Collected Essays (5 page)

Love Quadrilateral: In setting up Spaceland, I used the notion of two couples who swap partners, and then try and swap back.

Campbell’s Monomyth. In order to give my most recent novel Frek and the Elixir a nice mythic feel, I modeled the book on the specific “monomyth” template described in Joseph Campbell’s classic The Hero with A Thousand Faces (as George Lucas is said to have done for Star Wars.) Frek and the Elixir was designed from the ground up to match the monomyth so as to give the book the greatest possible resonance.

Campbell’s archetypal myth includes seventeen stages. By combining two pairs of stages, I ended up with fifteen chapters. And I matched my chapters to the Cambellian monomyth stages.

Looking back over my other novels, I was surprised to see how many of them had monomythic patterns in them—it’s hard in fact to avoid them. For instance, the odd-sounding “The Belly of the Whale” stage of Campbell’s monomyth occurs as a faster-than-light trip in White Light, as a boat ride down a river in The Hollow Earth, as a stint inside a hyperspherical creature named Om in Realware, as a ride inside Kangy the hyperspace cuttlefish in Spaceland, and so on.

It’s worth mentioning that even though I
consciously
used the monomyth to plot the chapters of
Frek and the Elixir
, I had to work as hard as ever to figure out the details. There’s no substitute for simulation.

As I keep saying, a characteristic feature of any complex process is that you can’t look at what’s going on today and immediately deduce what will be happening in a few weeks. It’s necessary to have the world run step-by-step through the intervening ticks of time. Gnarly processes are unpredictable; they don’t allow for short-cuts.

Let me say a bit about plots and outlining. I used to maintain that it was better not to plot my novels in advance. But maybe I was just making a virtue of a vice. I denigrated plot outlines because I didn’t like working on them, preferring to jump right into the writing.

One might defend the practice of not having a precise outline by speaking in terms of the gnarl. To wit, a characteristic feature of any complex process is that you can’t look at what’s going on today and immediately deduce what will be happening in a few weeks. It’s necessary to have the world run step-by-step through the intervening ticks of time. Gnarly computations are unpredictable; they don’t allow for short-cuts. In other words, the last chapter of a novel with a gnarly plot is, even in principle, unpredictable from the contents of the first chapter. You have to write the whole novel in order to discover what happens in the last chapter.

This said, I’ve also learned that if I start writing a novel with no plot outline at all, two things happen. First of all, the readers can tell. Some will be charmed by the spontaneity, but some will complain that the book feels improvised, like a shaggy-dog story. Second, if I’m working without a plot outline, I’m going to experience some really painful and anxious days when everything seems broken, and I have no idea how to proceed. I’ve heard Sheckley refer to these periods in the compositional process as “black points.” Writing an outline makes it easier on me. Perhaps it’s a matter of mature craftsmanship versus youthful passion.

These days, even before I start writing a new book, I create an accompanying notes document in which I accumulate outlines, scene sketches and the like. These documents end up being very nearly as long as my books, and when the book comes out, I usually post the corresponding notes document online for perusal by those few who are very particularly interested in that book or in my working methods. (Links to these notes documents and some of my essays can be found on my writing
page
.)

Even with an outline, I can’t be quite sure about the twists and turns my story will take. How precise, after all, is an outline? William Burroughs used to say a novel is a map of a territory. But an outline is only a map of a map.

In the end, only the novel itself is the perfect outline of the novel. Only the territory itself can be the perfect map. In this connection, I think of Jorge Luis Borges’s one-paragraph fiction, “On Exactitude in Science,” that contains this sentence: “In time, those Unconscionable Maps no longer satisfied, and the Cartographers Guilds struck a Map of the Empire whose size was that of the Empire, and which coincided point for point with it.”

Regarding the outline, I think of a novel’s structure as breaking into four increasingly fine levels: parts, chapters, scenes, and actions. I start with a story arc, describing how the parts fit together. I break the parts into chapters and outline the chapters one by one. As I work on a chapter’s outline, I break it into scenes, trying to outline the individual scenes themselves. But as for the actions that make up a scene, more often than not I simply visualize these and describe what I “see.”

The outline changes as I work. Shit happens. After writing each scene in a given chapter, I find that I have to go back and revise the outlines of the remaining scenes of the chapter. And after finishing a chapter, I have to go back and revise the outlines of the chapters to come.

Making the same point yet again, whether or not you write an outline, in practice, the only way to discover the ending of a truly living book is to set yourself in motion and think constantly about the novel for months or years, writing all the while. The characters and tropes and social situations bounce off each other like eddies in a turbulent wakes, like gliders in a cellular automaton simulation, like vines twisting around each other in a jungle. And only time will tell just how the story ends. Gnarly plotting means there are no perfectly predictive short-cuts.

But it’s not a bad idea to select in advance an armature of plot structure. The detailed eddies will indeed have to work themselves out during the writing, but there’s no harm in having some sluices and gutters to guide the flow of the story along a harmonious and satisfying course.

