CATSCAN by Bruce Sterling

CATSCAN by Bruce Sterling
Essays originally printed
in Steve Brown's _SF Eye_

Science Fiction Eye, a genre literary-critical magazine edited and published
by Stephen P. Brown, is available from PO Box 18539, Asheville NC 28814.
Subscription rates are $10 for 3 issues in the USA, $15 elsewhere. "Catscan"
is a regular column appearing in SF Eye.

CATSCAN 1: "Midnight on the Rue Jules Verne"
CATSCAN 2: "The Spearhead of Cognition"
CATSCAN 3: "Updike's Version"
CATSCAN 4: "The Agberg Ideology"
CATSCAN 5: "Slipstream"
CATSCAN 6: "Shinkansen"
CATSCAN 7: "My Rihla"
CATSCAN 8: "Cyber-Superstition"
CATSCAN 9: "Digital Dolphins in the Dance of Biz"
CATSCAN 10: "A Statement of Principle"

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Bruce Sterling
[email protected]
CATSCAN 2 "The Spearhead of Cognition"

You're a kid from some podunk burg in Alabama.

From childhood you've been gnawed by vague numinous sensations and a moody sense
of your own potential, but you've never pinned it down.

Then one joyful day you discover the work of a couple of writers. They're pretty
well-known (for foreigners), so their books are available even in your little
town. Their names are "Tolstoy" and "Dostoevsky." Reading them, you realize:
This is it! It's the sign you've been waiting for! This is your destiny-- to
become a *Russian Novelist*!

Fired with inspiration, you study the pair of 'em up and down, till you figure
you've got a solid grasp of what they're up to. You hear they're pretty
well-known back in Russia, but to your confident eye they don't seem like so
much. (Luckily, thanks to some stunt of genetics, you happen to be a genius.)
For you, following their outline seems simple enough--in a more sophisticated
vein, of course, and for a modern audience. So you write a few such books, you
publish 'em, and people adore them. The folks in 'Bama are fit to bust with
pride, and say you've got Tolstoy beat all hollow.

Then, after years of steadily growing success, strange mail arrives. It's from
Russia! They've been reading your stuff in translation, and you've been chosen
to join the Soviet Writers' Union! Swell! you think. Of course, living in
backwoods Alabama, it's been a little tough finding editions of contemporary
Russian novelists. But heck, Tolstoy did his writing years ago! By now those
Russians must be writing like nobody's business!

Then a shipment of modern Russian novels arrives, a scattering of various stuff
that has managed to elude the redtape. You open 'em up and-- ohmiGod! It's . . .
it's COMMUNISM! All this stupid stereotyped garbage! About Red heroes ten feet
tall, and sturdy peasants cheering about their tractors, and mothers giving sons
to the Fatherland, and fathers giving sons to the Motherland . . . Swallowing
bile, you pore through a few more at random--oh God, it's awful.

Then the _Literary Gazette_ calls from Moscow, and asks if you'd like to make a
few comments about the work of your new comrades. "Why sure!" you drawl
helpfully. "It's clear as beer-piss that y'all have gotten onto the wrong track
entirely! This isn't literature--this is just a lot of repetitive agitprop crap,
dictated by your stupid oppressive publishers! If Tolstoy was alive today, he'd
kick your numb Marxist butts! All this lame bullshit about commie heroes
storming Berlin and workers breaking production records--those are stupid
power-fantasies that wouldn't fool a ten-year-old! You wanna know the true
modern potential of Russian novels? Read some of my stuff, if you can do it
without your lips moving! Then call me back."

And sure enough, they do call you back. But gosh--some of the hardliners in the
Writers' Union have gone and drummed you out of the regiment. Called you all
kinds of names . . . said you're stuck-up, a tool of capitalism, a no-talent
running-dog egghead. After that, you go right on writing, even criticism,
sometimes. Of course, after that you start to get MEAN.

This really happened.

Except that it wasn't Tolstoy and Dostoevsky. It was H.G. Wells and Olaf
Stapledon. It wasn't Russian novels, it was science fiction, and the Writers'
Union was really the SFWA. And Alabama was Poland.

And you were Stanislaw Lem.

Lem was surgically excised from the bosom of American SF back in 1976. Since
then plenty of other writers have quit SFWA, but those flung out for the crime
of being a commie rat-bastard have remained remarkably few. Lem, of course, has
continued to garner widespread acclaim, much of it from hifalutin' mainstream
critics who would not be caught dead in a bookstore's skiffy section. Recently a
collection of Lem's critical essays, _Macroworlds_, has appeared in paperback.
For those of us not privy to the squabble these essays caused in the '70s, it
makes some eye- opening reading.

Lem compares himself to Crusoe, stating (accurately) that he had to erect his
entire structure of "science fiction" essentially from scratch. He did have the
ancient shipwrecked hulls of Wells and Stapledon at hand, but he raided them for
tools years ago. (We owe the collected essays to the beachcombing of his Man
Friday, Austrian critic Franz Rottensteiner.)

These essays are the work of a lonely man. We can judge the fervor of Lem's
attempt to reach out by a piece like "On the Structural Analysis of Science
Fiction:" a Pole, writing in German, to an Austrian, about French semantic
theory. The mind reels. After this superhuman effort to communicate, you'd think
the folks would cut Lem some slack--from pure human pity, if nothing else.

But Lem's ideology--both political and literary- -is simply too threatening. The
stuff Lem calls science fiction looks a bit like American SF--about the way a
dolphin looks like a mosasaur. A certain amount of competitive gnawing and
thrashing was inevitable. The water roiled ten years ago, and the judgement of
evolution is still out. The smart money might be on Lem. The smarter money yet,
on some judicious hybridization. In any case we would do well to try to
understand him.

Lem shows little interest in "fiction" per se. He's interested in science: the
structure of the world. A brief autobiographical piece, "Reflections on My
Life," makes it clear that Lem has been this way from the beginning. The
sparkplug of his literary career was not fiction, but his father's medical
texts: to little Stanislaw, a magic world of skeletons and severed brains and
colorful pickled guts. Lem's earliest "writings," in high school, were not
"stories," but an elaborate series of imaginary forged documents: "certificates,
passports, diplomas . . . coded proofs and cryptograms . . ."

For Lem, science fiction is a documented form of thought-experiment: a spearhead
of cognition.

All else is secondary, and it is this singleness of aim that gives his work its
driving power. This is truly "a literature of ideas," dismissing the heart as
trivial, but piercing the skull like an ice-pick.

Given his predilections, Lem would probably never have written "people stories."
But his rationale for avoiding this is astounding. The mass slaughters during
the Nazi occupation of Poland, Lem says, drove him to the literary depiction of
humanity as a species. "Those days have pulverized and exploded all narrative
conventions that had previously been used in literature. The unfathomable
futility of human life under the sway of mass murder cannot be conveyed by
literary techniques in which individuals or small groups of persons form the
core of the narrative."

A horrifying statement, and one that people in happier countries would do well
to ponder. The implications of this literary conviction are, of course, extreme.
Lem's work is marked by unflinching extremities. He fights through ideas with
all the convulsive drive of a drowning man fighting for air. Story structure,
plot, human values, characterization, dramatic tension, all are ruthlessly
trudgeon-kicked aside.

In criticism, however, Lem has his breath, and can examine the trampled flotsam
with a cynical eye. American SF, he says, is hopelessly compromised, because its
narrative structure is trash: detective stories, pulp thrillers, fairy-tales,
bastardized myths. Such outworn and kitschy devices are totally unsuited to the
majestic scale of science fiction's natural thematics, and reduce it to the
cheap tricks of a vaudeville conjurer.

Lem holds this in contempt, for he is not a man to find entertainment in
sideshow magic. Stanislaw Lem is not a good-time guy. Oddly, for a science
fiction writer, he seems to have very little interest in the intrinsically
weird. He shows no natural appetite for the arcane, the offbeat, the outre.. He
is colorblind to fantasy. This leads him to dismiss much of the work of Borges,
for example. Lem claims that "Borges' best stories are constructed as tightly as
mathematical proofs." This is a tautology of taste, for, to Lem, mathematical
proofs are the conditions to which the "best" stories must necessarily aspire.

In a footnote to the Borges essay Lem makes the odd claim that "As soon as
nobody assents to it, a philosophy becomes automatically fantastic literature."
Lem's literature *is* philosophy; to veer from the path of reason for the sake
of mere sensation is fraudulent.

American SF, therefore, is a tissue of frauds, and its practicioners fools at
best, but mostly snake- oil salesmen. Lem's stern puritanism, however, leaves
him at sea when it comes to the work of Philip K. Dick: "A Visionary Among the
Charlatans." Lem's mind was clearly blown by reading Dick, and he struggles to
find some underlying weltanschauung that would reduce Dick's ontological raving
to a coherent floor-plan. It's a doomed effort, full of condescension and
confusion, like a ballet-master analyzing James Brown.

