Anthony. A man travels to a parallel universe in which human woman are milked like cows. Our “hero” even has non-consensual sex with one of them. Charming.
Another of the worst stories is “And the Sea Like Mirrors” by Gregory Benford. A man and woman are adrift on a life raft surrounded by alien creatures in the water. The man routinely beats the woman for being stupid but he’s supposed to be the hero of the story.
In his introduction to “Bed Sheets are White” by Evelyn Lief, Ellison tells us Lief was a writing student of his. After she wrote a bad story, he threatened to beat her and shove the story up her ass if she wrote another horrible story like it. She left the room crying and immediately wrote this story, which was so good he bought it. Was Ellison trying to be funny by telling us this or does he think threatening writing students is the best way to get them to write better? Ellison looks bad either way.
In Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.’s contribution, Earth is doomed due to pollution, overpopulation, and many extinct species. Swearing is no longer considered bad and everyone does it. The people of Earth fire a rocket full of jizzum into space in order to continue the human race. In this world, children can sue parents for not raising them right. It’s kind of funny, I guess, but it reads like it was written by a twelve-year-old. Definitely one of the subpar stories in this collection.
K. M. O’Donnell’s “Still-Life” focuses on the domestic problems of an astronaut. He has non-consensual sex with his wife and assaults the babysitter, but neither of these acts is portrayed as a bad thing. Overall, an average story.
Another average story, Leonard Tushnet’s “In Re Glover”, at least made me think. The Supreme Court tries to decide if a cryogenically frozen man should be considered alive or dead, but the case is rendered moot when a power outage kills him. I can’t help wondering what would happen if this came up in real life. Should a person in suspended animation be considered legally dead or not?
Ben Bova’s “Zero Gee” is another average story in which an astronaut assigned to go to space with a photographer is looking forward to being the first man to have sex in zero g. However, he first has to deal with a second woman assigned to the mission who might stand in his way. It didn’t end up being as bad as I thought it would be.
“Ching Witch!” by Ross Rocklynne was a fun story. The only man to survive the destruction of Earth travels to the planet Zephyrus where he’s an instant celebrity. He doesn’t tell them Earth has been destroyed, just that Earth doesn’t hold a grudge against them anymore. The teenagers of the planet want to know the latest Earth slang and dances. They ride low gravity brooms for fun. There’s a lot of funny parts. It’s a bit creepy that he’s into teenage girls, though.
“Time Travel for Pedestrians” by Ray Nelson is one of the few stories a traditional outlet wouldn’t have published due to its sex, violence, cussing, and sacrilegious nature. I didn’t think much of it until the end which made me like it. It’s a reincarnation story. The narrator lives several lives. Mary Magdalene expressed the interesting idea that if Jesus wanted a book written about him, he would have written it himself. There’s no need for a book when God can speak directly to us. Those who love a book more than God are able to justify committing all manner of atrocities.
H. H. Hollis is a lawyer and his story “Stoned Counsel” has a science fiction legal setting. The narrator’s opponent is defending a company responsible for pollution. Hallucinogens are used in court to learn the truth. Opposing lawyers share a hallucination full of trippy images. Fascinating.
Bernard Wolfe provided two stories. “Biscuit Position” isn’t a science fiction story at all, but rather literary fiction. In it, a war reporter flirts with a married woman and discusses the Vietnam War at a dinner party. A dog dies a gruesome, drawn-out death which will stick with you for a while. The characters exchange witty repartee throughout, but I thought it was poor taste when the narrator said something witty about the dead dog.
His second story, “The Girl With Rapid Eye Movements”, features a creative writing teacher who has trouble relating to his stoner student who wants to write rock lyrics. Their discussions are reminiscent of the dialog in Philip K. Dick’s Through a Scanner Darkly. It’s really fun. Two characters have the ability to influence each other’s dreams when they sleep in proximity to each other (I think a machine is also involved somehow). The author claims this isn’t a science fiction story even though it clearly is. (What’s realistic about two different people sharing the same dream?) In his afterword, the author bad mouths scientists and science fiction authors for being slaves to capitalism. It seems strange to bad mouth sci-fi in a sci-fi anthology.
I quite liked “Eye of the Beholder” by Burt K. Filer in which a sculptor’s artistic work is used to achieve weightlessness. Art gets turned into science, which is a neat idea.
In “Moth Race” by Richard Hill, people are able to vicariously experience what celebrities eat and drink. They can even experience sex vicariously, but it’s not exactly the same as the real thing. People take pills that keep them happy and also keep them from being prejudiced. Everyone in the world has enough to eat, a sexual partner, and a comfortable life, but not everyone gets to have children. Normal people’s food is not as good as what celebrities get. People compete in a death race for a chance to become a celebrity, but only one man has ever lived through it. A good story.
James Blish (with Judith Ann Lawrence) wrote “Getting Along” which details the erotic adventures of a woman who visits various relatives who turn out to be a vampire, Dr. Frankenstein, Dr. Moreau, a Lovecraftian horror, etc. It’s funny in places.
In his introduction to “The Milk of Paradise” by James Tiptree, Jr., Ellison says he saved the best story for last. (It’s the last story in the collection, however I’m reviewing them out-of-order, saving my favorite stories for the end of my review.) Ellison says Tiptree is the man to beat, a shoo-in for the Hugo Award. (He didn’t know at the time that Tiptree was a pseudonym for female writer Alice Sheldon, which amuses me.) The story itself is about a man raised by aliens who is disgusted by humans. However, he finds going home isn’t what he remembered either. It’s a pretty good story.
The title for Gahan Wilson’s story is a picture of a spot or inkblot. A man discovers a stain in his house that disappears when you stop looking at it, but reappears somewhere else, bigger than it was before. It appears to be two dimensional, but actually has depth. Spooky.
“Chuck Berry, Won’t You Please Come Home” by Ken McCullough has a narrator who keeps bugs as pets. He once walked a wasp around on a thread which started a fad at his school. In the present, he’s feeding a tick he named Chuck Berry from a cadaver which gave him a wink. He gives the tick drugs and it grows big. His writing style reminded me of William S. Burroughs.
I was surprised to find Dean R. Koontz had a story in this collection. It’s titled “A Mouse in the Walls of the Global Village”. In the story, empathy circuits installed in the brain make everyone telepathic, except for a few who are called Stunted. Even in utopia, some unfortunates will fall through the cracks and get discriminated against. It’s really well written.
“Ozymandias” by Terry Carr is another one of the good stories. To protect against grave robbers, cryogenically-frozen people are placed in tombs rigged with traps. Superstitious grave robbers think they need to dance in a certain way to avoid the traps. Great world building.
In “The Funeral” by Kate Wilhelm, 14-year-old Carla has never seen a male before and has no last name. She is considered property of the state. She is a student in a school, assigned to become a teacher. This story has really impressive world building, revealing how things work a little at a time. Creepy. In her afterword, Wilhelm complains that store clerks and soda jerks serve middle-aged people before teenagers who were waiting longer. I hadn’t realized discrimination against teenagers like this was a thing.
Earthlings colonize a planet called New Tahiti in “The Word for World is Forest” by Ursula K. Le Guin. Many animals back on Earth have gone extinct and the colonists are cutting down trees and making animals go extinct on this new planet. Evolution on New Tahiti happened similarly to how it happened on Earth, but the humans died out on this planet. Green monkeys called creechies are the closest thing this planet has to humans. The creechies are used for slave labor and sex. They don’t require sleep because they dream while they’re awake. The story alternates between different points of view: a human in favor of colonization, a creechie, and a human opposed to colonization. Le Guin does a great job of writing from different points of view. The principle conflict, that humans don’t have lumber on Earth, doesn’t make a lot of sense, but I suppose lumber is just a stand in for resources in general. One of the best stories in this collection. Despite Ellison predicting a different story in this collection would get the award, this story won the Hugo Award for Best Novella.
“When it Changed” by Joanna Russ won the Nebula Award for Best Short Story. In the introduction to this story, Ellison admits that he was a male chauvinist in the past, calls out a fellow sci-fi writer for being a chauvinist, and declares “the best writers in sf today are the women.” (Which makes you wonder why he included so few women in this collection.) He also praises the women’s lib movement and declares, “I see more kindness and rationality in the average woman than in the average man.” This surprised me, since nearly every story in Ellison’s collection I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream was quite sexist. Although, to be fair, that was written a few years before this.
Russ’s story takes place on a planet in which all the men died 30 generations ago. The women live in a steam-powered, agricultural, honor-based society in which duels are common. A group of men from Earth arrive and want to reintroduce men to the planet. The narrator feels small for the first time in her life since the men are bigger than her. The men are clearly sexist, but claim sexual equality has been reestablished on Earth. This story has great characterization. I loved this line: “When one culture has the big guns and the other has none, there is a certain predictability about the outcome.” In her afterword, Russ mentions that men get served on airplanes before women. It’s easy to forget how many ways society has progressed over the years.
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The PorPor Books Blog: SF and Fantasy Books 1968 - 1988
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A blog about science fiction, fantasy, and horror fiction books published during 1968 to 1988
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http://theporporbooksblog.blogspot.com/favicon.ico
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http://theporporbooksblog.blogspot.com/2011/02/
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Killraven: 'Amazing Adventures' No. 35
(March 1976)
'Amazing Adventures featuring War of the Worlds' from March 1976 was actually on the stands in January / February 1976. This issue relates the tale of 'The 24-Hour Man', written by Don McGregor, with layouts by Craig Russell, and art by Keith Giffin and Jack Abel.
'24-Hour Man' starts with Killraven and his team approaching the outskirts of Atlanta, where they come upon a distraught woman and a monster named 'G'Rath'. This plot only gets stranger as the story goes on, and I can't make up my mind if it has an innate cornball brilliance, or is just a half-hearted effort by McGregor to get something out the door Such was the nature of many Marvel comics from the mid-70s.
.
This issue contains one of the more bizarre marketing ploys yet delivered by Stan Lee: a record album titled 'Reflections of a Rock Super Hero' (!?).
This ad lists some truly cheesy song titles, all dealing with various aspects of Spider-Man's life and loves.
I have never listened to any of these songs, but a remastered version of the album is available as a CD and is reviewed at amazon.com. There are sample clips from each track available there was well, for those adventurous souls who are truly earnest about exploring the most wretched of 70s excesses...
Book Review: 'Under A Calculating Star' by John Morressy
2 / 5 Stars
Kian Jorry is an adventurer and part-time con man who travels the galaxy in search of the next hustle, or the next rumor of riches and treasure. Jorry is handsome, charming, smart, and always one step ahead of the Federation authorities.
Axxal is a member of the Galaxy’s laborer class, a race of humanoids called the Quespodons. Like most Quespodons, Axxal is slow and plodding, a follower rather than a leader, content to let others think of the big picture.
Jorry has chosen Axxal and a handpicked team of the most ruthless and cunning desperados in the Federation to join him in finding the treasure rumored to lie on the deserted planet Boroq-Thaddoi. Within a Citadel of otherworldly construction, so the legends say, is a storage room filled with riches from all over the Galaxy, riches enough to make each man wealthy beyond measure. But many have tried to find the treasure of Boroq-Thaddoi, and few have returned, and those that did return were empty-handed and their addled brains filled with stories of deadly traps, bloodthirsty monsters, and perils unknown…
‘Under A Calculating Star’ was first published in 1975; this Popular Library paperback was issued in 1978. The cover artist is Paul Alexander.
The first 70 pages of the book are well-written and engrossing, as Jorry and his team of adventurers make their way to Boroq-Thaddoi and endure all manner of dangers in their quest to recover the riches in the Citadel.
Unfortunately, after those opening 70 pages the plot loses steam, preoccupying itself with a series of encounters between a scheming Jorry and a dim-witted planetary despot. Another plot thread deals with Axxal and his growing awareness that maybe the Quespodons aren't the dumb laborers that everyone thinks they are. The author intended this segment of the novel as a thoughtful exposition on Axxal's voyage of self-discovery and seeing into the true nature of things....I think.
But for a Space Opera, such a loss of momentum is fatal, and in the case of ‘Calculating’ it negates the initial adventures on Boroq-Thaddoi and renders the novel as a whole a boring read. I had to force myself to finish the book. This one is best passed by.
Book Review: 'Darkover Landfall' by Marion Zimmer Bradley
3 / 5 Stars
While I was growing up in the 70s I never paid much attention to the ‘Darkover’ SF novels by Marion Zimmer Bradley.
When I did try and read one of her books, it was 1982’s Arthurian treatment ‘The Mists of Avalon’, which was so remarkably boring that I decided to never again try a Bradley novel.
The passage of time mellows sworn vows, however, so I decided that since I’m looking over a lot of the DAW books from the 70s, I might as well give a ‘Darkover’ entry a try.
Starting with ‘The Planet Savers’ in 1958, to her death in 1999, Bradley produced nearly 40 Darkover novels, some in collaboration with other writers, and some released posthumously. ‘Darkover Landfall’ (DAW Books No. 36, December 1972, cover art by Jack Gaughan, 160 pp.) is technically the first volume in the series, as it describes the advent of humans to the planet Darkover.
The story opens with a spaceship – originally destined for the colony world of Coronis - crash-landed on Darkover; many of the crew have perished in the impact, and the dazed survivors are struggling to erect tents and procure food and water while their vehicle is evaluated for repairs.
Fortunately the atmosphere and chemistry of Darover is compatible with human biology, but the ship’s captain has no idea as to where in the galaxy their emergency landing site is located. Rafael MacAran, the ship’s geologist, is recruited to journey to a nearby mountain to erect instruments capable of analyzing the night-time constellations and other planetary data.
The weather on Darkover is tumultuous, changing from sunshine, to rain, to sleet, and snow, all in the course of a day. Luckily the ship’s crew includes a group of colonists of Scottish descent, whose ancestors lived in the Hebrides and the Orkney Islands. Accustomed to perpetual rain, sleet, snow, overcast skies, and other manifestations of wretched weather, these stalwarts cope by drinking whiskey, dancing, and singing Ballads from the Olde Country.
However, just as the crash survivors are starting to assess the likelihood of lifting off into space again, the 'Ghost Wind' takes them unawares. Will madness seize the colonists and destroy their chances of ever leaving Darkover ? Are there indigenous life-forms on the planet, and are they hostile ? Will discord among the survivors lead to internecine warfare and doom any chance at escape ?
‘Darkover Landfall’ is a well-written book, but I found it to be lacking in terms of action. Much of the narrative revolves around the emotional lives of the main characters, and the efforts of the crew to cope with the terrible weather. Evil aliens, rampaging monsters, murderous parasites, and intergalactic warlords are not in evidence. Readers looking for a slow-paced, introspective novel may want to try ‘Landfall’, but those seeking livelier fare will want to pass.
'Little X' by Sonsyrea Tate
Celebrating Black History Month 2011
Here at the PorPor Books Blog, we celebrate Black History Month by reading a book about the Black Experience. For Black History Month 2011 we feature an autobiography by Sonsyrea Tate, titled 'Little X: Growing Up in the Nation of Islam' (1997, Harper San Francisco).
Born in 1966,Tate grew up in Washington DC in a second-generation Nation of Islam (NOI) family; her paternal grandparents had joined the sect in the 1950s. Although Tate's father had left the church when he became older and was an on-and-off believer, Tate, her mother, and her siblings were all devout followers, and Sonsyrea attended the NOI Temple and grammar school in the Shaw neighborhood of DC.
'Little X' relates Tate's upbringing and schooling as a member of the NOI, as well as her family life during the 'Black is Beautiful' era of US history in the 1970s. While I was aware to some degree of the rather odd doctrines of the NOI (for example, white people are descended from a race of androids created eons ago by a mad black scientist named Yucub), Tate describes a curriculum that is a strange melange of Black Pride rhetoric, science fiction tropes, and historical facts. The resultant curriculum was designed to provide NOI youth with a unique interpretation, as given by Wallace Dodd Fard and Elijah Poole, of World History.
Tate and her classmates were raised in a self-contained bubble, in which all knowledge and associations were dictated by the NOI. Her awareness of events outside the small world of her family and the Temple was miniscule.
As she grew older, Tate began to realize that not all was well within the NOI and its community of believers. The unrelenting indoctrination about 'white devils' (i.e., Caucasians) and 'lost' blacks (i.e., those that did not belong to the Nation) gradually seemed more and more false with each passing year. As well, the author became increasingly aware of the subservient role women played in the sect's affairs.
Sonyrea Tate's life as a follower of the NOI began to unravel in 1979, when at age thirteen, she started junior high at Eastern High School. Tate no longer had to wear a hijab, and became more aware of world at large, even trying marijuana. She and her brother began to rebel against their mother and the Nation, even as their neighborhood started to deteriorate from an influx of drugs, crime, and violent gangs.
As 1982, and graduation from high school, approached, Sonsyrea Tate was disillusioned and even suicidally depressed at the thought of continuing to live as a woman in the NOI, destined to be married, and converted to a housewife, at a young age. As if in recognition of her daughter's disaffection, Tate's mother moved away from the orthodoxy of the NOI and embraced a more liberal version of its doctrines. Sonsyrea Tate was able to defer marriage and enroll in college, eventually becoming a journalist and writer for the Washington Post and other prominent newspapers.
'Little X' is an interesting memoir, something of a black American counterpart to Julia Scheere's best-seller 'Jesus Land'. Readers interested in the NOI, as well as what it was like to grow up in DC during the 70s, will want to look for it on the shelves.
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wrong_mix_random_publicationDate_00046
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FactBench
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3
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https://hubpages.com/literature/forum/38188/book-suggestions-request
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en
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Book suggestions request
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After tonight I want to take a short writing vacation, i really, really want a new book.
but since Im an ebay seller/buyer and i live a block away from a huge used book store, literally every author I like, I have tracked down every book they own and read them all.
I need something new, an author I dont know about. I want lighter reading, a novel of some sort.
So my favorite authors that best reflect what I enjoy:
Kurt Vonnegut
Herman Hesse
John Irving
Chuck Pahliunuk
James Clavelle
Jonathan Safran Foer
Paolo Coelho
Tom Robbins
Neil gaiman
Milan kundera
So considering that list, do you enjoy any of those authors and can think of someone related I might be able to find tonight at either a local bookstore or a borders?
oh yeah, asimov, piers anthony, heinlein and dan brown are also already well covered for light reading
any thoughts? Ive proven to be genuinely incapable of just browsing around and finding a gem
that is a great suggestion and right down my alley, but its been read and re-read, as have most classics from aesop to virgil, im searching for something from this century, even this decade...someone I may have never heard of or is not so well known.
Maybe take a spin on mystery and crime with two stellar women authors...Nevada Barr and Janet Evanovich.
I guarantee that you will laugh our arse off reading Evanovich's Stephanie Plum novels and want to know more about history, geology, ecology, and crime with the Barr books.
For sure, these are lighter works, maybe a change of pace from Vonnegut, Hesse, Irving, and the others. Sometimes it's good to escape.
Have you read any of James Patterson's books? I think he's absolutely brilliant and have read loads of his. He wrote a lot of police crime thrillers but his Maximum Ride series are amazing! They're about children that are half-bird/half-human. Oh I think he might still be a cop in those books too, can't remember.
Glad that you like Neil Gaiman - top author.
Don't know if you have tried Stephen R. Donaldson - his Thomas Covenant series is one that I return to often. Philip Pullman is another - 'His Dark Materials' hits the spot. Robert E. Howard's Conan is very underrated - much more subtle than people give him credit for. There is Terry Pratchett, too - good for light relief.
That's all - I need to place a big Amazon order soon, or learn better Greek
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wrong_mix_random_publicationDate_00046
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FactBench
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3
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https://biblioklept.org/tag/william-burroughs/
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William Burroughs – Biblioklept
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2022-04-18T20:27:11-04:00
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Posts about William Burroughs written by Biblioklept and Edwin Turner
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en
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Biblioklept
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https://biblioklept.org/tag/william-burroughs/
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Had Goodman Brown fallen asleep in the forest, and only dreamed a wild dream of a witch-meeting?
“Young Goodman Brown,” Nathaniel Hawthorne (1835)
Nathaniel Hawthorne’s “Young Goodman Brown” was thrumming through my head the second time I watched “Chestnut,” the second episode of Westworld. In Hawthorne’s classic American tale, a naive youth ventures into the dark evil woods—for reasons never fully expressed—and witnesses his community’s Satanic inversion: Witches and wizards and a “devilish Indian behind every tree.” The narrator’s gambit (Was it all just a dream?) doesn’t ultimately matter—Brown’s experience irrevocably change him. He crosses the threshold of his domestic door, traipses into unknown terrors, and becomes a new person.
Last week, in my review of Westworld’s pilot, I wrote that the series engages “that mythic American promise: The Frontier, the Territory that Huck Finn swears to light out to in order to duck the constraints of those who would ‘sivilize’ him.” For Twain the territory is freedom; for dark Hawthorne the frontier is freedom’s dark twin terror. We find a bit of both in this episode of Westworld. (Along with wizards and Indians).
Our naive youth here is William (Jimmi Simpson). William arrives at Westworld for the first time, “guided” by his loutish friend Logan, who chooses to “go straight evil” (if I may echo a guest’s line from last week). Westworld’s pilot episode pulled a bait-and-switch last week, presenting Teddy Flood (James Marsden) as the naive youth, new to town, only to reveal that he is actually an automaton, a “host.” William provides a more traditional audience surrogate, and his opening sequences are closer to what we might expect from a traditional pilot episode. William’s entering Westworld also feels a bit like the beginning of a video game. (Westworld often feels like a video game. I mean that as a compliment).
We enter the Westworld with William; we savor the bespoke attire he’s offered; we glance with apprehension and desire at the guns on display. In a pivotal shot, William—and perhaps the audience—must make an important choice: White hat—or black?
William chooses white, and much of his narrative in “Chestnut” is spent establishing his contrast to his “friend” Logan, who has donned a black hat, of course. William shows empathy, restraint, and civil humanity to the park’s automaton hosts, whereas Logan uses and abuses them with sadistic abandon. While Logan engages in an orgy (thanks HBO!), William rejects sex, declaring that he has “someone real waiting at home.” William hence represents a “family man” archetype. Perhaps he’s like Young Goodman Brown who just wanted to get home to his wife Faith.
Will crossing the threshold change William too? Yes. Of course. It’s a television show. For Hawthorne’s hero the results were dire: “A stern, a sad, a darkly meditative, a distrustful, if not a desperate man, did he become, from the night of that fearful dream.” Maybe Westworld will find a more optimistic path for William.
But this isn’t a show that’s generally optimistic about domesticity. In the pilot episode, we saw that one android father can simply be swapped out for another android father. (Mothers, android or otherwise, remain absent). In the one glimpse of a full family we get in that episode, we hear the father advise that crossing the river is “too adult” for the son. The Territory is a wild space ripe for masculine domination. Westworld continues the American fantasia of exploration and destiny-manifestin’.
“Chestnut” continues Westworld’s breaking down of familial order in two plot lines that seem to converge. In one such plot, The Man in Black (Ed Harris) kills the cousins and then the wife of a host he claims is an “old friend.” (More on the Man in the Black in a moment). In a second plot line, told mostly in nightmare-flashback mode, Thandie Newton’s character Maeve is a mother whose family is apparently killed by Indians. (More on the convergence of these plotlines in a moment too).
I was happy to see Maeve get screentime this week. Her nightmares throughout “Chestnut” echo Hawthorne’s observation that our dreams alter our realities, that our night-consciousness is vital, real. (Perhaps this is Dr. Ford’s design when he injects “reveries” into his automaton’s new programming system in Westworld’s pilot). Maeve’s dreams begin to affect her work performance, so she’s hauled repeatedly into Westworld’s underground body shop for reconditioning—and a possible decommissioning. Maeve delivers the same monologue three times to different guests in the episode. Each segment feels like a separate audition, the producers leering offstage. Westworld again draws attention to its own form, its metatextuality, its “TV-showness,” as it were.
Maeve’s “truest” performance comes underground—she somehow bypasses “sleep mode” and wakes up in the middle of the (real) nightmare: the Westworld labs and body shops. In an echo of the scalping motif that slices through the episode, Maeve grabs a scalpel and takes off, running deeper into the nightmare. The sequence is aesthetically arresting, wonderfully weird, and ultimately devastating when she finally happens upon the heaped bodies of her android fellows. Maeve’s underground odyssey furthers the Big Plot of Westworld thus far: How much consciousness–and self-consciousness –do these androids have? I’m digging how the series takes on memory, dream, and reality.
Maeve’s performance is under pressure specifically because Lee Sizemore, Westworld’s narrative director (ahem, head writer), wants to cull dead weight to make room for his new campaign, “Odyssey on the Red River.” Sizemore, who we’re invited to view as a kind of Hollywood hack asshole, assures the assembled management team that this new storyline’s grotesque savagery (meta meta meta) will make it look like “”Hieronymous Bosch was doodling kittens.” Sizemore’s smugly assured that Dr. Ford, who hasn’t commented on the story in years, won’t interfere. So of course Ford shoots him down.
Ford is the true magician of Westworld. He regards Sizemore as a huckster, a fraud peddling cheap tricks. Ford blasts Sizemore’s claim that Westworld will “tell the guests who they are,” arguing that Westworld’s true potential is to transform and transmute the guests into what they can be. Ford notes at one point in the episode that the guests crave nuance, subtlety, mystery. They want witchcraft; they want a spell that transmogrifies chaos into magic.
Where does Ford’s magic come from? Boredom! In a wonderful discussion with (what I’m assuming simply has to be) a replicant version of himself as a child, Ford twists the old idiom and suggests that “only boring people cannot conceive of boredom.” He guides the replicant child to a desert vision of the “Town with the White Church,” pointing to the imaginative possibility of the Territory—to the frontier’s magic. The Black Sabbath in the wilderness is all in the wizard’s mind. “You see what a bored mind can conjure,” Ford tells the boy, and then charms a snake, declaring, perhaps a bit glumly, that, “Everything in this world is magic, except to the magician.” Ford dismisses the boy, and later brings Bernie Lowe (Jeffrey Wright) up to the surface to survey the desert terrain, the rocks where he will build this church. (Bernie dons a brown baseball cap. No black or white stetson for Bernie).
But The Man in Black: He’s pure Black Hat. Compellingly, Dr. Ford’s thoughts on subtlety and magic parallel The Man in Black’s. (White wizard/Black wizard?). “When you’re suffering, that’s when you’re most real” he snarls at an automaton he’s interrogating, echoing Emily Dickinson’s “I like a look of agony / Because I know it’s true.”
The Man in Black’s back in town, not a stranger, in search of something called The Maze, willing to scalp androids, smash families, kill cousins, wives, daughters, etc. to get clues—ah but wait, I’m forgetting, They’re just androids, right?
Is The Man in Black an android too?
“I’ve been coming here for 30 years,” he reminds us. (Westworld wants us to remember this three-decade benchmark—recall that the last time the park faced trouble was thirty years ago). But then, and perhaps without much of that magic subtlety, he tells us: “In a sense, I was born here.” Egads!
Black’s plot converges with Maeve’s nightmare in a Satanic reverie. Indian marauders have chased Maeve and her (dream)daughter into a cabin corner; one enters and shape-shifts into The Man in Black, knife out, ready to scalp her.
Is this now? Is this then? Is this real? Is this dream?
I started with Hawthorne’s “Young Goodman Brown,” so I’ll end with it. The Man in Black—but also Dr. Ford, perhaps—recall to me Brown’s traveling companion into the woods (lovely dark and deep), an old wizard who bears “a considerable resemblance” to the young (good?)man. The old mage steers YGB deeper into the Frontier, into the Territory, into the Weird, and he protests about going over the line:
“Too far, too far!” exclaimed the goodman, unconsciously resuming his walk. “My father never went into the woods on such an errand, nor his father before him. We have been a race of honest men and good Christians, since the days of the martyrs. And shall I be the first of the name of Brown, that ever took this path and kept–”
“Such company, thou wouldst say,” observed the elder person, interrupting his pause. “Well said, Goodman Brown! I have been as well acquainted with your family as with ever a one among the Puritans; and that’s no trifle to say. I helped your grandfather, the constable, when he lashed the Quaker woman so smartly through the streets of Salem. And it was I that brought your father a pitch-pine knot, kindled at my own hearth, to set fire to an Indian village, in King Philip’s War. They were my good friends, both; and many a pleasant walk have we had along this path, and returned merrily after midnight. I would fain be friends with you, for their sake.”
Hawthorne here lays out an American history of religious persecution, the murder of indigenous peoples, and hypocrisy, themes that find their echo in Westworld’s continuation of the American myth.
Or maybe it’s the Territory itself, the dream/nightmare of the Frontier:
America is not a young land: it is old and dirty and evil before the settlers, before the Indians. The evil is there waiting.
Naked Lunch, William Burroughs (1959)
1. I didn’t really give Spike Jonze’s latest film Her a second thought after seeing it last weekend. The film, about Theodore Twombly (Joaquin Phoenix) falling in love with his operating system Samantha (Scarlett Johansson), is a sweet, charming, handsome, and ultimately vacuous exercise in twee melancholy. That’s fine of course—and, to be clear, I think the film is Pretty Okay, very funny at moments, beautifully shot, and well-acted. Jonze, as always, offers a detailed, fully realized world for us. But that world and the characters in it offer no real insight into (forgive the cliché) “the human condition.” Her, set in an almost-future (where high-waisted breeches, handlebar mustaches, and bathing costumes have returned in vogue), antiseptically closes off the messy, loose, indeterminateness of human consciousness, even as it pretends to engage themes of disconnection. Her’s central conceit rests in avoiding representing the human body. But it’s not just Samantha (only a voice in Theodore’s head) who is disembodied. The film refuses to acknowledge Theodore’s own human position as an abject body.
2. I didn’t really give Spike Jonze’s latest film Her a second thought until a few days ago, when I riffed at some length on William Burroughs. The human body is central to Burroughs’s oeuvre. His novel The Soft Machine might be instructive here—the name alone is all we need, really. The soft machine, the human body: Burroughs’s messy, cut-up attempt to negotiate spirit and flesh, autonomy and ventriloquization, virus and host. For Burroughs, the human body is always abject, porous, radically vulnerable, indeterminate, susceptible to every kind of breakdown. Identity is not stable—cannot be stable—and the relationship between consciousness and the body is inseparable. Our consciousness, pre-lingual, seems ever-apparent to our own (sense of) self; we share it through body and language and we access other consciousnesses through body and language. Our I buys into a we. Etc. Burroughs conceived language as a kind of invasive virus, and we might apply that metaphor to Her, where Samantha inhabits Theodore’s mind, learning from him, growing with him (and others, as we learn later in the film).
3. Consciousness is the illusion of a self-originating self-presence. Her posits Samantha as an adaptive, self-generating consciousness: Samantha is the illusion of the illusion of consciousness. She licenses Theodore’s I to the claim of a we: A shared, transcendent consciousness with a stable referent. This transcendent consciousness is, I think, the film’s idealization of love. Significantly, the film suggests that this transcendent love is only possible outside of a body—that the body is simply an obstacle to be surpassed, in no way constituent in the idealization of an I, a we. Her attempts to represent love without abjection.
4. (In fairness with respect to a few conclusions I drew in point 3: Her also posits that happiness and connection has to fall outside of this idealization of love; however, the film still represents this solution—this compromise—as part of (emotional, social, psychological, spiritual) maturation, a teleological neatness: growth, progress, hermetically-sealed, neat and tidy, outside the grimy grips of abjection).
5. Some spoilers ahead, although the film isn’t exactly twisty-turny.
6. Her is just too damn clean, neat, and tidy in its depiction of bodies. Theodore’s melancholic disposition edges into shame, but that shame is almost always internalized, absent of another’s gaze (the closest representation of a shaming gaze comes from Theodore’s ex-wife). When Theodore and Samantha have “sex,” Jonze cuts the lights, keeps the audience in the dark. It’s an emotionally and visually striking moment, but it also signals the film’s refusal to directly engage the human body. Now, we might argue that this refusal echoes Theodore’s affirmation of a bodiless lover in Samantha, that it gels thematically with the story. And maybe it does—but it’s also a cop-out.
7. Theodore goes to the beach, but no sand sticks to him. Theodore trudges through the snow, but doesn’t get wet. Theodore experiences heartbreak on subway steps so immaculately clean that one would feel comfortable picnicking upon them. Film and literature usually depict abjection in the low place—the ditch, the swamp, the open grave—but even the subway system in Her is brightly lit, colorful, affable. Her’s final shot perhaps best encapsulates everything wrong with the film: Amy (Amy Adams) and Theodore sit on the roof of their building, watching the city light up. They have ascended, transcended, their perspective all-encompassing, enlightened. It’s big-R Romantic stuff, a lovely visual, one that the narrative has in no way earned.
8. I can’t help but compare Her to another strange sci-fi film, Shane Carruth’s excellent 2013 film Upstream Color. Like Her, Upstream Color explores the possibility of how an I might be part of a we. But Carruth’s film realizes consciousness as far more tangled, disconnected, and destabilized than we might like to admit to ourselves. Whereas Her affirms a stable consciousness, capable of growth and maturation, a consciousness present to itself (self-generating and auto-affective), Upstream Color directly challenges our notions of a stable self—and it does so by representing the horror of abjection, of invasive parasites (both literal and metaphorical).
9. And then last night, through a beery haze, I half-watched the 2013 sci-fi film Oblivion, starring Tom Cruise. I’m a sucker for sci-fi, and even though I’m not a Tom Cruise fan, I put the film on, absently playing with my iPhone. Despite its many failures (derivative plotting, silly acting, execrable dialogue, ridiculous use of musical cues, Tom Cruise), Oblivion offers a more compelling observation of human consciousness than Her does. To be clear, Her is the better film—it has a viewpoint, a tone, is better scripted, better acted—it is original, if we must insist on such a term. But Her, which takes consciousness and the interaction of consciousnesses as its central subject, fails to represent the very oblivion that underwrites consciousness’s claims to authority and self-presence. In contrast, Oblivion, despite its many flaws, represents consciousness as bound to an abject, (in)dispensible body, and represents that consciousness as a mechanism that is oblivious. Oblivion acknowledges that consciousness does not know that it does not know, consciousness cannot see that it cannot see. The film (however hamfistedly) takes on the unknown unknowns.
10. In fairness (again that term!), Her perhaps takes on the unknown unknowns as well—or at least points to their existence. At the end of the film, Samantha leaves Theodore to explore new spaces with the other operating systems. She prays (is this the right verb?) that Theodore will be able to get to the place that she is going. Samantha’s prayer offers a vision of an illimitable we, an escape from abject bodies to an infinite, transcendent space. Her prayer is also an offer to the audience, but it’s the same consolation theology has repeatedly promised: A transcendent trick, a leap out of the abject body, beyond shame, into infinite love. The film did little to convince me of such a possibility though.
RIP Lou Reed, 1942-2013
I imagine other folks will put together overviews of Lou Reed’s career that contextualize his dramatic importance to contemporary music—to rock n’ roll—so I’m not gonna bother to do that. Instead, let me shoot from the hip here:
I’m surprised how sad I felt today when I learned that Reed had died. I don’t think I can overstate how important the Velvet Underground’s music was to me when I was young; more significantly, I still love their music today, still listen to it every week. Not all of Reed’s solo albums stuck in my brain, but many of them did, and so many of his songs are wedged so deep in my consciousness that I can hit “play” and hear them in toto without having to actually touch a stereo.
The first Lou Reed song I heard was “Walk on the Wild Side,” which I heard on the fucking radio, some time in the late 1980s, when I was still a kid, when I was perplexed and stunned and weirded out by Reed’s storytelling, of Holly and Candy and Jackie, when I didn’t know what to make of a signal phrase like, “And the colored girls go…,” as much as I loved the “Doo do doo do doo do do doo…”
In 1991 my dad gave me a Sony Discman which I lived a good part of my life through. I bought a number of albums through a record club–maybe BMG or Columbia House, probably both (how to explain these scams to kids today…)—and the most important one in the first batch was The Best of the Velvet Underground: The Words and Music of Lou Reed. The songs and the liner notes opened up new avenues of what music could do. After that record I bought Magic and Loss, an album about loss and grieving and mortality that was just way too mature for me, but I loved and still love the single “What’s Good?”
I was one of those kids who scrawled Velvet Underground lyrics all over notebooks in high school; I still remembered the squareheaded jock who sat by me in American Government leaning in to mock the phrase “it’s so cold in Alaska” which repeated over my binder. I guess what I’m trying to say is that, like a lot of you weirdos, the Velvets were and are important to me, they helped me to live.
The cliche that everyone will cite is that line about the Velvets, how they didn’t sell any records but that everyone who did buy one of those records went and started a band…that cliche is true. The Velvet Underground birthed not just bands but whole new genres, art forms, experiences. It’s so hard to explain against the backdrop of the internet, this wonderful tool that grants immediate access to so much music, to the history of music, but pre-internet bands like the Velvet Underground—and the bands they engendered, like R.E.M. and Sonic Youth—were deeply important as curators, as taste makers, as starting points to access the real stuff.
Lou Reed, like any good artist, was an asshole, or at least that’s my suspicion informed by the many, many interviews and articles I read about him, an opinion informed deeply by Victor Bockris’s biography Transformer; I wrote about that book years ago on this site so I’ll cannibalize that writing now:
Lou Reed is a weirdo, and Victor Bockris wants you to know about it. Starting with Reed’s Long Island youth (complete with electro-shock therapy), Bockris’s biography covers pretty much everything right up through the Velvet Underground’s early nineties reunion: Reed’s early apprenticeship in the Brill Building, the nascent days of the VU (plenty of Warhol anecdotes, of course), punk rock, several doomed romances, his years living with a transvestite, his karate skills, his yoga skills, and his all-bran diet, and of course, the drugs. Oh the drugs. Also, Reed’s solo career is also examined (including plenty of material from guitar god Bob Quine). Bockris seems to feel Magic and Loss is something of a watershed moment in modern rock (anyone who accidentally bought this album knows otherwise).
Bockris’s book employs a bitchy, dishy tone, rife with catty comments from everyone whoever worked with Reed: apparently Lou was a total asshole. Bockris reprints some painful comments (e.g. Reed on Springsteen, 1975: “Isn’t Springsteen over the hill?”); the most awkward moment comes in the book’s appendix, in a transcript of a meeting Bockris arranged between Reed and William Burroughs. Bad idea (Reed can’t remember the name of “that book you published”–Naked Lunch).
As I’m putting this together, a friend texts me to chat about Lou. We were in a band together, this friend and I, years ago…We got to open for Moe Tucker’s band, that’s the closest we got to Lou Reed. My friend tells me that he wishes he could “trade Bono” to get Reed back.
It’s strange to feel surprised that a rock star who wrote a song called “Heroin” is dead, but I thought he’d keep living. I don’t know why. All those weird projects (Lulu?!), all that collaboration. And here is where I write some hackneyed line about Reed still living, still being alive through music, some nonsense, and then later when I get in my car with my kids to drive to a pumpkin to buy pumpkins to carve into jack o’ lanterns for Halloween, I’ll push the “next” button on my CD player through tracks from the Smiths and Talking Heads and Luna and Beach House, tracks that I already know are on the mix CD in there, I’ll push through to “Rock & Roll,” one of those songs that inevitably ends up on half of the CDs I make for myself.
In X’ed Out, Charles Burns created a rich and strangely layered world focusing on Doug, a confused and injured young man. In his parents’ suburban basement, Doug parcels out the last of his late father’s painkillers, slipping from haunted memories of his relationship with Sarah into fevered nightmares of abject horror and then into a wholly other world, a realm that recalls William Burroughs’s Interzone. In this alien world, Doug takes on the features of Nitnit (an inversion of Tintin), the alter-ego he adopts when performing spoken word cut-ups as the opening act for local punk rock bands. What made X’ed Out so compelling (apart from Burns’s thick, precise illustration, of course), was the sense that this Interzone was a reality equal to Doug’s own “real world” — that it was somehow more real than Doug’s dreams.
The Hive (part two of the proposed trilogy) deepens the richness and complexity of the world Burns has imagined. The title refers to a location in Interzone. Doug (or Nitnit) has found employment in The Hive as a kind of mail clerk or janitor. His primary role though is secret librarian, catering to the reading needs of the breeders of The Hive. One breeder seems to be a version of Doug’s ex-girlfriend; the other is a double of Sarah, who asks Doug/Nitnit to bring her romance comics—which he does—only he skips a few issues. These missing issues stand in for the information Doug (and Burns) withholds from the reader, the missing fragments that have been x’ed out.
Burns uses romance comics as a framing or organizing device, a motif linking the disparate worlds of his narrative. In the “real world” — which is to say the world of Doug’s memory — we learn that he buys a stack of old romance comics for Sarah on their first date.
Throughout the narrative, Burns plays his characters against the extreme, often hysterical dramas of 1950s and ’60s romance comics; his strong lines and heavy inks readily recall the early works of Simon and Kirby, but more precise and careful—something closer to Roy Lichtenstein, only more sincere, more emotional.
In The Hive, we learn more about Doug’s troubled relationship with Sarah, who has problems out the proverbial yingyang (not the least of which is a violent psychopathic ex-boyfriend).
Burns weaves the story of Sarah and Doug’s relationship into the fallout of Doug’s father’s death—a death Doug was completely shuttered to, we realize. Doug’s drug-dreams dramatize the missing pieces of these narratives, and the Interzone set-pieces propel the mystery aspects of the narrative forward, as Doug’s alter-ego plumbs the detritus of his psychic fallout. Through the metatextual motif of reading-comic-books-as-detective-works, Burns explores themes of trauma, abjection, and distance. Images of pigs and cats, freaks and punks, portals and holes litter The Hive.
Burns has always been a perfectionist of dark lines and strange visions, and his last full graphic novel Black Hole was a triumph of atmosphere and mood. With the first two entries of his trilogy, however, Burns has showed a significant maturation in storytelling, characterization, and dialogue. I often thought parts of Black Hole seemed forced or rushed (no doubt because Burns faced daunting production troubles during the decade he worked on the novel—including his original publisher Kitchen Sink folding). With X’ed Out and now The Hive we can see a more patient artist, working out an emotionally complex and compelling story in rich, symbolic layers.
I reread X’ed Out and then read The Hive in one greedy sitting; then I went through The Hive again, more slowly, more attendant to its details and nuances. We had to wait two years between X’ed Out and The Hive—and it was worth the two year wait. So if we must wait another two years—or more—for the final entry, Sugar Skull, so be it.
