Collected Essays

by Rucker, Rudy

  The outline changes as I work. Shit happens. After writing each scene in a given chapter, I find that I have to go back and revise the outlines of the remaining scenes of the chapter. And after finishing a chapter, I have to go back and revise the outlines of the chapters to come.

  Making the same point yet again, whether or not you write an outline, in practice, the only way to discover the ending of a truly living book is to set yourself in motion and think constantly about the novel for months or years, writing all the while. The characters and tropes and social situations bounce off each other like eddies in a turbulent wakes, like gliders in a cellular automaton simulation, like vines twisting around each other in a jungle. And only time will tell just how the story ends. Gnarly plotting means there are no perfectly predictive short-cuts.

  But it’s not a bad idea to select in advance an armature of plot structure. The detailed eddies will indeed have to work themselves out during the writing, but there’s no harm in having some sluices and gutters to guide the flow of the story along a harmonious and satisfying course.

  Power Chords and Thought Experiments

  Complexity

  Scientific Speculation

  Predictable

  Rote magic or pedagogic science, emphasizing limits rather than possibilities. Power chords.

  Low Gnarl

  Moderate thought experiments: the consequences of a few plausible new ideas.

  High Gnarl

  Extreme thought experiments: the consequences of some completely unexpected new ideas.

  Random

  Irrational and inconsistent; Anything goes. Logic is abandoned.

  What stampedes are to Westerns or murders are to mysteries, power chords are to science fiction. I’m talking about certain classic tropes that have the visceral punch of heavy musical riffs: blaster guns, spaceships, time machines, aliens, telepathy, flying saucers, warped space, faster-than-light travel, immersive virtual reality, clones, robots, teleportation, alien-controlled pod people, endless shrinking, the shattering of planet Earth, intelligent goo, antigravity, starships, ecodisaster, pleasure-center zappers, alternate universes, nanomachines, mind viruses, higher dimensions, a cosmic computation that generates our reality, and, of course, the attack of the giant ants.

  When a writer uses an SF power chord, there is an implicit understanding with the informed readers that this is indeed familiar ground. And it’s expected the writer will do something fresh with the trope. “Make it new,” as Ezra Pound said, several years before he went crazy.

  Mainstream writers who dip a toe into what they daintily call “speculative fiction” tend not be aware of just how familiar are the chords they strum. And the mainstream critics are unlikely to call their cronies to task over failing to create original SF. They don’t have a clue either. And we lowly science-fiction people are expected to be grateful when a mainstream writer stoops to filch a bespattered icon from our filthy wattle huts. Oh, wait, do I sound bitter?

  One way we make power chords fresh is simply to execute them with a lot of style—to pile on detail and make the scene very real. To execute the material impeccably. I can’t resist mentioning two rock’n’roll examples. The Rolling Stones: “I know it’s only rock and roll, but I like it.” The Ramones in “Worm Man”: “I need some dirt!” The idea is to invest the familiar tropes with enough craft and energy that they rock harder than ever.

  Another way to break a power chord out of the low-complexity predictable zone is to place the chord into an unfamiliar context, perhaps describing it more intensely than usual, or perhaps using it for a novel thought experiment. I like it when my material takes on a life of its own. This leads to the gnarly zone. As with plot, it’s a matter of working out unpredictable consequences of simple-seeming assumptions.

  A different way to handle the familiarity of a power chord is to use irony but there can a bad taste in this practice, a sense that the author’s saying, “Science fiction is stupid junk. None of it matters. Let’s be silly! Weally, weally thilly!” That’s no way to treat our noble genre.

  The reason why fictional thought experiments are so powerful is that, in practice, it’s intractably difficult to visualize the side effects of new technological developments. Only if you place the new tech into a fleshed-out fictional world and simulate the effects on reality can you get a clear image of what might happen.

  In order to tease out the subtler consequences of current trends, a complex fictional simulation is necessary; inspired narration is a more powerful tool than logical analysis. If I want to imagine, for instance, what our world would be like if ordinary objects like chairs or shoes were conscious, then the best way to make progress is to fictionally simulate a person discovering this.

  The kinds of thought experiments I enjoy are different in intent and in execution from merely futurological investigations. My primary goal is not to make useful predictions that businessmen can use. I’m more interested in exploring the human condition, with literary power chord standing in for archetypal psychic forces.

  Where to find material for our thought experiments? You don’t have to be a scientist. As Kurt Vonnegut used to remark, most science fiction writers don’t know much about science. But SF writers have an ability to pick out some odd new notion and set up a thought experiment. As Robert Sheckley remarked to me when he was living in a camper in my driveway, “At the heart of it all is a rage to extrapolate. Excuse me, shall I extrapolate that for you? Won’t take a jiffy.”

  The most entertaining fantasy and SF writers have a rage to extrapolate; a zest for seeking the gnarl.

  Satire and Cyberpunk

  So here’s the last of my complexity-spectrum tables.

  Complexity

  Social Commentary

  Predictable

  Unthinking advocacy of the status quo.

  Low Gnarl

  Comedy: Noticing that existing social trends lead to absurdities.