Fiction is written to charm, to entertain, to enlighten, to convey cultural
values, to analyze life and manners and morals and the nature of the human
heart. The stuff Stanislaw Lem writes, however, is created to burn mental holes
with pitiless coherent light. How can one do this and still produce a product
resembling "literature?" Lem tried novels. Novels, alas, look odd without
genuine characters in them. Then he hit on it: a stroke of genius.

The collections _A Perfect Vacuum_ and _Imaginary Magnitudes_ are Lem's
masterworks. The first contains book reviews, the second, introductions to
various learned tomes. The "books" discussed or reviewed do not actually exist,
and have archly humorous titles, like "Necrobes" by "Cezary Strzybisz." But here
Lem has found literary structures--not "stories"--but assemblages of prose,
familiar and comfortable to the reader.

Of course, it takes a certain aridity of taste to read a book composed of
"introductions," traditionally a kind of flaky appetizer before the main course.
But it's worth it for the author's sense of freedom, his manifest delight in
finally ridding himself of that thorny fictive thicket that stands between him
and his Grail. These are charming pieces, witty, ingenious, highly
thought-provoking, utterly devoid of human interest. People will be reading
these for decades to come. Not because they work as fiction, but because their
form follows function with the sinister elegance of an automatic rifle.

Here Lem has finessed an irrevocable choice. It is a choice every science
fiction writer faces. Is the writer to write Real Novels which "only happen to
be" science fiction--or create knobby and irreducible SF artifacts which are not
true "stories," but visionary texts? The argument in favor of the first course
is that Real Readers, i.e. mainstream ones, refuse to notice the nakedly
science-fictional. How Lem must chuckle as he collects his lavish blurbs from
_Time_ and _Newsweek_ (not to mention an income ranking as one of poor wretched
Poland's best sources of foreign exchange) . By disguising his work as the
haute-lit exudations of a critic, he has out-conjured the Yankee conjurers, had
his cake and eaten it publicly, in the hallowed pages of the _NY Review of
Books_.

It's a good trick, hard to pull off, requiring ideas that burn so brilliantly
that their glare is overwhelming. That ability alone is worthy of a certain
writhing envy from the local Writers' Union. But it's still a trick, and the
central question is still unresolved. What is "science fiction," anyway? And
what's it there for?

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Bruce Sterling
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CATSCAN 5 "Slipstream"

In a recent remarkable interview in _New Pathways_ #11, Carter Scholz alludes
with pained resignation to the ongoing brain-death of science fiction. In the
60s and 70s, Scholz opines, SF had a chance to become a worthy literature; now
that chance has passed. Why? Because other writers have now learned to adapt
SF's best techniques to their own ends.

"And," says Scholz, "They make us look sick. When I think of the best
`speculative fiction' of the past few years, I sure don't think of any Hugo or
Nebula winners. I think of Margaret Atwood's _The Handmaid's Tale_, and of Don
DeLillo's _White Noise_, and of Batchelor's _The Birth of the People's Republic
of Antarctica_, and of Gaddis' _JR_ and _Carpenter's Gothic_, and of Coetzee's
_Life and Times of Michael K_ ... I have no hope at all that genre science
fiction can ever again have any literary significance. But that's okay, because
now there are other people doing our job."

It's hard to stop quoting this interview. All interviews should be this good.
There's some great campy guff about the agonizing pain it takes to write short
stories; and a lecture on the unspeakable horror of writer's block; and some
nifty fusillades of forthright personal abuse; and a lot of other stuff that is
making _New Pathways_ one of the most interesting zines of the Eighties. Scholz
even reveals his use of the Fibonacci Sequence in setting the length and number
of the chapters in his novel _Palimpsests_, and wonders how come nobody caught
on to this groundbreaking technique of his.

Maybe some of this peripheral stuff kinda dulls the lucid gleam of his argument.
But you don't have to be a medieval Italian mathematician to smell the reek of
decay in modern SF. Scholz is right. The job isn't being done here.

"Science Fiction" today is a lot like the contemporary Soviet Union; the
sprawling possessor of a dream that failed. Science fiction's official dogma,
which almost everybody ignores, is based on attitudes toward science and
technology which are bankrupt and increasingly divorced from any kind of
reality. "Hard- SF," the genre's ideological core, is a joke today; in terms of
the social realities of high-tech post- industrialism, it's about as relevant as
hard- Leninism.

Many of the best new SF writers seem openly ashamed of their backward Skiffy
nationality. "Ask not what you can do for science fiction--ask how you can edge
away from it and still get paid there."

A blithely stateless cosmopolitanism is the order of the day, even for an
accredited Clarion grad like Pat Murphy: "I'm not going to bother what camp
things fall into," she declares in a recent _Locus_ interview. "I'm going to
write the book I want and see what happens ... If the markets run together, I
leave it to the critics." For Murphy, genre is a dead issue, and she serenely
wills the trash-mountain to come to Mohammed.

And one has to sympathize. At one time, in its clumsy way, Science Fiction
offered some kind of coherent social vision. SF may have been gaudy and naive,
and possessed by half-baked fantasies of power and wish-fulfillment, but at
least SF spoke a contemporary language. Science Fiction did the job of
describing, in some eldritch way, what was actually *happening*, at least in the
popular imagination. Maybe it wasn't for everybody, but if you were a bright,
unfastidious sort, you could read SF and feel, in some satisfying and deeply
unconscious way, that you'd been given a real grip on the chrome-plated handles
of the Atomic Age.

But *now* look at it. Consider the repulsive ghastliness of the SF category's
Lovecraftian inbreeding. People retched in the 60s when De Camp and Carter
skinned the corpse of Robert E. Howard for its hide and tallow, but nowadays
necrophilia is run on an industrial basis. Shared-world anthologies. Braided
meganovels. Role-playing tie-ins. Sharecropping books written by pip-squeaks
under the blazoned name of established authors. Sequels of sequels, trilogy
sequels of yet-earlier trilogies, themselves cut-and- pasted from yet-earlier
trilogies. What's the common thread here? The belittlement of individual
creativity, and the triumph of anonymous product. It's like some Barthesian
nightmare of the Death of the Author and his replacement by "text."

Science Fiction--much like that other former Vanguard of Progressive Mankind,
the Communist Party-- has lost touch with its cultural reasons for being.
Instead, SF has become a self-perpetuating commercial power-structure, which
happens to be in possession of a traditional national territory: a portion of
bookstore rackspace.

Science fiction habitually ignores any challenge from outside. It is protected
by the Iron Curtain of category marketing. It does not even have to improve "on
its own terms," because its own terms no longer mean anything; they are rarely
even seriously discussed. It is enough merely to point at the rackspace and say
"SF."

Some people think it's great to have a genre which has no inner identity, merely
a locale where it's sold. In theory, this grants vast authorial freedom, but the
longterm practical effect has been heavily debilitating. When "anything is
possible in SF" then "anything" seems good enough to pass muster. Why innovate?
Innovate in what direction? Nothing is moving, the compass is dead. Everything
is becalmed; toss a chip overboard to test the current, and it sits there till
it sinks without a trace.

It's time to clarify some terms in this essay, terms which I owe to Carter
Scholz. "Category" is a marketing term, denoting rackspace. "Genre" is a
spectrum of work united by an inner identity, a coherent esthetic, a set of
conceptual guidelines, an ideology if you will.

"Category" is commercially useful, but can be ultimately deadening. "Genre,"
however, is powerful.

Having made this distinction, I want to describe what seems to me to be a new,
emergent "genre," which has not yet become a "category."

This genre is not "category" SF; it is not even "genre" SF. Instead, it is a
contemporary kind of writing which has set its face against consensus reality.
It is a fantastic, surreal sometimes, speculative on occasion, but not
rigorously so. It does not aim to provoke a "sense of wonder" or to
systematically extrapolate in the manner of classic science fiction.

Instead, this is a kind of writing which simply makes you feel very strange; the
way that living in the late twentieth century makes you feel, if you are a
person of a certain sensibility. We could call this kind of fiction Novels of
Postmodern Sensibility, but that looks pretty bad on a category rack, and
requires an acronym besides; so for the sake of convenience and argument, we
will call these books "slipstream."

"Slipstream" is not all that catchy a term, and if this young genre ever becomes
an actual category I doubt it will use that name, which I just coined along with
my friend Richard Dorsett. "Slipstream" is a parody of "mainstream," and nobody
calls mainstream "mainstream" except for us skiffy trolls.

Nor is it at all likely that slipstream will actually become a full-fledged
genre, much less a commercially successful category. The odds against it are
stiff. Slipstream authors must work outside the cozy infrastructure of genre
magazines, specialized genre criticism, and the authorial esprit-de-corps of a
common genre cause.

And vast dim marketing forces militate against the commercial success of
slipstream. It is very difficult for these books to reach or build their own
native audience, because they are needles in a vast moldering haystack. There is
no convenient way for would-be slipstream readers to move naturally from one
such work to another of its ilk. These books vanish like drops of ink in a
bucket of drool.

