Collected Essays

by Rucker, Rudy

  Another thing that makes robots attractive is the notion that they might always be rational. People are so rarely rational—but why is this? Not because we wouldn’t like to be rational. The real reason is that the world is so complex, one’s data are so slight, and so many decisions are required. Full rationality is, in a formal sense, impossible for us—and it will, I fear, be impossible for the robots as well.

  There’s another SF tradition of writing about computer brains; here instead of intelligent robots, the vision is of a very large computer brain which is seemingly very wise and just. It is as if we humans might be hoping to build the God-the-Father whom we fear no longer exists. In most such stories the god-computer turns out to be evil, either like a cruel dictatorship or like a blandly uncaring bureaucracy. But this leads us out of the domain of things that writers wish for.

  Saucer aliens. I loosely use the phrase “saucer aliens” to include any kind of creatures that might show up on Earth, either from space, from underground, or from another dimension.

  In C. G. Jung’s 1958 book on UFO’s, Flying Saucers: A Modern Myth of Things Seen in the Skies, he makes the point that, in popular mythology, saucer aliens play much the same role that angels did in the Middle Ages. See my Saucer Wisdom for further discussion. There is a hope that no matter how evil and messed up things might get on Earth, there are still some higher forces who might step in and fix everything. The UFO aliens are, perhaps, replacements for the gods we miss, or for our parents who have grown old and weak.

  Another very important strand in thinking about saucer aliens is the element of sexual attraction. A key element to sexual attraction is the idea of otherness. An alien stands for something wholly outside of yourself that is, perhaps, willing to get close to you anyway. This drive is probably hard-wired into us for purposes of exogamy: it’s genetically unwise to mate with people so similar to you that they might be your cousins.

  It is interesting in this context to note how some rock-groups try to give an impression of being aliens.

  Of course, Earth is already full of aliens—other races, other sexes, other backgrounds. By constantly striving to broaden one’s circle of under-standing, one can begin to see the world in a variety of ways.

  So—those are some of the things that SF writers want. Undoubtedly, I’ve left out some important types of SF wishes, and it may be that some other pattern of classifying SF dreams is more enlightening. One thing that I do find surprising is that it is at all possible to begin a project of this nature. When one first comes to SF, there is a feeling of unlimited possibility—what is startling is how few basic SF themes there really are. As indicated, I think most of our favorite themes appeal to us for reasons that are psychological.

  As long as I’m whipped up into this taxonomic mania for systemizing things, let me suggest that the psychology of human behavior is based upon avoiding Three Bad Things, and upon seeking Three Good Things that are the respective opposites of the Bad Things.

  The Three Bad Things might be called Jail, Madness, and Death—and the Three Good Things would be Change, Slack, and Love.

  * * *

  Note on “What Science Fiction Writers Want”

  Written 1985.

  Appeared in The Bulletin of the Science Fiction Writers of America, Spring, 1985.

  “What SF Writers Want” was my second piece for the SFWA Bulletin. George Zebrowski was editing it at the time, and he kept calling me up asking me to write essays. He liked “What SF Writers Want” so well that he asked me to start doing a regular column for him. The next piece, “Access To Tools” was the result.

  By the way, in the last line of “What Science Fiction Writers Want,” I’m using “Jail” to mean any kind of imprisonment or dulling routine, and “Slack” to mean of serenity and inner peace.

  Against Mundane SF

  In 2004, Geoff Ryman and his Clarion West SF Writing Workshop students proposed a “Mundane SF Manifesto.” I never liked the idea, and I started brooding over Mundane SF again because Geoff reprinted the manifesto in the last edition of the New York Review of Science Fiction along with a thoughtful essay based on a talk he gave at the Boréal SF con in Montreal this April. I also checked out the Wikipedia “Mundane SF” entry, as well as the Mundane SF blog.

