Some Remarks: Essays and Other Writing

by Neal Stephenson

  Galaxy Quest, of course, was transparently based on Star Trek, which brings to mind the archetypal bifurcated actor: Leonard Nimoy, who attained such perfection in his portrayal of Spock that it led to two unintended consequences. The one everyone knows about is that he afterwards found it difficult to get non-Vulcan work. The less obvious one is that never again, in the ongoing history of the franchise, were the producers of any of those films or television episodes able to find an actor who could convincingly portray a Vulcan.

  Just as an exercise, I spent a while trying to think whether there was any actor, living or dead, who could possibly portray a Vulcan as convincingly as Leonard Nimoy. I assumed that this experiment would end in failure, but, surprisingly, the answer came to me immediately: Hugo Weaving. Hugo Weaving would make a totally convincing Vulcan. And it’s not just because we’ve already seen him with pointy ears. It’s something else.

  I think that it is the ability to portray intelligence. When I first saw Weaving as Elrond, I didn’t think I was going to like him, because he looked very different from how I had imagined this character when I read The Lord of the Rings. But I ended up liking his performance very much. He was able to convince me that he really was a three-thousand-year-old Elf lord. Part of this is simply that he’s a professional actor who is good at what he does, but it also, I’m convinced, has something to do with this ability to project intelligence.

  Consider some of the other characters in the Star Trek franchise. Out of the entire cast of Star Trek: The Next Generation, I would say that the two most beloved, successful characters, at least to fans in the SF world, are Commander Data, portrayed by Brent Spiner, and Jean-Luc Picard, played by Patrick Stewart. These are very different characters, but what they have in common is that they are intelligent people, portrayed convincingly by actors who are either very intelligent or else good at seeming that way. Some other characters in this series did not ring true, for SF fans, in the same way.

  Going back to the female actors I was talking about earlier, I believe that the same is true. Oh, it helps that they are statuesque, beautiful, and athletic, but there is more to it than that. It is conspicuous in the first two Alien films that Sigourney Weaver’s character is the smartest person in the room at any given time. The only possible exception is Bishop, the android in the second film, played by Lance Henriksen, in another fine example of an intelligence-projecting performance. One believes in this character in the same way that one believes in Nimoy’s Spock or that I, at least, believe in Weaving’s Elrond. All of these actors can somehow convey that there is complexity behind the eyes.

  The intelligence of these characters isn’t just a slapped-on trait—these are not token nerds, thrown into an ensemble piece to solve technical problems. Their intelligence is an intrinsic reason why you are supposed to find them interesting, to identify with them. It is what makes them human—even—especially—when they are not actually humans. If the actor can’t portray that intelligence, the character fails altogether. This is why I have devoted a bit of time to what might strike some as a fairly lowbrow pop culture analysis: because I think that the bifurcated-career phenomenon can tell us something about what differentiates SF from Mundane culture.

  PART 3: VEGGING OUT AND GEEKING OUT

  The cheap, and, since I’m an SF person, self-congratulatory answer is that SF is for intelligent people. But, saying that—even supposing it were true—doesn’t actually get us very far, since there are so many different kinds, and different definitions, of intelligence. And so here is where this talk has to pick its away along the spine of a narrow ridge, if you will, with fatal drop-offs to either side. If I stray one direction, I end up talking endlessly about intelligence, or intelligences, and what they mean, and end up defining it out of existence. If I go the other way, I run afoul of invidious class distinctions, since intelligence is still linked, in many people’s minds, with expensive educations and high-status jobs. Neither explains SF very well. If the first were true, everyone would be an SF fan. Clearly that’s not the case. If the second were true, the only people who liked SF would be those with Ph.D.s. And that is slightly closer to the truth—but still not very close. No doubt there is a sort of vague correlation between having higher education and being an SF fan, but there are so many exceptions—so many Ph.D.s who can’t abide SF, and so many waiters and welders who live for it—that it doesn’t serve well as a model.

  The correct way to think about intelligence, in this case, is as a human quality shared by just about everyone, at least until it gets beaten out of us. Not a special gift that is bestowed on only a few. And secondly that it is a functional trait that most people find some way of using in their careers, or whatever it is that they spend their days doing. Sometimes, this trait is put to use doing theoretical physics, but much more often, it’s used in raising children or building houses or operating farm machinery.

  Counter-examples are legion. We have all suffered through movies that were ruined by characters doing stupid things. The classic example is in suspense movies, when someone, usually a pretty girl, is running away from a monster or a serial killer, when she happens to trip and fall down. Whereupon, instead of simply getting back to her feet and running some more, she sits on the ground whimpering until the threat catches up with her. And we’ve all seen bad horror movies in which the protagonists blunder into situations that no one who has ever actually watched a bad horror movie would ever get into. The satisfaction, and the solace, offered by good SF, is that its characters don’t behave that way. Consider how Ripley, the character played by Sigourney Weaver, responds to the threat posed by the aliens. In the second film, once she and the Marines she’s with have made first contact with the aliens, and had a chance to catch their breath, they very quickly agree that they should simply go back to the orbiting ship and nuke the place. It’s a brilliant move on the part of the filmmakers, precisely because it is the obvious and intelligent thing to do—it’s exactly what we in the audience are all thinking to ourselves—but because it’s a kind of horror movie, and we’ve been conditioned to expect stupid behavior from characters in horror movies, it’s the last thing we’re expecting. When the idea is raised and agreed on, we wake up, sit a little straighter in our chairs and say “Oh! This is a movie about REAL people–which is to say, people who behave intelligently.” And for the rest of the film, that promise is largely borne out, as Ripley goes on to do a number of more or less intelligent things, such as using a cigarette lighter to set off a fire alarm when she needs to draw the others’ attention, and so on.