Occasional writers will triumph against all these odds, but their success
remains limited by the present category structures. They may eke out a fringe
following, but they fall between two stools. Their work is too weird for Joe and
Jane Normal. And they lose the SF readers, who avoid the mainstream racks
because the stuff there ain't half weird enough. (One result of this is that
many slipstream books are left- handed works by authors safely established in
other genres.)

And it may well be argued that slipstream has no "real" genre identity at all.
Slipstream might seem to be an artificial construct, a mere grab-bag of
mainstream books that happen to hold some interest for SF readers. I happen to
believe that slipstream books have at least as much genre identity as the
variegated stock that passes for "science fiction" these days, but I admit the
force of the argument. As an SF critic, I may well be blindered by my parochial
point- of-view. But I'm far from alone in this situation. Once the notion of
slipstream is vaguely explained, almost all SF readers can recite a quick list
of books that belong there by right.

These are books which SF readers recommend to friends: "This isn't SF, but it
sure ain't mainstream and I think you might like it, okay?" It's every man his
own marketer, when it comes to slipstream.

In preparation for this essay, I began collecting these private lists. My
master-list soon grew impressively large, and serves as the best pragmatic
evidence for the actual existence of slipstream that I can offer at the moment.

I myself don't pretend to be an expert in this kind of writing. I can try to
define the zeitgeist of slipstream in greater detail, but my efforts must be
halting.

It seems to me that the heart of slipstream is an attitude of peculiar
aggression against "reality." These are fantasies of a kind, but not fantasies
which are "futuristic" or "beyond the fields we know." These books tend to
sarcastically tear at the structure of "everyday life."

Some such books, the most "mainstream" ones, are non-realistic literary fictions
which avoid or ignore SF genre conventions. But hard-core slipstream has unique
darker elements. Quite commonly these works don't make a lot of common sense,
and what's more they often somehow imply that *nothing we know makes* "a lot of
sense" and perhaps even that *nothing ever could*.

It's very common for slipstream books to screw around with the representational
conventions of fiction, pulling annoying little stunts that suggest that the
picture is leaking from the frame and may get all over the reader's feet. A few
such techniques are infinite regress, trompe-l'oeil effects, metalepsis, sharp
violations of viewpoint limits, bizarrely blase' reactions to horrifically
unnatural events ... all the way out to concrete poetry and the deliberate use
of gibberish. Think M. C. Escher, and you have a graphic equivalent.

Slipstream is also marked by a cavalier attitude toward "material" which is the
polar opposite of the hard-SF writer's "respect for scientific fact."
Frequently, historical figures are used in slipstream fiction in ways which
outrageously violate the historical record. History, journalism, official
statements, advertising copy ... all of these are grist for the slipstream mill,
and are disrespectfully treated not as "real-life facts" but as "stuff," raw
material for collage work. Slipstream tends, not to "create" new worlds, but to
*quote* them, chop them up out of context, and turn them against themselves.

Some slipstream books are quite conventional in narrative structure, but
nevertheless use their fantastic elements in a way that suggests that they are
somehow *integral* to the author's worldview; not neat-o ideas to kick around
for fun's sake, but something in the nature of an inherent dementia. These are
fantastic elements which are not clearcut "departures from known reality" but
ontologically *part of the whole mess*; "`real' compared to what?" This is an
increasingly difficult question to answer in the videocratic 80s-90s, and is
perhaps the most genuinely innovative aspect of slipstream (scary as that might
seem).

A "slipstream critic," should such a person ever come to exist, would probably
disagree with these statements of mine, or consider them peripheral to what his
genre "really" does. I heartily encourage would-be slipstream critics to involve
themselves in heady feuding about the "real nature" of their as-yet- nonexistent
genre. Bogus self-referentiality is a very slipstreamish pursuit; much like this
paragraph itself, actually. See what I mean?

My list is fragmentary. What's worse, many of the books that are present
probably don't "belong" there. (I also encourage slipstream critics to weed
these books out and give convincing reasons for it.) Furthermore, many of these
books are simply unavailable, without hard work, lucky accidents, massive
libraries, or friendly bookstore clerks in a major postindustrial city. In many
unhappy cases, I doubt that the authors themselves think that anyone is
interested in their work. Many slipstream books fell through the yawning cracks
between categories, and were remaindered with frantic haste.

And I don't claim that all these books are "good," or that you will enjoy
reading them. Many slipstream books are in fact dreadful, though they are
dreadful in a different way than dreadful science fiction is. This list happens
to be prejudiced toward work of quality, because these are books which have
stuck in people's memory against all odds, and become little tokens of
possibility.

I offer this list as a public service to slipstream's authors and readers. I
don't count myself in these ranks. I enjoy some slipstream, but much of it is
simply not to my taste. This doesn't mean that it is "bad," merely that it is
different. In my opinion, this work is definitely not SF, and is essentially
alien to what I consider SF's intrinsic virtues.

Slipstream does however have its own virtues, virtues which may be uniquely
suited to the perverse, convoluted, and skeptical tenor of the postmodern era.
Or then again, maybe not. But to judge this genre by the standards of SF is
unfair; I would like to see it free to evolve its own standards.

Unlike the "speculative fiction" of the 60s, slipstream is not an internal
attempt to reform SF in the direction of "literature." Many slipstream authors,
especially the most prominent ones, know or care little or nothing about SF.
Some few are "SF authors" by default, and must struggle to survive in a genre
which militates against the peculiar virtues of their own writing.

I wish slipstream well. I wish it was an acknowledged genre and a workable
category, because then it could offer some helpful, brisk competition to SF, and
force "Science Fiction" to redefine and revitalize its own principles.

But any true discussion of slipstream's genre principles is moot, until it
becomes a category as well. For slipstream to develop and nourish, it must
become openly and easily available to its own committed readership, in the same
way that SF is today. This problem I willingly leave to some inventive
bookseller, who is openminded enough to restructure the rackspace and give these
oppressed books a breath of freedom.