Power Chords and Thought Experiments

What stampedes are to Westerns or murders are to mysteries,
power chords
are to science fiction. I’m talking about certain classic tropes that have the visceral punch of heavy musical riffs: blaster guns, spaceships, time machines, aliens, telepathy, flying saucers, warped space, faster-than-light travel, immersive virtual reality, clones, robots, teleportation, alien-controlled pod people, endless shrinking, the shattering of planet Earth, intelligent goo, antigravity, starships, ecodisaster, pleasure-center zappers, alternate universes, nanomachines, mind viruses, higher dimensions, a cosmic computation that generates our reality, and, of course, the attack of the giant ants.

When a writer uses an SF power chord, there is an implicit understanding with the informed readers that this is indeed familiar ground. And it’s expected the writer will do something fresh with the trope. “Make it new,” as Ezra Pound said, several years before he went crazy.

Mainstream writers who dip a toe into what they daintily call “speculative fiction” tend not be aware of just how familiar are the chords they strum. And the mainstream critics are unlikely to call their cronies to task over failing to create original SF. They don’t have a clue either. And we lowly science-fiction people are expected to be grateful when a mainstream writer stoops to filch a bespattered icon from our filthy wattle huts. Oh, wait, do I sound bitter?

One way we make power chords fresh is simply to execute them with a lot of style—to pile on detail and make the scene very real. To execute the material impeccably. I can’t resist mentioning two rock’n’roll examples. The Rolling Stones: “I know it’s only rock and roll, but I like it.” The Ramones in “Worm Man”: “I need some dirt!” The idea is to invest the familiar tropes with enough craft and energy that they rock harder than ever.

Another way to break a power chord out of the low-complexity predictable zone is to place the chord into an unfamiliar context, perhaps describing it more intensely than usual, or perhaps using it for a novel thought experiment. I like it when my material takes on a life of its own. This leads to the gnarly zone. As with plot, it’s a matter of working out unpredictable consequences of simple-seeming assumptions.

A different way to handle the familiarity of a power chord is to use irony but there can a bad taste in this practice, a sense that the author’s saying, “Science fiction is stupid junk. None of it matters. Let’s be silly! Weally, weally thilly!” That’s no way to treat our noble genre.

The reason why fictional thought experiments are so powerful is that, in practice, it’s intractably difficult to visualize the side effects of new technological developments. Only if you place the new tech into a fleshed-out fictional world and simulate the effects on reality can you get a clear image of what might happen.

In order to tease out the subtler consequences of current trends, a complex fictional simulation is necessary; inspired narration is a more powerful tool than logical analysis. If I want to imagine, for instance, what our world would be like if ordinary objects like chairs or shoes were conscious, then the best way to make progress is to fictionally simulate a person discovering this.

The kinds of thought experiments I enjoy are different in intent and in execution from merely futurological investigations. My primary goal is not to make useful predictions that businessmen can use. I’m more interested in exploring the human condition, with literary power chord standing in for archetypal psychic forces.

Where to find material for our thought experiments? You don’t have to be a scientist. As Kurt Vonnegut used to remark, most science fiction writers don’t know much about science. But SF writers have an ability to pick out some odd new notion and set up a thought experiment. As Robert Sheckley remarked to me when he was living in a camper in my driveway, “At the heart of it all is a rage to extrapolate. Excuse me, shall I extrapolate that for you? Won’t take a jiffy.”

The most entertaining fantasy and SF writers have a rage to extrapolate; a zest for seeking the gnarl.

Satire and Cyberpunk

So here’s the last of my complexity-spectrum tables.

I’m always uncomfortable when I’m described as a science-fiction humorist. I’m not trying to be funny in my work. It’s just that things often happen to come out as amusing when I tell them the way I see them.

Wit involves describing the world as it actually is. And you experience a release of tension when the elephant in the living room is finally named. Wit is a critical-satirical process that can be more serious than the “humorous” label suggests.

The least-aware kinds of literature take society entirely at face value, numbly acquiescing in the myths and mores laid down by the powerful. These forms are dead, too cold.

At the other extreme, we have the chaotic forms of social commentary where everything under the sun becomes questionable and a subject for mockery. If everything’s a joke, then nothing matters. This said, laughing like a crazy hyena can be fun.

But it’s worth noting you can be funny without being silly. This was something I picked up from the works of Philip K. Dick. A Scanner Darkly is one of the funniest books I’ve ever read, but the laughter rides upon a constant counterpoint of tragedy, a muted background of sad French horns. It’s relevant to this essay to mention that the masterwork
Scanner
uses fresh SF tropes such as the scramble-suit and the scanner, and has a transreal feeling of being about parts of Dick’s real life.

In the gnarly zone, we have fiction that extrapolates social conventions to the point where the inherent contradictions become overt enough to provoke the shock of recognition and the concomitant release of laughter. At the low end of this gnarly zone we have observational commentary on the order of stand-up comedy. And at the higher end we get inspired satire.

In this vein, Sheckley wrote the following in his “Amsterdam Diary” in
Semiotext[e] SF
, Autonomedia 1997:

Good fiction is never preachy. It tells its truth only by inference and analogy. It uses the specific detail as its building block rather than the vague generalization. In my case it’s usually humorous—no mistaking my stuff for the Platform Talk of the 6th Patriarch. But I do not try to be funny, I merely write as I write… In the meantime I trust the voice I can never lose—my own . . . enjoying writing my story rather than looking forward to its completion.

So that’s enough about comedy. Let’s also move onto social commentary, which often takes a revolutionary turn. In particular, let’s talk about cyberpunk.