"That's how you move? From world to world?"
"That's right, my friend. This ugly duckling can fly."
The Elena's waiter arrived to tidy up our table. “A little rice pudding?” he asked.
Massimo was cordial. “No, thank you, sir."
"Got some very nice chocolate in this week! All the way from South America."
"My, that's the very best kind of chocolate.” Massimo jabbed his hand into a cargo pocket. “I believe I need some chocolate. What will you give me for this?"
The waiter examined it carefully. “This is a woman's engagement ring."
"Yes, it is."
"It can't be a real diamond, though. This stone's much too big to be a real diamond."
"You're an idiot,” said Massimo, “but I don't care much. I've got a big appetite for sweets. Why don't you bring me an entire chocolate pie?"
The waiter shrugged and left us.
"So,” Massimo resumed, “I wouldn't call myself a ‘God'—because I'm much better described as several million billion Gods. Except, you know, that the zero-point transport field always settles down. Then, here I am. I'm standing outside some cafe, in a cloud of dirt, with my feet aching. With nothing to my name, except what I've got in my brain and my pockets. It's always like that."
The door of the Elena banged open, with the harsh jangle of brass Indian bells. A gang of five men stomped in. I might have taken them for cops, because they had jackets, belts, hats, batons and pistols, but Turinese cops do not arrive on duty drunk. Nor do they wear scarlet armbands with crossed lightning bolts.
The cafe fell silent as the new guests muscled up to the dented bar. Bellowing threats, they proceeded to shake-down the staff.
Massimo turned up his collar and gazed serenely at his knotted hands. Massimo was studiously minding his own business. He was in his corner, silent, black, inexplicable. He might have been at prayer.
I didn't turn to stare at the intruders. It wasn't a pleasant scene, but even for a stranger, it wasn't hard to understand.
The door of the men's room opened. A short man in a trenchcoat emerged. He had a dead cigar clenched in his teeth, and a snappy Alain Delon fedora.
He was surprisingly handsome. People always underestimated the good looks, the male charm of Nicolas Sarkozy. Sarkozy sometimes seemed a little odd when sunbathing half-naked in newsstand tabloids, but in person, his charisma was overwhelming. He was a man that any world had to reckon with.
Sarkozy glanced about the cafe, for a matter of seconds. Then he sidled, silent and decisive, along the dark mahogany wall. He bent one elbow. There was a thunderclap. Massimo pitched face-forward onto the small marble table.
Sarkozy glanced with mild chagrin at the smoking hole blown through the pocket of his stylish trenchcoat. Then he stared at me.
"You're that journalist,” he said.
"You've got a good memory for faces, Monsieur Sarkozy."
"That's right, asshole, I do.” His Italian was bad, but it was better than my French. “Are you still eager to ‘protect’ your dead source here?” Sarkozy gave Massimo's heavy chair one quick, vindictive kick, and the dead man, and his chair, and his table, and his ruined, gushing head all fell to the hard cafe floor with one complicated clatter.
"There's your big scoop of a story, my friend,” Sarkozy told me. “I just gave that to you. You should use that in your lying commie magazine."
Then he barked orders at the uniformed thugs. They grouped themselves around him in a helpful cluster, their faces pale with respect.
"You can come out now, baby,” crowed Sarkozy, and she emerged from the men's room. She was wearing a cute little gangster-moll hat, and a tailored camouflage jacket. She lugged a big black guitar case. She also had a primitive radio-telephone bigger than a brick.
How he'd enticed that woman to lurk for half an hour in the reeking cafe toilet, I'll never know. But it was her. It was definitely her, and she couldn't have been any more demure and serene if she were meeting the Queen of England.
They all left together in one heavily armed body.
The thunderclap inside the Elena had left a mess. I rescued Massimo's leather valise from the encroaching pool of blood.
My fellow patrons were bemused. They were deeply bemused, even confounded. Their options for action seemed to lack constructive possibilities.