THE SLIPSTREAM LIST

ACKER, KATHY - Empire of the Senseless
ACKROYD, PETER - Hawksmoor; Chatterton
ALDISS, BRIAN - Life in the West
ALLENDE, ISABEL - Of Love and Shadows; House of Spirits
AMIS, KINGSLEY - The Alienation; The Green Man
AMIS, MARTIN - Other People; Einstein's Monsters
APPLE, MAX - Zap; The Oranging of America
ATWOOD, MARGARET - The Handmaids Tale
AUSTER, PAUL - City of Glass; In the Country of Last Things
BALLARD, J. G. - Day of Creation; Empire of the Sun
BANKS, IAIN - The Wasp Factory; The Bridge
BANVILLE, JOHN - Kepler; Dr. Copernicus
BARNES, JULIAN - Staring at the Sun
BARTH, JOHN - Giles Goat-Boy; Chimera
BARTHELME, DONALD - The Dead Father
BATCHELOR, JOHN CALVIN - Birth of the Peoples' Republic of Antarctica
BELL, MADISON SMARTT - Waiting for the End of the World
BERGER, THOMAS - Arthur Rex
BONTLY, THOMAS - Celestial Chess
BOYLE, T. CORAGHESSAN - Worlds End; Water Music
BRANDAO, IGNACIO - And Still the Earth
BURROUGHS, WILLIAM - Place of Dead Roads; Naked Lunch; Soft Machine; etc.
CARROLL, JONATHAN - Bones of the Moon; Land of Laughs
CARTER, ANGELA - Nights at the Circus; Heroes and Villains
CARY, PETER - Illywhacker; Oscar and Lucinda
CHESBRO, GEORGE M. - An Affair of Sorcerers
COETZEE, J. M. - Life and rimes of Michael K.
COOVER, ROBERT - The Public Burning; Pricksongs & Descants
CRACE, JIM - Continent
CROWLEY, JOHN - Little Big; Aegypt
DAVENPORT, GUY - Da Vincis Bicycle; The Jules Verne Steam Balloon
DISCH, THOMAS M. - On Wings of Song
DODGE, JIM - Not Fade Away
DURRELL, LAWRENCE - Tunc; Nunquam
ELY, DAVID - Seconds
ERICKSON, STEVE - Days Between Stations; Rubicon Beach
FEDERMAN, RAYMOND - The Twofold Variations
FOWLES, JOHN - A Maggot
FRANZEN, JONATHAN - The Twenty-Seventh City
FRISCH, MAX - Homo Faber; Man in the Holocene
FUENTES, CARLOS - Terra Nostra
GADDIS, WILLIAM - JR; Carpenters Gothic
GARDNER, JOHN - Grendel; Freddy's Book
GEARY, PATRICIA - Strange Toys; Living in Ether
GOLDMAN, WILLIAM - The Princess Bride; The Color of Light
GRASS, GUNTER - The Tin Drum
GRAY, ALASDAIR - Lanark
GRIMWOOD, KEN - Replay
HARBINSON, W. A. - Genesis; Revelation; Otherworld
HILL, CAROLYN - The Eleven Million Mile High Dancer
HJVRTSBERG, WILLIAM - Gray Matters; Falling Angel
HOBAN, RUSSELL - Riddley Walker
HOYT, RICHARD - The Manna Enzyme
IRWIN, ROBERT - The Arabian Nightmares
ISKANDER, FAZIL - Sandro of Chegam; The Gospel According to Sandro
JOHNSON, DENIS - Fiskadoro
JONES, ROBERT F. - Blood Sport; The Diamond Bogo
KINSELLA, W. P. - Shoeless Joe
KOSTER, R. M. - The Dissertation; Mandragon
KOTZWINKLE, WILLIAM - Elephant Bangs Train; Doctor Rat, Fata Morgana
KRAMER, KATHRYN - A Handbook for Visitors From Outer Space
LANGE, OLIVER - Vandenberg
LEONARD, ELMORE - Touch
LESSING, DORIS - The Four-Gated City; The Fifth Child of Satan
LEVEN, JEREMY - Satan
MAILER, NORMAN - Ancient Evenings
MARINIS, RICK - A Lovely Monster
MARQUEZ, GABRIEL GARCIA - Autumn of the Patriarch; One
Hundred Years of Solitude
MATHEWS, HARRY - The Sinking of the Odradek Stadium
McEWAN, IAN - The Comfort of Strangers; The Child in Time
McMAHON, THOMAS - Loving Little Egypt
MILLAR, MARTIN - Milk, Sulphate and Alby Starvation
MOONEY, TED - Easy Travel to Other Planets
MOORCOCK, MICHAEL - Laughter of Carthage; Byzantium Endures; Mother London
MOORE, BRIAN - Cold Heaven
MORRELL, DAVID - The Totem
MORRISON, TONI - Beloved; The Song of Solomon
NUNN, KEN - Tapping the Source; Unassigned Territory
PERCY, WALKER - Love in the Ruins; The Thanatos Syndrome
PIERCY, MARGE - Woman on the Edge of Time
PORTIS, CHARLES - Masters of Atlantis
PRIEST, CHRISTOPHER - The Glamour; The Affirmation
PROSE, FRANCINE - Bigfoot Dreams, Marie Laveau
PYNCHON, THOMAS - Gravity's Rainbow; V; The Crying of Lot 49
REED, ISHMAEL - Mumbo Jumbo; The Terrible Twos
RICE, ANNE - The Vampire Lestat; Queen of the Damned
ROBBINS, TOM - Jitterbug Perfume; Another Roadside Attraction
ROTH, PHILIP - The Counterlife
RUSHDIE, SALMON - Midnight's Children; Grimus; The Satanic Verses
SAINT, H. F. - Memoirs of an Invisible Man
SCHOLZ, CARTER & HARCOURT GLENN - Palimpsests
SHEPARD, LUCIUS - Life During Wartime
SIDDONS, ANNE RIVERS - The House Next Door
SPARK, MURIEL - The Hothouse by the East River
SPENCER, SCOTT - Last Night at the Brain Thieves Ball
SUKENICK, RONALD - Up; Down; Out
SUSKIND, PATRICK - Perfume
THEROUX, PAUL - O-Zone
THOMAS, D. M. - The White Hotel
THOMPSON, JOYCE - The Blue Chair; Conscience Place
THOMSON, RUPERT - Dreams of Leaving
THORNBERG, NEWTON - Valhalla
THORNTON, LAWRENCE - Imagining Argentina
UPDIKE, JOHN - Witches of Eastwick; Rogers Version
VLIET, R. G. - Scorpio Rising
VOLLMAN, WILLIAM T. - You Bright and Risen Angels
VONNEGUT, KURT - Galapagos; Slaughterhouse-Five
WALLACE, DAVID FOSTER - The Broom of the System
WEBB, DON - Uncle Ovid's Exercise Book
WHITTEMORE, EDWARD - Nile Shadows; Jerusalem Poker; Sinai Tapestry
WILLARD, NANCY - Things Invisible to See
WOMACK, JACK - Ambient; Terraplane
WOOD, BARI - The Killing Gift
WRIGHT, STEPHEN - M31: A Family Romance

[email protected]

Bruce Sterling
[email protected]
Literary Freeware -- Not For Commercial Use


Bruce Sterling Bibliography

INVOLUTION OCEAN (1977)
THE ARTIFICIAL KID (1980)
SCHISMATRIX (1985)
MIRRORSHADES: THE CYBERPUNK ANTHOLOGY (ed) 1986
ISLANDS IN THE NET (1988)

CRYSTAL EXPRESS (1989)
"Swarm" F&SF April 82
"Spider Rose" F&SF August 82
"Spook" F&SF April 83
"Cicada Queen" UNIVERSE 13, Terry Carr ed 1983
"Twenty Evocations" INTERZONE Spring 1984
"Sunken Gardens" OMNI June 84
"Telliamed" F&SF Sept 84
"Dinner in Audoghast" IASFM May 85
"Green Days in Brunei" IASFM Oct 85
"The Beautiful and the Sublime" IASFM June 86
"Flowers of Edo" IASFM May 87
"The Little Magic Shop" IASFM Oct 1987

THE DIFFERENCE ENGINE (with William Gibson) 1990




GLOBALHEAD (1992)
"The Compassionate, the Digital," INTERZONE Winter 85/86.
"Storming the Cosmos," (with Rudy Rucker), IASFM Mid-December
1985.
"The Gulf Wars," OMNI Feb 1988.
"Our Neural Chernobyl," F&SF June 1988.
"Dori Bangs," IASFM Sept 1989.
"The Sword of Damocles," IASFM Feb 1990.
"The Shores of Bohemia," in UNIVERSE 1, eds Robert Silverberg and
Karen Haber, Doubleday 1990.
"Hollywood Kremlin" F&SF Oct 1990.
"We See Things Differently," in SEMIOTEXT(E) SF, eds Rudy Rucker,
Peter Lamborn Wilson, Robert Anton Wilson Autonomedia 1990.
"Jim and Irene" in WHEN THE MUSIC'S OVER, ed. Lewis Shiner,
Bantam Spectra 1991.
"The Moral Bullet" (with John Kessel) IASFM July 1991.
"The Unthinkable," F&SF August 1991.
"Are You For 86?" first published in GLOBALHEAD

Uncollected stories by Bruce Sterling

"The Unfolding" (with John Shirley) INTERZONE; HEATSEEKER
"Red Star Winter Orbit" with William Gibson OMNI, MIRRORSHADES
"Mozart in Mirrorshades" with Lewis Shiner OMNI, MIRRORSHADES
"Sacred Cow" in OMNI (?)

THE HACKER CRACKDOWN: LAW AND DISORDER ON THE
ELECTRONIC FRONTIER (1992) (nonfiction)

HEAVY WEATHER (forthcoming)

Uncollected nonfiction/critical

CHEAP TRUTH
"The New Science Fiction" INTERZONE 16
Six Interzone columns
Six F&SF columns (?)
SF EYE columns
DETAILS Hacker piece
DETAILS Haruki Murakami piece
Preface to BURNING CHROME by William Gibson
Introduction to PATTERNS by Pat Cadigan
Introduction to SPASM: THE SOUND OF VIRTUAL REALITY by Arthur
Kroker
MONAD piece "Precessing the Simulacra for Fun and Profit"
NYRSF Womack review
NY TIMES op-ed piece "Get the Bomb Off My Back"
NEWSDAY drug piece

"Glamor Machines" in COMPUTERWORLD
WHOLE EARTH REVIEW pieces: "The Obsolete Body" forum"
WHOLE EARTH REVIEW "Shout Sister Shout"
"Let's Go Downtown" in BOING BOING
"No Climate, Just Weather" in CEO INTERNATIONAL
MONDO interview

[email protected]

Bruce Sterling
[email protected]

Cyberpunk in the Nineties

This is my sixth and last column for INTERZONE, as I promised a year ago when I
began this series. I've enjoyed doing these pieces, and would like to thank the
energetic editor and indulgent readership of INTERZONE. A special thanks to
those who contributed terms and comments for "The SF Workshop Lexicon," which
remains an ongoing project, and will show up again someday, probably in
embarrassing company. Those readers who had enough smarts and gumption to buy
the SIGNAL catalog (see column one in issue 37) have been well rewarded, I
trust.

In this final column, I would like to talk frankly about "cyberpunk" -- not
cyberpunk the synonym for computer criminal, but Cyberpunk the literary
movement.

Years ago, in the chilly winter of 1985 -- (we used to have chilly winters then,
back before the ozone gave out)-- an article appeared in INTERZONE #14, called
"The New Science Fiction." "The New Science Fiction" was the first manifesto of
"the cyberpunk movement." The article was an analysis of the SF genre's history
and principles; the word "cyberpunk" did not appear in it at all. "The New SF"
appeared pseudonymously in a British SF quarterly whose tiny circulation did not
restrain its vaulting ambitions. To the joy of dozens, it had recently graduated
to full- colour covers. A lovely spot for a manifesto.

Let's compare this humble advent to a recent article, "Confessions of an
Ex-Cyberpunk," by my friend and colleague Mr. Lewis Shiner. This piece is yet
another honest attempt by Someone Who Was There to declare cyberpunk dead.
Shiner's article appeared on Jan 7, 1991, in the editorial page of THE NEW YORK
TIMES.

