Which Beat writer’s 1962 book The Ticket That Exploded uses cut-up prose and science-fiction imagery?

William S. Burroughs wrote The Ticket That Exploded, a 1962 book using cut-up prose and science-fiction imagery.

The book is part of Burroughs’s experimental Nova trilogy, which also includes The Soft Machine and Nova Express. Its disrupted structure reflects Burroughs’s interest in breaking sentences and narratives into fragments that can be rearranged into new combinations.

Burroughs developed the cut-up method with the artist Brion Gysin. The technique involved physically cutting texts and recombining the pieces, challenging the idea that prose must follow a continuous, linear order. In The Ticket That Exploded, this method works alongside themes of language, control, technology, addiction, and extraterrestrial threat.

The title is sometimes confused with Naked Lunch because both books are central Burroughs works. Naked Lunch is his earlier breakthrough novel; The Ticket That Exploded belongs to the later, more radically fragmented Nova cycle.