Ascendancies (2 page)

I was always impressed by science fiction's deeply oxymoronic aspects: that it was wondrous yet trashy, elite yet cheap, obscure yet global, cosmic yet a gutter literature, a literature-of-ideas scared by literary ideologies. You may notice that all these contradictions are also true of the Internet now.

In my youth, science fiction writers were supposed to be hands-on paperback midlist guys who could dent the wire racks with truckloads of popular product. I was totally into that business model, but I turned out to be a rather artsy, fussy, highbrow, theory-driven, critics'-darling kind of science fiction writer. As you can see by these stories, I tried hard to avoid that. My basic attitude to the enterprise was about as determinedly pulpy and street-level as they come, but after thirty years of writing science fiction, I nevertheless became what I am. At this point in my life, I'm some kinda gypsy-scholar cyberpunk aesthete who writes for glossy magazines, teaches in design schools and keynotes European tech conferences. I have to admit I'm a little crestfallen.

Given a book like this one, though, the evidence is just irrefutable. I wonder guiltily what my spiritual ancestors would think of me.

Take, for instance, Robert E. Howard, who is definitely the patron saint of Texan science fiction writers like myself. “Two-Gun Bob,” they used to call him. Howard was a raging, off-kilter guy from a scarily isolated West Texas village who, in order to save money and paper during the depths of the Depression, would type a new story
between the lines
of an earlier manuscript. God knows what he did for ribbon ink. Or H.P. Lovecraft: living on 19 cents a day while writing endless morale-boosting letters to the far-flung members of his literary coterie. I've got a literary coterie, too, but at least I can send them email. I still bite my lips about Henry Kuttner. Kuttner could appear in ten or twelve SF magazines all at once, writing under a dozen pseudonyms, writing a new story
every day
. I once wrote a story in a single day, just like Henry Kuttner. Yeah, I did that: once.

Howard shot himself, Lovecraft perished of malnutrition and Kuttner died of a heart attack from too much desk work, but the Gothic prospect of writerly immolation never deterred me. Not a bit of it. Us 1970s rock 'n' roll counterculture no-future punk types, we considered that sort of activity romantic. Nevertheless, I have conspicuously failed to drop dead. As far as I can tell, I'm not even close. On the contrary, now that I'm in my supposedly stolid and sensible '50s, years when I ought to be finding a favorite easy chair, my life has become wildly frenetic: I travel incessantly and I scribble reams of scattershot journalism about design, architecture, politics, science.… I've already lived twice as long as John Keats.

As this tome amply demonstrates, my pen has gleaned my teeming brain in a high-piled book like a rich garner of the full-ripened grain (as young Mr. Keats used to put it). What might Mr. Keats make of the goods purveyed here? His poesy rarely lacked for the florid and phantastic, but I mean, really: spacey posthumans, intelligent raccoons, anarchist bike mechanics… stand-up comedians from Meiji Japan, computer-crime investigators… Furthermore,
Ascendancies
contains the calmer, more lucid and considered material from the Sterling oeuvre.

Keats was a gifted critic and had things to say about writing that I took to heart: yes, “load every rift with ore.” I have ored my share of rifts in here, but would Keats be able to parse a single paragraph? I might mention that John Keats himself appears as a minor character in one of my novels. Not as a poet. He's a computer programmer. That may have been impolite of me.

There's just no getting around it: these stories are plenty weird. They're not merely about weird topics. These texts are conjured up and stuck together in peculiar, idiosyncratic ways. Since I've been known to write reviews, I know what stories are supposed to look like. These stories don't look much like that. My stories strongly tend to be laborious and overcrowded, with frazzled wiring and excessive moving parts. They writhe in organic profusion. They're antic, snarled and open-ended. This book makes it pretty obvious that I've worked like that during my entire creative life. Somehow, I must know what I'm doing.

It alarms me now to see how much these texts, many of them written on typewriters decades ago, look and feel like contemporary websurfing. They have that cyberized “more is more” aesthetic, like techno music and software art. Sometimes it's pitifully easy to predict the future.

