Future Tense: An interview with Bruce Sterling
by Paul D. Miller
"For if the Jazz Age is year for year the Essences
and Symptoms of the times, then Jes Grew is the germ making it rise yeast-like
across the American plain.... the letters after their names are their
tommy guns and those universities where the pour over syllables their
Big House..."
---Ishmael Reed, Mumbo Jumbo
"...the city no longer exists, except as a cultural ghost for tourists..."
---Marshall Mcluhan, "The Alchemy of Social Change"
from Verbi-Voco-Visual Explanations, 1967
First things first: It took me a zillion years (summer to winter,'99)
to write this 'cause I didn't know where to start. I think about Bruce
Sterling's writing and see a precendent that runs throughout alot of American
science fiction. It's a tradition of writing where the future is far more
of a barometer to measure the present than the past, and it's the fracture
points in the lines of thought holding it all together that his work explores.
He, like J.G. Ballard, is one of those people who can peer deep inside
the structures holding together contemporary society and weave together
stories that somehow make past, present, and future blend in a way that
is incredibly well researched and astute, not to mention excellent fiction
as well. A difficult task indeed. Sterling has been on the writing scene
for ages, and with his peers Neal Stephenson, William Gibson, and in a
more remote "hard science" fashion, Greg Egan, has sparked the imagination
of people within both the arts and technological communities for the last
two decades with science fiction created from stories and situations that
would only be remotely possible in our world. A tape recorder, a geographically
dispersed conversation that took place over several months, a chain of
e-mail corrections and file exchangesS and the article was done. The stories,
like the conversation, are fractured and full of a strange humorS fluid
but crisp, openly flaunting the kind of hypertext narrative drift that
drives editors bonkers, but kept tantalizing close to the "reality" we
inhabit. The thing that differentiates Sterling from many of his compatriots
in science fiction is that he focuses on the everyday and uses his explorations
(take that one literally because he travels more than almost anyone I
know), as a platform from which to write about America and the world it
finds itself in. Sterling strikes a fine tuned balance between shear impossibility
and and "the real" to create milieux that are all too hauntingly familiar.
Heimlich versus unheimlich, - the familiar and its distortions and permutations
- remote possibility and unerringly "scientifically possible" renditions
of future worldsS what could be more relevant to todays uncanny world
of contemporary hyper-reality?
To me Sterling is a writer working within a strain of of American fiction
at least as old as Edward Bellamy's classic "Looking Backward"- a story
that predicted credit cards, politics based on pop culture, and an American
Utopia based on technology and individual choice taken to societal extremes.
But where Bellamy would write a "passion" that created an almost "palpable
barrier" between citizens and the culture they constructed out of America's
dreams, Sterling explores the outer fringes of a culture that Bellamy
could only dream of. "This passion for losing ourselves in others or for
absorbing them into ourselves" he wrote back at the turn of the 19th century,
"is the greatest law of solidarity." And indeed, Sterling's latest fictions
are an exploration of that theme inverted and remixed into an America
frought with technological disruptions of the human condition most previous
writers - even in speculative fiction - would have barely conceived.
In his most recent novel, Distraction, Sterling sets the scene in a mid
21st century America being torn apart by various economic, social, and
political issues. I look out my window and think of the present moment
as I write.... My laptop monitor flickers to life as I with the push of
the "spacebar" banish the looping images of Bart Simpson scrolling across
the now blank screen surface of my computer. The word "cyberpunk" at 5
a.m. draws a relative blank for me, and my computer has responded by going
into screensaver mode. I look out the window and see a swimming pool several
stories below me, and wistfully gaze out over the parking lots and swamp
trees surrounding the hotel I'm staying in. A series of convergences,
open texts, and a hot summer nite flash across my mind, the mental equivalent
of the process my computer is going through. Tallahassee, Florida, and
I'm on tour with a hip-hop M.C. named "Kool Keith" playing around the
country to promote his album called "Black Elvis" to large crowds of kids
dressed in all manner of costumes and ethnic backgrounds. Basically it
feels like the future is here now - but I realize it was never gone, it
too, was just another screensaver banished with the push of a button.
