Cities of the Red Night
Clem Snide, a private detective, has to solve a case of ritual murder. In the Gobi Desert 100,000 years ago, a red virus has erupted. And in the 18th century, gay pirates have set up their own republics in South America and are at war with the conquistadors. All three stories are merged at the end in a giant trans-time, trans-space battle.
Stats for nerds
2recommend
6mentions
4people
2016–2022years
33% recommend67% neutral
Mentions per year
What Hacker News says
- Seconded. My personal favorite is a short essay called "The Discipline of Do Easy", around which Gus van Sant has made a narrated short film[1].
Book wise I enjoyed the Ticket That Exploded, Yagé Papers and the trilogy around Cities Of The Red Night more than Naked Lunch.
- I highly recommend Of Captain Mission by Daniel Defoe.
And Cities of the Red Night by William S. Burroughs :)
- This reminds me of William S Burrough’s “Cities of the Red Night,” in which a deadly plague appears suddenly. The character Dr. Pierson is a heroin addict, and helps discover that heroin is prophylactic against the fever:
“A top government official bluntly warned: ‘Virus B-23 now loose in our overcrowded cities, is an agent that produces biologic changes in those affected – fatal in many cases, permanent and hereditary in those who survive and become carriers for that strain, which as a matter of survival they will spread as far and fast as possible to destroy enemies and quite literally make friends.’ Junkies, however, are only lightly affected by the virus and remain characteristically unchanged.
…
“He recovers in the fear because of his addiction, and the word went out that the junk was the only insurance against the fever. No stemming the black market the Government concedes and legalises. Now begins a deadly war to extermination between the junkies and the fever-freaks.”
- While reading about William S. Burroughs' "Cities of the Red Night" I found out about Konstantīns Raudive's book "Breaktrhough".
This book was about electronic voice phenomena (EVP) and the attempt at recording voices from the afterlife. Even if you don't buy into the concept of it, the content struck me as highly poetic.
I was fascinated by the book (which I never heard of) and was wondering if anyone could recommended me resources to find more "obscure", "interesting" and completely "left field" literature. (I put the previous words in quotations because these are things which are hard to quantify).
- From Cities of the Red Night by William S. Burroughs:[0]
> As I study the picture I see an island in the sky, green as the heart of an emerald, glittering with dew as waterfalls whip tattered banners of rainbow around it. The shores are screened with thin poplars and cypress and now I can see other islands stretching away into the distance like the cloud cities of the Odor Eaters, which vanish in rain ...
0) https://books.google.ae/books?id=iZrqAQAAQBAJ&pg=PA216&lpg=P...
- Sure.
But then, anyone who'd do that could just include the code in the retrovirus ;)
There's a trope in dystopian SF (and maybe first, in Burroughs' Cities of the Red Night) about specifically targeting particular races.
