by Rudy Rucker
Om dat de Vierelt is soe ongetru
Daer om gha ic in den ru.
[In literal English:]
For that the World is so untrue
There fore go I in the sorrow.
The "in den ru" is squeezed together. It hits me wow, that I'm Ru! In a synchronistic sense, perhaps Bruegel is saying he will go "in den ru" meaning ''into a book by Rudy Rucker!" Well, it's a pleasant fantasy anyhow. Too bad the Misanthrope doesn't look a little happier about it.
This picture and The Parable of the Blind right next to it have the same milky gray sky and dun Earth. Winter. A depressing pair. Bruegel knew he was dying.
I had a very nice lunch in the museum cafe, great vegetables. "Contorni" they call vegetables in Italy. These were Naples style with garlic and hot peppers, four kinds: mushrooms, chicory, spinach, and some other green.
Leaving the Naples museum, I think "Sigh, goodbye Bruegel, goodbye Europe."
Riding back to Rome on the train, the clouds are lit from behind, the sun down west over the Mediterranean. Fields with streams,
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irrigation ditches, ponds, fens. Now and then the orange-edged clouds can be seen reflected in a patch of ruffled green water - exquisite. A line of pines (cypress?), their green tops blended into one worm, their bare trunks twisting down like legs.
October 9, 1998. On the Plane from Rome to SF.
So all right, we're on the way home. I'm ready. Let the hemorrhage of money stop. No more snotty waiters! Good clean food! Hello comfortable bed! Time to go back to being a producer instead of a consumer.
Out the window is Greenland. Whipped cream snow with sharp-ridged peaks sticking out here and there; mountains buried up to their necks in ice and snow.
It's a big world.
Unpublished. Handwritten travel notes, fall, 1998.
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PART III:
ART
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A Transrealist Manifesto
In this piece I would like to advocate a style of SF-writing that I call transrealism. Transrealism is not so much a type of SF as it is a type of avant-garde literature. I feel that transrealism is the only valid approach to literature at this point in history.
The transrealist writes about immediate perceptions in a fantastic way. Any literature which is not about actual reality is weak and enervated. But the genre of straight realism is all burnt out. Who needs more straight novels? The tools of fantasy and SF offer a means to thicken and intensify realistic fiction. By using fantastic devices it is actually possible to manipulate subtext. The familiar tools of SF - time travel, antigravity, alternate worlds, telepathy, etc. - are in fact symbolic of archetypal modes of perception. Time travel is memory, flight is enlightenment, alternate worlds symbolize the great variety of individual world-views, and telepathy stands for the ability to communicate fully. This is the "trans" aspect. The "realism" aspect has to do with the fact that a valid work of art should deal with the world the way it actually is. Transrealism tries to treat not only immediate reality, but also the higher reality in which life is embedded.
The characters should be based on actual people. What makes standard genre fiction so insipid is that the characters are so obviously puppets of the author's will. Actions become predictable, and in dialogue it is difficult to tell which character is supposed to be talking. In real life, the people you meet almost never say what you want or expect them to. From long and bruising contact, you carry simulations of your acquaintances around in your head. These simulations are imposed on you from without; they do not react to imagined situations as you might desire. By letting these simulations run your characters, you can avoid turning out mechanical wish-fulfillments. It is essential that the characters be in some sense out of control, as are real people - for what can anyone learn by reading about made-up people?
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In a transrealist novel, the author usually appears as an actual character, or his or her personality is divided among several characters. On the face of it, this sounds egotistical. But I would argue that to use oneself as a character is not really egotistical. It is a simple necessity. If, indeed, you are writing about immediate perceptions, then what point of view other than your own is possible? It is far more egotistical to use an idealized version of yourself, a fantasy-self, and have this para-self wreak its will on a pack of pliant slaves. The transrealist protagonist is not presented as some super-person. A transrealist protagonist is just as neurotic and ineffectual as we each know ourselves to be.
The transrealist artist cannot predict the finished form of his or her work. The transrealist novel grows organically, like life itself. The author can only choose characters and setting, introduce this or that particular fantastic element, and aim for certain key scenes. Ideally, a transrealist novel is written in obscurity, and without an outline. If the author knows precisely how his or her book will develop, then the reader will divine this. A predictable book is of no interest. Nevertheless, the book must be coherent. Granted, life does not often make sense. But people will not read a book which has no plot. And a book with no readers is not a fully effective work of art. A successful novel of any sort should drag the reader through it. How is it possible to write such a book without an outline? The analogy is to the drawing of a maze. In drawing a maze, one has a start (characters and setting) and certain goals (key scenes). A good maze forces the tracer past all the goals in a coherent way. When you draw a maze, you start out with a certain path, but leave a lot of gaps where other paths can hook back in. In writing a coherent transrealist novel, you include a number of unexplained happenings throughout the text. Things that you don't know the reason for. Later you bend strands of the ramifying narrative back to hook into these nodes. If no node is available for a given strand-loop, you go back and write a node in (cf. erasing a piece of wall in the maze). Although reading is linear, writing is not.
