‘The time has come’, wrote Burroughs in Port of Saints (1973), ‘to travel in time … We will rewrite all the wrongs of history. We will kill all the shits before they can be born’. With this, the writer unveiled the subject of his forthcoming second epic, a work that would attempt to inhabit the apophatic vacuum left behind by The Ticket That Exploded. Avoiding the experimental extremes of his Olympia books, the ‘Red Night’ trilogy (published between 1981 and 1987) would turn out to be significantly more reserved than its predecessor; framing the transition between the two in astronomical terms, Alex Houen has referred to the Nova Trilogy as ‘a literary Big Bang’, and suggested that it is only ‘with the Cities of the Red Night trilogy [that Burroughs began] to form more distinct worlds’. The implicitly entropic process can indeed be glimpsed throughout the later texts, which bear an unmistakable sense of winding down, leading to the valedictory announcement on the penultimate page of its final volume: