by Rucker, Rudy
Yeah, I know, John. This is music to my ears, man. This totally makes sense. As Shirley puts it, “Science Fiction, see, is humanity’s way of warning, readying itself; it’s what goes on under the racial Rapid Eye movement.”
One final gem of wisdom. “The universe is alive, but it is not ‘God.’ And…it is not friendly. Nor unfriendly. However, we do not wish to make these distinctions with the American public.” Too true.
Daringly set in the late twenty-first century—well, hey, the twentieth century’s all done!—Bruce Sterling’s Holy Fire is about an extremely old woman who gets a radical rejuvenation treatment and becomes a beautiful twenty-year-old. Due to this extreme change in her body she is no longer human in the old sense of the word; she’s post-human. Other SF writers have come up against the task Sterling faces here, how to depict people after technology has made them into superhumans; I would say that no other writer has ever succeeded so well. Here’s one of Sterling’s statements about post-humans: “Machines just flitted through the fabric of the universe like a fit through the brain of God, and in their wake people stopped being people. But people didn’t stop going on.”
Bruce Sterling in 1983.
In person and in his journalistic writing, Sterling is loud and Texan, but in his novels he is the most thoughtful and civilized of men. In Holy Fire he transforms himself into this wide-eyed rejuvenated old lady and takes us on a tour of marvels, a wanderjahr in Europe in search of the holy fire of artistic creativity.
She arrived at the airport. The black tarmac was full of glowing airplanes. They had a lovely way of flexing their wings and simply jumping into the chill night air when they wanted to take off. You could see people moving inside the airplanes because the hulls were gossamer. Some people had clicked on their reading lights but a lot of the people onboard were just slouching back into their beanbags and enjoying the night sky through the fuselage.
When science fiction performs so clear and attractive a feat of envisioning the future, its like a blueprint that you feel like working to instantiate.
Instantiate, by the way, is an object-oriented-computer-programming word that, in Sterling’s hands, means “to turn a software description into a physical object.” Such as a goddess sculpture derived from studies of the attention statistics of eye-tracked men looking at women “…what we got here is basically a pretty good replica of something that a Paleolithic guy might have whittled out of mammoth tusk. You start messing with archetypal forms and this sort of thing turns up just like clockwork.” This pleasing suggestion of cosmic order contains a subtle nod to the notion of a chaotic attractor.
Science fiction sometimes gets humorous effects by extrapolating present-day things into heady overkill. Here’s what espresso machines might evolve into:
The bartender was studying an instruction screen and repairing a minor valve on an enormously ramified tincture set. The tincture set stretched the length of the mahogany bar, weighed four or five tons, and looked as if its refinery products could demolish a city block.
The obverse of this technique is to have future people look back on our current ways of doing things. “That’s antique analog music. There wasn’t much vertical color to the sound back in those days. The instruments were made of wood and animal organs.” Or here’s a 21C person deploring the obsolete habit of reading.
“It’s awful, a terrible habit! In virtuality at least you get to interact! Even with television you at least have to use visual processing centers and parse real dialogue with your ears! Really, reading is so bad for you, it destroys your eyes and hurts your posture and makes you fat.”
Like all the cyberpunks, Sterling loves to write. He can become contagiously intoxicated with the sheer joy of fabulous description, as in this limning of a cyberspace landscape:
“Rising in the horizon-warped virtual distance was a mist-shrouded Chinese crag, a towering digital stalagmite with the subtle monochromatics of sumi-e ink painting. Some spaceless and frankly noneuclidean distance from it, an enormous bubbled structure like a thunderhead, gleaming like veined black marble but conveying a weird impression of glassy gassiness, or maybe it was gassy glassiness…”
Wouldn’t you like to go there? You can, thanks to this lo-res VR device you’re holding, it’s called a printed page…
Sterling is an energetic tinkerer, and he drops in nice little touches everywhere. What looks like a ring on a man’s finger is “a little strip of dark fur. Thick-clustered brown fur rooted in a ring-shaped circlet of [the man’s] flesh.” Two people riding on a train ring for a waiter from the dining-car and here’s the response:
A giant crab came picking its way along the ceiling of the train car. It was made of bone and chitin and peacock feathers and gut and piano wire. It had ten very long multijointed legs and little rubber-ball feet on hooked steel ankles. A serving platter was attached with suckers to the top of its flat freckled carapace…It surveyed them with a circlet of baby blue eyes like a giant clam’s. “Oui monsieur?”