As a weblogger and tech journalist, I find myself doing a great deal of web-surfing these days. I work on computer screens much more than I work on paper. Websurfing is ominously different from classical literature, in that it's machine-assisted and basically infinite in scope. Websurfing bears the relationship to reading that movies do to oil-paint. Email, web-posts, digital photographs, streaming speeches on video.… The web has no ends, no beginnings, no arc of development, no denouement, no plot. The web has no center, no heart. The web has data. It has tags and terms. Increasingly, the web has something like a native semantics. As a tech journalist and futurist, I'm fascinated; as a literateur, I look on these developments with alarmed misgivings. They're just not well understood. I ought to be in the business of understanding a transition like that. Frankly, I can't say that I do.

It worries me that the Internet suits my own sensibilities so much better than ink on paper ever did. These stories of mine are still “stories,” but instead of being well-contained verbal contrivances, disciplined and redolent of literary-cultural sensemaking, Sterling texts generally look-and-feel like they could do with some hotlinks and keywords. Maybe a scrollbar.

Sterling stories are nets of ideas and images that have been bent, tucked and pruned into a pocket world. Their literary sensibility—and they do have one—is in the worldbuilding. It's about the settings, the semiotics. And the feelings. Not the characters' feelings—mostly, the key to these stories is the
narrator's
feelings. With one brisk exception, the narrator's not a character within these stories, but he's the busiest guy in this book. In his lighter moments, he exhibits a certain amiable boyish gusto, like some kid happily mangling encyclopedias. His most common affect, as he razors and duct-tapes, is sinister glee.

The writer of these pieces, like a lot of comedians, has a rather dark muse. His inner child is the kind of kid that pokes anthills with a stick. The lad just can't let those ants be; he direly needs to satirize the ants a little, to jolt them out of their mental ant-box. Science fiction writing can be a problematic effort. Annoying ants is not a major literary enterprise. Why? Because ants don't get illuminated by that artistic intervention; ants are just ants. Imagined worlds have so many phony, sandbox aspects.… science fiction makes head-fakes toward profundity, which too often turn out to be mere sleights of hand, in-jokes, trivial paradoxes, vaudeville.… Like a trained flea-circus, where the fleas are dressed as six-armed Martian swordsmen.

Sense of wonder? Too short a shelf-life. Blowing people's minds? Like stage magic, that's done mostly through misdirection. Happy, upbeat endings? Depends on when you stop telling the story.

Are there other burning lamentations one might offer about the cruel creative agony and the dire existential limits involved in writing science fiction stories? Well, now that you insist on asking me, yeah. For instance, this big Bruce Sterling collection sure does have a lot of Bruce Sterling in it. My other story collections tend to feature some pleasant collaborations with other writers, which break up that relentless Sterlingness.

I used to spend rather a lot of my time and energy trying to write stories that nobody else could write. You know: unique, original, ground-breaking, non-derivative work. Young writers suffer anxiety-of-influence, so they attempt a lot of that. Some of these stories are much in that vein. “Finding one's own voice,” they call that.

It might also be dignified with the term “self-actualization.” Self-actualization is a conceptual, very writerly game in which one tries to become as much like Bruce Sterling as one can. There's much to be said for that activity, especially if one actually is Bruce Sterling. However, when a science fiction writer pursues that line of development, in that particularly oracular and eccentric science-fictional way, it can be rather trying to the reader. “Okay, fine, pal, nobody but you could have ever conceived of that notion. That was totally, utterly unheard-of. Great. So how come I have to read about that?” Now that you ask, that's another good question.

The way that certain SF writers cough up those raw crunchy nuggets of the barely thinkable… well, that's one of the connoisseur delights of SF as a genre. It's like whales and their ambergris. Rare and superb in small amounts, rather scary in large beached lumps. Furthermore, as an artistic program, it's dubious. Suppose you're radically self-actualized, but you're also a delusional goofball. Wouldn't you do better by seeking some cues from objective reality, rather than hearkening always to those magic promptings of the inner self?

Furthermore: just suppose that, like me, your inner self is, for obscure design-fan reasons, deeply inspired by forks, manhole covers and doorknobs, rather than raucous, technicolor, crowd-pleasing sci-fi gizmos such as robots, rocketships and time machines. If you write a sci-fi book about forks and manhole covers, will that be a great work? No. It won't. Because forks and manhole covers are not entertaining. They're boring. Not to you, of course; you adore manhole covers. Manhole covers are very you. But they're also incredibly boring. They just plain are.

