IGMS Issue 17

by IGMS

  I led Roy over to my seat in the second row. I was the first one there, which meant I got to watch the rest of the class come in. It was pretty much a three-step process. Step one: walk in, all proud of your pet -- whether it was a cat, a rat, or a salamander -- and all ready to get attention. Step two: freeze, then stare in disbelief at Sheeba, possibly leaving your mouth open long enough for a bit of drool to form and dangle. Step three: chase your fleeing pet down the hall while groaning at the pain of having claws, teeth, beaks, or pincers break your flesh.

  Eventually, we all got seated. Mr. Stockton started the lesson. Nobody paid much attention. Everyone stared at Sheeba. But, like he'd said, she seemed happy to nap. And I think there's some expression about letting sleeping tigers lie. If not, there should be. We hadn't gone more than ten minutes into the period when Duncan Imberson, who sat dead center in the front row, leaned forward and dangled his hamster cage in Sheeba's face.

  "Want a snack?" he asked. "Yummmm. It's hamsterific."

  "Stop that, Duncan," Mr. Stockton said.

  I didn't think it was very funny. The hamster was terrified, and had nowhere to hide.

  A minute or two later, Duncan dangled the hamster again. "Mmmmm. Crunchy and chewy," he said.

  "Duncan, please stop doing that," Mr. Stockton said.

  Of course, Duncan didn't stop. But after the fifth or six time he dangled his hamster, Mr. Stockton took away the cage and put it on his desk. "You can have your pet back at the end of the period," he said.

  Duncan kept quiet for about five minutes. Then he grabbed Sylvia Baldwin's bird cage and tried to dangle that in front of Sheeba.

  Sylvia snatched the cage away from him and moved to a different seat.

  When the bell rang, Roy, who'd been lying patiently by the side of my desk, got up, looked at me, and panted. "Let's get you some water," I said. As I headed out of class, I saw Duncan walk to Mr. Stockton's desk and reach toward the hamster cage.

  Mr. Stockton put his hand on the cage and said, "I think I changed my mind. Sheeba's probably hungry by now. Maybe we should give her a snack. Maybe that will teach you a lesson."

  I was sort of interested in seeing how this turned out. But Roy was tugging at the leash, and I knew he was thirsty. Besides -- Mr. Stockton was just bluffing. He was too much of a softie to ever sacrifice a hamster. So I headed down the hall to get Roy's water bowl from my locker.

  The rest of the day was a lot of fun. Everyone had a great time, and Roy got a tons of compliments, both for his behavior and his appearance. I guess seventh grade isn't too old for Pet Day.

  The next day was pretty much back to normal. No pets. Well, there was one pet. Duncan's hamster. It was in its cage on a table at the back of Mr. Stockton's classroom. That was a relief, because I didn't think it would be fair to use the hamster for a snack, even if Sheeba was a pretty cool looking tiger. Speaking of Sheeba, there was no sign of her.

  It was a couple days later that I realized there was no sign of Duncan, either. Not then. Not ever. So maybe Sheeba had gotten a snack after all.

  InterGalactic Interview With Paul Di Filippo

  by Darrell Schweitzer

  * * *

  SCHWEITZER: Let's start in the middle . . . I wonder if you have any comments on why we're having a second big wave of Steampunk just now. It's so 20th century, something that happened in the late '80s, but now it's happening again.

  Di FILIPPO: It's funny, Darrell, that you would bring that up, because that was the topic of a panel, last night, here at Boskone. I think it's an extra-literary phenomenon. There's that aspect of it, where it's become a cultural lifestyle thing that has summoned a whole flock of people. I think it's almost the reverse order. They enter the lifestyle and then start looking for the fiction that originally sparked that lifestyle. So I think that a lot of it is that people feel that there is an audience out there of people who are attracted to the superficial trappings, the costumes and gadgets of Steampunk. Maybe writers feel that they can wean those people off that, or transfer their affections from all those tchotchkes to the literary aspect of it.

