The Nova Trilogy

[version]

The thing he says about The Board's 'Green Deal' and them running the planet into the ground before escaping in drag sounds like something a right winger ranting about climate change and the WEF would say nowadays.

 

[Mr. Tea]

The thing he says about The Board's 'Green Deal' and them running the planet into the ground before escaping in drag sounds like something a right winger ranting about climate change and the WEF would say nowadays.

comment pls, @mixed_biscuits

 

[version]

Listened to this the other night and just it read it today in Nova Express, love it, one of the best bits so far. Inflexible Authority.

I'd forgotten how relatively straightforward some of it is. I'm around where you are, or were, and chunks of it feel like splattered Hammett via PKD.

 

[Benny Bunter]

The Coordinate Points section is really just straightforward explication isn't it? Almost makes me want to go back to the beginning and read it all again in light of this new information.

This bit in the notes that was cut out is cool, with the text spread out over the page like a modernist poem.

 

[version]

You finished it or you flipping to the notes after each section?

 

[Benny Bunter]

Just finished the towers open fire section - it's like all out war has broken out.

I'm just sort of glancing at the notes now and then, haven't really read them properly.

 

[version]

This bit in the notes that was cut out is cool, with the text spread out over the page like a modernist poem.

That repetition of FIRE reminds me of a clip of Eminem doing a radio phone-in when LL Cool J was on, saying how him shouting DAMAGE! DAMAGE! in the middle of 'Mama Said Knock You Out' was a revelation; he didn't know you could just do something like that in a song.

 

[Benny Bunter]

It really gets across the feel of a chaos of scrambled military radio transmissions during a battle

 

[version]

The thing he says about nova criminals being detected due to their hosts picking up their tics, habits and vices is brilliant. You can look at every smoker, gambling addict and glutton and start to wonder whether something really is using and working through them.

And the junk/image analogy feels so on point in the wake of TikTok and Instagram in particular. You hear of people able to scroll through that stuff for hours, bombarded with seconds of film and hundreds of images.

Not to mention "going viral,".

 

[Benny Bunter]

Yeah it's been said a million times before about Burroughs, but it really is unbelievably prescient.

Might have got this a bit mangled, but that part where they're injecting colour tinted junk into someone so it shows up on a scan of their body, then making a copy of the scan to replicate it in other subjects/feed off it is genius.

One of those books that I'll probably want to reread straightaway

 

[version]

Might have got this a bit mangled, but that part where they're injecting colour tinted junk into someone so it shows up on a scan of their body, then making a copy of the scan to replicate it in other subjects/feed off it is genius.

The bit about viruses being mapping agents is great too. The flu virus mapping the nasal passageways and lungs and reporting back.

 

[Benny Bunter]

It's really making me feel like I need to get offline completely, quit smoking and drinking and move to the country to grow my own vegetables.

 

[version]

Corpsey, King of Vice, is evidently host to every nova criminal at once.

 

[Benny Bunter]

"Corpsey the Butcher"

"Iron Claws Corpsey"

"Corpsey the Brown Artist"

"Jack Law"

 

[version]

"Jacky Blue Note,"

 

[version]

There's a cool bit in the notes about Iron Claws existing in film.

"The technician who performed the experiments is known as Iron Claws - (Actually he has no hands as a result of a birth injury - He exists in a speed up film and was himself an experiment in film technique)"

He's often referring to fade ins/outs as though we're watching a film in general, also "The Director" suddenly appearing and ranting at everyone. That happens in some of the later books too, particularly The Place of Dead Roads.

 

[Benny Bunter]

He's often referring to fade ins/outs as though we're watching a film in general, also "The Director" suddenly appearing and ranting at everyone. That happens in some of the later books too, particularly The Place of Dead Roads.

I guess The Director is kind of similar to The Arranger in Ulysees in that respect, replacing the traditional narrator in literature as new mediums and methods were invented.

It's like how the cut-up method came from Bryon Gysin saying painting was years ahead of writing in its use of collage, and how cinema introduced new effects that various modern writers later picked up on and incorporated.

 

[Benny Bunter]

Maybe it's the tape experiments above all that Burroughs was doing around that time that really pushed him forward to another stage that we're only just catching up with.

I'm sure people more up to date and clever than me could find premonitions of AI in Burroughs too.

 

[Benny Bunter]

Or maybe AI is where it where it all ends and we're totally fucked - no more art.

 

[version]

I guess The Director is kind of similar to The Arranger in Ulysees in that respect, replacing the traditional narrator in literature as new mediums and methods were invented.

He talks about the Reality Film, the film on which everything that happens and will happen is pre-recorded. Everything being pre-recorded except the pre-recordings themselves. One of the things Kim Carsons does, or tries to do, in The Place of Dead Roads is to escape and disrupt the film.