The Soft Machine

This article is about the William Burroughs novel. For the rock band, see Soft Machine. For other uses, see The Soft Machine (disambiguation).

The Soft Machine

1st edition cover
Author	William S. Burroughs
Language	English
Series	Nova Trilogy
Genre	Novel
Publisher	Olympia Press
Publication date	1961
Publication place	United States
Media type	Print (Hardcover and Paperback)
ISBN	NA
Followed by	The Ticket That Exploded

The Soft Machine is a novel by William S. Burroughs, first published in 1961, two years after his groundbreaking Naked Lunch. It was originally composed using the cut-up and fold-in techniques from manuscripts belonging to The Word Hoard. It is part of The Nova Trilogy.

Title and structure

The title The Soft Machine is a name for the human body, and the main theme of the book (as explicitly written in an appendix) concerns how control mechanisms invade the body.

The book is written in a style close to that of Naked Lunch, though now using the cut-up method.

After the main material follow three appendices, the first explaining the title (as mentioned above) and two accounts of Burroughs' own drug abuse and treatment using apomorphine. Here Burroughs clearly states that he considers drug abuse a metabolic disease and writes about how he finally escaped it.

Plot summary

The main plot appears in linear prose in chapter VII, The Mayan Caper. This chapter portrays a secret agent who has the ability to change bodies or metamorphose his own body using "U.T." (undifferentiated tissue). As such an agent he makes a time travel machine and takes on a gang of Mayan priests who use the Mayan calendar to control the minds of slave laborers used for planting maize. The calendar images are written in books and placed on a magnetic tape and transmitted as sounds to control the slaves. The agent manages to infiltrate the slaves and replace the magnetic tape with a totally different message: "burn the books, kill the priests", which causes the downfall of their regime.

Characters

The characters of the Soft Machine fall into three categories:

• Characters from the previous novels Junkie, Queer and Naked Lunch: Dr Benway, Clem Snide, Sailor, Bill Gains, Kiki, and Carl Peterson.
• Characters associated with the Nova Trilogy:
  • The Nova Mob: Mr Bradly Mr Martin, Sammy the Butcher, Green Tony, Izzy the Push, Willy the Rat/Uranian Willy, agent K9?
  • The Nova Police: Inspector J. Lee
  • Alien races: The Venusians/Green Boys (Johnny Yen, Contessa di Vile), The Uranians/Blue heavy metal boys.
• Characters recycled from the work of other authors:
  • Jimmy Sheffields from the novel Fury by Henry Kuttner
  • Salt Chunk Mary from the novel You Can't Win by Jack Black
  • Danny Deaver from poem with the same title by Rudyard Kipling
  • Billy Budd and Captain Verre comes from the short-story Billy Budd by Herman Melville

Editions

The Soft Machine has been printed in no fewer than three different editions, each time revised by the author.

1. The first edition was printed by Olympia Press in Paris, in 1961, as number 88 in the Traveller Companion Series. It featured 182 pages arranged in 50 chapters of about 8 pages each. This edition was colour-coded into four different chunks, and it was fragmented. This edition is rare and the text is not widely available.
2. The second edition was printed by Grove Press in the United States, in 1966. In this edition, Burroughs removed 82 pages and inserted 82 new pages, and the remaining 100 pages were rearranged and restructured using further cut-ups. Much of the added material was linear, narrative prose, which is arguably easier to read than the disorganized first edition. Many chapters were renamed and rearranged in this edition, and the colour code from the first edition was removed.
3. The third edition was printed by John Calder in Great Britain, 1968. This time most chapter titles were intact from the second edition, but they began at more natural places in the text, whereas the second edition could place them in the middle of a sentence. The chapter 1920s War Movies was renamed The Streets of Chance. Twenty pages of new material had been added, plus about eight pages from the first edition which had been removed in the second edition. About five pages of material which was present in both the first and second edition was removed. This edition also included an "Appendix" and "Afterword".

Burroughs himself was very displeased with the first edition and this was the main reason for rewriting it so thoroughly: in 1961 he wrote to his friend Allen Ginsberg that he rewrote it extensively while he was working on Dead Fingers Talk, mostly because he was displeased with bad cut-ups and introduced linear material to replace it.

Cultural references

British progressive rock band Soft Machine took their name from the novel.

Obscenity controversy

The novel was subject to an obscenity trial in Turkey in 2011. Sel Publishing House and the novel's Turkish translator faced obscenity charges after the release the book, due to alleged "incompliance with moral norms". The trial was postponed until 2015 due to the implementation of new legislations.