Again an apt venue, one supposes, but illustrative of the paradoxical hazards of
"movements." An avalanche, started with a shout and a shove somewhere up at the
timberline, cannot be stopped again with one's hands, even with an audience of
millions of mundanes.

"Cyberpunk," before it acquired its handy label and its sinister rep, was a
generous, open-handed effort, very street-level and anarchic, with a
do-it-yourself attitude, an ethos it shared with garage-band 70s punk music.
Cyberpunk's one-page propaganda organ, "CHEAP TRUTH," was given away free to
anyone who asked for it. CHEAP TRUTH was never copyrighted; photocopy "piracy"
was actively encouraged.

CHEAP TRUTH's contributors were always pseudonymous, an earnest egalitarian
attempt to avoid any personality-cultism or cliquishness. CHEAP TRUTH
deliberately mocked established "genre gurus" and urged every soul within
earshot to boot up a word-processor and join the cause. CT's ingenuous standards
for SF were simply that SF should be "good" and "alive" and "readable." But when
put in practice, these supposed qualities were something else again. The fog of
battle obscured a great deal at the time.

CHEAP TRUTH had rather mixed success. We had a laudable grasp of the basics: for
instance, that SF writers ought to *work a lot harder* and *knock it off with
the worn-out bullshit* if they expected to earn any real respect. Most folks
agreed that this was a fine prescription -- for somebody else. In SF it has
always been fatally easy to shrug off such truisms to dwell on the trivialities
of SF as a career: the daily grind in the Old Baloney Factory. Snappy cyberpunk
slogans like "imaginative concentration" and "technological literacy" were met
with much the same indifference. Alas, if preaching gospel was enough to reform
the genre, the earth would surely have quaked when Aldiss and Knight espoused
much the same ideals in 1956.

SF's struggle for quality was indeed old news, except to CHEAP TRUTH, whose
writers were simply too young and parochial to have caught on. But the cultural
terrain had changed, and that made a lot of difference. Honest "technological
literacy" in the 50s was exhilirating but disquieting -- but in the high-tech
80s, "technological literacy" meant outright *ecstasy and dread.* Cyberpunk was
*weird,* which obscured the basic simplicity of its theory-and-practice.

When "cyberpunk writers" began to attract real notoriety, the idea of cyberpunk
principles, open and available to anyone, was lost in the murk. Cyberpunk was an
instant cult, probably the very definition of a cult in modern SF. Even
generational contemporaries, who sympathized with much CHEAP TRUTH rhetoric,
came to distrust the cult itself -- simply because the Cyberpunks had become
"genre gurus" themselves.

It takes shockingly little, really, to become a genre guru. Basically, it's as
easy as turning over in bed. It's questionable whether one gains much by the
effort. Preach your fool head off, but who trusts gurus, anyway? CHEAP TRUTH
never did! All in all, it took about three years to thoroughly hoist the
Movement on its own petard. CHEAP TRUTH was killed off in 1986.

I would like to think that this should be a lesson to somebody out there. I very
much doubt it, though.

Rucker, Shiner, Sterling, Shirley and Gibson -- the Movement's most fearsome
"gurus," ear-tagged yet again in Shiner's worthy article, in front of the N. Y.
TIMES' bemused millions -- are "cyberpunks" for good and all. Other cyberpunks,
such as the six other worthy contributors to MIRRORSHADES THE CYBERPUNK
ANTHOLOGY, may be able to come to their own terms with the beast, more or less.
But the dreaded C-Word will surely be chiselled into our five tombstones. Public
disavowals are useless, very likely *worse* than useless. Even the most sweeping
changes in our philosophy of writing, perhaps weird mid-life-crisis conversions
to Islam or Santeria, could not erase the tattoo.

Seen from this perspective, "cyberpunk" simply means "anything cyberpunks
write." And that covers a lot of ground. I've always had a weakness for
historical fantasies, myself, and Shiner writes mainstream novels and mysteries.
Shirley writes horror. Rucker was last seen somewhere inside the Hollow Earth.
William Gibson, shockingly, has been known to write funny short stories. All
this means nothing. "Cyberpunk" will not be conclusively "dead" until the last
of us is shovelled under. Demographics suggest that this is likely to take some
time.

CHEAP TRUTH's promulgation of open principles was of dubious use -- even when
backed by the might of INTERZONE. Perhaps "principles" were simply too foggy and
abstract, too arcane and unapproachable, as opposed to easy C-word recognition
symbols, like cranial jacks, black leather jeans and amphetamine addiction. But
even now, it may not be too late to offer a concrete example of the genuine
cyberpunk *weltanschauung* at work.

Consider FRANKENSTEIN by Mary Shelley, a wellspring of science fiction as a
genre. In a cyberpunk analysis, FRANKENSTEIN is "Humanist" SF. FRANKENSTEIN
promotes the romantic dictum that there are Some Things Man Was Not Meant to
Know. There are no mere physical mechanisms for this higher moral law -- its
workings transcend mortal understanding, it is something akin to divine will.
Hubris must meet nemesis; this is simply the nature of our universe. Dr.
Frankenstein commits a spine-chilling transgression, an affront against the
human soul, and with memorable poetic justice, he is direly punished by his own
creation, the Monster.

Now imagine a cyberpunk version of FRANKENSTEIN. In this imaginary work, the
Monster would likely be the well- funded R&D team-project of some global
corporation. The Monster might well wreak bloody havoc, most likely on random
passers-by. But having done so, he would never have been allowed to wander to
the North Pole, uttering Byronic profundities. The Monsters of cyberpunk never
vanish so conveniently. They are already loose on the streets. They are next to
us. Quite likely *WE* are them. The Monster would have been copyrighted through
the new genetics laws, and manufactured worldwide in many thousands. Soon the
Monsters would all have lousy night jobs mopping up at fast-food restaurants.

In the moral universe of cyberpunk, we*already* know Things We Were Not Meant To
Know. Our *grandparents* knew these things; Robert Oppenheimer at Los Alamos
became the Destroyer of Worlds long before we arrived on the scene. In
cyberpunk, the idea that there are sacred limits to human action is simply a
delusion. There are no sacred boundaries to protect us from ourselves.

Our place in the universe is basically accidental. We are weak and mortal, but
it's not the holy will of the gods; it's just the way things happen to be at the
moment. And this is radically unsatisfactory; not because we direly miss the
shelter of the Deity, but because, looked at objectively, the vale of human
suffering is basically a dump. The human condition can be changed, and it will
be changed, and is changing; the only real questions are how, and to what end.

This "anti-humanist" conviction in cyberpunk is not simply some literary stunt
to outrage the bourgeoisie; this is an objective fact about culture in the late
twentieth century. Cyberpunk didn't invent this situation; it just reflects it.

Today it is quite common to see tenured scientists espousing horrifically
radical ideas: nanotechnology, artificial intelligence, cryonic suspension of
the dead, downloading the contents of the brain... Hubristic mania is loose in
the halls of academe, where everybody and his sister seems to have a plan to set
the cosmos on its ear. Stern moral indignation at the prospect is the weakest of
reeds; if there were a devilish drug around that could extend our sacred
God-given lifespans by a hundred years, the Pope would be the first in line.

We already live, every day, through the means of outrageous actions with
unforeseeable consequences to the whole world. The world population has doubled
since 1970; the natural world, which used to surround humankind with its vast
Gothic silences, is now something that has to be catalogued and cherished.

We're just not much good any more at refusing things because they don't seem
proper. As a society, we can't even manage to turn our backs on abysmal threats
like heroin and the hydrogen bomb. As a culture, we love to play with fire, just
for the sake of its allure; and if there happens to be money in it, there are no
holds barred. Jumpstarting Mary Shelley's corpses is the least of our problems;
something much along that line happens in intensive-care wards every day.

Human thought itself, in its unprecedented guise as computer software, is
becoming something to be crystallized, replicated, made a commodity. Even the
insides of our brains aren't sacred; on the contrary, the human brain is a
primary target of increasingly successful research, ontological and spiritual
questions be damned. The idea that, under these circumstances, Human Nature is
somehow destined to prevail against the Great Machine, is simply silly; it seems
weirdly beside the point. It's as if a rodent philosopher in a lab-cage, about
to have his brain bored and wired for the edification of Big Science, were to
piously declare that in the end Rodent Nature must triumph.

Anything that can be done to a rat can be done to a human being. And we can do
most anything to rats. This is a hard thing to think about, but it's the truth.
It won't go away because we cover our eyes.

*This* is cyberpunk.

This explains, I hope, why standard sci-fi adventure yarns tarted up in black
leather fail to qualify. Lewis Shiner has simply lost patience with writers who
offer dopey shoot-em-up rack-fodder in sci-fiberpunk drag. "Other writers had
turned the form into formula," he complains in THE NEW YORK TIMES, "the same
dead-end thrills we get from video games and blockbuster movies." Shiner's early
convictions have scarcely budged so much as a micron -- but the stuff most folks
call "cyberpunk" no longer reflects his ideals.

