The Tech Gonzo Diary

from Mundane-SF:

“Take the Third Star on the Left and on til Morning!” by Geoff Ryman

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Being a Mundane boils down to avoiding old tropes and sticking more closely to what science calls facts. We believe that for most of us, the future is here on Earth.

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I don�t believe in starships. At least not the starships that turn up so regularly in Star Trek, Star Wars, Battlestar Galactica, etc. The speed of the universe is c. Go faster than �c� and something catastrophic happens: mass becomes infinite. We have no idea what that means. It�s a mathematician�s way of saying something can�t happen.

Yet mass-market SF still dreams of faster-than-light travel, through such tropes as warp drives. The Physics of Star Trek by Laurence M Krauss calculates that warp drives would consume energy equivalent to whole galaxies. This is his way of saying something can�t happen without alienating the Star Trek fans who bought the book.

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The cost of transporting terra-forming equipment and material 20 light years is likely to be prohibitive. Terraforming Mars may be a better bet than traveling those vast distances to terraform a rocky, radioactive wilderness. Both efforts would take tens of thousand years. What human endeavor has lasted tens of thousands of years?

Well, agriculture has lasted that long; and the rearing of children along with language itself. Staying home on the farm and raising kids seems to be just the activities most SF dreams of escaping.

Since the same physical restrictions will apply to aliens, at least aliens made of matter, I don�t believe we are likely to meet aliens. We might be able to exchange some kind of messages with them at the speed of light. If we are picturing our future, it�s a safer bet to imagine one without Mr Spock or even versions of cuttlefish who communicate with shifting skin patterns.

For most of us whose descendants will not be among those specially selected interstellar crews, for our children, for humankind as whole, the future is here on Earth.

I realized that I didn�t believe in time travel either. We are part of the universe, embedded in it. If we travel in time, we have to take the universe with us. I don�t think that�s at all feasible number one, affordable number two and number three: if everything around us is going backwards or forwards in time with us, would we even notice? How could we tell? Oh yes, we go through one of those wormhole loops. That�s of real mathematical interest. You know my views on wormholes.

So a few kindred spirits drew up a list of things we didn�t believe in like telepathy. Have you ever experienced it?

Immortality? Suns die, galaxies die, the universe dies. Nothing is immortal outside of God�s heaven. We will all die one day. Leaving Earth won�t stop it.

Brain downloads: transferring something that has four switches (up and down in both directions) to a system works through binaries?

Partly Mundanity was also the result of asking: what�s worked best in the past? My favourite SF authors such as Philip K Dick, J G Ballard, Samuel Delaney or Walter Miller tended to avoid those particular tropes. For a while naming writers who could be considered Mundane was quite a hobby.

We felt as if SF had accumulated so many improbable ideas and relied on them so regularly, that it had disconnected from reality. The futures it was portraying were so unlikely as to be irrelevant, if not actually harmful.

Julian Todd, a British SF writer, pointed out the moral problems as well. If we keep telling ourselves that faster-than-light travel will whisk us to scores of new Earths, then we�d feel better about burning through this one.

In really bad SF, like the movie LOST IN SPACE, environmental catastrophe is almost wished upon us, to justify the cost of interstellar voyages. Why, why the continual desire to escape our beautiful planet?

My particular bugaboo was the cheat of having faster-than-light travel without any relativity effects from different time frames. Mass market SF, the SF that most ordinary people think of when you use the phrase, commercial and media SF want to pick and choose from science, using only those things that will grant us our wishes and dreams.

We want FTL interstellar travel with no more inconvenience than a tour of duty on an aircraft carrier. Mom can ring us up from 30,000 light years away to have a real-time conversation about why we haven�t married yet. She�s still alive when we get back home. Everything is recognizable, comfortable. In Star Trek, we get to the stars without having to change.

Mass market SF doesn�t imagine how different interstellar flight will make us. And I don�t mean the usual posthuman stuff. I mean different culturally. I mean getting back home to find 200 years have passed and that everything we loved and believed in is gone. Yes, some SF has done just that, notably The Forever War. So why isn�t the space pilot coming back from the distant past an SF stereotype? Answer: because that�s not what the SF wants.