  But I think the whole genre does answer a certain need that we feel here in the 21st century, where we are distant from our shiny gadgets. They're impenetrable. Nobody knows what goes on inside an iPod. It's all a mystery. But you know what goes on inside a steam engine or a brass telescope. So I think that's part of the appeal of the genre, that the characters within the Steampunk stories can be very hands-on and proactive with their technology and not just at the mercy of it.

  SCHWEITZER: And here I thought it was sort of like Goth, only they dress better.

  Di FILIPPO: Well, there is that. [Laughs.] There is the style element. You don't have to wear so much black eyeliner. It's probably better for the health of your eyes. But, on the panel last night, we had a very neat crowd. We had Lev Grossman, Michael Swanwick, myself and Everett Soares, who has done a Steampunk comic. Michael Swanwick made a very important point about Steampunk, which I think ties in to what may be seen of the malaise of science fiction, which is that Steampunk is generally fun. We've heard in recent years that science fiction has concentrated too heavily on dystopias, and there are no more bright and shiny futures to allure readers, and Steampunk offers that, even if it's dystopian Steampunk like The Difference Engine. You note that The Difference Engine is in a minority in terms of the kind of Steampunk that it is. I think Steampunk offers some of the old allure that Science Fiction in the Golden Age used to have, a future or an alternate reality that you would actually want to live in.

  SCHWEITZER: It's more of an alternate past than a future.

  Di FILIPPO: Right, an alternate past. But it's kind of hard to say with some Steampunk. I am thinking of Stephen Hunt, who did two books, The Kingdom Beneath the Waves, and there was a sequel out recently. In those books you're not quite sure if it's the past or an alternate continuum or our future. I think, yeah, generally Steampunk seems to be a retro thing, where it takes place in Victorian England or even further back. It's not the future, but it is an alternate timestream that possesses a certain romantic allure that readers find attractive.

  SCHWEITZER: What seems to have happened here is an interesting interplay between the culture and the literature, as if the original literature created the culture and now the culture is re-stimulating the literature.

  Di FILIPPO: Exactly. That's what I was trying to say. There's a feedback loop, because it began as a literary movement, and then it was adopted by people who felt they could use it almost in the way the SCA people use medieval times as a weekend recreational thing, or even a 24-7 recreational thing if they incorporate it that fully into their lives. So that built up and then the authors, seeing that phenomenon, realized how they could utilize some of the aspects of it to ramp up their own fiction, or write their own fiction differently. So I think there is a very interesting feedback loop between the people who are the hardcore fans and writers and the people who are on the edges of it as a lifestyle.

  SCHWEITZER: We haven't really seen second-wave Cyberpunk. Or have we? The literature had an enormous impact on the culture, but I am not sure it fed back into the literature.

  Di FILIPPO: Right, very accurate. There were generations of cyberpunk writers, as we know. There were people who came after Gibson and Sterling. I am thinking of someone like Simon Ings, a British writer who did some great stuff. He was chronologically younger than us old Baby Boomers, like in his thirties where we were in our forties when we were writing Cyberpunk. So there were writers who came after that Gibson/Sterling wave, but they didn't really expand it or take it in vastly new directions. They amped up bits and pieces of it, but you could see that it was basically a straight line continuation of what the first generation Cyberpunks had done. So, yeah, it hasn't really mutated into anything that is like the mutant offspring of Cyberpunk. I don't think we've seen that yet.

  SCHWEITZER: Maybe the difference was that Cyberpunk was really trying to address the future and even the real worl
d of present, whereas most Steampunk takes place in a never-neverland.

  Di FILIPPO: We talked on the panel about the escapist nature of Steampunk, whether it was good escapism to focus on the Victorian era instead of our current problems, whether that was good, because it gave us a perspective on the roots of our current culture, or whether it was just bad escapism like hiding your head in the sand. Certainly there is that didactic, forward-looking impulse that we found in Cyberpunk is, I think, missing from Steampunk, to a large degree.

  SCHWEITZER: Doesn't any writer have to develop beyond these movements anyway? Surely the most superficial of all literary values, not to mention careers strategies, involves getting on someone else's bandwagon. It must wear thin rather quickly.