It's the summer of 1999 and strange things have been happening. Reality
as a Spike Jonze commercial. Reality as a Hype Williams videoS. Wars with
smalltime European dictators are covered relentlessly by the press while
far more devastating situations in Asia and Africa are rendered into filler
between "jungle" soundtracked automobile commercials (or even Macintosh's
"Think Different" celebrity branding campain of the dead and the living).
Switch channels, look at a different billboard and you might see a Chihuaha
singing the praises of Taco Bell while hip-hop beats play in the background.
Get the wrong e-mail, and you might even receive a worm virus that selectively
deletes your entire address book - by propogating itself through your
friends and colleagues. Record level droughts, an iceberg the size of
the state of Rhode Island breaking off of Antartica 24 miles wide by 48
miles long, anti-resistant bacteria, genetically engineered crops, presidential
politics as celebrity sports, etc. etc. I think you get the picture. There's
even stuff like the Black hardcore hip-hop M.C. DMX raising his hands
at Woodstock in the symbol of an "X" above his head and yelling at the
ocean of white people in front of him "how many of y'all niggas don't
give a fuck? Put your hands up!" and the crowd putting itself into a sea
of symbols - X marking the spot of their ethnic meltdown at a festival
meant to celebrate the dying values of 60's counter culture that ended
in a rainbow riot of smashed cash machines and burning concession stands.
A strange telemetry seemed to be the driving force of the summer's events
- the list goes on: Presidents, Prime Ministers, the continuing break-down
of the former super power known as the Soviet Union into all sorts of
strange polities, white males going bonkers and shooting up kindergartens,
highschools, and day-trading stock companies, etc. etc. I could stop there,
or I could mention the stunning popularity of movies like "The Matrix"
and the "Blair Witch Project" that pointed to the psychological implosion
of one of the prime American directives of the last two centuries - expansion
at all costs - but that would be giving away the idea. Outter space in
1999 took a back seat to our own inner turmoils and fears (even Star Wars's
Phantom Menace, with its non-linear #3 version coming out before the other
#1 and 2" but after the other trilogies #7 and so on, kind of got the
point), and in a sense, has created the backdrop to the kind of narrative
milieux that Bruce Sterling inhabits and describes with ease. The signs
are all there, but of course, they're in real time, and quite, perhaps
all too much, contemporary. I guess you could call it "Summer of Bruce."
A long time ago J.G. Ballard, a writer that I feel is Sterling's predecessor
in many ways, wrote a simple statement that seems to drift over me like
some sort of overlit neon expanse, a Times Square icon hanging on my screen
as I write: "above all, science fiction is likely to be the only form
of literature which will cross the gap between the dying narrative fictions
of the present day, and the cassette and video tape fictions of the near
future. " In a world where Garth Brooks can create new recording personalities
at whim, and where during a flight to Japan earlier this summer, I realized
that I was flying Air Nippon's Pokemon jet - a vehicle done over to completely
mirror the environment of the video game of the same name, I realized,
yes, it's definitely been a Bruce Sterling summer. Science fiction is
a kind of psychological exploration of a fascination between science and
technology, and in remarkable feat of prestidigitation, writers like Sterling,
William Gibson, Pat Cadigan, and Neal Stephenson, with bows to Octavia
Butler, Thomas Disch, and Samuel Delaney, have always focused on the mutuality
of science and the desires that it evokes and obeys. This century began
with books like Olaf Stapledon's classic "Star Maker," George Schuyler's
"Black No More" and H.G. Well's classics, and went from there to pulp
fiction and Hollywood, only to close the circuit and arrive at the footsteps
of people like Ursula K. Leguin and Micheal Moorcock - introverts who
live through the multiple (for lack of a better word) "operatic" agency
of the serial oriented stories they, as an almost mandarin like reflection/inversion
of pulp culture. But where this crowd focused on the far future, or far
past, the brand of sci-fi Sterling and Gibson pioneered was much closer
to home. The loops holding the past, present, and future, were getting
smaller, and their telemetry was beginning to go into narrow focus mode:
Then this year we get Stephenson writing Cryptononomicon from the contemporary
past, Sterling writing Distraction (like he almost always seems to do
these days) about a closer cycle of near future narratives, and Gibson,
remaining relatively mute while he still thrashes out the more Hollywood
oriented nuances of the genre in his "All Tommorows Parties."