Transrealism is a revolutionary art form. A major tool in mass thought control is the myth of consensus reality. Hand in hand with this myth goes the notion of a "normal person."
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There are no normal people - just look at your relatives, the people that you are in a position to know best. They're all weird at some level below the surface. Yet conventional fiction very commonly shows us normal people in a normal world. As long as you labor under the feeling that you are the only weirdo, then you feel weak and apologetic. You're eager to go along with the establishment, and a bit frightened to make waves - lest you be found out. Actual people are weird and unpredictable, this is why it is so important to use them as characters instead of the impossibly good and bad paperdolls of mass culture.
The idea of breaking down consensus reality is even more important. This is where the tools of SF are particularly useful. Each mind is a reality unto itself. As long as people can be tricked into believing the reality of the 6:30 news, they can be herded about like sheep. The "president" threatens us with "nuclear war," and driven frantic by the fear of "death'' we rush out to "buy consumer goods." When in fact, what really happens is that you turn off the TV, eat something, and go for a walk, with infinitely many thoughts and perceptions mingling with infinitely many inputs.
There will always be a place for the escape-literature of genre SE But there is no reason to let this severely limited and reactionary mode condition all our writing. Transrealism is the path to a truly artistic SF.
Appeared in The Bulletin of the Science Fiction Writers
of America, #82, winter, 1983.
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What SF Writers Want
I think some of the appeal of SF comes from its association with the old idea of the Magic Wish. Any number of fairy tales deal with a hero (humble woodcutter, poor fisherman, disinherited princess) who gets into a situation where he or she is free to ask for any wish at all, with assurance that the wish will be granted. Reading such a tale, the reader inevitably wonders, "What would I wish for?" It's pleasant to fantasize about
having such great power; and thinking about this also provides an interesting projective psychological test.
Some SF stories hinge on the traditional Magic Wish situation - the appearance of a machine (= magic object) or an alien (= magic being) who will grant the main character's wishes. But more often, the story takes place after the wish has been made . . . by whom? By the author.
What I mean here is that, in writing a book, an SF writer is in a position of being able to get any Magic Wish desired. If you want time travel in your book . . . no problem. If you want flying, telepathy, size-change, etc., then you, as SF writer, can have it - not in the real world, of course, but in the artificial, written world into which you project your thoughts.
To make my point quite clear, let me recall a conversation I once had with a friend in Lynchburg. "Wouldn't it be great," my friend was saying, "if there were a machine that could bring into existence any universe you wanted, with any kinds of special powers. A machine that could call up your favorite universe, and then send you there." ''There is such a machine," I answered. "It's called a typewriter."
Okay. So the point I want to start from here is the notion that, in creating a novelistic work, the writer is basically in a position of being able to have any wish whatsoever granted.
What kinds of things do we, as SF writers, tend to wish for? What sorts of possibilities seem so attractive to us that we are willing to spend the months necessary to bring them into the pseudore-
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ality of a polished book? What kinds of needs underlie the wishes we make?
In discussing this, my basic assumption is that the driving force behind our SF wishes is a desire to find a situation wherein one might be happy . . . whatever "happy" might mean for any particular writer.
There are, of course, a variety of very ordinary ways to wish for happiness: wealth, sexual attractiveness, political power, athletic prowess, sophistication, etc. I'm not going to be too interested in these types of wishes here - because such wishes are not peculiar to the artform of SF. Any number of standard paperback wish-fulfillments deal with characters whom the author has wished into such lower-chakra delights.
No, the kind of wishes I want to think about here are the weird ones - wishes that have essentially no chance of coming true - wishes that are really worth asking for.
I can think of four major categories of SF wishes, each with several subcategories:
1) Travel.
(1.1) Space travel. (1.2) Time travel.
(1.3) Changing size scale. (1.4) Travel to other universes.
2) Psychic powers.
(2.1) Telepathy. (2.2) Telekinesis.
3) Self-change.
(3.1) Immortality. (3.2) Intelligence increase.
