(s)oft machines

Reading The Soft Machine and Blade Runner, a Movie -- sifting through Burrough's intermitternt but sustained celebrations of young men and sex -- helped me better understand Gravity's Rainbow as a form of SF. It isn't just that Pynchon's novel so comfortably embraces the absurd that it begins to take on aspects of the fantastic. Somewhat in the same way, Burroughs' novels clearly embrace the fantastic but are utterly grounded in the real (partially because of the visceral descriptions of sex). It's another one of those times in which SF troublingly, interestingly, inevitably complicates genre boundaries. The connection between these tese texts recalls for me something about what is at the heart of "the speculative present," a term that Bruce Sterling, William Gibson, Michael Swanwick, and others seem to be batting around more and more these days.