This crab is a purely surreal and Dadaist assemblage, quite worthy of Kurt Schwitters or Max Ernst. The wonder of science fiction is that, with a bit of care, you can paste together just about anything and it will walk and talk and make you smile.
Near the end of the book, the heroine encounters the ultimate art medium.
It was like smart clay. It reacted to her touch with unmistakable enthusiasm…indescribably active, like a poem becoming a jigsaw. The stuff was boiling over with machine intelligence. Somehow more alive than flesh; it grew beneath her questing fingers like a Bach sonata. Matter made virtual. Real dreams.
Such is the stuff that science fiction is made of.
So, okay, those were the three new cyberpunk novels of 1996. Let’s compare and contrast. What are some of the things they have in common other than the use of cyberspace?
One of the main cyberpunk themes is the fusion of humans and machines, and you can certainly find that here. In Idoru a man wants to marry a computer program, in Holy Fire machine-medicine essentially gives people new bodies. There is less of the machine in Silicon Embrace, though there is that remote-controlled guy with the chip in his head.
Another cyberpunk theme is a desire for a mystical union with higher consciousness, this kind of quest being a kind of side-effect of the acid-head ‘60s which all of us went through. Contact with higher intelligence is the key theme of Silicon Embrace, though in Idoru it is present only obliquely, as part of the idoru’s appeal. Holy Fire ends with a thought-provoking pantheistic sequence where a human has actually turned his own self into an all pervading Nature god, with “every flower, every caterpillar genetically wired for sound.”
Cyberpunk usually takes a close look at the media; this is an SF tradition that goes pack to Frederic Pohl and Norman Spinrad. Holy Fire goes pretty light on the media, but in Idoru, the main villain is the media as exemplified by an outfit called Slitscan. “Slitscan was descended from ‘reality’ programming and the network tabloids…, but it resembled them no more than some large, swift bipedal carnivore resembled its sluggish, shallow-dwelling ancestors.” One of the heroines of Silicon Embrace is Black Betty, a media terrorist who manages to jam the State’s transmissions.
He watched the videotape, the few seconds of a former President yammering with a good approximation of sincerity in his State of the Union address—and then Black Betty stepping into the shot; stepping her video-persona into the former President’s restricted public space; taking public space back from authority, giving it back to the public, the Public personified by Betty. Tall and lean and smiling from a crystallized inner confidence…she seemed to…stare at the president from within his Personal Space: a rudeness, a solecism become a political statement.
In terms of optimism/pessimism about the future, Holy Fire is very optimistic, Silicon Embrace very pessimistic, and Idoru somewhere in the middle. In terms of political outlook, Silicon Embrace is explicitly radical, Idoru is apolitical, and Holy Fire is—well—Republican?
In Holy Fire, the world is run by old people, by the gerontocracy, and this is not necessarily presented as a bad thing, it’s simply presented as the reality of that future.
Above and beyond the themes and attitudes, the single common thing about these three books is style. All are hip, all are funny, all are written by real people about the real world around us.
After all the good ink I’ve just given my peers, I can’t resist slipping you a long excerpt of my Freeware, which came out a few months after the books discussed here.
So here’s shirtless Willy under the star-spangled Florida sky with eighty pounds of moldie [named Ulam] for his shoes and pants, scuffing across the cracked concrete of the JFK spaceport pad. The great concrete apron was broken up by a widely spaced grid of drainage ditches, and the spaceport buildings were dark. It occurred to Willy that he was very hungry.