In my opinion the derivative piffle is a minor issue. So is the word
"cyberpunk." I'm pleased to see that it's increasingly difficult to write a
dirt-stupid book, put the word "cyberpunk" on it, and expect it to sell. With
the c- word discredited through half-witted overkill, anyone called a
"cyberpunk" will have to pull their own weight now. But for those willing to
pull weight, it's no big deal. Labels cannot defend their own integrity; but
writers can, and good ones do.

There is another general point to make, which I believe is important to any real
understanding of the Movement. Cyberpunk, like New Wave before it, was a voice
of Bohemia. It came from the underground, from the outside, from the young and
energetic and disenfranchised. It came from people who didn't know their own
limits, and refused the limits offered them by mere custom and habit.

Not much SF is really Bohemian, and most of Bohemia has little to do with SF,
but there was, and is, much to be gained from the meeting of the two. SF as a
genre, even at its most "conventional," is very much a cultural underground.
SF's influence on the greater society outside, like the dubious influence of
beatniks, hippies, and punks, is carefully limited. Science fiction, like
Bohemia, is a useful place to put a wide variety of people, where their ideas
and actions can be examined, without the risk of putting those ideas and actions
directly into wider practice. Bohemia has served this function since its start
in the early Industrial Revolution, and the wisdom of this scheme should be
admitted. Most weird ideas are simply weird ideas, and Bohemia in power has
rarely been a pretty sight. Jules Verne as a writer of adventure novels is one
thing; President Verne, General Verne, or Pope Jules is a much dicier
proposition.

Cyberpunk was a voice of Bohemia -- Bohemia in the 1980s. The technosocial
changes loose in contemporary society were bound to affect its counterculture.
Cyberpunk was the literary incarnation of this phenomenon. And the phenomenon is
still growing. Communication technologies in particular are becoming much less
respectable, much more volatile, and increasingly in the hands of people you
might not introduce to your grandma.

But today, it must be admitted that the cyberpunks -- SF veterans in or near
their forties, patiently refining their craft and cashing their royalty checks
-- are no longer a Bohemian underground. This too is an old story in Bohemia; it
is the standard punishment for success. An underground in the light of day is a
contradiction in terms. Respectability does not merely beckon; it actively
envelops. And in this sense, "cyberpunk" is even deader than Shiner admits.

Time and chance have been kind to the cyberpunks, but they themselves have
changed with the years. A core doctrine in Movement theory was "visionary
intensity." But it has been some time since any cyberpunk wrote a truly
mind-blowing story, something that writhed, heaved, howled, hallucinated and
shattered the furniture. In the latest work of these veterans, we see tighter
plotting, better characters, finer prose, much "serious and insightful
futurism." But we also see much less in the way of spontaneous back-flips and
crazed dancing on tables. The settings come closer and closer to the present
day, losing the baroque curlicues of unleashed fantasy: the issues at stake
become something horribly akin to the standard concerns of middle-aged
responsibility. And this may be splendid, but it is not war. This vital aspect
of science fiction has been abdicated, and is open for the taking. Cyberpunk is
simply not there any more.

But science fiction is still alive, still open and developing. And Bohemia will
not go away. Bohemia, like SF, is not a passing fad, although it breeds fads;
like SF, Bohemia is old; as old as industrial society, of which both SF and
Bohemia are integral parts. Cybernetic Bohemia is not some bizarre advent; when
cybernetic Bohemians proclaim that what they are doing is completely new, they
innocently delude themselves, merely because they are young.

Cyberpunks write about the ecstasy and hazard of flying cyberspace and Verne
wrote about the ecstasy and hazard of FIVE WEEKS IN A BALLOON, but if you take
even half a step outside the mire of historical circumstance, you can see that
these both serve the same basic social function.

Of course, Verne, a great master, is still in print, while the verdict is out on
cyberpunk. And, of course, Verne got the future all wrong, except for a few
lucky guesses; but so will cyberpunk. Jules Verne ended up as some kind of
beloved rich crank celebrity in the city government of Amiens. Worse things have
happened, I suppose.

As cyberpunk's practitioners bask in unsought legitimacy, it becomes harder to
pretend that cyberpunk was something freakish or aberrant; it's easier today to
see where it came from, and how it got where it is. Still, it might be thought
that allegiance to Jules Verne is a bizarre declaration for a cyberpunk. It
might, for instance, be argued that Jules Verne was a nice guy who loved his
Mom, while the brutish antihuman cyberpunks advocate drugs, anarchy, brain-plugs
and the destruction of everything sacred.

This objection is bogus. Captain Nemo was a technical anarcho-terrorist. Jules
Verne passed out radical pamphlets in 1848 when the streets of Paris were strewn
with dead. And yet Jules Verne is considered a Victorian optimist (those who
have read him must doubt this) while the cyberpunks are often declared nihilists
(by those who pick and choose in the canon). Why? It is the tenor of the times,
I think.

There is much bleakness in cyberpunk, but it is an honest bleakness. There is
ecstasy, but there is also dread. As I sit here, one ear tuned to TV news, I
hear the US Senate debating war. And behind those words are cities aflame and
crowds lacerated with airborne shrapnel, soldiers convulsed with mustard-gas and
Sarin.

This generation will have to watch a century of manic waste and carelessness hit
home, and we know it. We will be lucky not to suffer greatly from ecological
blunders already committed; we will be extremely lucky not to see tens of
millions of fellow human beings dying horribly on television as we Westerners
sit in our living rooms munching our cheeseburgers. And this is not some wacky
Bohemian jeremiad; this is an objective statement about the condition of the
world, easily confirmed by anyone with the courage to look at the facts.

These prospects must and should effect our thoughts and expressions and, yes,
our actions; and if writers close their eyes to this, they may be entertainers,
but they are not fit to call themselves science fiction writers. And cyberpunks
are science fiction writers -- not a "subgenre" or a "cult," but the thing
itself. We deserve this title and we should not be deprived of it.

But the Nineties will not belong to the cyberpunks. We will be there working,
but we are not the Movement, we are not even "us" any more. The Nineties will
belong to the coming generation, those who grew up in the Eighties. All power,
and the best of luck to the Nineties underground. I don't know you, but I do
know you're out there. Get on your feet, seize the day. Dance on tables. Make it
happen, it can be done. I know. I've been there.

[email protected]

Bruce Sterling
[email protected]

Bruce Sterling's Idea of What Every Well-Appointed "Cyberpunk SF" Library
Collection Should Possess (circa June 92)

The Canon:

BURNING CHROME William Gibson
Gibson's short stories.

NEUROMANCER, COUNT ZERO, MONA LISA OVERDRIVE William Gibson
The "Cyberspace Trilogy."

MIRRORSHADES THE CYBERPUNK ANTHOLOGY Bruce Sterling ed.
Useful pointer to actual no-kidding Movement Cyberpunks.

MINDPLAYERS Pat Cadigan
Her best novel. An absolute must-have.

HEATSEEKER John Shirley
Shirley's short-stories. His most significant and influential work.

DESERTED CITIES OF THE HEART Lewis Shiner
Shiner's best SF novel.

SLAM Lewis Shiner
Intriguing cyberpunk mainstream non-genre novel.

SOFTWARE and WETWARE Rudy Rucker
Best-known novels of deranged math-professor/hacker/cyberpunk.

TRANSREAL Rudy Rucker
Every short piece Rucker ever wrote. Enormous. Like being hit
in the head with a bowling ball.

BLOOD MUSIC Greg Bear
Bear's most c-wordish book.

CRYSTAL EXPRESS Bruce Sterling
Sterling's short work.

SCHISMATRIX Bruce Sterling
Posthuman space opera.

ISLANDS IN THE NET Bruce Sterling
21st-century global information politics.

THE DIFFERENCE ENGINE William Gibson and Bruce Sterling
19th-century cyberpunk by subgenre's foremost critics'-darlings.

Other Useful Fiction:

HALO Tom Maddox
Remarkable SF treatment of robots and artificial intelligence.

GLOBALHEAD Bruce Sterling
Sterling's second story collection.

PATTERNS Pat Cadigan
Cadigan's short work. Great range of topics and treatments.

SYNNERS Pat Cadigan
Cadigan's well-received second novel.

FRONTERA Lewis Shiner
Shiner's first novel, about mission to Mars.

LOOK INTO THE SUN James Patrick Kelly
Interesting novel by peripheral cyberpunk.

ARACHNE Lisa Mason
Cyberspace robots vs drug-addict San Francisco lawyer-careerists.
Weirdissimo.

SNOW CRASH Neal Stephenson
Fine example of second-generation cyberpunk by Seattle hacker.

HARDWIRED Walter Jon Williams
Williams' most successful effort.

SPACETIME DONUTS, WHITE LIGHT Rudy Rucker
Rucker's early novels. Brilliantly deranged.

INVOLUTION OCEAN, THE ARTIFICIAL KID Bruce Sterling
Sterling's first two novels. SF adventures.