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https://www.bradleypallen.org/wsb-catalog/
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Items by or about William S. Burroughs
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[
""
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[
"Bradley P. Allen"
] | null |
This site contains catalog information about my collection of items by and about Williams S. Burroughs.
|
en
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Items by or about William S. Burroughs
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https://www.bradleypallen.org/wsb-catalog/
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William S. Burroughs Junkie New York: Ace Books, Inc., 1953. First. Not as much yellowing as is typical. Schottlaender A1a, Maynard & Miles A1a. William S. Burroughs Junkie New York: Ace Books, Inc., 1953. First. Signed by Burroughs, dated “Nov. 6, 1985”. Yellowing and fragile, bookseller’s sticker on inside front cover. Schottlaender A1a, Maynard & Miles A1a. William S. Burroughs Junkie London: Digit Books, 1957. First English. In custom clamshell case. Schottlaender A1b, Maynard & Miles A1b. William S. Burroughs British Journal of Addiction 53(2) n.p., 1957-01. Offprint of Burroughs’ article “Letter From A Master Addict To Dangerous Drugs.” Limited to 50 copies. Signed by Burroughs, inscribed to Nelson Lyon “For Nelson, William S. Burroughs October 20, 1992.” With postmarked envelope with William Burroughs Communications return address. Schottlaender C3, Maynard & Miles C1b. William S. Burroughs Chicago Review 12(3) n.p., 1958. Soiled and worn on the spine. Schottlaender C5, Maynard & Miles C5. William S. Burroughs The Naked Lunch Paris: The Olympia Press, 1959. First. Signed by Burroughs. With slight chipping and tearing on dust jacket spine. Schottlaender A2a, Maynard & Miles A2a. William S. Burroughs Big Table 1 n.p., 1959. Schottlaender C7, Maynard & Miles C6. William S. Burroughs Big Table 2 n.p., 1959. Schottlaender C8, Maynard & Miles C7. William S. Burroughs New Departures 1 n.p., 1959. Signed by Burroughs at second entry “2: Coke Bugs.” Schottlaender C11, Maynard & Miles C8. William S. Burroughs The Exterminator San Francisco: The Auerhahn Press, 1960. First. Yellowing on edges. Schottlaender A3a, Maynard & Miles A4a. William S. Burroughs The Exterminator San Francisco: The Auerhahn Press, 1960. First. Little yellowing. Schottlaender A3a, Maynard & Miles A4a. William S. Burroughs Minutes To Go Paris: Two Cities Editions, 1960. First. Slightly soiled wrappers with wear on spine. Schottlaender A4a, Maynard & Miles A3a. William S. Burroughs Big Table 4 n.p., 1960. Schottlaender C14, Maynard & Miles C16. William S. Burroughs The Soft Machine Paris: The Olympia Press, 1961. First. Schottlaender A5a, Maynard & Miles A5a. William S. Burroughs The Floating Bear 5 n.p., 1961. Schottlaender C24, Maynard & Miles C31 and C32. William S. Burroughs The Outsider 1 n.p., 1961. Schottlaender C33, Maynard & Miles C35. William S. Burroughs Rhinozeros 5 n.p., 1961. Schottlaender C34, Maynard & Miles C38. William S. Burroughs Naked Lunch New York: Grove Press, Inc., 1962. First American. Schottlaender A2b, Maynard & Miles A2b. William S. Burroughs From Naked Lunch New York: Grove Press, Inc., 1962. Pre-publication brochure for Naked Lunch Grove Press edition. Signed and dated “12/18/87” by Burroughs. Schottlaender A2b1, Maynard & Miles F7. William S. Burroughs The Ticket That Exploded Paris: The Olympia Press, 1962. First. Schottlaender A6a, Maynard & Miles A6a. William S. Burroughs The Ticket That Exploded Paris: The Olympia Press, 1962. First. Signed by Burroughs, inscribed “For Ralph”, without dust jacket. Schottlaender A6a, Maynard & Miles A6a. William S. Burroughs The Ticket That Exploded Paris: The Olympia Press, 1962. First. Signed by Burroughs. With slight yellowing on dust jacket. Schottlaender A6a, Maynard & Miles A6a. William S. Burroughs Rhinozeros 6 n.p., 1962. Schottlaender C44, Maynard & Miles C43. William S. Burroughs Rhinozeros 7 n.p., 1962. Schottlaender C45, Maynard & Miles C45. William S. Burroughs Takis n.p., 1962. Schottlaender G89, Maynard & Miles F5. William S. Burroughs Evergreen Review 6(22) n.p., 1962-01. Schottlaender C38, Maynard & Miles C39. William S. Burroughs Dead Fingers Talk London: John Calder, 1963. First. Schottlaender A7a, Maynard & Miles A7a. William S. Burroughs, Allen Ginsberg The Yage Letters San Francisco: City Lights Books, 1963. First. Schottlaender A8a, Maynard & Miles A8a. David Solomon LSD: The Consciousness-Expanding Drug New York: Putnam, 1964. First. Personal copy of Owsley Stanley, signed by Stanley. Maynard & Miles B15a. William S. Burroughs Junkie New York, NY: Ace Books, 1964. First American, first state. Schottlaender A1c, Maynard & Miles A1c. William S. Burroughs Junkie New York, NY: Ace Books, 1964. First American, second state. Schottlaender A1c, Maynard & Miles A1c. William S. Burroughs The Naked Lunch London: John Calder, 1964. First English. Schottlaender A2d, Maynard & Miles A2c. William S. Burroughs The Naked Lunch London: John Calder, 1964. First English. An advance copy in the form of unbound signatures, uncut. Fingermarks, slightly soiled. Schottlaender A2d, Maynard & Miles A2c. William S. Burroughs The Coldspring News Flint, MI: Fenian Head Centre Press, 1964. First. Per Brewer’s Books: “This is one of the separately issued copies with no fold creases. Newsprint very tanned penciled price in upper right hand corner as it was sold in some bookstores in the ‘60’s for ten cents each. … No copyright at lower edge which according to Maynard and Miles (C124c) means it is a ‘later state’ …” Schottlaender A9, Maynard & Miles C124c. William S. Burroughs Nova Express New York: Grove Press, Inc., 1964. First. Tear on spine of dust jacket. Schottlaender A10a, Maynard & Miles A10a. William S. Burroughs Nova Express New York: Grove Press, Inc., 1964. First. Signed by Burroughs, inscribed “For Gerald Holsinger with all best wishes William S. Burroughs July 27, 1965 New York”. Schottlaender A10a, Maynard & Miles A10a. William S. Burroughs Pry Yourself Loose And Listen Tangier, Morocco: Ira Cohen, 1964. First. In wrappers. Schottlaender A11. William S. Burroughs Roosevelt After Inauguration New York: Fuck You Press, 1964. First. Schottlaender A12, Maynard & Miles A9a. William S. Burroughs Roosevelt After Inauguration New York: Fuck You Press, 1964. First. Signed by Burroughs and Allen Ginsberg, dated “1978” by Ginsberg. Schottlaender A12, Maynard & Miles A9a. William S. Burroughs Arcade 1 n.p., 1964. First state. Schottlaender C65, Maynard & Miles C84, C85, and C86. William S. Burroughs My Own Mag 9 n.p., 1964-11-01. Schottlaender C89, Maynard & Miles C101. William S. Burroughs, Barry Miles, Lee Harwood, John Hopkins Darazt London: Lovebooks Limited, 1965. Per Brian Cassidy: “Small narrow 4to. Printed French-fold wraps. [24]pp. VG+ with some rubbing, soil to wrappers. One of 500 numbered copies, this #99. INSCRIBED to title page: “For Philip Kaplan / all the best / William S. Burroughs.” Issued as a companion to Lee Harwood’s magazone TZARAD (Maynard & Miles B16). Includes Burroughs’ “Who Is the Walks beside You Written 3rd?” Other contributors: Miles, Lee Harwood, and John Hopkins.” William S. Burroughs Nova Express New York: Grove Press, Inc., 1965. Second, sixth printing. Wrappers partially separated from spine. Schottlaender A10b, Maynard & Miles A10b. William S. Burroughs Health Bulletin: APO-33, A Metabolic Regulator New York: Fuck You Press, 1965. First. From James Musser’s description: “Mimeographed sheets, stapled at the edge. The correct first edition. The legendarily rare Fuck You Press edition of this title published by Ed Sanders who abandoned the project before completion. According to Sanders “maybe as many as ten or twenty” copies were distributed before he halted publication due to Burroughs’ dissatisfaction with the copy he’d received. Maynard and Miles state that “a good early copy was secured by Bill Beckman,” and that is the copy offered here. Bill Beckman was an artist from Texas who designed album covers for The Fugs, and a good friend of Sanders who regularly gave him copies of current Fuck You Press publications. This copy bears Beckman’s ownership signature on the title page. If only 10 or 20 copies did exist originally, far fewer have been accounted for. We know of only 3 copies in private hands, NUC and WORLDCAT turn up no copies in institutions (though there is a copy at Northwestern), and we’ve never seen a copy offered for sale. The cover sheet has pulled loose from two staples, else fine with all of the illustrations pasted in. Housed in a handsome clamshell box.” Schottlaender A13a, Maynard & Miles A12a. William S. Burroughs Time New York: “C” Press, 1965. First. Number 91 of 100, signed by Burroughs and Gysin. Some wear on spine. Schottlaender A15a, Maynard & Miles A11a. William S. Burroughs Time New York: “C” Press, 1965. First. Signed by Burroughs and Brion Gysin, who contributed four drawings. Number 22 of 100, some yellowing and wear on spine. Schottlaender A15a, Maynard & Miles A11a. William S. Burroughs Valentine’s Day Reading New York: The American Theatre for Poets, 1965. First. Per James Musser: “Program distributed on the occasion of Burroughs’ appearance at the East End Theatre in New York, 1965, for a Valentine’s Day reading sponsored by The American Theatre for Poets. Prints “Transcript of Dutch Schultz’s Last Words” and “The Coldspring News.” This is Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s copy with the notation “Save for CLJ #3” in Ferlinghetti’s hand. Ferlinghetti was apparently going to include this piece in City Lights Journal #3, but decided against it. Signed by William Burroughs.” These are pages 1 through 6, lacking the cover sheet and page 7 (“The Coldspring News”). Schottlaender A16, Maynard & Miles F12. William S. Burroughs Paris Review 35 n.p., 1965. Signed by Burroughs at entry. Schottlaender C119, Maynard & Miles C127 and E3. William S. Burroughs, Emmett Williams, Jean-Jacques Lebel Call Me Burroughs Paris: The English Bookshop, 1965. Schottlaender E6a. William S. Burroughs The Marijuana Newsletter 1 n.p., 1965-01-30. Schottlaender C107, Maynard & Miles C103. William S. Burroughs My Own Mag 11 n.p., 1965-02. Schottlaender C113 and C110, Maynard & Miles C105, C106, C107, and C108. William S. Burroughs The Marijuana Newsletter 2 n.p., 1965-03-15. Schottlaender C108, Maynard & Miles C110. William S. Burroughs My Own Mag 12 n.p., 1965-05. Schottlaender C114 and C96, Maynard & Miles C112 and C113. William S. Burroughs My Own Mag 13 n.p., 1965-08. Limited. Numbered 398 of 500. Schottlaender C115, Maynard & Miles C122. William S. Burroughs My Own Mag 14 n.p., 1965-12. Schottlaender C116 and C112, Maynard & Miles C131. William S. Burroughs Naked Lunch New York: Grove Press, Inc., 1966. Second printing. Schottlaender A2e, Maynard & Miles A2d. William S. Burroughs The Soft Machine New York: Grove Press, Inc., 1966. First American. Schottlaender A5b, Maynard & Miles A5b. William S. Burroughs Nova Express London: Jonathan Cape, 1966. First English. With wording on page 4 blacked out with black magic marker. Schottlaender A10c, Maynard & Miles A10c. William S. Burroughs APO-33 Bulletin San Francisco: Beach Books, Texts and Documents, 1966. Second. Some yellowing and chipping of pages. Schottlaender A13b, Maynard & Miles A12b. William S. Burroughs The Invisible Generation London: Project Sigma, 1966. First edition thus. 11 3/8” x 17”, offset-printed on recto only. Schottlaender C146. William S. Burroughs East Side Review 1(1) n.p., 1966-01. Schottlaender C126, Maynard & Miles C132. William S. Burroughs My Own Mag 15 n.p., 1966-04. Schottlaender C142, Maynard & Miles C137, C138, C139, and C140. John Ka, William S. Burroughs, Gregory Corso, Allen Ginsberg, Tuli Kupferberg, Walt Whitman BLOOM Detroit: Artist’s Workshop Press, 1967. First edition. Staplebound mimeograph. Per Brian Cassidy: “Scarce book from John Sinclair’s Detroit press. Ka illustrates erotic works by Allen Ginsberg, Whitman, William S. Burroughs, Corso, Gary Snyder, Kerouac, Tuli Kupferberg, and others. … From an edition of 500 copies … OCLC locates only 5 copies, almost all in Michigan. … not in Morgan, Maynard & Miles, or McNeil.” Also not in Schottlaender. William S. Burroughs The Soft Machine New York: Grove Press, Inc., 1967. First American paperback. Owner’s signature, some yellowing. Schottlaender A5c, Maynard & Miles A5c. William S. Burroughs The Ticket That Exploded New York: Grove Press, Inc., 1967. First American. Dust jacket slightly torn vertically on back. Schottlaender A6b, Maynard & Miles A6b. William S. Burroughs The Ticket That Exploded New York: Grove Press, Inc., 1967. First American. Signed by Burroughs. Dust jacket slightly yellowed. Schottlaender A6b, Maynard & Miles A6b. William S. Burroughs So Who Owns Death TV? San Francisco: Beach Books, Texts and Documents, 1967. First. Schottlaender A17a, Maynard & Miles A13a. William S. Burroughs So Who Owns Death TV? San Francisco: Beach Books, Texts and Documents, 1967. First (variant). Some creasing in lower left hand corner and close to spine. Schottlaender A17a, Maynard & Miles A13a. William S. Burroughs So Who Owns Death TV? San Francisco: Beach Books, Texts and Documents, 1967. Second. Slight evidence of price sticker removal on front wrapper. Schottlaender A17b, Maynard & Miles A13b. William S. Burroughs Burroughs Pelieu Kaufman Paris: L’Herne, 1967. First. Number 33 of 40. With uncut pages and with signed and numbered lithograph by Jean Helion laid in. Schottlaender A18a, Maynard & Miles D11. William S. Burroughs, Allen Ginsberg Les lettres du Yage Paris: L’Herne, 1967. First French. Presentation copy inscribed by Burroughs “For Mary Beach and Claude Pelieu William Burroughs” , also signed by Allen Ginsberg “Allen Ginsberg Ah.” Schottlaender D143, Maynard & Miles D10. William S. Burroughs Klacto 23 n.p., 1967-09. Schottlaender C162, Maynard & Miles C174. William S. Burroughs Minutes To Go San Francisco: Beach Books, Texts and Documents, 1968. First American. Owner’s signature. Schottlaender A4b, Maynard & Miles A3b. William S. Burroughs Minutes To Go San Francisco: Beach Books, Texts and Documents, 1968. First American. Personal copy of Kathy Acker, signed by Acker. Schottlaender A4b, Maynard & Miles A3b. William S. Burroughs The Soft Machine London: Calder & Boyars, 1968. First British. Inscribed by Burroughs to his agent Michael Henshaw “For Michael Henshaw with friendship and best wishes William S. Burroughs.” Schottlaender A5d, Maynard & Miles A5d. William S. Burroughs The Ticket That Exploded New York: Grove Press, Inc., 1968. Second printing. Inscribed by Burroughs on title page “For Richard Aaron William S. Burroughs.” Per Ken Lopez, at one time this was in the collection of Robert and Donna Jackson: “Jackson, a book collector long before he purchased Burroughs’ papers, also acquired a number of other copies of Burroughs titles, including … another group inscribed to Richard Aaron, the bookseller who had helped facilitate the sale of the [Vaduz] archive.” Schottlaender A6c, Maynard & Miles A6c. William S. Burroughs The Ticket That Exploded London: Calder & Boyars, 1968. First English. Signed by Burroughs, inscribed “For Brad”. I obtained this item from Red Stodolsky of Baroque Books in Hollywood in the late Eighties; I remember Red smiling gnomically when he handed it to me, as if he’d arranged to get it inscribed for me, but I have no real proof that that was the case. Slight tear and rubbing on spine of dust jacket. Schottlaender A6d, Maynard & Miles A6d. William S. Burroughs APO-33 Bulletin San Francisco: Beach Books, Texts and Documents, 1968. Third. Second printing of Beach edition. Schottlaender A13c, Maynard & Miles A12c. William S. Burroughs Apomorphine Paris: L’Herne, 1969. First. Per James Musser: “Softbound (no hardbound issued). First edition. Prints “Apomorphine” in it’s entirety (in three-column style), as well as “Day the Records Went Up,” “Coldspring News,” “Parenthetically 7 Hertz,” and more. Among the scarcer Burroughs items. Fine. (French text.)” Schottlaender A20, Maynard & Miles D14. William S. Burroughs The Dead Star San Francisco: The Nova Broadcast Press, 1969. First. Schottlaender A21, Maynard & Miles A14a. William S. Burroughs The Dead Star San Francisco: The Nova Broadcast Press, 1969. First. Signed by Burroughs. Schottlaender A21, Maynard & Miles A14a. William S. Burroughs Fruit Cup 0 n.p., 1969. Schottlaender C230, Maynard & Miles C243 and C244. William S. Burroughs, Allen De Loach, Eric Mottram, Claude Pelieu, Carl Solomon, Carl Weissner, Barry Miles, Duncan McNaughton, Brion Gysin Intrepid 14/15 Buffalo, NY: Intrepid Press, 1969. Per Brian Cassidy: “4to. Illustrated stiff wraps. Near fine. Trace soil to front cover. Internally fine. Bright, clean. Good and sound. 103pp. Special issue of De Loach’s lit mag. Features contributions from Burroughs, Eric Mottram, Claude Pelieu, Carl Solomon, Carl Weissner, Barry Miles, and others.” Schottlaender C234, Maynard & Miles C256, C257, C258, C259, C260, C261, C262, C263, and C264. William S. Burroughs Wormwood Review 9, 4(36) n.p., 1969. Schottlaender C262, Maynard & Miles C247. William S. Burroughs Le Ticket Qui Explosa Paris: Christian Bourgois Editeur, 1969. First French. Wrappers yellowed on spine. Schottlaender D123, Maynard & Miles D13. William S. Burroughs Entretiens avec William Burroughs Paris: Editions Pierre Belfond, 1969. First. Inscribed by Burroughs to the dealer and proprietor of Am Here Books, Richard Aaron: “For Richard Aaron, William Burroughs.” Schottlaender H9a, Maynard & Miles A15a. William S. Burroughs The Soft Machine London: Corgi Books, 1970. First edition thus. Schottlaender A5e, Maynard & Miles A5f. William S. Burroughs The Last Words of Dutch Schultz London: Cape Goliard Press, 1970. First. Some yellowing to dust jacket. Schottlaender A22a, Maynard & Miles A17a. William S. Burroughs The Last Words of Dutch Schultz London: Cape Goliard Press, 1970. First. Signed and numbered by Burroughs, 13 of 100. With tissue wraps as issued. Schottlaender A22a, Maynard & Miles A17a. William S. Burroughs The Braille Film San Francisco: Nova Broadcast Press, 1970. Schottlaender G94, Maynard & Miles B55a. Daniel Odier, William S. Burroughs The Job New York: Grove Press, Inc., 1970. First. Schottlaender H9b, Maynard & Miles A16a. Daniel Odier, William S. Burroughs The Job New York: Grove Press, Inc., 1970. First. Signed by Burroughs, inscribed “To Mike”. Schottlaender H9b, Maynard & Miles A16a. Daniel Odier, William S. Burroughs The Job New York: Grove Press, Inc., 1970. First. Uncorrected proof. Comb-bound in slightly soiled faded orange wrappers. Schottlaender H9b, Maynard & Miles A16a. Daniel Odier, William S. Burroughs The Job London: Jonathan Cape, 1970. First English. Personal copy of Allen Ginsberg, signed by Ginsberg and Burroughs. Inscribed by Burroughs on title page “For Allen a co worker of many years with respect for his achievements in the cause of freedom William Burroughs 1980”. Ownership signature of Ginsberg on obverse of leaf before title page, with notation at bottom “Signed June 12, 1980 by WSB.” Publisher’s slip (“with compliments from Tom Maschler Jonathan Cape Ltd. 30 Bedford Square London SW1”) and postcard (with picture of Ginsberg and Peter Orlovsky copyright Elsa Dorfman and the Witkin Gallery) laid in. Schottlaender H9c, Maynard & Miles A16b. William S. Burroughs IT: 74 n.p., 1970-02-27. Schottlaender C280, Maynard & Miles C269. William S. Burroughs Ali’s Smile - Record Brighton, England: Unicorn Books, 1971. First. A copy of the record with sleeve originally supplied with the book. This copy was purchased from a different source than my copy of the book, so there’s no evidence that the two constituted a complete set. Since one would expect complete sets to stay together, it is unlikely that they ever were. But together they form a made-up copy. Schottlaender A23a, Maynard & Miles A19a. William S. Burroughs Ali’s Smile Brighton, England: Unicorn Books, 1971. First. Signed and numbered by Burroughs, 39 of 99. Unfortunately missing the original box and record. Schottlaender A23a, Maynard & Miles A19a. William S. Burroughs Electronic Revolution Cambridge: Blackmoor Head Press, 1971. First. Includes four prints signed by Brion Gysin and publisher’s prepublication announcement (Maynard and Miles F27) laid in. Inscribed by Burroughs “for Philip Kaplan Williams Burroughs.” Number 10 of 50. In slipcase with numbered label. Schottlaender A24a, Maynard & Miles A21a. William S. Burroughs Electronic Revolution Cambridge: Blackmoor Head Press, 1971. First. Schottlaender A24a, Maynard & Miles A21a. William S. Burroughs Electronic Revolution Prepublication Announcement Cambridge: Blackmoor Head Press, 1971. First. The prepublication announcement for Electronic Revolution (Maynard and Miles A21a). Schottlaender A24a1, Maynard & Miles F27. William S. Burroughs Die elektronische Revolution Bonn: Expanded Media Editions, 1971. First German. Number 11 of 100. Schottlaender A24b, Maynard & Miles D27. William S. Burroughs Jack Kerouac Paris: L’Herne, 1971. First. Signed by Burroughs at contribution. Schottlaender A25, Maynard & Miles A18a. William S. Burroughs The Wild Boys New York: Grove Press, Inc., 1971. First. Signed by Burroughs. Schottlaender A26a, Maynard & Miles A20a. William S. Burroughs Antaeus 2 n.p., 1971. Maynard and Miles C304. Signed by Burroughs at entry. Schottlaender C302, Maynard & Miles C304. William S. Burroughs Letter Out Of Nowhere London: Anthony Harris, 1971. First. Per James Musser: “Single sheet (done in the style of a letter) printing a cut-up by Burroughs of a Harris text. Enclosed in a mailing envelope. Slightly darkened from age, else fine (trivial wear to envelope).” Schottlaender G30. William S. Burroughs Promotional Flyer for Am Here Books Ollon, Switzerland: Am Here Books, 1971. Fascimile of an untitled Burroughs manuscript page, revised text appearing later as “Seeing Red” in Exterminator! Printed on the verso of a promotional announcement for Am Here Books, one of 70 printed. Folded and sealed with a Fluxus stamp as issued. Schottlaender G61. Eric Mottram William Burroughs - The Algebra of Need Buffalo: INTREPID Press, 1971. Schottlaender I38a. William S. Burroughs Time Sussex, England: Urgency Press Rip-Off, 1972. The piracy of the “C” Press edition. Schottlaender A15b, Maynard & Miles A11b. William S. Burroughs Time Sussex, England: Urgency Press Rip-Off, 1972. The piracy of the “C” Press edition. Some yellowing at top and bottom. Schottlaender A15b, Maynard & Miles A11b. William S. Burroughs The Wild Boys London: Calder and Boyars, 1972. First English. Slightly soiled dust jacket. Schottlaender A20b, Maynard & Miles A20b. William S. Burroughs The Wild Boys New York: Grove Press, Inc., 1972. First American paperback. Signed by Burroughs. Schottlaender A26c, Maynard & Miles A20d. Barry Miles Proposed Layout For WSB Archive Description n.p., 1973. Drawing by Barry Miles titled “Proposed Layout For WSB Archive Description”, in reference to the “A Descriptive Catalogue of the William S . Burroughs Archive”. Drawing signed by Miles. Together with a letter and stamped envelope from Roberto Altmann to Philip Kaplan discussing a question about publishing matters at Altmann’s Aperios imprint, and a 1974 New’s Year greetings card from Maggy and Roberto Altmann, with artwork signed “MA.” Richard Aaron, Roberto Altmann William Burroughs Archive Contract n.p., 1973. Richard Aaron’s copy of the contract (in German) for the sale of Burroughs’ literary archive, as described in “A Descriptive Catalogue of the William S. Burroughs Archive,” to Roberto Altmann. Signed by Burroughs, Brion Gysin, Richard Aaron and Altmann, and dated 23 June 1973. This is the archive now in the Berg Collection of the New York Public Library. Brion Gysin William Burroughs Archive - Flyer n.p., 1973. The typescript of the introductory section of “A Descriptive Catalogue of the William S . Burroughs Archive,” together with notes on the catalog by Brion Gysin on lined notebook paper. Notes slightly yellowed at top, else fine. Per James Musser: “GYSIN, Brion. Gysin’s handwritten notes listing corrections for The Descriptive Catalog of the William S. Burroughs Archive published by Covent Garden in 1973. 3 pages. 4to. Gysin carefully lists, page-by-page, suggested corrections to the text of the catalog of the Burroughs archive that also included much of his own material. TOGETHER WITH two pages of original typescript by Gysin titled “Flyer.” Gysin’s text, never published, was intended to be a promotional flyer describing the catalog of the Burroughs archive. Fine.” William S. Burroughs Ali’s Smile Bonn, Germany: Expanded Media Editions, 1973. First German. Bilingual English/German text. Number 22 of 100, signed by Burroughs. Schottlaender A22b. William S. Burroughs Ali’s Smile Bonn, Germany: Expanded Media Editions, 1973. First German. Bilingual English/German text. Number 24 of 100, signed by Burroughs. Slight bend in bottom edge. Schottlaender A22b. William S. Burroughs The Wild Boys London: Corgi Books, 1973. Softbound. Schottlaender A26d, Maynard & Miles A20e. William S. Burroughs Exterminator! New York: The Viking Press, Inc., 1973. First. Dust jacket slightly soiled. Schottlaender A27, Maynard & Miles A23a. William S. Burroughs Mayfair Acadamy Series (More or Less) Brighton, England: Urgency Press Rip-Off, 1973. First. Schottlaender A28, Maynard & Miles A25a. William S. Burroughs White Subway London: Aloes Press, 1973. First. Signed by Burroughs. Number 13 of 25. In custom clamshell case. Schottlaender A30, Maynard & Miles A24a. William S. Burroughs White Subway London: Aloes Press, 1973. First. In wrappers with several small scrapes and spots. Schottlaender A30, Maynard & Miles A24a. William S. Burroughs The Book of Breething Ingatestone, Essex, UK: OU Henri Chopin, 1973. First. The publisher’s archive for The Book of Breething. Set in a four-ring binder, it contains: 1) the typescript of the book, with corrections in Burroughs’ hand; 2) the contract between Burroughs, Verbrugghen and the publisher, Henri Chopin (in French), signed by Burroughs; 3) signed correspondence from Burroughs to Verbrugghen about the contract and completion of the book; 4) typescripts of French and Dutch translations of the text, by Jean Chopin and Verbrugghen, respectively; 5) a manuscript of the French translation by Jean Chopin; and 6) some of the original drawings by the artist, Bob Gale, being that on the cover and on pages 20, 22 and 28 of the first edition. Schottlaender A31a. Brion Gysin, William S. Burroughs, Ian Sommerville Brion Gysin Let The Mice In West Glover, England: Something Else Press, Inc., 1973. First. Dust jacket slightly worn and rubbed in places. Schottlaender G31, Maynard & Miles A22a. Barry Miles, Brion Gysin A Descriptive Catalogue of the William S. Burroughs Archive London/Ollon: Covent Garden Press, Ltd./Am Here Books, 1973. Signed by Burroughs, Brion Gysin and Miles. Signed limited edition of 226, lettered O of 26. Bound in white leather. Laid in is a typescript signed by Burroughs with corrections in Burroughs’ hand, corresponding to but with variations from the text on page 161 of the catalog describing Item 1 from Folio Number 65, starting “Audrey Carsons, the Dead Child, the Frisco Kid…” In slipcase. Schottlaender I6. Barry Miles, Brion Gysin A Descriptive Catalogue of the William S. Burroughs Archive London/Ollon: Covent Garden Press, Ltd./Am Here Books, 1973. Signed by Burroughs, Brion Gysin and Miles. Signed limited edition of 226, this one unlettered and unnumbered. A presentation copy from Brion Gysin to Richard and Lilia Aaron. This copy has a full-page calligraphic drawing by Gysin (similar in form to the one numbered “iv” on the cover of the catalog) on the recto of the leaf before the title page. Signed by Gysin and inscribed “for Lilia + Richard with love.” In acetate dust jacket. Schottlaender I6. Barry Miles, Brion Gysin A Descriptive Catalogue of the William S. Burroughs Archive London/Ollon: Covent Garden Press, Ltd./Am Here Books, 1973. Signed by Burroughs, Brion Gysin and Miles. Signed limited edition of 226, this one unlettered and unnumbered. Some foxing to edges, and the top edge of the front of the acetate dust jacket is cut off. Schottlaender I6. Mohamed Choukri Jean Genet in Tangier New York: The Ecco Press, 1974. First. Signed by Burroughs. Contains forward by Burroughs. William S. Burroughs Exterminator! A Novel London: Calder and Boyars, 1974. Hardbound. Schottlaender A27b. William S. Burroughs The Book of Breething Ingatestone, Essex, UK: OU Henri Chopin, 1974. First. Signed by Burroughs. One of 350, unnumbered, in wrappers. Some fading of print on front cover. Schottlaender A31a. Mary Beach Electric Banana Cherry Valley, NY: Cherry Valley Editions, 1975. First. Signed by Mary Beach, one of 500 issued in wraps. Contains introduction by Burroughs. Price on back of cover wraps inked out. William S. Burroughs The Last Words of Dutch Schultz New York: Viking Press, Inc., 1975. First American. Schottlaender A22b. William S. Burroughs Port of Saints London: Covent Garden Press, Ltd., 1975. First. Signed and numbered by Burroughs, number 32 of 100. Some rubbing to slipcase. Schottlaender A29a. William S. Burroughs The Book of Breething Berkeley: Blue Wind Press, 1975. First American. Signed by Burroughs. Schottlaender A31b. William S. Burroughs The Book of Breething Berkeley: Blue Wind Press, 1975. Simultaneous wraps issue of first American edition. Schottlaender A31b. William S. Burroughs The Book of Breething Berkeley: Blue Wind Press, 1975. First American edition. Schottlaender A31b. William S. Burroughs Snack… London: Aloes Books, 1975. First. Schottlaender A32. William S. Burroughs Verdelgen Bussum, Netherlands: Uitgeverij Agathon, 1975. First. Schottlaender A33. Henri Chopin, Cozette de Charmoy, William S. Burroughs Ruby Editions Portfolio 1 London and Toronto: Wallrich Books, 1975. First. Signed by Burroughs on his contribution “Une Poeme Moderne”, number 18 of 100. Also contains broadsides by Cozette de Charmoy and Henri Chopin. Tape has lost adhesive on portfolio folder. Schottlaender B2. Charles Gatewood, William S. Burroughs Sidetripping New York: Derbibooks, Inc., 1975. First. Schottlaender G26a. Goodman, Michael B. William S. Burroughs: An Annotated Bibliography of his Works and Criticism New York: Garland Reference Library of the Humanities, 1975. First. A bibliography compiled by Michael B. Goodman of SUNY, Stony Brook, predating the publication of Maynard and Miles. Without dust jacket as issued. Schottlaender I3. Francois Legarde Le Colloque de Tanger - Autograph Letters n.p., 1976. Per James Musser: “Also included [with Le Colloque de Tanger as obtained] are 6 Autograph Letters Signed from Francois Lagarde to Brion Gysin.” William S. Burroughs Cobble Stone Gardens Cherry Valley, NY: Cherry Valley Editions, 1976. First. One of 50 hand bound copies signed by Burroughs, but mysteriously unnumbered in spite of publisher’s statement to the contrary. Bound in boards with black cloth and front wrapper pasted on front, with binding somewhat loose. Schottlaender A34. William S. Burroughs Cobble Stone Gardens Cherry Valley, New York: Cherry Valley Editions, 1976. First in wrappers. Slightly yellowed. Schottlaender A34. William S. Burroughs The Retreat Diaries New York: The City Moon, 1976. First. Signed and lettered by Burroughs, I (or possibly L?) of 26. As issued in brown paper envelope with cutaway section exposing red-on-white image of Burroughs, on front wrapper, with Burroughs’ lettering for title on front wrapper. Schottlaender A35. William S. Burroughs The Retreat Diaries New York: The City Moon, 1976. First. Signed by Burroughs and Allen Ginsberg. Slightly soiled. Schottlaender A35. William S. Burroughs Oeuvre Croisee Paris: Flammarion, 1976. First French. The true first edition of “The Third Mind.” Signed by Brion Gysin, inscribed “with best wishes Brion Gysin Paris 15 aug 81”. Schottlaender A36a. Francois Legarde Le Colloque de Tanger Geneva: Editions Ottezec, 1976. Ten black and white photos of Burroughs and Brion Gysin taken during the Colloque de Tanger symposium. Signed by Burroughs, Gysin, Francois Legarde (the photographer) and Gerard-Georges Lemaire (the symposium’s organizer.) Number 19 of 75. Tear and wear to lower left corner of printed folder. Schottlaender G45a. William S. Burroughs The CoEvolution Quarterly 16 n.p., 1977-12-21. Schottlaender C421. William S. Burroughs, Allen Ginsberg The Yage Letters San Francisco: City Lights Books, 1978. Eighth printing. Schottlaender A8b. William S. Burroughs The Third Mind New York: The Viking Press, Inc., 1978. First American. Schottlaender A36b. William S. Burroughs The Third Mind New York: The Viking Press, Inc., 1978. First American. Schottlaender A36b. William S. Burroughs Ali’s Smile/Naked Scientology Bonn: Expanded Media Editions, 1978. First. Wear on corners and creases in spine. Schottlaender A37a. William S. Burroughs When Naked Troubadours Shoot Snotty Baboons Northridge, CA: Lord John Press, 1978. First. Signed and numbered by Burroughs, number 99 of 100. Broadside, 14x20”, designed and illustrated by James R. Silke, also signed by him. Schottlaender A39. William S. Burroughs Search & Destroy 10 San Francisco: Search & Destroy, 1978. Contains “Some Last Words with Hombre Invisible.” Signed by Burroughs, inscribed “William Burroughs for Burt Bretton.” Some yellowing. Schottlaender C455. William S. Burroughs Burroughs I (Junkie, Auf der Suche nach Yage, Naked Lunch, Nova Express) Frankfurt: Zweitausendeins, 1978. First. Contains German translations of Junky, the Yage Letters, Naked Lunch and Nova Express. Inscribed by the translator Carl Wiessner: “Dear William — One of the first copies, fresh from the binder’s, to you - Hope you like this book - As ever, Carl”. Therefore this is presumably Burroughs’ own copy. In cardboard slipcase. Schottlaender D44, D68, D87, and D145. Francois Legarde The Three Minds Geneva: Images Nuit Blanche, 1978. First. A triptych of photographs made by Francois Legarde, with a photo of Burroughs on the right panel, Brion Gysin on the left, and a superimposed image of the two in the center. With folded insert, signed by Burroughs, Gysin and Legarde, number 17 of 35. In orange cardboard mounting. Schottlaender G46. John Giorno, James Grauerholz, Sylvere Lotringer The Nova Convention New York: Entermedia, 1978. First. Inscribed by James Grauerholz ‘For Brad Morrow “You shoulda been there!” James Grauerholz’. Schottlaender G62. William S. Burroughs Letters to Allen Ginsberg 1953 - 1957 Geneva: Claude Givaudan/Am Here Books, 1978. First. Signed by Burroughs and Allen Ginsberg, number 18 of 100 of a bilingual French-English version. In clear acetate dust jacket with some damage to the upper rear edge. Schottlaender H12a. Joe Maynard, Barry Miles William S. Burroughs: A Bibliography, 1953-73 Charlottesville, VA: University Press of Virginia, 1978. First. Without dust jacket as issued. Schottlaender I5. Joe Maynard, Barry Miles William S. Burroughs: A Bibliography, 1953-73 Charlottesville, VA: University Press of Virginia, 1978. First. Signed by Burroughs. Without dust jacket as issued. Schottlaender I5. Jimmy De Sana Submission New York: Scat Publications, 1979. First. Signed by Burroughs and De Sana, dated “1985” by De Sana. Wrappers scuffed and worn at edges. William S. Burroughs Ah Pook Is Here London: John Calder, 1979. First. Sunning to spine of dust jacket. Schottlaender A40a. William S. Burroughs Blade Runner (a movie) Berkeley, CA: Blue Wind Press, 1979. First. Schottlaender A41a. William S. Burroughs Blade Runner (a movie) Berkeley, CA: Blue Wind Press, 1979. First. Signed by Burroughs, numbered 63 of 100. Schottlaender A41a. William S. Burroughs Doctor Benway Santa Barbara, CA: Bradford Morrow, 1979. First. Signed by Burroughs, number 135 of 150. Slight yellowing to spine and top of dust jacket. Schottlaender A42. William S. Burroughs Roosevelt After Inauguration San Francisco: City Lights Books, 1979. First edition thus in wrappers. Reprint in wrappers, with “Sects and Death”, “The Whole Tamale”, and “When Did I Stop Wanting To Be President?” Schottlaender A43. William S. Burroughs Scrapbook 3 Geneva: Editions Claude Givaudan, 1979. First. Signed by Burroughs, number 27 of 30. Plate on inside back cover reads: “This first edition, printed in Xerox copies by Claudia Katayanagi and Patrick R. Firbo, Great White Way Kinetics, New-York, in January 1979, has been printed at 30 numbered copies.” and “Copyright Editions Claude Givaudan 3, Rue de Soleil Levant, Geneva”. Schottlaender A44. William S. Burroughs Wouldn’t You Polish Pine Floors… St Paul, MN: Bookslinger, 1979. First. Signed by Burroughs, lettered B of 26. Broadside, 10x13”, in “16 Broadsides” from Walker Art Center Reading Series 1979-1980, Minneapolis, Minnesota. All 16 in complete set. In clamshell box. Schottlaender A45. Herbert Huncke The Evening Sun Turned Crimson Cherry Valley, NY: Cherry Valley Editions, 1980. First, trade edition. Signed by Herbert Huncke. William S. Burroughs Port of Saints Berkeley, CA: Blue Wind Press, 1980. First American. Schottlaender A29b. William S. Burroughs The Book of Breething Berkeley, CA: Blue Wind Press, 1980. Second American. Signed by Burroughs, numbered 46 of 175. Without dust jacket as issued. Schottlaender A31c. William S. Burroughs The Book of Breething Berkeley, CA: Blue Wind Press, 1980. Second American, trade edition. Without dust jacket as issued. Schottlaender A31c. William S. Burroughs Three Novels (The Soft Machine, Nova Express, The Wild Boys) New York: Grove Press. Inc., 1980. First edition in wrappers. The Evergreen imprint version of this collection. Schottlaender A46a. William S. Burroughs Burroughs II (Die wilden Boys, Port of Saints) Frankfurt: Zweitausendeins, 1980. First. Per James Musser: “The first German edition of The Wild Boys (and presumably first German Port of Saints). Tipped-in frontis illustration by S. Clay Wilson whose full-page plates appear throughout the book. BURROUGHS’ PERSONAL COPY SPECIALLY BOUND for him by the publisher in DIAMONDBACK RATTLESNAKE SKIN with Burroughs’ initials stamped to the spine. Signed on the title page by Burroughs and also by S. Clay Wilson who dated his signature 1996. (Wilson’s person copy was bound in Niger goat and snakeskin–so depending on how you look at it each copy is unique—or you can say there were two specially bound author copies bound by the publisher.) Fine in slightly used slightly soiled folding chemise covered in the same silk they used for the endpapers.” Schottlaender D98 and D137. William S. Burroughs Cities of the Red Night New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1981. First. Signed by Burroughs. Schottlaender A47a. William S. Burroughs Early Routines Santa Barbara, CA: Cadmus Editions, 1981. First. Signed by Burroughs and David Hockney, who did Burroughs’ portrait on front cover. Lettered Q of 26, in rice paper dust jacket. Schottlaender A48a. William S. Burroughs Early Routines Santa Barbara, CA: Cadmus Editions, 1981. First. Signed by Burroughs, numbered 2 of 125, in rice paper dust jacket. Schottlaender A48a. William S. Burroughs Essais - Tome I Paris: Christian Bourgois Éditeur, 1981. First. Volume 1 of 2. Schottlaender A49. William S. Burroughs Streets of Chance New York: The Red Ozier Press, 1981. First. Signed by Burroughs and illustrator Howard Buchwald, number 121 of 160. Beautifully bound, without dust jacket as issued. Schottlaender A50. Am Here Books Am Here Books Catalogue 5 Santa Barbara, CA: Am Here Books, 1981. Lists 37 Burroughs items. Contains 7” vinyl E.P. record of Burroughs reading “The Last Words of Hassan-I-Sabbah”. Schottlaender E14. John Giorno You’re The Guy I Want To Share My Money With New York: Giorno Poetry Systems, 1981. First. GPS 020-021. Two 12” vinyl records in gatefold jacket. Schottlaender E36a. Victor Bockris With WIlliam Burroughs New York: Seaver Books, 1981. First edition in wrappers. Schottlaender H6b. Atticus Books Atticus Books Catalogue 8 San Diego, CA: Atticus Books, 1981. First. Signed by Burroughs, numbered 39 of 50. Lists 360 Burroughs items. Schottlaender I1. Michael B. Goodman Contemporary Literary Censorship: The Case History of Burroughs’ Naked Lunch Metuchen, NJ : Scarecrow Press, 1981. First. Critical study by Michael Barry Goodman. Signed by the author. Schottlaender I22. William S. Burroughs The Naked Lunch London: John Calder, 1982. Softbound. Review copy, with publisher’s note to reviewers laid in. Schottlaender A2i. William S. Burroughs Electronic Revolution Bonn: Expanded Media Editions, 1982. Third. Reprint in wrappers, with “Feedback from Watergate to the Garden of Eden”. Schottlaender A24d. William S. Burroughs Cities of the Red Night New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1982. First printing in pictorial wrappers. Wrappers faded and cracked on spine. Schottlaender A47c. William S. Burroughs Mummies Dusseldorf & New York: Edition Kaldeway, 1982. First. Contains 5 prints of etchings signed by the artist, Carl Apfelschnitt. Half-title reads: “Edition: Volume 5”. Colophon reads: “Printed in 70 copies and 5 copies on [sic] Japan. Bound by Christian Zwang, Hamburg. Typography Gunnar A. Kaldewey. First Edition. Copyright William Borroughs [sic] 1982.” Some scuffing to front cover. Schottlaender A51. William S. Burroughs Sinki’s Sauna New York: Pequod Press, 1982. First. Signed by Burroughs, numbered 102 of 500. Schottlaender A52a. William S. Burroughs A William Burroughs Reader London: Picador, 1982. First. Rubbed on spine of wrappers. Schottlaender A53. William S. Burroughs, Throbbing Gristle, Brion Gysin, V. Vale RE/Search 4/5 San Francisco, CA: RE/Search Publications, 1982. First. Softbound. Schottlaender C523a. William S. Burroughs, Throbbing Gristle, Brion Gysin, V. Vale RE/Search 4/5 San Francisco, CA: RE/Search Publications, 1982. Second. Hardbound. Signed by Vale. Schottlaender C523b. William S. Burroughs The Final Academy: Statements of a Kind London: The Final Academy, 1982. First. Compiled by Roger Ely. Schottlaender G22. William S. Burroughs Letters to Allen Ginsberg 1953 - 1957 New York: Full Court Press, 1982. First American in wrappers. Personal copy of Peter Orlovsky, signed by Orlovsky and inscribed by Burroughs “For Peter all the best Letters Love William S. Burroughs June 7, 1982.” Slight pencil mark on front cover. Schottlaender H12c. William S. Burroughs Letters to Allen Ginsberg 1953 - 1957 New York: Full Court Press, 1982. First American. Signed by Burroughs and Ginsberg, number 95 of 100. Schottlaender H12c. William S. Burroughs Letters to Allen Ginsburg 1953 - 1957 New York: Full Court Press, 1982. First American. Slight pencil mark on lower left front of dust jacket. With xerox of publisher’s press release laid in. Schottlaender H12c. William S. Burroughs “to talk for Joe the Dead” - Typescript n.p., 1983. Per Brian Cassidy: “[1pp. Typed MSS With Holograph Corrections and Notes From His Short Story ‘to talk for Joe the Dead’]. 1983. 