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Nova Express is the third novel in William Burroughs's Nova Triolgy. This series treats language in an experiemental fashion, using the cut-up technique, and includes The Soft Machine, The Ticket That Exploded, and Nova Express.

Author background
William Burroughs was born on February 5, 1914 to a wealthy family in St. Louis, Missouri. As a boy, Burroughs attended the John Burroughs School where he printed his first work, "Personal Magnetism," in 1929. After graduating from primary school, Burroughs attended Harvard University. While attending Harvard, he frequently visited New York City and was introduced to gay society. Burroughs graduated from Harvard in 1936.

Shortly after graduating, Burroughs moved to New York. Through the drug scene, Burroughs became in touch with fellow Beat Writers Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac, who introduced him to his future wife Joan Vollmer. After a run in with police over drug charges, Joan and William fled to Mexico to avoid arrest. While living there, Vollmer and Burroughs attended a party in which Burroughs accidently shot and killed Vollmer. Three decades later, Burroughs wrote, "I am forced to the appalling conclusion that I would never have become a writer but for Joan's death...I live with the constant threat of possession, and a constant need to escape from possession, from Control."

Burroughs began publishing several novels which were met with great criticism over obscene content, most notably Naked Lunch. Several years after Naked Lunch was published, Burroughs published Nova Express an inclusion of the Nova Trilogy series. These novels are famous for Burroughs’ prominent use of the cut-up technique.

Burroughs moved back to the United States in 1974 and remained there for the rest of his life. Burroughs moved around the United States, teaching in New York City and at Naropa University in Boulder, CO. Burroughs moved to Lawrence, Kansas in 1981 and died there on August 2, 1997 due to a heart attack.

Influences
Nova Express was internally influenced by Burroughs’s previous works. Burroughs considered Nova Express a “sequel” or “mathematical” continuation of his earlier work, Naked Lunch. He responded to his own work in Nova Express, not in criticism, but as an “extension.” This work was also influenced by the cup-up method that Burroughs and Gysin created. The style is heavily motivated by “visual collage” and “filmic montage.”

Style of the trilogy
The Nova Trilogy is composed of three novels—The Soft Machine (1961, revised 1966), The Ticket That Exploded (1962, revised 1967) and Nova Express (1964)—and is viewed by critics as being one of William S. Burroughs’s most radical experimentations with narrative form. All three novels are crafted using the cut-up method, a style in which existing texts are cut into various pieces and put back together in random order. Burroughs developed the cut-up method in collaboration with painter and novelist Brion Gysin and computer programmer Ian Sommerville. The technique was combined with images of Gysin’s painting and sounds from Somerville’s tape recorders.

Due to the cut-up method’s random approach to text, Burroughs repeatedly defended his writing style against critics, explaining that the cut-up method created possibilities for mixing text written by himself and other writers and helped deemphasize the traditional role of text. As a result, the novels that make up the Nova Trilogy are even more sporadic in plot and structure than Burroughs’ previous work, Naked Lunch. Burroughs spoke of the Nova Trilogy as being a “sequel,” and “mathematical extension” to the themes and techniques of Naked Lunch. The Soft Machine is the first book within the Nova Trilogy, and is a compilation of descriptive and interchangeable scenes, which delve further into the sexual and biological issues previously explored in Naked Lunch. Mac Tonnies, a book review critic, best descibed the main themes within "The Soft Machine" as including "time travel, media bombardment, and out-of-body travel"

In The Ticket that Exploded, Burroughs deals with tape recorders, an allegory Burroughs links to the "destruction of control systems, cybernetic pleasure farms, and homosexual erotic exploitations on the planet Venus". Like the other volumes in the Nova Trilogy, Ticket That Exploded has to be read in order to understand the chaos that ensues within its pages. Burroughs bypasses linear structure, pattern, and narrative within "The Ticket that Exploded (i.e. a clear beginning, middle, and end), aiming straight for the heart by de-constructing traditional organization and composition of a novel.

Third in Burroughs trilogy is Nova Express, which follows Inspector Lee as he tracks down members of the Nova Mob. Nova Express has many examples of the cut-up technique and is hard to follow at times. It is considered by critics as being one of the best books within the trilogy due to its graphic descriptions and fragmented cyber world.

Criticism
While Naked Lunch was an initial shock to the literary community, Nova Express was considered the end of Burroughs’s stylistic experiment and of the Nova Trilogy. Nova Express received praise as a final installment of the trilogy, and although it was treated as its own book, it was often compared to the other books in the trilogy and Naked Lunch. Eric Mottram stated that although “Burroughs’s repetitive narcotic and homoerotic fantasies become tedious in sections of his third novel,…it is from these obsessions that his most powerful work develops”. Some of the extra material from the stock Burroughs used in Naked Lunch and the Nova Trilogy ended up in Cobblestone Gardens and Exterminator!

Summary and analysis
Nova Express, the third novel in The Nova Trilogy, is a social commentary on human and machine control of life. The Nova Criminals—Sammy the Butcher, Izzy the Push, The Subliminal Kid, and others—are viruses, “defined as the three-dimensional coordinate point of a controller” “which invade the human body and in the process produce language”. These Nova Criminals represent society, culture, and government, and have taken control. Inspector Lee and the rest of the Nova Police are left fighting for the rest of humanity in the power struggle. “The Nova Police can be compared to apomorphine, a regulating instance that need not continue and has no intention of continuing after its work is done”. The police force is focused on “first-order addictions of junkies, homosexuals, dissidents, and criminals; if these criminals vanish, the police must create more in order to justify their own survival”. The Nova Police depend upon the Nova Criminals for existence; if the Nova Criminals cease to exist, so do the Nova Police. “They act like apomorphine, the nonaddictive cure for morphine addiction that Burroughs used and then promoted for many years”.

Burroughs not only uses the Nova Police as a function for catching the Nova Criminals, he also adds satire about his own life and addictions. Control is the main theme of Nova Express, and Burroughs attempts to use language to break down the walls of culture, the biggest control machine. Burroughs uses inspector Lee to express his own thoughts about the world. "The purpose of my writing is to expose and arrest Nova Criminals. In Naked Lunch, Soft Machine and Nova Express I show who they are and what they are doing and what they will do if they are not arrested. Minutes to go[. . . . ]With your help we can occupy the Reality Studio and retake their universe of Fear Death and Monopoly—(Signed) INSPECTOR J. LEE, NOVA POLICE.” As Burroughs battles with the self and what is human, he finds that language is the only way to maintain dominance over the “powerful instruments of control,” which are the most prevalent enemies of human society.  In the end, Burroughs strives to create a world where everything is true and everything is permitted, using the mastery of language to prove his own dominance.