But time waits for no man, and indeed all these different permutations
of the American dream fade away when we see the huge sweeps of cautionary
and speculative fiction in the form of videos and music albums laid out
before us like some virtual feast that we can never leave, unsatisfied
until the end of the cycle, you know, the "ctrl+alt+delete" for a forced
quit/shutdown of your computer. But the screen will somehow someway turn
on again. Strange loops take us into the mix of literary elements, some
have more force than others, and in a sense, you could say Sterling is
probably metaphorically speaking, about as strong as a black hole in this
department. Like Pollack used to say, "it's all in the process." To describe
Sterling's work I really would like to use words like "autoreferentiality"
"metasignifier" "narrative catalyst" and stuff like that, but that would
destroy the poetry of the words he uses. One of my favorite theorists
of the kind of cultural and economic flux that Sterling describes, Gayatri
Chakravorty Spivak, wrote in her recent book "Critique of Post-Colonial
Reason" that "simply put, culture alive is always on the run, always changeful...
it is an absurd denial of history simply to ask for its prohibition..."
In other words, shit happens, and like Harlan Ellison said at the height
of the disco era back in 1977 about Sterling's first novel: "Go. Rush
inside and marvel at this kid named Sterling, 0.995 fine, who writes like
a cynical angel....We owe it not so much to Sterling, but to ourselves,
to make sure nothing gets in this man's way as he tells us his stories.
He enriches us." Who am I to stand in the way? And now the interview:
Date: Tue, 24 Aug 1999 17:33:01 +0000 From: artbyte <artbyte@mindspring.com>
Organization: Artbyte MIME-Version: 1.0 To: paulmiller <anansi@interport.net>
Subject: Re: hey! it's future>tense splice and dice... this interview
was a blast 'cause we had to go back and forth and create the interview
out of the free time either of us had. It was fun, and I think you'll
see an interview here that you would definitely not catch anywhere else.
That Subliminal Kid versus Bruce Sterling... by the way, he has a great
sense of humor and the conversation was really candid. So keep that in
mind as you read...
<paul: okay, we gotta do this through that tape, and then go back and
splice everything in, so you have to mail it back. Remix, remix!
Questions: okay, your work has everything utterly fragmented and involuted.
Characters are extensions of a social reality where almost everything
can be changed and attained. I think of the origins of sci-fi this century
as opposed to the fictions of the past: unitary governments, reflections
of imperial realities held together by the firm reigns of some centralized
narrative, and basically at the end of the century, with your work, all
of that has been thrown out the metaphorical window. What's up?>
Bruce Sterling: Well you know that's a very interesting question, but
it all went into the ether, because I couldn't possibly repeat all of
that. Let me see if I can rephrase it. Unless you wrote it down that piece
of genius is lost to mankind. I think essentially what you were saying
is how come my stuff is broken up into little pieces and is decentered
and polyvalent, when if you read an H.G. Wells novel, it's all about socialism
is going to unify the world. Is this what you are saying basically? Okay,
well my problem is I am a post-modernist, okay? I don't believe in single,
dominant narratives that have all the answers. I don't believe in any
kind of totalizing intellectual framework that offers an unchallengable
center to human affairs. (?)... corners and holes in the wall and fractal
structure and places where things are seeming to obey and going their
own way.