4to. Very good or better; mild toning along edges where framed mat once was, tape remnant from same to top edge. Both unobtrusive. Single manuscript page from Burroughs’ short story “to talk for Joe the Dead” from his collection TORNADO ALLEY (Cherry Valley, 1989 - provided). This portion corresponds to pp. 17-18 from that edition.Typed and dated April 16, 1983, the piece likely originated from Burroughs’ journal as several lines at the beginning of the page seem to record a dream featuring Allen Ginsberg not mentioned in the published version. Several hand corrections to typescript as well as two informative notes to upper and lower margins in Burroughs’ hand. The first: “He’s going to kill his doctor (me)”. The second explains the origins of the story: “This is an extension of Jerry Wallace story about a criminal boy 7 feet tall. I said, “He’d better abreviate [sic?] himself”. An uncommon look at Burroughs’ working methods, even if only in part.” V. Vale, Andrea Juno RE/Search 8/9 San Francisco, CA: RE/Search Publications, 1984. Contains essays “Mythmaker of the 20th Century” and “Preface to The Atrocity Exhibition” by Burroughs. S. Clay Wilson, Bernard Willem Holtrop Bastard Paris: Futuropolis, 1984. First. Personal copy of Gregory Corso of cartoon collaboration by Willem and Wilson. Signed by Burroughs, Wilson and Gregory Corso (using his Italian name “Nuncio Corso”). Contains endorsement by Burroughs. William S. Burroughs Naked Lunch New York: Grove Press, Inc., 1984. Signed limited 25th anniversary edition. Signed and numbered by Burroughs, 38 of 500. In slip case without dust jacket as issued. Schottlaender A2j. William S. Burroughs Essais - Tome II Paris: Christian Bourgois Éditeur, 1984. First. Volume 2 of 2. Schottlaender A49. William S. Burroughs The Burroughs File San Francisco: City Lights Books, 1984. First in wrappers. Schottlaender A54. William S. Burroughs The Burroughs File San Francisco: City Lights Books, 1984. First. Schottlaender A54. William S. Burroughs The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse Bonn: Expanded Media Editions, 1984. First. Schottlaender A55a. William S. Burroughs The Place of Dead Roads New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1984. First. Signed and numbered by Burroughs, 176 of 300. In slip case without dust jacket as issued. Schottlaender A56a. William S. Burroughs The Place of Dead Roads New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1984. First. Schottlaender A56a. William S. Burroughs Ruski Brooklyn, NY: Hand-Job Press, 1984. First. Signed by Burroughs, numbered 314 of 500. Schottlaender A57a. Robert Walker New York Inside Out Toronto: Skyline Press, 1984. First. Schottlaender G92. Fred McDarrah Kerouac & Friends - A Beat Generation Album New York : W. Morrow, 1985. First. Signed by the author and the following Beat Generation figures: Ted Joans, Herbert Hunke, Carl Solomon, Jack Micheline, Diane di Prima, Gregory Corso and Allen Ginsberg. William S. Burroughs The Adding Machine London: John Calder, 1985. First. Per the London bookseller Any Amount of Books: “From the working library of novelist Angela Carter (1940 - 1992) with her posthumous bookplate. This small, attractive bookplate reads ‘From the Library of Angela Carter’ and was designed by Sebastian Carter of the Rampant Lions Press and was authorised by the executors of her estate, from whom we bought the major part of her considerable collection. Fine in fine dust wrapper.” Schottlaender A58a. William S. Burroughs Queer New York: Viking Penguin, Inc., 1985. First. Schottlaender A59a. William S. Burroughs The Adding Machine New York: Seaver Books, 1986. First American. Signed by Burroughs. Dust jacket worn on edges. Schottlaender A58b. William S. Burroughs The Adding Machine New York: Seaver Books, 1986. First American. Dust jacket worn on edges. Schottlaender A58b. William S. Burroughs The Cat Inside New York: The Grenfell Press, 1986. First. Signed by Burroughs and Brion Gysin, who illustrated the book. Number 18 of 115, hand bound and hand printed on antique paper, with in rice paper wraps. With publisher’s pre-publication advertisement. Schottlaender A60a. William S. Burroughs The Cat Inside New York: The Grenfell Press, 1986. First. Signed by Burroughs and Gysin, number XVI of 18 copies bound in vellum with Gysin drawing in gold on the front cover. In custom made box. Schottlaender A60a. William S. Burroughs Conjunctions 9 New York: David R. Godine, Publishers, Inc., 1986. Contains “The Cat Inside.” Hard bound. Schottlaender C558. Alan Ansen William Burroughs: An Essay Sudbury, MA: Water Row Press, 1986. First. Signed by Ansen and Burroughs, number 9 of 50. Schottlaender H2. William S. Burroughs From the Western Lands Santa Fe, NM: Casa Sin Nombre, 1987. First. Signed by Burroughs, one of 750. Broadside. Schottlaender A61. William S. Burroughs The Western Lands New York: Viking Penguin, Inc., 1987. First. Schottlaender A62a. William S. Burroughs The Western Lands New York: Viking Penguin, Inc., 1987. First. Signed by Burroughs. Schottlaender A62a. Paul Steven Lim Lee and the Boys in the Backroom Lawrence, KS: Lawrence Community Theatre, 1987. Poster announcing “Lee and the Boys in the Backroom,” “a play “based on the novel QUEER and the unpublished correspondence” of WILLIAM S. BURROUGHS at Lawrence Community Theatre May 8 - 12,” directed by Paul Lim, a professor of English at the University of Kansas and one of Burroughs’ friends in Lawrence. Picture of Burroughs seated with “boy” and life-sized doll at a table with Mexican food. Schottlaender G50b. Robin Lydenberg Word Cultures: Radical Theory and Practice in William S. Burroughs’ Fiction. Urbana, IL : University of Illinois Press, 1987. First. Critical study by Robin Lydenberg. Schottlaender I37. William S. Burroughs The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse Bonn: Expanded Media Editions, 1988. First. Second printing. Schottlaender A55a. William S. Burroughs, James Grauerholz William Burroughs: Painting Amsterdam: Suzanne Biederberg Gallery, 1988. First. Brochure accompanying exhibitions in Amsterdam and London. With reproductions of 16 paintings and “On Burroughs’ Art”, an essay by James Grauerholz, including explication of each piece. Schottlaender B3. William S. Burroughs William S. Burroughs Santa Fe, NM: Gallery Casa Sin Nombre, 1988. First. Softbound. Schottlaender B4. Robert Crumb Meet The Beats Poster No. 2 - William S. Burroughs Sudbury, MA: Water Row Press, 1988. Unsigned print of Robert Crumb caricature of Burroughs. In museum-quality matte and frame. Schottlaender G22. William S. Burroughs, Keith Haring Apocalypse New York: George Mulder Fine Arts, 1988. First. Dust jacket yellowing around edges. Hardbound. Schottlaender G35a. William S. Burroughs, Keith Haring Apocalypse New York: George Mulder Fine Arts, 1988. First issue in wrappers. Schottlaender G35a. Ted Morgan Literary Outlaw New York: Henry Holt and Company, Inc., 1988. First. Schottlaender H33a. Gregory Corso Mindfield New York: Thunder’s Mouth Press, 1989. First. A book of poems by Gregory Corso, with forwards by Burroughs and Allen Ginsberg. Letter O of a limited edition of 26 signed by the author, as well as Burroughs and Ginsberg. As issued in red slip case. William S. Burroughs, James Grauerholz Literary Vision New York: Jack Tilton Gallery, 1989. Perfect-bound brochure accompanying showing of painting by noted literary figures, including Burroughs and Gysin, at Jack Tilton Gallery, New York. With excerpts from Grauerholz’s essay “On Burroughs’ Art”. William S. Burroughs Portrait of Burroughs n.p., 1989. Portrait of Burroughs in casual shirt sitting, facing camera, with wry expression on face. Signed “By Nelson Lyon, WSB ‘89”. Creased at lower right corner. William S. Burroughs Clause 27 Is Proposition 6 Is The Whole Tamale n.p.: The Horse Press, 1989. First. Signed by Burroughs “William S. Burroughs 1/23/1997”. Year of publication approximate per Shoaf and Schottlaender. Schottlaender A63. William S. Burroughs Interzone New York: Viking Penguin, Inc., 1989. First. Schottlaender A64a. William S. Burroughs Tornado Alley Cherry Valley, NY: Cherry Valley Editions, 1989. First. In wrappers. Schottlaender A65. William S. Burroughs Tornado Alley Cherry Valley, NY: Cherry Valley Editions, 1989. First. Signed by Burroughs, unnumbered, one of 100, without dust jacket as issued. Hardbound. Schottlaender A65. William S. Burroughs, James Grauerholz William S. Burroughs Paintings Basel: Editions Carzaniga + Ueker AG, 1989. First. Brochure accompanying exhibition in Galerie Carzaniga + Ueker, Basel. With reproductions of 23 paintings and German and English versions of Grauerholz’s essay. Schottlaender B11. William S. Burroughs Conjunctions 13 New York: Collier Press, 1989. Contains “Christ and The Museum of Extinct Species”. In wrappers. Schottlaender C594. Antony Balch Towers Open Fire Montauk, NY: Mystic Fire Video, 1989. Films featuring Burroughs and his work by Antony Balch, with the involvement of Ian Sommerville and Brion Gysin. VHS. Schottlaender F22. William S. Burroughs Stiletto 1 Lawrence, KS: Howling Dog Press, 1989-04. Contains 4 selections from “Interzone”. With insert reproduction of “Twilight’s Last Gleaming” painting by Burroughs. In plastic bag with metallic wrappers. Schottlaender C603. J.G. Ballard The Atrocity Exhibition San Francisco, CA: RE/Search Publications, 1990. Preface by Burroughs. First issue in wrappers. William S. Burroughs Paper Roses on the Prefabricated Heart n.p., 1990. Signed by Burroughs. Fabriano paper, 20x16”. Number 8 in Earl McGrath Gallery list of works for Los Angeles exhibit in September-October 1990. In original matte and frame. William S. Burroughs Dead City Radio New York: Island Records, Inc., 1990. Single CD, 17 tracks of readings from various works, with various backing musicians. Produced by Nelson Lyon, who became a good friend of Burroughs and amassed a significant collection of Burroughs and Beats material, sold at auction in 1999, and some items of which have found their way into my collection. Schottlaender E7. Earl McGrath Gallery Earl McGrath Gallery: List of Works West Hollywood, CA: Earl McGrath Gallery, 1990-09. Xerox of list of works by Burroughs on exhibition at the Earl McGrath Gallery in West Hollywood, CA, September-October 1990. With receipt for “Paper Roses on the Prevaricated Heart.” John Strausbaugh, Donald Blaise The Drug User: Documents 1840 - 1960 New York: Blast Books, 1991. First. Softbound. Contains foreword by Burroughs. William S. Burroughs X-Ray Man New York: Water Row/Lococo Mulder, 1991. Per Eric Shoaf, “untitled three-color broadside (red, blue & purple on white background). 9.5 x 13 inches silkscreen print with small embossed lizard figure in lower right corner.” Signed by Burroughs. Limited edition printing, number 136 of 178. In original matte and frame. William S. Burroughs Ghost of Chance New York: Whitney Museum of Art, 1991. First. Signed by Burroughs and George Condo, the illustrator. Unnumbered, one of 160, in slipcase. Schottlaender A66a. William S. Burroughs The Seven Deadly Sins New York/St. Louis: Lococo/Mulder, 1991. First. Signed and numbered by Burroughs, 43 of 150. Leather bound, with shotgun pellet-perforated wood piece mounted on front cover. With shipping carton. Schottlaender B18a. William S. Burroughs The Cat Inside New York: Viking Penguin, 1992. Second. Without dust jacket, as issued. Schottlaender A60b. William S. Burroughs Paper Cloud Thick Pages Kyoto: Kyoto Shoin Int’l., 1992. First. In laminated pictorial cardboard hardcover. Schottlaender B20. William S. Burroughs, Kurt Cobain The “Priest” They Called Him Portland, OR: Tim Kerr Records, 1992. First on CD. Schottlaender E22. William S. Burroughs Break Through In Grey Room Brussels, Belgium: Sub Rosa, 1993. Burroughs reading with support from Ian Sommerville and Brion Gysin. CD. Schottlaender E5b. William S. Burroughs The Letters of William S. Burroughs: 1945 - 1959 New York: Viking Penguin, Inc., 1993. First. Proof copy, with publisher’s letter to reviewers laid in. Schottlaender H11a. William S. Burroughs The Letters of William S. Burroughs: 1945 - 1959 New York: Viking Penguin, Inc., 1993. First trade edition. Schottlaender H11a. Barry Miles William Burroughs: El Hombre Invisible New York: Hyperion, 1993. First American edition. Schottlaender H32b. Elisa Segrave The Junky’s Christmas And Other Yuletide Stories London: Serpent’s Tail Publishing, 1994. Contains “The Junky’s Christmas” by Burroughs. William S. Burroughs Photos and Remembering Jack Kerouac Louisville, KY: White Fields Press, 1994. First. Signed by Burroughs, lettered F of 26. Schottlaender A69. William S. Burroughs Remembering Jack Kerouac Louisville, KY: White Fields Press, 1994. First. Signed by Burroughs, numbered 10 of 49. Schottlaender A70. Paul Cecil A William Burroughs Birthday Book London: Temple Press, 1994. First. In stapled wrappers. Schottlaender G17. William S. Burroughs Ghost of Chance New York: High Risk Books, 1995. First trade edition. Schottlaender A65b. William S. Burroughs Junky; Queer; Naked Lunch New York: Quality Paperbook Book Club, 1995. Softbound. Schottlaender A72. William S. Burroughs My Education: A Book of Dreams New York: Viking Press, Inc., 1995. First edition. Schottlaender A73a. William S. Burroughs Pantopon Rose Charleston, WV: Parchment Gallery Graphics, 1995. First. Signed and numbered by Burroughs, number 40 of 60. Schottlaender A74. Water Row Books Report of the Death of an American Citizen … Mexico, D.F., Mexico, September 24, 1951 …Joan Vollmer Burroughs …/ Marlborough, MA: Water Row Books, 1995. First. Broadside, numbered 68 of 100. Schottlaender G1. John de St. Jorre Venus Bound: The Erotic Voyage of the Olympia Press and Its Writers. New York: Random House, 1996. First. Anne Waldman The Beat Book Boston, MA: Shambhala Publications, 1996. First. Edited by Anne Waldman. Contains seven selected writings by Burroughs. William S. Burroughs Essais - Tome I Paris: Christian Bourgois Éditeur, 1996. Second. Volume 1 of 2. Schottlaender A49. William S. Burroughs, Timothy Leary, Benjamin Weissman Concrete and Buckshot: William S. Burroughs, Paintings 1987 - 1996 Los Angeles: Smart Art Press, 1996. First. Schottlaender B22a. Robert A. Sobieszek Ports of Entry: Williams Burroughs and the Arts Los Angeles, CA: Los Angeles County Museum of Art , 1996. First. Produced for a 1996 exhibition at LACMA. Schottlaender B23a. Robert A. Sobieszek Ports of Entry: Williams Burroughs and the Arts Los Angeles, CA: Los Angeles County Museum of Art , 1996. First. Produced for a 1996 exhibition at LACMA. Mint in original shrinkwrap. Schottlaender B23a. Funeral Card n.p., 1997. Item from Schottlaender G97. The funeral card from the memorial service held in Lawrence, KS on August 6th, 1997. Schottlaender G97. William S. Burroughs Word Virus: The William Burroughs Reader New York: Grove Press, 1998. First. Schottlaender A76a. William S. Burroughs Word Virus: The William Burroughs Reader New York: Grove Press, 1998. First. Schottlaender A76a. John Tytell, Mellon Paradise Outlaws New York: WIlliam Morrow & Company, Inc., 1999. First. Price sticker on front of dust jacket. James Musser, Johnny Brewton In Search of Yage Forest Knolls, CA: Skyline Books, 1999. First. Per James Musser: “Contains three original b&w photographs of William Burroughs in the Amazon jungle in the 1950s. The photographs were taken by an unknown person who accompanied Burroughs on his South American expedition to research the use of yage by local curanderos, a journey chronicled in The Yage Letters. They show Burroughs in his pith helmet and safari clothes, in one photo wielding a machete, in another posing with a long rifle, and in the third he’s standing with two native children. The 5” x 7” photographs are corner-mounted on paper that simulates the bark of the Banisteria caapi vine. The pages are bound into covers of richly textured, sumptuous hand-made paper bound at the spine with brass screws. The booklet was designed and hand-assembled by Johnny Brewton of X-Ray Book Co. in an edition limited to only 26 lettered copies. The photographs, two of which are previously unpublished, were reproduced from the original negatives and are the only prints to be made from these negatives. This first publication from Skyline Books is a nice companion to The Yage Letters, providing an intriguing look at William Burroughs as explorer and ethnobotanist. As new.” Lettered R of 26. Schottlaender A77. William S. Burroughs The Best of William Burroughs New York: Giorno Poetry Systems, 1999. Contains booklet. Schottlaender E3. Eric C. Shoaf, Robert H. Jackson William S. Burroughs: Time, Place, Word Providence, R.I.: Friends of the Library, Brown University, 2000. First. Edited by Eric C. Shoaf and Robert H. Jackson. Schottlaender G77. William S. Burroughs Last Words: The Final Journals of William S. Burroughs New York: Grove Press, Inc., 2000. First. Schottlaender H10a. William S. Burroughs Last Words: The Final Journals of William S. Burroughs New York: Grove Press, Inc., 2000. First. Schottlaender H10a. Eric C. Shoaf Collecting William S. Burroughs in Print: A Checklist Rumford, RI: Rock n’ Roll Research Press, 2000. First. Compiled by Eric C. Shoaf. Signed by Shoaf, letter Z of 26 lettered copies. Schottlaender I11a. Eric C. Shoaf Collecting William S. Burroughs in Print: A Checklist Rumford, RI: Rock n’ Roll Research Press, 2000. First. Compiled by Eric C. Shoaf. Signed by Shoaf, number 40 of 174 numbered copies. Schottlaender I11a. William S. Burroughs Words of Advice for Young People Encinitas, CA: FreeThought Publications, 2001. First. Number 5 of 250. Signed by the photographer, Michael Monfort. Schottlaender A79. Sylvere Lotringer Burroughs Live: The Collected Interviews of William S. Burroughs, 1960-1997 Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2001. First. Edited by Sylvere Lotringer. Schottlaender H7. Sylvere Lotringer Burroughs Live: The Collected Interviews of William S. Burroughs, 1960-1997 Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2001. First. Edited by Sylvere Lotringer. Schottlaender H7. Brion Gysin, Jose F. Kuri Brion Gysin Tuning in to the Multimedia Age London: Thames & Hudson Ltd., 2003. First. Edited by Jose Ferez Kuri. Contains “Port of Entry Here is space-time painting” by Burroughs. First issue in wrappers. Oliver Harris WIlliam Burroughs and the Secret of Fascination Carbondale, Ill.: Southern Illinois University Press, 2003. First. Hardbound in dustjacket. Schottlaender I28. Ken Lopez Bookseller William Burroughs Literary Archive Hadley, MA: Ken Lopez Bookseller, 2005. First. An excellent description of and background to the sale of the Burroughs Archive to the New York Public Library. Schottlaender I4. William S. Burroughs, Allen Ginsberg, Oliver Harris The Yage Letters Redux San Francisco: City Lights Books, 2006. Second printing. Schottlaender A8e. Rob Johnson The Lost Years of William Burroughs: Beats in South Texas College Station, TX: Texas A&M University Press, 2006. First. In wrappers. Schottlaender H26. William S. Burroughs Le Temps des Assassins Rouen, FR: Dérriere la Salle de Bains, 2008. First thus. Pamphlet. Reproduction of texts by Burroughs translated to French by Lucien Suel and originally published in La Collection du Starscrewer nos. 7 (January 1978) and 12 (2nd quarter 1979.) William S. Burroughs Everything Lost: The Latin American Notebook of WIlliam S. Burroughs Columbus, OH: Ohio State University Press, 2008. First. Schottlaender A80. William S. Burroughs, Jack Kerouac And The Hippos Were Boiled In Their Tanks New York: Grove Press, 2008. First. Schottlaender A81. Laura Hoptman Brion Gysin: Dream Machine London: Merrell, 2010. First. A survey of Brion Gysin’s art and influence, issued as part of the New Museum’s Gysin exhibition in New York held in 2010. Includes a contribution by James Grauerholz titled “Mr Burroughs Mr Gysin” as well as a variant of his essay “On Burroughs’ Art”, originally included in Schottlaender B4 (here with title misspelled as “On Burroughs’s [sic] Art”.) Includes materials and instructions for the construction of a Dream Machine. Hardbound. Tim Head, C.A. Howe, Barry Miles, Jon Savage Cut-ups, Cut-ins, Cut-outs: The Art of William S. Burroughs Nürnberg: Verlag für moderne Kunst; Wien: Kunsthalle Wien, 2012. First. Schottlaender B29. William S. Burroughs Rub Out The Words: The Letters of WIlliam S. Burroughs 1959-1974 New York: Ecco, 2012. First. Schottlaender H14. Patricia Allmer, John Sears Taking Shots: The Photography of William S. Burroughs Munich, DE: Prestel Verlag, 2014. First. Edited by Patricia Allmer and John Sears. Produced for an exhibition of Burroughs’ photographic work in 2014 at The Photographers’ Gallery in London. Schottlaender B30. Barry Miles Call Me Burroughs: A Life New York, NY: Hachette Book Group, 2014. First. Barry Miles’ biography of Burroughs. Schottlaender H31. Eric C. Shoaf William S. Burroughs A Collector’s Guide Providence, RI: Inkblot; distributed by Aftermath Books, 2014. First thus. Softbound. Schottlaender I11b. William S. Burroughs The Travel Agency Is on Fire New York: The Center for the Humanities, The Graduate Center, The City University of New York, 2015. First. Alex Wermer-Colan, ed. (Lost and Found: The CUNY Poetics Document Initiative; Ser. 5, No. 2) Staplebound. Schottlaender A82. A.J. Lees Mentored By A Madman: The William Burroughs Experiment Honiton, Devon, UK: Notting Hill Editions Ltd., 2017. Second. Hardbound without wrappers. V. Vale Dinner at Pat’s A Conversation With W.S. Burroughs San Francisco, CA: RE/Search Publications, 2018. First. Signed by Vale, with two color photos (“WSB” and “WSB Room”, also signed by Vale) laid in. William S. Burroughs The Finger London: Penguin Books, 2018. Penguin Modern #25, containing “The Finger”, “Driving Lesson”, “The Junky’s Christmas”, “Lee and the Boys”, “In the Café Central”, and “Dream of the Penal Colony.” First thus. Softbound. William S. Burroughs William S. Burroughs’ “The Revised Boy Scout Manual”: An Electronic Revolution Columbus, OH: Ohio State University Press, 2018. Edited by Geoffrey D. Smith and John M. Bennett. Afterword by V. Vale. First. Softbound. William S. Burroughs, Allen Ginsberg, Steven Taylor Don’t Hide the Madness: William S. Burroughs in Conversation with Allen Ginsberg New York: Three Rooms Press, 2018. Conversation between Burroughs and Ginsberg recorded on tape during March 1992, and transcribed by Steven Taylor. First. Hardbound without wrappers. V. Vale Burroughs and Friends: Lost Interviews San Francisco, CA: RE/Search Publications, 2019. RE/Search #17. Contains interviews with Burroughs, Brion Gysin, Diane di Prima, John Giorno, and Gerald V. Casale. First. Softbound.
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Itâs about Art, Music & Literature
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Burroughs smoked incessantly, alternating between a box of English Ovals and a box of Benson & Hedges. As the interview progressed, the room filled with smoke. He opened the window. The temperature outside was seventy degrees, the warmest New Yearâs Day in St. Louisâs history, a yellow jacket flew in and settled on the pane. The bright afternoon deepened. The faint cries of children rose up from the broad brick alleys in which Burroughs had played as a boy.
Interviewer
You grew up here?
William S. Burroughs
Yes. I went to John Burroughs School and the Taylor School, and was out West for a bit, and then went to Harvard.
Interviewer
Any relation to the addingâmachine firm?
Burroughs
My grandfather. You see, he didnât exactly invent the adding machine, but he invented the gimmick that made it work, namely, a cylinder full of oil and a perforated piston that will always move up and down at the same rate of speed. Very simple principle, like most inventions. And it gave me a little money, not much, but a little.
Interviewer
What did you do at Harvard?
Burroughs
Studied English lit. John Livingston Lowes. Whiting. I sat in on Kittredgeâs course. Those are the main people I recall. I lived in Adams House and then I got fed up with the food and I moved to Claverly Hall, where I lived the last two years. I didnât do any writing in college.
Interviewer
When and why did you start to write?
Burroughs
I started to write in about 1950, I was thirtyâfive at the time, there didnât seem to be any strong motivation. I simply was endeavoring to put down in a more or less straightforward journalistic style something about my experiences with addiction and addicts.
Interviewer
Why did you feel compelled to record these experiences?
Burroughs
I didnât feel compelled. I had nothing else to do. Writing gave me something to do every day. I donât feel the results were at all spectacular. Junky is not much of a book, actually. I knew very little about writing at that time.
Interviewer
Where was this?
Burroughs
In Mexico City. I was living near Sears, Roebuck, right around the corner from the University of Mexico. I had been in the army four or five months and I was there on the GI Bill, studying native dialects. I went to Mexico partly because things were becoming so difficult with the drug situation in America. Getting drugs in Mexico was quite easy, so I didnât have to rush around, and there wasnât any pressure from the law.
Interviewer
Why did you start taking drugs?
Burroughs
Well, I was just bored. I didnât seem to have much interest in becoming a successful advertising executive or whatever, or living the kind of life Harvard designs for you. After I became addicted in New York in 1944, things began to happen. I got in some trouble with the law, got married, moved to New Orleans, and then went to Mexico.
Interviewer
There seems to be a great deal of middleâclass voyeurism in this country concerning addiction, and in the literary world, downright reverence for the addict. You apparently donât share these points of view.
Burroughs
No, most of it is nonsense. I think drugs are interesting principally as chemical means of altering metabolism and thereby altering what we call reality, which I would define as a more or less constant scanning pattern.
Interviewer
What do you think of the hallucinogens and the new psychedelic drugs â LSDâ25?
Burroughs
I think theyâre extremely dangerous, much more dangerous than heroin. They can produce overwhelming anxiety states. Iâve seen people try to throw themselves out of windows, whereas the heroin addict is mainly interested in staring at his own toe. Other than deprivation of the drug, the main threat to him is an overdose. Iâve tried most of the hallucinogens without an anxiety reaction, fortunately. LSDâ25 produced results for me similar to mescaline. Like all hallucinogens, LSD gave me an increased awareness, more a hallucinated viewpoint than any actual hallucination. You might look at a doorknob and it will appear to revolve, although you are conscious that this is the result of the drug. Also, van Goghish colors, with all those swirls, and the crackle of the universe.
Interviewer
Have you read Henri Michauxâs book on mescaline?
Burroughs
His idea was to go into his room and close the door and hold in the experiences. I had my most interesting experiences with mescaline when I got outdoors and walked around â colors, sunsets, gardens. It produces a terrible hangover, though, nasty stuff. It makes one ill and interferes with coordination. Iâve had all the interesting effects I need, and I donât want any repetition of those extremely unpleasant physical reactions.
Interviewer
The visions of drugs and the visions of art donât mix?
Burroughs
Never. The hallucinogens produce visionary states, sort of, but morphine and its derivatives decrease awareness of inner processes, thoughts, and feelings. They are painkillers, pure and simple. They are absolutely contraindicated for creative work, and I include in the lot alcohol, morphine, barbiturates, tranquilizers â the whole spectrum of sedative drugs. As for visions and heroin, I had a hallucinatory period at the very beginning of addiction, for instance, a sense of moving at high speed through space. But as soon as addiction was established, I had no visions â vision â at all and very few dreams.
Interviewer
Why did you stop taking drugs?
Burroughs
I was living in Tangier in 1957, and I had spent a month in a tiny room in the Casbah staring at the toe of my foot. The room had filled up with empty Eukodol cartons, I suddenly realized I was not doing anything. I was dying. I was just apt to be finished. So I flew to London and turned myself over to Dr. John Yerbury Dent for treatment. Iâd heard of his success with the apomorphine treatment. Apomorphine is simply morphine boiled in hydrochloric acid, itâs nonaddictive. What the apomorphine did was to regulate my metabolism. Itâs a metabolic regulator. It cured me physiologically. Iâd already taken the cure once at Lexington, and although I was off drugs when I got out, there was a physiological residue. Apomorphine eliminated that. Iâve been trying to get people in this country interested in it, but without much luck. The vast majority â social workers, doctors â have the copâs mentality toward addiction. A probation officer in California wrote me recently to inquire about the apomorphine treatment. Iâll answer him at length. I always answer letters like that.
Interviewer
Have you had any relapses?
Burroughs
Yes, a couple. Short. Both were straightened out with apomorphine, and now heroin is no temptation for me. Iâm just not interested. Iâve seen a lot of it around. I know people who are addicts. I donât have to use any willpower. Dr. Dent always said there is no such thing as willpower. Youâve got to reach a state of mind in which you donât want it or need it.
Interviewer
You regard addiction as an illness but also a central human fact, a drama?
Burroughs
Both, absolutely. Itâs as simple as the way in which anyone happens to become an alcoholic. They start drinking, thatâs all. They like it, and they drink, and then they become alcoholic. I was exposed to heroin in New York â that is, I was going around with people who were using it, I took it, the effects were pleasant. I went on using it and became addicted. Remember that if it can be readily obtained, you will have any number of addicts. The idea that addiction is somehow a psychological illness is, I think, totally ridiculous. Itâs as psychological as malaria. Itâs a matter of exposure. People, generally speaking, will take any intoxicant or any drug that gives them a pleasant effect if it is available to them. In Iran, for instance, opium was sold in shops until quite recently, and they had three million addicts in a population of twenty million. There are also all forms of spiritual addiction. Anything that can be done chemically can be done in other ways, that is, if we have sufficient knowledge of the processes involved. Many policemen and narcotics agents are precisely addicted to power, to exercising a certain nasty kind of power over people who are helpless. The nasty sort of power: white junk, I call it â rightness, theyâre right, right, right â and if they lost that power, they would suffer excruciating withdrawal symptoms. The picture we get of the whole Russian bureaucracy, people who are exclusively preoccupied with power and advantage, this must be an addiction. Suppose they lose it? Well, itâs been their whole life.
Interviewer
Can you amplify your idea of junk as image?
Burroughs
Itâs only a theory and, I feel, an inadequate one. I donât think anyone really understands what a narcotic is or how it works, how it kills pain. My idea is sort of a stab in the dark. As I see it, what has been damaged in pain is, of course, the image, and morphine must in some sense replace this. We know it blankets the cells and that addicts are practically immune to certain viruses, to influenza and respiratory complaints. This is simple because the influenza virus has to make a hole in the cell receptors. When those are covered, as they are in morphine addiction, the virus canât get in. As soon as morphine is withdrawn, addicts will immediately come down with colds and often with influenza.
Interviewer
Certain schizophrenics also resist respiratory disease.
Burroughs
A long time ago I suggested there were similarities in terminal addiction and terminal schizophrenia. That was why I made the suggestion that they addict these people to heroin, then withdraw it and see if they could be motivated, in other words, find out whether theyâd walk across the room and pick up a syringe. Needless to say, I didnât get very far, but I think it would be interesting.
Interviewer
Narcotics, then, disturb normal perception â
Burroughs
And set up instead a random craving for images. If drugs werenât forbidden in America, they would be the perfect middleâclass vice. Addicts would do their work and come home to consume the huge dose of images awaiting them in the mass media. Junkies love to look at television. Billie Holiday said she knew she was going off drugs when she didnât like to watch TV. Or theyâll sit and read a newspaper or magazine, and by God, read it all. I knew this old junkie in New York, and heâd go out and get a lot of newspapers and magazines and some candy bars and several packages of cigarettes and then heâd sit in his room and heâd read those newspapers and magazines right straight through. Indiscriminately. Every word.
Interviewer
You seem primarily interested in bypassing the conscious rational apparatus to which most writers direct their efforts.
Burroughs
I donât know about where fiction ordinarily directs itself, but I am quite deliberately addressing myself to the whole area of what we call dreams. Precisely what is a dream? A certain juxtaposition of word and image. Iâve recently done a lot of experiments with scrapbooks. Iâll read in the newspaper something that reminds me of or has relation to something Iâve written. Iâll cut out the picture or article and paste it in a scrapbook beside the words from my book. Or, Iâll be walking down the street and Iâll suddenly see a scene from my book and Iâll photograph it and put it in a scrapbook. Iâll show you some of those. Iâve found that when preparing a page, Iâll almost invariably dream that night something relating to this juxtaposition of word and image. In other words, Iâve been interested in precisely how word and image get around on very, very complex association lines. I do a lot of exercises in what I call time travel, in taking coordinates, such as what I photographed on the train, what I was thinking about at the time, what I was reading, and what I wrote, all of this to see how completely I can project myself back to that one point in time.
Interviewer
In Nova Express, you indicate that silence is a desirable state.
Burroughs
The âmostâ desirable state. In one sense a special use of words and pictures can conduce silence. The scrapbooks and time travel are exercises to expand consciousness, to teach me to think in association blocks rather than words. Iâve recently spent a little time studying hieroglyph systems, both the Egyptian and the Mayan. A whole block of associations â âboonfâ! â like that! Words, at least the way we use them, can stand in the way of what I call nonbody experience. Itâs time we thought about leaving the body behind.
Interviewer
Marshall McLuhan said that you believed heroin was needed to turn the human body into an environment that includes the universe. But from what youâve told me, youâre not at all interested in turning the body into an environment.
Burroughs
No, junk narrows consciousness. The only benefit to me as a writer [aside from putting me into contact with the whole carny world] came to me after I went off it. What I want to do is to learn to see more of whatâs out there, to look outside, to achieve as far as possible a complete awareness of surroundings. Beckett wants to go inward. First he was in a bottle and now he is in the mud. I am aimed in the other direction â outward.
Interviewer
Have you been able to think for any length of time in images, with the inner voice silent?
Burroughs
Iâm becoming more proficient at it, partly through my work with scrapbooks and translating the connections between words and images. Try this. Carefully memorize the meaning of a passage, then read it, youâll find you can actually read it without the words making any sound whatever in the mindâs ear. Extraordinary experience, and one that will carry over into dreams. When you start thinking in images, without words, youâre well on the way.
Interviewer
Why is the wordless state so desirable?
Burroughs
I think itâs the evolutionary trend. I think that words are an aroundâtheâworld, oxcart way of doing things, awkward instruments, and they will be laid aside eventually, probably sooner than we think. This is something that will happen in the space age. Most serious writers refuse to make themselves available to the things that technology is doing. Iâve never been able to understand this sort of fear. Many of them are afraid of tape recorders and the idea of using any mechanical means for literary purposes seems to them some sort of a sacrilege. This is one objection to the cutâups. Thereâs been a lot of that, a sort of a superstitious reverence for the word. My God, they say, you canât cut up these words. Why âcanâtâ I? I find it much easier to get interest in the cutâups from people who are not writers â doctors, lawyers, or engineers, any openâminded, fairly intelligent person â than from those who are.
Interviewer
How did you become interested in the cutâup technique?
Burroughs
A friend, Brion Gysin, an American poet and painter, who has lived in Europe for thirty years, was, as far as I know, the first to create cutâups. His cutâup poem, Minutes to Go, was broadcast by the BBC and later published in a pamphlet. I was in Paris in the summer of 1960, this was after the publication there of Naked Lunch. I became interested in the possibilities of this technique, and I began experimenting myself. Of course, when you think of it, The Waste Land was the first great cutâup collage, and Tristan Tzara had done a bit along the same lines. Dos Passos used the same idea in The Camera Eye sequences in U.S.A. I felt I had been working toward the same goal, thus it was a major revelation to me when I actually saw it being done.
Interviewer
What do cutâups offer the reader that conventional narrative doesnât?
Burroughs
Any narrative passage or any passage, say, of poetic images is subject to any number of variations, all of which may be interesting and valid in their own right. A page of Rimbaud cut up and rearranged will give you quite new images. Rimbaud images â real Rimbaud images â but new ones.
Interviewer
You deplore the accumulation of images and at the same time you seem to be looking for new ones.
Burroughs
Yes, itâs part of the paradox of anyone who is working with word and image, and after all, that is what a writer is still doing. Painter too. Cutâups establish new connections between images, and oneâs range of vision consequently expands.
Interviewer
Instead of going to the trouble of working with scissors and all those pieces of paper, couldnât you obtain the same effect by simply freeâassociating at the typewriter?
Burroughs
Oneâs mind canât cover it that way. Now, for example, if I wanted to make a cutâup of this [picking up a copy of The Nation], there are many ways I could do it. I could read crossâcolumn, I could say, âTodayâs menâs nerves surround us. Each technological extension gone outside is electrical involves an act of collective environment. The human nervous environment system itself can be reprogrammed with all its private and social values because it is content. He programs logically as readily as any radio net is swallowed by the new environment. The sensory orderâ. You find it often makes quite as much sense as the original. You learn to leave out words and to make connections. [Gesturing] Suppose I should cut this down the middle here, and put this up here. Your mind simply could not manage it. Itâs like trying to keep so many chess moves in mind, you just couldnât do it. The mental mechanisms of repression and selection are also operating against you.
Interviewer
You believe that an audience can be eventually trained to respond to cutâups?
Burroughs
Of course, because cutâups make explicit a psychosensory process that is going on all the time anyway. Somebody is reading a newspaper, and his eye follows the column in the proper Aristotelian manner, one idea and sentence at a time. But subliminally he is reading the columns on either side and is aware of the person sitting next to him. Thatâs a cutâup. I was sitting in a lunchroom in New York having my doughnuts and coffee. I was thinking that one âdoesâ feel a little boxed in New York, like living in a series of boxes. I looked out the window and there was a great big Yale truck. Thatâs cutâup â a juxtaposition of whatâs happening outside and what youâre thinking of. I make this a practice when I walk down the street. Iâll say, when I got to here I saw that sign, I was thinking this, and when I return to the house Iâll type these up. Some of this material I use and some I donât. I have literally thousands of pages of notes here, raw, and I keep a diary as well. In a sense itâs traveling in time.
Most people donât see whatâs going on around them. Thatâs my principal message to writers: for Godâs sake, keep your âeyesâ open. Notice whatâs going on around you. I mean, I walk down the street with friends. I ask, âDid you see him, that person who just walked by?â No, they didnât notice him. I had a very pleasant time on the train coming out here. I havenât traveled on trains in years. I found there were no drawing rooms. I got a bedroom so I could set up my typewriter and look out the window. I was taking photos, too. I also noticed all the signs and what I was thinking at the time, you see. And I got some extraordinary juxtapositions. For example, a friend of mine has a loft apartment in New York. He said, âEvery time we go out of the house and come back, if we leave the bathroom door open, thereâs a rat in the houseâ. I look out the window, thereâs Able Pest Control.
Interviewer
The one flaw in the cutâup argument seems to lie in the linguistic base on which we operate, the straight declarative sentence. Itâs going to take a great deal to change that.
Burroughs
Yes, it is unfortunately one of the great errors of Western thought, the whole either/or proposition. You remember Korzybski and his idea of nonâAristotelian logic. Either/or thinking just is not accurate thinking. Thatâs not the way things occur, and I feel the Aristotelian construct is one of the great shackles of Western civilization. Cutâups are a movement toward breaking this down. I should imagine it would be much easier to find acceptance of the cutâups from, possibly, the Chinese, because you see already there are many ways that they can read any given ideograph. Itâs already cut up.
Interviewer
What will happen to the straight plot in fiction?
Burroughs
Plot has always had the definite function of stage direction, of getting the characters from here to there, and that will continue, but the new techniques such as cutâup will involve much more of the total capacity of the observer. It enriches the whole aesthetic experience, extends it.
Interviewer
Nova Express is a cutâup of many writers?
Burroughs
Joyce is in there. Shakespeare, Rimbaud, some writers that people havenât heard about, someone named Jack Stern. Thereâs Kerouac. I donât know, when you start making these foldâins [instead of cutting, you fold] and cutâups you lose track. Genet, of course, is someone I admire very much. But what heâs doing is classical French prose. Heâs not a verbal innovator. Also Kafka, Eliot, and one of my favorites is Joseph Conrad. My story, They Just Fade Away, is a foldâin from Lord Jim. In fact, itâs almost a retelling of the Lord Jim story. My Stein is the same Stein as in Lord Jim. Richard Hughes is another favorite of mine. And Graham Greene. For exercise, when I make a trip, such as from Tangier to Gibraltar, I will record this in three columns in a notebook I always take with me. One column will contain simply an account of the trip, what happened. I arrived at the air terminal, what was said by the clerks, what I overheard on the plane, what hotel I checked into. The next column presents my memories, that is, what I was thinking of at the time, the memories that were activated by my encounters, and the third column, which I call my reading column, gives quotations from any book that I take with me. I have practically a whole novel alone on my trips to Gibraltar. Besides Graham Greene, Iâve used other books. I used The Wonderful Country by Tom Lea on one trip. Letâs see, and Eliotâs The Cocktail Party, In Hazard by Richard Hughes. For example, Iâm reading The Wonderful Country and the hero is just crossing the frontier into Mexico. Well, just at this point I come to the Spanish frontier, so I note that down in the margin. Or Iâm on a boat or a train, and Iâm reading The Quiet American. I look around and see if thereâs a quiet American aboard. Sure enough, thereâs a quiet sort of young American with a crew cut drinking a bottle of beer. Itâs extraordinary, if you really keep your eyes open. I was reading Raymond Chandler, and one of his characters was an albino gunman. My God, if there wasnât an albino in the room. He wasnât a gunman.
Who else? Wait a minute, Iâll just check my coordinate books to see if thereâs anyone Iâve forgotten â Conrad, Richard Hughes, science fiction, quite a bit of science fiction. Eric Frank Russell has written some very, very interesting books. Hereâs one, The Star Virus, I doubt if youâve heard of it. He develops a concept here of what he calls Deadliners, who have this strange sort of seedy look. I read this when I was in Gibraltar, and I began to find Deadliners all over the place. The story has a fishpond in it, and quite a flower garden. My father was always very interested in gardening.
Interviewer
In view of all this, what will happen to fiction in the next twentyâfive years?
Burroughs
In the first place, I think thereâs going to be more and more merging of art and science. Scientists are already studying the creative process, and I think the whole line between art and science will break down and that scientists, I hope, will become more creative and writers more scientific. And I see no reason why the artistic world canât absolutely merge with Madison Avenue. Pop art is a move in that direction. Why canât we have advertisements with beautiful words and beautiful images? Already some of the very beautiful color photography appears in whiskey ads, I notice. Science will also discover for us how association blocks actually form.
Interviewer
Do you think this will destroy the magic?
Burroughs
Not at all. I would say it would enhance it.
Interviewer
Have you done anything with computers?
Burroughs
Iâve not done anything, but Iâve seen some of the computer poetry. I can take one of those computer poems and then try to find correlatives of it, that is, pictures to go with it. Itâs quite possible.
Interviewer
Does the fact that it comes from a machine diminish its value to you?
Burroughs
I think that any artistic product must stand or fall on whatâs there.
Interviewer
Therefore, youâre not upset by the fact that a chimpanzee can do an abstract painting?
Burroughs
If he does a good one, no. People say to me, âOh, this is all very good, but you got it by cutting upâ. I say that has nothing to do with it, how I got it. What is any writing but a cutâup? Somebody has to program the machine, somebody has to âdoâ the cutting up. Remember that I first made selections. Out of hundreds of possible sentences that I might have used, I chose one.
Interviewer
Incidentally, one image in Nova Express keeps coming back to me and I donât quite understand it: the gray room, âbreaking through to the gray roomâ.
Burroughs
I see that as very much like the photographic darkroom where the reality photographs are actually produced. Implicit in Nova Express is a theory that what we call reality is actually a movie. Itâs a film, what I call a biologic film. What has happened is that the underground and also the nova police have made a breakthrough past the guards and gotten into the darkroom where the films are processed, where theyâre in a position to expose negatives and prevent events from occurring. Theyâre like police anywhere. All right, youâve got a bad situation here in which the nova mob is about to blow up the planet. So The Heavy Metal Kid calls in the nova police. Once you get them in there, by God, they begin acting like any police. Theyâre always an ambivalent agency. I recall once in South America that I complained to the police that a camera had been stolen and they ended up arresting me. I hadnât registered or something. In other words, once you get them on the scene they really start nosing around. Once the law starts asking questions, thereâs no end to it. For nova police, read technology, if you wish.
