Conversations with William S. Burroughs

Allen Hibbard (editor)
Conversations with William S. Burroughs (1999)
Given that Burroughs oeuvre can often prove somewhat repetitive, it's probably testament to the man's ability that new details remain to be discovered even when you've read pretty much everything. I haven't read everything but I've read the major novels and a significant quota of those lesser known, with this being my spooky twenty-third Burroughs title. As may be obvious, it's a collection of interviews spanning his career of which only the one first seen in Re/Search is familiar to me; and taking in subjects adjacent to the writing, whatever Bill felt like talking about at the time, it feels like a more thorough overview of his work than, for example, John Calder's William Burroughs Reader, not least in its reiteration of themes which we may or may not have noticed in individual novels - notably that Burroughs' life work can be distilled to a desire to communicate that which we already know, but don't realise we already know.

Also, this collection roughly maps out the shape of Burroughs' intellectual progress over the years, particularly as he dismisses and moves beyond earlier fixations. This is in particular a relief as the first third of the page count is dull as fuck, adding nothing new whilst endlessly retreading everything we've already read in Naked Lunch and others in response to the enquiries of overly earnest young men with long hair and beards, the nadir of which has Burroughs concluding that the revolution will not only be won, but will probably be won by the Rolling Stones.

It gets a lot more interesting once we're past the sixties and Bill's habit of predicting massive cultural shifts which never came to pass, which also means we have to talk about telepathy, mind control and the like, but at least he has his gun pointed in the right direction. By the time we come to the last page, the journey has proven mostly fascinating as our boy pontificates on his life, influences, favourite painters and writers, and other subjects which fed into the novels without any more overt manifestation therein. I'm still not sure he was the most important writer of the twentieth century - let alone that such an accolade means anything - but he was certainly one of the most interesting.

The Witling

Vernor Vinge The Witling (1976)
I'm not quite sure how this one came to leap from the shelf and into my shopping trolley. I vaguely recall finding Vinge's A Fire Upon the Deep and The Peace War underwhelming beyond their admittedly sparky ideas, and nothing on the cover of this one promises anything likely to change my mind; and yet I picked it up, for some reason, and it's fucking great, and so much so as to leave me wondering why the other two failed to get me going.

Anyway, this being my third Vinge, I think I've spotted the theme, specifically that he very much enjoys fucking around with the laws of physics as they apply to space and how one moves around therein. Here it's a pseudo-mediaeval alien civilisation which has evolved an ability to instantaneously teleport from place to place. The rhythm of the story and the cadence of its characters borders on Tolkien, albeit less cloying, or at least something by Ursula LeGuin, and this contrasts very well with how their society is seen through the eyes of technologically advanced human visitors - with the story riding along on the fact of said visitors having found themselves stranded on this strange world.

The Witling isn't anything mind-expanding, but it does that which it does exceptionally well and makes for a thoroughly breezy read which does much to remind the reader what first drew him* to the science-fiction novel.

*: I've made this hypothetical person masculine because I'm referring directly to myself, and also because girls are more likely to read romance novels or the latest issue of Woman's Hat Monthly than anything by Vernor Vinge.