(3.3) Shape-shifting.
4) Aliens.
(4.1) Robots. (4.2) Saucer aliens.
Let's look at these notions one at a time.
1) Travel. Your position relative to the universe can perhaps be specified in terms of four basic parameters: (1.1) space-location, (1.2) time-location, (1.3) your size, and (1.4) which universe you're actually in. Our powers to alter these parameters are very limited. Although it is possible to change space-location, this is hard and slow work. We travel in time, but only in one direction, and only at one fixed speed. In the course of a lifetime, our size changes, but only to a
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small extent. And jumping back and forth between parallel universes is a power no one even pretends to have. Let's say a bit about the ways in which science fiction undertakes to alter each of these four stubborn parameters.
(1.1) Space travel. Faster-than-light drives, matter transmission, and teleportation are all devices designed to annihilate the obdurate distances of space. One might almost say that these kinds of hyper-jumping devices turn space into time. You no longer worry about how far something is, you just ask when you should show up.
Would happiness finally be mine if I could break the fetters of space? I visualize a kind of push-button phone dial set into my car's dashboard, and imagine that by punching in the right sequence of digits I can get anywhere. (Actually, the very first SF story I ever read was a Little Golden Book called The Magic Bus. I read it in the second grade. The Bus had just one special button on the dash, and each push on the button would take the happily tripping crew to a new randomly selected locale. Of course - ah, if only it were still so easy - everyone got home to Mom in time for supper and bed.) That would be fun, but would it be enough? And what is enough, anyway?
In terms of the Earth, power over space is already, in a weak sense, ours. If it matters enough to you, you can actually travel anywhere on Earth - it's not instantaneous, using cars and planes, but you do get there in a few days. Even easier, by using a telephone, you can actually project part of yourself (ears and voice) to any place where there's someone to talk to. But these weak forms of Earthbound space travel are the domain of travel writing and investigative journalism, not of SF.
Hyperjumping across space would be especially useful for travel to other planetary civilizations. One underlying appeal in changing planets would be the ability to totally skip out on all of one's immediate problems, the ability to get out of a bad situation. "Color me gone," as some soldiers reportedly said, getting on the plane that would take them away from Viet Nam and back to the U.S. "I'm out of here, man, I'm going back to the world." Jumping to a far-distant planet would involve an escape from real life, and certainly SF is, to some extent, a literature of escape.
(1.2) Time travel. I once asked Robert Silverberg why time travel
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has fascinated him so much over the years. He said that he felt the desire to go back and make good all of one's major life-errors and past mistakes. I tend to look at this a little more positively - I think a good reason for wanting to go back to the past is the desire to reexperience the happy times that one has had. The recovery of lost youth, the revisiting of dead loved ones.
A desire to time travel to an era before one's birth probably comes out of a different set of needs than does a desire to travel back to earlier stages of one's own life. People often talk about the paradoxes involved in going back to kill their ancestors - this gets into the territory of parricide and matricide. And a sublimated desire for suicide informs the tales about directly killing one's past self. Other time travel stories talk about going back to watch one's parents meeting - I would imagine that this desire has something to do with the old Freudian concept of witnessing the "primal scene."
What about time travel to the future? This comes, I would hazard, out of a desire for immortality. To still be here, long after your chronological death.
To a lesser extent than with space, we have some slight power over time: each day you live through brings you one day further into the future, and going to sleep is a way of making the future come "sooner." And one of the appeals of marijuana is that it can make time seem to pass slower, making the future come "later." And of course, a session of intensely focused recollection can make the past briefly seem alive. (Thus Proust, thus psychoanalysis.)
As with power over space, we must question whether power over time is really enough to wish for. Eventually, both of these powers simply boil down to having a special sort of "car" which enables you to jump here and there, checking out weirder and weirder scenes.
(1.3) Changing size scale. Without having to actually travel through space or time, one could see entirely new vistas simply by shrinking to the size of a microbe. Alternatively, one might try growing to the size of a galaxy.
One problem with getting very big is that you might accidentally crush the Earth, and have nothing to come back to. I prefer the idea of shrinking. What need in me does this speak to? On a sexual level, the notion of getting very small is probably related to an Oedipal
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desire to return to the peaceful and ultra-sexual environment of the womb. On a social level, getting small connotes the idea of being so low-profile as
to be unhassled by the brutal machineries of law and fame. Economically speaking, being small suggests independence - if I were the size of a thumb, my food bills would be miniscule. A single can of beer would be more than the equivalent of a full keg!
