20 October 2001

Robert Bringhurst consistently uses a, b and c instead of a, b, and c, and Bill Watterson often does. I’m about three more examples from switching. I asked some people on IRC a month or two ago, and they seemed mostly against it, but didn’t comment when I used it. Darn IRC doesn’t let you watch people creepily. Well.

I guess my problem with cyberpunk is that I think it’s doomed to embarrassing falsehood because you can’t really tell the future. I mean, yeah, you can quote a dozen sci-fi authors who were talkin’ rockets and robots in the thirties, but none of them ever got a solid grip on what life in 2001 feels like, and that’s what cyberpunk seems to be trying for. My ideal for cyberpunk is to mange both technology and culture, and the one of the other. Perhaps it is impossible, or just unrealistically difficult, to manage hard science and a compelling story if you aren’r Neal Stephenson, Vernor Vinge, or David Brin. I can’t hold Sterling, Gibson, et al. to the ignorance of the thirties, but neither can they touch the future — they’re not smarter by virtue of living today. In fact, making eighty-year predictions is harder now than then, what with the well-known exponential growth of history and all. (Of course, that’s a prediction in itself.) (Some sarcasm.) The twenties’ predictions showed Art Deco moon bases and womens’ space-suits with cloche helmets; the sixties’ predictions had puzzle-piece chairs and food colors everywhere — and, needless to say, neither had women doing anything useful or Black people doing anything at all.

(Food colors: Asher Sandburg-Lewis has cogently pointed out that every color popular in the late sixties and early seventies was directly derived from food, mostly fruit. Avocado, peach, orange, raspberry, oatmeal (popular for buildings), mint, chocolate, and so on, with absolutely no exceptions.)

— The idea that, once we’ve discovered enough races to be worth writing a novel about, we’ll turn out to be the most human of them, is pretty fair. After all, they’re likely to be decidedly strange, and even if one of ’em were to have more of our qualities than we do, we’ll still be the most human by having the qualities in the right amounts. The question is: what qualities? Sci-fi authors consistently make humans the plucky, well-rounded, unexceptional but unpredictable race. Look at Asimov, Niven, Star Trek, Pratchett, Robert Asprin, Herbert, and any number of others: their spectrums of races are almost interchangeable. There’s a warlike race, a cute race, a glum race, a smart race, an old wise race, a bear-like race, a(n inter)stellar race of pure energy, a trickster/trader race, and so on and on. Most authors are original enough to mix and match the stock aliens a little, but they always make humans exactly the same in relation to them: the underdog, the disadvantaged but noble species with not a lot of resources or book-learnin’ but plenty of spirit and gumption. We baffle the overly-intelligent, we beat the warlike, we outwile the wily, and so on, not by strength but by quirky earthling logic and sudden intuition. Well, what the hell? How did we get any idea of what’s earthling and what’s not without comparing ourselves to anyone? How can we expect to be more or less anything than anyone without having any idea what they’re like? I mean, get real. What we’re looking at — this gritty humanoid pride, this unpredictable earthling cleverness — is pure projection. Any portrayal of humans vs. x is coming from nowhere but the author’s head. As such, it’s interesting as human psychology, but surely we should worry if something so contrived feels right as a portrayal of ourselves in circumstances we can’t imagine. Like action-movie characters having huge biceps and breasts, it’s best to notice and think about.

— The idea that, to maintain an air of futurosity, it helps to write with a hypercool disregard for not-strictly-necessary grammatical tags. The building was big, gray, uncaring. Another slept, tired. This only seems futuristic because it’s modern, and it’s been modern for a really long time, so quit it. If you think it makes your prose cleaner and more icily sparse, you may be right, but you’re also stupid. Hemingway — who was cool, don’t get me wrong — with his transcendence of inessential grammar, was reacting or experimenting against the Victorians, who liked to use as much grammar as possible. Now, you may like Hemingway because he was clean and clear and studly (which Asimov and clones seemed to like), and you may think the Victorians are old hat, and you may be right. But Hemingway, despite being lucid and fast, was quite the converse of both computers and the shiny gritty bitterness (like bad coffee) that cyberpunk seems to like so much. Semicolons are extremely well-adapted to cyberpunk’s modes of thought; they’re not <wuss> tags. The Victorian feel for language is what cyberpunk needs: an expressive, structured, big-idea/tiny-detail meta-patterning. Yes, it needs new vocabulary and new forms (maybe an infusion of Nipponese), but it’s a far better base than Hemingway or anything like him. Dig The Difference Engine, by Sterling and Gibson. (Stephenson, in The Diamond Age, sums up why other Victorian ideas port well to technocracy.)