  So, in SF, intelligence is just how people behave, and it is what you expect in a well-wrought piece. But by this definition, intelligence is something that has undergone some changes during the last fifty years or so. The Heinleinian hero who knows everything, who can do everything, is gone. The world is complicated. No one can be good at everything. I bought a new car a couple of weeks ago, and I still haven’t read more than a few pages of the inch-and-a-half-thick pile of instruction books that came with it. It, like everything else in our lives, has too many features, too many details for our minds to hold. The best we can do is to be good at something, or a few things. We come home tired, and we feel the need to veg out—a recent coinage, meaning to drop voluntarily into a kind of vegetative coma, typically in front of the TV. I should know; in my family, I am infamous for my lowbrow tastes in entertainment, my sluggishness to attend art films and theatrical productions. It’s a miracle, actually, that Gresham College was able to get me over here right in the middle of the NBA Playoffs.

  But many people, after they have vegged out long enough to recharge their batteries, derive fun and profound satisfaction from geeking out on whatever topic is of particular interest to them. Choose any person in the world at random, no matter how non-geeky they might seem, and talk to them long enough, and in most cases you will eventually hit on some topic about which they are exorbitantly knowledgeable and, if you express interest, on which they are will
ing to talk, enthusiastically, for hours. You have found their inner geek. Sometimes the inner geek may be hidden very deeply indeed. The grizzled, taciturn machinist, who normally speaks in sentences of one or two words, will light up and deliver an extemporaneous dissertation about his favorite alloys of steel. The forklift operator at Wal-Mart will turn out to be a Civil War reenactor who can recite the full history of the Battle of Shiloh down to the level of individual squads and soldiers. This is how knowledge works today, and how it’s going to work in the future. No more Heinleinian polymaths. Instead, a web of geeks, each of whom knows a lot about something.

  Twenty years ago, we called them nerds, and we despised them; we didn’t like the power that they seemed to have over the rest of us, and we identified them as something different from normal society. Now, we call them geeks, and we like them just fine, because they are us. Nerds were limited to math and science and computers. Geeks also do those kinds of things—which isn’t saying much, because everyone works with computers all the time now—but geeks can also be experts on welding or Civil War battles or fine cabinetmaking. Everyone gets, now, that this is how society is going to work, and as long as geeks bathe frequently enough and don’t commit the faux pas of geeking out at the wrong time, in the wrong company, it’s okay. It’s better than okay. It’s desirable. We’re all geeks now.

  But we’re all geeks in different subject areas, and so the only thing that links us all together is what we watch on the tube when our geek energies have been spent and we feel the need to veg out—the lowest common denominator stuff. Almost everyone knows and agrees that this material is idiotic. It doesn’t reflect the way the world actually works, because it doesn’t contain as many geeks as the real world that we all inhabit. In that sense, it’s more unrealistic, more fantastical, than the material that actually gets tagged as fantasy. It is when we turn on a movie or a television show and observe people behaving intelligently that we sit up a little straighter in our seats and get interested, begin to take the story and its characters a little more seriously.

  It would be a little too simplistic and, again, self-congratulatory to say, flat-out, that the first category of entertainment, the veg-out stuff, is Mundane and the latter type, the geek-out stuff, is SF. It would be like saying that people from the United States drink coffee and people from the U.K. drink tea. But there is a more than faint trend that bears thinking about and that, I believe, helps to explain the bifurcated career phenomenon that I mentioned in Part 2 of this talk.

  PART 4: GENRE REDUX

  In this, the last and shortest part of this talk, I’m going to revisit the genre question. Despite the fact that this seminar is supposed to be about literature, I’ve devoted most of my time so far to speaking about movies and television. That’s because I believe that certain movies and TV programs that almost everyone has seen can provide insights into SF culture that translate directly to the literary side.

  In Part 1 I mentioned that, in the Standard Model, some of the traditional markers of genrehood were its low intellectual content and depraved moral stature. In the literary world as it existed back in the days when the Standard Model was still operative, this would presumably mean that real literature was written by respected authors with credentials while pulp genre novels were churned out by semi-anonymous hacks in cheap hotel rooms. All of which of course, is just a set of stereotypes, and I don’t mean to suggest that we should take them too seriously. Let’s instead look at how things are today.