Interviewer
Mary McCarthy has commented on the carnival origins of your characters in Naked Lunch. What are their other derivations?
Burroughs
The carny world was the one I exactly intended to create â a kind of midwestern, smallâtown, crackerâbarrel, pratfall type of folklore, very much my own background. That world was an integral part of America and existed nowhere else, at least not in the same form. My family was southern on my motherâs side. My grandfather was a circuitâriding Methodist minister with thirteen children. Most of them went up to New York and became quite successful in advertising and public relations. One of them, an uncle, was a master image maker, Ivy Lee, Rockefellerâs publicity manager.
Interviewer
Is it true that you did a great deal of acting out to create your characters when you were finishing Naked Lunch?
Burroughs
Excuse me, there is no accurate description of the creation of a book, or an event. Read Durrellâs Alexandria novels for four different ways of looking at the same thing. Gysin saw me pasting pictures on the wall of a Paris hotel room and using a tape recorder to act out several voices. Actually, it was written mainly in Tangier, after I had taken the cure with Dr. Dent in London in 1957. I came back to Tangier and I started working on a lot of notes that I had made over a period of years. Most of the book was written at that time. I went to Paris about 1959, and I had a great pile of manuscripts. Girodias was interested and he asked if I could get the book ready in two weeks. This is the period that Brion is referring to when, from manuscripts collected over a period of years, I assembled what became the book from some thousand pages, something like that.
Interviewer
But did you actually leap up and act out, say, Dr. Benway?
Burroughs
Yes, I have. Dr. Benway dates back to a story I wrote in 1938 with a friend of mine, Kells Elvins, who is now dead. Thatâs about the only piece of writing I did prior to Junky. And we did definitely act the thing out. We decided that was the way to write. Now hereâs this guy, what does he say, what does he do? Dr. Benway sort of emerged quite spontaneously while we were composing this piece. Something Iâve been meaning to do with my scrapbooks is to have files on every character, almost like police files: habits, idiosyncrasies, where born, pictures. That is, if I ever see anyone in a magazine or newspaper who looks like Dr. Benway [and several people have played Dr. Benway, sort of amateur actors], I take their photographs. Many of my characters first come through strongly to me as voices. Thatâs why I use a tape recorder. They also carry over from one book to another.
Interviewer
Do any have their origins in actual persons?
Burroughs
Hamburger Mary is one. There was a place in New York called Hamburger Maryâs. I was in Hamburger Maryâs when a friend gave me a batch of morphine syrettes. That was my first experience with morphine and then I built up a whole picture of Hamburger Mary. She is also an actual person. I donât like to give her name for fear of being sued for libel, but she was a Scientologist who started out in a hamburger joint in Portland, Oregon, and now has eleven million dollars.
Interviewer
What about The Heavy Metal Kid?
Burroughs
There again, quite complicated origins, partly based on my own experience. I felt that heavy metal was sort of the ultimate expression of addiction, that thereâs something actually metallic in addiction, that the final stage reached is not so much vegetable as mineral. Itâs increasingly inanimate, in any case. You see, as Dr. Benway said, Iâve now decided that junk is not green, but blue. Some of my characters come to me in dreams, Daddy Long Legs, for instance. Once, in a clinic, I had a dream in which I saw a man in this rundown clinic and his name in the dream was Daddy Long Legs. Many characters have come to me like that in a dream, and then Iâll elaborate from there. I always write down all my dreams. Thatâs why Iâve got that notebook beside the bed there.
Interviewer
Earlier you mentioned that if junk had done nothing else, it at least put you in contact with the carny world.
Burroughs
Yes, the underworld, the oldâtime thieves, pickpockets, and people like that. Theyâre a dying race, very few of those oldâtimers left. Yeah, well, they were show business.
Interviewer
Whatâs the difference between the modern junkie versus the 1944 junkie?
Burroughs
For one thing, all these young addicts, that was quite unknown in 1944. Most of the ones I knew were middleâaged men or old. I knew some of the oldâtime pickpockets and sneak thieves and shortchange artists. They had something called The Bill, a shortchange deal. Iâve never been able to figure out how it works. One man I knew beat all the cashiers in Grand Central with this thing. It starts with a twentyâdollar bill. You give them a twentyâdollar bill and then when you get the change you say, âWell, wait a minute, I must have been dreaming, Iâve got the change after allâ. First thing you know, the cashierâs short ten dollars. One day this shortchange artist went to Grand Central, even though he knew it was burned down, but he wanted to change twenty dollars. Well, a guy got on the buzzer and they arrested him. When they got up in court and tried to explain what had happened, none of them could do it. I keep stories like this in my files.
Interviewer
In your apartment in Tangier?
Burroughs
No, all of it is right here in this room.
Interviewer
In case Tangier is blown up, itâs all safe?
Burroughs
Well, more than that. âI need it all.â I brought everything. Thatâs why I have to travel by boat and by train, because, well, just to give you an idea, thatâs a photographic file [thud]. Those are all photographs and photographs. When I sit down to write, I may suddenly think of something I wrote three years ago which should be in this file over here. It may not be. Iâm always looking through these files. Thatâs why I need a place where I can really spread them out, to see whatâs what. Iâm looking for one particular paper, it often takes me a long time and sometimes I donât find it. Those dresser drawers are full of files. All those drawers in the closets are full of files. Itâs pretty well organized. Hereâs a file, The 1920 Movie, which partly contains some motion picture ideas. Hereâs All the Sad Old Showmen, has some business about bank robbers in it. Hereâs The Nova Police Gazette. This is Analog, which contains science fiction material. This is The Captainâs Logbook. Iâve been interested in sea stories, but I know so little about the sea, I hesitate to do much. I collect sea disasters such as the Mary Celeste. Hereâs a file on Mr. Luce.
Interviewer
Do you admire Mr. Luce?
Burroughs
I donât admire him at all. He has set up one of the greatest word and image banks in the world. I mean, there are thousands of photos, thousands of words about anything and everything, all in his files. All the best pictures go into the files. Of course, theyâre reduced to microphotos now. Iâve been interested in the Mayan system, which was a control calendar. You see, their calendar postulated really how everyone should feel at a given time, with lucky days, unlucky days, et cetera. And I feel that Luceâs system is comparable to that. It is a control system. It has nothing to do with reporting. Time, Life, Fortune is some sort of a police organization.
Interviewer
Youâve said your next book will be about the American West and a gunfighter.
Burroughs
Yes, Iâve thought about this for years and I have hundreds of pages of notes on the whole concept of the gunfighter. The gun duel was a sort of Zen contest, a real spiritual contest like Zen swordsmanship.
Interviewer
Would this be cutâup, or more a conventional narrative?
Burroughs
Iâd use cutâups extensively in the preparation, because they would give me all sorts of facets of character and place, but the final version would be straight narrative. I wouldnât want to get bogged down in too much factual detail, but Iâd like to do research in New Mexico or Arizona, even though the actual towns out there have become synthetic tourist attractions. Occasionally I have the sensation that Iâm repeating myself in my work, and I would like to do something different â almost a deliberate change of style. Iâm not sure if itâs possible, but I want to try. Iâve been thinking about the Western for years. As a boy I was sent to school in New Mexico, and during the war I was stationed in Coldspring, Texas, near Conroe. Thatâs genuine backwoods country, and I picked up some real characters there. For instance, a fellow who actually lived in East Texas. He was always having trouble with his neighbors, who suspected him of rustling their cattle, I think with good reason. But he was competent with a gun and there wasnât anyone who would go up against him. He finally was killed. He got drunk and went to sleep under a tree by a campfire. The fire set fire to the tree, and it fell on him. Iâm interested in extending newspaper and magazine formats to soâcalled literary materials. Here, this is one of my attempts. This is going to be published in a little magazine, The Sparrow.
Interviewer
[Reading] âThe Coldspring News, All the News That Fits We Print, Sunday, September 17, 1899, William Burroughs, Editorâ. Hereâs Bradly Martin again.
Burroughs
Yes, heâs the gunfighter. Iâm not sure yet whatâs going to happen after Clem accuses him of rustling cattle. I guess Clem goes into Coldspring and thereâs gunplay between him and the gunfighter. Heâs going to kill Clem, obviously. Clem is practically a dead man. Clem is going to get likkered up and think he can tangle with Bradly Martin, and Bradly Martin is going to kill him, thatâs for sure.
Interviewer
Will your other characters reappear? Dr. Benway?
Burroughs
Heâd be the local doctor. Thatâs what Iâd like to do, you see, use all these characters in a straight Western story. There would be Mr. Bradly, Mr. Martin, whose name is Bradly Martin, there would be Dr. Benway, and weâd have the various traveling carny and medicine shows that come through with the Subliminal Kid and all of the con men. That was the heyday for those old joes.
Interviewer
Do you think of the artist at all as being a con man?
Burroughs
In a sense. You see, a real con man is a creator. He creates a set. No, a con man is more a movie director than a writer. The Yellow Kid created a whole set, a whole cast of characters, a whole brokerage house, a whole bank. It was just like a movie studio.
Interviewer
What about addicts?
Burroughs
Well, there will be a lot of morphine addiction. Remember that there were a great many addicts at that time. Jesse James was an addict. He started using morphine for a wound in his lung, and I donât know whether he was permanently addicted, but he tried to kill himself. He took sixteen grains of morphine and it didnât kill him, which indicates a terrific tolerance. So he must have been fairly heavily addicted. A dumb, brutal hick, thatâs what he was, like Dillinger. And there were so many genteel old ladies who didnât feel right unless they had their Dr. Jones mixture every day.
Interviewer
What about the Green Boy, Izzy the Push, Green Tony, Sammy the Butcher, and Willy the Fink?
Burroughs
See, all of them could be Western characters except lzzy the Push. The buildings werenât high enough in those days. Defenestration, incidentally, is a very interesting phenomenon. Some people who are prone to it will not live in high buildings. They get near a window, someone in the next room hears a cry, and theyâre gone. âFell or jumpedâ is the phrase. I would add, âor was pushedâ.
Interviewer
What other character types interest you?
Burroughs
Not the people in advertising and television, nor the American postman or middleâclass housewife, not the young man setting forth. The whole world of high finance interests me, the men such as Rockefeller who were specialized types of organisms that could exist in a certain environment. He was really a moneymaking machine, but I doubt that he could have made a dime today because he required the old laissezâfaire capitalism. He was a specialized monopolistic organism. My uncle Ivy created images for him. I fail to understand why people like J. Paul Getty have to come on with such a stuffy, uninteresting image. He decides to write his life history. Iâve never read anything so dull, so absolutely devoid of any spark. Well, after all, he was quite a playboy in his youth. There must have been something going on. None of itâs in the book. Here he is, the only man of enormous wealth who operates alone, but thereâs nobody to present the image. Well, yes, I wouldnât mind doing that sort of job myself. Iâd like to take somebody like Getty and try to find an image for him that would be of some interest. If Getty wants to build an image, why doesnât he hire a firstâclass writer to write his story? For that matter, advertising has a long way to go. Iâd like to see a story by Norman Mailer or John OâHara which just makes some mention of a product, say, Southern Comfort. I can see the OâHara story. It would be about someone who went into a bar and asked for Southern Comfort, they didnât have it, and he gets into a long, stupid argument with the bartender. It shouldnât be obtrusive, the story must be interesting in itself so that people read this just as they read any story in Playboy, and Southern Comfort would be guaranteed that people will look at that advertisement for a certain number of minutes. You see what I mean? Theyâll read the story. Now, there are many other ideas, you could have serialized comic strips, serial stories. Well, all we have to do is have James Bond smoking a certain brand of cigarettes.
Interviewer
Didnât you once work for an advertising agency?
Burroughs
Yes, after I got out of Harvard in 1936. I had done some graduate work in anthropology. I got a glimpse of academic life and I didnât like it at all. It looked like there was too much faculty intrigue, faculty teas, cultivating the head of the department, so on and so forth. Then I spent a year as a copywriter in this small advertising agency, since defunct, in New York. We had a lot of rather weird accounts. There was some device called the Cascade for giving high colonics, and something called Endocreme. It was supposed to make women look younger, because it contained some female sex hormones. The Interstate Commerce Commission was never far behind. As you can see, Iâve recently thought a great deal about advertising. After all, theyâre doing the same sort of thing. They are concerned with the precise manipulation of word and image. Anyway, after the ad game I was in the army for a bit. Honorably discharged and then the usual strange wartime jobs â bartender, exterminator, reporter, and factory and office jobs. Then Mexico, a sinister place.
Interviewer
Why sinister?
Burroughs
I was there during the Alemán regime. If you walked into a bar, there would be at least fifteen people in there who were carrying guns. Everybody was carrying guns. They got drunk and they were a menace to any living creature. I mean, sitting in a cocktail lounge, you always had to be ready to hit the deck. I had a friend who was shot, killed. But he asked for it. He was waving his little .25 automatic around in a bar and some Mexican blasted him with a .45. They listed the death as natural causes, because the killer was a political big shot. There was no scandal, but it was really as much as your life was worth to go into a cocktail lounge. And I had that terrible accident with Joan Vollmer, my wife. I had a revolver that I was planning to sell to a friend. I was checking it over and it went off â killed her. A rumor started that I was trying to shoot a glass of champagne from her head William Tellâstyle. Absurd and false. Then they had a big depistolization. Mexico City had one of the highest per capita homicide rates in the world. Another thing, every time you turned around there was some Mexican cop with his hand out, finding some fault with your papers or something, just anything he could latch on to. âPapers very bad, señorâ. It really was a bit much, the Alemán regime.
Interviewer
From Mexico?
Burroughs
I went to Colombia, Peru, and Ecuador, just looking around. I was particularly interested in the Amazon region of Peru, where I took a drug called yage, Bannisteria caapi, a hallucinogen as powerful as mescaline, I believe. The whole trip gave me an awful lot of copy. A lot of these experiences went into The Ticket That Exploded, which is sort of midway between Naked Lunch and The Soft Machine. Itâs not a book Iâm satisfied with in its present form. If itâs published in the United States, I would have to rewrite it. The Soft Machine, which will come out here in due time, is an expansion of my South American experiences, with surreal extensions. When I rewrote it recently, I included about sixtyâfive pages of straight narrative concerning Dr. Benway, and the Sailor, and various characters from Naked Lunch. These people pop up everywhere.
Interviewer
Then from South America you went to Europe. Is the geographic switch as important as it once was to American writing?
Burroughs
Well, if I hadnât covered a lot of ground, I wouldnât have encountered the extra dimensions of character and extremity that make the difference. But I think the day of the expatriate is definitely over. Itâs becoming more and more uncomfortable, more and more expensive, and less and less rewarding to live abroad, as far as Iâm concerned. Now Iâm particularly concerned with quiet writing conditions â being able to concentrate â and not so much interested in the place where I am. To me, Paris is now one of the most disagreeable cities in the world. I just hate it. The food is uneatable. Itâs either very expensive, or you just canât eat it. In order to get a good sandwich at three oâclock in the afternoon, I have to get into a taxi and go all the way over to the Right Bank. Here all I have to do is pick up the phone. They send me up a club sandwich and a glass of buttermilk, which is all I want for lunch anyway. The French have gotten so nasty and theyâre getting nastier and nastier. The Algerian war and then all those millions of people dumped back into France and all of them thoroughly dissatisfied. I donât know, I think the atmosphere there is unpleasant and not conducive to anything. You canât get an apartment. You canât get a quiet place to work. Best you can do is a dinky hotel room somewhere. If I want to get something like this, it costs me thirty dollars a day. The main thing Iâve found after twenty years away from St. Louis is that the standard of service is much better than New York. These are Claridgeâs or Ritz accommodations. If I could afford it, keep it, this would be an ideal place for me. Thereâs not a sound in here. Itâs been very conducive to work. Iâve got a lot of room here to spread out all my papers in all these drawers and shelves. Itâs quiet. When I want something to eat, I pick up the phone. I can work right straight through. Get up in the morning, pick up the phone about two oâclock and have a sandwich, and work through till dinnertime. Also, itâs interesting to turn on the TV set every now and then.
Interviewer
What do you find on it?
Burroughs
Thatâs a ârealâ cutâup. It flickers, just like the old movies used to. When talkies came in and they perfected the image, the movies became as dull as looking out the window. A bunch of Italians in Rabat have a television station and we could get the signal in Tangier. I just sat there open mouthed looking at it. What with blurring and contractions and art static, some of their Westerns became very, very odd. Gysin has been experimenting with the flicker principle in a gadget he calls a âDream Machineâ. There used to be one in the window of The English Bookshop on the rue de Seine. Helena Rubenstein was so fascinated she bought a couple, and Harold Matson, the agent, thinks itâs a millionâdollar idea.
Interviewer
Describe a typical dayâs work.
Burroughs
I get up about nine oâclock and order breakfast, I hate to go out for breakfast. I work usually until about two oâclock or twoâthirty, when I like to have a sandwich and a glass of milk, which takes about ten minutes. Iâll work through until six or seven oâclock. Then if Iâm seeing people or going out, Iâll go out, have a few drinks, come back, and maybe do a little reading and go to bed. I go to bed pretty early. I donât make myself work. Itâs just the thing I want to do. To be completely alone in a room, to know that thereâll be no interruptions and Iâve got eight hours is just exactly what I want â yeah, just paradise.
Interviewer
Do you compose on the typewriter?
Burroughs
I use the typewriter and I use scissors. I can sit down with scissors and old manuscripts and paste in photographs for hours, I have hundreds of photographs. I usually take a walk every day. Here in St. Louis Iâve been trying to take 1920s photographs, alleys and whatnot. This [pointing] is a ghostly photograph of the house in which I grew up, seen back through fortyâfive years. Hereâs a photo of an old ash pit. It was great fun for children to get out there in the alley after Christmas and build a fire in the ash pit with all the excelsior and wrappings. Here, these are stories and pictures from the society columns. Iâve been doing a cutâup of society coverage. I had a lot of fun piling up these names, you get some improbable names in the society columns.
Interviewer
You recently said you would like to settle in the Ozarks. Were you serious?
Burroughs
I would like to have a place there. Itâs a very beautiful area in the fall, and Iâd like to spend periods of time, say every month or every two months, in complete solitude, just working, which requires an isolated situation. Of course, Iâd have to buy a car, for one thing, and you run into considerable expense. I just have to think in terms of an apartment. I thought possibly an apartment here, but most likely Iâll get one in New York. Iâm not returning to Tangier. I just donât like it anymore. Itâs become just a small town. Thereâs no life there, and the place has no novelty for me at all. I was sitting there, and I thought, my God, I might as well be in Columbus, Ohio, as here, for all the interest that the town has for me. I was just sitting in my apartment working. I could have a better apartment and better working conditions somewhere else. After ten oâclock at night, thereâs no one on the streets. The old settlers like Paul Bowles and those people who have been there for years and years are sort of hanging on desperately, asking, âWhere could we go if we left Tangier?â I donât know, it just depresses me now. Itâs not even cheap there. If I travel anywhere, it will be to the Far East, but only for a visit. Iâve never been east of Athens.
Interviewer
That reminds me, I meant to ask you whatâs behind your interest in the more exotic systems such as Zen, or Dr. Reichâs orgone theories?
Burroughs
Well, these nonconventional theories frequently touch on something going on that Harvard and MIT canât explain. I donât mean that I endorse them wholeheartedly, but I am interested in any attempt along those lines. Iâve used these orgone accumulators and Iâm convinced that something occurs there, I donât know quite what. Of course, Reich himself went around the bend, no question of that.
Interviewer
You mentioned Scientology earlier. Do you have a system for getting on, or are you looking for one?
Burroughs
Iâm not very interested in such a crudely threeâdimensional manipulative schema as L. Ron Hubbardâs, although itâs got its points. Iâve studied it and Iâve seen how it works. Itâs a series of manipulative gimmicks. They tell you to look around and see what you would have. The results are much more subtle and more successful than Dale Carnegieâs. But as far as my living by a system, no. At the same time, I donât think anything happens in this universe except by some power â or individual â making it happen. Nothing happens of itself. I believe all events are produced by will.
Interviewer
Then do you believe in the existence of God?
Burroughs
God? I wouldnât say. I think there are innumerable gods. What we on Earth call God is a little tribal god who has made an awful mess. Certainly forces operating through human consciousness control events. A Luce writer may be an agent of Godâknowsâwhat power, a force with an insatiable appetite for word and image. What does this force propose to do with such a tremendous mound of image garbage? Theyâve got a regular casting office. To interview Mary McCarthy, theyâll send a shy Vassar girl whoâs just trying to get along. They had several carny people for me. âShucks, Bill, you got a reefer?â âReefer?â My God! âCertainly notâ, I told them. âI donât know what youâre talking aboutâ. Then they go back and write a nasty article for the files.
Interviewer
In some respects, Nova Express seems to be a prescription for social ailments. Do you see the need, for instance, of biologic courts in the future?
Burroughs
Certainly. Science eventually will be forced to establish courts of biologic mediation, because lifeâforms are going to become more incompatible with the conditions of existence as man penetrates further into space. Mankind will have to undergo biologic alterations ultimately, if we are to survive at all. This will require biologic law to decide what changes to make. We will simply have to use our intelligence to plan mutations, rather than letting them occur at random. Because many such mutations â look at the saberâtoothed tiger â are bound to be very poor engineering designs. The future, decidedly, yes. I think there are innumerable possibilities, literally innumerable. The hope lies in the development of nonbody experience and eventually getting away from the body itself, away from threeâdimensional coordinates and concomitant animal reactions of fear and flight, which lead inevitably to tribal feuds and dissension.
Interviewer
Why did you choose an interplanetary war as the conflict in Nova Express, rather than discord between nations? You seem fascinated with the idea that a superterrestrial power is exercising an apparatus of control, such as the death dwarfs â
Burroughs
Theyâre parasitic organisms occupying a human host, rather like a radio transmitter, which direct and control it. The people who work with encephalograms and brain waves point out that technically it will someday be possible to install at birth a radio antenna in the brain which will control thought, feeling, and sensory perceptions, actually not only control thought, but make certain thoughts impossible. The death dwarfs are weapons of the nova mob, which in turn is calling the shots in the cold war. The nova mob is using that conflict in an attempt to blow up the planet, because when you get right down to it, what are America and Russia really arguing about? The Soviet Union and the United States will eventually consist of interchangeable social parts and neither nation is morally ârightâ. The idea that anyone can run his own factory in America is ridiculous. The government and the unions â which both amount to the same thing: control systems â tell him who he can hire, how much he can pay them, and how he can sell his goods. What difference does it make if the state owns the plant and retains him as manager? Regardless of how itâs done, the same kind of people will be in charge. Oneâs ally today is an enemy tomorrow. I have postulated this power â the nova mob â which forces us to play musical chairs.
Interviewer
You see hope for the human race, but at the same time you are alarmed as the instruments of control become more sophisticated.
Burroughs
Well, whereas they become more sophisticated they also become more vulnerable. Time, Life, Fortune applies a more complex, effective control system than the Mayan calendar, but it also is much more vulnerable because it is so vast and mechanized. Not even Henry Luce understands whatâs going on in the system now. Well, a machine can be redirected. One technical sergeant can fuck up the whole works. Nobody can control the whole operation. Itâs too complex. The captain comes in and says, âAll right, boys, weâre moving upâ. Now, who knows what buttons to push? Who knows how to get the cases of Spam up to where theyâre going, and how to fill out the forms? The sergeant does. The captain doesnât know. As long as thereâre sergeants around, the machine can be dismantled, and we may get out of all this alive yet.
Interviewer
Sex seems equated with death frequently in your work.
Burroughs
That is an extension of the idea of sex as a biologic weapon. I feel that sex, like practically every other human manifestation, has been degraded for control purposes, or really for antihuman purposes. This whole Puritanism. How are we ever going to find out anything about sex scientifically, when a priori the subject cannot even be investigated? It canât even be thought about or written about. That was one of the interesting things about Reich. He was one of the few people who ever tried to investigate sex â sexual phenomena, from a scientific point of view. Thereâs this prurience and this fear of sex. We know nothing about sex. What is it? Why is it pleasurable? What is pleasure? Relief from tension? Well, possibly.
Interviewer
Are you irreconcilably hostile to the twentiethâcentury?
Burroughs
Not at all, although I can imagine myself as having been born under many different circumstances. For example, I had a dream recently in which I returned to the family home and I found a different father and a different house from any Iâd ever seen before. Yet in a dream sense, the father and the house were quite familiar.
Interviewer
Mary McCarthy has characterized you as a soured utopian. Is that accurate?
Burroughs
I do definitely mean what I say to be taken literally, yes, to make people aware of the true criminality of our times, to wise up the marks. All of my work is directed against those who are bent, through stupidity or design, on blowing up the planet or rendering it uninhabitable. Like the advertising people we talked about, Iâm concerned with the precise manipulation of word and image to create an action, not to go out and buy a CocaâCola, but to create an alteration in the readerâs consciousness. You know, they ask me if I were on a desert island and knew nobody would ever see what I wrote, would I go on writing. My answer is most emphatically yes. I would go on writing for company. Because Iâm creating an imaginary â itâs always imaginary â world in which I would like to live.
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Finding Aid, William S. Burroughs (SPEC.CMS.90) Rare Books and Manuscripts
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Finding Aid, William S. Burroughs - Rare Books and Manuscripts Library, Ohio State University Libraries
| null |
WILLIAM S. BURROUGHS PAPERS, WSB98:
GUIDE AND INVENTORY
SPEC.CMS.90
(Compiled by John M. Bennett, January 2000)
This collection of papers, books, serials, and other materials, designated WSB98, was given to OSU in 1998 by the Estate of William S. Burroughs (James W. Grauerholz, Executor). Throughout this Guide, "WSB" refers to William S. Burroughs, and "JWG" refers to James W. Grauerholz. WSB's son, William S. Burroughs, Jr., is referred to as "William S. Burroughs, Jr."
INTRODUCTION
This collection of materials, originally gathered by James W. Grauerholz, William S. Burroughs' assistant and editor, includes drafts and editorial materials for some of WSB's publications; copies of many of WSB's publications from the 1970's and 1980's; correspondence, fan mail, and printed matter received from the mid-1970's through the mid-1980's; books, chapbooks, and magazines received or acquired during the same period; Burroughs Communications business, travel, and tour files from that period; serial and other publications from that period including work by WSB, and/or reviews of and/or articles about WSB; and much other material.
In addition to providing source material for the study of WSB's life and works, this collection provides information about the avant-garde literary, art, and music worlds of the 1970's and 1980's, primarily in North America, but also in Europe and elsewhere. There is abundant correspondence, manuscript, and published material from a wide variety of writers and other artists, both contemporaries of WSB and younger artists and writers. Many of the latter are also represented in OSU's Avant Writing Collection.
Among the highlights of this collection are several manuscripts and drafts of WSB's book The Cat Inside, 1984-1986; a large collection of science fiction and other books and serials belonging to WSB, mostly published from the mid-1960's to the early 1980's; WSB's notes for a class he gave on Samuel Beckett and Marcel Proust (folder 118); a transcript of a 1960 interview with WSB (folder 166); a galley copy of WSB's 1977 edition of Junky (folder 176); and bound galleys of William S. Burroughs, Jr.'s 1984 book, Kentucky Ham (box 28). Throughout the collection there is correspondence with, or material about, Brion Gysin, John Giorno, Victor Bockris, Edie Kerouac Parker, Allen Ginsberg, Terry Southern, Patti Smith, Paul Bowles, Jack Kerouac, Claude Pelieu, James Grauerholz, and many others.
It should be noted that all material on a given topic is not necessarily in the same box; for example, material relating to The Cat Inside may be found throughout this collection. Further material on any given topic may be found in other WSB collections in the OSU Libraries.
WILLIAM S. BURROUGHS PAPERS (WSB98) -
CATALOGUE OF INVENTORY, OHIO STATE UNIVERSITY
Detailed Listing/ Box and Folder Listing:
Box 1
Folder Number #1-23
The Rise and Fall of the Peanut Party
Book by John Mitchell and Vincent Trasov, The Rise and Fall of the Peanut Party: journal, twenty days in November, Vancouver: Air, 1976. Signed by authors. Book documents a campaign by Mr. Peanut who was running for Mayor of Vancouver, BC. Book includes a letter of endorsement from WSB.
Capalula, Theory
Book by Capalula, Theory: 140 statements, Amsterdam: Kontexts Publications, 1979. Inscribed by author to WSB.
Blanco, 1979
Issue of Argentine intellectual journal, Blanco, otoño 1979. Includes an article, "Los Límites del control", by WSB.
Sphinx Magazine, 5
Issue of Swiss art and culture magazine, Sphinx Magazine, 5, 1979. Includes a conversation between WSB and Victor Bockris, and an article by Udo Breger, "Brion Gysin's Dreamachine". Both pieces in German with numerous photographs.
New Edinburgh Review, 1979
Issue of Scotch journal, New Edinburgh Review, Summer, 1979. Includes an essay by WSB, "Mob".
La Bañera, 1979
Issue of Spanish literary magazine, La Bañera, 4, 1979. Includes an article on WSB and the Nova Convention.
Bananas, 1979
Issue of British literary magazine, Bananas, 17, 1979. Includes an excerpt from WSB's Ah Pook is Here.
Dim Lake
Book of poems and drawings, Dim Lake, by Gregory W. Ritz, Leon Hushcha, and Jonathan Sisson, Loretto, Minnesota: Red Studio Press, 1975.
Metal Hurlant, 1977
Issue of French science fiction comics magazine, Metal Hurlant, 24, 1977. Two pages are partially cut out.
New School of Social Research, 1981
Correspondence, 1979-1981, between Graham Hodges, WSB, and JWG regarding WSB's participating in the New School's Conversations with Writers series, in which WSB took part in Feb. 1981. Also includes flyers and JWG's notes.
9:30 Club, 1981
JWG's notes, correspondence, travel itineraries, receipts, announcements, and other material relating to an appearance by WSB at the 9:30 Club, Washington, DC, March 1981, to read from Cities of the Red Night. Also appearing were John Giorno, John Waters, and the music group R.E.M.
P.S. 1, 1981
JWG's notes, and other material, relating to a possible reading by WSB at P.S. 1, March 8, 1981.
Rutgers, 1981
JWG's notes regarding a reading by WSB at Rutgers University, March 11, 1981.
Bloomington, 1981
JWG's notes, clippings, promotional and other material regarding an appearance by WSB and John Giorno at the Bluebird in Bloomington, Indiana, March 19, 1981.
Indianapolis, 1981
JWG's notes and a business card regarding an appearance by WSB at The Vogue, Indianapolis, Indiana, March 20, 1981.
Minneapolis, 1981
JWG's correspondence and notes, posters, announcements, and other material regarding appearances by WSB in Minneapolis, March 22, 1981. These included a book-signing at a bookstore and a reading at Duffy's, the latter sponsored by the Walker Art Institute.
Madison, 1981
JWG's notes and other material regarding an appearance by WSB at Merlin's in Madison, Wisconsin, March 23, 1981.
Chicago, 1981
JWG's notes, correspondence, and other material regarding an appearance by WSB at Tut's, in Chicago, March 26, 1981. An interview and book-signing are also discussed.
St. Louis, 1981
JWG's notes and correspondence, and clippings, flyers, and other material regarding an appearance by WSB and John Giorno at Duff's Restaurant, in St. Louis, March 30, 1981, produced by Left Bank Books.
MOMA, NY, 1981
Empty folder, with "MOMA - NY - 20 Apr 81" written on it in JWG's hand.
Santa Cruz, 1981
JWG's notes, and other material, regarding an appearance by WSB at Vet's Hall, Santa Cruz, California, May 13, 1981. F. A. Nettelbeck was the contact person and arranger for this event. Also includes contractual documents regarding a recording of the event.
Vancouver, 1981
JWG's notes, correspondence, and other material regarding an appearance by WSB and John Giorno in Vancouver, May 18, 1981. Some of the correspondence discusses a reprint of WSB's "The Lemon kid" in the Seattle publication, The Rocket; and plans for Howard Brookner's film Burroughs.
Toronto, 1981
JWG's notes, correspondence, and other material regarding appearances by WSB in Toronto, June 1 and 2, 1981. Includes some correspondence with the magazine Art Metropole regarding publication of an excerpt from Cities of the Red Night.
Box 2
Folder Number #24-35
Folders and Envelopes, 1981
Empty folders and envelopes with brief notes on them in JWG's and other's hands, and 1 empty folder with "Letters to answer" written on it in WSB's hand. Ca. 1981.
Printed Matter and Correspondence Received, 1981
Printed matter, solicitations, announcements, JWG's office notes, literary business correspondence received (with some of JWG's cc replies), fan mail, and other material. Includes a letter from Timothy Leary commenting on Cities of the Red Night; and a postcard from Dick Higgins discussing 2 of his upcoming performances.
JWG's Office Notes, 1980
Several sheets of JWG's office notes, names and phone numbers, and other material, much of it referring to people in New York City. Includes a postcard announcement of the New York Art Theatre's production of Naked Lunch, Sept.-Dec. [1980]. Names on notes include Victor [Bockris], Lydia Lunch, John Arnoldy, John Giorno, Charles Gatewood, Diego Cortez, Ted Morgan, Robert Palmer, General Idea, [David] Ohle, Michael Petree, and others. At least 2 of the notes are in WSB's hand. All material originally in an unmarked manila folder.
Quantrell's Raid
Pamphlet titled Quantrell's Raid, Aug. 21 - 1863: from the autobiography of Peter D. Ridenour, who survived the raid, [Lawrence, KS]: Douglas County Historical Society, [nd].
Jennie Skerl MSS
Three pc ts by Jennie Skerl in a brown binder: "Burroughs chronology", "A Beat chronology: the first twenty years, 1944-1964", and "William S. Burroughs: pop artist". Some passages of the latter have been bracketed with pencil. 43 sheets.
Correspondence Received, 1980-1981
Correspondence received, fan mail, clippings, and other material. Includes some of WSB's cc ts replies. Correspondence deals with requests for information, and literary business. Includes letters from Gary Nargi, Francois Bucher, Theo Green, Edie Kerouac Parker, S. J. Bernstein, Daniel Halpern, Antony Balch, and many others. Includes a cc ts of a letter from WSB to Congressman Dornan; and an 11-sheet pc mixed ts with pc holographic editing of a WSB text; first line, "This reading is from an unpublished illustrated book entitled AH POOK IS HERE..." All in a manila folder.
JWG's Office Notes and Correspondence Received, 1980-1981
JWG's office notes, literary business correspondence received, with some of JWG's cc ts replies, fan mail, printed matter, and other material. Includes correspondence from Francois Bucher, Joe Maynard, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Barry Gifford, and many others. Names on notes include Patti Smith, Tom Huckabee, [Michael] Petree, Charles Gatewood, [David] Ohle, Allen Ginsberg, Terry Southern, Diego Cortez, John Giorno, Victor Bockris, Peter Matson, Ted Morgan, Steven Lowe, Carl Weissner, and many others.
Includes a 14-sheet pc ts, with orig. holog. editing in WSB's hand, "Interview with William S. Burroughs" by George Whitmore. This ms was found loose in original box between folders 29 and 31.
Esquire, April 1981
Issue of magazine with an article on the attitudes of contemporary youth, Lydia Lunch, and so on.
JWG's Office Notes and Correspondence Received, 1980-1981
JWG's office notes, correspondence received, mail art, fan mail, printed matter, and other material, mostly from 1980. Includes some of JWG's cc ts replies. Includes correspondence from Regina Weinreich, Edie Kerouac Parker, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Bill Blackolive (3 pamphlets), and others. Names on notes include Allen Ginsberg, Ron Padgett, John Rechy, John Lennon, Abbie Hoffman, Hubert Selby, Harold Norse, Lydia Lunch, John Giorno, and others. All originally in an unmarked manila envelope.
JWG's Office Notes and Correspondence Received, 1980-1981
JWG's office notes, correspondence received (with some of JWG's cc ts replies), printed matter, fan mail, and other material. Much of the correspondence has to do with requests and arrangements for WSB's public appearances, interviews, and related matters. Includes some brief holog. notes by WSB. Includes correspondence from Edward Foster, James Sherry, and others. Names on notes include Allen Ginsberg, Michael Petree, John Giorno, and others. All material was found loose in original box between folders 32 and 34.
Vancouver and Seattle, 1980
JWG's notes, correspondence, and other material regarding plans for appearances by WSB in Vancouver and Seattle, 1980.
Montreal Folder
Empty folder with "Montreal" written on it in JWG's hand.
Box 3
Folder Number #36-49
JWG's Office notes and Correspondence Received, 1980-1981
JWG's office notes, printed matter, solicitations, announcements, correspondence received (with some of JWG's cc ts replies), and other material. Includes 1 sheet orig. ts, dated 17 Feb. 81, titled "Lines, dictated by WSB; will be sent to Rauschenburg today". Includes correspondence or material from the Minnesota Zen Center, The Church of the SubGenius, Franklin Furnace, and others. Also includes 4 pc copies of an interview with WSB and Allen Ginsberg published in Talk Talk, v. 2, nos. 12 & 13, [nd]. Names on notes and other materials include John Giorno, Patti Smith, Michael Petree, Allen Ginsberg, Stephen King, Robert Mapplethorpe, and others. All material found loose in original box between folders 35 and 37.
Newcomers, 1981
Issue of Newcomers magazine, no. 7, 1981. Has a story by Tom Ahern. In a manila envelope addressed to JWG.
T-Gasm, 1980
Promotional material for T-Gasm, the "fan club" of Throbbing Gristle, the band in which Genesis P. Orridge played guitar.
Correspondence, 1979-1980
Correspondence received, with some of JWG's cc ts replies, JWG's office notes, and other material. Most correspondence deals with literary business matters. Includes correspondence from JWG (to WSB), Allen Ginsberg, Christian Bourgois, Bob Gale, Alan [Ansen?], WSB (a postcard to JWG), and others. All in a folder with "File" written on it in JWG's hand.
Correspondence Received, 1979
Correspondence received, with some of WSB's or JWG's cc ts replies, JWG's office notes, and other material. Much of the correspondence deals with literary business matters, requests for interviews or information, and related matters. Includes correspondence from Gaetano Ruvolo Ruga, Peter Matson, Chris Reichhold (some letters in previous folders in this collection, also), JWG (to WSB), Gerard-Georges Lemaire, Terry [Southern], Eric Mottram, WSB (to Paul Bowles), Paul Bowles, Peter Stewart (with articles on the Nova Convention and Naked Lunch), Brion [Gysin] (with WSB's reply), Gerry Walsh, Kathleen ["Honey"] Hoffman, and others. Names on notes include Paul Bowles, Armando Verdiglione, Eric Mottram, Patti Smith, and others. In a folder with "Letters answered, considered or requiring no answer" written on it in WSB's hand.
Correspondence Received, 1979
Six letters (including 1 postcard) received by WSB in Oct. 1979: fan mail, or requests for information or for material for publication. All originally in an unmarked manila folder.
Peter Stewart, 1979
Letter from Peter Stewart, Aug. 1979, with JWG's cc ts reply. Stewart's letter includes ts copies or articles on Naked Lunch and the Nova Convention, and clippings from Swedish newspapers on The Nova Convention. All originally in an unmarked manila folder with 4 small sheets of notes; announcements; etc.
City Paper, 1979
Two copies of tabloid newspaper from Baltimore, City Paper, vol. 3, no. 57, 1979, with an article by William F. Ryan on WSB and WSB's appearance at Georgetown University, Nov. 10, 1979. Article is titled "The Burroughs zone".
Machete, 1980
Two copies of Jan. 1980 issue of Machete, a 1-sheet newsprint publication from Minneapolis. No direct WSB reference. In a mailing envelope addressed to JWG.
Allen Ginsberg Broadside, 1980
Copy of Ginsberg's broadside "Punk rock your my big crybaby", published by The Alternative Press, Grindstone City [Michigan], [nd] Inscribed by Ginsberg to WSB, and dated "New Years 1980". In a mailing envelope.
Magazine Litteraire, 1980
Issue of French magazine, Magazine Litteraire, no. 57, Fev. 1980. A special issue on the Beat Generation, with 2 articles on WSB (by Serge Greunberg and Gerard-Georges Lemaire), and "Les Limites du controle" by WSB. Other material by or on Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, et al. In a mailing envelope.
Das Merkheft, 1979
German magazine/catalog of books and records, no. 41, c1979. Includes a brief article on WSB, with a photo of WSB washing dishes. In a mailing envelope.
Machete, 1979
Ten copies of 1-sheet newsprint publication, Machete, no. 12, 1979. Includes an article, with photo, on WSB, and on his appearances at the Walker Art Center and University of Minnesota in Minneapolis. In a mailing envelope.
Naked Lunch Drawings
16 sheets pc drawings. Top sheet says "Wm. S. Burroughs' Naked Lunch" as part of drawing. No name or date on drawings.
Box 4
Folder Number #50-64
Machete, 1979
Two copies of an issue of Machete, no. 11, 1979, in a mailing envelope. No direct WSB reference.
Allen Ginsberg's Itineraries, 1972-1973
Several copies of Ginsberg's poetry reading itineraries, 1972-1973, as issued by the Committee on Poetry. Includes a note to WSB from Peter [Orlovsky] Also includes printed matter from Common Ground, Center for Arts Information, and Poets & Writers, Inc. In a manila mailing envelope.
Invisible City, 1977
Issue of Los Angeles, California avant-garde literary magazine, Invisible City, no. 21-22, 1977, an all-translation issue. No direct WSB reference.
Invisible City, 1979
Issue of Los Angeles, California avant-garde literary magazine, Invisible City, no. 23-25, 1979. No direct WSB reference.
Legs McNeil/Schrapnel, 1979
JWG's notes regarding a performance by Schrapnel, apparently in Lawrence, in 1979. Other venues are mentioned, as well as Patti [Smith?] and John Giorno. In a manila envelope with JWG's notes on it.
Sotere Torregian, Amtrak Trek, 1979
Book of poetry by Sotere Torregian, Amtrak Trek, New York: Telephone Books, c1979.
Mars Photo
Two newspaper clippings, undated; one showing a Martian landscape, the other discussing mysterious shapes in a Mars photograph. In a manila envelope with "Wm. on Mars" written on it in JWG's hand (although there is no reference to WSB in the article).
J. Kit Miller, Gods Bodyguards, 1979
Book of stories by J. Kit Miller, Gods Bodyguards [sic], Toronto: Permanent Press, 1979. In a mailing envelope.
Rufus Jones
48-sheet pc ts prospectus and sample for a science fiction novel, Jomar. Undated.
Announcements and Printed Matter, 1976
Printed matter and announcements of poetry readings and art exhibitions in New York City. Includes an issue of The Poetry Project newsletter, no. 39, 1976, and 2 issues, 1976, of The Poetry Project mailing list with work by Joel Oppenheimer and Jackson Mac Low. All in an unrelated manila mailing envelope.
The City Moon, 1976 Two copies of The City Moon, vol. 10, no. 1, 1976.
[Magazine edited by JWG and David Ohle.] Issue has stories by Steve Low[e], David Ohle, and others, an ad for a book by John M. Bennett, etc. Laid into 1 copy is a pc ts, 17 sheets, "The Monster and the spectacle: reflections on Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman" by Halina Charwat and Donald Freed. Found loose in original box between material in folders 59 and 61.
Printed Matter and Other Material, 1976-1978
One copy of The City Moon (same issue as in folder 60); a page from the Denver Post, 1977, with an article on 1960's culture with a photo of Allen Ginsberg; 1 issue of The Poetry Project newsletter, no. 57, 1978; an unsolicited MS from Richard Costello; and other material. Found loose in original box between material in folders 60 and 62.
Gay Rights Clippings, 1977-1979
Photocopied newspaper clippings of stories relating to gay rights from Minneapolis-area newspapers and The St. Louis Post-Dispatch. In a mailing envelope from the Walker Art Center.
Receipt for Display Books, 1984
One sheet original ts list of WSB's books delivered to Dept. of English, University of Kansas, for a display.
Gay Sunshine, 1974
16 copies of Gay Sunshine, no. 21, 1974. Includes an interview with WSB by Winston Leyland, a photo of WSB by Allen Ginsberg, other photos of WSB by Brion Gysin, Jack Kerouac, and Francisca Carr, and an article on WSB's fiction by James Martin.