So, one by one, they rose and left the bar. They left that fine old place, silently and without haste, and without meeting each other's eyes. They stepped out the jangling door and into Europe's biggest plaza.
Then they vanished, each hastening toward his own private world.
I strolled into the piazza, under a pleasant spring sky. It was cold, that spring night, but that infinite dark blue sky was so lucid and clear.
The laptop's screen flickered brightly as I touched the f1 key. Then I pressed 2, and then 3.
Copyright © 2009 Bruce Sterling
[Back to Table of Contents]
BOOKZONE—Interview with Bruce Sterling, Various Book Reviews
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THE CARYATIDS
Bruce Sterling
Reviewed by Ian Sales
In 1930, Hugo Gernsback wrote: ‘Not only is science fiction an idea of tremendous import, but it is to be an important factor in making the world a better place to live in, through educating the public to the possibilities of science and the influence of science on life which, even today, are not appreciated by the man on the street.’ And yet in the decades since then, the genre has ceased to be either didactic or predictive. A science fiction may have something to say—and most certainly do—but any such conversation will most likely be about the present.
Bruce Sterling, however, is not just a science fiction writer. He has also been a ‘Visionary in Residence’ at both the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, California, and the Sandberg Instituut in Amsterdam. He has eleven science fiction novels to his name, and five collections of short stories. He has also written non-fiction, such as Tomorrow Now and Shaping Things. His last three novels could be described as conversations with the future: in Zeitgeist, it was the commodification of entertainment product and the feral capitalism of the ex-Soviet client states; in The Zenith Angle, it was the War on Terror and ubiquitous surveillance; and now, in The Caryatids, it is the collapse of the earth's climate, of the global economy, and of nation-states.
The Caryatids of the book's title are the four surviving clone sisters of a group of seven created by a female Croatian warlord (what is the female equivalent of warlord? warlady? bellatrix?). Vera is a member of a recovery team on the Adriatic island of Mljet (known to the Ancient Greeks as Melita), which has suffered toxic pollution. Radmila has married into a powerful Hollywood family and is now a media star. Sonja is a medic, living and working for the Chinese in a space city in the Gobi Desert. And then there's Biserka, who is insane.
I suspect it's no accident there are seven clone sisters—that's one for each continent. It's equally telling that only four have survived. Vera is Europe—technological, non-authoritarian, looking for new ways to live. Radmila is the US—technology-backed spectacle, a self-imposed role as the guardian of the planet, and wielding capitalism as a weapon with the clinical precision of a scalpel. Sonja is Asia—undefeatable, strong, and finding a way to live that neither Europe nor the US would ever contemplate. And poor Biserka is Africa—the dark continent, forever at war with itself.
There is also an eighth clone, a man. His name is Djordje—George—and he is a Viennese businessman. He has a nice Viennese hausfrau wife and darling children. He is successful, and makes more than enough money to keep his family safe and secure. He's not above bending laws, or ethics, when making deals. He has just started using the latest business tools and he thinks they're wonderful. George is perhaps the world as it used to be.
And the ‘mother'? She is the climate disaster which created the world of The Caryatids. Once she's done her bit, s
he's hustled off to a space station in orbit, out of the way of story and history.
Each clone has her story—and The Caryatids is a story. And shown to be a story about a story in the afterword ‘interview’ with Radmila's daughter, Mary Montalban. There are three sections to the novel: Vera, Radmila and Sonja. An epilogue sees all four meet for the funeral of their mother. They are burying the world's past as much as they burying their own.
The world as it is in The Caryatids is not the world we know. The climate has crashed, billions have died, and most nation-states have failed. The world is now dominated by two supra-national societies—the Dispensation and the Acquis. The Dispensation is Californian and supremely capitalist. Its members talk like the flakiest of Hollywood ‘business’ people. The Acquis are European.
As a writer or a visionary, Sterling has never been short of ideas, and there are plenty in The Caryatids. Most of them seem extrapolated from his arguments in Tomorrow Now and Shaping Things—ubiquitous computing, and complex devices created from simple components using unsophisticated techniques. This is a ‘spime'-dominated future.
Conversations can change minds. They can alter opinions. When conversing about the future, wiggle-room for such changes is built-in. The Caryatids is not going to be “educating the public to the possibilities of science and the influence of science on life,” but it may well prove a catalyst for conversations which will do that. Gernsback might not recognise the 21st century version of his ‘scientifiction', but for those of us living in the 21st century and gazing into the abyss of the future, The Caryatids provides a thought-provoking, entertaining, and perhaps important, roadmap for the decades ahead.
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Bruce Sterling interviewed by Ian Sales
Do you see The Caryatids as an optimistic novel?
Obviously it's about a future world severely beset with disasters. Still, the people in that book don't waste much time hand-wringing about their situation. They've internalized their world, so that they think reality is inherently disastrous. The prospects that worry them are all super-disasters.
Do we have much to be optimistic about in the rest of this century?
People don't need optimistic things so as to be happy. What we need to be happy is something to be enthusiastic about. When I do science-fiction world-building, I try hard to get away from intellectual vices like pessimism and optimism. Choosing a view like that is akin to putting a patch over one eye—it flattens the world, it makes you lose depth and detail. I always liked Brian Aldiss’ idea of ‘enantiodromia'—the notion that over long periods of time, things turn into their opposites. Clouds become silver linings. Silver linings generate clouds. Our ancestors had many optimistic ideas about us, but the gifts they most wanted to give us are commonly things we ourselves don't want. Henry Ford wanted to give people power and freedom, not car exhaust.
In the State of the World 2009 discussion on The Well, you wrote: “Communism, capitalism, socialism, whatever: we've never yet had any economic system that recognizes that we have to live on a living planet.” In The Caryatids, you've created the Acquis and the Dispensation but, as far as I can tell, both are chiefly capitalist supra-societies. What were the indicators you used as inspiration for the two societies?
I like to describe those set-ups as ‘global civil societies'. They're not nations, they're not multinational companies. They are native 21st century institutions. Based in networks, not national boundaries. The way that we run the world today is just gone—it evaporated like the Soviet Union. Nobody talks about the past much. They don't fret much about the minutiae of their power-structures either—they're too busy fending off emergencies. Obviously they're not simple capitalist enterprises—for the first third of the book, nobody has any money. Their way of life is post-monetary. I know that people are painfully fascinated by economics right now, but you know, even for a science fiction writer, economics is the most dismal science in the world. The less a writer says about it, the more entertaining he gets.
How much of your Well State of the World discussion, your Wired posts, and even this electronic arts fair you're currently attending, feed into your SF?
Oh, I used to be very clever about this synergetic activity, but frankly, the silos are disintegrating. I strongly suspect now that people who read me no longer care a whit about the difference. I mean, supposedly the position of Bruce Sterling as a science-fiction author is quite different from that of Bruce Sterling the journalist, Bruce Sterling the weblogger, Bruce Sterling the futurist, Bruce Sterling the sometime academic and general-purpose cultural theorist—or whatever ... It's dawning on me that this polymathic blither is much less impressive than it sounds.
It's not that we're becoming Renaissance titans. It's that the older, comfortable divisions between genres and disciplines have been blurred, blenderized, cruelly smashed by the Internet. We just waltz though the rubble.
If I try to grab something obscure and ‘feed it into my SF', it will leak back out immediately now. Most things I find of compelling SF interest explode into public awareness off my weblog long before I can find the time to fictionalize them. The cyberpunk SF game is up, that's the story. We're all hip-deep, neck-deep in cyberculture now. We made that bed and now we have to sleep in it.
Do you think there's a danger when writing novels whose plots are based on the bête noire du jour (if you'll pardon my French) that the stories are no longer relevant by the time they're published?
Well, yeah—clearly a trendy novel ‘ripped from today's headlines’ is going look a little funky when newspapers no longer exist and we have no headlines to rip. On the other hand, I think there's a kind of long-lasting universality in a fictional situation that is very clearly specific. If you can really feed and groom that bête noire, if you know something about the black beast that no one else does, that can be news that stays news, true literature.
