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Gysin (on the “third mind,” a concept and practice of collaboration in itself). The results—in writing, film, tape, photography and collage—were weapons in a war and as much by-products of a process as artistic objects in themselves.

      The last decade has begun to catch up with Burroughs, and has seen not only a mass of new scholarly and critical work but the opening up of the enormous archive at the Berg Collection of the New York Public Library, the curating of major artwork exhibitions around the world, the publication of catalogs, the release of films, tapes, letters, and the online digitization of some of the hundreds of texts he contributed to the little magazines of the 1960s mimeograph revolution. The result has been a complete transformation in the Burroughs oeuvre, putting center-stage his cut-up work in media beyond the book form. In 2004 it was still possible to argue that the easy commercial availability of The Soft Machine, The Ticket That Exploded, and Nova Express, as well as the critical attention paid to them, had misrepresented the cut-up project and perpetuated Burroughs’ reductive reception as a novelist: as marketed books, the Cut-Up Trilogy might even be seen as an extraordinary exception to the cut-up project, I myself argued.13 With so much more of the larger project available, now is the time to make the counter­argument, and for a new generation to discover the trilogy and to see where it always belonged: not separate from but integrally connected to the full range of Burroughs’ unique experiments with word and image.

      This is the context for revising the three texts by drawing on archival resources of breathtaking richness, to establish for the first time their manuscript and publishing histories. It is also time to rethink such terms as cut-up novel and cut-up trilogy. New readers need new scholarship, the state of which has barely advanced since the 1980s, when the first serious but materially flawed academic studies appeared. Drawing on several thousand pages of archival ­materials—from first drafts and variant typescripts to final long galleys—the notes in this edition aim to reveal the unrecognized complexity of Nova Express: they are organized section-by-section because every part has its own untold backstory. The notes therefore aim to make possible new lines of research and reading, and in what follows I offer one such reading, focused on the story that lies behind the book’s title. But first, in order to piece together the writing of Nova Express we have to unpick the received wisdom about it, starting from the apparent truism that it was the third novel of the Cut-Up Trilogy.

      “THE SOFT TICKET”

      The Soft Machine, The Ticket That Exploded, and Nova Express have been grouped together for fifty years. This is partly because they are so unlike anything else and partly because the identity of each book is blurred by Burroughs’ recycling of material across and between them. Running the books together, however, and taking as read the term “Cut-Up Trilogy” (or its thematic alternative, “The Nova Trilogy”), has separated them from their larger context—the many related short texts, photo-collages, scrapbooks, films and tapes that Burroughs made in parallel—and downplayed the important differences between the books (including the almost total lack of sexual material in Nova Express). To some, confusion about the trilogy seems not so much inevitable as intentional, on the basis that the cut-up project attacked stable identities and linear chronology.

      A certain confusion was indeed inherent in the method, since cutting up texts on the scale of Burroughs’ project—involving literally thousands of pages of source material, many of which were cut, retyped and cut over and over again—was a process incompatible with achieving a satisfactorily finished product, a definitive text. Burroughs didn’t think that Nova Express was “in any sense a wholly successful book,” but he said the same of The Soft Machine and The Ticket That Exploded, and for the same reasons.14 The cut-up method worked well with short texts for little mimeo magazines because the texts were immediate, rough and ephemeral, like the publications themselves: was Burroughs “satisfied” with “Where Flesh Circulates” in Floating Bear No. 24 (1962)? The question wasn’t relevant. In contrast, the commercially published novel had a fixed form that took time to produce and would last forever. To call Nova Express a “cut-up novel” is both inaccurate (it wasn’t a novel that was then cut up), and imprecise (how much of it is “cut-up” and how much a “novel”?), but Burroughs himself couldn’t avoid calling the book a “novel.” It was a contradiction in terms, which is one reason he ended up producing revised editions, so that over a seven-year period the “trilogy” materialized itself as no fewer than six different books: three versions of The Soft Machine (1961, 1966, 1968); two of The Ticket That Exploded (1962, 1967), and one of Nova Express (1964). And as we’ll see, that “one” edition of Nova Express gives an entirely misleading impression of simplicity.

      In the 1966 edition of The Soft Machine, Burroughs made a joke out of the resulting confusion (and of his books’ lack of commercial success), referring to being paid for the film rights of “a novel I hadn’t written called The Soft Ticket” and to selling “the Danish rights on my novel Expense Account.” But it’s not so funny for anyone genuinely interested in the trilogy and how its parts relate one to another. What is “the trilogy” when the editions published in the 1960s make possible no fewer than six different permutations and when there’s a trilogy alone of Soft Machines?

      Ironically, “the trilogy” has by default always maintained a single order: first The Soft Machine, then The Ticket That Exploded, finally Nova Express. The sequence keeps faith with the chronology of the first publications of each title: The Soft Machine in 1961 (by Olympia Press in Paris); The Ticket That Exploded in 1962 (again, Olympia in Paris); and Nova Express in 1964 (by Grove Press in New York). The Olympia editions were never published in the United States and went out of print, however, and the available versions are not only different books but have an entirely different chronological order: in Grove editions, the last title, Nova Express, was the earliest edition (dating from 1964), while the revised middle title, The Ticket That Exploded, became the last edition (published in 1967), and the revised first title, The Soft Machine, became the middle volume (published in 1966). Confused? Sketching the development of Burroughs’ trilogy over time and relating the books to his work in other media, critics have invariably muddled up the editions and got the history back-to-front. Far from being contra-indicated, an historical approach is long overdue.

      The books’ reception in the United States and Europe were mirror opposites of each other, since American readers only started the trilogy in 1964 with Nova Express, by which time The Soft Machine and The Ticket That Exploded had been out in Europe for two years. But this is to simplify, since British readers also had a cut-up trilogy-in-one, in the shape of Dead Fingers Talk (1963), which was made from revised selections of Naked Lunch, The Soft Machine, and The Ticket. In 1968 John Calder also brought out the much-revised British edition of The Soft Machine, so that the trilogy’s first title had now become its final text, and then to cap it all, in 1980 Grove unwisely brought out in one volume a “trilogy” comprising The Soft Machine, Nova Express, and The Wild Boys.

      In light of this confusion’s masterpiece, it’s less surprising that the history of Nova Express, the one “unrevised” edition, turns out to be more complicated than assumed. Constructing the history of its composition clarifies its position within Burroughs’ oeuvre, but the initial clues to its status as part of a trilogy are given in the opening pages of the text itself.

      One way that Nova Express distinguishes itself from the rest of the trilogy is by naming other books by Burroughs, and in its second section it refers to Naked Lunch and The Soft Machine twice—in surprising terms: “The purpose of my writing is to expose and arrest Nova Criminals. In Naked Lunch, The Soft Machine and Nova Express I show who they are.” Burroughs identifies Nova Express as the third of three books, but this is a trilogy beginning with Naked Lunch and excluding The Ticket—an omission that turns out to be crucial for understanding the “trilogy.”15

      Contrary to the history of publication—in which Nova Express appeared in November 1964, almost two years after The Ticket—Burroughs had in fact written almost all of Nova Express, including this passage, months before he even began The Ticket. Had it not been for delays at Grove Press and the speed with which Burroughs wrote

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