  High Gnarl

  Satire: extrapolating social trends into mad yet logical environments.

  Random

  Jape, parody, anarchist humor.

  I’m always uncomfortable when I’m described as a science-fiction humorist. I’m not trying to be funny in my work. It’s just that things often happen to come out as amusing when I tell them the way I see them.

  Wit involves describing the world as it actually is. And you experience a release of tension when the elephant in the living room is finally named. Wit is a critical-satirical process that can be more serious than the “humorous” label suggests.

  The least-aware kinds of literature take society entirely at face value, numbly acquiescing in the myths and mores laid down by the powerful. These forms are dead, too cold.

  At the other extreme, we have the chaotic forms of social commentary where everything under the sun becomes questionable and a subject for mockery. If everything’s a joke, then nothing matters. This said, laughing like a crazy hyena can be fun.

  But it’s worth noting you can be funny without being silly. This was something I picked up from the works of Philip K. Dick. A Scanner Darkly is one of the funniest books I’ve ever read, but the laughter rides upon a constant counterpoint of tragedy, a muted background of sad French horns. It’s relevant to this essay to mention that the masterwork Scanner uses fresh SF tropes such as the scramble-suit and the scanner, and has a transreal feeling of being about parts of Dick’s real life.

  In the gnarly zone, we have fiction that extrapolates social conventions to the point where the inherent contradictions become overt enough to provoke the shock of recognition and the concomitant release of laughter. At the low end of this gnarly zone we have observational commentary on the order of stand-up comedy. And at the higher end we get inspired satire.

  In this vein, Sheckley wrote the following in his “Amsterdam Diary” in Semiotext[e] SF, Autonomedia 1997:

  Good fiction is never preachy. It tells its truth only by inference and analogy. It uses the specific detail as
its building block rather than the vague generalization. In my case it’s usually humorous—no mistaking my stuff for the Platform Talk of the 6th Patriarch. But I do not try to be funny, I merely write as I write… In the meantime I trust the voice I can never lose—my own . . . enjoying writing my story rather than looking forward to its completion.

  So that’s enough about comedy. Let’s also move onto social commentary, which often takes a revolutionary turn. In particular, let’s talk about cyberpunk.

  I have a genetic predisposition for dialectic thinking. We can parse cyberpunk as a synthesizing form.

  Cyber. Discuss the ongoing global merger between humans and machines.

  Punk. Have the people be fully non-robotic; have them be interested in sex, drugs, and rock’n’roll. While you’re at it, make the robots funky as well! Get in there and spray graffiti all over the corporate future.

  As well as amping up the gnarliness, cyberpunk is concerned with the maintaining a high level of information in a story—where I’m using “information” in the technical computer-science sense of measuring how concise and non-redundant a message might.

  By way of having a high level of information, it’s typical for cyberpunk novels to be written in a somewhat minimalist style, spewing out a rapid stream of characterization, ornamentation, plot twists, tech notions, and laconic dialog. The tendency is perhaps a bit similar to the way that punk rock arose as a reaction to arena rock, preferring a stripped-down style that was, in some ways, closer to the genre’s roots.

  When I moved to California in 1986, I fell in with the editors of the high-tech psychedelic magazine Mondo 2000, and they began referring to themselves as cyberpunks as well. They liked my notion of creating cultural artifacts with high levels of information, and their official T-shirt bore my slogan, “How fast are you? How dense?”

  Changing the World

  Our society is made up of gnarly processes, and gnarly processes are inherently unpredictable.

  My studies of cellular automata have made it very clear to me that it’s easy for any kind of social system to generate gnarl. If we take a set of agents acting in parallel, we’ll get unpredictable gnarl by and repeatedly iterating almost any simple rule—such as “Earn an amount equal to the averages of your neighbors’ incomes plus one—but when you reach a certain maximum level, go bankrupt and drop down to a minimum income.”

  Rules like this can generate wonderfully seething chaos. People sometimes don’t want to believe that such a simple rule might account for the complexity of a living society. There’s a tendency to think that a model with a more complicated definition will be a better fit for reality. But whatever richness comes out of a model is the result of a gnarly computation---which can occur in the very simplest of systems.

  As I keep reiterating, the behavior of our gnarly society can’t be predicted by computations that operate any faster than does real life. There are no tidy, handy-dandy rubrics for predicting or controlling emergent social processes like elections, the stock market, or consumer demand. Like a cellular automaton, society is a parallel computation, that is, a society is made up of individuals leading their own lives.

  The good thing about a decentralized gnarly computing system is that it doesn’t get stuck in some bad, minimally satisfactory state. The society’s members are all working their hardest to improve things—a bit like a swarm of ants tugging on a twig. Each ant is driven by its own responses to the surrounding cloud of communication pheromones. For a time, the ants may work at cross-purposes, but, as long as the society isn’t stuck in a repetitive loop imposed from on high, they’ll eventually happen upon success—like a jiggling key that turns a lock.

  But how to reconcile the computational beauty of a gnarly, decentralized economy with the fact that many of those who advocate such a system are greedy plutocrats bent on screwing the middle class?

