It’s true that it is very different. It sure starts off with a bang. Unfortunately, much of this book is in my opinion inferior to the material in the other versions of The Soft Machine. I don’t mean that I always prefer the clearer narrative prose to the more challenging cut-up “poetic” content of the original edition. I mean that this cut-up material is inferior in comparison to the cut-up material in the other SL editions and the other books in the trilogy. We know that WSB was obsessive with the cut-up results beyond just cutting up and piecing together. He manipulated the resulting prose well beyond the cut-up itself. I feel like much of this material is awkward, rough, and asking for the revisit it later gave it. At times this reads like a parody of WSB’s prose, or another author trying their hand at prose in imitation of Naked Lunch, which in a way is exactly what this is. WSB after NL was completed and published was a very different man with very different interests. A lot of material was left over from NL and this book mined this material but through the filter of the cut-up method. I do think the ideas in the book, the war between the sexes, the color magic, the Novia Conspiracy, are much more interesting then the continuation of the addiction theme from NL that the later editions of Soft Machine begin with. I remember when I first read Soft Machine (Grove edition) I read the first line about “working the hole” with the Sailor and feeling immediately tired, as in “Again?” like it was a retread of the NL junkie world and not the space fantasy I was anticipating. So really there’s much I’d have kept from this first edition but much I would have revised, thrown out, and added from the later editions, which makes any notion of a “restored text” a bit impossible and definitely intrusive. A true version of The Soft Machine that is the culmination of all three editions doesn’t exist in this world.

I first read the Cut-Up Trilogy when I was 16 or 17. I was dazzled by it then, but much less so now. So maybe I’m just not as receptive. I do think that Burroughs’ lack of exposure to French experimental literature as well as visual art of his day and of 100 years before elevated the importance of the cut-up method in his mind that it didn’t necessarily deserve. I don’t think he ever read his contemporary Maurice Roche (compare the method in MR’s “Compact” to WSB’s comparatively minor cut-up method). I don’t think he was familiar much with weirdos like Roussel except at a distance, or even giants like Mallarme or Alfred Jarry. And WSB really didn’t know very much at all about art history. Here is a guy who kissed the hand of Marcel Duchamp once at a party but I’ve never read anything from WSB mentioning a familiarity with his work. What I mean is something like the cut-up method would have been part of a basic and well-worn vocabulary for a French writer or artist by the time WSB came upon it living in France and producing works like Minutes To Go, The Exterminator and then this “sequel” to NL. I don’t mean to sound so disparaging. Many results of the cut-up are dazzling. Much of it, though, in my mind doesn’t serve his whole Nova mythology. I feel like the cut-ups work much better usually in shorter format. The text included on this website “Where Flesh Circulates” would be an exceptionally beautiful example. WSB wasn’t striving for beauty, but a slow but ruthless dismantling of the linear mind, etc. etc. I feel like he did that better in NL without the cut-ups. NL is also a very, very funny book and for the most part the Cut-Up Trilogy for me is not. He revisited old jokes verbatim in a way that diminished the original surprise of hearing the joke the first time. The freshness of his routines developed in his letters that reached their fruition in Naked Lunch he never matched afterwards. The long stretches of “Word Falling-Photo Falling” cut-up material is a unique reading experience and one well worth having, but as a reader I value these experiments more for how they strengthened him as a writer much later. There are sentences he wrote in his Red Night trilogy that have an intensity, especially a conjuring power, he would not have gained without his having gone so deeply into the cut-ups.

All that said, this book isn’t any more difficult than the rest of the Cut-Up Trilogy no matter what editions have been published, and there is no reason that this one shouldn’t be reprinted.

https://realitystudio.org/bibliographic-bunker/operation-total-exposure/

You are right to say “definitive” is a slippery term in Burroughs’ bibliography.