In 1954, Jack Kerouac announced that he was writing the world’s first Beat Science Fiction novel; what resulted the following year was actually a short story of around 10,000 words entitled cityCityCITY, a futurist dystopian tale of a mega-city plated in superconducting steel, whose inhabitants are housed in “Zone Blocks” which double, when necessary, as electrified mass-execution chambers. Kerouac apparently sent this blueprint to William S. Burroughs with a request to collaborate on a full-length version, but Burroughs declined. Thus the story languished in limbo, until a new version of it, entitled “The Electrocution Of Block 38383939383”, was published in 1959 (in Nugget magazine). This special ebook edition of “The Electrocution Of Block 38383939383” as it was originally published, restores to prominence one of the most intriguing literary experiments of Kerouac’s oeuvre, and of the Beat Generation as a whole.
