IGMS - Issue 17

by IGMS

  SCHWEITZER: Now, Gore Vidal in his novel Messiah solved this problem very quickly. He wrote about the creation of a new religion, but got his messiah out of the picture quickly, then wrote about all the quarrelling disciples. So what you do is write about the other people reacting to the genius, rather than about the genius.

  Di FILIPPO: The thing about the Singularity is not to say that it is the only feature of the future universe. Say it comes into being locally, on a planet or in space, or whatever. There is still the rest of the universe to write about. The Singularity can be something like a black hole. It can be something that every other character, the rest of the universe has not ramped up to yet, so they are viewing the Singularity from the outside. Plotwise it can figure either negligibly or to a large degree, depending on your needs. So the Singularity can almost function like an astronomical black hole. It's there. You can't get at it. It has an effect if you get too close, but you can tell stories around it, at a distance.

  SCHWEITZER: To bring up Star Trek again for a second, aren't the Borg the people who have passed the Singularity?

  Di FILIPPO: There you go. [Laughs.] The Borg are probably not the model we want for ourselves. Or you could always deny it. The Singularity is just a theory. It's not a law of the universe. It's a theory with some justification behind it, or some line of logic behind it, so you could always deny the Singularity and say it's not possible and that human consciousness or machine consciousness will never reach these dimensions so that they become unfathomable.

  SCHWEITZER: Or it may that once it happens everyone will take it for granted. One of the great science fiction stories on this subject is "The Shape of Things That Came" by Richard Deming. Have you ever read it?

  Di FILIPPO: No.

  SCHWEITZER: Most of us when we were kids got a two-volume Groff Conklin set from the Book Club, A Treasury of Great Science Fiction.

  Di FILIPPO: Yeah, of course.

  SCHWEITZER: In that there is a quite short story, first published in 1951, about a man from Victorian times who invents the "time-nightshirt" and goes to see the future, then returns to his own time and writes about 1950, where they have cars and airplanes and telephones, and so on. His editor back in 1890 says, "This is very imaginative and wonderful extrapolation, but what I can't believe is that anyone would ever take these things for granted."

  Di FILIPPO: That's wonderful. We are living, as a lot of people have noticed, in a science fiction world. It has crept up on us. It hasn't assumed the full dimensions of jet packs and food pills and so on that was present in a lot of Golden Age SF, but like the frog in boiling water, we have succumbed to this future without quite realizing that it is a science-fictional future. Try explaining much of what we take for granted to someone from, even, 1960. I think they would just look at you as if you were insane. It's an ongoing process. We are inventing the future day-by-day, and assimilating it almost as quickly, I think.

  SCHWEITZER: You ask a sixteen-year-old to explain to someone who is fifty what that little thing they're operating with their thumbs is.

  Di FILIPPO: This brings up another whole point, which Charles Stross has brought up on his blog. He did a post about the impossibility or near-impossibility of writing short-term future SF. That is what he is currently working on. He is working on a sequel to his novel Halting State. That was near-future SF. It took place like, whenever - five, seven, twelve years into the future, and involved theft of virtual currency. That was the McGuffin at the heart of it. There was this gaming world like Second Life and someone broke into the virtual bank and stole the virtual money. The straight cops who had no idea what this was all about and were just baffled. Is this a real crime? Can we prosecute? How do we go about solving it? So within months of the publication of Halting State, that actually happened. There have been several robberies of virtual banks. So Charles Stross said, "Well, my novel was outmoded six months after it came out. Now I've got to write the sequel, and I am just stumped, because two weeks later I am still in the middle of the novel and the thing put in chapter one has come true." So he had an interesting post about this, which you can easily find if you go to his blog, claiming that the pace of change is accelerating so fast that it makes it very hard for the SF writer who wants to deal realistically with current trends. It is impossible to stay abreast of it, given the year-long cycle of manuscript to published book.

  SCHWEITZER: This is not a new thing. Some books just ride past that sort of problem without any difficulty. The example that comes to my mind is Tom Disch's Camp Concentration which is set in 1975. It was published first serially in 1967, but certainly by the time most people had read the book it was "obsolete." I don't think this slowed it down much.

  Di FILIPPO: Well great art will hold up, for sheer narrative value. That is why we still can read with pleasure the Golden Age SF which has been superseded. We read about some hypothetical Moon-landing, and we know it doesn't match reality, but we still enjoy the story for the sake of story. Think of the Hal Clement story, "Dust," in which the moondust sticks to the visor. We know that didn't happen, but it's still a suspenseful and intriguing puzzle story.

  So, yeah, great works of art still give us pleasure on many levels even if their predictive elements have fallen short. Charlie may be angsting a little too much, because, as you say, it has always been an issue. I always remember that great anecdote about the Asimov story, in which the reason that mankind could never get to the top of Mt. Everest is that there was an alien base on top. The story saw print in a magazine the same month that Hilary reached the summit of Mt. Everest, so Isaac said that he was very disappointed that his timing had been off on that one.

  SCHWEITZER: It could have been worse. It could have been printed a month later. But today we'd say it was all part of a conspiracy cover-up. But we approach a serious subject here. All this stuff about the Singularity and the inability to cope with the near future is turning into a consensus in science fiction, and if we have a consensus about what the future is going to be like, it might be science fiction that comes grinding to a halt. So maybe the task of the writer is to subvert the whole thing.

  Di FILIPPO: That's a very important point, Darrell. Any consensus should be distrusted. It's like that bumper-sticker, SUBVERT THE DOMINANT PARADIGM. What was that French critic, who back in the '60s and '70s argued that science fiction was wasting its energies writing all these separate futures and we needed to get together and establish a consensus future? It was Jacques Sadoul . . .?

  SCHWEITZER: Someone brought up that idea in American fandom in the 1940s and it was very sensibly laughed down.

  Di FILIPPO: Yeah, so that notion that science fiction could be made much stronger and do a better job if it narrowed its options seems to me insane. What you want is to let a thousand flowers bloom. That's the whole point of science fiction, that the alternatives that it can propose are endless and boundless, so you get that hybrid vigor as the different scenarios interfertilize. If you narrow it down to where, yes, the Singularity must occur and I have to acknowledge it in my fiction, you're right. It's a lack of diversity of possibility.

  SCHWEITZER: Given the infinite number of possibilities, why do so many science fiction writers of late seem to be shying away from the future? Some have suggested that the whole alternate history thing is simply a way to avoid writing about the future.

  Di FILIPPO: That is a major defect in the current marketplace, or the marketplace of ideas, maybe. The old style - let's use Heinlein as the main exponent of it - that old Heinlein style of SF has disappeared. I think writers succumb to despair and they are absorbing the cultural malaise that we're in, and that should not be their job, I think that especially in science fiction we need to be a counterforce to counterbalance the gloom and doom and cultural malaise that's out there. But you know what it is. . . . There is probably a term for this in philosophy, or in physics for all I know. This has always struck me. The universe has a very narrow set of conditions for most things to go right, whereas the
conditions for things to go wrong are almost infinite. If you have a teacup, there is basically only one way to keep it safe on the shelf. There are a million ways for it to get broken. That unfortunately is the way the universe is set up. I often think about the multiplier effect of this too. You take that fellow who violated airport terminal security in New York. It was the young Asian man who wanted to say goodbye to his girlfriend, and so he ducked under the security rope. Now his little action of ducking under that security rope shut down the terminal. It has a multi-million-dollar consequence, and it impacted the lives of literally thousands of people. What simple action could you or I take which would have a beneficial effect of that nature? How could we duck under a rope and instantly add millions of dollars to the Gross National Product and benefit the lives of thousands of people? It's just not possible. The universe is a perverse entity where simple actions can cause tremendous damage, but the same simple actions generally cannot cause tremendous benefit.

  This is a long, round-about way of saying that it is always easier to envision the gloom-and-doom scenario when you are sitting down to write the story than it is to envision the positive one. I think that is a natural human failing which explains why dystopias are easier to write.

  SCHWEITZER: If you could figure out, even satirically, what that beneficial action would be, you'd have a great story.

  Di FILIPPO: There's one little story that I think about. It's a Mack Reynolds story called "Depression or Bust." [Published in Analog August 1967 - DS]. I think of it in the current economic conditions too, because it's very relevant. We follow Joe Q. Public. He's coming home from his job. He looks at a display of televisions in the store, and he says, "My television is on the way out. I'd like to buy a new one, but I didn't get that raise, so I'm not going to buy the television." Then it cuts from him to the store owner, who says, "Gee, I didn't sell twelve televisions this month. I only sold eight. I've got to lay off a worker." Then Mack Reynolds builds this cascade where, by the time it is done, the economy is in shambles. There's a world-wide depression. So all the scientists and politicians get together and say, "What the hell caused this depression? We were humming along great." That track it back to the man who didn't buy the TV. They go to his house. They give him $200 and say, "Go buy yourself a new TV." Then it cascades in the reverse direction and all of the sudden the global economy is humming again. So, yeah, you wonder, are there hidden tai chi pressure points in the world. You're right, it would be a wonderful story, and it might be more fantasy than science fiction, though you could put a science-fictional spin on it, where someone discovers psychohistory only it's not psychohistory. You'd have to come up with some great scientific term for it. But someone discovers the pressure points of the universe. It you can touch it just right, something great happens.

  SCHWEITZER: You write it.

  Di FILIPPO: I think I will. You've inspired me.

  SCHWEITZER: I guess we should talk about what you are writing now or about to publish.

  Di FILIPPO: I have two books coming out from PS Publishing, Pete Crowther's wonderful UK small press. They're coming out this year. The first one is called Roadside Bodhisattva, and it's a totally mimetic, naturalistic novel. I am very proud to have him publish it. He's done a little straight crime stuff with Ed Gorman's books, but he doesn't do mimetic novels, so I have a feeling that he liked this one and thought it was worth doing. I've written a couple of previous novels which have contemporary settings, but the events are so absurd and surrealistic that even though there's nothing supernatural of fantastical, to me they always read like fantasies. This earlier books are Joe's Liver and Spondulix. The events were over-the-top and outrageous and postmodern. But I wanted to sit down and see if I could actually meet the goal that everybody tells us is so great, and write a literary novel. It's not super-literary, Thomas Pynchon or anything. But I wanted to try to write a strictly naturalistic novel, and I think I did a pretty good job. But it did feel like having one hand continuously tied behind my back. Every time I had an impulse to put something fantastical on the page, I had to stop myself.

  So that's coming out, and the second book from Pete's firm is my sequel to A Year in the Linear City. That's one of my best-received books. It got onto a couple award ballots and people have been asking me for a sequel for a long time. I kind of resisted, because I don't do sequels, in general. But I finally got a way to wrap my mind around doing a sequel. So this one is called A Princess of the Linear Jungle. It's kind of Burroughsian, which I think might appeal to a lot of readers, but at the same time it's a kind of New Weird, science-fictional mishmash that I hope will take off.

  Those two are coming out, and I've a picked up a novel that I'd put aside called Up Around the Bend. It's named after that great Creedance Clearwater Revival song. It's kind of a post-apocalyptic thing, but with a lot of surreal, timeslip elements in it. That's pretty much my major project right now.

  SCHWEITZER: Thanks very much, Paul.

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