<Paul: I think that your "zone" of sci-fi is far more open to how hybrid
the world really is. It seems like America has been so frightened of truly
realizing how intertwined it really is, that we've created fictions to
hold out anything that couldn't be assimilated. And that's what, for me
at least, makes your work have such a strong resonance with what's actually
going on. In "Distraction" the groups that create the fabric of the story
have an almost cybernetic role... homeostasis, reflexivity... all of these
issues are what Weiner and Claude Shannon would have described as parts
of info theory. But for you they become narrative structure. Smart. Cool.>
Bruce> Mixed cultures, mixed codes, he repeated helpfully. How do I
see that as a narrative tool in my book? Moderators, Regulators. Well,
I've hung out with government people, military people, and cop people
and other sort of sub-cultures. And I think that every time, I mean they
all present a kind of front as if they had all the answers and were in
complete command and control. This is the impression that a soldier or
a cop is very anxious to present to you. It's part of what they call the
atmosphere of deterrence. If you see a cop, all cops are like doctors
or something. They are all in the state of total brotherhood and solidarity
and they want to present a unified front to the outside world of Marx
and criminals and dumb civilians and so forth. But once you are actually
under the skin of an enterprise like this, you soon find that the stuff
that cops are really upset about is rivalry with other cops. Like the
Federal Bureau of Investigation hates and fears the United States Secret
Service. Everybody despises the Internal Revenue Service. There are tremendous
interservice rivalries. Then even if you get below that, you'll soon find
that there is stiff, internal competition among cliques within the FBI.
Or you know there's the Mormon Mafia within the FBI for instance, who
were despised and feared by all other FBI agents.
<Paul:> well, yeah, if you're out in the world, you'd just think,
well they have it all under control, and the situation is crazy ill. But
then again, America's ability to transform any culture is amazing. Politics
and industry seem to get displaced in your work by biotech and America's
other main exports, entertainment and arms sales. But the internal policing
of the U.S. is a whole different ballgame. I sometimes think of what J.
Edgar Hoover must have been like. Extreme fracture points there.... but
religion is such a wildcard these days. It's really remixed America in
ways we can't even ascertain yet.
<Bruce> Yeah, the Mormon Mafia, there are a buttload of Mormons
in the FBI, for some reason the Bureau attracts Mormons. It's not a politically
correct thing to say, I'm sure without trying to make any religious allegations
here. I can just say that it's a matter of common knowledge in the FBI
that the thing's full of Mormons.
<Paul: Wow. Well, that's in tune with alot of your critique of ethnicity
in the U.S., and it's not a negative. It's difficult to get a grip on
how that affects law enforcement, but I would think in one way or another
it does... It would make an incridible story, but it's not something you
would check out unless you were another law agency or a science fiction
writer, eh? (sense of humor here)
<Bruce> Yeah, well, why would you? Why should you have to? It's
not like you can exploit that knowledge to help yourself in any way. But
within the FBI, this is just something that looms large, right? So I just
don't believe in the central thing. I mean, there is no quote government
unquote. I mean, there's an image of a government, but once you're behind
the image of the government you see it's really all about bureaucratic
in-fighting and interservice rivalries, and so forth and so on.
<paul: polyphrenia, eh?>
<Bruce> Yeah, that's right. I mean, I think it is just more accurate
to describe it in that way.
<Paul: fact and ficition blur in such a weird way these days. That's
what I love about your work. It looks at different cultural trajectories
and extrapolates them in sucha way that we arrive at some pretty wild
places, but then again, who would have thought we would be able to land
on the moon a hundred years ago, eh?
<Bruce: I suppose it could be called the late tw-... It just reflects
reality in a somewhat more exaggerated way. Yeah.
<Paul: is that what made you intrigued by the science fiction medium?