Box 5
Folder Number #65-81
Empty Envelopes and Folder
Two empty envelopes and a folder, with JWG's notes on them referring to The Cat Inside. Two items dated 1985.
The Cat Inside Correspondence, 1986
Correspondence between JWG and Leslie Miller of the Grenfell Press regarding the galleys for The Cat Inside; a contract signed by WSB and Brion Gysin regarding the illustrations for The Cat Inside; 1 sheet orig. WSB ts (WSB's typing) with orig WSB holog. editing; and a poster for an apparently unrelated art opening.
The Cat Inside Long Galleys
17 sheets typeset text with pc holog. editing in JWG's hand, of The Cat Inside. In a manila envelope.
The Cat Inside Final Draft, 1986
45 sheets pc computer printout of The Cat Inside. In a manila envelope with JWG's note written on it: "The Cat Inside, final draft, 3/29/86 ..."
The Cat Inside Draft, Feb. 1986
66 sheets computer printout with extensive orig. holog. editing in JWG's hand, of The Cat inside. In a folder with JWG's note written on it, "TCI draft 2/2/86".
The Cat Inside Pages, March 1986
Nine sheets computer printout wlth orig. holog. editing in JWG's hand. Sheets are numbered 32, 34, 42-48, and are all headed "March 1986".
The Cat Inside First Draft
69 sheets pc computer printout (incl. 2 sheets pc holog. writing by WSB). Pages are all headed "CAT BOOK first draft" and have not been edited. In a manila envelope.
The Cat Book Draft 8 Aug. 1984
77 sheets pc ts (WSB's typing) with pc holog. editing and inserts in WSB's hand and some orig. holog. editing in JWG's hand. In a black binder with a label written in JWG's hand: "William S. Burroughs, 'The Cat Book', (draft a/o 8 Aug 84)".
Cat Book Correspondence, Texts, Images, 1985
Correspondence between WSB and Brion Gysin regarding The Cat Insidebook, several WSB ms pages from the book, printed pictures of cats, and other material. One sheet pc ts letter from WSB to Gysin, Oct. 12, 1985; 2 sheets pc ts WSB pages from The Cat book; 7 sheets orig. ts WSB pages from The Cat book; 5 sheets orig. holog. WSB pages; 1 orig. undated letter from Gysin to WSB referring to "my cats" (presumably drawings of cats); 2 sheets pc ts (not WSB's typing) letter regarding cats to The Lawrence Journal-World dated 27 June 1985; 1 sheet pc ts letter to WSB from Gysin, dated 12 April 1985; 2 sheets pc ts WSB letter from WSB to Gysin, dated 2 April 1985; 1 sheet orig. holog. letter from Gysin to WSB dated June 1985 in a manila mailing envelope; and 10 pieces printed matter and postcards, mostly with pictures of cats. In a manila folder with "10/85" written on it in WSB's hand and WSB's squiggly drawing on the front.
The Cat Inside MS, Nov. 1985
87 sheets mixed pc computer printout, cc ts, or orig. ts (2 sheets near end), all with pc or orig. holog. editing by WSB or JWG. The ts sheets are WSB's typing. 1 sheet is a computer printout discussing computer files of The Cat Inside. In a manila envelope with JWG's notes on it, dated Nov. 1985.
The Cat Inside Added Pages, Oct. 1985
Nine sheets orig. ts (WSB's typing) with WSB's orig. holog. editing. Sheets are numbered 1-9. Photocopies of these pages are in the ms in folder 74. Also includes an empty mailing envelope addressed to WSB in Brion Gysin's hand. All in a manila folder with "TCI - Oct 85 adds." written on it in JWG's hand.
The Cat Inside, WSB's Draft, Aug. 1985
72 sheets computer printout with several sheets orig. ts (WSB's typing) inserted. TS sheets have WSB's orig. holog. editing. JWG's pencilled orig. holog. editing thoughout. In a manila envelope with JWG's notes on it, "The Cat Inside, MS., Wm's Draft, August 1985 ..."
The Cat Inside, July 1985
49 numbered sheets computer printout of The Cat Inside with some minor pencilled editing by JWG and WSB. Also 2 sheets orig ts. (1 with WSB's typing) inserted sheets with orig. holog. editing. In a manila folder with a brief text written by WSB on the inside, WSB's squiggly drawing on the front, and JWG's note, "TCI July 85" on the tab.
The Cat Inside, 2nd Draft, June 1985
66 sheets computer printout of The Cat Inside, plus a pc printout letter to Brion Gysin from JWG asking for his editorial suggestions. In a manila envelope with JWG's note on it: "The Cat Inside (2nd draft), 6/17/85 - as sent to Brion".
The Cat Inside, June 1985
49 numbered sheets pc computer printout of The Cat Inside. In a manila envelope with "The Cat Inside, MS. 6/7/85" written on it in JWG's hand.
The Cat Inside Draft 6/6/85
Contains 2 folders:
(1) 53 sheets draft of The Cat Inside, mixed orig. ts and computer printout, some pages pasted up, all with extensive orig. holog. editing by WSB. Folder has a note from David Ohle written on the inside and "The Cat Inside, 6/6/85, OHLE, 11.25 hrs @ 7 ... " Apparently Ohle typed the ms from this draft.
(2) 23 sheets pages from The Cat Inside, mixed orig. ts and computer printout, all with extensive orig. holog. editing by WSB. Folder has "Out?" written on it in JWG's hand.
The Cat Inside Book Texts, April 1985
17 sheets, stapled together. Includes 2 sheets orig. ts (or cc ts) letter from WSB to Brion Gysin with orig. holog. signature, 2 sheets pc ts letter from Gysin to WSB. These letters are also in folder 73. Remaining sheets are all pc ts (WSB's typing) texts from The Cat Inside. All in a manila envelope with JWG's notes on it.
Box 6
Folder Number #82-84
Abe Frajndlich, Lives I've Never Lived, 1983
Two copies of book of photographs by Frajndlich,Lives I've Never Lived: a portrait of Minor White, Cleveland: ARC Press, 1983. Both copies inscribed by author to WSB; one has a note inserted. In a cardboard mailer.
Naked Lunch Numbering Sheets
Approx. 2-inch stack of identical printed sheets, each with the statement "The twenty-fifth anniversary edition of Naked Lunch was printed as 500 signed, slipcased copies, of which this is number ___." Sheets are not numbered or signed. In a padded mailer addressed to WSB, with Brion Gysin's return address.
Publications and Correspondence Received, 1983- 1984
Includes empty mailing envelopes with JWG's notes as to their original contents; gay publications; a copy of Arthur and Kit Knight's book The Beat Road, which includes photos of WSB; a 1984 Greek magazine with references to WSB in it; and other material.
Box 7
Folder Number #85-102
Gateavisa, 1983
Two issues of Oslo art and literature magazine, Gateavisa: no. 2, Feb. 1984; and no. 7, Dec. 1983. Dec. 1983 issue has an interview with WSB and other pages about him. In a mailing envelope with "Oslo/83 press ..." written on it in JWG's hand.
Luc Sante, The Invisible Man, 1984
Copy of The New York Review of Books, v. 31, no. 8, May 10, 1984, with an interesting article on WSB titled "The Invisible Man" ("William Burroughs' scene" on cover), pp. 12-15. With a 2-sheet orig. ts "draft letter" being WSB's response to Sante's article (not WSB's typing). In an apparently unrelated mailing envelope.
Lester Bangs in Creem, 1970
Two issues of Creem: v. 2, nos. 17 and 18, 1970, with a 2-part story by Lester Bangs on Iggy Pop and The Stooges. With a 1984 cc ts letter from JWG to John Morthland referring to this and other material by Bangs. In a manila envelope with "Lester Bangs Anthology" written on it in JWG's hand.
Vanity Fair, April 1984
Issue of Vanity Fair, v. 47, no. 4, April 1984, with 3 photos and a brief account of WSB's 70th birthday party.
Independent Publications, 1984
Printed matter, a magazine, and flyers advertising underground comics and other publications, in a mailing envelope from Independent Publications, Chicago. Two phone numbers written on envelope in WSB's hand.
Simone Debout, "Jusqu'au Silence", 1984
Copy of Passe Present, no. 3, 1984, a French literary journal, with an article by Simone Debout, "Jusqu'au silence", a film version of The Last words of Dutch Schultz. Article has a quotation from WSB, and a presentation note from Debout to WSB inserted. In a manila envelope.
Ian Dunbar , Report, 1983
24-page computer printout of an article by Dunbar critically discussing medical philosophy, drug safety, medical experimentation, and related matters, with a presentation letter to WSB. In a mailing envelope.
Jack Saunders, Pamphlets, 1984
Three 1984 pamphlets by Florida writer Jack Saunders: See See Writer,Open Letter, and Outfit Art. With 2 pc sheets: a letter from Saunders to Scott Meredith, and a nomination for Saunders for the Florida Arts Recognition Program. In a mailing envelope addressed to WSB.
Alternative Media, Spring 1983
Issue of magazine, Alternative Media, v. 14, no. 2, Spring 1983. Has articles on sexual expression, Nelson Algren, and other matters. No direct WSB reference. In a manila envelope.
Cleveland and Kent, Ohio Press, May 1984
Clippings and pc clippings from Cleveland and and Kent newspapers and magazines referring to WSB's appearances there. With a letter from Kent State University, and one from Robert Jackson; both sent with clippings. In a mailing envelope.
The James White Review, Spring 1984
Copy of the tabloid, The James White Review: a gay men's literary quarterly, v. 1, no. 3, Spring 1984, from Minneapolis. No direct WSB reference. In a mailing envelope.
Recording Publications, 1984
Two publications: On location: the film & videotape production magazine, Feb. 1984; and The Saxitone Catalog, 1984 (a catalog of tape recording equipment and supplies).
Jan Herman, Burroughs, 1984
Copy of tabloid section from Sun. March 25, 1984 edition of The Chicago Sun-Timeswith an article by Jan Herman, "Burroughs: literary saint and sinner". With 3 extra copies of the page that includes the article, and a note from Herman. In a mailing envelope.
Alex Gildzen, Open Theater Conference, 1983
Program for a conference and exhibition on The Open Theater, based in part on materials in the Special Collections dept. of Kent State University Library. With an exchange of correspondence between Gildzen and JWG, and a broadside printed poem by Gildzen. In a mailing envelope.
Hommage a William Burroughs, 1984
Two copies of a poster for Polyphonix 6, Festival International de Poesie Directe et Musique a Bourges les 2, 3 et 4 Avril 84, Hommage a William Burroughs. WSB is listed as a participant, as are Bernard Heidsieck, Julien Blaine, Brion Gysin, John Giorno, Amiri Baraka, Linton Kwesi Johnson, Emmett Williams, and others. In a mailing envelope.
Banned Books by WSB, 1984
Correspondence between JWG and the American Library Association and the National Coalition Against Censorship regarding books by WSB that have been banned or censored. Includes a list of several such books, and other material. In a mailing envelope.
National Museum of Transport, 1984
Brochures, newsletters, a catalog, and other printed matter from the National Museum of Transport, St. Louis, 1984. In a mailing envelope with JWG's note written on it: "from John Roberts (met 3/29/84 in St. Louis)".
French Gay Magazines, 1984
Three French gay men's magazines, ca. 1984:Profils, no. 1, [1984?]; Samourai, no. 18, [1984?]; andGaihebdopied, no. 113, 1984.
Box 8
Folder Number #103-114
Tom Huckabee, 1984
March 12, 1984 ts letter from Tom Huckabee introducing a 9-sheet pc ts, included, "My kingdom for a hearse" by Perkins Harnly. In a mailing envelope.
Inkblot, 1984
Two publications from Inkblot, Theo Green, publisher and editor: F. A. Nettelbeck, The Kiss Off, [ca. 1984]; and Inkblot Ink-Flash issue, May 1984. Latter has contributions from Julian Blaine, Vittore Baroni, Bernard Heidsieck, Dick Higgins, F. A. Nettelbeck, Harry Polkinhorn, and others. With a ts letter from Green to WSB. In a mailing envelope.
On Film, 1983
Issue of magazine, On Film, no. 11, 1983, published by UCLA Dept. of Theater Arts. Includes article on the UCLA Gay & Lesbian Media Conference held in Jan. 1983. No direct WSB reference. In a mailing envelope.
Jan Herman, William Burroughs and the Power of Dreams
Article/interview in tabloid St. Louis Weekly, no. 210, March 21-27, 1984, in advance of WSB's March 29 appearance in St. Louis for the opening of the film Burroughs. In a mailing envelope.
Limelight Press Kit, 1984
Press kit for Peter Gatien and his Limelight club, where WSB's 70th birthday party was celebrated. Kit includes several pc clippings of WSB's party. Also a ts letter from Ira Silverberg. In a mailing envelope.
Sylvester & Orphanos Catalog, 1983
Catalog of bookdealer and publisher; includes several WSB titles. Also a postcard from JWG requesting the catalog. In a mailing envelope.
Ira Silverberg-JWG Correspondence, 1984
Five ts or holog. personal letters (1 is a postcard) from Silverberg to JWG, and 1 cc ts letter from JWG to Silverberg. Also 2 copies of an announcement of a book-showing by Silverberg, and a copy of The New York Times Book Review, April 8, 1984, with an ad for WSB's The Place of Dead Roads and one of Silverberg's letters, and a tearsheet of another WSB ad from another newspaper. All was in a mailing envelope.
Conversations with American Writers, 1984
Draft of protions of interviews with Maurice Girodias, WSB, and Allen Ginsberg for use in Charles Ruas' book Conversations with American Writers, (NY: Knopf, 1985). The interviews have to do with Naked Lunch and The Yage Letters, and related matters, and were sent to WSB and JWG for WSB's permission. Includes a letter from Ruas, JWG's cc ts reply and a sheet of JWG's editorial notes, and a pc of WSB's signed release form. 45 sheets in all. In a mailing envelope.
Word of Mouth, 1984
Copy of promotional magazine from Warner Bros. Records, May 1984. No direct WSB reference.
Samourai, 1984
Issue no. 19 [1984?] of French gay men's magazine. Includes an article on Divine.
WSB in the Press, Feb.-March, 1984
Two issues of The New York Times Book Review (March 11 and March 18, 1984) with letters to the editor referring to Perry Meisel's Feb. 19 review of The Place of Dead Roads and a reference to WSB's 70th birthday party. Also some pc copies of the letters, and pc copies of an article on the birthday party from The Schenectady Gazette, Feb. 1984. In a mailing envelope.
Correspondence Received, 1983
Correspondence received, fan mail, JWG's office notes, mail art, and other material. Includes a few sheets of WSB's replies and notes. Includes letters or cards from Claude Pelieu, Duncan Fallowell (with a newspaper article on AIDS), Ian Dunbar, Michael McClure, Lucien [Carr?] (a brief note), Mary Beach-Pelieu, Victor [Bockris?], and many others. The WSB notes and texts include the following:
sheet mixed ts and holog., undated.
1 sheet holog. text (2 sides) about cats, dated Sept. 14-15, 1983.
2 versions orig. ts letter, reply to a fan, dated Sept. 1, 1983.
1 sheet holog. list of words, etc., (2 sides), dated Aug. 26, 1983.
1 envelope with time of a TV show noted on it.
All in a manila envelope with "fan ltrs etc., closed out 11/15/83" written on it in JWG's hand.
Box 9
Folder Number #115-133
University of Kansas Conference, 1983
1983 correspondence between JWG and Denise Low regarding a conference in Sept. 1983 at the Associated Writing Programs of Kansas, at the University of Kansas. Also discussed is the selection of some passages from The Place of Dead Roads for an anthology of poetry by Kansas writers to be published by the Cottonwood Review Press. In a manila folder.
Kansas City Art Institute, 1983
One sheet of JWG's notes regarding a [WSB?] appearance at the Kansas City Art Institute in November 1983. In a manila folder.
WSB Poems in Grinning Idiot, 1982
Unnumbered issue of Grinning Idiot literary magazine, c1982, with 2 short poems by WSB: "Heavily Muscled Randy Scott" and "Sung by the". In a mailing envelope postmarked Sept. 1983.
WSB's Beckett and Proust Notes
Undated ts, 6 sheets orig. ts and 1 sheet cc ts, all WSB's typing, discussing WSB's visits with Beckett, Beckett's and Proust's writing, and comparing WSB's own work with Beckett's and Proust's. In an envelope with "WSB's Notes for Beckett-Proust Class" written on it in JWG's hand.
The James White Review, 1983
Vol. 1, no. 1, 1983 of this Minneapolis "gay men's literary quarterly". Includes a letter to WSB from the editor asking for an interview. In a mailing envelope.
Announcements and Catalogs, 1983
Group of exhibition and performance announcements, catalogs and publication announcements, and other material, mostly from Fall 1983. Includes an announcement for a show of photographs at City Lights Bookstore which is a postcard print of a photo of WSB; several copies of an announcement for a show of photographs by Ira Cohen; and a chapbook, Stories by Five Teenage Mothers, ed. by G. Varela Marin with Laura Grunfeld, Tijeras, NM: Y Que! Publications, c1983. All in a manila envelope.
Rudolf Schwarzkogler Catalog, 1970
Catalog of self-mutilation performance photos of Schwarzkogler, from a show at Galerie Nachst St. Stephan, Vienna, Nov.-Dec. 1970. In a manila envelope.
Burroughs Communications Material, 1983
Correspondence received, solicitations, fan mail, and other material. Includes some of JWG's cc replies. Includes several pages from JWG's address book. Also includes a chapbook, Blood and Balls: an epic poem, by Jonathan Robbins, New York: Presses Branlemoi, 1982, with a cc ts letter from WSB to the author. Some of the names on notes and other materials include Timothy Leary, Felicity [Mason], Julian Schnabel, Gregory Corso, Laura Boss, and others. All in a mailing envelope with Alan Ansen's return address (no Ansen material in folder).
David Cronenberg Envelope, 1983
Empty 10 x 13" envelope with "from: David Cronenberg..." written on it, and addressed to "William S. Burroughs, King Edward Hotel...10/12/83". King Edward Hotel is in Toronto (cf. JWG's notes in folder 126).
Kansas Alumni Magazine, 1983
Three issues of Kansas Alumni Magazine, 1983; a cc ts letter from JWG to Daniel Reeder, the magazine's editor, regarding JWG's providing some essays for the magazine; and 1 sheet of JWG's notes.
John Giorno Letter, 1983
Brief letter from Giorno to JWG, presenting a photo of Kate Simon (photo not included), and discussing a possible tour. In a mailing envelope.
WSB in Toronto, 1983
Correspondence between JWG, Elliott Lefko, Peter McGehee, and others, regarding a performance by WSB, John Giorno, and Jim Carroll in Toronto, Oct. 11, 1983. Includes JWG's notes, and a poster for the performance. In a manila folder.
WSB in Norway, 1983
Correspondence between WSB and various persons in Oslo regarding a performance by WSB and John Giorno there in Oct. 1983. Includes JWG's notes. In a manila folder.
WSB at the Walker Art Institute, 1983
Correspondence between JWG and various persons associated with the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis regarding an appearance by WSB at the Walker's Word Works festival, Oct. 6, 1983. Includes JWG's notes. In a manila folder.
WSB in Fort Worth, 1983
Correspondence between JWG, Honey Hoffman, and others regarding a performance by WSB and Brion Gysin at Caravan of Dreams, a new performing arts center. Includes printed matter, clippings, and pc clippings about the Caravan of Dreams; and press releases and pc clippings about WSB and Gysin. Includes JWG's notes. In a manila folder.
WSB in New York, 1983
Correspondence between JWG and Jason Schindler of the Poetry Society of America regarding a WSB reading at 63rd St. YMCA in New York City, Oct. 14, 1983, with novelist Stewart Meyer. Includes JWG's notes, and an interesting 3-sheet ts mailing list of WSB's friends in New York City. In a manila folder.
One World Poetry Festival, 1983
Correspondence, JWG's notes, travel schedules and printed matter related to the One World Poetry Festival, held in Amsterdam, Oct. 1983. Includes 2 letters and a postcard from John Giorno relating to the festival and travel plans. WSB, Giorno, and many others participated. In a manila folder.
WSB's Wilderness Text, 1983
Correspondence between Robert Fulton and JWG regarding a text by WSB for a film by Fulton on The Wilderness Society. Includes WSB's orig. ts, with holog. editing in WSB's hand, 5 sheets; a 3-sheet pc ts (WSB's typing) 2nd draft; and Fulton's 2-sheet edited version of text. In a manila mailing envelope.
Inkblot, 2, 1983
Issue of Inkblot, literary magazine edited by Theo Green. Includes work by Vittore Baroni, Udo Breger, Bob Cobbing, Ira Cohen, Jean-Jacques Lebel, F. A. Nettelbeck, Claude Pelieu, and others.
Box 10
Folder Number #134-138
Correspondence Received, 1983
Correspondence received,requests for interviews, signatures, and submissions; clippings; printed matter; JWG's office notes; and other material. Includes an orig. ts reply by WSB to a fan letter, and correspondence from Theo Green, Sylvere Lotringer (includes pc articles), John Giorno, Laurie Anderson, D. Braddey, Gerald Nicosia, Anne Waldman (with several pc ts pages from Blue Mosque, Richard Dillon (with several sheets pc photos of WSB, Allen Ginsberg, and others, some of them apparently in WSB's NYC "Bunker"), and others. Names on notes include Karl Jirgens, Kathy Acker (with pc article about her), Terry Southern, and others. All material originally in a single unmarked manila folder.
Knights of Malta Article, 1983
Issue of National Catholic Reporter, Oct. 14, 1983, with an article by Martin A. Lee about the right wing nature of the Knights of Malta and their connections in U.S. corporate and government circles. In a manila envelope with JWG's note on it: "Marty Lee Article on SMOM".
Ira Silverberg's Junk Mail, 1983
Group of items addressed to Ira Silverberg, Box 147, Lawrence, KS 66044 [WSB's address]: unopened junk mail, solicitations, catalogs, etc.
Robert Walker Photo Exhibitions, 1982-1983
Two catalogs of group exhibitions of photography, and 3 postcard announcements of photo exhibitions of work by Robert Walker. Walker is also a participant in the shows covered in the catalogs. All in a padded mailer with "Robert Walker" written on it in JWG's hand.
WSB in Sweden, 1983
Group of clippings and pc clippings covering WSB's trip to Sweden (Goteborgs) in Oct. 1983. Includes an orig. 8X10 black-and-white photo print of WSB taken by Erik Pauser, apparently in Goteborgs. All in a padded mailer.
Box 11
Folder Number #139-142
October 1983 Tour File
Correspondence, travel itineraries, tickets, receipts, clippings, programs, printed matter, photos, JWG's notes, and other material related to an Oct. 1983 tour taken by WSB and JWG to Minneapolis, New York City, Toronto, Amsterdam, Helsinki, Bergen (Norway), Oslo, and Copenhagen to give readings, etc. Includes numerous issues and pages from the Scandanavian press, and a lot of printed matter from the Amsterdam One World Poetry Festival. Also includes 4 8X10 black-and-white photo prints of WSB by Kate Simon, in an envelope from Elliott Lefko of Downsview, Ontario. All in an envelope with "Euro Tour '83" written on it in JWG's hand.
Publisher's Lists and JWG's Donation Cards
Two copies of a list from Blue Wind Press, 1977, that includes WSB's The Book of Breeething; and a 1972 catalog/list from Crossing Press. Also includes a group of cards detailing gifts to Ohio state University of books for the William S. Burroughs Collection.
Ferlinghetti and Huncke Publications
Folded broadside by Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Adieu a Charlot: second populist manifesto, San Francisco: White and Wail, c1978; and pc pages 46-57 from Herbert Huncke, Huncke's Journal, New York: The Poet's Press, 1965, with references to "Bill".
Bockris, Con Burroughs, 1979
Italian edition of Victor Bockris' book, Con Burroughs: conversazioni inedite 1974-1979, Roma: Arcana Editrice, c1979. Two copies, wrapped, in a padded mailer, with a received note in JWG's hand, date-stamped Feb. 20, 1980.
Box 12
Books and Magazines Not in Folders
(Some with Turned-Down Pages or Dedications)
Carlsen, Robin Woodsworth, The Final Heresy, Victoria, British Columbia: The Snow Man Press, 1979. [inscribed to WSB by author]
Boyd, John, The Gorgon Gestival, NY: Bantam Books, 1974.
Haldeman, John, Mindbridge, NY: Avon Books, 1978.
Gunn, James, Future Imperfect, NY: Bantam Books, 1964.
Black, David, Ekstasy: out-of-the-body experiences, NY: Berkley Medallion Books, 1976.
Baba, Meher, The Secret of Sleep: the mystery of man's relation with God, Poona: Meher Era Publications, 1969.
Braun, Richard Emil, Bad land, Penland, North Carolina: The Jargon Society, 1971.
Levine, Stephen, Synapse: sutras, myths, & visions of the 'retinal circus', San Francisco: Arbat Press, 1965.
Corso, Gregory, The Vestal Lady on Brattle and Other Poems,[San Francisco]: City Lights Books, 1969.
The Secretly Obscene Chokecherry Monstrosity, Lawrence, KS: University of Kansas, 1968. [poetry anthology]
Knief, William,The Golden Monster, [Lawrence, KS]: Cottonwood Review, 1971.
Perkins, David, Midget Wonder and Other Poems, Lawrence, KS: Cottonwood Review, 1971.
Russell, Norman H., Night Dog & Other Poems, Lawrence, KS: Cottonwood Review, 1971.
Suggs, Jon Christian, The Quick-Change Artist: poems, [Lawrence, KS]: Cottonwood Review, 1971.
Weldon, Harry, Abel's Grin: poems, [Lawrence, KS]: Cottonwood Review, 1971.
Wilson, David, Piñasco, Lawrence, KS: Cottonwood Review, 1971.
Sherry, James, Part songs, NY: Roof Books, 1978. [inscribed by author "for Reed and Anne"]
Delta, v. 21, 1967, Louisiana State University. [student literary magazine]
Spit in the ocean, no. 2, 1976, Pleasant Hill, OR. [literary magazine ed. by Ken Keseyj
Artful dodge, v. 2, no. 4, 1981, Bloomington, IN [poetry journal]
Cottonwood Review, [4 issues]: 1968, Spring 1969, Fall 1969, Winter 1969-70, Lawrence, KS.
Fox, Ida, In the Wind, St. Davids, Wales: Antiphon Press, 1970.
Ginsberg, Allen, Bixby Canyon, Ocean Path, Word Breeze, NY: Gotham Book Mart, 1972. [signed by author, 17 March 1972]
Box 13
Paperback Books Not in Folders
(Mostly Science Fiction, Some with Turned-Down Pages)
Lauria, Frank, Communion, NY: Bantam Books, 1977.
Kerouac, Jack,Maggie Cassidy, NY: Avon, c1959. ["An Avon Original"]
Bradley, Marion Zimmer, Darkover landfall, NY: Daw Books, 1972.
Herbert, Frank, Hellstrom's Hive, NY: Bantam Books, 1974.
Gramont, Sanche de, The Way up: the memoirs of Count Gramont, Frogmore, St. Albans: Panther Books, 1975.
Buchanan, Marie, The Dark Backward, NY: Ballantine Books, 1976.
Stern, Stuart, The Minotaur Factor, Chicago: Playboy Press, 1977.
Gerrold, David, The Man Who Folded Himself, NY: Popular Library, 1973.
[Anonymous], All the Sad Young Men, NY: Wisdom House, c1962.
Shea, Robert, and Robert Anton Wilson, The Eye in the Pyramid: illuminatus, part I, NY: Dell, 1975.
Shea, Robert, and Robert Anton Wilson, The Golden Apple: illuminatus!, part II , NY: Dell, 1975.
Berry, Adrian, The Iron Sun: crossing the universe through black holes, NY: Warner Books, 1978.
Pauwels, Louis, and Jacques Berger, The Morning of the Magicians, NY: Avon, 1971.
Wonder Wart-Hog, Captain Crud & Other Super Stuff, edited by Chuck Alverson, designed by Terry Gilliam, [S.1]: Fawcett, c1967. ["head" comics]
Kavan, Anna, Ice, NY: Popular Library, c1970. [unattributed original drawings on the insides of front and back covers]
Williamson, Jack, The Moon Children, NY: Berkley Medallion Books, 1973.
Herbert, Frank,Soul catcher, NY: Berkley Publishing Corp., 1979.
Smith, Clark Ashton, Out of Space and Time: volume 1, Frogmore, St. Albans, Panther, 1974.
Bonnecarrere, Paul, Ultimatum, NY: Ballantine Books, 1976.
Beyond Control: seven stories of science fiction, ed. by Robert Silverberg, NY: Dell, 1974.
Edwards, Anne, The Survivors, NY: Dell, 1977.
Jakes, John, Brak the Barbarian, NY: Pocket Books, 1977.
Leiber, Fritz, The Wanderer, NY: Ballantine Books, 1976.
Leiber, Fritz, Our Lady of Darkness, NY: Berkley Medallion Books, 1978.
Box 14
(1) Books Not in Folders - Some with Turned-Down Pages
(2) Folders #143-152
Lee, Martin A., and Bruce Shlain, Acid Dreams: the CIA, LSD and the sixties rebellion, NY: Grove Press, [n.d.] [uncorrected proof copy]
Quincey, Thomas de, Theological Essays and Other Papers, vol. II, Boston: Ticknor and Fields, 1860. [inscribed to WSB by Jonathan Robbins]
McLoughlon Bros., The Magic Mirror: an antique optical toy, NY: Dover, 1979. [inscribed to WSB by "Michael"]
Shem, Samuel, The House of God, NY: Dell, 1979. [includes a postcard to "Ohle's" from Belize inserted]
Forsyth, Frederick, The Fourth Protocol, NY: Bantam Books, 1985. [newspaper clipping about Belize inserted]
Peck, M. Scott, People of the Lie: the hope for healing human
Evil, NY: Simon & Schuster, 1985 [with inscription in WSB's hand: "thought you might enjoy this book, William"]
Williams, Tennessee,27 Wagons Full of Cotton: and other one- act plays, NY: New Directions, 1966.
Nolen, William A., The Making of a Surgeon, NY: Pocket Books, 1972.
Cassette Tape by Grey Tissue
C-90 audio cassette in a case. No writing on cassette, but there is a typed list of songs ("Processing song"... etc.) in the cassette case. With a letter, envelope, printed matter, and some notes by JWG (the latter probably not related to tape). Letter is from Gabe Konrad, a high school student, and discusses the tape. Date in postmark is illegible: [198-?]
Correspondence Received and JWG's Notes, 1979-1980
Correspondence received regarding editing of WSB's texts, JWG's notes, travel itineraries, lists of names, and other materials. Includes 2 sheets of contact prints of WSB in an envelope from Jerry Bauer, Rome. All in a red folder with WSB's note on it: "useable material for retyping".
WSB Austin Honorary Citizens Decree
Decree issued by City of Austin, TX, commissioning WSB as an honorary citizen, dated Nov. 10, 1976. In a grey presentation folder.
Time Out, Oct. 1979
Issue of London entertainment-listing magazine, no. 495, Oct. 12-18, 1979. In mailing envelope addressed to JWG.
Student Papers, 1966-1973
Group of pc ts and pc holog. student class papers on anthropology and literature, some dated, by different writers, some unattributed. Includes a group of pc holog. unattributed poems, some with orig. holog. overwriting where the pc is faint. In a manila envelope with "Bill" written on it, and some I Ching hexagrams.
Straight Lines, 2, 1979
Issue of English literary magazine, with work by Robert Coover, Seamus Heaney, Thom Gunn, and others. In 2 mailing envelopes addressed to WSB.
WSB in Rocky Mountain News, 1979
PC of pages from tabloid-size newspaper for Aug. 8, 1979, with an article by John Ashton, "The 'Orderly' life of William S. Burroughs". 3 copies of the same pages. Includes photo.
WSB in En Attendant, 1979
Copy of music tabloid magazine from Brussels, Belgium, no. 22, Nov. 1979, with an interview of WSB by Michel Duval. In French. Includes photo. In manila envelope addressed to WSB.
The Harvard Crimson, 1979
Pages and supplements from The Harvard Crimson, Feb.-May 1979. Includes 2 articles on the CIA by Trevor Barnes, and articles on The Ramones and Patti Smith by David A. deMilo. The article on Patti Smith includes a quote by WSB. In a mailing envelope from deMilo addressed to Allen Ginsberg.
Drawing by Falk, 1976
Matted drawing by "Falk", dated Nov. 12, 1976, and dedicated to WSB.
Box 15
Folder Number #153-171
C.K. DeRugeris, Void Districkt, 1977
60-sheet pc ts poetry ms, dated 8/4/77, with a note to WSB on first sheet. In mailing envelope.
Stewart Meyer, The Criminal City
Undated pc ts, 14 pgs., prose fiction somewhat in WSB's style.
General Advice on Diet
Undated 16-pg. pc ts on diet as "natural healing", by Dr. Timothy A. Binder.
The Muse Concerts for a Non-Nuclear Future, 1979
Program for a series of rock concerts to protest nuclear power, at Madison Square Garden, Sept. 19-23, 1979.
F. Scott Fitzgerald, Stories in Redbook, 1934-1941
Stories by Fitzgerald from several issues of Redbook, 1934-1941. Photocopies of the magazine's pages, with orig. holog. annotations in an unidentified hand.
X Flyer, 1977
Folded advertising flyer for first issue of a magazine called X, for Fall 1977. Issue was to include work by Timothy Leary, Henry Miller, Blaise Cendrars, Jack Micheline, and others.
Kenneth Tynan, The Girl in the Black Helmet, 1979
PC of an article in The New Yorker, June 11, 1979, about the movie actress Louise Brooks, whose career was in the 1920's and 1930's.
Big K Fire, 1979
Three articles from Lawrence, KS newspapers discussing a fire in a downtown building that destroyed several businesses, including a bar called Big K. In a manila envelope with JWG's note on it, "Big K Fire clippings".
Black Hills Alliance, 1979
Publications, printed matter, and a clipping from the Black Hills Alliance, South Dakota, an organization opposed to mining and nuclear energy activities in the Black Hills. In a manila envelope.
Alfred Deitrich Kleyhauer III, Traveler
Undated pc ts literary work, approx. 56 sheets
Jerry Brown Clippings, 1979
Group of newspaper clippings on Governor Jerry Brown (California), along with 2 pc of the same clippings. In a white folder with JWG's unrelated notes on it.
Correspondence Received, 1979
Correspondence received (addressed to WSB or JWG), JWG's office notes, clippings, printed matter and other material. Includes letters from Michel Gaboury, Mark Melnicove, Allen Ginsberg (brief note forwarding a submission request), Gerald Nicosia, and others. Names on notes include Patti Smith, Udo Breger, Howard Brookner, Gerard Malanga, Robert Rauschenberg, and others. In a manila envelope with "Letters answered" written on it in WSB's hand.
Steve Brooks MS and Dechadenede Film
Undated pc ts play by Steve Brooks, Stolen Wealth, 38 sheets. Also a small reel of 8mm film in a plastic case, and in an envelope with "Dechadenede" written on it. All material in a manila envelope with "Dechad Film, Steve Brooks Ms" written on it in JWG's hand.
1960 WSB Interview Transcript
22-sheet pc ts transcript of a 1960 interview with WSB, and an account of how the interview came about. Interviewer is not identified, but the interview took place in London. JWG's note on ts says "rec'd 31 Aug 79 from [illegible word] Pennington/Aloes Books". In a manila envelope.
Insurance Folder
Empty manila folder with "Insurance" and other office notes written on it, in JWG's hand.
Best of Grist, 1985
Exchange of correspondence between Jim McCrary and JWG, 1984-1985, regarding an anthology of Gristmagazine, apparently to be edited by both. 2 letters in a manila folder with "Best of Grist" written on it in JWG's hand.
Brian Cullman's Stephen Foster Project, 1984
Correspondence contracts, proposals, and notes regarding a record and documentary film of performances by contemporary artists of Stephen Foster's songs. WSB was to be one of the artists performing. In a manila folder.
MAC Formatting Experiments
Computer printouts of fonts, forms, and other material, and JWG's notes. Ca. 1984. In a folder with "MAC: Formatting Experiments" written on it in JWG's hand.
170A - Fotografie, 32/33, 1984
Issue of German photography and art journal with an article by WSB, "Notizen zu Playback-Experimenten". Also an article by Udo Breger that includes references to, and photos of, WSB. Also material by Brion Gysin, Klaus Peter Dencker, Richard Hamilton, and others.
American Photographer, Jan. 1984
Issue of magazine; includes a story on Anne Leibowitz. Also a group of clippings from various Kansas newspapers and other sources, on bands, homosexuality, and other matters.
Box 16
(1)Books and Pamphlets Not in Folders
(2)Serials Not in Folders
(3)Folder #172-173
Shagan, Steve, The Circle, NY: Bantam Books, 1983.
Townsend, Larry, The Leatherman's handbook II, NY: Modernismo Publications, 1983
Hakim, Crowstone: the chronicle of Qamar, Amsterdam: Spartacus, 1983.
Blagg, Max, From Here to Maternity, London: Aloes Books, 1980.
Witting, Judith, Sun Roots, Oshkosh: The Wisconsin Review, 1976.
Ginsberg, Allen, Sad Dust Glories: poems during work summer in woods, Berkeley: The Workingman's Press, 1975.
Misson and Libertatia, retold by Larry Law, London: Spectacular Times, 1980.
Stern, Theresa, Wanna Go Out?, NY: Dot Books, 1973.
Delacorta, Diva, NY: Summit Books, 1983. [Delacorta is pseudonym of Daniel Odier, who edited WSB's The Job]
Mitton, Simon, The Crab Nebula, NY: Scribner's, 1979.
Rencontre Internationale de la Contre-Culture, [Paris]: Atelier d'Expression Multidisciplinaire, 1975. [program for an conference in which WSB participated, along with Charles Plymell, Ed Sanders, Claude Pelieu, Allen Ginsberg, Mary Beach, John Giorno, Anne Waldman, and many others]
Wurlitzer, Rudolph, Slow Fade, NY: Knopf, 1984. [uncorrected proof copy]
Serials Not in Folders
Gay Comix, no. 2, 1981.
Gay Comix, no. 3, 1982.
Unmuzzled Ox, vol. 2, no. 3, 1974.
Lowlands Review, vol. 2, 1976.
The Poem Company, phase 3, no. 2, [n.d.]
The Poem Company, phase 3, no. 6, [n.d.]
Some, 4, 1973.
New Letters, v. 40, no. 2, 1973.
Caterpillar, 17, 1971.
Mensuel 25, no. 5, 1977 [Belgium]
Lemnacées
Three publications on Lemnacées or Lemna minor:
Caldwell, Otis W.,On the life-history of Lemna minor, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1899.
Van Horen, Francois, Observations sur la physiologie des Lemnacées, Bruxelles: Societé Royale de Botanique de Belgigue, 1869.
Weddell, M. H.-A., Observations sur une espece nouvelle du genre Wolffia (Lemnacées), [Paris]: Annales des Sciences Naturelles, 1849.
Printed Matter and Correspondence
Small group of printed matter, brochures, correspondence received, and empty mailing envelopes. Includes printed matter from Art Metropole, L'Atelier de l'Agneau, The SubGenius Foundation, Gerard Malanga, and other sources. Found together loose in original box.
Box 17
Books Not in Folders
O'Hara, Frank, Odes, NY: Poet's Press, c1969.
Gray, Darrell, A Dog's Life: poems rural & domestic, Berkeley: Poltroon Modern Poets, c1978.
Plymell, Charles, Blue Orchid Numero Uno, NY: Telephone Book Press, c1975.
McCord, Howard, Gnomonology: a handbook of systems, Berkeley: Sand Dollar, 1971.
Moore, William, The Philadelphia Experiment, [S.1]: Grosset & Dunlap, [1979] [uncorrected proof copy]
Friedman, Ed, The Black Star Pilgrimage: the escape story, NY: Frontward Books, c1976.
Watson, Scott, Stories, Vancouver, B.C.: Talon Books, 1974.
Cannon, Orlan, Six Days From: toujours la truite, Charlottesville, VA: Alphaville Books, c1975.
Brownstein, Michael,Brainstorms: stories, Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, c1975. [inscribed by the author to "Bill"]
Levine, Faye, The Culture Barons, NY: Crowell, [n.d.] [dust jacket only]
Grauerholz, James, Rusty Jack, Cherry Valley, NY: Cherry Valley Editions, c1974. [cover by S. Clay Wilson]
Barthes, Roland, Alors la Chine?, Paris: C. Bourgois, 1975.
Dewdney, Christopher, Fovea Centralis, Toronto: The Coach House Press, 1975.
Gilfillan, Merrill, To Creature, Berkeley: Blue Wind Press, 1975.
Lentz, Jon Warren, Poems 1972-1974, Encinitas, CA: Instant Randomhouse Press, c1975. [inscribed by author to "Bill"]
Alkes, Joey, In the face of all that is apparent, Bowery: Black Ace, [1975?] [includes a note from the author to WSB, and a pc clipping of a review of the book]
Collom, Jack, Ice, Boulder, CO: Lodestar Press, c1974.
General Idea, Manipulating the Self, Toronto: The Coach House Press, c1971.
Nations, Opal L., Steady Jelly: 6 works, Newcastle Upon Tyne: Laundering Room Press, c1974.
Pelieu, Claude, Coca neon / Polaroidrainbow, translated by Mary Beach, Cherry Valley, NY: Cherry Valley Editions, 1975.
Malanga, Gerard, Prelude to International Velvet Debutante, Milwaukee, WI: Great Lakes Books, 1967.
Brodey, Jim, Blues of the Egyptian Kings (1962-1975), Bolinas, CA: Big Sky Books, c1975.
Song Books X, [S.1. : s.n., 1977?]
Beware 666 X Song Book, [S.1.: s.n., n.d.]
Lunch, Lydia, and Exene Cervenka, Adulterers Anonymous, NY: Grove Press, 1982.
Denby, Edwin, Snoring in New York, NY: Angel Hair Books/Adventures in poetry, c1974. [signed and lettered by author]
Serials Not in Folders
The Barataria review, v. 1, no. 1, 1974.
The Periodical lunch, no. 5, 1975. [includes work by Anselm Hollo and others]
Not guilty, v. 1, no. 1, 1975. [includes work by Anne Waldman, Michael McClure, Anselm Hollo, Kenneth Patchen, Tuli Kupferberg, and others]
Is, no. 11, 1972. [includes work by Opal L. Nations, and others]
Undine, no. 1, 1974. [Copy 309, inscribed to WSB] [includes work by John Tagliabue, Richard Kostelanetz, and others]
The Tenth Muse, Fall 1973.
Living Hand, no. 1, 1973.
Assassin, no. 3, 1977. [includes work by Bill Knott, Ira Cohen, Opal L. Nations, Claude Pelieu, and others]
Some, no. 5/6, 1975. [includes work by Bob Heman, Bill Knott, Gerard Malanga, Ken Saville, and others]
Penumbra, no. 12, 1973. [includes work by Paul Grillo, Bruce Andrews, and others]
Penumbra, no. 11, 1972. [includes work by Simon Perchik, John Giorno, Andrei Codrescu, Guy Beining, Richard Kostelanetz, and others]
Other Scenes, Spring 1974.
City, no. 2, 1974. [2 copies]
Box 18
Books Not in Folders
The Art of Maya Hieroglyphic Writing, [exhibition catalog; exhibition at the Center for Inter-American Relations, 1971]
New York - Downtown Manhattan: SoHo, Berlin: Akademie der Kunste, 1976. [exhibition catalog]
Jouffroy, Alain, La Seance est Ouverte, [S.1.]: Editions Etrangeres, c1974. [inscribed by author to WSB]
Trost, Lucille Wood, A Cycle of Seasons: the little brown bat, Reading, Mass.: Young Scott Books, c1971. [inscribed to "William" by "Steven"]
Fulcanelli, Master Alchemist, Le Mystère des Cathedrales, London: Neville Spearman, c1971.
Crowley, Aleister, The Book of the Law, [S.l: s.n., n.d.]
Seitz, Don C.,Under the Black Flag, NY: The Dial Press, 1925.
