Cut Up Or Shut Up

FROM THE ORIGINAL 1972 EDITION: What is Fiction? What is Reality? The pinhole through which we see medieval epidemics is occluding and the future will go next ... come the year 2000, if not sooner, people will be living only in the present and will not be interested in the future at all ... The election of a Grade B movie star to the office of governor of California already shows how easy it is to map one reality on to another ... The pathetic bullshit uttered by the first men on the moon shows that science is now the greatest producer of fiction ... (Will Hollywood never learn?) ... Well, with a telescope you can watch our boys surface in developer fluid ... now you see it now you don't ... As Burroughs and Ballard have pointed out, the media are now producing mass fictions at such a staggering rate that the writer's sole function can be summed up as CUT UP OR SHUT UP.