Nova Express

by William S. Burroughs

Book Overview

The most ferociously political and prophetic book of Burroughs's "cut-up" trilogy, Nova Express fires the reader into a textual outer space the better to see our burning planet and the operations of... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0802133304
• ISBN13: 9780802133304
• Release Date: January 1994
• Publisher: Grove Press
• Length: 192 Pages
• Weight: 0.52 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.5" x 5.4" x 8.3"

Customer Reviews

Remind you of something?

I don't have much to add to the other reviews, except to note that one of the techniques of the Nova Mob is to provoke conflict by playing back the worst things opposing groups have to say to each other in a positive feedback loop. I started to think about this when tracking the Clinton sex scandal and impeachment on the Web, and have had cause to think of it since....

"Give me that kimono!"-The Captain

I won't be as vivid and descriptive as an eel in hot pursuit over gravy, er, I won't be as evil and malignant as Cortez babies, er, want I....EGAD! Start over...I won't be as descriptive and detailed (there we go) on this review as on THE Wild Boys. This too is a good book, but my least favorite of my collection. It also seems to be the shortest, and less memorable. Parts of it seem to be more preachy than other releases, opening with Agent Lee talking about how the mass media is controlled by psuedo-punk poseurs addicted to controlling the brainwashed populace. From what I remember, Burroughs seems to make fun of these individuals (who have such elaborate names as Jimmy The Butcher, Jackie Blue Note, etc.) who are portrayed as racist punks fooling everyone with actually being the enemy of true revolutionaries. The plans they hatch up to keep the world controlled are amusing. Aside from this most coherent of writing, the rest is pure Burroughs insanity...classics include the section "Twilight's Last Gleeming", in which a ship is going down and all hell is breaking loose (the immortal line quoted above is said by the drag-wearing captain of that ship). This may come as a shock, but some of the sections actuall bored me...mainly the more scientific information packed parts like the relationship between parasites and hosts, other easily forgettable things. But look past this, and Burroughs knows what he's talking about. As before, there are some downright beauties and truths around...this may have been from one of the other books since they all seem to flow together as a whole, but I remember a story about a house shifting over a dsert plain and the tenants trying to socialize with lonely lemurs hanging in a tree. There's a great peice of poetry existing right around there. about angry warriors waitng around with their arrows loking for someone to shoot. It just proves that WSB would've been good at straitforward poetry, possibly better than Allen Ginsburg. He actually tried it with Tom Waits on The Black Rider album, remind myself I gotta get that. Wancha all stripped down, all stripped down....wrong album. Point blank, this book is just as worthy/signifigant/brown propeller on a fasion moon as any of his others. Dig? Flat, baby. Flatfooted and pure goulash on my headset tonight. Burroughs, my man...you know it...you...Fadeout in classic form.

thirty-six years old and still ahead of its time

Oh, this book is superb; thrilling. Burroughs' critique of media/information culture has never been more relevant (he even predicts, in 1964, the emergence of something that sounds very much like the Web - "more and more images in less space pounded down under the sex acts and torture ever took place anywhere"). Great chunks of the book function practically as a Machiavellian instruction manual on how those in power might use a stream of words and images to generate fear, passivity, and conflict in a human population. Some of Burroughs' incisiveness may derive from his usage of the famous cut-up and fold-in techniques (using passages plagiarized / "sampled" from other texts, including psychology journals, newspapers, pulp science fiction and true crime texts, and literary sources like T. S. Eliot and Rimbaud) - when he uses these, he gets at a radical (if illogical) analysis of the source texts. The illogical / nonlinear structure that results might throw some, but to my mind, this fits in perfectly with the book's overall critique - if you believe that certain forms of language (and thought) are politically corrupted, as Burroughs does, then the answer may be to compose a text that exists outside of those structures. The result feels vital and exciting - it is practically a new way of thinking on the page - and Burroughs' ideas on how to resist and defeat "the machine" and the nova process are similarly thought-provoking and unexpected (they bring to light a spiritual (monastic) side of Burroughs that I hadn't been previously familiar with).

the one with the silencer in his hand talks to you

Yes and he means business. This sequel to the Soft Machine continues to aim at shooting holes in the phoney fabrications of our indoctrinated minds. Before pulling the trigger it chats away with us at random like the friendly policeman, but his sentences don't make sense in the normal way, they're like shreds of human tissue that fall on us like snow: somewhere there must have been an explosion. Before our fearfully closed eyes we see flashes of the fight between the invader and the protectors. But is what is defended worth to behold? The severed phrases turn slowly and with intervals into trancelike asymmetric symphonies of mindturning poetry. An abstract message is communicated. The gun that was pointing at you slips into your hand. A terrible truth.

Naked Lunch++

Society, consciousness, language--Religion, time space--Nova Express takes us for a ride through the very roots of these imposed structures.  For a more detailed description of what this book is all about I'll simply refer you here: But be warned, this book is not a casual read, I found this book very difficult to penetrate.  One of the things I had to learn was to focus all my attention, and I mean ever scrap of mental energy, because there's no way of getting anything out of the book otherwise.  And then there's the slight matter of exterminating self imposed rational constraints.  But once I did this Nova Express was like stepping through Blake's doors of perception.