RealityStudio.org

There's an interesting thread on Michael Moorcock's site (with comments by Moorcock) about William Burroughs' sci-fi influences, including his friendship with Arthur C. Clarke:

http://www.multiverse.org/fora/showthread.php?t=3479



I'd like to read more about the Clarke-Burroughs interactions. Incidentally, the shared dislike to rock music probably comes as a shock to those who associate WSB's name with various rock music spinoffs.

dont open that can of black meat again! ahem. for the LAST time WSB was a great name to drop with Rock WRITERS. most musicians are too ephemeral to really dig the Bill (sorry Robert, dont mean you...). see the Steely Dan thread, blah blah.
i always felt that they felt it would transfer some of his "aura", where none of them are fit to lick his undersoles. in fact when i hear the talking asshole bit, im reminded of led zeppelin in particular.

Given Bill's interests, it makes sense that he would have a great conversation with any science fiction writer. Though I cant see Clarke being a fan of Burroughs' work, I'm sure he had a lot to say about Bill's theories and scientific speculations.

In another reality, Bill was able to get it together, avoid the Beats + hard drugs and eventually make a name for himself writing for Astonishing Tales and the pulp sci-fi market. His obsessions with mind control and the potential of evolution/mutations through psychedelics would put his fiction up there with Heinlen, Sturgeon and Bradbury.

Clarke and Burroughs also shared a conviction that human beings would eventually evolve into a higher form of life. The star child in Clarke's 2001 certainly brings to mind Burroughs' statements about the need to leave the body behind if we are to travel through space and time.

I always kind of assumed that Burroughs distanced himself from SF circles after he stopped being being reliant on pulp magazines for publication. I suppose it makes sense though. Clarke was sharp and they were both older guys, godfathers, if you will.

I'm not sure if Bill ever relied on pulp mags for publication. I guess he used them as a vehicle for his Cut Ups, but for the most part, he never did pay his dues writing short fiction for the small mags.

In many ways, I think he suffered as a novelist for this. In all his books, the potential's there, they could've could've been universally reknowned rather than uneven collections; incredible bursts of insight and beauty. While writing Queer, he seemed to have lacked follow-through with traditional narrative structure. Everything that came after can be seen as arguments against framing his thoughts and prose into something which could have been very popular.

This lack of structure needlessly alienates his audience. And if you put aside his WORD/VIRUS philosophy and get down to it, The Novia trilogy reads like an outline for the best sci-fi novel of the 60's. And to think all he needed to do was WRITE it.

It's also a pity he never corresponded with John Cambell Jr, editor of Analog. An eccentric who advocated Dianectics as well as esp + psionic devices, techniques and a slew of other new age technology and pseudoscience.

If Burroughs wrote straight narrative and adhered to traditional, plot and character-driven forms of storytelling, I doubt he would have made much of an impact. There were/are many authors filling that conventional niche and doing it better than he ever could.

Burroughs is remembered mostly because he broke away from traditional forms - free association/collage in Naked Lunch, the cut-ups of course, and his other experimental fiction.

To me at least, his attempts at straight narrative fall flat, i.e. the short stories in Exterminator never seem to go anywhere, and I always found Burroughs' attempt at writing plot-driven adventure stories in the Red Night trilogy to be one of his weaker efforts. He just wasn't that kind of writer.

I love the Cut-Ups and all his other work, but I cant help thinking that his prose suffered needlessly from it.

I agree with Exterminator falling flat, though what was frustrating about it was that a lot of the "chapters" read like first drafts of potentially incredible stories. Wind Die/i] with the crab people would have been amazing if he followed through and dropped the story-within-a-story gimmick.

re:Burroughs success and appeal, let the market speak for itself, what novels remain the most popular: Junky and Naked Lunch. The latter being more of a collection of short stories than a real novel. With a bit of editing and focused writing, he could've had several potentially saleable stories. [i]The Talking Asshole submitted on its own, without it being part of a Benway monologue. Maybe even a Mugwump Cycle.

Though Ghost of Chance is arguably his best standing effort in conventional prose, in that his ideas are distilled into a more readable, yet coherent form.