There was a roar and blaze in the sky above. The Selena was coming down. Close, too close. The nearest ditch was so far he wouldn’t make it in time, Willy thought, but once he started running, Ulam kicked in and superamplified his strides, cushioning on the landing and flexing on the take-offs. They sprinted a quarter mile in under twenty seconds and threw themselves into the coolness of the ditch, lowering down into the funky brackish water. The juddering yellow flame of the great ship’s ion beams reflected off the ripples around them. A hot wind of noise blasted loud and louder; then all was still.
[A crowd of angry locals appears and attacks the ship.]
There was a fusillade of gun-shots and needler blasts, and then the mob surged towards the Selena, blazing away at the ship as they advanced.
Their bullets pinged off the titaniplast hull like pebbles off galvanized steel; the needlers’ laser-rays kicked up harmless glow-spots of zzzt. The Selena shifted uneasily on her hydraulic tripod legs.
“Her hold bears a rich cargo of moldie-flesh,” came Ulam’s calm, eldritch voice in Willy’s head. “Ten metric tons of chipmold-infected imipolex, surely to be worth a king’s ransom once this substance’s virtues become known. This cargo is why Fern flew the Selena here for ISDN. I tell you, the flesher rabble attacks the Selena at their own peril. Although the imipolex is highly flammable, it has a low-grade default intelligence and will not hesitate to punish those who would harm it.”
When the first people tried to climb aboard the Selena, the ship unexpectedly rose up on her telescoping tripod legs and lumbered away. As the ship slowly lurched along, great gouts of imipolex streamed out of hatches in her bottom. The Selena looked like a defecating animal, like a threatened ungainly beast voiding its bowels in flight—like a frightened penguin leaving a splatter trail of krilly shit. Except that the Selena’s shit was dividing itself up into big slugs that were crawling away towards the mangroves and ditches as fast as they could hump, which was plenty fast.
Of course someone in the mob quickly figured out that the you could burn the imipolex shit slugs, and a lot of the slugs started going up in crazy flames and oily, unbelievably foul-smelling smoke. The smoke had a strange, disorienting effect; as soon as Willy caught a whiff of it, his ears started buzzing and the objects around him took on a jellied, peyote solidity.
Now the burning slugs turned on their tormentors, engulfing them like psychedelic kamikaze napalm. There was great screaming from the victims, screams that were weirdly, hideously ecstatic. And then the mob’s few survivors had fled, and the rest of the slugs had wormed off into the flickering night. Willy and Ulam split the scene as well.
Cyberpunk lives!
* * *
Note on “Cyberpunk Lives”
Written 1998.
Appeared as “Letters From Home” in The New York Review of Science Fiction, #113, January 1998.
Although it’s framed as a review of three books, the essay also has some of my thoughts on the similarities between the cyberpunks and the Beats. I particularly like the idea that I get to be Burroughs. And I mention the meeting with Ginsberg that I describe in my “William Burroughs and Allen Ginsberg” essay—one of the high points of my life.
The Freestyle Antifesto (Written with Marc Laidlaw)
Write like yourself. Exaggerate it. Write more like yourself. You are correct. Write more. Only you have the secret. Tell every detail in the readiest tongue. Write like yourself except more so. Everyone but you is crazy. Write high, write drunk, write depressed, write in ecstasy, always tell the truth and always lie. Manipulate subtext; transreally seize each character and attitude from that day’s mental magpie-gleanings. Your streetscene events are, ideally, to be elicited by you in the manner of a ranter who leaves no soul unturned—and no idler in your room’s corner is left unharrassed or unloved or untreated to a freestyle soul-winning session.
I view Marc Laidlaw as the head freestylist, the behind-it-all zealot surfpunk dictator of freestyle. Marc is the author of that most immaculate novel, Dad’s Nuke, where timebake flurries snatch your ass from the diaper into the deathbed. On deck: Marc’s Tibetan Buddhist SF novel, The Neon Lotus, with the future fantasia Kalifornia still to come.
Marc and I picked up on the word freestyle while working on our surfing SF story, “Probability Pipeline.” To me, surfing has always been a central life image, as in the phrase, “wave with it.” Now that I’m in California, I got a wetsuit and used board from local shop. By way of further research, I went out to try surfing at Three Mile Beach north of Santa Cruz on New Year’s Day, 1987, with my wife Sylvia, Marc, his wife Geraldine, and our three kids. Memorable.