  A rude person might imagine one of the original Clarion students’ thought processes to be as follows:

  “I’ve always wanted to write like Henry James or John Updike or Jane Austen—don’t you just adore Jane Austen? But, frankly, it’s so hard to break into mainstream writing that I figured I’d try a genre first. And then I thought, why not be a science fiction writer! Only, then, when I start looking at sci fi a little bit, I find out that a lot of it is written by nutty loners, and it’s full of science and crazy ideas, and it’s not like Jane Austen or John Updike at all. So I’m thinking, why not get rid of all the weird icky science and write stories about people’s emotions and about the kinds of problems you read about in the newspaper?”

  The basic idea of Mundane SF is to avoid the more unrealistic of the classic SF tropes—or power chords, as I like to call them. Geoff feels that faster than light travel, human-alien encounters, time travel, alternate universes, and telepathy are absolutely impossible. He feels that if we draw on these unlikely power chords, we are feeding people wish-fulfillment pap.

  Like me, the Mundanes would like to see SF as real literature. They feel that real literature mustn’t use fundamentally false scenarios. By the way, Ryman has very good lit chops, he has a cool modernistic novel 253 online—it’s in the form of a subway car full of people!

  Mundane SF is to be about picturing possible futures, drawing on such sober-sided Sunday magazine think-piece topics as “Disaster, innovation, climate change, virtual reality, understanding of our DNA, and biocomputers that evolve.”

  I have so many objections!

  I don’t think SF is necessarily about predicting possible futures. I’ve always felt that SF is more like surrealism. The idea is to shock people into awareness. Show them how odd the world is. Whether or not you draw on realistic tropes is irrelevant. But my personal bent is always to try and make the science plausible.

  Let it be said that futurism and SF are quite different endeavors. A rude person might say that futurism is about feeding inspirational received truths to businessmen and telling them it will help them make more money. SF is about unruly artistic visions. Why let the ruling class’s media propaganda condition our practice of Art?

  Writing responsibly about socially important issues can be timid and boring. The thing is, science really does change a lot over time. Compare what we’re doing now to what we were doing in the year 1000. A Mundane SF writer of year 1000 might want us to write only about alchemy, the black plague, and the papacy.

  Not that Mundane SF really has to be stuffy. Come to think of it, my early cyberpunk novel Software was thoroughly mundane, as was my Silicon Valley novel, The Hacker and the Ants—everything in these novels could well happen—and they were pretty lively. Maybe that’s why I don’t see my books showing up on any lists of Mundane SF. Can serious literature be dirty and funny? Of course!

  Despite my sniping, I do understand, for instance, someone like Charles Stross’s relish in accepting the Mundane strictures and in writing a Mundane SF novel, as he says he’s done with Halting State. Why not? It’s a form, like a sonnet or a one-square-meter canvas. And, of course, clever Mundanes like Geoff Ryman know this. A manifesto needn’t be a universal strait-jacket. But maybe some forms are self-defeating. Like a novel that doesn’t use the letter E. Or a piano piece that doesn’t use the black keys. Or a painting with no red or yellow.

  Personally I’ve been growing less constrained from novel to novel—I keep trying to get further out into space. I was mundanely stuck on the Moon for a long time! I think it’s an interesting intellectual game to find valid scientific ways around the specific strictures suggested by Mundane SF.

  Yes, FTL travel is hard. But I kno
w of at least four ways to travel very rapidly.

  (a) The traditional way is to do down into the subdimensions and take shortcuts. And, no, you don’t have to do this via wormholes. Nor do you need to travel in large steel cylinders. Science finds new things.

  (b) A simple method that I’ve discussed in my books Freeware and in Saucer Wisdom is to send your personality as a zipped up information file and have it unzipped at your destination. This doesn’t go faster than light, but it goes at the speed of light, and seems to the traveler to take no time at all. Charles Stross used a weaker form of this in Accelerando, where people’s codes are packed into a ship the size of a soft drink can that travels at near-light speed. But, yes, when you get back home, a lot of time has elapsed.