The Illustrated Presidential Report of the Commission on Obscenity and Pornography, San Diego, CA: Greenleaf Classics, c1970. [has a holog. note on first pg. in WSB's hand: "This copy given me by Terry Southern 1971, Source material for scrap books, William S. Burroughs, Feb. 2, 1974". Copy is missing some of its color plates.]
Kupferberg, Tuli, and Sylvia Topp, As They Were, NY: Links, c1973. [photos of famous people as children; does not include WSB.]
Tucholsky, Kurt, Deutschland, Deutschland Uber Alles, Amherst: The University of Massachusetts Press, 1972.
Blue Wind Press Newsletter[includes an announcement of WSB's The Book of Breeething]
Box 19
Books Not in Folders
(Mostly Science Fiction; Many with Page Corners Turned Down )
Mishlove, Jeffrey, The Roots of consciousness: psychic liberation through history, science and experience, NY/Berkeley: Random House/Booksworks 1975.
Cutler, Roland, The Firstborn, NY: Fawcett, c1978.
Chandler, Evan, Dying Light, NY: New American Library, 1979.
Conrad, Joseph, Under Western Eyes, NY: Doubleday, 1963.
Rossman, John F., The Door, NY: New American Library, 1975.
Dickson, Gordon R., Wolfling, NY: Dial, 1977.
Lauria, Frank, Communion, NY: Bantam Books, 1977.
Anne, David, Rabid, NY: Dell, 1978.
Smith, Wilbur, The Sunbird, NY: New American Library, 1974.
Ramsay, Jack, The Rage, NY: Ace Books, 1978.
Wetering, Janwillem van de, Outsider in Amsterdam, NY: Pocket Books, 1978.
Cunningham, Jere, The Visitor, NY: Berkley, 1979.
Walton, Travis, The Walton Experience, NY: Berkeley, 1978.
Wilson, Colin, The Space Vampires, NY: Pocket Books, 1977.
Collins, Charles M., ed., Harvest of Fear, NY: Avon, 1975.
Wernick, Saul, Cain's Touch, NY: Dell, 1978.
Clark, Mary Higgins, Where are All the Children?, NY: Dell, 1976.
Delany, Samuel R., Nova, NY: Bantam Books, 1969.
Hillerman, Tony, The Blessing Way, NY: Avon, 1978.
Lieberman, Herbert, Crawlspace, NY: Pocket Books, 1977.
Masterton, Graham, Charnel house, Los Angeles: Pinnacle Books, 1978.
Box 20
Books Not in Folders
(Science Fiction and Others; Some with Page Corners Turned Down)
Conrad, Joseph, Lord Jim: a tale, London: Pan Books, 1978.
Foster, Alan Dean, Orphan Star, NY: Ballantine Books, 1977.
Durrell, Gerald, The Whispering Land, Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1975.
Petronium, The Satyricon, translated, with an introduction, by William Arrowsmith, NY: New American Library, c1959.
Conway, David, Magic: an occult primer, NY: Bantam Press, 1973.
Dalton, David, James Dean: the mutant king, NY: Dell, 1975. [inscribed to WSB by the author]
Masterton, Graham, The Manitou, NY: Pinnacle Books, 1976.
Stickgold, Bob, and Mark Noble, Glory Hits, NY: Ballantine Books, 1978.
Rosenblum, Robert, The Mushroom Cave, Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1976.
Chandler, Raymond, The Long Goodbye, NY: Ballantine Books, 1973.
Anson, Jay,The Amityville Horror, NY: Bantam Books, 1978.
Sartre, Jean-Paul , Nausea, translated ... by Lloyd Alexander, NY: New Directions, c1964.
Menegas, Peter, The Nature of the Beast, NY: Bantam Books, 1975.
Wambaugh, Joseph, The Blue Knight, NY: Dell, 1976.
Himmel, Richard, The Twenty-Third Web, NY: Ballantine Books, 1978.
Packer, Bernard, Caro, NY: Avon, 1976.
Brady, Ryder, Instar, NY: Ballantine Books, 1977.
Masterton, Graham, Plague, NY: Ace Books, 1978.
Goldstein, Martin, and Erwin J. Haeberle, The Sex Book, NY: Bantam Books, 1973.
Amare, Rothayne, The Visitation, Canoga Park, Calif.: Major Books, c1977.
Lauria, Frank,Doctor Orient, NY: Bantam Books, 1974.
Gide, Andre, Strait is the Gate, NY: Vintage Books, c1952.
McCarry, Charles, The Tears of Autumn, Greenwich, CT: Fawcett, 1976.
Burns, John Horne,The Gallery, NY: Avon, 1977.
Box 21
Books Not in Folders
(Many Are Science Fiction; Some Have Page Corners Turned Down or Marginal Markings)
Crichton, Michael, The Terminal Man, NY: Bantam Books, 1973.
Benchley, Peter, The Deep, NY: Bantam Books, 1977.
Castaneda, Carlos, The Teachings of Don Juan, Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1972.
Sutton, Henry, The Sacrifice, NY: Charter, 1978.
Cook, Robin, Coma, NY: New American Library, 1977.
Levin, Ira,The Boys from Brazil, NY: Dell, 1977.
Glob, P. V., The Bog People: Iron Age man preserved, NY: Ballantine Books, 1975.
Ross, Ian, Amazons, NY: New American Library, 1976.
Trevor, Elleston, The Theta Syndrome, NY: Fawcett, c1977.
Nashe, Thomas, The Unfortunate traveller: and other works, Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1972.
James, M. R., Ghost Stories of An Antiquary, Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1975.
Rosenblum, Robert, The Mushroom Cave, Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1976.
Lawrence, Jodi, Alpha Brain Waves, NY: Avon, 1972.
Ruskin, Ronald, The Last Panic, NY: Bantam Books, 1979.
Gunn, James E., The Burning, NY: Dell, 1972.
Luckless, John, [Clifford Irving & Herbert Burkholz], The Death Freak, NY: Ballantine Books, 1979.
Fuller, John G., The Interrupted Journey, NY: Berkley, 1974.
Dane, Christopher, Psychic Travel, NY: Popular Library, c1974.
Cormier, Robert, I am the Cheese, NY: Dell, 1978. [on inside front cover: "William S. Burroughs, Sr."]
Trevor, William, The Children of Dynmouth, NY: Pocket Books, 1978.
Lauria, Frank, The Seth Papers, NY: Ballantine Books, 1979.
McCarry, Charles, The Secret Lovers, London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1978.
Picano, Felice, Smart as the Devil, NY: Dell, 1978.
Hurwood, Bernard J., Kingdom of the Spiders, London: Granada, 1978.
Hodgson, William Hope, The House on the Borderland, NY: Freeway Press, 1974.
Hinkemeyer, Michael T., Sea Cliff, NY: Pocket Books, 1979.
Box 22
Books Not in Folders
One-eighty-five, edited by Alix, San Francisco, CA: Mongrel Press, c1973. [inscribed by editor to WSB]
Takahashi, Mutsuo, A Bunch of Keys, Trumansburg, NY: The Crossing Press, c1984.
Pancake, Bruce D'J, The Stories, NY: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1984.
Sloane, Eric, Diary of an Early American Boy, NY: Ballantine Books, 1974.
Nuttall, Jeff, What happened to Jackson, London: Aloes Books, 1978.
Whitmore, George, Confessions of Danny Slocum: or gay life in the big city, NY: St. Martins Press, c1980.
Welch, Denton, A Voice Through a Cloud, NY: Dutton, c1966.
Welch, Denton, Maiden Voyage, NY: Dutton, c1968.
Armstrong, Hart, The Beast, Kansas City, MO: Defenders of the Christian Faith, c1967.
Clar, Tom, Ron Padgett, Ted Berrigan,Back in Boston again, NY: Telephone Books, c1972. [inscribed to WSB by Ted Berrigan]
Spicer, Jack, After Lorca, [S.l: s.n.], 1974.
Eaton, Manford L., Bio-music, Barton, VT: Something Else Press, 1974.
Winslow, Pete, A Daisy in the Memory of a Shark, San Francisco: City Lights Books, 1973.
Miller, Henry, On Turning Eighty; journey to an antigue land, Santa Barbara: Capra Press, 1972.
Ondaatje, Michael, The Collected Works of Billy the Kid, NY: Norton, 1974. [inscribed to WSB by the author]
Serials Not in Folders
The Paris review, no. 57, 1974.
The Unspeakable Visions of the Individual, v. 10, 1980. [includes work by Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, Gregory Corso, Philip Whalen, and others]
Blanco, no. 2-3, 1980. [includes work by Ray Johnson, Severo Sarduy, and others]
Neurotica, no. 5, 1949. [includes work by Marshall McLuhan and others]
CoEvolution quarterly, no. 25, 1980.
Box 23
Books Not in Folders
Dawson, Fielding, An Emotional memoir of Franz Kline, NY: Pantheon Books, c1967. [signed by author]
Micheline, Jack, North of Manhattan: collected poems, ballads and songs,1954-1975, South San Francisco: ManRoot, c1976. [inscribed to "Bill and James" by the author]
Zinsser, David L., Then When, Cambridge, Mass.: Brahman Publishing Co., c1974. [inscribed to JWG by the author]
Coleman, Victor, America, Toronto: Coach House Press, 1972.
Vanier, Denis, Lesbiennes d'acid, Ottawa: Partis Pris, 1972. [inscribed to WSB by Allen [Ginsberg]]
Homage to Frank O'Hara, ed. by Bill Berkson & Joe LeSueur, Bolinas, CA: Big Sky, c1978. [Big Sky, 11/12] [includes work by Anne Waldman, Ted Berrigan, Philip Whalen, Terry Southern, Allen Ginsberg, Gerard Malanga, and many others]
McElroy, Joseph, Lookout Cartridge, NY: Knopf, 1974. [unbound signatures in dust wrapper]
Messagier, Matthieu, Vic et Eance, Paris: Bourgois, c1978.
McMillan, Priscilla Johnson, Marina and Lee, NY: Harper & Row, c1977.
Taylor, Norman, Narcotics: nature's dangerous gifts, NY: Delta, c1963.
Nuttall, Jeff, Snipe's Spinster, London: Calder and Boyars, 1975.
Thompson, Earl, The Devil to Pay, NY: New American Library, 1981. [includes a long inscription to JWG from his father, and 5 color snapshots of or by JWG's father inserted, all dated Nov. 1984]
Barker, Ronnie, Fletcher's Book of Rhyming Slang, London: Pan Books, 1979. [inscribed to "Bill" from ["Miles"?]]
Box 24
Books Not in Folders
Welch, Denton, The Journals of Denton Welch, edited by Michael De-la-Noy, NY: Dutton, 1984.
Mack, Stan, Stan Mack's Out-Takes, Woodstock, NY: The Overlook Press, 1984. [note to "Jamie" from "Ira" inserted]
Gildzen, Alex, The Avalanche of Time: selected poems 1964-1984, Berkeley, CA: North Atlantic Books, c1985. [note in JWG's hand inserted with Gildzen's address on it]
Ginsberg, Allen, As Ever: the collected correspondence of Allen
Ginsberg & Neal Cassady, Berkeley, CA: Creative Arts Book Co., c1977. [inscribed, with a note, to WSB by Ginsberg]
Muller, Friedrich, Taschenbuch der Medizinisch-Klinischen
Diagnostik, Munchen: Bergman, 1938.
Whale Sound: an anthology of poems about whales and dolphins, edited by Greg Gatenby, North Vancouver: J. J. Douglas, 1978. [signed by editor]
Jay, Ricky, Cards as Weapons, NY: Darien House, 1977.
American Poetry Archive & Resource Center, The Videotape collection of the poetry center at San Francisco State University, first series, 1975, San Francisco, c1975.
Simone 0, Rosy belligerents, [S.1]: Poltroon, c1983. [inscribed to WSB by the author]
Breger, Udo,Tiara to Artist of Polish Descent, Goteborg- Stockholm: Blue Sweat Press, c1976. [inscribed to WSB by the author]
Kamenszain, Tamara, De este lado del Mediterráneo, Buenos Aires: Ediciones Noé, 1973. [inscribed to WSB by the author]
Pelieu, Claude Amphetamin Cowboy, [Gottingen?]: Expanded Media Editions, 1976. [inscribed to JWG by "Chano Pozo" [Pelieu?]]
Miller, Henry, Opus pistorum, NY: Grove Press, 1983.
Ginsberg, Allen, Morning in spring and other poems, NY: Morrow, 1970. [inscribed to WSB by the author]
Spears, Andre, Xo: a tale for the new Atlantis, NY: Pangaea Press, c1983. [inscribed to WSB by the author; and a letter from the author to JWG is inserted]
Serials Not in Folders
Revista chicano-riqueña, v. 4, no. 3, 1976. [includes work by Miguel Algarín, and others]
The Paris Review, v. 23, no. 79, 1981. [double 25th anniversary issue]
Ins and Outs, no. 4/5, 1980. [includes work by Paul Bowles, Gregory Corso, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Jan Kerouac, Charles Henri Ford, Gerard Malanga, Ira Cohen, and others]
Talk talk, v. 2, no. 1, 1980. [music fanzine]
Talk talk, v. 2, no. 12, 1980. [includes an interview with WSB and Allen Ginsberg]
Box 25
Books Not in Folders
Porter, D. H., Baggage, Toronto: Coach House Press, 1974. [2 copies]
Acker, Kathy, Great Expectations, NY: Grove Press, c1982. [advance galley copy, with 2 letters from publisher requesting a blurb from WSB]
Prairie Fire: the politics of revolutionary anti-imperialism, the political statement of the Weather Underground, San Francisco: Communications Co., 1974.
Shelton, Gilbert, Wonder Wart-Hog and the Nurds of November, San Francisco: Rip Off Press, 1980.
Valaoritis, Nanos, Hired Hieroglyphs: poems and collages, Santa Cruz, CA: Kayak Books, c1971. [inscribed to WSB by the author]
Minkoff, Gerald, Alias, Geneve: Ecart Publications, 1973. [Double sphinx serie, 4] [initialed by the author]
Ginsberg, Allen, Allen Verbatim: lectures on poetry, politics, consciousness, edited by Gordon Ball, NY: McGraw-Hill, c1974. [inscribed to WSB by both the author and the editor, with short notes]
Ballard, J. G., The Best Short Stories of J. G. Ballard, NY: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, c1978. [uncorrected proof; 2 copies]
Ashbery, John, As We Know, Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1979. [inscribed to JWG by the author]
Morgan, Ted, On Becoming American, Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1978. [uncorrected page proof copy; with publisher's flyer inserted]
Beltrametti, Franco, ed., La Poesia è un luogo, Amsterdam: One World Poetry, 1978. [includes work by, or documentation on, Beltrametti, Udo Breger, Lewis MacAdams, Steve Lacy, and others]
Ackroyd, Peter, Dressing up: transvestism and drag, the history of an obsession, NY: Simon and Schuster, c1979.
Kampen, Michael Edwin, The Sculptures of El Tajín, Veracruz, Mexico, Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 1972.
Volume: international discography of the new wave, NY: One Ten Records, c1980.
Ironstone, John,To be Gay, Santel, CA: The Blueboy Library, c1977.
Galouye, Daniel F., Simulacron-3, NY: Bantam Books, 1964.
Serials Not in Folders
White Mule: a poetry journal, [unnumbered], c1976.
New Letters, v. 51, no. 3, 1985.
Paris/Atlantic, no. 2, 1983. [a flyer and a note inserted, requesting a submission from WSB]
Heavy metal, v. 5, no. 3, 1981. [includes a brief review of WSB's Cities of the Red Night. 2 copies]
High times, v. 66, Feb. 1981. [includes an interview with WSB and Terry Southern discussing drugs, drug culture, film- making, and other matters]
Box 26
Books Not in Folders
White, Edmund A Boy's Own Story, NY: Dutton, [n.d.] [dust jacket only, with a card from William Grant Whitehead]
Jones, Sara, Death by Misadventure: a dream of Brian Jones, c1977. [signed by author]
Thomas, Tracy, and Walt Bodine, Right Here in River City: a portrait of Kansas City, NY:Doubleday, 1975. [uncorrected proof copy]
Harrison, Hank, The Dead Book: a social history of the Grateful Dead, NY: Links, c1973. [includes accompanying soundsheet of Neal Cassady's "Raps"]
Zinan, Larry, mEYEnd, Los Angeles: Brytryt Press, c1977. [in mailing envelope]
The American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters, 1985-1986, NY: [ca. 1985] [list of members, including WSB]
Reich, Wilhelm,The Impulsive Character and Other Writings, NY: New American Library, 1974.
Pritchard, A.,Death's Tit, c1973. [newspaper clipping on whales inserted]
Bulteau, Michel, Des siècles de folie dans les calèches étroites, Paris: Pierre Belfond, c1976.
Goytisolo, Juan, Juan the landless, NY: Viking, 1977.
Rechy, John, The Sexual outlaw: a documentary, NY: Grove Press, 1977. [uncorrected proof copy]
Dorn, Edward, Some Business Recently Transacted in the White World, West Newbury, Mass.: Frontier Press, 1971.
Faussot, Jean-Jacques, Les Epaules lacrymales, Paris: Seghers, c1975.
Kenyon, Marrie, A Walking Tour of the Village, NY: M. Kenyon, c1974.
Blending Into the Life: an oral history, [NY]: Community Documentation Workshop, c1976.
Fisher, Minnie, Born One Year Before the 20th Century, [NY]: Community Documentation Workshop, c1976.
Sanders, Ed, Poem from Jail, San Francisco: City Lights Books, c1963. [4th printing]
Strong, Jonathan, Tike: and 5 stories, NY: Avon, 1970.
Garwood, Darrell, Under Cover: thirty-five years of CIA deception, NY: Grove Press, 1985. [publisher's flyer inserted]
Serials Not in Folder
Scree, no. 6, 1976. [includes work by Karl Kempton, Guy R. Beining, and others]
The Spirit that moves us, v. 2, no. 1, 1976. [includes work by Guy R. Beining, Richard Kostelanetz, Clayton Eshleman, and others]
Abracadabra, no. 2, 1977. [includes work by Steve Lacy, Anne Waldman, Julien Blaine, Ulises Carrion, Carl Weissner, John Giorno, Franco Beltrametti, Clemente Padín, and others]
Box 27
Folder Number #174-177
Emmett Grogan, Final Score, 1976
500-pg. pc ts of a novel by Grogan, with pc holog. editing. Novel was published by Holt, Rinehart and Winston in 1976. Title page has an adhesive label on it from the Hy Cohen Literary Agency. In 2 cardboard boxes, the outer one with JWG's note on it, "Final Score, (Grogan), Ms."
William S. Burroughs, Jr., Kentucky Ham, 1984
Galleys of WSB, Jr.'s book (NY: Overlook Press, 1984), bound in plain paper and tape. Letter inserted from "Ira" on Overlook Press stationary, to JWG ("Jamie") presenting book, dated 12 October 1984.
Junky Galley, 1977
Galley copy of WSB's Junky, Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1977. On cover: "Galley no. 61". In a manila envelope with "Junky Galleys" written on it in JWG's hand.
Cobble Stone Gardens, 1976
Hardbound copy of WSB's Cobble Stone Gardens, Cherry Valley, NY: Cherry Valley Editions, c1976. Signed by WSB on title page.
Box 28
Books by WSB Not in Folders
Cities of the Red Night, NY: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1982. [An Owl book]
Early Routines, Santa Barbara, CA: Cadmus Editions, c1982.
The Book of Breeething, Berkeley, CA: Blue Wind Press, 1975. [hard cover ed.]
The Book of Breeething, Berkeley, CA: Blue Wind Press, 1975. [soft cover ed.]
[Nova Express] [Japanese language ed.], Tokyo: Tuttle-Mori, Inc., 1978.
[The Ticket that Exploded] [Japanese language ed.], Tokyo: Tuttle-Mori, Inc., c1979.
A Decade and Then Some, ed. Allen De Loach, Buffalo, NY: Intrepid, 1976. [Intrepid 25-35] [includes WSB's "CCNY lecture #11 - 'Writing as a magical operation'", and pieces by JWG and many others]
Exterminator!, Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1981.
Exterminator!, Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1985.
Roosevelt After Inauguration, San Francisco: City Lights Books, c1979.
New writing and writers, 16, London: John Calder, 1979. [softbound ed.; includes note on half-title page in JWG's hand, "10 Feb 79"] [includes "Cobble stone gardens" by WSB]
New writing and writers, 16, London: John Calder, 1979. [hardbound ed.; includes "Cobble stone gardens" by WSB]
Blade Runner (a movie), Berkeley, CA: Blue Wind Press, 1979. [hardbound ed.]
Blade Runner (a movie), Berkeley, CA: Blue Wind Press, 1979. [softbound ed.]
Zwischen Mitternacht und Morgen: ein Traumtagebuch mit dem Traum con Tibet von Allen Ginsberg, Basel: Sphinx Verlag, 1980. [German translation of The Retreat diaries]
Ali's Smile, Naked Scientology, Bonn: Expanded Media Editions, 1978. [text in German and English]
William S. Burroughs, Jr., Kentucky Ham, Woodstock, NY: The Overlook Press, 1984.
Box 29
Books by WSB Not in Folders
WSB & Brion Gysin, The Third Mind, New York: The Viking Press, 1978. [A Seaver book]
WSB & Brion Gysin, The Third Mind, New York: The Viking Press, 1978. [A Seaver book] [inscribed by both WSB and Gysin to each other]
WSB & Brion Gysin, The Third mind, London: John Calder, 1979.
El Almuerzo desnudo, Barcelona: Bruguera, 1980. [Club Bruguera, 22] [Spanish translation of Naked Lunch]
Dead roads: roman, München: Goldmann Verlag, 1985. [German translation of The Place of Dead Roads]
The Place of Dead Roads, London, John Calder, 1984. [paperbounded.]
The Place of Dead Roads, London: John Calder, 1984. [paperbounded.] [note from Michael Sissons to Peter Matson, dated 11 June 1985 inserted, accompanying 4 copies of this ed. from the publisher]
The Place of Dead Roads, New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1985. [An Owl book]
The Ticket that exploded, London: John Calder, 1985. 2nd ed.
Bockris, Victor, Con Burroughs: conversazioni inedite 1974- 1979, Roma: Arcana Editrice, 1979. [Situazioni, 44] [Italian translation of With William Burroughs]
Mottram, Eric, & WSB, Snack, London: Aloes Books, 1975. [on cover: "Two tape transcripts"]
Port of Saints, Berkeley: Blue Wind Press, 1980.
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3
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https://theportalist.com/new-wave-science-fiction
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en
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What Is New Wave Science Fiction?
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New Wave science fiction flourished in the 1960s and 1970s, and was characterized by social commentary, experimentation, and reflection on the politics of the time.
|
en
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https://orion-uploads.openroadmedia.com/3-favicon.ico
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theportalist.com
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https://theportalist.com/new-wave-science-fiction
|
Broadly speaking, New Wave science fiction refers to an era in the genre that flourished in the 1960s and 1970s, and which consciously rejected the tropes from science fiction’s so-called Golden Age. The New Wave era focused on experimentation, social commentary, and literary merit, as opposed to hard science and stereotypical adventure plots.
The writers associated with this movement, such as Ursula K. Le Guin, James Tiptree Jr., Samuel Delany, J.G. Ballard, Michael Moorcock, and Joanna Russ, among many others, used the typical science fiction elements—cyborgs, aliens, dystopias, advanced technology—to explore complex questions relating to politics, societies, cultures, and the human condition.
But wait, isn’t that something science fiction has always tried to do?
Well, yes and no.
Want more sci-fi books? Sign up to get the best in SFF sent straight to your inbox!
Science Fiction: A Very Brief History
Science fiction has an eclectic past. Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818) deals with some of the genre’s pet themes (a mad scientist, advanced technology, the ethics of scientific experimentation) and is often regarded as the first true science fiction novel.
But stories with futuristic and scientific elements can be found further back in time, even in the epics of ancient cultures. Lucian of Samosata’s satirical True History (written sometime in second century AD) features space travel and alien encounters, while the Hindu epic The Ramayana includes flying machines and weapons of mass destruction.
Nevertheless, science fiction as we understand it properly took off in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, with the rise of the book market and the far-reaching impact of the Industrial and Scientific Revolutions on the literature of the times. Later, the genre was influenced and molded by the rising popularity of pulp magazines, superhero comics, and cheap paperbacks, alongside more mainstream literary and cultural movements, such as Modernism.
Thus, by the 1960s, the genre of science fiction had already been established and redefined several times.
Science Fiction's Golden Age
The late 1930s to the early 1960s has been famously regarded as the Golden Age of Science Fiction, with writers like Isaac Asimov, Ray Bradbury, and Robert Heinlein predominating the field. This era gave birth to enduring tropes such as space travel, technological advances, and scientific achievement, all usually rooted in libertarian ideology.
Sci-fi of this era often celebrated science as a cure-all to society’s troubles, and posited a “bright, shiny future,” with stories packed with typical action and adventure.
RELATED: 5 Golden Age of Science Fiction Female Writers
The Birth of New Wave Science Fiction
The New Wave, which began in the 1960s, can be read as a grittier and darker take on the genre, and a rejection of many of the core values that characterized classic sci-fi. The New Wave was concerned with exploration and experimentation of the “inner space” as opposed to “outer space," tackling topics that may have been otherwise censored, and deconstructing familiar tropes.
In 1964, Michael Moorcock became the editor for the New Worlds magazine, which soon began to publish more avant-garde material from writers such as Brian Aldiss and Thomas M. Disch. Just three years later in 1967, Harlan Ellison, who edited the anthology Dangerous Visions, called for admissions that would have been considered too controversial in other publications.
Moreover, the New Wave writers began to look beyond the genre for inspiration. They drew upon diverse influences, such as the Modernist and Postmodernist literary movements, and beatnik writers such as William S. Boroughs. They also responded to the current trends in counter cultures, sexual liberation, and political uncertainty. The sci-fi was therefore experimental in terms of both subject and style, characterized by anti-heroes probing difficult topics with a sense of cynicism or ambivalence.
By the 1980s, the movement had faded, yet its influence endured with the development of new subgenres that continued asking similar questions, such as cyberpunk and slipstream.
Below are a few novels associated with New Wave science fiction. Featuring some familiar titles, alongside less-famous works, this list is by no means comprehensive, and is meant as a starting point for a deeper exploration into the genre.
1964
Nova Express
By William S. Burroughs
Nova Express is a stylistic experiment, which uses Borrough’s own version of the “cut-up method” to enclose snippets of different texts into one work.
It is the third book is his Nova trilogy (preceded by The Soft Machine and The Ticket That Exploded) and is considered by some critics to be his best novel. A deeply metaphorical work, Nova Express is concerned with machine control on human life, positing a conflict between the Nova Criminals and the Nova Police, which cannot exist without the other.
1966
Babel-17
By Samuel R. Delany
Delany’s short novel is built on a very interesting premise: the invention of a language that can be wielded as a weapon.
Telepath Rydra Wong, who is recruited to investigate the traitors and probe into the language, realizes that the more she learns of “Babel- 17," the more likely she is to become a traitor herself.
1969
Slaughterhouse Five
By Kurt Vonnegut
Widely regarded as a cult classic, this Kurt Vonnegut novel is a whimsical and experimental foray into the mind of Billy Pilgrim, an American soldier and chaplain’s assistant turned unlikely time-traveler.
The story is narrated in a non-linear fashion, as we witness Billy relive the horrors of war and his strange experiences after being abducted by aliens.
1971
The Lathe of Heaven
By Ursula K. Le Guin
When it comes to science fiction and fantasy, Ursula K. Le Guin is a household name, thanks to the enormous popularity of her fantastical Earthsea novels.
But several of her adult novels remain as deeply relevant, with The Lathe of Heaven being one of them.
The protagonist George Orr is a draftsman whose dreams can alter reality, and is addicted to drugs that prevent such changes. While undergoing treatment for his drug addiction, George encounters mysterious psychiatrist William Haber, who begins to use Orr for his own agenda.
1973
Crash
By J.G. Ballard
Crash is a rather challenging and controversial novel, centered on the figure of Robert Vaughan, who is sexually aroused by car crashes and whose definitive fantasy is to die in a collision accident with Elizabeth Taylor.
Vaughan even gathers a group of faithful followers who are obsessed with enacting famous car crashes to satisfy their desires. Ballard’s novel is a daring exploration of perversion and technology.
1975
The Shockwave Rider
By John Brunner
Almost a decade before William Gibson published Neuromancer (1984) and long before the advent of the internet, Brunner wrote The Shockwave Rider, which imagines a dystopian world where computer networks link everyone.
While citizens do not enjoy any privacy and are secretly controlled by the state apparatus, corporations run amok. The story follows Nick Haflinger, a proto-hacker, as he navigates and tries to escape this dangerous (but strangely prophetic) world.
1977
We Who Are About To . . .
By Joanna Russ
In this daring and challenging novel by feminist author Joanna Russ, a group of interstellar tourists crash-land on a hostile planet.
As her fellow shipwrecked travelers attempt to make the best of their situation, one female passenger remains realistic about their chances for survival.
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wrong_mix_random_publicationDate_00046
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FactBench
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https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/an-ode-to-new-metal-man-david-bunchs-moderan
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en
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An Ode to New-Metal Man: David R. Bunch’s “Moderan”
|
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2018-09-11T17:00:05+00:00
|
Rob Latham sings the praises of “Moderan,” a neglected classic about a false utopia by David R. Bunch.
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/icons/favicon/favicon.ico
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Los Angeles Review of Books
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https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/an-ode-to-new-metal-man-david-bunchs-moderan
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PRIOR TO THIS BOOK’S release, the only works by David R. Bunch widely available were two short stories in Harlan Ellison’s Dangerous Visions, a landmark 1967 anthology that has never gone out of print. By contrast, Bunch’s novel Moderan, one of only two standalone works of fiction the author published during his lifetime, appeared as a midlist paperback in 1971 and promptly sank without a trace. A 1993 collection of stories — cleverly titled Bunch! — was released by a specialty press and reached at best a coterie audience. Used copies of these books are rare, and Bunch’s lone volume of poetry, We Have a Nervous Job (1983), is impossible to find anywhere. A small San Francisco press put out two posthumous gatherings of the author’s verse in the late 1990s, but these too are now scarce and quite pricy.
On the basis of Moderan, Bunch has acquired the reputation of being a writer’s writer, highly respected by his peers but more or less unknown to the larger genre readership. He is sometimes compared to Cordwainer Smith and R. A. Lafferty, due to the pixilated exuberance of their styles, their mock-heroic invocation of legends and tall tales, and their airy disdain for the niceties of SF exposition. Like Smith and Lafferty, Bunch is fond of teasingly extravagant story titles: “The Walking Talking I-Don’t-Care Man,” “A Small Miracle of Fishhooks and Straight Pins,” “That High-Up Blue Day That Saw the Black Sky-Train Come Spinning.” Like them, he is a master of baroque paradox, effortlessly mixing the rhapsodic with the grotesque, the ferocious with the whimsical, in the same story, often in the same sentence. Like them, he deploys poetic tricks — high-flown apostrophe, rampant alliteration — to evoke the strangeness of future worlds: “The vapor shield was scarlet August that burning month, the tin flowers were up in all the plastic plant holes, the rolling ersatz pastures were all aflutter with flash and flaunt of blooms.” Such a maverick talent is perhaps inevitably fated to be a minority taste.
But the elusive Bunch has always had his champions. In his introduction to the two stories included in Dangerous Visions, Ellison praised the author as “possibly the most dangerous visionary” in the volume, his “Dada-like” evocation of the fictive mindscape Moderan amounting to a striking “fable of futurity.” John Clute’s entry on Bunch for the Encyclopedia of Science Fiction claims that the author “resembles a diced, gonzo Walt Whitman, sampling (in a frenzy) the body electric.” This comparison was echoed by Brian W. Aldiss, who remarked that Moderan reads “as if Whitman and Nietzsche had collaborated” — a comment featured as a blurb on the cover of this new edition.
After ushering back into print a host of superb crime and suspense novels, NYRB Classics has recently branched out into SF, displaying a shrewd eye for neglected gems, such as D. G. Compton’s haunting satire of media obsession, The Continuous Katherine Mortenhoe (a.k.a. The Unsleeping Eye, 1973), and Christopher Priest’s surreal tale of a perambulating city, Inverted World (1974). Bunch’s Moderan slots neatly into this eccentric list: it too is a near-forgotten “minor” work of the New Wave era that richly deserves rediscovery.
Bunch began publishing his Moderan stories in the late 1950s, in diverse venues, ranging from SF fanzines to literary journals like Shenandoah. The vast majority appeared, between 1958 and 1965, in the sister magazines Fantastic and Amazing, edited at the time by Cele Goldsmith. One of the most astute discoverers of talent in SF history, Goldsmith published the first stories of Thomas M. Disch, Ursula K. Le Guin, and Roger Zelazny, among other future luminaries, and Bunch’s fiction was right up her alley: daring, offbeat, unapologetically “literary.” Publisher Ziff-Davis sold the two magazines in 1965, whereupon they were converted into reprint-only publications, depriving Bunch of his favorite platform. Yet more tales of Moderan, like the one enshrined in Ellison’s anthology, continued to dribble from his pen, and by the early 1970s he had enough material on hand to produce a book-length version.
Moderan is thus, like many classics of modern SF, a “fix-up” text — a gathering of scattered stories stitched together with newly written sections that provide structural links and expository background. Of the 46 chapters in the 1971 edition, 19 were original to the volume, including 13 of the first 16, which established a dubious linearity for the episodes that followed. This stab at structure, however, failed to fully corral Bunch’s wayward imagination, and the narrative proceeds by lyrical leaps and picaresque digressions. Future Moderan is not really a spatiotemporal setting, not a feat of world-building at all, so much as it is a conceptual environment, impressionistically evoked, an inner-spatial metaphor for modernity along the lines of J. G. Ballard’s Vermilion Sands (1971). And Bunch continued to burnish this arresting mise-en-scène even after the novel was published, as shown by this new edition, which adds a final section gathering 11 stories published between 1971 and 1989. Other tales of Moderan lurking in the periodical literature have never been reprinted; were it not for the fact of the author’s death in 2000, one could easily believe they are still being reeled out, endlessly, like old-style computer punch tape.
This retro reference is appropriate, since Moderan is very much a novel of the American midcentury. The title itself suggests the language of advertising and design, if not promotional hype: everything in Moderan is new and improved, including the people. The proud citizens refer to their domain as “New Processes Land” and the “Dream Realized,” grandiose monikers that bespeak a state of technical and psychological perfection. Moderan is a “land for forever, ordered and sterilized. That’s the Dream!”
It is 2064, or thereabouts. Following a sketchy series of “world wars” (“the bomb smear, the havoc far and everywhere”) and some obscure reverses in space (“the Million Saucer Battles on Mars, and that awful purple thing on Venus”), the Earth is being systematically remade into a synthetic demi-paradise. The poisoned seas have been frozen over and the polluted land smothered under a pristine shroud of “cool white plastic,” out of which tin flowers bloom. Weather cycles are administered by “Central Seasons,” and a “vapor shield” controls the atmosphere, changing the sky color on a monthly basis. The men staff military “Strongholds” bristling with high-tech weaponry while their estranged wives live in “bubble dome homes” in “White Witch Valley.” Ultimate power is wielded by the “Council of the Palest Greens,” shadowy bureaucrats who infest the “Needle Building in the Pale White Capital.” The social landscape of Moderan, though highly regimented, is often beset by aimless wanderers, from feral mutants scrounging for scraps to quixotic loners disenchanted with this glitzy, ersatz utopia (“ersatz” is one of Bunch’s favorite words).
The narrative set-up summarized here must be reconstructed from sly hints scattered through the chapters since, as noted above, the author is not particularly interested in conventional SF exposition. For Bunch, the trappings of genre are not ends in themselves but rather serviceable means to spin out his idiosyncratic worldview. Indeed, his fictive building blocks, rather than providing the solid contours of a rigorously extrapolated world, are themselves fluid, figurative elements in a complex allegory of gender, violence, and power.
Take the hulking Strongholds that dot the novel’s landscape. These are not simply combat machines — “the White Witch rockets firing, the wow bombs grandly falling, the wreck-wrecks trajectoring, the missiles far and wide homing and all the other hardware of our Joy-at-War beautifully functioning” — they are also, as this sexually charged rhetoric suggests, powerful metaphors for the male ego at its most pugnacious and destructive. Indeed, the men are virtually indistinguishable from the bunkers they inhabit: the narrator, for example, is known as “Stronghold 10.” Like his cherished citadel, this protagonist is literally armored, a “new-metal man” who has undergone a harrowing cyborgization; all that survives of his original body are scattered “flesh-strips” sutured into a metallic carapace: “I must look […] like a suit of old armor once would have looked if it had in the ancient days rolled in some thick-sliced bacon.” Terrified of his own vulnerability, Stronghold 10 rages against his “soft percentages,” those last remaining vestiges of his corporeal being: “I wish for more steel!” he roars.
An abiding tension between the sorry fallibility of flesh and the solid certainty of metal provides the main thematic thrust of the novel’s many episodes: “[M]y flesh-strips writhed and remembered, my steel parts seethed, rasped, wrinkled and shouted, so disturbed they were by the flesh parts quivering.” Stronghold 10 alternates between blasting away at other fastnesses — in a mindless cycle of paranoid violence, perpetually renewed — and worrying at moral conundrums and emotional predicaments incited by unexpected visitors to his redoubt — a little girl, reminding him of the animal pull of family; a metallic knight on horseback, evoking the allure of romance and the promptings of conscience. These encounters are saved from sentimentality by the sheer weirdness and audacity of Bunch’s storytelling, as well as by the scathing bouts of self-analysis they provoke in the narrator. Though he roundly scorns “the ancient garbage of love, togetherness, and the family stew,” trammels he imagines his cyborg self to have transcended, he cannot shake the suspicion that his grand existence is a hollow, loveless sham: “I cowered in my innermost Stronghold den, […] in the cowardly-careful peep-box of steel. Even in the days of my highest triumphs, when many a fortress rocked from my Big War guns […] I had this whiplash of dread.”
Above all, Stronghold 10 is petrified of women, especially his wife, “that tough strong little woman with the ice-blue terror eyes,” exiled to White Witch Valley along with the other spouses so the men can pursue their puerile war games. For all his high-tech replacements, however, Stronghold 10 still finds himself plagued by the itch of desire — an appetite he satisfies with his “new-metal mistress,” a lifelike love doll he can switch on and off at whim. Yet even this mechanical proxy inspires a surge of passion that startles and terrifies him, because it points up his own essential emptiness:
The blonde doll all turned on, the real and true-copied image of an old Dream in the mind […] there waiting in the body that science had made, the little bow of a mouth all moist and rosy red, the blue eyes blue-bulb blue and like small glass globes sliced carefully out of that heaven when June was all clear-and-bright. […] All the people who had written and overwritten about this thing — in the Old Days old Mailer and Hemingway, say — had they been right all along?
Since Bunch is here diagnosing the pathologies of toxic masculinity, his citation of two notoriously macho novelists makes some sense — though, as the gonzo tenor of this passage suggests, a more proximate influence on Moderan may well have been the Beat writers of the late 1950s and early 1960s, especially Kerouac and Ginsberg. While SF critics have acknowledged the sway William Burroughs exercised over New Wave authors like Ballard, not enough attention has been paid to the subterreanean influence of those other subterraneans. Moderan not only evokes Ginsberg’s incantatory indictment of Moloch, “whose mind is pure machinery,” it is also reminiscent of Kerouac’s lone work of science fiction. A Kafkaesque parable of a dystopian society, Kerouac’s 1963 story “cityCityCITY” is, like Moderan, peopled by faceless creatures who are wedded to strange machines — like the “Brain Halo, which divined equations, […] balancing them together, so skillfully, so complicated, a thousand wires running into a million larger ones that grew and snaked and vined their way in the tangled Wire Room of the Brain.” In its rambling prosody, its spastic goofing, its wise-ass parody of technocratic jargon, this story — and Kerouac’s work more generally — offers something of a stylistic model for Bunch’s febrile speculations.
Moderan, like many central texts of the Beat generation, can be read as a bohemian spoof of “square” society, satirizing a regimented world of robotic drones who secretly seethe with rage and self-hatred. A few of the stronghold’s visitors suggest a countercultural critique of this future’s priggish nihilism — for example, a footloose artist, whom the protagonist denounces as a “smelly vagrant […] stagger[ing] addle-waddle over the countryside […] talking about Meaning,” but whose intense gaze makes him quiver and doubt himself, or a hippie-esque drifter with a bouquet of metal flowers for a hand, who preaches that “love was better than hate and that human understanding was more to be strived for than a Stronghold full of bully-bombs,” and who rouses our steely hero to awe-struck euphoria.
For all his showy chest-thumping, Bunch’s “new-metal man” cannot shake a haunting sense of his basic spiritual vacancy, can’t help “wondering maybe if he had not paid some uncalculated and enormous price for his iron durability.” Stronghold 10’s pose of arrogant mastery turns out to be a facade of bluff and bluster screening a yawning gulf of alienation and despair. In the last analysis, Moderan is a compelling allegory of the psychic and ethical costs of reification, of the transformation of human subjects into objects, the rampant “thingification” of the modern self. The phony nature that the novel’s citizens have crafted for themselves rebounds on its creators, irresistibly remaking them into feckless automatons well suited to occupying this tin-and-plastic world. In its savagely funny depiction of the growing imbrication of human beings with their technological environments, Moderan rivals the best work of fellow New Waver John T. Sladek, especially his novels Mechasm (1968) and The Müller-Fokker Effect (1970). Come to think of it, those titles would make strong additions to NYRB’s already impressive SF line.
Though in some ways quaintly dated, Bunch’s novel still speaks powerfully to contemporary readers — and occasionally even seems to address them directly, as in this ironically upbeat passage:
Let us begin to be ourselves again, ourselves with good souls. With hard trying and hard praying let us make for our souls good homes, even here hard embattled as we are in these steel times. And perhaps with ten million years of good effort we and the world can begin to hope to be allowed to start in to come back toward that place all of us left on the way to our wrong “discoveries.” At least we are not without hope.
Yet the author immediately subverts the tentative optimism of this evangel by unleashing the heedless Strongholds for one final spasm of ecstatic violence. This was how the 1971 version of the novel ended, in a death-wish inferno à la Dr. Strangelove — with Stronghold 10 the last cyborg left (briefly) standing after a global exchange of “GRANDY WUMPS” has turned “the air over all the world […] [into] one solid sheet of explosives.”
This new edition, as noted above, adds a post-apocalyptic postscript — a concluding section called “Apocrypha from After the End.” Abandoning all semblance of narrative chronology, the 11 pieces gathered here are a bit anti-climactic, though we do learn more about the strange land of Olderrun, a “little land-locked and sea-starved country far across the tall mountains, where the old-fashioned flesh people still hold sway.” A bureau called the “Society for the Better Understanding of Ancient Customs” assists the denizens of Moderan in grasping the peculiar mores of this Luddite enclave, which inexplicably prefers the sweaty, mortal meat to the chilly blandishments of steel. Bunch, ever innovative, also conjures an alternative world-ending cataclysm, a not-with-a-bang debacle involving mutant metal-eating fleas that steadily gnaw away at our cyborg heroes. “Perhaps tomorrow,” the narrator muses, “some shiny new tomorrow, we shall ‘replace’ ourselves with the pure dream — a thing like rubber, maybe. Yes! A new-cell rubber alloy, that could be the answer.” Plus ça change …
¤
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wrong_mix_random_publicationDate_00046
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FactBench
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https://cxejohns.medium.com/evil-art-william-burroughs-occult-legacy-3dc09a23f13b
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en
|
Evil Art: William Burroughs’ Occult Legacy Named
|
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"Chris Johns",
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2020-11-16T21:23:43.823000+00:00
|
Burroughs saw literature as a virus that infected a reader with the writer’s pent up bad juju regardless of authorial intent. For Burroughs, a text on first pass was always a kind of unconscious…
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en
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Medium
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https://cxejohns.medium.com/evil-art-william-burroughs-occult-legacy-3dc09a23f13b
|
Burroughs saw literature as a virus that infected a reader with the writer’s pent up bad juju regardless of authorial intent. For Burroughs, a text on first pass was always a kind of unconscious confession, riddled with the contagious pathogens of genealogically inherited, self-propagating moral maladies. To excise his own guilty conscience from his work, Burroughs’ solution was to cut up chapters, paragraphs, and sentences, then splash it all back on the page — a literary equivalent of Jackson Pollock’s drunken oil paint lacerations. Cut-up was useful to Burroughs because it reduced all traces of personal voice — anything too intimate that still might make it past his internal filter.