In The Caryatids, Mary Montalban says, “Future is prediction. We all know that's impossible.” Does science fiction have a part to play in conversations about the future?
Well, not the SF paperback genre necessarily, but the techniques of science fiction, yeah, you bet they have a part to play. There's so much blatant science fictional thinking going on right now that it probably ought to be renamed without its speculative-fiction hangover. Maybe renamed something like ‘Speculative Culture'. SF ideation is in web development, design, couture, architecture, the military ... espionage and religion even ... man, it's all over the place. Sometimes I worry for the culture's sanity. Especially when you contemplate the blue-sky radicalism of the clowns who call themselves ‘conservative'.
Charles Stross has said, “We are living in interesting times; in fact, they're so interesting that it is not currently possible to write near-future SF.” Do you agree?
Obviously not, since I do rather a lot of near-future work, but I know whereof Mr Stross speaks. Much of the near-future stuff I emit lately is likelier better-described as ‘design fiction’ or even ‘political activism’ rather than as classic science fiction. It's not that the pace of events is freakish, or that we're nearing a Singularity or anything. It's that both ‘science’ and ‘fiction’ have changed their social character. The ground shifted under them, and under science fiction, too. Science fiction writers used to cherry-pick bits of physics and then candy-coat them in drama, secure in the knowledge that their mostly teenage readers would appreciate the effort in popularization. Nowadays a teen with physics interests will just Google the keywords and download a few arXiv e-papers. Or maybe he reads edge.org. Lord knows I do, and Edge has far more brain-bending SF kick than bestselling SF novels do. Especially since most SF bestsellers are media tie-ins.
You've said that the “War on Terror bubble” has gone, and terrorism barely appears in The Caryatids. Unlike in The Zenith Angle. What will kill it?
Terrorism dies out when the people feeding and sheltering the terrorists weary of their noisome presence. The sense-of-terror do
esn't have a lot of staying power. Unless it's comprehensive, state-imposed terror, it tends to burn out a lot like the sense-of-wonder. It would be interesting to see how far a ‘War on Wonder’ would get us.
Couldn't it be argued that SF itself is a long-running ‘War on Wonder'? Is our tolerance for spectacle increasing with each passing year—we're demanding more eyeball-kicks for the bucks?
If that were the case, why would anybody read Verne, Wells, Orwell or Huxley? Yet they do. Obviously SF perpetrators are the ‘wonderists’ whose maunderings should be ruthlessly repressed. Anybody who reads David Langford's Ansible fanzine would see a litany of mainstream efforts to stuff science fiction back under the carpet where it belongs. In that war we're the miserable guerrillas.
Would you ever consider moving away entirely from writing science fiction and into ‘SF ideation'?
I'm not sure I will even be allowed that choice. It's like asking me whether I'd be willing to move away from my manual typewriter. Because I had one once, you know. I wrote my first two novels with those machines. I used carbon paper. You explain that to adults now, they look at you as if you used to run on wind-up clockwork. I used to compose on paper. I still publish on paper. But I have few remaining illusions about any paper-based industry.
Although people don't directly ask me to work at ‘SF ideation'—not with that term, anyway—I'm doing more and more work that fits that description. Not for the SF reading public, alas, but for clients. People from product-development teams, or tech startups, or even government agencies. The work is something like technical writing—clearly they want me to show up, listen to them, and put their vague ambitions into prose ... but it isn't technical writing, because they don't want to publish. They don't pay by the word, and printed matter is not the deliverable. I thought this was happening accidentally. Now I'm starting to wonder if this isn't some kind of emergent, post-SF profession. Star bloggers, industry-booster types, they seem to do a whole lot of this. No particular set of definable skills, just ... they're verbal-frameworking guys. Blue-sky ‘conceptualists'. Pundits. Techno-courtiers.
Interzone Science Fiction and Fantasy Magazine #221 Page 14