Big SF, the stuff that sells hugely or is found in movies, is not really about the future; we know that. It�s also not about the present, though that�s our excuse when people point out that SF couldn�t predict its way of a public restroom. SF, especially mainstream commercial SF, copies the past onto the future, to make it comfortably entertaining. The future will be just like the more exciting parts of the past only with better toys. Perhaps that�s because so many people now fear the future, rather than welcome it as a wonderland of possibility.

So I wrote a jokey Mundane Manifesto. It said let�s play this serious game. Let�s agree: no FTL, no FTL communications, no time travel, no aliens in the flesh, no immortality, no telepathy, no parallel universe, no magic wands. Let�s see if something new comes out of it.

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This January I read the introduction to The Human Condition by Hannah Arendt. Written at the moment of Sputnik, Arendt was struck that mainstream newspapers said what science fiction had been saying: mankind was now free from Earth.

Science fiction is worth regarding she says, because it is a vehicle for mass dreams and desires. In essence it is a dream of escaping being human. We want to leave Earth, a free gift that gives us life, and substitute artificial environments that we have made. We wish to escape old means of reproduction. We wish to escape death. We want to become post-human.

"This future man... seems to be possessed by a rebellion against human existence
as it has been given, a free gift from nowhere (secularly speaking), which he
wishes to exchange for something he has made himself."

Fifty years after she wrote that, these themes are still with us. Indeed they have been with us from the beginning, and the beginning is Frankenstein in 1818. Science Fiction predates Darwin, has survived Marx and Freud and outlasted modernism and post-modernism. That mass dream it fulfils is no temporary fancy. That dream runs deep.

The dream only cares about seeing its wishes fulfilled. That explains why old, tired, improbabilities survive as SF regulars, while the storytelling innovations of The Forever War have not become genre stand-bys. Only those slim possibilities that help fulfil the dream survive to be re-used: wormholes, warp drives. Because the aim is NOT to write about a real future.

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A real future will have an everyday life and a home just as domestic as the one the dream needs to leave. So it does not dream of a real future.

I think the sources of the SF dream are not culturally specific. I think they are psychological, perhaps even ultimately biological. That explains the incredible endurance of SF for rising 200 years. I suspect that the dream has something to do with how we as an animal are cared for, the length of time we are dependent, the length of time our parents must love us and have power over us. In other species, parents initiate the process of separation, pushing the fledglings out. In human beings, that process is initiated by the cubs. In order to leave adolescents become angry and resentful, and initiate the separation themselves.

The SF dream recapitulates this. I believe it�s a kind of extension of somewhat undifferentiated drive to leave home, and escape into adventure. The dream therefore belongs essentially to childhood and to early adolescence.

The drive to write and read big-market SF is not much different from the drive to write and read Peter Pan. You never grow up. You fly by magic away from home to Never-neverland. (Take the third star on the left.) It�s full of mermaids, pirates and native peoples, just like Star Trek. Something really weird is going on around the whole idea of mother and Wendy.

I like Peter Pan. I like watching mass market SF. It�s a holiday from being an adult. The fantasies that fulfill the dream may show us wonders, but they are very repetitive, stereotyped wonders. Less to do with real innovation and more to do with a sense of comfort.

To sum up, what I realised reading Arendt was this: I am a Mundane because I don�t share the dream.

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What, I want to ask, is so un-wonderful about Earth? What is so unexciting about our future here? Disaster, innovation, climate change and virtual reality, understanding of our DNA, biocomputers that evolve.

Will cramped, smelly spaceships full of people who have been trapped with each other for twenty years, with terrible food, no light, drugs and entertainment only so long the computers hold out, is that really the most exciting thing we can imagine?

There is a case for saying that our distraction with outer space meant SF missed the information revolution until it was past tense. It had already happened and was on the street when we started to write about it. What are missing now?

