The Science Fiction World Builder

doi:10.1017/9781009554732.022

Chapter 20 - The Science Fiction World Builder

Burroughs’ Speculative Cities and Their Legacy

from Part III - Space-Time Travel

Published online by Cambridge University Press: 02 July 2026

Clémentine Hougue

Edited by

Oliver Harris ,

Davis Schneiderman and

Alex Wermer-Colan

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Oliver Harris: Affiliation:
Keele University
Davis Schneiderman: Affiliation:
Lake Forest College
Alex Wermer-Colan: Affiliation:
Temple University

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Summary

This chapter examines William Burroughs as a radical world builder within science fiction, exploring how his early and late works engage deeply with the genre’s tropes – time travel, space opera, interplanetary conflict, and dystopian urban control. From the Cut-Up/Nova trilogy to The Wild Boys and the Red Night trilogy, Burroughs constructs fragmented urban landscapes and hybrid futures that destabilize genre conventions and resist linear narrative. Situating Burroughs among proto-SF, Golden Age authors, and the New Wave of the 1960s, Hougue explores how his stylistic innovations – especially the cut-up method – helped redefine the speculative tradition. Clémentine Hougue traces Burroughs’ influence on writers like Samuel Delany, William Gibson, and Kathy Acker, showing how his mutating urban imaginaries prefigure cyberpunk and experimental SF. Moving from dystopian insurrections to utopian reimaginings of space and time, Burroughs’ work becomes a site of poetic and political speculation, operating at the boundaries of genre and form.

Keywords

William S. Burroughs science fiction New Wave SF cyberpunk urban space Composite City speculative fiction dystopia utopia William Gibson Samuel Delany Kathy Acker

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Type: Chapter
Information: William Burroughs in Context , pp. 259 - 271

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009554732.022 [Opens in a new window]

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Print publication year: 2026

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References

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