SEMIOTEXT(E) SF Rudy Rucker, Peter Lamborn Wilson, Robert Anton Wilson, eds.
Story anthology of bad craziness. Quite likely to cause protests from
scandalized parents and censors.


Magazines

MONDO 2000.
"Cyberpunk" as glossy West Coast fashion magazine. It Had To Happen.

ISAAC ASIMOV'S SCIENCE FICTION MAGAZINE.
Least reactionary of the standard American SF magazines.


INTERZONE
Foremost British SF magazine. Libraries should carry this worthy
zine as a public service, since individual US subscriptions are costly.

SCIENCE FICTION EYE
More-or-less official lit-crit organ of cyberpunk SF and assorted
fellow-travellers. Like most fanzines, sadly sporadic.

SCIENCE FICTION STUDIES
Dull gray academic rag recently seized in startling coup by wacky
post-modernists. Now almost readable!

Non-Fiction, Critical Studies

STORMING THE REALITY STUDIO Larry McCaffery ed.
Cyberpunk's man-in-academe gives his highly postmodern take on matters
in this bug-crusher anthology.

CYBERPUNK: OUTLAWS AND HACKERS ON THE COMPUTER FRONTIER by Katie Hafner and
John Markoff.
The best book to date on the outlaw "computer underground."

ACROSS THE WOUNDED GALAXIES Larry McCaffery ed.
McCaffery interviews various weirdo leading-lights of pomo SF,
including Gibson and Sterling.

[email protected]

Bruce Sterling
[email protected]

Speech to the Library Information Technology Association
June 1992, San Francisco CA

"Free as Air, Free As Water, Free As Knowledge" (Speech)

Hi everybody. Well, this is the Library Information Technology Association, so I
guess I ought to be talking about libraries, or information, or technology, or
at least association. I'm gonna give it a shot, but I want to try this from an
unusual perspective. I want to start by talking about money.

You wouldn't guess it sometimes to hear some people talk, but we don't live in a
technocratic information society. We live in a highly advanced capitalist
society. People talk a lot about the power and glory of specialized knowledge
and technical expertise. Knowledge is power -- but if so, why aren't
knowledgeable people *in* power? And it's true there's a Library *of* Congress.
But how many librarians are there *in* Congress?

The nature of our society strongly affects the nature of our technology.

It doesn't absolutely *determine* it; a lot of our technology is sheer accident
, serendipity, the way the cards happened to fall, who got the lucky breaks,
and, of course, the occasional eruption of *genius,* which tends to be
positively unpredictable by its nature. But as a society we don't develop
technologies to their ultimate ends. Only engineers are interested in that kind
of technical sweetness, and engineers generally have their paychecks signed by
CEOs and stockholders. We don't pursue ultimate technologies. Our technologies
are actually produced to optimize financial return on investment. There's a big
difference.

Of course there are many elements of our lives that exist outside the money
economy. There's a lot going on in our lives that's not-for-profit and that
can't be denominated in dollars. "The best things in life are free," the old
saying goes. Nice old saying. Gets a little older-sounding every day. Sounds
about as old and mossy as the wedding vow "for richer for poorer," which in a
modern environment is pretty likely to be for-richer-or poorer modulo our
prenuptial agreement. Commercialization. Commodification, a favorite buzzword of
mine. It's a very powerful phenomenon. It's getting more powerful year by year.

Academia, libraries, cultural institutions are already under protracted
commercial siege. This is the MacNeill Lehrer News Hour, brought to you by
publicly supported television and, incidentally, AT&T. Welcome students to Large
Northeastern University, brought to you by Pepsi-Cola, official drink of Large
Northeastern. Ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make ye employable.
Hi, I'm the head of the microbiology department here at Large Northeastern. I'm
also on the board of directors of TransGenic Corporation. The Chancellor says
it's okay because a cut of the patent money goes to Large Northeastern.

Welcome to the Library of Congress. Jolt Cola is the official drink of the
Library of Congress. This is our distributed electronic data network, brought to
you by Prodigy Services, a joint venture of IBM and Sears. You'll notice the
banner of bright-red ads that runs by your eyeballs while you're trying to
access the electronic full-text of William Wordsworth. Try to pay no attention
to that. Incidentally there's a Hypertext link here where you can order our
Wordsworth T-shirt and have it billed to your credit card. Did I mention that
the Library of Congress is now also a bank? Hey, data is data! Digits are
digits! Every pixel in cyberspace is a potential sales opportunity.

Be sure to visit our library coffee-bar, too. You can rent videos here if you
want. We do souvenir umbrellas, ashtrays, earrings, the works. We librarians are
doing what we can to survive this economically difficult period. After all, the
library is a regrettably old-fashioned institution which has not been honed into
fighting trim by exposure to healthy market competition. Until now, that is!

The American library system was invented in a different cultural climate. This
is how it happened. You're Benjamin Franklin, a printer and your average
universal genius, and it's the Year of Our Lord 1731. You have this freewheeling
debating club called the Junto, and you decide you're going to pool your books
and charge everybody a very small fee to join in and read them. There's about
fifty of you. You're not big people, in the Junto. You're

not aristocrats or well-born people or even philanthropists. You're mostly
apprentices and young people who work with their hands. If you were rich, you
wouldn't be so anxious to pool your information in the first place. So you put
all your leatherbound books into the old Philadelphia clubhouse, and you charge
people forty shillings to join and ten shillings dues per annum....

Now forget 1731. It's 1991. Forget the leatherbound books. You start swopping
floppy disks and using a bulletin board system. Public spirited? A benefit to
society? Democratic institution, knowledge is power, power to the people?
Maybe... or maybe you're an idealistic nut, Mr. Franklin. Not only that, but
you're menacing our commercial interests. What about our trade secrets, Mr
Franklin? Our trademarks, copyrights, and patents. Our intellectual property
rights. Our look-and-feel. Our patented algorithms. Our national security
clearances. Our export licenses. Our FBI surveillance policy. Don't copy that
floppy, Mr. Franklin! And you're telling me you want us to pay *taxes* to
support your suspicious activities? Hey, if there's a real need here, the market
will meet it, Mr Franklin. I really think this "library" idea of yours is
something better left to the private sector, Mr Franklin. No author could
possibly want his books read for free, sir. Are you trying to starve the
creative artist?

Let's get real, Mr Franklin. You know what's real, Mr Franklin? *Money* is real.
You seem to be under the misapprehension that information wants to be free and
that enabling people to learn and follow their own interests will benefit
society as a whole. Well, we no longer believe in society as a whole. We believe
in the *economy* as a whole -- a black hole! Why should you be able to think
things, and even learn things, without paying somebody for that privilege? Let's
get to brass tacks, the bottom line. Money. Money is reality. You see this
printed dollar bill? It' s far more real than topsoil or oxygen or the ozone
layer or sunlight. You may say that this is just a piece of paper with some
symbols on it, but that's sacrilege! This is the Almighty Dollar. Most of the
dollars we worship are actually stored in cyberspace. Dollars are just digital
ones and zeros in a network of computers, but that doesn't mean they're only
virtual reality, and basically one big fantasy. No, dollars are utterly and
entirely real, far more

real than anything as vague as the public interest. If you're not a commodity,
you don't exist!

Can you believe that Melville Dewey once said, "free as air, free as water, free
as knowledge?" Free as knowledge? Let's get real, this is the modern world --
air and water no longer come cheap! Hey, you want breathable air, you better pay
your air conditioner's power-bill, pal. Free as water? Man, if you've got sense
you buy the bottled variety or pay for an ionic filter on your tap. And free as
knowledge? Well, we don't know what "knowledge" is, but we can get you plenty of
*data,* and as soon as we figure out how to download it straight into student
skulls we can put all the teachers into the breadline and the librarians as
well.

Ladies and gentlemen, there's a problem with showing Mr Franklin the door. The
problem is that Mr Franklin was *right* in 1731 and Mr Franklin is *still
right!*. Information is not something you can successfully

peddle like Coca-Cola. If it were a genuine commodity, then information would
cost nothing when you had a glut of it. God knows we've got enough data! We're
drowning in data. Nevertheless we're only gonna make more. Money just does not
map the world of information at all well. How much is the Bible worth? You can
get a Bible in any hotel room. They're worthless as commodities, but not
valueless to humankind. Money and value are not identical.

What's information *really* about? It seems to me there's something direly wrong
with the "Information Economy." It's not about data, it's about attention. In a
few years you may be able to carry the Library of Congress around in your hip
pocket. So? You're never gonna read the Library of Congress. You'll die long
before you access one tenth of one percent of it. What's important --
*increasingly important* -- is the process by which you figure out what to look
at. This is the beginning of the real and true economics of information. *Not*
who owns the books, who prints the books, who has the holdings. The crux here is
*access,* not holdings. And not even *access* itself, but the signposts that
tell you *what* to access -- what to pay attention to. In the Information
Economy *everything* is plentiful -- except attention.

