Sci-Fi and Fantasy Books

20 All Time Classic Sci Fi Novels - Naked Lunch: The Restored Text (Harper Perennial Modern Classics)

Reviews
 

Coruscating satire, impish humour allied with the darkest mulches of despair, unrelentingly intense poetic imagery, descriptions of truly back-of-brain sexual acts, and, of course, the mugwumps. What more could one possibly want? Excellent notes and appendices too, showing not only the miracle of how years of grinding work conspired to bring about a book of extraordinary spontaneity, but also the ripples of Naked Lunch through the literary and artistic history of the last fifty years. Don't bother perusing the menu - this is the best lunch there is.
James Argles

---

Transparent Red Pony

She asked me to write my name on her wrist but I pressed too hard and soon the ink was in her blood and in her eyes.

A little postcard town five miles from the station.

Where the razorblade slices through space a line opens up allowing a glimpse of the present location of the subject. The two sides can be peeled apart leaving an entry-point a ticket to ride or door.

These three portals coexist simultaneously on different levels yet all lead to the same room in the back of the house.

A thick purple curtain separates the front of the house from this back room. This curtain is itself actually a sine-wave-shaped map which turns two-dimensional coordinate points into thick present space by means of its sound-producing mechanical structuring.

There was no way out of this picture.

(Idiomatic relays fed her transceiver-set,

leaving us thick as thieves.) eat nine in 9 numerical display systems

There are no longer any sentences (so we):

1. chance-met Award Ceremonies
2. quarter your dead
3. Crystalline Structuring Event
4. fibrous
5. prehensile Recording layers into group,


The Gibraltar tape recorder was on and sending data through to node seventeen. Sound collapse & error. They woke up and found themselves in a graphical system.

The Tackle Box Structure
(in which they were seen to overlap at times)

Train windows flapping two clicks

A crackle and low humming mixed frequency

Training glasses on face the music turned

Tackle box sow Ming Hum frequently mixed

Train endows winning flaps to clicks then stop.



"Abdomen Approach Notebook One"
Abdomen Approach, Notebook One

(tell `em: give me a minute)

I think it's in: Abdomen Approach, Notebook One.


{SOUND}

in an aura of murmurs and projections

and these sixteen belts tightening around your waist.

when two girls cough simultaneously, from different coordinate points in the back room. Then the back room becomes the front room during which the walls imperceptibly become semi-transparent one-way mirrors.

the scene: somewhere in The Disassociational Matrix.

enter Felix Baxter Burton (in his febrile incandescence)

Via the seven retrograde memory points marked into his wrist,

Suddenly a gun is fired,
Creating an entry-point which reveals threescore memory holes,
And yet the whole somehow functions.

One lays down an event like a damp curtain and inside the folds tiny landscapes unfurl. Zooming in yet further we are able to peek through the bedroom window of a teenage girl who is hiding under the covers with TV reruns and magazines. She is vaguely aware of being watched, which excites her. She reaches under the covers

but all of a sudden the transmitter starts malfunctioning and the image begins to flicker erratically, in time with the motions of her hand and fingers which are already too far inside to be picked up by the receiver. Then, suddenly just a dial-tone...

They tended to overlap, but proper editing later made it all seem to make sense.

The images are rhythmically & repetitively redrawn and form points of temporary focus when all of a sudden (in a movement trail) associational patterns flow like reversed images to produce a page in the history of our species written in blood and viewable only through a rendering device such as a web browser an epic poem or a song.
Michael Beijer

---

I read Burroughs first when I was in my teens. The homosexuality was just like reading about the sex-life of Martians or something; his whole world was so bizarre that it just seemed like part of his freak show - I thought he was just trying to be as disgusting as possible. But that's not the point about Burroughs - if you can get hold of any recordings of Burroughs reading from the Naked Lunch, or the Soft Machine, the Ticket that Exploded, or Nova Express, you'll 'get it' more - it's a sort of beat poetry, stunningly inventive, imaginative and hilarious, if patchy. A lot of fuss is made about his 'cut up technique', which is just the equivalent of scrap iron or turds in art galleries - pretentious drivel. But actually, it throws up some interesting effects when he uses it on his own stuff. You'd have to read the first four novels in a row to appreciate that - Don't worry, he only uses it here and there. I don't think he uses cut-up in this one though, which makes it an easier read than the others.
The Naked Lunch would be enough to be going on with for most people, though. David Lynch's film is great, and as good a stab at it as you could get, but it's really only a few selected scenes and themes from all his books and his life - great but not the book.

Don't expect a straightforward story, but there are recurring themes and threads, that sort of link it all together. It was apparently written in Tangier, in installments which he then posted to Allan Ginsberg, as 'reports from Interzone', just for his own amusement. Ginsberg persuaded him to publish it all. That was the story a while back. I daresay this new edition will have some new insight on all that.
As to the substance: consider when the Naked Lunch was written, and what he was writing about, and what others were writing about at the time. It's not the homosexuality that's the point, or even remarkable. While everyone else was writing about the 'cold war', he was writing about the expansion of the drug-trade, and the symbiotic and parasitic expansion of law enforcement to parallel it, using heroin as a metaphor for all sorts of parasitic political and economic forces that insinuate themselves into the human world and deliberately create a dependence, and behind them the alien, child-sacrificing Mugwumps, and the Heavy Metal Kids, alien lizards from a high density world, with all their scams and projects, like 'the Oven Gang' (the nazis). Burroughs is sometimes credited with introducing 'heavy metal' into the vocabulary, but encountered other stories about that.
I haven't read it for a while so I can only give some hints off the top of my head, but I disagree with those who say Burroughs is someone who you read when young and never revisit - he gets better with age. The Naked Lunch is a remarkable work, and a remarkable prophecy which is getting truer by the day, unfortunately - 'the moment when everyone sees what's on the end of every fork'! The most inspired and bizarred science fiction ever!
Jm Leven

---

This is a book for sad people who like to think they're cool and clever - like most of the `beat' texts. It plays with being difficult and wallows in degradation for the sake of it.

Having read enough difficult books to be able to tell the difference between honest and necessary difficulty on the one hand and self-indulgent confusion on the other, I can confidently put The Naked Lunch in the second category.

As far as the subject matter is concerned, I've seen enough to be fairly unshockable, and I can look at it calmly enough to recognise self-indulgent wallowing when I see it.

If you really want to read something difficult for the sake of it, you're better reading a book that's also rewarding and meaningful, like Finnegans Wake. James Joyce has vistas of significance and depths of humanity that Burroughs can't hold a candle to.

I first became aware of Burroughs a long time ago, in my teens, but never got round to reading him. In the meantime I've read a lot of books in the course of getting a master's degree in literature. Some are worthwhile. Others aren't. Some are merely hyped-up trash. This is one of the latter.
Andrew

---

OK, it's black, bleak, about control and the "algebra of need" ... and startlingly funny!
Nicholas Lake

---