William S. Burroughs's Cities of the Red Night Trilogy: Writing Outer Space

Abstract

In August 1962 the American novelist Mary McCarthy surprised everyone by extolling the virtues of William S. Burroughs's Naked Lunch (1959), thereby raising the public profile of both the novel and novelist. The occasion was an Edinburgh conference on writing and censorship organized by the publisher John Calder, and attended by literary luminaries such as Norman Mailer and Henry Miller. For McCarthy the virtue of Naked Lunch was its timeliness, the way it appeared “sort of speeded up like jet travel”; “it has that somewhat supersonic quality.” Addressing the conference audience, Burroughs went a step further, heralding a new epoch of space writing: I feel that a new mythology is now possible in the space age and that we can again have heroes and villains, with respect to the planet, and in closing I would say that the future of writing is in space and not in time.