By way of introducing Marc’s quintessential summation of freestyle writing, he sent me an ad torn from the pages a surfing magazine, with the following block of copy circled:
Break down the word “freestyle” and you have two of the most liberating concepts in life. Given such a forum of experimentation and challenge as the Ocean, freestyle becomes a statement limited only by the participant’s mind…Adventurism represents the cutting edge of the freestylist. It requires an individual who is willing to take any risk at any time, subject himself to the demands of the sea, and ignore limitations imposed on him by friends, society, or the conditions…Freestyle is a forum of inner rhythm: what beat do you choose to march to? In all likelihood, that beat, that inner rhythm, projects into our style of living and surfing, and draws our life experiences to us…Each person’s moves and personality blend together to create style. Each person’s style is different. [From an ad in Breakout magazine, December 1986.]
This ad-copy itself serves as a synchronistic Rosetta stone for the meaning of freestyle. As Marc explicates:
There it is, Rude Dude. The freestyle antifesto. No need to break down the metaphors—an adventurist knows what the Ocean really is. No need to feature matte-black mirrorshades or other emblems of our freestyle culture—hey, dude, we know who we are. No need to either glorify or castrate technology. Nature is the Ultimate. We’re skimming the cell-sea, cresting the waves that leap out over the black abyss of the maybe-death/whatever-that-is. Wet dreams of geometry: the curl of the wave as we carve our turns toward the blue lip, glossing over the shoulder into the turquoise pocket of ecstasy.
Yeah, baby. Write like yourself.
* * *
Note on “The Freestyle Antifesto”
Written 1987.
Based on Marc Laidlaw’s zine, Freestyle SF, Fall 1987.
Marc Laidlaw in 1986
Marc and I ended up publishing four surfing SF stories, “Probability Pipeline,” “Chaos Surfari,” “The Andy Warhol Sand Candle,” and “The Perfect Wave.” You can find these tales in my Complete Stories (Transreal Books, 2012).
Marc and I tried to convince our fellow Bay Area SF-writers Richard Kadrey, Pat Murphy, and Michael Blumlein that they were freestylists too, but none of them took our wild talk seriously. The problem with freestyle, as a movement, was that it really had no prescriptive program. We were all diverging along our own worldlines.
One more great quote from Marc. We weren’t having an easy time getting our far-out
stories and novels published, and he remarked, “The editors will sink into the tarpits like dinousaurs. With their throats ripped out by a saber-toothed tiger. And I, Rudy, I will be that tiger.”
In the end, we may not have ripped out anyone’s throats, but Marc got a great job writing the stories for games like Half-Life at the computer-gaming company Valve Software. And he’s still writing a gem-like story now and then. And me? I’m starting in on self-publishing ebooks! Forever freestyle.
What SF Writers Want
I think some of the appeal of SF comes from its association with the old idea of the Magic Wish. Any number of fairy tales deal with a hero (humble woodcutter, poor fisherman, disinherited princess) who gets into a situation where he or she is free to ask for any wish at all, with assurance that the wish will be granted. Reading such a tale, the reader inevitably wonders, “What would I wish for?” It’s pleasant to fantasize about having such great power; and thinking about this also provides an interesting projective psychological test.
Some SF stories hinge on the traditional Magic Wish situation—the appearance of a machine (= magic object) or an alien (= magic being) who will grant the main character’s wishes. But more often, the story takes place after the wish has been made…by whom? By the author.
What I mean here is that, in writing a book, an SF writer is in a position of being able to get any Magic Wish desired. If you want time travel in your book…no problem. If you want flying, telepathy, size-change, etc., then you, as SF writer, can have it—not in the real world, of course, but in the artificial, written world into which you project your thoughts.
To make my point quite clear, let me recall a conversation I once had with a friend in Lynchburg. “Wouldn’t it be great,” my friend was saying, “if there were a machine that could bring into existence any universe you wanted, with any kinds of special powers. A machine that could call up your favorite universe, and then send you there.” “There is such a machine,” I answered. “It’s called a typewriter.”