What is so useful about dreaming things that are unlikely to happen? Have you not noticed that we are NOT going into outer space? In the Star Trek universe, the Federation has already been founded for nine years.

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I dream of a future here on Earth, a future that I hope continues to get better in some ways. We so face many unpleasant and pressing issues for which there will be no cheap, quick easy fixes. I enjoy reading books like Forty Days of Rain that look at these near future challenges. I�m not sure that democracies are equipped to survive this future either.

Mundanity is not just about a near future, but also a far future, one in which there are new wonders to take the place of the old ones. I dream of a future in which things really change. Post-human, possibly, if we do succeed in controlling our own evolution. These new humans won�t be us, and not because they have extra limbs or can photosynthesize. They will not be us because they value different things, speak differently, think differently, and respond differently in emergencies. They will be the end of everything we love and believe in. And the change will keep on going.

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Nothing in our human culture is more adult than science. It doubts and tests our lies, half truths, fond hopes, and unsorted dreams by testing its hypotheses. Science could be working hand in hand with fiction to deliver the greatest possible literature.

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I�ve spoken a bit about the dream that underlies SF as being essentially adolescent. But there is one aspect of the dream I�ve left out. Surely the urge to leave home and escape everyday life finally ends with the child making a home of its own and becoming adult. There is room in the SF dream for growing up, accepting the mundane. That�s the part of the dream my fiction will try to fulfill.

It�s never too late to grow up.

– some interesting stuff in there… definite food for thought.

I discovered JunkDNA when Warren linked to his microfiction writings on Twitter .

He describes his work thusly on his MySpace profile:

I’m a short story author. I scritch-scratch in a little known genre called BIZARRO (twisted fiction). It is heavily poisoned with cyberpunk, hardboiled, and/or noir elements. I like it like that.

As the genre is described at wikipedia:

Bizarro is described as “literature’s equivalent to the cult section at the video store” and a genre that “strives not only to be strange, but fascinating, thought-provoking, and, above all, fun to read.”

Which is fair description of JunkDNA’s writing. Racey – and not for the faint of heart or easily offended.

Writing for the Twitter audience, each sentence delivers a vivid scene.
Very vivid usually. Often combining sex, gore, horror and scifi elements in one or two sentences. Just the way to make an impact in 140 characters or less.

After commenting on his MySpace blog, I won a copy of his latest release, Media Whores – a tale of pr0n and zombies in a post-post apocalyptic Japan. I’ve elected to quote one his funnier passages, that had me lol’ing on the train this arvo:

“They move surprisingly well for being jerkied peeps.”

“Cloud-seed based basting”, Kurara thrusts her chin at the sky. “Seals the flavor in. Keeps them juicy.”

“And whats keeping them back?”

“Music barrier. Geosync radio station beams down a hideous rain of directional boy-bop pop.”

I grimace as a bad taste like someone’s unwashed fundoshi coats my brain in a long lost and best-forgotten cultural meme.

“Wasn�t that genre outlawed?” I cock her a look.

“Along with breast over-augmentation, tabloid magazines, and SMS-based microblogging. As weapons of mass distraction.”

JunkDNA’s just started Twitter’ing his latest work, Bukkake Brawl. It’s already gotten pretty hardcore – and he’s said he’s just warming up. If you’re Twitter shy, he also does daily digests on his MySpace blog.

Keep those mass-distractions coming man!

Man, i love William Gibson’s writing. I can even deal with the 4 -5 year wait for a new one we get these days.
And with Spook Country he’s as on the money as ever.

It’s always the first third I love the most. Wherein he sets up his universe of characters, technologies, corporations etc.

Maybe it’s too much lately thinking about things steampunk, but I kept thinking Gibson was writing about some alternate-present.

Just like Pattern Recognition – the world he paints is very much of the now and makes use of the present’s technology. But it’s a different, cooler world his character’s live in. Just as P.R’s F:F:F could have existed ~2000 (but did largely inspire the creation of ARG‘s).. so could his locative-art scene been all the rage of 2006. I wonder what it will inspire…

Probably something everting – like in this clip:

Proof of Gibson’s thesis that it’s art and the military that find the uses of new tech.