That's why the spin-doctor is the creature who increasingly rules the
information universe. Spin doctors rule our attention. Never mind that man
behind the curtain. No, no! Look at my hand! I can make a candidate disappear.
Watch me pull a President out of a hat. Look! I can make these starving people
disappear in a haze of media noise. Nothing up my sleeve. Presto! The facts
don't matter if he can successfully direct our *attention.*

Spin-doctors are like evil anti-librarians; they're the Dark Side of the Force.

Librarians used to be book-pullers. Book-pullers. I kind of like the humble,
workaday sound of that. I like it kind of better than I like the sound of
"information retrieval expert," though that's clearly where librarians are
headed. Might be the right way to head. That's where the power seems to be.
Though I wonder exactly what will be retrieved, and what will be allowed to
quietly mummify in the deepest darkest deserts of the dustiest hard-disks.

I like libraries and librarians, I owe my career to libraries and librarians. I
respect Mr. Franklin. I hate seeing books turned into a commodity and seeing
access to books turned into a commodity. I do like bookstores too, and of course
I earn my living by them, but I worry about them more and more. I don't like
chainstores and I don't like chain distributors. We already have twelve human
beings in the US who buy all the science fiction books for the twelve major
American distributors. They're the information filters and the attention
filters, and their criterion i s the bottom line, and the bottom line is bogus
and a fraud. I don't like megapublishers either. Modern publishing is owned by
far too few people. They're the people who own the means of production, and
worse yet, they own far too much of the means of attention. They determine what
we get to pay attention to.

Of course, there are other ways, other methods, of delimiting people's attention
besides merely commercial ones. Like aesthetic and cultural means of limiting
attention. Librarians used to be very big on this kind of public-spirited
filtering. Conceivably, librarians could get this way again with another turn of
the cultural wheel. Librarians could become very correct. Holdings must be
thinned, and even in electronic media the good old *delete* key is never far
from hand.

Try reading what librarians used to say a hundred years ago Your ancestral
librarians were really upset about popular novels. They carried on about novels
in a way which would sound very familiar to Dan Quayle. Here's a gentleman named
Dr. Isaac Ray in the 1870s. I quote him: "The specific doctrine I would
inculcate is, that the excessive indulgence in novel- reading, which is a
characteristic of our times, is chargeable with many of the mental
irregularities that prevail upon us to a degree unknown at any former period."

Here's the superintendent of the State of Michigan in 1869. "The state swarms
with peddlers of the sensational novels of all ages, tales of piracy, murders,
and love intrigues -- the yellow-covered literature of the world." Librarian
James Angell in 1904: "I think it must be confessed that a great deal of the
fiction which is deluging the market is the veriest trash, or worse than trash.
Much of it is positively bad in its influence. It awakens morbid passions. It
deals in the most exaggerated representations of life. It is vicious in style."

These worthies are talking about authors who corrupt the values of youth,
authors who write about crime and lowlife, authors who drive people nuts,
authors who themselves are degraded and untrustworthy and quite possibly insane.
I think I know who they're talking about. Basically they're talking about *me.*

Here's the President of the United States speaking at a library in 1890.

"The boy who greedily devours the vicious tales of imaginary daring and
blood-curdling adventure which in these days are far too accessible will have
his brain filled with notions of life and standards of manliness which, if they
do not make him a menace to peace and good order, will certainly not make him a
useful member of society." Grover Cleveland hit the nail on the head. I feel
very strongly, I feel instinctively, I feel passionately that *I* am one of
those nails. Not only did I start out in libraries as that greedy devouring boy,
but thanks to mindwarping science fictional yellow-covered literature, I have
become a menace to Grover Cleveland's idea of peace and good order.

Far too accessible, eh Mr President? Too much access. By all means let's not
provide our electronic networks with *too much access.* That might get
dangerous. The networks might rot people's minds and corrupt their family
values. They might create bad taste. Think this electrical network thing is a
new problem? Think again. Listen to prominent litterateur James Russell Lowell
speaking in 1885. "We diligently inform ourselves and cover the continent with
speaking wires.... we are getting buried alive under this avalanche of earthly
impertinences... we... are willing to become mere sponges saturated from the
stagnant goosepond of village gossip."

The stagnant goosepond of the *global* village. Marshall MacLuhan's stagnant
goosepond. Who are the geese in the stagnant pond? Whoever they are, I'm one of
them. You'll find me with the pulp magazines and the bloodcurdling comics and
the yellow-covered works of imaginary daring. In the future you'll find me, or
my successors, in the electronic pulps. In the electronic zines, in the
fanzines, in the digital genres, the digital underground. In whatever medium it
is that really bugs Grover Cleveland. He can't make up his mind whether I'm the
scum from the gutter or the "cultural elite" -- but in either case he doesn't
like me. He doesn't like cyberpunks.

He doesn't like cyberpunks. That's not big news to you people I'm sure. But he's
not going to like cyberpunk librarians either. I hope you won't deceive
yourselves on that score.

Weird ideas are tolerable as long as they remain weird ideas. Once they start
challenging the world, there's smoke in the air and blood on the floor. You
cybernetic LITA guys are marching toward blood on the floor. It's cultural
struggle, political struggle, legal struggle. Extending the public right-to-know
into cyberspace will be a mighty battle. It's an old war, a war librarians are
used to, and I honor you for the free-expression battles you have won in the
past. But the terrain of cyberspace is new terrain. I think that ground will
have to be won all over again, megabyte by megabyte.

You've heard some weird ideas today. That's what we're here for -- weird ideas.
I like reading Hans Moravec. I respect him, and I pay close attention to what he
says. He's a true fount of weird ideas, and in my opinion he's a credit to the
basic values of the American republic. I think he even makes a certain amount of
sense, technically and rationally, if not politically and socially.

But then again, I don't think the Ayatollahs have read MIND CHILDREN yet. If
they had, they would recognize it as complete and utter blasphemy, far worse
than Salman Rushdie's SATANIC VERSES. If Hans actually got around to creating a
digital afterlife right here on Earth, I'm pretty sure the Moslem
fundamentalists would try to have him killed. They'd surely consider this their
moral duty. And they probably wouldn't be first in line, either. A lot of people
have seen the science fiction film, TERMINATOR TWO. They might figure our friend
Hans here as the future Architect of Skynet. He wants to make the human race
obsolete and let robots rule. Doesn't that mean it'd be a lot more convenient to
kill him right now?

Of course we're not going to kill Hans now. I mean, not till he gets hi s own
satellite channel and starts his own religious movement and asks for
love-offerings. Not till he starts building a posthuman brain in a box. When his
technology moves from the rhetorical to the commercial. When MIND CHILDREN
become MIND CHILDREN (TM) and they're manufactured by Apple and Toshiba and
retailed to adventurous aging yuppies. Fifty years to the Singularity? Fifty
years to the complete transformation of the human condition? Maybe. Maybe it's
just five years till the day the Secret Service raids the basements of MIT and
removes all Hans's equipment. As for criminal charges, well, they'll think of
something. Maybe they can nail him on an FDA rap.

I do kind of believe in the singularity though. I think some kind of genuine
deep transformation in the human condition is in the works. I have no idea what
that will be, but I can smell it in the wind. It's no accident that this
historic period is producing people like Mr. Moravec here. Right or wrong, he is
a cultural avatar. Maybe we're about to radically change the operating system of
the human condition. If so, then this would be a really good time to make
backups of our civilization.

That's why I want to bring up one last topic today. One last weird,
science-fictional idea. I call it Deep Archiving. It's possibly the most
uncommercial act possible for the institutions we call libraries. I'd like to
see stuff archived for the long term. The VERY long term. For the successors of
our civilization. Possibly for the successors of the human race.

We're already leaving some impressive gifts for the remote future of this
planet. Nuclear wastes, for instance. We're going to be neatly archiving

this repulsive trash in concrete and salt mines and fused glass canisters, for
tens of thousands of years. Imagine the pleasure of discovering one of these
nice radioactive time-bombs six thousand years from now. Imagine the joy of
selfless, dedicated archaeologists burrowing into one of these twentieth-
century pharaoh's tombs and dropping dead, slowly and painfully. Gosh, thanks,
ancestors. Thanks, twentieth century! Thanks for thinking of us!

Possible, it is our moral obligation to explain ourselves to these possible
people that we might possibly offend? Possibly. Shouldn't we give some thought
to leaving them a legacy a little less lethal and offensive than our giant
fossilized landfills and the radioactive fallout layer in the polar snows? If
we're going to put the Library of Congress in our hip pocket, I'd like to see us
put a Library of Congress beside every canister of nuclear waste. Let's airmail
the Library of Congress to the year 20,000 AD.

There's absolutely no benefit for us in this action. There's no money in it.
That's why I like the idea. That's why I find it appealing. I think i t would be
good for the soul of consumer society. It's a moral gesture to demonstrate that
our sense of values is not entirely selfish, not entirely narrow, not entirely
short-term. I hope you'll think about Deep Archiving. As weird ideas go it's one
of the less hazardous and more workable ones. If you remember one idea from my
visit here, I hope you'll remember that idea.

That's all I have to say, thanks a lot for listening.

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