  Di FILIPPO: I was affiliated with the Cyberpunks, to whatever degree. I wrote The Steampunk Trilogy, so I dipped my toe into that movement. I've even done some stuff which could be classified as New Weird, which of course is a fairly recent phenomenon and quasi-movement, although it is leaderless and diffuse. Personally, I don't like to follow any one pattern of writing or school of writing for very long before lighting out for the territories and looking out for something new; but I think it can hurt a writer's career to be too much identified with one movement. Eventually Steampunk is going to jump the shark and seem passé, and then what do you do if that's all you're known for writing? You can't really conceive of writing anything else.

  SCHWEITZER: I noticed that after Gibson and Sterling and so on, there were indeed a lot of little Gibsons and imitation Gibsons, and most of those have faded away, whereas Gibson and Sterling themselves are doing just fine. I will venture a prediction, that you may agree with or not, that fairly soon the New Weird movement is going to crash and burn, but when it's all over Jeff Vandermeer and China Mieville and people like that will be doing as well as ever. It's their imitators who will be in trouble.

  Di FILIPPO: Consider M. John Harrison, a name highly central to the whole New Weird phenomenon. His career is just so vast. He started in the New Wave and he wrote a number of different types of books down the past several decades and his involvement with the New Weird, I think, indicates that he is one of the writers who will persevere beyond this current craze for any kind of surreal, slipstream type literature. So, yeah, I do think those writers you identified, Jeff and China, will have long careers after this whole thing has faded.

  SCHWEITZER: Are these really movements, or publicity stunts? I become suspicious when someone declares a "movement." Don't you?

  Di FILIPPO: A think a true literary movement has to have an organic genesis and arise out of a vision, either an individual vision or a shared vision, of what could be in the literature, how the literature could do things differently. I don't think either of us would deny that there have been genuine literary movements. People of like mind found themselves banding together, thinking along the same lines. They work out a certain synergy. You could relate the output of certain writers to each other and against each other. So the history of literature is full of genuine organic movements that have sprung up. Whether some of these that we are seeing today are more factitious, more contrived, I think you have to gauge each one and study the history of it. Use your hype meter too, your bullshit meter and see if it seems to be just dedicated to furthering careers or if it actually represents a genuine response to a deficiency in the literature.

  SCHWEITZER: I wonder if charting movements isn't a job for the critics, and the writers should just leave it alone and go on writing.

  Di FILIPPO: I would have to agree. A lot of these things happen in retrospect. People look backwards or they just freeze a moment in time and try to analyze what's happening amongst a variety of writers who might not even be necessarily connected personally or on any kind of actual working level. So, yes, critics obviously play a huge part. Editors also. Look at how instrumental Ellen Datlow and Gardner Dozois were in the Cyberpunk movement. They played as big a role as some of the writers did.

  SCHWEITZER: If you were to start a movement now . . . what in contemporary science fiction dissatisfies you, which you as a writer would like to address?

  Di FILIPPO: I did try to start a movement in a very jokey way, back in the heyday of Cyberpunk. I called it Ribofunk. That word, I invented. I took the ribo prefix from ribosomes, from biology, and I took funk as the music, as opposed to punk. I jammed them together and created a neologism, and I wrote a little mock manifesto to go along with it, and then, when I was done being satirical, I looked at what I had created and I said, "You know, this actually has some potential," and I wrote a number of stories according to my own imaginary dictates, and they were eventually collected in a volume called Ribofunk. Now, if you Google it, you get ten thousand hits for the word I created. A lot of them are duplicates. They're just references to my book on eBay or whatever, but still it's kind of awesome to think that I created that neologism and it's out there. There's another term, "Biopunk." If you type that into Wikipedia, it says, "Another term for this is ribofunk." So my term has now become a subsidiary to Biopunk, which I think has more actual precedence in the critical terminology.

  So at one point I did address what I thought was a defect in the Cyberpunk movement, that it was all about hardware. It was about silicon and turning yourself into software, and I thought that we were neglecting the organic side of our heritage, and the bodily side, and bio-engineering. I felt we should concentrate more on that.

