Evadare Volney's Blog - Posts Tagged "beat-generation"

Turing & Burroughs: A Beatnik SF Novel by Rudy Rucker

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


This one has really stuck with me days later. I was sucked right in by the audacious premise: Alan Turing escapes an assassination attempt and uses his weird bioengineering experiments to fake his death, copy his dead lover's face and flee to Tangier, where he meets William S Burroughs and develops a prickly romance with him and with a cast of bohemian side characters. Turing's mad science has led to the development of parasitic/symbiotic sluglike creatures called "skugs" that fuse to their hosts and grant a range of weird powers, including telepathy, self-healing, and shapeshifting. This has both pros and cons (Skug sex sounds amazing though)! Rucker has a flexible, adaptable writing style and he's even good with women characters (more than the actual Beats). The ghost of Joan Burroughs has a strong personality, and I fell a little bit in love with Susan, the avant-garde composer who has a sort of physics-magick of her own based on sound (and who is an adventurous soul who takes Turing's seduction of her husband more or less in stride as long as there's also something in it for her).

There's a LOT of scientific material in here, thoroughly integrated in narration and dialogue - both realistic and not, and a cameo by the nuclear physicist Stanislaw Ulam - and I'll be frank, most of it is way over my head. But Rucker and his characters describe it with such ecstatic glee that it becomes bop prosody in its own right: like the best Beat writing, it works as music as much as prose. And his style really sings in the sections of the book that are in the form of letters from Burroughs to Kerouac and Ginsberg - he really nails WSB's bone-dry wit and morbid frankness and inimitable gift for unconventional syntax. The love story (well really there are several) is both sweet and prickly, and doesn't skimp on the bitterness caused by being dangerously queer and smart in the repressive 50s.



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