The Soft Machine
Condition: SECONDHAND
This is a secondhand book. The jacket image is a photograph of the exact copy we have in stock. This image shows the condition of this book. Further condition remarks are below.
Edition: Revised first ed.
Condition remarks:
Book: Good
Jacket: Chipped and worn with some minor damage
Pages: Good
Markings: Previous owner,Ex-library with usual markings
A hallucinatory journey through fractured time, colonized bodies, and the machinery of control, The Soft Machine is William Burroughs' visceral assault on language itself, following a cast of morphine-addled, shape-shifting figures across a nightmarish landscape where past, present, and future collapse into one another. The novel, the first in Burroughs' Nova Trilogy, chronicles a war waged not with weapons but with words, images, and biological programming — a world where flesh is software and addiction is the ultimate instrument of subjugation. Burroughs constructs his narrative using his infamous cut-up technique, pioneered alongside artist Brion Gysin, slicing and reassembling text to mirror the disorientation of a mind under siege. The result is a work of radical, confrontational modernism that argues language is a virus — a parasitic control system imposed on human consciousness. Seminal, transgressive, and deeply unsettling, The Soft Machine remains a cornerstone of the Beat Generation's literary legacy, challenging every reader to question the very medium through which they receive the story — will you still trust the words on the page?
Author: William Burroughs
Format: Hardback
Published: 1968, Calder and Boyars
Genre: Modern fiction
Edition: Revised first ed.
Condition remarks:
Book: Good
Jacket: Chipped and worn with some minor damage
Pages: Good
Markings: Previous owner,Ex-library with usual markings
A hallucinatory journey through fractured time, colonized bodies, and the machinery of control, The Soft Machine is William Burroughs' visceral assault on language itself, following a cast of morphine-addled, shape-shifting figures across a nightmarish landscape where past, present, and future collapse into one another. The novel, the first in Burroughs' Nova Trilogy, chronicles a war waged not with weapons but with words, images, and biological programming — a world where flesh is software and addiction is the ultimate instrument of subjugation. Burroughs constructs his narrative using his infamous cut-up technique, pioneered alongside artist Brion Gysin, slicing and reassembling text to mirror the disorientation of a mind under siege. The result is a work of radical, confrontational modernism that argues language is a virus — a parasitic control system imposed on human consciousness. Seminal, transgressive, and deeply unsettling, The Soft Machine remains a cornerstone of the Beat Generation's literary legacy, challenging every reader to question the very medium through which they receive the story — will you still trust the words on the page?