Original genius, that's not everything in the world. The world is more significant than the inside of anybody's head. Sometimes you're well-advised to just get over yourself.

If your thoughts were genuinely original—literally unthinkable by other people—then you could never express them in a language sharable with readers. That's not what writing is about. Literature is a heritage. Language is a commons. Language is centuries old and enriched by thousands of minds. Language and literature need to be treated with a sensitivity and care which doesn't always mesh with raw, kraken-busting sci-fi aesthetics. I know that, and I further know that, as a writer, I ought to do better at that. Is there any clear sign of my making any progress along that front, within these stories? Am I fighting the good fight here, or am I pretty much part of the problem? I do have to wonder.

A writer pestered with truly original thoughts would have to make up new nouns, new verbs. Frankly, I do a great deal of that. My writing in this book—in all my books—is cram-full of invented jargon and singular idiolects. It's a signature riff of mine that I compose a great many words and terms that no mere computer spell-checker understands. I'm trying to get a little subtler about that. It works best when people don't notice I'm doing it.

With all this anguished authorly handwringing, you might wonder how stories like these get written at all. But they do get written; they even get finished and sent off to publishers. I got one coming out next month. It's not in this book, but man, it's aces. I've got a hundred ideas for other ones—really weird ideas—but, well, ideas aren't stories. As stories, I've yet to get them done.

A Sterling story is generally done—or it stops, at least—when the writer's inner creative daemon has fully stacked up its Lego blocks.

Rational analysis is never the strong suit of the inner daemon. The inner daemon is profoundly creative, yet he's rather stupid. A creative daemon by nature is a rather simple, headstrong being who sees the cosmos as daemon-friendly toy-blocks. The daemon assembles a mental world from a raw confusion into some meaningful coherency. He does that through assembling his blocks. The daemon himself is made of the blocks. He's not a conscious personality, he's much lower in the chain-of-being than that; the daemon is a sense-making network, some pre-conscious society-of-mind. The daemon is a capturer of imagination. That's his reason for being.

When the daemon is on top of his game, he can whip up a story from his shadowy basement of mentality. A story is a tower of blocks, one with some coherent structure of feeling. A story says something evocative about the world, it somehow means something… Then the conscious mind can bind that in wire, slap on a label and ship it.

That's how I write stories. That's how these works came into being. Thanks for putting up with that confession. I rather hope to do a lot more of that. I don't do it with any particular regularity because I'm not fully in control of the process. The same goes for a lot of artists. You learn to live with that.

So: a few closing notes now somehow seem necessary. Let me explain the title of this book. From some mysterious cataloging bug or cyber-mechanical oversight, a book called “Ascendancies” was attributed to me back in 1987. “Ascendancies” frequently appears in bibliographies of mine. For years, people have written me eager fan mail determined to locate my book, “Ascendancies”. I never wrote that book. I don't think I ever used the word, either. Still “Ascendancies” is quite a pretty-looking word, almost a palindrome: “Seicnadnecsa.” It'll do.

Better yet, the sudden appearance of a genuine “Ascendancies” by Bruce Sterling, a full twenty years in the future after its announced publication date, is a time-travel paradox that will drive bibliographers nuts. Deeply confusing my audience, librarians, and the industry in toto: hey, just another service we offer.

In conclusion, I'd like to formally thank every rugged, determined, anonymous consumer who, through a host of small purchases, has given American science fiction something like an economic basis. Nobody ever thanks these noble people; they're considered to be some kind of vast, rumbling mass audience, but, well, they're all individuals. Every one of them is individual. Reading is a solitary pursuit. Writing as an art is the mingling of one mind with one other. But there are lots of American readers, and thank goodness. In some smaller society with a smaller language, I'd have quite likely done this sort of thing anyway, yet never been paid one shekel, ruble, peso, real or dinar. So that was great luck for all concerned, eh? Fate has truly been kind! Let's hope we all do more of that!