<Bruce> What made me become a science fiction writer? Well, you
know I couldn't think of anything better to do. Really, that is pretty
much the answer there. I mean I thought of...I got a degree in journalism,
just writing. I mean there are things you can do to earn a living, science
fiction isn't high among them, generally. Like other forms of creative
endeavors, a few people on the top are making millions, and then there
are tons of people who are, you know, just trying to scrape the rent together,
or they have day jobs. But, you know, I looked at other ways of earning
a living, and I just didn't care for any of them very much, and I don't
know, I just think it suits me pretty well. It really is kind of my metier.
<Paul: coming out of journalism gives you a way to explain things in
a concrete way, and it gives your work a resonance with events that happened
historically and create new situations oout of totally different situations.
You just have a great frame to bounce the events off of. That whole 1960's
"New Journalism" thing gets a serious re-working, eh?
<Bruce> I guess so, but I just think that my own personality is
well-suited to this line of work. I couldn't really make it into sciences,
per se, because I can't concentrate long enough. I can write journalism,
but I don't really have that kind of nose for news that a top flight journalist
has to have. A real journalist is a kind of guy who can go over to your
house when your child has died in a car wreck and ask you for a photo.
You know? And that's really what's required. There's a toughness of mind
there that a top flight journalist has to have. You know it's like being
in the army or something. You just can't flinch when there's blood all
over the floor, and I don't really have that. As journalists go, I'm like
an art critic, just one of these kind of epistolary style essay writer
guys.
<Paul: I think that's what makes travel so amazing in alot of your
stories. The reader is really given an "overview" of the situations and
geographic contexts they live and move through. I think it's cool.
<Bruce> Yes. Uh huh...yes... you are asking a question about travel
here. I am trying to sum this up. Remember none of this is going down
onto tape. (laughs) Yeah, you're wondering why I am obsessed with travel
stuff. Some critic pointed out, I think it was Paul DePhillipo but it
might have been this other guy, he said that I was obsessed with mass-evacuations.
And that hadn't occurred to me. Somebody wrote that like five years ago,
and I thought, yeah, I am obsessed with mass evacuations, and Distraction
is full of places that have been evacuated. There are sort of post-disaster
zones or places that were wiped out by giant tornados or places where
everybody picked up and left. And another obsession of mine which somebody
else pointed out, that bugged the hell out of me, cause I hadn't been
aware of it, was my early obsession with submarines. It's like almost
every book I wrote up til 1990, had a submarine in it at one point or
another. And if it didn't have a submarine, it had a hot air balloon,
which when you think about, is kind of the functional equivalent of a
submarine, right?
<Paul: depth psychology or something like that... but again, it really
works and conveys a whole sense of culture on the move, and that's what
I see as being the "core" issue of "cyberpunk," a term I think you coined,
eh? But is there a narrative strategy, could there be another layer of
meaning? Networks, displaced peoples, and nation states on the verge of
being consumed within larger trading structures are also a recurring motif.
<Bruce> Why? I can't tell you. It's like why is JG Ballard obsessed
with empty swimming pools. I do travel a lot. When I was a teenager I
was an oil-company kid, we were on and off of aircraft all the time. I
went around the globe, I don't know, it must have been, six or eight times
before I turned twenty. And I think that world travel had a very formative
influence on me. And even now, I log a lot of mileage. Like in the past
three weeks, I have been in Turkey, Cyprus, Georgia, New York City.
<Paul: Post Soviet/Russian federation Georgia?>
No, Georgia, USA, Atlanta. Yeah. Almost as exotic a place as Georgia,
Russia, really. And I'm not even on tour or anything. This is just something
I was doing in order to, I don't know, amuse myself, or pick up some loose
change.
<Paul: I think that's what makes alot of your work have such a gravitational
pull... they're almost like an extended dialog about how stories arise
out of conflict. Dialog as dialectics or something like that, but done
with great flair and the highest attention paid to detail. hey, even the
word jazz comes to mind sometime, and it's derived from the French verb
"jazzer" which means to "have a dialog." Definitely a central motif in
Distraction.
