Pirate Utopia

by Bruce Sterling

  D’ANNUNZIO IN FIUME

  WITH ARMED FORCES

  Brings Machine Guns and Armored Cars in Defiance of

  Italian Government Orders.

  ROME, Sept. 12—Gabriele D’Annunzio, the Italian poet-aviator, arrived in Fiume from Ronchi this afternoon with detachments of grenadiers and Arditi provided with machine guns and armored automobiles, according to reports reaching this city tonight. The movement was made in violation of orders from the government. No disorders were reported till late tonight.

  That is not to suggest that Pirate Utopia is a true story. It’s an alternate history of a momentarily successful attempt to conjure an alternate future, written by the author’s Italian multiverse doppelgänger. Given the wide variations among consensus reality’s histories of Fiume, Sterling’s speculative counterfactual proves a useful tool to divine deeper truths about this extravagant deviation from post-Westphalian convention that, when viewed from a century’s distance, proves to be an important lodestar of our own immanent tomorrows—and how we can go about rewriting them.

  The real world’s Gabriele D’Annunzio—the Prophet of Pirate Utopia—was a global celebrity of the Proud Tower era before WWI, a decadent poet, playwright, and novelist whose works were popular on both sides of the Atlantic, and an adherent of Nietzsche who transformed himself into a bona fide world historical Übermensch at the dawn of the twentieth century. A longtime flying buff who had flown with Wilbur Wright in 1908, when the war broke out he incredibly became a military aviator in his fifties, losing an eye in aerial combat, and then using the constraints of his partially blinded convalescence to innovate a new mode of literary composition. When the political brokers at Versailles gave the former Austro-Hungarian port of Fiume to the new nation of Yugoslavia they had just patched together on the conference room table, the burgeoning Italian nationalist movements saw a failure of politics—Fiume to them was a historical part of Italy, an old territory of Venice still dominated by an Italian population that expected repatriation. After an auspicious reading of the cards by an American-born princess, D’Annunzio grabbed the opportunity to accept the Italian-Fiumans’ invitation and round up a crew of demobilized troops to correct this error of the state through bold action, anticipating that by restoring this piece of Italian glory, he would inspire a movement that would do the same with the whole country. He was partially right.

  D’Annunzio, aided by “Ace of Hearts” Guido Keller, a fellow Ardito aviator who kept a pet eagle and liked to take naked walks on the beach, managed to take Fiume with just 186 veterans and a few barely serviceable surplus vehicles—pushing through the nominal opposition with bluster, patriotic appeals, and a few rounds of gunfire. But he was unable to work out mutually agreeable terms for the adoption of Fiume by the mother country. In the absence of clear politico-legal status, Fiume became a temporary autonomous zone to which war-forged modernists flocked from all over the world—Futurists and proto-fascists, Dadaists and syndicalists, free lovers and strident Bolsheviks, radio innovators and desperadoes, all drawn by D’Annunzio’s calls from his hotel balcony and the press releases put out by his team of international poets turned public relations hacks. At night, Dionysus reigned in the libertine festa that would never end, and in the daytime, the new Fiumans rewrote the social contract with a fresh constitution that would make the means of production communally managed, obliterate conventional divisions of labor, and elevate aesthetics to the point of making music a central principle of the state.

  Real-world Fiume’s candle burned out after fifteen months, but the Fiume of Utopia Pirata isn’t bound by such constraints. Sterling imagines a different outcome—one where the mix of technological innovation, futurist ideas and liberated territory creates a moment in which forward-thinking people can seize the controls and steer the world towards their vision of a better future—or at least one juiced with more imaginative vitality. Sterling’s alt.Fiume is uninfected by the naive idealizations of contemporary anarchist depictions of D’Annunzio’s experiment, showing the dark fascist specters lurking behind the Waldropian fun-house mirror—and the deluded hubris intrinsic to all applied utopias. At the same time, the story’s whimsy lubricates the narrative tumblers that unlock the gates of “what if?” wonder and invite us to invent our own ending—for the story and for our own selves. “Compare that meager, mundane reality to the world you really desire,” says H. P. Lovecraft the ad-man. After the chuckles stop, the provocation remains.