  (c) Teleportation, based on quantum indeterminacy. There’s a finite (small) chance that I’m on planet Pengö near the Great Attractor as well as here. It’s not hard to imagine that coming improvements of quantum computation will make it possible to amplify the indeterminacy and collapse it so that I can make the trip.

  (d) The yunching technique described in my Frek and the Elixir (cf. also the Bloater Drive in Harry Harrison’s Bill the Galactic Hero). You wind some of your strings to get really big, then step across the galaxy, then shrink back down.

  Gotta have the alien bar scene! Painting by R.R.

  As for aliens, perhaps they come via one of these rapid travel methods. But perhaps they are already here. Living in the subdimensions. What are the subdimensions? A power chord from the 1930s. Whatever is going on below the Planck length. We have no idea. Why not assume it might be interesting? Maybe aliens are those flashes you see out of the corner of your eye sometime. Maybe they’re aethereal protozoa in the atmosphere.

  When trying to justify telepathy, don’t forget that only a tiny fraction of our universe’s mass is the familiar visible matter. Most of it is dark energy and dark matter. As my physicist friend Nick Herbert has remarked, maybe some of that dark stuff is consciousness.

  Alternate universes are quite popular in modern physics. Something is going on in all those extra dimensions. Why not other worlds? Looked at in a certain quantum-mechanical way, each conscious being lives in a different parallel universe. Why should we settle for consensus reality?

  Implausible as time travel is, it may be the SF power chord most commonly used by non-SF writers. I’ve always wanted to write a time travel book and get it right. Surely this can be done. Rather than throwing up my hands, I prefer to continue searching for ways to be less and less Mundane.

  * * *

  Note on “Against Mundane SF”

  Written July, 2007.

  Appeared in The New York Review of Science Fiction, 2007.

  This started as a cranky post on Rudy's Blog, and I made it into a little piece for the NYRSF. By now, the Mundane SF movement has pretty much faded away, but for a few months everyone was talking about it, and it got my goat, reactionary member of the old-guard that I’m becoming.

  Psipunk

  I often call myself a transrealist SF writer. This means that I turn my life and my speculations into science fiction, I watch what emerges in my novelistic laboratories, and I turn my science-fictional discoveries into scientific speculation, which in turn fuels fresh novels, on and on in an endless, rising gyre. Now and then my speculations have an impact on the real world. Today I’ll give you some specific examples of science fiction affecting science fact.

  (1) First I’m going to talk about a particular idea that fueled the cyberpunk literary movement in the 1980s.

  (2) Second I’m going to talk about how this idea has affected technology over the last twenty-five years.

  (3) Third I’m going to talk about some ideas that I’m using in my new series of psipunk novels.

  (4) Fourth I’ll say a bit about how I think my new ideas might play out in the technology of the coming twenty-five years.

  My Idea for Cyberpunk

  During the year 1979-1980 I wrote a novel called Software, which was to take its place as one of the very first cyberpunk novels. My new idea for the book was this:

  Software Immortality: A person’s mind can be uploaded into a robot.

  To make the situation colorful, I had the subject’s software extracted by having a gang of sleazy biker-type androids eat his brain!

  Although the notion of uploading a human into a computer is now commonplace, when I wrote Software, it was a rather new idea. I came upon the notion of software immortality by thinking in terms of the then-new distinction between a system’s physical hardware and the software that’s running on it. This was not at all an obvious thought in 1979, it took me nearly a year to wrap my mind around it.

  Although it would be nice to claim that I single-handedly invented the notion of software immortality, Wikipedia lists three SF authors who mention uploading human minds into computers before my novel Software .

  In Roger Zelazny’s 1968 Lord of Light , just like in my Wetware, people save their minds as electronic data and load them into fresh tank-grown meat bodies. In Detta är verkligheten (This is reality), 1968, by the philosopher Bertil Mårtensson, people become programs in a giant VR (virtual reality) computation. And in Fredrik Pohl’s Heechee series beginning 1977, we have a hero whose wife’s mind has been uploaded into a mainframe computer.