<Bruce> Yeah. Well, it's talkier than a lot of other books, because
politicians talk a lot. They are always on tour and giving speeches, and
there is always a message, and you're on message for the day, right? I
see this book as part of... it's a linked series of books. It's like Heavy
Weather, Holy Fire, and Distraction are three books which are written
with a very similar technique. They are very different from one another
because they examine different aspects of human life. Like Heavy Weather
is an eco-disaster novel, in wihch everybody is dealing with the consequences
of some terrible catastrophe, or expecting one, or you know, trying to
come to terms with it. And Holy Fire is about things like life extension
and cosmetics. And Distraction is about politics and science. But they
each have starring characters who personify the problem at hand, and then
sort of go on a tour of fields of data, where they are behaving as our
binoculars to examine the problem. So, they are very different books and
have very different settings, are not formally linked in any way; they're
certainly not a trilogy, or any of that nonsense. They are related works.
I am using the same techniques in each one. So, I haven't done these three
books in fairly short order, plus the short story collection. I wanted
to get a lot done in the 90s. I really felt that I had a pretty good hold
of how I was working these things out. I was pretty well up on the mountain
side there and I wanted to drive a big set of petons(?) in there. But,
now I think I am going to write some non-fiction here.
<Paul: You've also written non-ficiton, again, with that hyper well
researched flair you always bring to bear on whatever topic you choose.
Your new stuff is on historical computer stuff, eh?
<Bruce> Yeah, I've been working on this stuff...It's been ten years
since I had a non-fiction book out. So, every once in a while I like to
sort of take a breather, go back, refresh myself, brush up my chomps,
and then come back. Yes, that's right. I'm trying to sell my Dead Media
book now. I am doing a book on obsolescence in media. And I want to talk
about media that are no longer used. You know, it's a very hot thing in
the DJ line of work. You see all these guys who are into analog synths,
and there's like this weird black market in like thermeotic valves and
vacuum tubes, right? Because they are "spankier sounding." They're like
"hard to get" now. There's these digital guys who have these names now
like DJ Black Ninja Electron, you know, as if they'd come from the twenty-third
century. And you actually look at the stuff they're using, and it's like
this weird, flaking crap out of the mid-70s that's held together with
duct tape.
<Paul: it's definitely a kind of "back to the future" type situation
on the dj scene. I can tell ya some stories sometime, but I gotta finish
my own books before that happens... But the whole obsolete equipment issue
is definitely going to be a bugged out reflection of culture in the early
21st Century, 'cause class, social hieararchy and info access seem to
move so quickly but are all mutually reflective... it's a situation that
the industry creates for its own built-in time frames, and it all just
filters down into the other zones of contemporary culture. That's what
I see in alot of your work, ya know?
<Bruce> Yeah. Yeah... Well, I think these issues are going to come
up pretty strong, I mean there are a lot of guys like Bureau of Low Technology...
I think the history of electronics, the fact that a lot of electronics
is old, and kind of fallen off the edge of the table... Time is on my
side when it comes to the dead media thing. And by the time the book comes
out, I would expect this to be becoming an issue. Dealing with the legacies
of this sort of frenetic electronic explosion we've had...
<Paul: blank memory space filled with potential: think of Charles Babbages
and Ada Lovelace's "Difference Engine" and the whole steam engine calculating
scene. I think it's great that you work with so many other writers and
have created a forum that is pretty much a group of people who are all
open to issues that alot of other sci-fi writers can't hold a candle to.
<Bruce> I have written things with Gibson. The defining moment:
What did Gibson, Sterling, and Neal Stephenson have in common? Okay, well,
the thing that Gibson and Sterling have in common is that we are more
or less, kinda the same age, and that we spend a lot of time sending faxes
to each other. So, we share the same research material. Uh, Neal Stephenson,
I don't know, he read my stuff, he read Gibson's stuff, but he's seven
years younger than I am, and I'm seven years younger than Gibson. We certainly
didn't have to bring this guy up by the seat of his pants, he just burst
on the scene all by himself. I'm on good terms with Neal; I was over at
Neal's house during my most recent signing tour, and I respect him very
much, but there really isn't like a mafia linkage between us. The thing
is he is just looking at the same things we are, and drawing the same
conclusions. Cause if you look hard, it's hard to miss. I would have to
say that the world, and especially the Soviet Union, the former Soviet
Union, Russia, looks incredibly like the world William Gibson was describing
in 1984, in Neuromancer. I mean I remember when Neuromancer came out,
people were saying, "You know, how could this society possibly survive?
