Essays

by Gregory Benford

  You were just talking about how the knowledge lies in the body. Yeah, Ted Williams knew that, right? Hitting a baseball is not up here man, it's disseminated material. And the same thing is true about a lot of things about ourselves. Einstein once said that instead of having visual pictures or mathematical pictures, his sense, when working on a physics problem, is kinesthetic. Einstein felt movement and he felt it in his whole body. If you take away the body, you are not going to have the same Einstein. And I think that it is generally true. This kind of science fiction that treats the body as a series of disposable parts or as the feminists in the seventies used to say the only difference is in the plumbing - it just ain't so. This kind of easy technology is not going to work and the pursuit of it is probably going to get you in a whole mess of trouble.

  Haldeman: You can look at the statistics of people who have two sex change operations, who change their sex and try to go back to the other and are imperfect copy of what they were in the first place. Think about how much pain and expense and terror there is involved in the operation. You would think nobody would do it again but a lot of people do. There was an article in the Esquire> about it, it was terrifying. I think that idea terrifies me anyhow, but what if it were easy to change the sex, but not the gender, to leave the hardwiring male but make the plumbing female. You would get a kind of weird cocktail of sensations. Cocktail is not a very good word to use. Einstein was talking about this hardwiring but, the same guy in his sixties wanted to get real old so he didn't spend half his time thinking about women. And that's hardwiring because very few women spend half their time thinking about men, at least past the age of sixteen and that's because you have to run the world and all we have to do is make new babies. Just think that we will be obsolete in another fifty years. Parthenogenesis will be the order of the day and people will remember what the world was like when there were men.

  Interactive Storytelling

  Jenkins: If we go back to the origins of the American science fiction tradition, Hugo Gernsbeck saw science fiction as responding to technological or scientific changes, as part of the public education about science. Of course we know that Hugo Gernsbeck was also very involved in amateur radio and so was very interested in communication technologies. Science fiction became a way to educate a public about the changes which those media technologies were causing in their daily lives. Today, many would say we are in another period of media in transition or rapid change, and I was wondering if you had thought about how creative artists contribute to helping the public understand that process of change.

  Haldeman: I feel like an anchor; that's my role. I am basically a conservative artist and I've been looking at the things people have been doing in terms of interactive writing and writing into sort of cartoon worlds that are built on gaming software and some of them are really neat visually, interesting to look at for a few minutes. But I haven't yet seen one that had any actual writing in it, that had interesting stories. I guess it's hard to get someone who's gone through years and years of story telling in a conventional medium to sit down and actually learn how to use the software. I'd be tempted, but I have to make my living writing this stuff and I can't spend a couple of years creating something in a new medium that nobody is going to pay me to enjoy. I guess we just keep letting the engineers work on it and work on it until it's so natural that a writer or a musician or painter can just step in and use it. But, I remain a little skeptical.

  I have a friend who's a fine artist and her medium is collage and we talk all the time on email. She lives in London. And when I got PhotoShop, I told her that "This is what you need for collaging because you can set the sucker up and you can make images out of the various elements of the collage and you can turn them into variables and just move them across a field and see what the thing would look like before you paste anything down." She was appalled at the idea of not taking the chance of cutting out the picture and glueing it down. I can sort of agree with her because I am a water-colorist and I know part of the charm of watercolor is the danger because you can't change it when you put it down. If you make a mistake, you just throw it away. With any kind of computer-aided art, you can always back up and if something goes wrong, you can try the state previous to it. This can be pretty neat, but it may be antagonistic to a certain kind of artistic sensibility and it may just require a new kind of artistic sensibility that is more fluid and more tentative.

  Benford: You know writing changed that way when we went from chiseling the stuff into stone and it's been a tough transition for some of us but we've done it. You can actually rewrite. So artistic change is inevitably driven by technology and there ain't no way out of that. I wonder if writing can really do much about the new medium. We can write short stories envisioning what might come, but there's so little you can do in the printed page that's truly avant-garde. Almost all of it has been done by somebody and basically almost all of it is a blind alley. What bothers me about interactive fiction is that people really want to be told a story and there's a hierarchical authority position in story-telling: I am telling the story. You are listening. You've even paid money for it. Sorry, too late, you've bought it, it's yours. Of course you don't have to read it. But people want to be told an authoritative story. They wish to be told how something came out and that's part of the suspension of disbelief. If you tell them, "Hey, this is all malleable! You can change all this at every step," it destroys some of the suspension of disbelief that is crucial to caring about the story. You've read a book. You know these people aren't real and yet you are indulging in an extra size of caring about them. This is a page turner; you are going to find out what happens next but you know it didn't happen. And that's an odd little trick that we have because story-telling is very important for us. You are taking a real risk if you tinker with that, and say at every turn "Oh, by the way , this is completely arbitrary, and remember you can change this as much as I can change it." I think that may be fatal to interactive media and that is one of the reasons that I've not done it.

  Haldeman: Or maybe interactive media is going to be something as different from reading as say surfing is different from reading; that is just a different way of amusing yourself. There was a fascinating book a few years ago, Arthur Shank's Tell me a Story. His convention was that we are hard-wired to be told stories and that almost any kind of heuristic process from algebra to learning how to play ball is done in a sort of a narrative way. Yes, there is always an authority, the person who knows what you have to know. And stories are entertaining because they present what is in essence a hard-wired survival mechanism in a non vital context. You exercise skills that you have to do well in order to succeed but while you are at a movie or reading a book, the outcome is not itself crucial to your development as a surviving or reproducing creature. Of course, we have had, in essence, hypertext stories since the nineteenth century when the Germans did it. If you want Grunwelt to win the fight, go to page 43 and if you want Herman to win the fight, go to page 44 and you keep branching the story like that. It's actually a fairly old trick but the fact that it's a fairly old trick and people don't do it indicates to me that it never has worked too well.

  Question: I have a question about interactive fiction. You talked about the narratives being central to interactive fiction. As I see it, interactive fiction allows you to be a world builder rather than a storyteller; that's something that science fiction writers excel at. Science fiction writers have always built interesting worlds and populated them with interesting things. Do you think that's more the role of the storyteller in interactive media?

  Haldeman: I tell you, quite seriously, a big difference is that science fiction writers get paid for doing it. If they allow the authority to build the world and tell the story leak out to the reader, then what are they getting paid for? They are essentially just building masters at that point.

  Benford: In fact, I just entered into a contract with an Internet firm called Hollyworlds. They are taking a novel of mine called Great Sky
River and building a game on it that is accessible by the Internet. They deployed the first level of it at Thanksgiving and you can dialup on the Internet and play this game involving all the sociology of this family on a planet where machines are of higher capabilities than humans and human beings are the rats in the walls and you are trying to stay alive. You can play it singly or in groups. You are a member of a family moving across a strange terrain and there are various kinds of creatures. All of the key ideas come from my novel, Great Sky River and they just wanted to use the background apparatus. You go in there and you write your own narrative by performing in it. About every month or two, they will add another layer as they develop more of it and it will become a more elaborate quest to find a certain thing and so forth. This is something that has never been done on the net before, at least not with a novel. Specifically it's an advertising vehicle. They are going to sell banner space on the side to Mitsubishi or somebody. I don't care, I just get ten percent, I don't care. I get ten percent of all gross revenues. So that's actually doing what you said and it's interactive not in the sense that you could go in and tinker with the basic mechanics but rather that you can act in that play; you can do things. You can convince all the members of the family you ought to go down in this valley rather than in that valley and you can change its outcome because you've been down there and you got killed, so you do it differently next time. And I suppose that's what you mean. Who knows, maybe it will fly, maybe not. I might even try to play it myself. I'll probably looooooose real big.

  Haldeman: They made a board game out of the Forever War. They gave me a copy of it and I couldn't figure it out. It was this huge thing and it must have had 250 pieces in it and you had to punch them all out and the manual was so poorly written you had to be a computer jerk to understand it. So I've never played it. It's still sitting there.

  Class Issues and Body Augmentation

  Question: I was wondering what impact personal augmentation would have on the divisions between social and economic classes in our society and if this is something that we as a society should be worried about.

  Haldeman: If there's going to be a financial division in the cyber universe, it is going to be in the nature of filters. I get so much email that I just ignore most of it and yet I still can take care of it in about ninety minutes a day. Ultimately I will have a machine that will discard all of the ones that are obvious crap and then it will feed that to another machine that find out the people I talk to most frequently and stacks them first and then if I have time, I get to the others. That's trivial. Probably there's a program out there now that would do it or hell, I could write one but I don't have time. It takes less time just to click through the mail. Ultimately, digital media is democratizing. I love the sight of these free terminals in public libraries and the ubiquity of net facilities in public schools at least in some school districts. Because it is a key to the universe, I mean you can ultimately download anything if you have the patience and the hunting skills to find it and that hasn't ever been true before. Because the thing that kept the hierarchy going in the medieval world and before that was the lack of information available to the lower classes. Only the upper classes learned how to read, let alone had access to the scrolls and manuscripts that had the information. Now you are born with access to information as a birthright.

  Benford: Yes, that's true. But every technology leaves somebody behind and not just the technophobes. There's still people using quill pens, you know somewhere. But it would be a small percentage, I hope. I think that technology will get so cheap that everybody will have the rudiments in the same sense that just about anybody can buy a newspaper now or can suck on the glass tit of the TV. TV sets are so cheap now that everybody has them and in fact they are the number one soporific of modern society. Where I part company with the Internet evangelicals is when they think that it will transform the world. Actually, I think most people will use it for trivial reasons. The rest of us will be watching public television.

  Haldeman: or hardcore pornography.

  The Responsibilities of the Science Fiction Writer

  Question: Does science fiction have a special responsibility to help us understand the consequences of information technology and if so, how can this be accomplished?

  Benford: Yes, SF, all fiction, has some responsibility to do some thinking about where the hell we are going it's just that most fiction isn't conditioned to do that. The mystery novel, the western, they typically don't tell us anything about technology, so it's more or less left up to SF. The problem is that cautionary tales are a bit limiting once you catch on to what they are cautioning you about. The best ones can really throw you a zinger or two and I like those kinds. There are so many obvious drawbacks to technology that we try to defend against but it's just a chimpanzee fascination, folks. We are just going to make this stuff. It's too sweet. You see the technical sweetness of the thing and you will build it. I mean, look, we built nuclear weapons and that's got obvious problems. On the other hand, the first half of this century was a slaughter house and the second half has been a golden age because you couldn't stop the nation states from slogging it out with each other by appealing to their higher interests or morality but you could sure scare them. Nobody realized that when we invented that thing. And that's the problem ó technology has huge effects on society. And who would have predicted that (in fact nobody did) nuclear bombs would simply scare the nation system so badly that they never use them, so far. Nobody guessed that.

  Haldeman: And nobody got the first moon landing right either. How many hundreds of stories about the first trip to the moon and nobody had it an essentially political act of misplaced or displaced aggression.

  The Science of Science Fiction

  Question: What role does contemporary scientific research play in your writing?

  Haldeman: It does make it harder to write. You can only read so much a day and most of the science that I read is on the general level: New Scientist, Scientific American. I can read technical things if I screw my brain really hard. I can read physics reviews letters and I can read the astrophysical journal, but I don't unless I absolutely have to find out something that only they have and medical journals are pretty easy to read if you have a little medical dictionary. But the point is there's so much information. How do you know what's important unless it's within a spitting distance of your own specialty?

  The students I have in this August institution (and I used the word institution advisedly); a lot of them don't know much about science outside of their required courses or their major. 40% of us are course 6, and course 6 people don't seem to know an awful lot about physics or chemistry because they don't have to and they have to learn so much else... course six is computer science and electrical engineering. It's where the money is. And I am even worse, because I don't have to learn anything about any science. I can write science fiction about totally bogus stuff so long as I know what not to write about. I wouldn't write bogus stuff about computers because half the people that pick up a science fiction magazine know more about computers than I do, so I just kind of tiptoe around that. I am also very careful about writing in the life sciences, because I know I can't keep up with that; it's going too fast. I can't even speak the language anymore, but I can write fairly straightforward stuff about physics, astronomy and astrophysics while I basically don't try to write about superstring theory. I don't want to write about things that other people can't understand anyhow. I am basically in the communication business, so most of my physics was actually written down before 1960. But if they actually had pulled a rug out of from under Newton and nobody has told me...? Newton still seems to describe the world that I live in.

  Benford: Well, that's because you don't drive as fast as I do.

  Haldeman: I don't drive. I ride a bicycle.

  Benford: I drive a Mercedes 560Sl and it can go 170miles an hour and v/c is still 10(-6) but still you can see the effect. The light gets redder as you run away from it.


  Haldeman: Does it make you live longer?

  Benford: It will seem longer. Indeed that's a very real problem. I have written about a lot of things like biology which has taken a hell of a lot of work, but luckily, my latest novel is actually about mostly papers written by Alan Guth here in your own physics department. And I got all the information by coming here on a sabbatical four years ago and talking to Alan Guth and taking him to dinner and reading all his papers. That's one way to do it, but it's always a challenge. The problem is that scientific culture is the true bloom of the twentieth century (not that it was that minor in the nineteenth) but it's an astonishingly complex structure and yet it's cultural implications and how it works and how scientists work in a society is largely uninspected in fiction.. And the fictional landscape just doesn't understand what's going on so you have lots of conventional novelists like Philip Roth. They don't have a clue what really happened in the 19th century or the 20th century without looking at the role of science. The science fiction writers are some of the few people who are trying to understand what the true drivers of our times were.

  Final Thoughts

  Jenkins: Do either of you have any final comments to make before we wind things down?

  Benford: I think it's striking that science fiction has captured the larger culture. The most popular films of all time are science fiction. Science fiction metaphors have invaded the ordinary speak of midtown America and yet the kernel of science fiction has not made it through; science fiction expresses a profound disquiet and yet enthusiasms for change. Science fiction is particularly well matched to the American mind. The American mind is not like that of the Europeans or the Asians or something. We have a different mindset, a different culture, and that's why modern science fiction is predominantly American. Even the most popular British writer, Arthur C. Clark, is really more American than the other British sci-fi writers. And yet I have this profound feeling that science fiction is being exported into mainstream culture and it's primary field is not getting through yet, and may never. The only way you can get people buy a science fictional landscape with all the virtues it has, life's interesting new things in it, is by getting them to go there as a part of a club or part of a family as a shared experience. And that's why Star Trek was inevitable. And that's why Star Wars is about basically Hans and you know, a bunch of other guys, or is it Han, yeah, I am not fan of any of those. But it's basically about three or four people who are close to each other and have this strange relationship and so forth. Star Trek is about a bunch of swell folks who go to the stars. You go to these movies and identify with people in there. It's a shared experience. We go to the stars and we are always safely ensconced in some support mechanism. Raw science fiction isn't like this.