  The text of Pirate Utopia looks backward, but the story is more cyberpunk than steampunk—a work that shares DNA with Sterling’s seminal 1980s novel Islands in the Net, with its global archipelago of future Fiumes, and applies Sterling’s more recent observations about the ways network culture liberates the timeline of our minds from the constraints of historiographically sanctioned official narratives. Pirate Utopia travels back to Fiume to open a portal that looks forward from our own destabilized present, a liminal now whose 2019 just came into range looking a lot like the pre-apocalyptic truncheon show of that 1919 New York Times. But where D’Annunzio and his interwar peers were inspired by the romantic visions of generations of continental philosophers, we are stuck with a world governed by the more dismal (and now discredited) science of neoclassical economics. And with science fiction, and all its pulp-tethered limitations.

  The Zeitgeist surfers of Fiume rode the long waves of speculative social science that charged European political change from the Enlightenment through the Cold War. Rousseau’s revelation that human nature could be improved by redesigning the structure of society uncorked a few centuries of whiteboard utopias that managed to get beta-tested in real life, from Saint-Simon’s prescient visions of techno-meritocracy to Fourier’s communal phalanxes of work based on joy and Marx’s elusive communist paradise. These utopian postulates provided the aspirational dipole to Darwinian pragmatism and pushed Western societies in the long-term pursuit of an idealized tomorrow. But the mechanized violence of the twentieth century, the corrupt failure of the Soviet experiment, and the quotidian demands of capital extinguished the aurora of those ideas, leaving us a “politics practiced as a branch of advertising” whose pretenses of diversity mask a resigned nihilism and the exhaustion of hope. And so the business of inventing better worlds falls to sf writers, most of whom find it is dystopia that pays the bills.

  The author of Pirate Utopia is someone who walks the talk, busy the past decade bushwhacking an alternate future in the fabric of his own life—busting out of generic confinement to practice speculative design as a freshly potent narrative mode, living the laptop-based existence of an itinerant cybernomad in the ethereal realm he helped create, and even occupying an Italian mirror world version of himself, the Turinese scrittore di fantascienza Bruno Argento, who was the actual author of the story you just read. If you catch one of Bruce/Bruno’s many public speaking appearances, you may hear him talk of his aspiration “to write a regional novel of Planet Earth.” In Pirate Utopia and other recent European counterfactuals like “Black Swan” and “The Parthenopean Scalpel,” it’s evident that he is already doing that, in installments—in this episode, glimpsing a different American future through atemporal Italian portals. While no bona fide utopian prescriptions have yet emerged from Sterling’s trenchant speculative diagnostics, one wonders what he would do if we gave him a liberated city-state to run.

  While in Austin for the annual SXSW Interactive conference, Bruce Sterlin sat down with editor Rick Klaw. The pair discussed many things including alternate history and ego, Riijeka, Gabriele D'Annunzion, fantasciencza, fascism, H. P. Lovecraft, torpedoes, and, of course,Pirate Utopia.

  Rick Klaw: People who have read your work before might be a bit surprised by Pirate Utopia because it’s not the hard science fiction of your novels. It has much more of the cultural aspects present in your short fiction.

  Bruce Sterling story. It’s like Difference Engine or other alternate history stories. I wrote an alternate history story more recently that was
in Twelve Tomorrows. Every year [the MIT Technology Review] do their science fiction issue and I’ve been the editor twice. This year I wrote an alternate history story about a guy with an Antikythera device, which is this lost Greek calculating device. I’ve actually written a lot of alternative history stuff. It’s usually very much about technology.

  Pirate Utopia has got a killer F-Ray and a flying aerial torpedo in it. Not to mention cheap, mass-produced single-shot handguns. The lead character’s an engineer, it’s engineering fiction, military engineering fiction. It’s got a lot of dress-up stuff; I mean, guys are wearing trenchcoats, with a lot of careful descriptions of Italian Futurist-styled uniforms and all kinds of cool period gear: megaphones, wireless sets, biplanes. I think if you’re a dieselpunk fan or a steampunk fan you would find that rather simpatico. If you’re interested in that period, it’s a refreshing setting.

  Klaw: What interests you so much about this particular alternate history?

  Sterling: I’ve actually been through the area a lot that’s described in this story, and Rijeka, the former Fiume, is an area I pass through very often on my way from the Balkans to Italy. I’ve come to know that city very well. It really is a haunted place. It’s just a peculiar Adriatic port. What went on there during the period that I’m describing was really one of the strangest episodes of political extremism in European history. Really a weird thing, and surprisingly little-known. So I was hanging out in Rijeka, and I thought, “I’m gonna write something about what happened here.” I knew people there and they were interviewing me. “So, American Science Fiction Writer, what’s your next project?” and I said, “I’m gonna write some science fiction set here in Rijeka.” People were just thunderstruck, like “Why would he do it?” but also impressed. There’s surprisingly a lot of Croatian science fiction fandom. Rijeka has a society which was literally split between Yugoslavia and Italy in a very violent way. I’ve spent a lot of time in both Yugoslavia and Italy, so it’s an area that culturally interests me a lot.

  Klaw: How much do the events in the book match up to the true history of Fiume?

  Sterling: They’re very close until they begin to deviate as my hero’s machinations have more and more of an effect on history. Because he’s never aware that he’s a major figure—in fact he has no idea that he’s managed to sidetrack Mussolini and Hitler. That’s just collateral damage. He’s just trying to build some bombs here. Torpedoes are what really interests the guy. In our own line of history he’s a dead man, obviously, but in the story’s line of alternate history, he’s a Turinese engineer with a gift, and a chip on his shoulder. So he is able to emphasize the technological aspects of the Fiume Revolution more than just hanging around, reciting poetry, and taking drugs, which is what they mostly did. In our original timeline there was a torpedo factory in Fiume, but the Allies managed to shut it down. The poetic rebels just didn’t have anybody with the technical chops to hack a factory and get it going.

  Klaw: You’re talking about in our real history, there was a torpedo factory there?

  Sterling: Yeah.

  Klaw: But that would have been in the ’20s.

  Sterling: It was an Austro-Hungarian torpedo factory. There are still remnants of it there. They were major torpedo makers…I mean, they made a lot of armaments for the Austro-Hungarian Navy.

  Klaw: And you’ve visited that factory?

  Sterling: Yeah, we were there, Jasmina [Tešanović] and I were both there for a big cyberpunk event, which was held on Tito’s rusty old yacht in the Fiume Harbor. I was lecturing the people of Fiume on their own history, which they know very little about. They’re like most people. It’s like telling people in Austin about Colonel [Edward M.] House, who basically ran the U.S. Government while Woodrow Wilson was demented by a stroke. House lived in Austin. And nobody here would know that. He’s not a household figure.

  Klaw: Have others written about the pirates of Fiume?

  Sterling: Peter Lamborn Wilson wrote a famous work on pirate utopias. And there were a number of other pirate utopias, but Fiume is one of the most famous and actually had real pirates; they were stealing the living daylights out of stuff.

  Klaw: Pirates think everything works like that.

  Sterling: The Strike of the Hand Committee was very much a smash-and-grab-style organization. They stole tons of stuff: entire ships, herds of horses, diesel fuel, weaponry, all kinds of things.

  Klaw: Alternate histories about this region and World War I are practically an Italian subgenre.

  Sterling: Yeah. A lot exist. There’s a work of Italian science fiction called The Biplanes of D’Annunzio [by Luca Masali], which was written about ten years ago. It starred Gabriele D’Annunzio, who is also a character in my book.

  Klaw: What’s up with all the nicknames in Pirate Utopia?

  Sterling: For some mythic reason I decided to refer to everybody by their epithets, so the hero Lorenzo Secondari is called Pirate Engineer by most people, and D’Annunzio is called The Prophet, and the Ace of Hearts is actually a guy named Guido Keller in real life, and the Jewish Economist was a Jewish economist, and The Constitutionalist, they’re all real, and the Art Witch, of course, is Luisa Casati.

  Klaw: It’s all very pulp in a superhero kind of way.