There aren't any honest people in this book. Nobody ever goes out in daylight,
there's no working stiffs!" It just seemed improbable and cartoon-like
because every single person in Neuromancer is some kind of criminal. You
know, they've all got some agenda and some hustle, and they just despise
the government and the law enforcement agencies, utterly and totally.
These sort of formal public entities just have received absolutely no
respect whatsoever from the population. Right?
Well, that's what Russia is right now, right? Everybody is a criminal
and all the real activity is going on in these sort of large, spooky,
mafia-style organizations, which aren't corporations exactly, but they're
clearly behind the scenes pulling the strings. And the ability of the
common Joe in Russia to get a handle on, let's say Boris Berezovsky's
media empire, is just as distant as, let's say Automatic Jack in a Gibson
story trying to raid Mitsubishi Genetech. Right, I mean it's really a
very, very, very Gibsonian milieu. And it's not the United States. But
hey, it is a former super power. So, if you look at other science fiction
that was being written at the time, and you try and compare Neuromancer
to 2001: A Space Odyssey. It's a great science fiction movie and everything,
but hey, it's almost 2001, right? We ought to be on a Pan Am clipper to
the moon by now. We should be wearing velcro shoes and contacting aliens
and monoliths. You seen any monoliths around lately? You seen any zero
gravity stewardesses with velcro moon boots? No, you haven't seen any
of those. Have you seen like, down and dirty guys in lofts who are making
their living by like assembling big pieces of semi-legal electronic equipment?
Yeah, you've seen plenty of those guys! Haven't you? They're kind of like
pirates, and you know they've got MP3 websites where you don't have to
like pay for other people's music and shit. How many of those guys do
you know?
<narrative interjection from Paul: I know alot of those types, but
like you say, alot of people don't...>
<Bruce> Can you even count the number of guys like that that you
know? You know, probably not. And every one of them looks like a character
out of a Gibson novel. They're hanging around in their shirtsleeves; they're
buying used equipment down at the junk store. There's a whole class of
these characters! They don't necessarily break into banks, or steal data
by penetrating the black ice or any of that kind of shit, but they certainly
look a lot more... I mean the world of 1999 looks a hell of a lot more
like a William Gibson novel than it does like an Arthur Clark novel. It's
that simple. And why? Because he was looking at things that Clark wasn't
looking at. Clark was spending all his time with Werner Von Braun, and
Gibson was spending all his time listening to Velvet Underground albums
and haunting junk stores in Vancouver. And, you know, it's just a question
of you are what you eat. And the guy who had a different diet than science
fiction writers that preceded him.
<Paul: like I've said earlier the whole thing reminds me a little of
how different themes pass from author to author, and then on through to
the audience. Have you checked out Jack Womack's "Let's Put the Future
Behind Us?" Like you were saying, "Distraction" is about a fallen U.S.,
"Let's Put the future Behind Us" is kind of a fallen Russia story. Great
piece of ficiton by the way...
<Bruce> So, right...yeah, I know him...yeah, he's a good friend
of Gibson's...they spend a lot of time together. He lives up in New York...Kentucky
guy...wrote a pretty good Russian novel, spent some time in Russia...
That's a very good book, it's really like a Bulgakhov novel. It's one
of the best Russian novels a Russian never wrote.
<Paul> it's an open situation 'cause of this way of recording the
conversation. This is kind of fun. Kind of an "erase yourself in '99"
type thing. Only your voice on the tape, mine is just a memory from a
couple months in the future. heh, heh.