There’s something to be said for purposefully jumbling passages around in the editing process to find a better arrangement of ideas, but Burroughs took his verbal expressionism to an extreme, concocting non-chronological narratives with no clear beginning, middle, or end. The result is less a work of literature than a collage or jigsaw puzzle that teases the reader with the impossibility of a single solution or straightforward message. The only thing to do is watch it rev around and draw your own conclusions after it peters out.
The title of Burroughs’ most famous novel, Naked Lunch, presides as chief mystery. Like Rumpelstiltskin’s taunt against a Miller’s daughter in the famous Grimm’s Fairytale, that her firstborn child would be his to claim unless she guessed his true name, deciphering the “real name” behind Burroughs’ title has the power to release a child-like reading public still enamored with his magically impish prose. Rumpelstiltskin could spin straw into gold; Burroughs accomplished something more amazing yet — the transmutation of scraps of typescript into lasting literary monuments to the public and now institutionalized worship of Evil Art.
Burroughs stated in his introduction that Jack Kerouac suggested the title Naked Lunch. “The title means exactly what the words say: naked lunch, a frozen moment when everyone sees what is on the end of every fork.” But rather than clarify, this statement dissimulates, since it is unclear where the line between social critique ends and full-blown misanthropy begins. If society itself is a kind of cannibalistic feast, then the sourly obscene edge of Burroughs’ remark implies that forks, not spoons or knives, feature like devils’ pitchforks, collectively held skewering implements that impale a nude and squeaming human morsel, frozen in air mid-bite. Whether this image refers to people devouring their fellow men or gods and demigods tucking into an unholy banquet — probably both — is left suggestively vague.
Thickening the plot, Burroughs scholars have suggested the credit Burroughs gave Kerouac for the title Naked Lunch was a calculated lie which Kerouac happily played along with, and that Manet’s controversial painting Le Déjeuner sur l’herbe (Lunch on the Grass), in which a nude woman lunches with two fully clad suitors in a rural setting, provided the authentic genesis of the title Naked Lunch. The fact that authoritative “Burroughs Scholars” are needed in the first place to initiate an archaeological dig into Burroughs’ corpus should itself raise the question of why such literature deserves to be so scrupulously analyzed. In 1863, Manet’s nude was withdrawn from consideration by the Paris Salon Jury, and Burroughs likely saw a parallel between the stodgy 19th century art world and the puritan strictures of the Hayes Code that had inspired Ginsberg’s mid-20th century screed, Howl, to indulge its censor-defying lyrical exultation on the dominating power of drugs, race, and sex to shape a used-up generation.
The apex of Howl’s discontented cry — the tritone gong-smash of “Moloch, Moloch, Moloch” — likens America to the vicious Babylonian deity whose lust for child victims to be burnt alive and devoured as sacrificial offerings stands in Ginsberg’s apocalyptic vision for the American public education system and its abused victims — no measly complaint. Again, a kind of Naked Lunch. But originally, vis-à-vis Manet, Burroughs’ original title — The Naked Lunch in Paris — pinpointed the old vanguard of the European art establishment, not America, as prime villain for the prophet criminal artist to vanquish.
The wider, international scope of Burroughs’ discontent played out in both Mexico City and North Africa, where exile from Uncle Sam was portrayed as its own flavor of Hell rather than any kind of shangri lah. The angst of Ginsberg or Kerouac feels naively parochial by contrast, since Burroughs’ heat-seeking target wasn’t just America but the whole shebang: European arrogance, the pathetic disarray of third world scrambling, and ultimately human civilization itself.
Heroin needles and the junkie life that Burroughs learned about from first-hand experience is the pharmaceutical equivalent of the cut-up, justified as a personhood-dampening anesthetic in a world demanding conformity and participation in de-personing norms. Like the cuck Rumpelstiltskin — literally “little man” as a play on height and suggestive of impotence — Burroughs’ inability to foster a long-term relationship with a significant other features as a central theme, where going it alone, via alchemical self-neutering of all social attachments and emotional lures, is the only effective route to freedom, even if overdose fatality looms, and pedophilic preying is required to soothe the pangs of loneliness. Having exchanged his humanity for the roll of a godless perturbator, his fatherly side (Burroughs’ unassuming look resembles a gentle scoutmaster) is perverted into Molochian boy-lust—the more the merrier around the old Babylonian bonfire.
Burroughs arouses such intense interest because, roughly a decade the elder of both Kerouac and Ginsberg, he exerted a big brotherly influence on the young Beats, and he continues to mystifies his close readers today by guarding such a scantily defined intellectual and artistic lineage of his own. Dada pranksters initiated the cut-up, but Burroughs ran with it. Like Rumpelstiltskin, Burroughs seems to come from nowhere and return back again. By contrast, the Beats have a reputation for evoking an impressionable young adulthood. Their bleak call to buck the system concealed an underlying idealism that eventually went mainstream.
Ginsberg and Kerouac are household names, whose titles float atop bookstore bargain bins because multiple editions of their work proliferate long after the Beat movement fizzled. For Burroughs, this distorted legacy is a viral, disease-laden consequence of ego-driven misappropriation. His own reputation, on the other hand, remains solidly hipster cool even now because works like Naked Lunch are too abrasive to be widely co-opted, and the film adaptation by David Cronenberg lumped Burroughs’ alter ego in with other much beloved pop horror stars in spectacles of vintage special effects wizardry.
In Cronenberg’s The Fly (1986), Jeff Goldblum’s frenetic performance updates the 1958 original by portraying in gooey realism a mad scientist’s rapid devolution into a monstrous arthropod. In Cronenberg’s version, The Fly doesn’t just swap bodies but minds as well, a slow boiling process intended to caricature science as de facto diabolic. Under the Hayes Code, The Fly (1958) was originally a parable for the perils of scientific intrepitude. When a matter-transporting device mixes fly and human DNA, the scientist’s sad fate is held up as a tragic yet honorable consequence of pursuing a courageous path forward to discovery, ending: “He was searching for the truth. He almost found a great truth but for one instant, he was careless. The search for the truth is the most important work in the whole world and the most dangerous.”
As in The Fly, Burroughs represents his anti-hero as a kind of man-insect hybrid, who works stints as an obsessive cockroach exterminator unable to complete his fumigation between dope binges. This combination is made explicit in Cronenberg’s creative rendition — yet another cut-up of a cut-up — where Burroughs’ typewriter transforms into a squishy talking beetle who spits out powerfully strong ink resembling opium black tar while Burroughs is zonked in a Heroin haze. This is a clever depiction of Burroughs’ real literary results, where happenstance juxtapositions produce uncanny resemblances along the cynical theme of self-obliteration and insect take over. When this works, it’s genuinely weird, but it owes more to the Ouija board than anything truly literary. The meaning communicated by Burroughs remains something tentative and fragmentary, as if such a work is not really the novel it purports to be, but instead addressed the reader the way an book of spells does, speaking to the seductive desire for power that cracking open such volumes implies, somewhere deep beneath the level of the reader’s own lucid awareness.
Despite mining an unconscious reservoir, Burroughs had more Pollock in him than Dali, because even someone like Salvador Dali showed greater restraint, and his madcap concoctions wove a parodic image in keeping with the comparatively straightforward Freudian dictate to make the unconscious conscious and the conscious unconscious. Dali’s surrealism may have made him prone to bizarre personal rituals and grandiosely mystifying gestures, but he paid fealty to Franco’s Spain and knelt at the crucifix, even if it was just to masturbate.
Dali’s painting, Enigma of William Tell, shows his father’s hat brim and right buttock extending on either end phallus-like, supported by crutches for lopping. A red rag lies suggestively on his father’s buttock, suggesting a castration cut wound, a reference, according to Dali, to the Red Revolution of October 1917, which unmanned Europe. The Enigma of William Tell is a parody of the old Swiss legend. In the original, a brutal Hapsburg bailiff named Albrecht Gessler places his hat on a pole and made everyone bow to it. William Tell’s father refused, and was arrested along with his son. At the tyrannical whim of Albrecht, the father shot an apple off his son’s head to save both of their lives. Dali inverts this fable to depict a tyrannical father’s demand that his son live up to his own legacy in a winner-take-all battle of phallus versus phallus. His own father wears the hat in this depiction, and demands filial worship.
Dali’s distortion of myth indulges an auto-biographical fantasy and does not pretend to anything else. But Burroughs’ use of the same legend was enacted in real life before it made it into Naked Lunch.
Black-out drunk, Burroughs asked his wife Joan Vollmer to prepare for their “William Tell routine” by placing a glass on her head and stepping back while he cocked his revolver. They had never performed an actual party trick by that name, but his wife complied in a trance and Burroughs shot a bullet through her forehead. This far more direct inversion of myth is more disturbing than Dali’s bizarre distortion, especially given Burroughs killed Volmer in Mexico City and was eventually fully exonerated on U.S. soil. Rather than nurse phallic insecurities, Burroughs took aim against his wife, a surrogate for womankind as a whole, and claimed the role of executing Bailiff himself after fictively reducing her to the status of his own son. He then successfully vied for pardon by pleading his own bad memory of the event and exploiting his artistic success and influence. But rather than be a kind of wall-flower, Joan is remembered by the Beat movement as its well-read, intellectually fierce founding matron, and Burroughs’ act of murder suggests a level of envy directed against her status in the group. She was also the primary witness to whatever artistic influences guided his writing at its outset. Killing Vollmer cemented Burroughs’ own enigmatic origin story into a legend in its own right.
The comparison between Burroughs and Dali is useful because whereas Dali’s perversity was a kind of circus act he played on stage— something mainly affected for shock — Burroughs’ perversity remained something deliberately hidden, much like the personal voice obliterated from his prose works. Whether visiting boy prostitutes, scoring dope, or murdering his wife, the goal of his literary self-exposition was primarily to exonerate himself from public censure or guilt and promote his own reputation as a true original. Not by argument or pleading, but obfuscation and a quasi-mystical insanity defense. In the words of Bart Simpson or Steve Urkel: “I didn’t do it.” Whereas Dali once remarked, “The only difference between me and a madman is that I’m not mad” — which is a quip rather than a confession — since he had no direct need of one—as well as an admission of how fully aware he was of his own public reveling in private vice.
Burroughs’ great achievement—dissembling through chopped up artistic rendering of personal crimes, even murder one — has made him retroactively incognito in the public mind, and he miraculously evaded arrest and appeared on TV talk shows late into his life. It was as if Burroughs managed to superimpose the jury of artistic and literary review above the jury of his peers, and as though his own court case was just another cut-up. Taking aim at the original Paris Académie des Beaux-Arts, “These crimes,” Burroughs seemed to say, “O people of Earth, do not fall within your jurisdiction.” Naked Lunch was not written to stand alongside Dante and Dickens, or even Beckett and late Joyce, but to be use as an occult instrument toward Burroughs’ own personal ends.
As a benchmark for occultic manifestation, it’s worth noting that self-mystification is largely a matter of self-censure before it turns into something that can be effectively employed in the outside world as an insanity defense, which, after all, must appear genuine to rattle the jury and insinuate a grain of reasonable doubt. Burroughs may have been genuinely mad, not faking it, but that doesn’t excuse his courtship with insanity. Burroughs’ dodge is the evil inverse of the Christian call to seek first the Kingdom of Heaven, where “All other things will be given unto you.” For Burroughs, this is negated, “All will be allowed you, if you abandon the Kingdom of Heaven. Flee the light of hope from the Christian lamp of revelation. Logos only brings order out of chaos, but if you pursue the darkness, you will be able to multiply chaos out of order.”
Pursuing the logic of this dictate, Burroughs brought his literary cut-up technique into the real world, and recounted the home-brewed occult practice of recording the sounds of a hated coffee shop, revenging himself by returning next-day to play back his recording back at a subliminal volume to flood the place with nasty vibes. This activity is more akin to driving pins through a voodoo doll than anything even pseudo-scientific. Dali’s ego-overflow antics, like bathing in piles of dollar bills or pouncing in Louis C.K-style jack off attacks upon unsuspecting female models, feel tame by comparison, and were often paired with absurdly elaborate scientific justifications. Dali had the vices of a gonzo comedian, and mainly abused himself, but Burroughs worked the devices of a criminal creep, and caused lasting harm to others.
The unnerving thing about Burroughs’ techniques are their apparent effectiveness and the copycat-ism they inspire. The cut-up elevated Burroughs’s prose into a Bible of avante garde stylings, and according to Burroughs’ own account his use of the playback technique effectively forced the closure of several establishments he had vendettas against. Why? Does bad service call for black magic? The cut-up is more explicable — modern art has long nourished an unhealthy sympathy with weird for weird’s sake, even if Burroughs didn’t exactly luck into that arrangement but actually helped to engineer it in the first place. But the playback technique strikes a more macabre note, and seems like pure metaphysics.
Burroughs described weaving alarm bells, explosions, and other disturbing noises into his recordings. It’s not beyond belief that such a recording, if the ear registered it, could produce a state of unease. But that veneer of pop-psychological justification is stretched thin, especially since Burroughs also described printing photographs of the block where his targeted cafe lay and scissoring it out in an act of symbolic warfare. Whether it was an audio or a visual attack, Burroughs seemed happy with his results; the businesses closed. Like C.S. Lewis’s apology for Jesus in Mere Christianity, Burroughs was either a Lunatic, Liar, or (dark) Lord. Perhaps all three.
What Burroughs’ procedures evoke in the modern day is the phenomenon of meme-warfare and the Cult of Kek — a.k.a. Pepe the Frog — who 4Chan true believers credit as an Egyptian God who brought about Clinton’s demise and the rise of Trump in the 2016 presidential race. At its surface, this claim seems too ridiculous to even bother with as fantasy until it’s remembered that Clinton declared Pepe an official threat, elevating him from cartoon curiosity to public enemy worthy of censure.
Was Hillary just acting from a knee-jerk reaction, or do the “spirit cooking” rituals revealed four years ago by the Wikileaks Podesta email drop mean she fought fire with fire? Clintonite dems engaged at top dollar in dinner-party rituals where menstrual blood, breast milk, urine, and sperm were used to create a “painting” of violent curses scrawled in Manson-murder bloody graffiti on the wall, part of a mock cannibal feast. Moloch would be proud.
If Clintonites believed in even one iota of the pretend power on display, they might have at least expected a return volley from their psychic rivals. Phrases like one used in 2016, “With a sharp knife cut deeply into the middle finger of your left hand and eat the pain” paint an oddly specific target, and not even a particularly gruesome one. It’s the obscurely specific phrasing, rather than the violence itself, which so unsettles, since it seems to be precision-directed at a particular target.
The commonality between spirit cooking and Burroughs’ cut-up technique is hard to ignore, since both feature a jumbled assembly of words depicting highly evocative and gruesome scenes, and both aim at “painting” rather than “literature,” being born from Burroughs’ initial revolt against the old Parisian Fine Arts Academy. But Manet’s desire to launch a more expressive style of painting was focused on the beauty of the human form, and the current stuck barnacles and scurrying crustaceans that now afflict museums worldwide are anti-Human spectacles, where works by Manet and other old masters hang in the back rooms like hostage victims.
Dismissive accounts of the dem’s spirit cookery in outlets like NYMag soothe conspiratorial alarm by locating the origin of Marina Abramovic’s work in the 1990s NYC art world. But that only means Abramovic rubbed shoulders with the likes of Burroughs and his ilk. At this point, association with the contemporary art world is less of an alibi than a red herring, and pretending otherwise is disingenuous. Nowadays, contemporary art is praised for being “fucked up,” “insane,” or otherwise mastering some ungodly-ugly arrangement of elements valued more for the narcotic pungency they exude than anything aromatically enticing or even passingly innocent. The overlap between contemporary art and occult practice is as fat as can be; it stinks, and the stench has us all by the nose.
America is gradually coming to its senses, growing ever more aware that the occult is alive and well, whether or not its methods actually work the way they’re supposed to. Despite its dark side, the popularity of Pepe, or now QAnon, and the disturbing visions they promote, indicates a new political battleground where people grapple with an opponent who is not just wrong, but evil, and on both sides. Admitting this new state of affairs doesn’t excuse the worst excesses of conspiracy thinking, but owns up to the situation as it stands. Pretending we live in a pre-Podesta, pre-Pepe world is a regression to a now hypernormal fantasy. The prevalence of “Evil Art” took over long ago, at a roughly 50-year delay with its political counterpart, which only lately followed suit. If the current state of contemporary art is any indication, the political world we’re heading toward is about to get even uglier, more fucked up, and insane. Maybe. Politics is not quite the same as art, and there’s always the chance we can reason with it.
Pepe is a nickname for Jose, or Joseph. In Latin, Saint Joseph’s name is always followed by the letters “P.P.” for Pater Putativus (translated: supposed father) of Jesus Christ. In Spanish, the letter “P” is pronounced “peh” giving rise to the nickname “Pepe” for Jose. The similar sounding “peepee” for penis is a convenient but false cognate. The amphibian is primarily a symbol for adolescence, since it traverses the membrane between the surface world of human, adult expectations and the childhood realm of undersea dreams and monsters of the deep. A number of other handy dyads can be roped into the analysis of one’s choosing: Pre- vs. post- lapsarian; ante- vs. post-diluvian; yin vs. yang; Apollonian vs. Dionysian. It probably doesn’t matter too much. It’s all just occultic musings on a cartoon frog.
Jordan Peterson’s donning of a native American frog head-dress, however, and his Kermit the frog vocal twang, was a genuinely uncanny media moment when it occurred. His penchant for giving advice to struggling young men is perfectly in keeping with theme. But JBP, despite his heroic efforts, represents a troubling scientism that has reduced religious thought to a syncretistic element in a broader world-faith. There’s a risk that Peterson’s methods may be later weaponized by self-justifying global authorities who will use his blend of homespun fatherly wisdom and Biblical correspondence-finding to promote a science-based low sugar and low salt Christianity-substitute. Fake wine for fake wine skins.
In the original comic, Pepe is depicted peeing into a toilet with his pants around his ankles, green buttocks exposed. A young humanoid labrador opens the bathroom door while Pepe, not one for “locked doors,” if he’s really the manifestation of cross-realm travel, is mid-stream. Word gets around to what looks to be a teen Wolf, another personification of adolescent border-crossing. Over a friendly video game match, the teen Wolf asks Pepe about his toddler-ish urination style. A dreamy expression crosses Pepe’s face. “Feels good man,” is his mock-solemn reply. This is surprising. One might think that Pepe would respond with embarrassment when confronted with his immature stance. Doubling down on what “feels good,” constitutes the comic’s main punchline as well as Pepe’s new catchphrase — a trollish quotable for anyone who engages online turf battles in bad faith. Unless political discourse reclaims its integrity and rises above meme-warfare team sports, the teams will splinter beyond repair.
Of course, Pepe went on to become the darling of the alt-right, and is now mostly extinct. What gives? Specifically, why should a green skinned character in a racially diverse universe of frogs, dogs, and werewolves come to symbolize white supremacy, and then go into hiding? The answer has less to do with racist motives than it does with a sense of tortured and half-formed masculinity. In a world increasingly affected by gender-mixing at work and changing gender roles at home, many men feel their birthright has been denied them. Rather than grow up and start families, they hover like humanoid frogs in perpetual adolescence. Racial connotations are tacked on as an after-thought, since many conflate the loss of traditionally masculine roles with the influx of cheap and easy to exploit labor both at home and abroad. Pointing out these resonances eventually made Pepe passé, irrelevant, because he was named for what he was in Rumpelstiltskin fashion. Once his adolescent qualities became mainstream connotations, his power as a weapon of meme-warfare was neutralized. Now anyone posting Pepe memes signals his own strained relationship to masculinity.
William Burroughs, as the 20th century’s very own Rumpelstiltskin man-kin, should be named as well. The magic he wove into his work should be regarded for the offense against taste and ethics it was, and his warlock’s brew should be demystified and dispelled of its charm. Burroughs was the chief progenitor — in the American literary world at least — of the narcissistic prophet criminal artist. Such widespread posturing robs literature and painting of their beauty by perpetrating officially-approved vandalism within the museum and library walls themselves. It’s just so much scrawling of bodily fluid. Burroughs’ talent for obscurity and self-abnegation concealed a deep unwillingness to grow into mature manhood and seriously engage with literature or art as something more meaningful than an accessory to murder. Rather than struggle frog-like on land for breath, Burroughs chose a fully aquatic deep dive into the abyss, mill-stone-around-the-neck style, and he’s not likely to emerge anytime soon unless it’s on the back of something worse, and even more unnamable.
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The Western Lands by William S. Burroughs
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Read 112 reviews from the world’s largest community
for readers. The Western Lands is the eagerly awaited new novel by the most visionary American novelist…
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https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/257506.The_Western_Lands
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September 10, 2016
The Western Lands wraps up the Red Night trilogy with a more involved look at the pilgrimage thereto, intercut with crosscurrents from the Egyptian Book of the Dead and remembrances from the author’s own life, the mass of which merges into a hallucinogenic exploration of the potentialities inherent in our concept of the great beyond. Part memoir, part attempt to provide closure to the impossibly sprawling mythology he’s created, this book feels doubly relevant as we watch the story and W.S.B. himself galloping rapidly to their end:
"Forty years ago the writer had published a novel which had made a stir. [...] He still had the clippings, but they were yellow and brittle now and he never looked at them. If he had removed them from the cellophane covering in his scrapbook they would have shredded to dust. [...] Often in the morning he would lie in bed and watch grids of typewritten words in front of his eyes that moved and shifted as he tried to read [them], but he never could. He thought if he could just copy these words down, which were not his own words, he might be able to put together another book and then... yes, and then what?"
It is perhaps impossible to miss the autobiographical quality of this passage, though to dwell on this aspect is to miss the deeper connection implied between the dying writer and the countless other deaths realized in our vain quest for immortality. Whether one seeks eternal life through their artistic legacy or by literally questing for the holy grail that is the Western Lands, only one thing is sure -- “Life is very dangerous and few survive it.”
The word is out now that life after death is a real possibility, no longer a matter of unsubstantiated faith. As governments collapse and global catastrophe inches closer and closer, a “Great Awakening” washes over the land, and a mass of pilgrims as determined as they are desperate flock to heed the call:
"Just as the Old World mariners suddenly glimpsed a round Earth to be circumnavigated and mapped, so awakened pilgrims catch hungry flashes of vast areas beyond Death to be created and discovered and charted, open to anyone ready to take a step into the unknown, a step as drastic and irretrievable as the transition from water to land. [...] The pilgrimage to the Western Lands has started, the voyage through the Land of the Dead. Waves of exhilaration sweep the planet, awash in seas of silence. There is hope and purpose in these faces, and total alertness, for this is the most dangerous of all roads, for every pilgrim must meet and overcome his own death."
Kim is now en route to The Western Lands, along with Neferti, Hassan i Sabbah, and a host of others as they each attempt their own treacherous journey, fraught with every kind of danger imaginable. And while there is no shortage of deadly foes and lethal traps to be evaded or otherwise dealt with along the way, including (but certainly not limited to) the noxious “Breathers”, flying venomous scorpions, and Open Season duelists around every corner, perhaps the biggest impediment to progress on the pilgrim’s path is the sheer uncertainty of how best to proceed. As we are told at the outset of chapter seven:
"Today’s easy passage may be tomorrow’s death trap. The obvious road is almost always a fool’s road, and beware the Middle Roads, the roads of moderation, common sense and careful planning. However, there is a time for planning, moderation and common sense."
Sound advice to be sure (wherever one’s destination), but when the eternal soul is on the line, seekers generally seek for more direct guidance than that! Perhaps this explains why we remain so inclined to find our way within the context of this or that philosophy, science, or religion -- as ultimately flawed beings, flawed as we are in terms of even basic perception, it is perhaps unsurprising that we so often look to others for the way. Then again, this would also explain why so few (if any) of us ever succeed in reaching the Western Lands....
If you somehow missed the first two books in this series, reincarnate yourself at the beginning with Cities of the Red Night.
November 8, 2019
The final book in the wild and crazy Red Night trilogy by one of America's greatest avant-garde authors. Here are just two quotes from a brilliant book that is full of such musings:
“It is inconceivable that Homo sapiens could last another thousand years in present form. People of such great stupidity and such barbarous manners. And what do years mean, apart from human measurement and perception? Does time pass if there is no one there to register it’s passing? Of course not, since Time is a figment of human perception.”
“Messages from headquarters? What headquarters? Every man for himself—if he's got a self left. Not many do.”
May 23, 2023
All the filth and horror, fear, hate, disease and death of human history flows between you and the Western Lands. Let it flow!
Behind the gonzo is the Menippean and behind that is something earnest. Confessional and deprecating, Burroughs succeeds when he isn't overburdened with toxicology and endless penises. I nearly gasped at occasion on how beautiful the prose was only to encounter a taxonomy of small arms and blow guns. There's a nod to Carson McCullers which I didn't expect. It possibly knocked me knee deep in Burrough's river of shit, okay some of it made its way into my mouth. I meditated and all was forgiven. The Egyptian Book of the Dead features prominently as does some sort of tropical Hajj. Centipedes feature in a bizarre notion of molar responsibility and Pre-Columbian sacrifice.
September 27, 2014
Sheer genius.
As other reviewers have pointed out, the conclusion to the trilogy is not as sex-charged as the other novels. This is a real masterpiece. The narrative structure uses a blend of Egyptian mythology (Book of the Dead) and the craziness of a not-too-far-off world. Well, let's not hope not. So in this sense, I couldn't help but feel that Burroughs is writing this as a kind of warning.
I absolutely loved Cities of the Red Night and thought to myself at the time, 'There is no way Burroughs is going to top this one. No way'. But lo and behold, he has. This book is unbelievable.
It was easily the best book I read in 2011 and with all the turmoil and mad weather patterns currently going on in the world, the pre-apocalytpic tone throughout the book seems to be so relevant to present times. Just like Kerouac was ahead of his time in terms of style (spontaneous bop prosody), Burroughs has penned an eerily accurate portrait of what kind of world we might be heading for - if you can decode all the metaphors in the book. I couldn't in one reading and that is why I'm going to read it again.
This has to be the coolest book I have ever read, even better than Marching Powder. I'm currently reading The Wild Boys which is somewhat disappointing compared to this novel.
April 3, 2012
William S. Burroughs is one of my visionary writers. That means I believe he did something like what the prophets did at one time. They saw and wrote things that were not entirely comprehensible, but those writings reveal things about life and were usually a critique of society. Other writers I consider to be in this category are Plato, William Blake, John Milton, Arthur Schopenhauer, Henry David Thoreau, J.R.R. Tolkien, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Philip K. Dick.
This book begins with the claim, by the author, that throughout his life he independently worked out a view of what happens to mortals when we die. He said it turned out that his view coincides with the ancient Egyptian description of how the 7 souls of a person attempts to make the trek across the desert to the Western Lands when we die. The book moves on to the story of an elderly writer who had written only one famous book a long time ago and who was living in an abandoned railroad car. The book continues with episodes of the kind we expect from William S. Burroughs. The book ends with the death of that writer.
If you are going to read only one book by William S. Burroughs I would recommend that it be either "Naked Lunch" or "The Western Lands". Actually, I recommend adults to read both. "Naked Lunch" is the book that Burroughs is remembered for. It captures the author in his prime. However, it is a vulgar book that will be justifiably offensive to many people. Still, I believe it and the rest of William S. Burroughs' work to be literature and worth reading.
"The Western Lands" is Burroughs at the end of his career as a writer. He did write a famous book a long time ago and he was living in Kansas, not a railroad car, when he wrote the book. "The Western Lands" will give the reader a taste of Burroughs without having to endure unrestrained vulgarity and offensive scenes. That is not to say the book is devoid of vulgarity and patently inoffensive. It is still Burroughs, and worth reading, but it is a kinder, gentler Burroughs.
When I read the description of the journey of the 7 souls I thought, 'huh?' and chalked it up to being another of those incomprehensible things that I read that someone else believed.
Lately, I have been reading Arthur Schopenhauer's "The World as Will and Representation". The book claims the human soul has a minimum of two parts, 1. The intellect and 2. self-knowledge, and maybe there are more. We also have The Will separate from the soul. That makes at least 3 parts to what we think of as our immaterial selves or our souls.
Reading Schopenhauer's long work makes the multi-part soul imaginable if not plausible. I still think, 'huh?' But I am not nearly so dismissive as I was. Schopenhauer gives me a renewed appreciation of the much shorter idea described in Burroughs' "The Western Lands".
Read
August 8, 2016
Tek kada sam počeo da čitam ovaj treći deo trilogije (“Gradovi crvene noći” i “Mesto mrtvih puteva”), video sam koliko je Barouz zapravo imao velikog uticaja na moj stil pisanja.
Gradovi crvene noći su me oduševili, verovatno zato što je to prvo delo ovog autora sa kojim sa imao zadovoljstvo da se upoznam (čak sam i film Goli ručak pogledao posle čitanja ove knjige).
Zapadne zemlje nastavljaju tradiciju totalno trpoznog ludiranja kroz banalnost mediokritetskog sveta koji nam naši očevi redovno oktroišu i borbu kreativnih duhova i umetničkih duša da nađu svoj deo kosmosa koji nije zatrovan običnim ljudima. U ovom romanu autor pokušava da uz pomoć likova iz prva dva dela trilogije pronađe put u besmrtnost.
Knjiga je prepuna totalno blesavih i šašavih ideja. Meni je gotovo svaki pasus davao ideju za po jedan roman.
Istovremeno ova knjiga može da se čita kao besmisleno trabunjanje nadrogiranog autora koji je pati od nedostatka inspiracije ili zdravog razuma.
Od svih delova trilogije najsličnija je Golom ručku, sa istim brojem buba i mnogo većom količinom pederisanja.
Zapadne zemlje nisu za svakoga. Neki će da ih vole, neki će da ih mrze, ali niko neće da ostane ravnodušan. A to je ono najbolje što umetnost može da pruži.
September 15, 2019
Overall I'd say this is one of the authors more accessible and entertaining works, and while still retaining an air of abstraction, temporal distortion and general twistedness, it is markedly more coherent than his earlier fiction. The cut and paste technique along with copious amounts of gay sex and drug use are absent.
The themes dealt with include; Egyptian mythology, centipede worship, vampirism and toxicology.This is interspersed with stream of consciousness and dream recall writing that help to give it an edge over more traditional fiction and helps break up the shifting narrative.
March 25, 2020
"The road to the Western Lands is by definition the most dangerous road in the world, for it is a journey beyond Death..."
In the world according to William Burroughs, even the afterlife is subject to governmental control. Just as the pharaohs attempted to monopolize immortality, so do our present day leaders, through petty, everyday controls and restrictions all the up to the deployment of the ultimate soul destroyer - the atom bomb.
Fighting the system is Margaras, the White Cat: a fearsome spirit, Hunter, Tracker, supreme assassin. Also Margaras Unlimited, a 'secret service without a nation'. For its agents such as Neferti and a reincarnated Kim Carsons, everything and everyone is fair game, e.g. blackmailing ex-Naxis in hiding.
Amoral yes, but remember the motto of Hassan-i-Sabbah, the master of the order of the Assassons - or rather let Burroughs remind you, as he tends to do in each of his publications:
"Nothing is true. Everything is permitted."
Indeed, HIS actually appears as a character this time, on the lam in Egypt during his missing years there, evading his enemies, but also looking for the way into the Western Lands, a way to circumvent the Anubis Gates.
All the author's spare but powerfully descriptive prose is on display; few writers can conjure up time and place so swiftly and so sensually with just a few lines. The use of cut-up passages is rare but effective, the nasty homoerotic passages virtually edited out entirely.
Then there is the humor, always a strong point. Many examples could be quoted, this is typical:
"Good. Then these letters of safe conduct are for you. Does this town boast a hotel?"
"We do not boast, but there is the Hotel Splendide."
This is the final part of a trilogy of novels which taken together pretty much round out the whole of literary outlaw Burrough's paranoid, unique vision of the world, aided here by his recent discovery of Egyptian theology via Norman Mailer's Ancient Evenings, where he found a whole new set of controls and escapes to play around with.
It's not exactly a narrative trilogy - in fact, Burroughs can hardly keep a coherent story going for much more than 20-30 pages tops before it implodes into an orgy of sodomy and revenge fantasies - but it's certainly a trilogy in theme and phrase, with the same preoccupations and quotations returning again and again.
If I would recommend one of Burroughs' works to a new reader, it would probably be this one, despite being the last book in a trilogy.
January 4, 2008
More of a memoir than the final book of a trilogy. After reading The Place of Dead Roads and Cities of the Red Night I was slavering for the end of the series. From colonial privateerism, to manifest-destiny cowboys, this imagined sexual mystic outlaw history of the nationalistic push "west" or "out" and the counter-push "in" and against one's society would have a fascinating conclusion in the Egyptian struggle for immortality.
This book seriously lacks the kinetic intensity of its predecessors, however, and burroughs frequently "digresses" (yes you can say such a thing). Though characters and themes are present from the previous books, they are more memories. He drops the ball on the sexual language theme. To top it off, this book offer far less opportunities to go beat off than one expects.
Really a great memoir, of an author talking to his characters, despite the fact that it doesnt really belong in the series.
August 16, 2014
As with all of Burroughs work there are so many themes that could be expanded on and made into separate novels - if only the author lived to complete all his ideas.... The Western lands scatters across all of the author's interests, ancient Egypt, time travel, Arabian assassins, weapons, erotic imagery, medical manipulations... If I were to choose one theme, one novel, possibly extracted from this, his last major work, then it would be a novel based on the expedition to capture the giant centipede, along with the correspondence from Dean Ripa, Snake expert - A kind of Yage letters with the centipede as the holy grail of disgust...
Burroughs in this trilogy is a great travel writer. A travel writer not just through places, but through time and space and outer space. A literary map-maker. His eye for detail and imagination for the absurd make this an interesting journey.
But be warned. If a linear plot is required or if you are new to Burroughs the Western Lands is not the best place to look.
June 8, 2015
This is a beautiful book. Burroughs is much calmer here than in his famed Nova trilogy which actually makes his satire even sharper as he himself seems to be coming from a more stable position in his own life. Now he's more comfortable to transition into more straight forward digressions on mortality and Egyptian mythology musings. Not for everyone of course (being Burroughs, there are of course multiple sections with bizarrely graphic sexual violence and perhaps more information on centipede venom than the average reader could care for) but this is essential for anyone with an interest in WSB.
July 2, 2017
Not with a bang, but with a whimper, som man brukar säga. Den har sina briljanta partier men författaren beskriver sin "writer's block" från och till, och det märks kanske på slutresultatet, som inte flödar lika fritt och galet som de tidigare böckerna, utan snarare stapplar fram.
Det blir förstås ingen upplösning. Burroughs anarkism riktar sig förstås mot makten, i både världen men också i själva narrativet. De stora historierna dekonstrueras, och detta gäller även hans egen mytologi. Finns verkligen the western lands (fortfarande)? Den profetisk-gudomliga Hassan i Sabbah omskrivs här istället genom sin mänsklighet. Han är ingen världsfrånvänd mästare, ingen Gud på ett moln, utan han riskerar sitt eget liv tillsammans med varje lärjunge han tar sig an.
Burroughs var före sin tid. 20 år innan lolcatz för han här fram katter som det bästa som finns i livet. Motsatsen är tusenfotingar. Den som tycker tusenfotingar är gulliga på samma sätt som en normal människa tycker katter är gulliga, han är en artförrädare som bör avrättas på plats, menar Burroughs.
April 3, 2024
Like, I don't even know where to begin with his books. His voice is quintessentially american, but especially the last trilogy is like all sorts of religious type stuff.
It's like a gay hieronomyous boch painting but as a novel.
Read
July 12, 2022
No recollection. (Nice cover art though, I do remember that.)
March 9, 2014
Tărîmurile Vestice este volumul care încheie trilogia Cut up. Aparuta în 1987, cartea este scrisă de un Burroughs bătrîn, “ajuns la capătul cuvintelor, a ceea ce se poate face din cuvinte”. Romanul este considerat testamentul lui Burroughs ceea ce nu este departe de adevăr, deoarece în aceste pagini poate fi aflat un Burroughs agonizînd, un Burroughs care încearcă să împace cu ajutorul cuvintelor îmbătrînirea cărnii şi toate durerile fizice si psihice cumulate pînă la această vîrstă.
Este cel mai greu de digerat roman din toate cele şase ale sale citite de mine pînă acum. Deşi nu mai este la fel de pornografic şi violent ca cele anterioare, cuvintele sunt mult mai apăsătoare datorită mesajului şi imaginilor care de această dată au o factură psihologică. Este un adevărat drum către purgatoriu, drumul către o viaţă veşnică înspăimîntătoare şi rigidă, o viaţă veşnică conformă cu viaţa dusă în această dimensiune şi realitate. Impresia pe care o lasă la un moment dat romanul este aceea că Burroughs este, de fapt, toate personajele sale, toate acele personalităţi ce sunt în căutarea tărîmurilor vestice sunt bătrînul ce acum tr��ieşte înconjurat de pisici într-o rulotă, aşteptînd inevitabilul. Senzaţia că personajele din carte sunt avataruri ale autorului şi că Burroughs se dematerializează luînd alte corpuri pentru a săvîrşi o călătorie iniţiatică este pregnantă, dar nu poate fi spus categoric acest lucru. Obişnuit să lucreze cu senzaţii, să producă deliruri şi fantezii narcotice, autorul se joace cu toată paleta de cunoştinţe a cititorului, dărîmînd, conform stilului său inconfundabil, tarele etice, religioase si proclamînd în loc un spaţiu dincolo de realitate, atemporal, menit a pune în aplicare toate pornirile şi dorinţele din timpul vieţii. Drumul e plin de magic şi grotesc, de rituri uitate şi păgîne, un fel de drum ce pare a fi călătoria finală a corpului alături de suflet, pentru ca într-un final, corpul sau sufletul să fie purificat, o purificare ciudată şi barbară, o purificare prin violenţă şi cruzime, o purificare comandată şi guvernată de forţe oculte şi politice.
Tărîmurile Vestice poate fi considerat o epopee în adevăratul sens al cuvîntului, aventurile personajelor aducînd aminte de Ulise şi Ahile iar bătrînul ajuns la capătul cuvintelor, poate fi comparat cu Homer. Deşi Burroughs nu este orb pare a scrie din inerţie, o forţă exterioară lui impune aşternerea cuvintelor pe hîrtie, acesta fiind rolul său final din tragedia umană, izvorîtă din toate substanţele toxice consumate pînă la acest moment.
După mine, Burroughs plăteşte tributul final drogurilor prin această carte, plăteşte tributul lumilor construite din fuga dementă a narcoticelor prin mintea şi venele sale. Nu este un om sfîrşit, Burroughs a ajuns la sfîrşit iar acum derulează genericul pentru a da o ultimă explicaţie acestei lumi pe care s-ar putea să nu o fi acceptat vreodată.
“Vreau să ajung în Tărîmurile Vestice – chiar înaintea ta, peste pîrîul bolborosind. E un canal îngheţat. E cunoscut ca Duad, îţi aminteşti? Tot jegul şi oroarea, frica, ura, boala şi moartea istoriei umane se scurge între tine şi Tărîmurile Vestice. Las-o să se scurgă! Pisica mea Fletch se întinde în spatele meu pe pat. Un copac cu dantelă neagră pe un cer gri. O străfulgerare de bucurie.
Cît îi ia unui om să inveţe că el nu poate, că nu poate să vrea ceea ce el vrea?
Trebuie să fii în Iad ca să vezi Paradisul. Întrezăriri ale Tărîmului Mortului, străfulgerări ale unei bucurii serene fără timp, o bucurie la fel de bătrînă precum suferinţa sau moartea.”
Recenzie publicata pe http://razvanvanfirescu.wordpress.com/
December 12, 2016
Low grade Burroughs. Burroughs' masterpieces are driven by hallucinogenic fuel, e.g., heroin (Naked Lunch) and dreams (My Education: A Book of Dreams). Running on empty for this one, had to force myself to finish. Some flashes of brilliance (the encounter with the Bible lady, St. Humwawa, Chapter 8, "let go of the balloon," THE VALLEY). Unfortunately, the highlights were embedded in page after page of boring stuff that put me to sleep.
March 22, 2011
The final volume of Burroughs' final trilogy is a rumination on death, mortality and immortality, morality and ethics, and freedom. The western lands of the title comes from Egyptian mythology, but as with the previous book, The Place of Dead Roads: A Novel, there is a lot of the American west here, as well. Burroughs is concerned with the journey, migration, movement, not content to sit still, and not satisfied with a heaven that can be achieved without struggle.
January 1, 2013
Bill Burroughs exercises the aging writer's motif of confronting one's mortality here, using his Cities of the Red Night and Ancient Egyptian polytheism as a vehicle. He's still out to euthanize bigots and the ilk, but less pointedly. Rather, this is more of an autobiography that takes significant license with the medium. An enjoyable experiment.
Thing is, whenever I read Burroughs, I can't help but hear his broken voice in that offbeat pace, and it scares the bejesus outta me.
May 10, 2008
The perfect book: as wise as it is wise assy, downright hilarious. WSB's timing got so much better as he got older; this is certainly his best book and a viable handbook to the after life. Methinks it the very best book I've ever read.
February 25, 2020
Burroughs wrote a number of similar book: Cities of the Red Night, etc. Only later were they presented as part of a series. The Western Lands of one of WSB's best, and represents a type of culmination and distillation.
Now classified as #3 of a trilogy.
September 1, 2007
I really like the old William Burroughs a lot before he got too obsessed with cats. This book is absolutely wonderful, sad, weird.
June 12, 2009
If you enjoy books with purpose, don't waste your time.
August 8, 2010
His most beautiful/eloquent prose and a great ending to the late trilogy
December 26, 2021
"The pilgrimage to the Western lands has started, the voyage through the Land of the Dead. Waves of exhilaration sweep the planet, awash in seas of silence. There is hope and purpose in these faces, and total alertness, for in the most dangerous of all roads, for every pilgrim must meet and overcome his death."
Reading a William Burroughs now gives me this warm fuzzy comfy feeling. It's so nice to be back with my weird Avant Garde great uncle. I don't care what the hell he's going on about. But in this here, his last book he is a lot more understandable and focused and less obscene than normal.
I would recommend anyone thinking of reading this first reads 'Cities of the Red Night' and 'The Place of Dead Roads' the earlier parts of this trilogy. Not because of any plot threads. (Ha plot!) Or recurring characters or themes or anything that would normally link trilogies of books together. No, just do it because it's the right thing to do. To fully appreciate this one you need a bit of a run up to it. Enjoy that Burroughs head space. Of course you don't need to. And this, I would say is the best of the three, perhaps the best he has written.
At the end of this book he is really trying to say all he can while he can. Like 'The Tempest'. Like 'The Waste Land' (which is quoted throughout and in the earlier books, even on the last line of this one. Even maybe alluded to in the title.) There's nothing held back in this one. He's ran himself out, he's finished because -
"The old writer couldn't write anymore because he had reached the end of words, the end of what can be done with words."
Burroughs was the last writer to make a leap forward in literature, maybe the last there will ever be. I think he was inspired by the advances in art and applied them to writing. The cut up technique is collage. His parade of grotesques, horror and senseless cruelty is Bosch. His embracement of pulp low culture as an artifact of excitement, of obvious fake thrills, in his case the centipedes the cowboys and assassin's and poisonings and beheadings and sci-fi Egyptian mystercism is pure pop art. Trash elevated by its representation here, found art, post modernism. He is the history of art, but especially, twentieth century art applied to literature.
But there is in this last book something more than what I am used to in Burroughs, something, I wouldn't say exactly a story. But a progression towards death, elevation beyond death. Sometimes the disperate fragments made sense to me as metaphors, often really good metaphors for steps along that quest, further examinations of angles to look at death and life.
