ABSTRACT
The most primitive literary response to the threat of cybernetics is paranoia. Cybernetics and paranoia are naturally linked at the most general level because the first threatens to, and the second is threatened by, control through forces beyond the power of the individual. In the earlier works of Kurt Vonnegut, Jr and William Burroughs, both of whom began their literary careers in the 1950s when cybernetics first came to popular attention in America, this paranoia takes on simple shapes, and its relationship to cybernetics can be easily discerned. Burroughs and Vonnegut combine cybernetic paranoia with the more general apocalyptic mythology of the period to create baldly didactic satires on the situation of technological civilization. It is interesting that the paranoid fantasy in literature is almost always accompanied by a triad of terms that include determinism along with apocalypse and grandiosity.