<Bruce> Yeah...right...Well, man, there'll be my conversation. There's
not going to be a lot of your conversation. You are going to have to reinvent
your conversation (laughs).
<Paul: I'm really into the way you use art to highlight technology.
Very few sci-fi writers do that. What makes alot of your work a powerful
description of tools we use to create imaginary objects that don't even
exist yet is that I think you explore the psychology behind tool use.
And that's what made cyberpunk so interesting when it first hit the scene.
I think that Holy Fire's characters interaction with art is some of the
best stuff I've seen outside of Samuel Delaney. And I'm a huge Delaney
fan.
<Bruce> Yes...well, Holy Fire is my art novel. It is kinda my valentine
to the electronic arts crowd...Engineers have no taste, right? And science
fiction is mostly written by and for engineers. That's really about gizmos
and like "how do I get my hand on this gizmo?" But there are many things
that are intriguing about art, and I take art very seriously, but the
forms of art that I myself find most exciting are machine-mediated forms
of art, like photography. Which is an art form you can't do without a
gizmo. And now there's all types of computer art, web art, net.art, which
are all gizmo-oriented. So, in a way art is very technosized now. It's
all about the equipment, right? It's all about the return key and so forth.
So this makes it possible to technically speculate about art. You can
think about art the way an engineer would think now. And that's an exciting
thing for me. I am interested in design and I'm interested in areas in
the crevasse between the arts and sciences, or between art and engineering.
And I think that's where our society has kind of hidden all the oxygen.
Now it's in that paradox, that paradoxical area between CP Snow's two
cultures. There's a kind of ontological outlawry there. It interests me
to see what artists choose to put their mitts on. So, my experience there
is that whenever a device falls off the back of a truck and kind of falls
out of engineers' hands, that when artists appropriate it. It's like guys
who collect old medical instruments. You wouldn't want to go and collect
modern medical instruments because, hey they're for a doctor. But Victorian
medical instruments, which are now kind of obsolete and mysterious suddenly
become very aestheticized. Their beauty becomes apparent because they
no longer have any use. It's like a dental instrument hasn't actually
wrenched a bloody molar out of a guy's head in about a hundred years,
so now the leather case is pretty, and the fact that you no longer know
what certain devices are for, lends them a kind of mystery now, and they
become kind of romanticized. I think that is an important phenonmenon:
things moving from the realm of the medical or the industrial or the engineering
realm into the the realm of the poetic, the abstract and the arty. In
a way it shows that the arty is carnivorous. In a weird kind of way it
is stronger than the engineering because it gets to feed on the leavings
of the other one. I mean, engineering doesn't feed on dead art, but art
can feed on dead engineering. So, there's something very provocative going
on there. I mean, the strength of art is underestimated. So, I think about
art seriously, and I like to think about the future of art, the long term
future of art, like what might art be like 200 years from now. There's
never been a time when we were without it. There are tremendous cave paintings
from 20,000 years ago.
<Paul: art is just another code, and those paintings were all ritual
based, just like contemporary culture. Different time, different tools.
But they are amazing works.
<Bruce> Yeah, you know, fuckin-A! Theyre good. So, I think that
although the rhetoric of art changes over the years, the urge to do something
arty is an enormously powerful, almost sexual urge, and that's something
I take very seriously. My question is why do I write novels instead of
just going out and getting a job at Dell? I mean I could do that. Dell's
the guy... Bill Gates is almost exactly my age. We're a few months apart.
I'm of Gates' generation. Why didn't I go and join a tech startup and
have an initial public offering and try and become a computer guy? The
whole reason is because I am a fucking artist, okay? You know, that's
what I want to do. That's what gratifies me.
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OUT NOW! DJ Spooky's "Sound Unbound"
CREATION REBEL MIX CD on Trojan Records
DJ Spooky presents
DJ Spooky has produced material on the new Yoko Ono album.
DJ Spooky and the 2007 Venice Biennial
RHYTHM SCIENCE: