AFTERWORD

The very beginning was when I was reading Samuel R. Delany's The Jewel Hinged Jaw. There are only two things I really remember about it, and one of them was a glib quip about William Burroughs and Edgar Rice Burroughs as being poles apart, or polar opposites, or something like that. Well sure, that's easy to see: but the more I thought about it, the more I moved away from the immediate differences and into some striking similarities, including: libertarian streak; strong distrust of organized religion; repugnance towards sex; juvenile-seeming love objects; caucasian troglodytes; etc. Even Delany's main point, that of racism, began to blur: one man's

"racism" is another person's "racial awareness". I had a wild notion of a Burroughs Gemini; or that ERB and WB were different pseudonyms of the same man.

Anyway, eventually I settled down to the more pedestrian experiment "What if ERB had written Naked Lunch as his first novel?" It seemed to me that certain key scenes and sequences of Naked Lunch would be quite easy to translate, yet they would still be obvious WB riffs, and even the "wild" differences could be covered in ERB fashion. The thing wrote itself. The hardest part, surprisingly, was the title. I couldn't think of what to call it: I was stuck in neutral somewhere between Naked Lunch and A Princess of Mars. I asked Gene Wolfe for help, and he started punning around with titles like "Na Ked's Punch" and

"The Waiters of Mars", and that is when I suddenly remembered the earlier Barsoom title. It was done.