  I think that since then there have been any number of responses to that, whether it was in direct response to me or just other people seeing the same perceived defects. So if you go to that Biopunk entry on Wikipedia, you will see a whole list of great books, like maybe Kathleen Goonan's Queen City Jazz series. Rudy Rucker has dealt a little with the topic, as has Peter Watts. So that is something I think still needs to be explored. To me the reason that ten thousand years of literature is still intelligible to us is because basically we are the same human organism that we were, with the same mental capacities and physical capacities. We haven't grown four arms or we haven't added extra lobes to our brains. A lot of superficial things have changed, but our brain/body system has remained consistent for that whole period of time, and so we can mentally and emotionally grok Shakespeare and Plato and anybody else as far back as you want to go.

  But the prospect of bio-engineering the human organism, that to me is something that needs to be explored more in science fiction. When you change the baseline human, you put an iron curtain down between the new organism and our past, our entire history.

  SCHWEITZER: The term "Biopunk" to me suggests outlaw, underground, sleazy uses of biotechnology.

  Di FILIPPO: Yes, exactly.

  SCHWEITZER: Rather like Larry Niven's "Organlegger."

  Di FILIPPO: Yes, that's a very good precedent for that type of literature. If you look at something like Star Trek. I don't know, canonically, how far in the future Star Trek is supposed to happen, how their Star Dates relate to our Christian numbering -

  SCHWEITZER: About A.D. 2300, something like that.

  Di FILIPPO: So it's like 300 years in the future, and there have been no changes in the human baseline condition. They haven't amped up their reflexes -

  SCHWEITZER: Yes, they have, but it's illegal. There are a couple episodes about that. At one point on Deep Space 9 there was a big scandal because Dr. Bashir was discovered to be a bio-enhanced person.

  Di FILIPPO: So I am not up on the full canon then and I am deficient in a lot of the spin-off viewing. But when you have a space opera set hundreds of years in the future and you don't acknowledge these changes, it seems unconvincing. Even now, with smart drugs, people are using - what is it? - Provigil, the anti-sleep drug. They're using it to stay awake extra periods and hone their reflexes and so on. There has just got to be more of that depicted in the future. You can't just have these starships populated with regular 21st century people. I just don't think it's going to be a reality.

  SCHWEITZER: If you say the word "Si
ngularity" and point a microphone at Vernor Vinge, you're set for the next two hours, but we are approaching that topic. If people are going to be all that much different in the future, how do we write about them comprehensibly?

  Di FILIPPO: You're right. The Singularity is a huge practical and intellectual stumbling block, because if you endorse the notion that there is an iron curtain waiting up ahead of us, beyond which we cannot see, then that effectively limits your story space and your potential for examining the future of mankind. There have been a lot of solutions, each one more or less contrived or awkward. One solution that Vinge himself proposed was different shells within the universe where the Singularity was not permitted to happen within a certain shell of the cosmos. So he could tell stories within that shell because they were within that physical domain, because they were the old, familiar stories that we knew, just within futuristic settings. Then as you moved up his kind of cosmic ladder, things became more and more incomprehensible. So that was one way that he found around it.

  I've set stories on an Earth that is more or left deserted, and it's filled with the people who got left behind. The Singularity, as we know, is often called "The Rapture of the Nerds," so this is a kind of post-Rapture story where people are left behind. They weren't subsumed in the Singularity, so you get their story. But once again, as I say, these solutions are kludgy and awkward and they don't really address the problem. It's like showing a human genius, or a human artist of superb talent. When you depict them, you have to depict their stream-of-consciousness or the works they produce. You have to give some sample of it and convince the reader that this really is a genius or an artist of superior powers. How do you do that, because you can only write up to the peak of your own artistry? It's hard to depict a genius on the page. You can show everybody worshipping him, but at some point you have to adduce what he has done to actually be worthy of that. That's the same thing with the Singularity. You've got this entity out there. How do you depict it or make people believe that it's actually superhuman?