By writing about the recent past, Gibson also avoids the dangers inherent in trying to predict the future. As the InternetJesus said, on Doktor Sleepless:

I had to rewrite some stuff from the first issue because the present overtook my fiction — my friend Josie Nutter bought a device that allowed her to radio-tag objects. A year earlier, Bruce Sterling had talked about a future where you Google for the location of your shoes in the morning. Today, Josie dials them up on a handset instead. And I had to throw out a page. Hell, I should still lose the page where diagnostic RFIDs are swallowed for medical work, since that’s being prototyped now.

Think i’m gonna re-read P.R. now. Or atleast, the first third…

I linked to Gibson’s interview on Trashotron earlier…

This is my fave quote – where he talks about living in a SF world.

He elaborates on this in his recent interview with the BoingBoing crew.

All this of course is in support of his new novel, Spook Country. Which is due to arrive on my doorstop this very day. /cross-fingers

from College Crier:

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T. Virgil Parker: Your early Sci-Fi commented obliquely on contemporary issues, but it gave you a very unique set of strategies that you’re using to explicate the present.

William Gibson: Well, I don’t actually think they’re unique because I acquired them through the course of working in the genre of science-fiction, but I also acquired a conviction that what they’re actually good for, maybe the only thing that they’re really good for, is trying to get a handle on our sort of increasingly confused and confusing present.

TVP: Do you think that from your perspective, reality caught up to science fiction in certain ways? Just by creating so surreal a contemporary landscape that it parallels Sci-Fi?

WG: Well, in a sense, although I think when I started, one of the assumptions that I had was that science fiction is necessarily always about the day in which it was written. And that was my conviction from having read a lot of old science fiction. 19th century science fiction obviously expresses all of the concerns and the neuroses of the 19th century and science fiction from the 1940′s is the 1940′s. George Orwell’s 1984 is really 1948, the year in which he wrote it. It can’t be about the future. It’s about where the person who wrote it thought their present was, because you can’t envision a future without having some sort of conviction, whether you express it or not in the text, about where your present is.

I also started with the assumption that all fiction is speculative. That all fiction is an attempt to make a model of reality and any model of reality is necessarily speculative because it’s generated by an individual writer. It can’t be absolute. Fiction is never reality. I know I had those ideas to handle when I started writing because I was an English major and I was studying things like Comparative Literary Criticism. I came into it with a kind of mild, post-modern spin, and I think I was a little more self-conscious about what I was doing than someone who would have started writing science fiction forty years before. I think that as I’ve gone along, somehow that’s all geared up with the result that I now find myself writing speculative fiction about last February, rather than the middle of the coming century.

There’s a character in my previous novel, Pattern Recognition , who argues that we can’t culturally have futures the way that we used to have futures because we don’t have a present in the sense that we used to have a present. Things are moving too quickly for us to have a present to stand on from which we can say, “oh, the future, it’s over there and it looks like this.”

TVP: The present is contingent upon a kind of objectivity that no longer exists.

WG: Yeah, exactly.

TVP: But having said that, isn’t it a bit uncanny that all of the dystopian texts of science-fiction appear to be aiming at the present that we’re experiencing right now?

WG: Well, I would find that spookier if I had been believing all along that those sort of dystopian themes in science fiction were about some sort of vision of the future. I think they were actually like being perceived in the past when that stuff was being written. 1984 is a powerful book precisely because Orwell didn’t have to make a lot of shit up. He had Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union under Stalin as models for what he was doing. He only had to dress it up a little bit, sort of pile it up in a certain way to say, “this is the future.” But the reason it’s powerful is that it resonates of history. It doesn’t resonate back from the future, it resonates out of modern history. And the power with which it resonates is directly contingent on the sort of point-for-point mimesis, like sort of point-for-point realism, in terms of what we know happened.

TVP: With that in mind, is it harder for you to write about the present, as the present?