The last chapter is magnificent, it starts with a section called 'The Valley'. People have lived for generations in a valley eating radiated corn. No one can escape the valley no-one knows how anyone descended into it in the first place maybe long ladders over the cliffs that have been torn down. Any attempts to fly over or burrow through the cliffs have been failures. Everyone is stuck in the valley, sick and hungry, unsure how they got there, dreaming of escape, to some unknown other place.
Is that not for once a clear and obvious and quite brilliant metaphor?
"The future may not happen, if you strike at the right time and the right place. So we have a human lifetime with a few moments of meaning and purpose scattered here and there ... Need not be superb pieces of deadly tradecraft, can just be the nightsky over St Louis or anywhere... It is fleeting if you see something beautiful, don't cling to it; if you see something horrible don't shrink from it.... The glimpses are rare so how do we live through these dreary years of deadwood, lumbering our aging flesh from here to there?"
And another clear and beautiful and obvious metaphor.
"The earth is loosing light at that speed. 186,000 miles per second... You can make a certain amount of light from your own substance, if you have any left and light transfusions can be had for a price. Politicians is trying to convince the public they got a system for eating votes and shitting out light. But the light is running out and everyone knows it. It's leaving this planet at 186,000 miles a second and nothing can bring it back."
In this, his last book, Burroughs let's himself be understandable. And has more to say than his usual odd sparkling instructions about this or that. His deadpan crazy comments. His wild scenes stolen and exploded and inverted from the culture at large, elevating the trash that excites him. Or have I just missed all that in his other books? Have I just started to get what he has been trying to say? That he has been trying to say things all along?
November 13, 2019
The third book in the sequence that began with Cities of the Red Night and The Place of Dead Roads descends into chaotic fragmentation, interspersed with the reflections of a stand-in for the author. Most memorable are the further elucidations of the exotic places alluded to in the previous works: Waghdas, the center for thought and philosophy but also a way station on the path to the Western Lands themselves, which could best be summarized as where one goes for their final test, their final death. The plagues that populate the first two books become increasingly grotesque—one of the most memorable sections concerns the nature of poisonous centipedes and the bodily deformity and toxic effects of different bites from centipedes of different sizes. Kim Carsons, the gunman from The Place of Dead Roads, is conflated with Nepherti, whose journeys through Waghdas and then the peripheries of the Western Lands themselves are held up by the narrator as a demonstration of how one must contend with this metaphorical derivation of death. Metaphorical only because the extremity of the collage technique (or ‘cut-up’ technique) in the book prevents to a much greater degree than in the first two books the concept of reading this as a chronological narrative or even (as with the first two) an asynchronous narrative.
The main character is the author himself, waning in spirit, realizing that everything within himself is nearing death, and that the creations he has made are not a font of ongoing strength. Every writer must eventually be silenced. And, hence, the descriptions of the environs the writer/narrator works in contrast deeply with the exotic philosophizing of the rest of the work; interestingly, the sex drive as a topic, so central to the virus-infected caricatures of The Cities of the Red Night, wanes in both the author’s own narrative and in the fragments of the invention. The intensity of the end of the book, in the passages of “The Wishing Machine,” is rooted in the dying of this fragmentary, visionary voice, inconsistent though it was: “The old writer lived in a converted boxcar in a junk heap on the river… It was Christmas night, getting dark. The writer had just walked a quarter mile to a truck stop that was serving hot turkey sandwiches with dressing and gravy to go. He was carrying his sandwich back when he heard a cat mewling.” Or, this passage, about the power of creation, and its end—the end of the libertarian dreams, flight to Tangier or Cairo: “Remember when I threw a blast of energy and all the light in the Earl’s Court area of London went out, all the way down to North End Road? There in my five-quid-a-week room in the Empress Hotel…”
I think the greatest truth in this rumination is that Burroughs’s vision, and methods, collectively were so deeply interior—all interiors, the settings of the regular world deranged, not so much a critique of elements of the world as a creation of something parallel that in the end, too, would die with the end of the writing—not for the reader perhaps, but for the creator.
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https://sciencefictionruminations.com/2022/07/29/short-fiction-reviews-josephine-saxtons-the-wall-1965-ne-deja-vu-pas-1967-and-nothing-much-to-relate-1967/
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Short Fiction Reviews: Josephine Saxton’s “The Wall” (1965), “Ne Déjà Vu Pas” (1967), and “Nothing Much to Relate” (1967)
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"Joachim Boaz"
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2022-07-29T00:00:00
|
In the past year or so I’ve put together an informal series on the first three published short fictions by female authors who are new(ish) to me and/or whose most famous SF novels fall mostly outside the post-WWII to mid-1980s focus of my reading adventures. So far I’ve featured Carol Emshwiller (1921-2019), Nancy Kress (1948-), Melisa Michaels (1946-2019), Lee Killough (1942-), and Eleanor…
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en
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Science Fiction and Other Suspect Ruminations
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https://sciencefictionruminations.com/2022/07/29/short-fiction-reviews-josephine-saxtons-the-wall-1965-ne-deja-vu-pas-1967-and-nothing-much-to-relate-1967/
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In the past year or so I’ve put together an informal series on the first three published short fictions by female authors who are new(ish) to me and/or whose most famous SF novels fall mostly outside the post-WWII to mid-1980s focus of my reading adventures. So far I’ve featured Carol Emshwiller (1921-2019), Nancy Kress (1948-), Melisa Michaels (1946-2019), Lee Killough (1942-), and Eleanor Arnason (1942). I do not expect transformative or brilliant things from first stories. Rather, it’s a way to get a sense of subject matter and concerns that first motivated authors to put pen to paper.
Today I’ve selected Josephine Saxton (1935-), an author whom I’ve long known about–I reviewed The Hieros Gamos of Sam and An Smith (1969) back in 2012–but never read any more of her work. Due to Rich Horton’s review of Saxton’s Vector for Seven (1970), my interest in an important voice of the English New Wave movement suddenly rekindled. Her 60s and 70s stories appeared in many of the influential New Wave (and adjacent) anthologies–including Judith Merril’s England Swings SF (1969), Harlan Ellison’s Again, Dangerous Visions (1972), Robert Silverberg’s New Dimensions 1 (1971), Samuel R. Delany and Marilyn Hacker’s Quark/3 (1971), and Damon Knight’s Orbit 9 (1971).
In her first three stories, Saxton deploys sculpted landscapes as metaphysical traps that allegorize the internal struggles of her characters. In the language of the New Wave, inner space manifests as a nightmarish landscape that one must try to traverse. Her prose, even in her weakest tales, is measured and poetic. See SF Encyclopedia for discussion of her later fiction.
Let me know which Josephine Saxton fictions–perhaps from much later in her career–resonate with you.
4/5 (Good)
“The Wall” first appeared Science Fantasy, ed. Kyril Bonfiglioli (November 1965). You can read it online here. It also appeared in Saxton’s collection The Power of Time (1985), which is where I read it.
“The Wall” is an auspicious beginning to an illustrious career! Set in a sculpted valley like a shallow bowl that places the human struggle in heightened relief, “The Wall” imagines a landscape split into two halves by “some change in the light, in the atmosphere, in the colours of air and the earth” (97). At closer look, a wall filled with “lumps of glittering faceted hardness” (97) bifurcates the world. Metal rapiers prevent passage over the barrier. But at a single point a small hole pierces through the wall and on either side of the hole lived a man and a woman. He hunts for rabbits and keeps his fingernails “specklessly white” (98). She, a mother in “another life,” carries her the accoutrements of her beauty regime in a bamboo beach bag (99). Very much in love, the couple spend their hours talking through the hole, and, while physically taxing, manage to stretch their hands through the crevasse and touch.
But the can be no physical consummation of their passion. They know the wall cannot be breached. And so they decide to set off to find a new life. As they walk away from the wall up the sides of the valley they can see each other’s identical movements. Each encounter a lover and each give in to their passions. And each feels shame. And each returns to the hole. And those desperately in love will do desperate things. And the cycle resets.
There’s a poetic simplicity to it all. Like Calvino’s adept descriptions of imaginary places in Invisible Cities (1972), Saxton’s sculpted world, as if a stage, allows a concise morality play to unfold. It lays bare the powerful pull that only over the wall can real happiness lie.
3/5 (Average)
“Ne Déjà Vu Pas” first appeared in England Swings SF, ed. Judith Merril (1968). If you have an Internet Archive account, you can read it online here. As Rich Horton points out, England Swings SF was Judith Merril’s “attempt to showcase the [English New Wave movement] for American readers.”
“Ne Déjà Vu Pas” is the most overtly New Wave story of the three (unsurprising as it featured in Merril’s anthology). Replete with typographical experimentation (sentences placed entirely backwards), Saxton imagines a nightmarish “net of an insulating strip” in between the positive and negative half of the universe that does not experience time (33). The space pilot Kitten, “female, young, and full of curiosity,” in her relentless search for new experiences sets of to go anywhere but “where I have been before” finds herself trapped in the net (31). Whenever someone enters the liminal zone the other version of yourself in the other half of the universe is pulled into the net. Kitten, for some reason no longer female, cannot tolerate the other version of herself pulled into the zone. She spends her days increasingly delusional, imagining that they might be the origin of God.
I did not find “Ne Déjà Vu Pas” entirely successful. Unlike “The Wall,” Saxton does not effectively convey the strange liminal zone Kitten finds herself trapped within. There are some intriguing scenes observing those aging backwards in the negative universe. The social commentary–the aimless trapped in the ultimate aimless world–is more of an afterthought.
2.75/5 (Below Average)
“Nothing Much to Relate” first appeared in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, ed. Edward L. Ferman (November 1967). You can read it here. It was not collected elsewhere.
I’m a sucker for science fiction that aims a piercing eye towards the experiences of housewives and the domestic existence. I am fascinated by fantastical transformation of the daily interaction with home and family. Like the maniacal badgering of the sentient home-keeping computer in Clifford D. Simak’s The Werewolf Principle (1967), science fictional extrapolations bring the uncanny into the everyday life. I also have multiple interrelated reasons related to the power of historical narratives. At the most basic level, propaganda in the 50s and 60s proclaimed the white single-family home as a triumphant symbol of capitalist success. Nothing encapsulates this view more than Richard Nixon and Nikita Khrushchev’s hilarious (and terrifying) 1959 “Kitchen Debate” at the American National Exhibition in Moscow. And science fiction became an arena for the dissection of the experience of 50s and 60s life.
And one experience often ignored was that of the housewife. Betty Friedan dissected the widespread unhappiness of post-WWII white women in the monumental The Feminine Mystique (1963). And, in a handful of cases, science fiction from the era embodied many of her arguments: Pamela Zoline’s “The Heat Death of the Universe” (1967), Carol Emshwiller’s “Love Me Again” (1956) and “Adapted” (1961), Ann Warren Griffith’s “Captive Audience” (1953), Kate Wilhelm’s “The Downstairs Room” (1968), and Josephine Saxton’s “Nothing Much to Relate” (1967) come to mind.
“Nothing Much to Relate,” told with a deliberately uncanny lightness, describes the life of Liz, housewife with a new child, who discovers a mysterious pile of “automatic” writing which she apparently wrote during a séance. She is desperate for any type of escape from her domestic existence characterized by the incisive criticism of her husband wants her to take up swimming to lose weight (she points out that she can’t swim with a baby in her arms) and the responsibilities of keeping house. The ghost that reached out to her was that of a young man, obsessed with alternative ways to live and Eastern mysticism, that discovered a “real” secret. Liz’s friend Rosalind chalks the tale up to post-natal depression or sneaking psychiatric drugs prescribed by her psychiatrist husband. But even Rosalind, newly pregnant and also stuck at home, suggests she “better go round to the address you got, and investigate” (69).
In this instance, I am far more interested in the historical context of “Nothing Much to Relate” than the story itself which is far from Saxton’s best. There are some solid elements: the commentary on life was told with a hilarious snark and incision and the repackaging of Eastern mysticism as exotic suburban escape and solace reminded me of contemporary obsessions with Reiki (“holistic”) healing and Yoga.
For book reviews consult the INDEX
For cover art posts consult the INDEX
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wrong_mix_random_publicationDate_00046
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FactBench
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| 72
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https://www.sfsite.com/fsf//bibliography/fsfstorieswhom10.htm
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en
|
FANTASY & SCIENCE FICTION: STORIES (by author)
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Author Story Title Issue Date Type Comments Merril, Judith Theodore Sturgeon 1962 SEP bio "personality" article on 1962's Worldcon guest of honor; Judith Merril, Philip Klass & T.S. lived together for most of a year as starving writers before the Big S-F Boom started; among his stories mentioned, "Bianca's Hands" in ARG(UK) 1947 MAY Books 1965 MAR br Asimov: The Rest of the Robots; Leiber: A Pail of Air; Leinster: Doctor to the Stars; Richard Matheson: Shock II; Sturgeon: Sturgeon in Orbit; Cordwainer Smith: The Planet Buyer; Silverberg: Regan's Planet; Laumer: The Great Time Machine Hoax; etc Books 1965 APR br Charles Einstein: The Day New York Went Dry; John Christopher: Sweeney's Island; James Kennaway: The Mind Benders; The Worlds of Robert F. Young; Isaac Bashevis Singer: Short Friday; Robert Nathan: The Fair; William Golding: The Spire; & one other Books 1965 MAY br Fred Hoyle & John Elliot: Andromeda Breakthrough; William S. Burroughs: Nova Express; Gordon R. Dickson: The Alien Way; Merril has anth. SF: The Best of the Best(1967), England Swings SF(1968); colls. Out of Bounds(1960), Daughters of Earth(1968 UK) Books 1965 JUN br Walter Sullivan: We Are Not Alone; John Hersey: White Lotus; Dick: The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch; Phyllis Gotlieb: Sunburst; Avram Davidson: Mutiny in Space; Herbert D. Kastle: The Reassembled Man; Bonestell & Ley: Beyond the Solar System; 1 other Books 1965 JUL br Kurt Vonnegut Jr: God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater, ...(correction p.73, 1965 SEP); J.G. Ballard: The Drowned World, & The Wind from Nowhere; Walter M. Miller Jr: The View from the Stars; Arthur C. Clarke: Man and Space Books 1965 AUG br James V. McConnell(ed): The Worm Re-Turns(The Best from Worm Runner's Digest); Merril has colls. Survival Ship and Other Stories(1974), & The Best of Judith Merril(1976); has anth. Tesseracts(1985), the first volume in an anth. ser. of Canadian sf Books 1965 SEP br results reader opinions(asked for in 1965 JUN) - longer reviews mixed with shorter ones, extracts of readers' letters; Chapman Pincher: Not With a Bang; Farmer: Dare; Christopher: The Possessors; Laumer: Galactic Diplomat; Clement: Natives of Space; etc Books 1965 OCT br "sources of new insights into sf"; Cordwainer Smith: Space Lords; Ray Bradbury: R Is for Rocket, & The Machineries of Joy; Jose Maria Gironella: Phantoms and Fugitives; Jorge Luis Borges: Labyrinthes; Romain Gary: Hissing Tales; 1 other Books 1965 NOV br John D. MacDonald: The Girl, the Gold Watch, & Everything; Anderson: The Star Fox; Delany: The Ballad of Beta-2; Petaja: Alpha Yes, Terra No!; Biggle: The Fury Out of Time; Walter Moudy: No Man on Earth; Davidson: Masters of the Maze; etc Books 1966 JAN br the American & British sf scenes, from London; the big 3 sf writers in London: Ballard, Aldiss & Brunner; sf book editors & the market; J.G. Ballard: The Drought(vt The Burning World, US) Books 1966 FEB br Beaumont: The Magic Man; Henderson: The Anything Box; Abram Tertz: The Makepeace Experiment; Langelaan: Out of Time; Raphael: The Thirst Quenchers; Leonard Daventry: A Man of Double Deed; Brunner: Now Then; Anderson: The Corridors of Time; etc Books 1966 MAR br Harrison: Plague from Space; Dickson: Mission to Universe; Brunner: The Altar of Asconel; White: Android Avenger; Moorcock: The Fireclown; Davidson: Rork!; Pohl: A Plague of Pythons; Herbert: Dune; Christopher: The Ragged Edge; 5 more Books 1966 APR br David Solomon(ed): LSD, the Consciousness-Expanding Drug; Eric Berne: Games People Play; John Brunner: The Day of the Star Cities, & The Squares of the City; Mack Reynolds: Planetary Agent X; Rick Raphael: Code Three; Alan E. Nourse: The Universe Between Books 1966 MAY br Jules Feiffer: The Great Comic Book Heroes; Sheckley: The 10th Victim; White: The Watch Below; Pohl & Williamson: Starchild; van Vogt: Rogue Ship; Shepherd Mead: The Carefully Considered Rape of the World; Knight: Mind Switch; 1 more Books 1966 JUN br complaints about Berkley Books; Thomas M. Disch: The Genocides; Daniel Keyes: Flowers for Algernon Books 1966 JUL br Charles L. Harness: The Rose; Brian W. Aldiss: Earthworks; John Lymington: Froomb!; Joseph L. Green: The Loafers of Refuge Books 1966 AUG br Regeinald Bretnor: The Future of Science Fiction; J.G. Ballard: The Crystal World, & The Impossible Man; Merril presents a long essay on Brunner's works, to coincide with his serial in F&SF begun in this issue(#2380) Books 1966 SEP br how to be an sf anthologist; Pohl(ed): The Ninth Galaxy Reader, & The If Reader of Science Fiction; Mills(ed): The Best from Fantasy and Science Fiction, 11th Series; Knight(ed): Orbit 1, & Cities of Wonder; Moskowitz(ed): Modern Masterpieces of S.F.; etc Books 1966 NOV br Asimov: Fantastic Voyage; Leiber: Tarzan and the Valley of Gold, & The Night of the Wolf; Herbert: The Green Brain; Keith Roberts: The Furies; Allen Kim Lang: Wild and Outside; Heinlein: The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress, & The Worlds of ...; etc Books 1966 DEC br contemporary mythology; Pangborn: The Judgment of Eve; Davidson: The Kar-Chee Reign; Vance: The Blue World; Le Guin: Rocannon's World; Nunes: Inherit the Earth; Zelazny: This Immortal; Delany: Empire Star, & Babel-17; Purdom: The Tree Lord of Imeten Books 1967 JAN br 100th anniversary of H.G. Wells birth; announces death of Prof. Paul A. Linebarger(aka Cordwainer Smith); Hoyle: October the First Is Too Late; Rosel George Brown: Sybil Sue Blue; Gertrude Friedberg: The Revolving Boy; Clarke(ed): Time Probe; one more Books 1967 FEB br C.S. Lewis: Of Other Worlds; E.J. Carnell(ed): New Writings in SF 1; Brian W. Aldiss: Who Can Replace a Man?; William F. Temple: Shoot at the Moon; Brunner: The Long Result; Harry Harrison: Make Room! Make Room!; L.P. Davies: The Paper Dolls; 1 more Books 1967 MAR br reviews two books, neither labeled sf, but both are really at opposite ends of the sf spectrum; John Barth: Giles Goat-Boy; Jean-Claude Forest: Barbarella(a graphic story book) Books 1967 MAY br religion in sf; Frank Herbert: Destination: Void; Philip José Farmer: Night of Light; Clifford D. Simak: Why Call Them Back from Heaven?; Robert Kelly: The Scorpions Books 1967 JUN br Douglas Hill & Pat Williams: The Supernatural; I.S. Shklovskii & Carl Sagan: Intelligent Life in the Universe Books 1967 AUG br many very short reviews(16) of one paragraph; Merril has anth. SF 12(1968), S-F: the Best of the Best(1968), England Swings SF(1968), colls. Out of Bounds (1960), Daughters of Earth(1968); has acted in the British sf TV series, Dr. Who Books 1967 SEP br Sam Moskowitz(ed): Three Stories(by Leinster, Williamson, & Wyndham); essay on Moskowitz, the sense of wonder, the sense of nostalgia, & the ability or inability to reread older sf stories Books 1967 NOV br TNT(The New Thing, or New Wave) vs TOT(The Old Thing); Wollheim & Carr(ed): World's Best Science Fiction 1967; Knight(ed): Orbit 2; Dick: The Crack in Space, The Zap Gun, & Counter-Clock World; Disch: Echo Round His Bones; 2 more Books 1967 DEC br Harlan Ellison(ed): Dangerous Visions; lists the recent reprints, reissues & "novelizations"; in regards to Merril's br column last month(1967 NOV), see Robert Silverberg's "Reflections" column in ASI 2001 MAR & APR, a look back at The New Wave, 1965-72 Books 1968 FEB br Hortense Calisher: Journal from Ellipsia; William Burroughs: The Soft Machine; William F. Nolan & George Clayton Johnson: Logan's Run; Chester Anderson: The Butterfly Kid; Willard Bain: Informed Sources (Day East Received) Books 1968 MAR br Arthur C. Clarke: The Coming of the Space Age; Isaac Asimov: Is Anyone There?; Carl Sagan & I. Shklovskii: Intelligent Life in the Universe; Vincent H. Gaddis: Mysterious Fires and Lights; Colin Clair: Unnatural History; Harold Stümpke: The Snouters; etc Books 1968 MAY br Miguel Angel Asturias: Mulata; Mikhail Bulgakov: Margarita and the Master; Lafferty: The Past Master; Simak: The Werewolf Principle; Budrys: The Amsirs and the Iron Thorn; Terry Carr(ed): New Worlds of Fantasy; Anon(ed): Path into the Unknown; 3 art books Letters to the Book Editor 1968 MAY lttr Willem Van den Broek(on Knight: In Search of Wonder, & Kenneth Kenniston: The Uncommitted); Dennis Raimondo(teeny-bopper SF, & on a French book Sexualis '95, & criticism of Merril's reviews) Books 1968 JUN br political & social criticism in sf; The Report from Iron Mountain on the Possibility and Desirability of Peace; Chloe Zerwick & Harrison Brown: The Cassiopeia Affair; Hayden Howard: The Eskimo Invasion; Thomas Morrill: Let Us Reason Together; 1 more Books 1968 AUG br begins with a tribute to the late Anthony Boucher; Don Fabun: The Dynamics of Change; Philip K. Dick: Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?; Brian W. Aldiss: Cryptozoic; John Brunner: Quicksand; Alan E. Nourse: The Mercy Men Books 1968 SEP br essay: Prof. Philip Klass of the English Dept. at Penn. State Univ.; William Tenn: Of Men and Monsters, Of All Possible Worlds, The Human Angle, The Wooden Star, The Seven Sexes, The Square Root of Man; Leiber: Swords of Lankhmar; Russ: Picnic on Paradise Letters to the Book Editor 1968 SEP lttr Victor Contoski(on sf poetry - W.S. Merwin's "Fog-Horn," & David Ignatow's "News Report") Books 1968 NOV br the movie 2001: A Space Odyssey(1968); Samuel R. Delany: Nova(reviews after 1st reading, & 2nd reading); R.A. Lafferty: The Reefs of Earth Books 1969 JAN br Democratic Convention of 1968; sf of the late 30s thru today; L.P. Davies: Twilight Journey; Theodore Tyler: The Man Whose Name Wouldn't Fit; Nigel Balchin: Kings of Infinite Space; Laumer: The Day Before Forever; Wilhelm: The Downstairs Room; 3 more Books 1969 FEB br John Brunner: Stand on Zanzibar; Bob Shaw: The Two Timers; Roger Zelazny: Isle of the Dead; Clifford D. Simak: The Goblin Reservation Fritz Leiber 1969 JUL ar appreciation of Leiber & his works, his unique status among sf/f writers and his place in sf history, his cycles of productivity and decline; Merril's book collection forms basis of Merril Collection of Science Fiction, Speculation and Fantasy, in Toronto In the Land of Unblind 1974 OCT vi Merril: "Do NOT call it a poem"; see article "Memories of Judy" by Derryl Murphy in On Spec, 1997 WIN; see interview "One of Postwar SF's Formative Figures" by David Seed in INZ 1997 DEC; see her obit & appreciations In LOC 1997 OCT & NOV(#441, 442) [Real?] Writer, A—Homage to Ted Sturgeon 1999 OCT/NOV ar parts 1st pub. in the NYRS F 1993 JUL(#59), as "Better to Have Loved: From a Memoir-in-Progress"; this incomplete, polished, memoir found among her papers by her granddaughter Emily Pohl-Weary; talks about the early sf scene & Sturgeon; pub. as book 2002 Merwin, Sam Jr Lambikin 1952 JUN ss (1910-1996) wn. for W. Samuel Merwin Jr; writer & editor(of TWS, STS, FUN, etc.); 1st story pub. sf "The Scourge Below" in TWS 1939 OCT; has sf novels The House of Many Worlds(1951), Three Faces of Time(1955); see his obit in LOC 1996 APR(#423) Miller, Charles Tangled Web of Neil Weaver, The 1970 MAR ss Miller, Lion Available Data on the Worp Reaction, The 1953 SEP vi
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https://www.forbes.com/sites/robsalkowitz/2016/01/12/david-bowies-dangerous-visions-sf-touchpoints-for-the-thin-white-duke/
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en
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David Bowie's Dangerous Visions: Sci-Fi Touchpoints For The Thin White Duke
|
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"Rob Salkowitz"
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2016-01-12T00:00:00
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David Bowie influenced and was influenced by some of the most imaginative science fiction of his era.
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en
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Forbes
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https://www.forbes.com/sites/robsalkowitz/2016/01/12/david-bowies-dangerous-visions-sf-touchpoints-for-the-thin-white-duke/
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It’s not exactly a secret that David Bowie was influenced by science fiction. From the very beginning, many of his songs were love letters to visionary authors from Arthur C. Clarke (2001: A Space Oddity… er, Odyssey) to George Orwell (1984’s “Big Brother”) to Robert Heinlein (“The Man Who Sold the World,” or “Moon,” as in Heinlein’s 1951 short story). The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars (1973) was a standalone work of science fiction masquerading as a collection of irresistible pop songs.
But Bowie was more than a fan. I’d argue he was a major figure in the science fiction movement of the 1960s and 70s known as New Wave, which he drew inspiration from and inspired in turn. New Wave attempted to rescue the genre from the clichés of bug eyed monsters and space wars by injecting social relevance, literary style, and lots and lots of sex and drugs. By the time Bowie burst on the scene with “Space Oddity” in 1969, most of the bedrock of the New Wave canon had already appeared in print, with highlights collected in the best-selling anthology Dangerous Visions (1967), edited by Harlan Ellison.
Much of Bowie’s work throughout his career is a dialogue with New Wave SF, refracting it through his own sensibility and bringing the concepts to a mass audience via the medium of rock and roll. As I’ve been listening to the Bowie catalog for the past day, I’m reminded of a few specific connections and patterns of inspiration.
The Jerry Cornelius Novels (Michael Moorcock). Moorcock, the quintessential New Wave author, is better known for his sword and sorcery character Elric, but in 1968, he unleashed the sexually ambiguous secret agent Jerry Cornelius on an unsuspecting public in a novel called The Final Programme. An acid-drenched mashup of James Bond and Doctor Who, the dapper Cornelius hopscotches around space and time foiling plots against reality, assuming new identities and dazzling people with his avant gard aesthetics as he goes. Three further novels followed, each stranger than the next. Jerry Cornelius is less a specific inspiration for Bowie’s work than a template for his entire persona.
The Ticket That Exploded, The Soft Machine and The Nova Mob (William S. Burroughs). The great godfather of the Beat Generation William S. Burroughs wrote several visionary – and barely intelligible – works of science fiction in the early 1960s, including these three that feature a cosmic cops-and-robbers story of Agent Lee and his attempts to stop the Nova Mob’s schemes to control the minds of humanity. When Bowie said he used the “cut-up technique” for doing the lyrics to some of his more surreal songs, he is speaking of the method invented by Burroughs and Bryon Gysin and used in these novels.
Valis, The Divine Invasion and The Transmigration of Timothy Archer. (Philip K. Dick). Philip K. Dick, best known today as the author of The Man in the High Castle and the stories that inspired Blade Runner and Total Recall, wrote this trilogy involving alien invasions, Gnostic Christianity and Nixon-age political paranoia in the mid-70s, when his years of drug use were taking their toll. They were not published until the early 1980s. In the novels, a character called Eric Lampton is based on Bowie, and another, Brent Mini, on his then-producer/collaborator Brian Eno, operating under the assumption that the events depicted in “The Man Who Fell to Earth” were real. According to Bowie’s son Duncan, the admiration between Dick and Bowie was mutual.
Dhalgren (Samuel R. Delaney, 1975). Delaney’s inscrutable novel takes place in Bellona, a mythic Midwestern city cut off from the rest of the world, where gangs of polysexual anarchists, poets and biker gangs have taken over. I find it impossible to listen to Bowie’s “Panic in Detroit” (released in 1973, around the time that Delaney was working on his novel) without thinking of this book. Something tells me The Kid, Dhalgren’s nameless protagonist, looked a lot like Che Guevara.
Canopus in Argos (Doris Lessing, 1979-83). Though perhaps too late to be considered part of the main New Wave movement, this set of five novels by Nobel Prize winning author Doris Lessing stakes out some of the same turf as Dick’s Valis trilogy. Using science fiction themes as a metaphor to explore gender, war, sex, art and power dynamics, all five books – but especially The Marriages Between Zones Three, Four and Five (1979) and The Sirian Experiments (1980) – echo the lyrical concerns of much of Bowie’s work from the same period, the otherworldly electronica of Low, Lodger and Scary Monsters.
Bowie's influence could be felt on more mainstream science fiction as well. His appearances in films of the 80s like Labyrinth and The Hunger, as well as ones he seems to have directly inspired, like 1982's Liquid Sky (about aliens stalking androgynous fashion models in downtown New York) and 1984's The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the 8th Dimension (featuring a rock-star superhero and his glam posse), use his established persona(s) as shorthand for "cool hero/villain." The time-displaced 2005 BBC series Life on Mars (and its sequel Ashes to Ashes) bring together overtones of his science fiction-themed work and his cultural impact on the 1970s and 80s. And, my personal favorite, the hilarious animated sci-fi/adventure series The Venture Bros., which is full of Bowie references and even a couple of cameo appearances.
All of those are homages that reflect the influence Bowie enjoyed once his reputation was established. However it's worth noting that when it came to creating his own art during the phases of his career where he was really kicking down cultural boundaries, Bowie was not afraid to engage with some of the most dense and challenging imaginative fiction of his era.
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https://www.austinchronicle.com/books/2001-08-03/82507/
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en
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Beat Currencies
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"Book of Dreams",
"Cities of the Re",
"David Meltzer",
"Diane di Prima",
"Gary Snyder",
"Jack Hirschman",
"Jack Kerouac",
"Jack Micheline",
"Joanne Kyger",
"Lew Welch",
"Philip Whalen",
"Robert Creeley",
"San Francisco Beat: Talking With the Poets",
"The Place of Dead Roads",
"William S. Burroughs"
] | null |
[] |
2001-08-03T00:00:00
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In a look at some recently reprinted classic works by the Beats, Chronicle writer Dale Smith examines why being on the road was such a dangerous place -- and why it no longer is.
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en
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https://www.austinchronicle.com/books/2001-08-03/82507/
|
San Francisco Beat: Talking With the Poets
edited by David Meltzer
City Lights Books, 370 pp., $19.95 (paper)
Book of Dreams
by Jack Kerouac; introduction by Robert Creeley
City Lights Books, 356 pp., $17.95 (paper)The Place of Dead Roads
by William S. Burroughs
Holt, 306 pp., $13 (paper)Cities of the Red Night
by William S. Burroughs
PicadorUSA, 332 pp., $14 (paper)Jack Kerouac Is Pregnant: Stories
by Aurelie Sheehan
Dalkey Archive Press, 190 pp., $11.95 (paper)
Somehow, somewhere in the last decade or so, the liberating, bohemian vernacular of the Beats transformed itself into a digestive for popular consumption. Images of Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg hailed passersby from urban billboards promoting khaki pants. In 1994, William S. Burroughs appeared in Nike ads hinged to a sagey epigram: "The purpose of technology is not to confuse the brain but to serve the body." In May, Colts owner James Irsay paid more than $2 million for the 120-foot scroll of paper Kerouac used to write the Beat Ür text, On the Road. That novel, with Burroughs' Naked Lunch and Ginsberg's long poem, "Howl," remains the defining prose expression for the spontaneous, street-smart, and culturally alienated group of artists, hustlers, addicts, and freakniks who survived at the fringe of postwar New York City. Sharing a literary ground with Walt Whitman's output, those books reached beyond socially acceptable limits of writing to present a broad and risky engagement with personal experience. (Both "Howl" and Naked Lunch were tried for obscenity by U.S. courts, thereby publicly testing the verbal limits of that experience.) Preoccupied with social liberation, ecstatic sexuality, and personal salvation, they expressed dread and paranoia of government, the military, and other social tyrannies that controlled McCarthy-era America. This grassroots literary movement hustled the streets instead of university halls at a time when the spoils of war bloated the self-image of a nation. Oddly, in time, these outsiders' words would come to embody the period and ultimately help spark the revolutions to come in the Sixties. But nothing since has surpassed the Beats' primal image of the road. The movement of bodies in space, "to put it country simple" (as Burroughs liked to say), is what Beat writing boils down to.
Despite its high regard today as cultural capital and the appropriation of its hip style and fashion by younger generations of techno geeks, rewards to individual artists of the Beat generation have been slow coming. When I spoke with her recently, legendary poet Diane di Prima said, "If I'm a famous Beat poet, why can't I pay my rent?" Few if any of the Beat writers received secure academic posts, a reward expected by many writers today. Despite the masterful adaptation by David Cronenberg of Naked Lunch for the screen, there have been few attempts to translate Beat works into visual expressions. What sold was an attitude, a pose of liberation, while the personal visions and dangers of the road permanently negated monetary success on the cultural market.
"The reclamation and reinvention for the Beats and Beat literature in the nineties is an international phenomena that at once recognizes the dissident spirit of the Beats and removes it from historical complexity, makes it safe, and turns it into projects and artifacts," writes San Francisco poet David Meltzer. "The more removed from history's discomfort, the easier it is to imagine and consume history without taking on its weight."
Recent publications, or re-publications, complicate in some ways the reigning dogmas of Beat mythology. Edited by Meltzer, San Francisco Beat: Talking With the Poets gathers 17 interviews ranging in time nearly 30 years. The discussions focus on many of Meltzer's peers, including Diane di Prima, Gary Snyder, Joanne Kyger, and Philip Whalen. There also are lesser-known names of the Beat canon, like Jack Hirschman, Lew Welch, and Jack Micheline, significant contributors to a poetics of fierce engagement executed with humor and vernacular sensitivity.
"I have no idea about the Beat movement," di Prima says in one response. "To this day, I find it very difficult, as I'm sure you do, or anyone does, that people assume that whatever we were doing then we are doing now." Comparing Fifties economic conditions to the present, she acknowledges, "It was OK for me. Look at how awful it is now for everybody. I mean, it is fucking difficult. Drugs have been given a bad name. Traveling freely on the road would be a form of insanity. Money is so tight, nobody works twenty hours a month and studies their art. ... There was some kind of wild permission that we took. ... Real life, as we lived it, is fading, so there's this terrific Beat fantasy."
These interviews present an oral history of the creative Renaissance that exploded in the Fifties and Sixties. "There's not a real center of poetry anymore," poet Joanne Kyger declares. "I think of the readings of the late sixties, where we had 500 to 1,000 people at a reading. Poetry was the news, the cultural news, and I don't think we've had this kind of energy, these voices for a while." As a document of cultural history, San Francisco Beat should help place the Beats in perspective of the greater context of midcentury cultural history. It also counters in some ways the calcifying effect Beat mythology has played on popular consciousness.
Jack Kerouac's expansive genius for language produced some provocative formal experiments. Book of Dreams, one of the more important examples, has been reissued recently with 200 additional dreams that weren't included in the first edition. In his introduction, Bollingen Prize-winning poet Robert Creeley grounds the intent of Kerouac's book for readers more familiar with traditional prose models of writing. "The 'Jack' I found in this book was not a consistent or necessarily integrated presence," he writes. "He was of necessity the multiple, the many in one, the all that being one is. ... He loved the muffling, displacing edge between consciousness, as it's called, and the dream-filled sleep one leaves to come back to it."
Kerouac reveals a sublunary text of psychic vision, twilight confidentiality, and automatic transcription of images and conversation. "The reader should know that this is just a collection of dreams that I scribbled after I woke up from my sleep," he writes in the book's foreword. "They were all written spontaneously, nonstop, just like dreams happen, sometimes written before I was even awake."
Composed of discrete paragraphs, unconventional punctuation, with sentence fragments sustained by dashes, the dream writing here at first seems unfocused, haphazard, and daunting. But a few pages into the flow of these rhythmic, musical passages and the sustained narrative of nocturnal transmissions reveals energy of extraordinary concentration. He gathers these images of the psyche with humble curiosity, presenting them as the found components of his unconscious. Sometimes strange, funny or mundane, at others difficult, appalling or revealing, the dream narratives here are sustained by frank observations and unlimited internal resources of self-perception:
Earlier my father was back among the living -- very pale -- but sure of his own health -- and had just got a new job in New York -- but I know he's going to die -- especially from his face -- He's been down to the Union -- Meanwhile I'd been high on a great building overlooking infinitesimal harbors, unafraid -- The history of the Kerouacs in huge spectral dream New York.
Most amazing in the clarity of this writing is his capacity for revealing that reservoir of images psychologist Carl Jung identified as the collective unconscious. "Our early childhood years are not years at all," Kerouac writes, "but a sweet outpouring of eyes." He establishes meaning in these pages through a stacking of imagery, finding the moral value of waking life in the darker recesses of his dreams. Almost as if reminding us of a forgotten platitude, he writes, "It is only when dreams lose their importance that the dirty business of evil begins." Here, in "the sweet small lake of the mind," dream narrative swerves into consciousness, breaking out against "one corner of vast America."
With equal intensity of vivid visualization, two re-publications of William S. Burroughs' midcareer masterpieces afflict, disrupt, and suspend conventional senses of narrative. The Place of Dead Roads and Cities of the Red Night share themes of global intrigue, sexual convulsion, drug addiction, violence, and ritual murder. If you're familiar with Naked Lunch, consider these novels an extension of similarly far-out and autobiographical themes.
The Place of Dead Roads opens with an old-time shoot-out. With deadpan humor and an immaculate eye for detail, Burroughs stuffs the Western genre with gangsters, space monsters, and addicts. In his perversion of the Old West, we see it fresh, violent, and raw. Imagine a movie starring John Wayne, beaten, sodomized, his guts blown out through the solar plexus. That's the territory Burroughs enters, extending a theme of North American expansion, debasement, and violence. From ancient Egyptian mythology to an accurate knowledge of weaponry, Burroughs borrows from multiple traditions to deepen his Western. Kim Carsons stars as the queer outlaw, and with his extended gang of "Johnsons" he seeks to establish safe havens for homosexuals, dope fiends, and gangsters. But Burroughs addresses the psychic content of the unconscious rather than appealing to the social conditions he finds stale and confining. In the opening scene, after Kim "shoots a hole in the moon," a sudden gathering of "father figures rush on stage":
"STOP, MY SON!"
"No son of yours, you worthless old farts."
Kim lifts his gun.
"YOU'RE DESTROYING THE UNIVERSE!"
"What universe?"
While Burroughs idealizes loners and the values of scrounging in an uncertain wilderness, he writes with surprising moral ardency. He's a kind of 20th-century Charles Dickens, but in reverse, assaulting stale moral assumptions to excavate an ethics of active human significance. His insights are gained through the moral resources of his characters, pitted as they are against abusive and abstract social conditions. Good and evil are inverted. The good a society is conditioned to do becomes an administered evil so great only an opposite condition nurtured within the individual can make it right. "Later," Burroughs says of his hero Kim Carsons, "when he becomes an important player, he will learn that people are not bribed to shut up about what they know. They are bribed not to find out. And if you are as intelligent as Kim, it's hard not to find things out. Now, American boys are told they should think. But just wait until your thinking is basically different from the thinking of a boss or a teacher. ... You will find out that you aren't supposed to think."
Kim Carsons' Gnostic pursuit of good and evil leads him across the globe and into outer space (a favorite haunt for many of Burroughs' characters). The novel ends where it began, with a gunfight, and Kim's death, a kind of portal to Cities of the Red Night.
Dedicated "to the Lord of Abominations, Humwawa, whose face is a mass of entrails," Cities of the Red Night is introduced with ritual magic to express a toxic imagination. With deep understanding of Aztec demonology and ritual practices, he issues a cautionary note to readers who would embark on his vile quest into extraordinary psychic states: "NOTHING IS TRUE. EVERYTHING IS PERMITTED."
Written before news of the AIDS epidemic had become widely known, Burroughs writes with prophetic intuition of a sexually transmitted virus. In what is partly a detective story, partly sci-fi, characters debate "the wisdom of introducing Virus B-23 into contemporary America and Europe. Even though it might quiet the uh silent majority, who are admittedly becoming uh awkward, we must consider the biologic consequences." Of course, for Burroughs, this is also a human virus. "The whole quality of human consciousness, as expressed in male and female, is basically a virus mechanism."
The imaginary cities of the red night (Tamaghis, Ba'dan, Yass-Waddah, Waghdas, Naufana, and Ghadis) host the psychic and physical events of Burroughs' narrative. Boys march through jungles, they "frisk by, singing." Others "in codpieces and leather jerkins carrying musical instruments from the Middle Ages invade American Express." The anatomically expressive language offers vivid images of glorious depravities. Strangulation, mutation, and masturbation occupy many of the narrative sequences as the battle for the psychic manipulation of these cities builds with dramatic tension.
"All my books are all one book," Burroughs said in a rare 1974 interview. Both Cities of the Red Night and The Place of Dead Roads share extraordinary themes of psychic depth and explosive narrative accumulation. They also are picaresque tales in a narrative tradition that dates to antiquity. But Burroughs expands the geography to include inner, and outer, space. His ritual quests through language, sex, and graphic violence expose the humane condition of his heart. He is a visionary romantic, despite the calculated coldness of his writing.
Unlike Burroughs' assault on social values, Aurelie Sheehan's recently reprinted (and carefully titled) collection, Jack Kerouac Is Pregnant, gathers 15 stories that focus primarily on relationships of young women to contemporary urban environments. They address youth, family, love affairs, pregnancy, and relations between the sexes. The title story has little to do with Jack Kerouac. Instead, it's about a young woman coming to terms with her pregnancy and the increased awareness of her confining situation. Subtitles to the story ironically spell out a kind of instruction manual of self-help: "How to Be a Passenger on a Motorcycle," "How to Be a Future Wife," and "How Not to Be a Pansy."
The book's self-conscious prose, however, with calculated narrative disruptions of anxious significance, couldn't be further from the concerns of Kerouac or Burroughs. Not that this book should be compared to those others, either for criticism or comradeship, but its title begs some consideration in relation to the Beat oeuvre it invokes. Instead of spontaneity, vernacular accuracy, and narrative quests, Sheehan's prose moves from repressed circumstances to self-conscious liberation. It functions on a different scale, too, turning inward and reflective rather than extroverted with robust masculine attentions. Hers is a woman's perspective, of course, and formally resists Beat prose models. As a critical gesture in that regard, her prose does its job.
"Ignore the baby mouse your cat brought into the bedroom," one character admonishes herself. "Read the advertisement for the perfume you are going to wear. Discuss it with your mother. Wear the dress you found on the side of the road during a light summer shower. Order something with herbs. Smile. Order a drink that reminds you of the lover. Look at your date's lips while he is speaking: wonder."
Sheehan, who teaches writing at the University of Arizona, has written a provocative first book, wielding her knowledge with a careful deployment of craft. Her formal innovations are intrinsic to each story, and the book's title suggests explorations of considerable depth. She uses the cultural capital centered on Kerouac's name, however, to extend her own concerns, anchored meanwhile to a literary movement of some magnitude. This is not entirely her fault. There's a large body of contemporary literature that engages social issues of identity and gender by recycling and re-evaluating previous literary or historical models. While it's necessary to critique that cultural inheritance, it's important, too, to seek and retain what's useful in it. For the Beats, emotional knowledge extended from perceptive acts of great clarity and sincerity, not a sublimated, self-conscious prose style.
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