The Soft Machine
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- For the rock band named after this book, see Soft Machine
The Soft Machine is the title of a novel by William S. Burroughs, first published in 1961 and was Burroughs' first novel after the grandbreaking publication of Naked Lunch.
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. As such it deals a lot with transpersonal experiences and specifically drug abuse, which Burroughs considers an invasion of the body by an alien force.
The book is written in a style close to that of Naked Lunch and as such is quite fragmentary and hard to pin down. A few common themes will however boil up, some of which it has in common with the previous book. Themes and people from Naked Lunch are present in the first chapters, and themes and people from Nova Express are present in the latter chapters of the book, so The Soft Machine could be said to "fade in" from The Naked Lunch and "fade out" into Nova Express. This effect is probably the intent of the author. In the middle of the book is the main plot (described below) which does not refer to either The Naked Lunch or Nova Express.
After the main material follows 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
The main plot (which is intermingled with other plots) portrays a secret agent (presumably the same Bill Lee who appeared in Naked Lunch) who has the ability to change bodies or metamorphosize his own body using "U.T." (undifferentiated tissue). As such an agent he makes a time travel and takes on a gang of Maya priests who use the Maya calendar to control the minds of slave labourers 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 cause the downfall of their regime. The techniques used for changing bodies involves several chemical, biological and sexual magic-like practices and many things can go wrong.de:Soft Machine fr:Soft Machine it:Soft Machine