  As I mentioned, the bestseller lists have been exquisitely tweaked so as to ensure that the books that show up on the main list are—what, exactly? It’s easier to say what they’re not. Most so-called genre fiction is in paperback, so it doesn’t taint the hardcover list. Young adult books get shunted to a different list, so we don’t have to know how many copies Harry Potter is selling. Other special categories, such as business books or series books or media-related books, further winnow the field. I gather that the people who make these lists have got an idea in their heads as to what constitutes a proper book: a hardcover work of fiction, written recently, not too genre-esque, and so on. Literary fiction is the closest thing this has to a name.

  Now. People who aspire to write literature often study it first. It’s logical. If you want to build bridges, you study engineering. If you want to write literary fiction, you study . . . literature!

  The lecture halls, the editorships, the endowed chairs that might have been occupied 50 years ago by academics and intellectuals of a more traditional stripe are now occupied—and have been for decades—by insurgents who gained sway beginning in the 1960s and who, ever since then, have been teaching a kind of literary theory variously called post-modernist or post-structuralist or deconstructionist.

  What literary theorists—post-structuralists, anyway—are teaching, might be fascinating and encouraging to people who aspire to be critics, but must be just a bit unsettling to people who would like to become authors. One of the founding documents of post-structuralism is “The Death of the Author” by Roland Barthes!

  And I am not here to try to explain post-structuralism, or to argue with it, but I will say that if I were a would-be author studying literature, one hundred years ago, from professors who were willing to grant that authors actually created, understood, and controlled the meaning of their own work, I’d feel more encouraged than I would studying it from post-structuralists.

  Or perhaps it’s more accurate to say that I’d feel more sanguine writing certain types of fiction than others.

  I haven’t been in this situation myself, but based on what I read of post-structuralism, I’d imagine there’d be a weeding-out effect. It’s fun to imagine a comedy sketch with Robert Heinlein in a writer’s workshop having the first draft of Starship Troopers evaluated by a circle of earnest young post-structuralists.

  I don’t imagine that there is anything like out-and-out censorship, but I do suspect that people who write about relationships, who write autobiographical, introspective fiction, from a subjective point of view, are going to have an easier time of it, in this environment, than those who write SF. On the science fiction side of SF, such writers are working with abstract ideas from science. And scientists, who believe, and who can prove, that they are right, are notoriously at odds with post-structuralists, who are always looking for ways to bring science into the realm of criticizibility. On the fantasy side, writers are creating entire worlds inside of their brains and populating them with species and civilizations and histories: an undertaking that seems fantastically arrogant from a post-structuralist standpoint.

  The characteristics I spoke of earlier, that lead SF fans to want to see intelligence at work in the faces of movie characters, when rolled over into literature, mean that they want ideas. They want to learn something or to join with the author in speculating about a future or about a fantastical other world. Naturally they will see the aliens as dangerous predatory creatures that have to be killed, while literary theorists would say that perhaps the real reason we’re afraid of the Alien Other is because it represents the eruption into our discourse of heretofore subjugated knowledges.

  Post-structuralist critics, assuming they have the courage of their convictions, would say to the young Heinlein: I see that you are intelligent, that you know a lot, that you’ve worked hard and put a lot of ingenuity into this book, but the whole thing is pre-theoretical and therefore naive and as such, simply of lesser intellectual stature than something that was written taking into account the intellectual trends of the last half-century.

  And this is the same attitude—for completely different reasons—that the occupants of those lecture halls and editorships and endowed chairs fifty or a hundred years ago would have taken toward the pulp genre fiction of their day: namely, that it was intellectually inferior to literary fiction. The author of a fantasy or a science fiction novel may be an Oxford linguist like J.R.R. Tolkien or a Ph.D. astrophysicist like Gregory Benford, but by taking their own ideas seri
ously enough to write fantasy or science fiction about them, they reduce themselves, in the eyes of critics, to pre-theoretical knuckle-draggers. A curious inversion has taken place in which the very intellectual credentials that, back in the heyday of the Standard Model, might have given such authors the credibility needed to escape from the stigma of genrehood, today consign them irrevocably to the same.

  Another feature of genrehood in the Standard Model is moral depravity. This was easy to talk about back in the day when universities were strongly linked to churches, and professors, among other responsibilities, were the guardians of a religiously-based moral code. It might seem more difficult to talk about now, because we no longer have a shared idea of what it is to be moral. And yet post-modern academics are nothing if not censorious.

  Mind you, I don’t mean to say that all SF writers are oblivious to the last fifty years’ developments in critical theory, or that there is no SF literature that is alive to those changes. But there are entire swathes of SF—for example, a whole, vast subgenre called military science fiction—that I’m pretty sure would be considered not only intellectually naive, but morally bankrupt as well, by many members of the Modern Language Association. The incredulous hostility with which the movie 300 was greeted by a good many film critics serves as an especially vivid and entertaining example.

  So, having gone to some lengths in Part 1 to dismantle the idea that there are genres and that SF is one of them, I conclude Part 4, and this talk, with the observation that, in the current critical-theoretical environment, SF does possess at least two of the classic markers of genrehood, namely intellectual disreputability and moral salaciousness. SF thrives because it is idea porn.