WG: Yeah, it actually is. There are ways in which I find it a lot more demanding. It makes it harder to make shit up. If I get to something like what in Hollywood they call a “story point,” something that’s not working, like a plot point that’s not working for me. When I was writing a novel like Count Zero I would just invent some other level of imaginary technology or invent some part of the back story of my future history that would account for me having a way to scoot past that bit of illogic in the story. I hope I didn’t do that too much when I was doing that, but it’s just something you can do when you’re writing about an imaginary future. When you’re writing about a present, whether it’s imaginary or not, and there’s some major imaginary elements in Spook Country , the rules are different. It isn’t the same. I have to come up with something that allows me to suspend my disbelief in my fantastic narrative and which I hope will allow the reader to suspend their disbelief. So actually, it is more work. It requires a different sort of examination of my own sense of the world outside myself.

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TVP: The freaky thing about what you’re doing now, to me, is that you’re using metaphors that help to reveal things that are going on now. We kind of live in an era where people should be hysterical, but aren’t.

WG: Yeah.

TVP: And I think it’s because they’re not imagining what is going on. I think they’re just getting bits of data.

WG: Yeah, I know what you mean, I think that we have a way of living in the past, I think that our sense of reality, at any given time, particularly in the modern era, lags behind our sense of what’s really going on. I think that we need that in order to function, in order to be comfortable in our own skin. I doubt that need even existed before, although it may well have been. The fourteenth century was not an easy time, either. Humanity has gone through some very strange, strange periods and I think that we’re going through a very strange one now. A decade ago I was saying that we live sort of back from the moment, we live well back from the windshield of the present moment as it’s encountering the wind of the future. I said then that occasionally you would turn on the television and have what my friend Bruce Sterling called a “CNN moment,” and in that moment we would be really in the present moment. And it would be like the Frederick Jamison experience, you know? Simultaneously we would be like over the moon about it and scared shitless and experiencing extreme vertigo, but then we would snap back into that position that we always have. After 9/11 I’m not sure if we have that anymore. For me, 9/11 sort of blew that particular metaphor of mind out of the water. But that may be because it literally changed something. I don’t know now what would constitute a “CNN moment.” I seems like a dated term.

TVP: That’s because every moment is a CNN moment?.

WG: Now, what constitutes a “YouTube moment.” You know, something has changed.

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TVP: I think you’ve used metaphysics at times in the same way that you use cyberspace as a medium to explore narrative.

WG: At some point it become apparent to me that if I became too carried away with ideas of technological novelty, all I needed to do was look at the history of metaphysics to sort of get that back into perspective. I think that’s sort of another semi-conscious technique of mine. Like if I get too wrapped up in virtual reality I sort of go to, like, “what would the 14 th century have made of this?” Would it have wowed them the way it wows us? And often the answer is no. They had their own stuff going on.

TVP: You don’t see people really embrace as much as they do adapt .

WG: Yeah, most people just adapt.

TVP: Celebrity is essential to a lot your novels. Where do you think that comes from?

WG: It comes from a sense of that being so much of what we do , or so much what we did . I think we’ve gone into another stage of that in the last ten or fifteen years. Back in the early 80′s when I started writing, one of the things I noticed was that we were making increasingly less of the tennis shoes and automobiles. But what we were really doing was outsourcing the manufacturing of that stuff. What we really were doing was making celebrities. And that was like “the biz,” it was what this culture could do.

TVP: In a way that’s happening on a whole different level now. I mean almost self-generated.

WG: Yeah, well, I’m not sure where it is now. I sort of suggested, in Virtual Light , there’s that show “Cops in Trouble,” which was, when Virtual Light was published, quite funny. It wouldn’t be the same for like fifteen-year-olds reading that, they would just go “okay.” It’s like kind of beyond, the irony has evaporated. It doesn’t have the kick it had when the book was published because we’ve gone so much further than that. I mean the evil celebrity-destroying show Slitscan in Virtual Light just seems like, you know, it’s all here now.

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