I’m uncertain how to review Nova Express. I didn’t exactly like it, nor did I understand all of it. But I found it fascinating (very fascinating: I read it once in about three hours, then immediately turned around and read it again.)

Nova Express is the third novel in Burroughs’ Nova Trilogy, following The Soft Machine and The Ticket That Exploded (neither of which I’ve read, though I don’t think it makes any difference). So far as the story is “about” anything, it’s about the agents of the Nova Police as they attempt to bring the Nova Mob (parasitic, non-corporeal aliens causing havoc on Earth) to justice. Much of the book was composed using the “cut-up” technique that Burroughs pioneered, and for that reason, much of the novel is only obliquely comprehensible. The effect of the prose is difficult to describe; the Harper’s review quoted on the back cover says the reader “gets high” off it, which I suppose is about right.

Occasionally, a passage shines through with vivid clarity, these passages ranging from chilling (the city of Minraud), to bleakly bizarre (the Biological Court), to gruesome (the sinking of the S.S. America), to just plain sickening (Operation Sense Withdrawal and all that follows). Here’s a sample to give you a taste of the strange prose and the stranger themes:

“What does virus do whenever it can dissolve a hole and find traction?–It starts eating–And what does it do with what it eats?–It makes exact copies of itself that start eating to make more copies that start eating and so forth to the virus power the fear hate virus slowly replaces the host with virus copies–Program empty body–A vast tapeworm of bring down word and image moving through your mind screen always at the same speed on a slow hydraulic-spine axis like the cylinder gimmick in the adding machine–How do you make someone feel stupid?–You present to him all the times he talked and acted and felt stupid again and again any number of times fed into the combo of the soft calculating machine geared to find more images of stupidity disgust propitiation grief apathy death–”

Horrifying, isn’t it? I want more… ( )

I finally plowed my way through this one, and the best I can do is compare it to The Soft Machine -- which, on its own, is a pretty daunting task.

While this text does stick to the maddening "cut-up" and "fold-in" methods of Burroughs's outlandishly avant garde style, there's far more coherence here, as if he realized that a book probably should have SOME semblance of plot after all.

There are moments of clarity that are offset by moments of frustration, and by the end of the work, there is far more confusion than understanding. Thankfully, the explicit sexual and scatological content only shows up in the last pages.

In sum, it's a text that shows an experimental author executing his technique with greater precision, but it's still Burroughs. So it's still really bizarre. And, for most, probably not worth the time to slog through these brief 179 pages.

Part science fiction dystopia, part terrifying inner journey through a damaged mind, part literary experiment (sentences typed onto strips and then cut up and rearranged), reading this book was a great project when I felt I could find the meaning of the world by working hard enough at reading. ( )

Perhaps my favorite from the man that in a sense describes a ten course banquet by the feces of its participants. ( )

Just like an acid trip, Millions of ideas only 60% understandable ( )