  In some ways, uploading into a mainframe VR is a less interesting notion than that of a person uploading into an individual microcomputer mind which operates a real bodies in the real world, and I think this a genuinely new move in my Software. In other words, I think I really was the first to write novels in which A person’s mind can be uploaded into a robot.

  This was a farfetched enough notion in 1979-1980 that I actually had my robots’ computer mind housed in a Mr. Frostee ice-cream truck following the robots around.

  We all had trouble imagining how small computers were about to get. The future is always stranger than any of us expects.

  The Tech From Cyberpunk

  What’s happened in the intervening quarter century? My idea has served as a metaphor, a guide, a vision. There are a number of figurative ways in which we do now upload into the machine.

  In particular I’m thinking of how people upload text, pictures, audio and video. Although I can’t literally transform my personality into software, I can create a reasonable facsimile of myself online. The Web makes all the difference.

  I often use the my word lifebox in this context to stand for a collection of data that holds a copy of a person’s life. My recent non-fiction book The Lifebox, the Seashell, and the Soul discusses whether a lifebox emulation could ever truly be alive—and I think the answer will eventually be yes—but that’s not the issue I want to talk about today. Instead I want to focus on present-day and near-future technology.

  As I say, the Web makes all the difference. The Web is something that I didn’t foresee in Software, but which William Gibson stressed in his contemporaneous Neuromancer, calling it cyberspace. That’s the other piece of cyberpunk, by the way. That is, cyberpunk is the web plus software immortality.

  So what’s the big deal about the web? In the past, your life’s mementoes were but a dusty drawer of photos and diaries, or a cardboard box in a basement. But with the Web, your records can become a lifebox: a hyperlinked and searchable website mixing text, photos, sound and video.

  If you’re technically inclined, you might make a personal website. If you’re a blogger like me, you create part of the lifebox on the fly, as you go along. Or, if you’re busy with other things, you might employ someone to create a lifebox for you: I think of, for instance, Stephen Wolfram’s website , which includes a very nice “scrapbook” section.

  In the coming decade, there will be a very big business in lifebox-generation.

  Why are online lifeboxes going to be so popular? The Web makes all the difference. If I’m blogging, then I have the gratification of being able to post to my blog right away. I can post the text of this speech, and pictures of th
e audience, and everyone in the world can read it, and recommend it, and post comments, and give me feedback (such as a comment thread debating whether I really invented software immortality.) I’m not a lonely nut. I’m part of the planetary mind. It feels good to be plugged in.

  The ability to share and be heard and be connected is one reason for wanting a lifebox. But when I wrote Software, I was thinking in terms of literal, personal immortality. That’s not happening. In the literal sense, we’re not very close to transferring minds into computers.

  At present we don’t have terribly strong tools for munging a lifebox’s data. But don’t underestimate the power of automated Web search. More specifically, the Search This Site box to be found on most blogs allows you to search a series of topics so that you are, in effect, interviewing the lifebox. What is an interview, after all, but applying a search engine to a data base?

  A big part that’s still missing is the AI animation that’ll get my blog site to keep on generating entries after I’m dead! I can see a story idea in that, actually…

  Finally I need to acknowledge that having even an artificially intelligent online copy of me somehow doesn’t seem like true immortality. But I don’t worry as much about personal immortality as I used to. The secret is to identify my inner glowing “I Am” with the universal light that fills the cosmos, and then there is no death to worry about.

  But I if data won’t really make you immortal, why have a lifebox, a personal website, a photo-sharing page, a video-sharing presence, or a blog? To communicate with lots of people at once. To enable strangers to get to know you. To build a playground that people can interact with for a long time to come. To work in a new medium, to create a new kind of art.

  And I would argue that technology has brought us these pleasures as part of our instinctive quest for Software Immortality.

  My Ideas for Psipunk