  I think the problem is that, in practice, the multiple agents in a free-market economy are not of consummate size. Certain groups of agents clump together into powerful meta-agents. Think of a river of slushy nearly-frozen water. As long as the pieces of ice are of about the same size, the river will move in natural, efficient paths. But suppose that large ice floes form. The awkward motions of the floes disrupt any smooth currents, and, with their long borders, the floes have a propensity to grow larger and larger, reducing the responsiveness of the river still more.

  In the same way, wealthy individuals or corporations can take on undue influence in a free market economy, acting as, in effect, unelected local governments. And this is where the watchdog role of a central government can be of use. The central government can act as a stick that reaches in to pound on the floes and break them into less disruptive sizes. This is, in fact, the reason why neocons and billionaires don’t like the idea of a central government. When functioning properly, the government beats their cartels and puppet-parties to pieces.

  Science fiction plays a role here. SF is one of the most trenchant present-day forms of satire. Harsh truths about our present-day society can be too inflammatory to express outright. But if they’re dramatized within science-fictional worlds, vast numbers of citizens may be willing to absorb them.

  For instance, Robert Heinlein’s 1953 classic, Revolt in 2100, very starkly outlines what it can be like to live in a theocracy, and I’m sure that the book has made it a bit harder for such governments to take hold. John Shirley’s 1988 story, “Wolves of the Plateau” prefigured the eerie virtual violence of online hackerdom. And the true extent of the graft involved in George Bush’s neocon invasion of Iraq comes into unforgettably sharp relief for anyone who reads William Gibson’s 2007 Spook Country.

  Backing up a little, it will have occurred to alert readers that a government that functions as a beating stick is nevertheless corruptible. It may well break up only certain kinds of organizations, and turn a blind eye to those with the proper connections. Indeed this state of affairs is essentially inevitable given the vicissitudes of human nature.

  Jumping up a level, we find this perennial consolation on the political front: any regime eventually falls. No matter how dark a nation’s political times become, a change will come. A faction may think it rules a nation, but this is always an illusion. The eternally self-renewing gnarl of human behavior is impossible to control, and the times between regimes aren’t normally so so very long.

  Sometimes it’s not just single regimes that are the problem, but rather groups of nations that get into destructive and repetitive loops. I’m thinking of, in particular, the sequence of tit-for-tat reprisals that certain factions get into. Some loops of this nature have lasted my entire adult life.

  But whether the problem is from a single regime or from a constellation of international relationships, one can remain confident that at some point gnarl will win out. Every pattern will break, every nightmare will end. Here is another place where SF has an influence. It helps people to visualize alternate realities, to understand that things don’t have to stay the same.

  One dramatic lesson we draw from SF simulations is that the most wide-ranging and extreme alterations can result from seemingly small changes. In general, society’s coupled computations tend to produce events whose sizes have an unlimited range. This means that, inevitably, very large cataclysms will occasionally occur. Society is always in a gnarly state which the writer Mark Buchanan refers to as “upheavable” in Ubiquity: The Science of History…Or Why The World Is Simpler Than You Think (Crown, 2000 New York), pp. 231-233.

  Buchanan draws some conclusions about the flow of history that dovetail nicely with the notion of gnarly computation.

  History could in principle be like the growth of a tree and follow a simple progression towards a mature and stable endpoint, as both Hegel and Karl Marx thought. In this case, wars and other tumultuous social events should grow less and less frequent as humanity approaches the stable society at the End of History.

  Or history might be like the movement of the Moon around the E
arth, and be cyclic, as the historian Arnold Toynbee once suggested. He saw the rise and fall of civilizations as a process destined to repeat itself with regularity. Some economists believe they see regular cycles in economic activity, and a few political scientists suspect that such cycles drive a correspondingly regular rhythm in the outbreak of wars.

  Of course, history might instead be completely random, and present no perceptible patterns whatsoever …

  “But this list is incomplete … The [gnarly] critical state bridges the conceptual gap between the regular and the random. The pattern of change to which it leads through its rise of factions and wild fluctuations is neither truly random nor easily predicted. … It does not seem normal and lawlike for long periods of calm to be suddenly and sporadically shattered by cataclysm, and yet it is. This is, it seems, the ubiquitous character of the world.

  In his Foundation series, Isaac Asimov depicts a universe in which the future is to some extent regular and predictable, rather than being gnarly. His mathematician character Hari Seldon has created a technique called “psychohistory” that allows him to foretell the large-scale motions of society. This is fine for an SF series, but in the real world, it seems not to be possible.

  One of the more intriguing observations regarding history is that, from time to time a society seems to undergo a sea change, a discontinuity, a revolution—think of the Renaissance, the Reformation, the Industrial Revolution, the Sixties, or the coming of the Web. In these rare cases it appears as if the underlying rules of the system have changed.

  Although the day-to-day progress of the system may be in any case unpredictable, there’s a limited range of possible values that the system actually hits. In the interesting cases, these possible values lie on a fractal shape in some higher-dimensional space of possibilities—this shape is what chaos theory calls a strange attractor.