  Sterling: Within Fiume people referred to D’Annunzio as Il Vate, which is sort of the Prophetic Poet. D’Annunzio liked to rename people, and there was this atmosphere of unreality that came from living in the D’Annunzio orbit. Everything was sort of super-eloquent and kind of renamed. So if you were one of the pirates, the Fiume pirates, you were known as Uskoki. Nobody had any idea what the hell that was. The Uskoki were fifteenth-century Christian Adriatic pirates who had fought the Moslems of the Ottoman Empire. D’Annunzio, a super well-read guy, knew this, so he’s rounding up all his men and coming up with these bizarre rituals, many of which have, of course, been forgotten, but some of which became super-influential. The Roman fascist salute was invented in Fiume by D’Annunzio. “We’re not gonna salute the way we did during the war, we’re going to salute in the old-fashioned Roman way,” and they’re like, “Okay, Vate! Anything else?” “Yeah! Instead of saying ‘Hip-hip-hooray,’ we’re going to say ‘Eia, eia, alalà,’” and the fascists ended up shouting this all the time. Certain fascist theme songs were invented in Fiume, like “Giovinezza,” which is the famous fascist marching song. A lot of the leaders of the fascist group, including Mussolini, matriculated in Fiume. They would hang out there, do drugs, have sex, and soak up some fascist ideology. Marconi got a divorce in Fiume. It was a funny place. It was like Batista Cuba in some ways: everything was legal; everything was permitted.

  Klaw: When I last interviewed you in the early 2000s, we were talking at the time about the influence of Texas on your writing. You’ve lived in Europe now for ten years or so; has it had a similar effect on your writing?

  Sterling : Yeah, I have alter-ego writers now, who I rely on. I mean there’s Bruno Argento, who’s the Turinese Bruce Sterling, so my new Italian collection, which is called Utopia Pirata, has I Racconti di Bruno Argento as a subtitle. I actually see writing these Italian stories as my attempt to add something to the Italian tradition of fantascienza. I know there’s been quite a lot of fantastic writing in Turin over the years. Calvino was from Turin and Primo Levi was from Turin. Right now, although there’s a lot of science fiction fandom in Turin, there are no such prominent Turinese fantasy writers, except for me, or rather my alter-ego, Bruno Argento. I also have a Serbian alter-ego writer of fantastyka, who’s called Boris Srebro.

  Klaw: Are these very public alter-egos?

  Sterling: Yeah. I’ve been talking to people about it, but mostly it’s just something I put on the top of the page as I write. “I’m going to write with the Boris Srebro voice in this story.” So my story “Kiosk,” which is set in a future Belgrade, is a Boris Srebro story. But this particular story, Pirate Utopia, is actually kind of a Boris Srebro/Bruno Argento mash-up, because it’s about Yugoslavia and Ita
ly at the same time.

  Klaw: Are you writing in other languages, or still just in English?

  Sterling : I write entirely in English because I don’t have the chops to write a proper, literary Italian, and Serbian will always be out of my reach. I’m getting a little better at it. I can read Italian and I’ve got a sincere interest in fantascienza. I know what fantascienza’s about, what the themes are, the kind of historical roots of it, and why Italian popular genre writing is as it was. So I wouldn’t call myself a scholar of popular Italian literature, but I know at least enough about it that I can get away with creating it. I think I have a friendly reception from the Italian SF community for writing stuff about their interests. Which can be a little weird, as I try to imagine an Italian science fiction writer coming to Texas and deciding that he wants to write westerns and live in Austin. But maybe that would work—maybe he’d do great westerns, like great spaghetti westerns. Or maybe he’d just put a foot wrong and make a fool of himself. Or, it might be well-received work back where he came from, but it would be rather difficult for someone in Austin to say, “This Italian guy is telling us stuff about Austin that we ourselves didn’t know.” But I think it’s doable. I can get away with it because I write about a fantastic Italy rather than a real Italy. If I tried to write a modern novel about everyday life in Italy I think my foreignness would be more obvious. I can actually do these alternate Italys or future Italys and they have a freshness to them. Italian readers are just kind of like, “Where the heck did that come from?”