by Rudy Rucker
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Really, reading is so bad for you, it destroys your eyes and hurts your posture and makes you fat."
Like all the cyberpunks, Sterling loves to write. He can become contagiously intoxicated with the sheer joy of fabulous description, as in this limning of a cyberspace landscape:
Rising in the horizon-warped virtual distance was a mist-shrouded Chinese crag, a towering digital stalagmite with the subtle monochromatics of sumi-e ink painting. Some spaceless and frankly noneuclidean distance from it, an enormous bubbled structure like a thunderhead, gleaming like veined black marble but conveying a weird impression of glassy gassiness, or maybe it was gassy glassiness . . .
Wouldn't you like to go there? You can, thanks to this lo-res VR device you're holding, it's called a printed page . . .
Sterling is an energetic tinkerer, and he drops in nice little touches everywhere. What looks like a ring on a man's finger is "a little strip of dark fur. Thick-clustered brown fur rooted in a ring-shaped circlet of [the man's] flesh." Two people riding on a train ring for a waiter from the dining-car and here's the response:
A giant crab came picking its way along the ceiling of the train car. It was made of bone and chitin and peacock feathers and gut and piano wire. It had ten very long multijointed legs and little rubber-ball feet on hooked steel ankles. A serving platter was attached with suckers to the top of its flat freckled carapace . . . It surveyed them with a circlet of baby blue eyes like a giant clam's. "Oui monsieur?"
This crab is a purely surreal and Dadaist assemblage, quite worthy of Kurt Schwitters or Max Ernst. The wonder of science fiction is that, with a bit of care, you can paste together just about anything and it will walk and talk and make you smile.
Near the end of the book, the heroine encounters the ultimate art medium.
It was like smart clay. It reacted to her touch with unmistakable enthusiasm . . . indescribably active, like a poem
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becoming a jigsaw. The stuff was boiling over with machine intelligence. Somehow more alive than flesh; it grew beneath her questing fingers like a Bach sonata. Matter made virtual. Real dreams.
Such is the stuff that science fiction is made of.
So, okay, those were the three new cyberpunk novels of 1996. Let's compare and contrast. What are some of the things they have in common other than the use of cyberspace?
One of the main cyberpunk themes is the fusion of humans and machines, and you can certainly find that here. In Idoru a man wants to marry a computer program, in Holy Fire machine-medicine essentially gives people new bodies. There is less of the machine in Silicon Embrace, though there is that remote-controlled guy with the chip in his head.
Another cyberpunk theme is a desire for a mystical union with higher consciousness, this kind of quest being a kind of side-effect of the acidhead '60s which all of us went through. Contact with higher intelligence is the key theme of Silicon Embrace, though in Idoru it is present only obliquely, as part of the idoru's appeal. Holy Fire ends with a thought-provoking pantheistic sequence where a human has actually turned his own self into an all pervading Nature god, with ''every flower, every caterpillar genetically wired for sound."
Cyberpunk usually takes a close look at the media; this is an SF tradition that goes pack to Frederic Pohl and Norman Spinrad. Holy Fire goes pretty light on the media, but in Idoru, the main villain is the media as exemplified by an outfit called Slitscan. "Slitscan was descended from 'reality' programming and the network tabloids . . . , but it resembled them no more than some large, swift bipedal carnivore resembled its sluggish, shallow-dwelling ancestors." One of the heroines of Silicon Embrace is Black Betty, a media terrorist who manages to jam the State's transmissions.
He watched the videotape, the few seconds of a former President yammering with a good approximation of sincerity in his State of the Union address - and then Black Betty stepping into the shot; stepping her video-persona into the
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former President's restricted public space; taking public space back from authority, giving it back to the public, the Public personified by Betty. Tall and lean and smiling from a crystallized inner confidence . . . she seemed to . . . stare at the president from within his Personal Space: a rudeness, a solecism become a political statement."
In terms of optimism/pessimism about the future, Holy Fire is very optimistic, Silicon Embrace very pessimistic, and Idoru somewhere in the middle. In terms of political outlook, Silicon Embrace is explicitly radical, Idoru is apolitical, and Holy Fire is - well - Republican? In Holy Fire, the world is run by old people, by the gerontocracy, and this is not necessarily presented as a bad thing, it's simply presented as the reality of that future.
Above and beyond the themes and attitudes, the single common thing about these three books is style. All are hip, all are funny, all are written by real people about the real world around us.
After all the good ink I've just given my peers, I can't resist slipping you a taste of my Freeware, which came out a few months after the books discussed here.
So here's shirtless Willy under the star-spangled Florida sky with eighty pounds of moldie [named Ulam] for his shoes and pants, scuffing across the cracked concrete of the JFK spaceport pad. The great concrete apron was broken up by a widely spaced grid of drainage ditches, and the spaceport buildings were dark. It occurred to Willy that he was very hungry.
There was a roar and blaze in the sky above. The Selena was coming down. Close, too close. The nearest ditch was so far he wouldn't make it in time, Willy thought, but once he started running, Ulam kicked in and superamplified his strides, cushioning on the landing and flexing on the take-offs. They sprinted a quarter mile in under twenty seconds and threw themselves into the coolness of the ditch, lowering down into the funky brackish water. The juddering yellow flame of the great ship's ion beams reflected off the ripples around them. A hot wind of noise blasted loud and louder; then all was still.
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[A crowd of angry locals appears and attacks the ship.]
There was a fusillade of gun-shots and needler blasts, and then the mob surged towards the Selena, blazing away at the ship as they advanced.
Their bullets pinged off the titaniplast hull like pebbles off galvanized steel; the needlers' laser-rays kicked up harmless glow-spots of zzzt. The Selena shifted uneasily on her hydraulic tripod legs.
"Her hold bears a rich cargo of moldie-flesh," came Ulam's calm, eldritch voice in Willy's head. "Ten metric tons of chipmold-infected imipolex, surely to be worth a king's ransom once this substance's virtues become known. This cargo is why Fern flew the Selena here for ISDN. I tell you, the flesher rabble attacks the Selena at their own peril. Although the imipolex is highly flammable, it has a low-grade default intelligence and will not hesitate to punish those who would harm it."
When the first people tried to climb aboard the Selena, the ship unexpectedly rose up on her telescoping tripod legs and lumbered away. As the ship slowly lurched along, great gouts of imipolex streamed out of hatches in her bottom. The Selena looked like a defecating animal, like a threatened ungainly beast voiding its bowels in flight - like a frightened penguin leaving a splatter trail of krilly shit. Except that the Selena's shit was dividing itself up into big slugs that were crawling away towards the mangroves and ditches as fast as they could hump, which was plenty fast.
Of course someone in the mob quickly figured out that the you could burn the imipolex shit slugs, and a lot of the slugs started going up in crazy flames and oily, unbelievably foul-smelling smoke. The smoke had a strange, disorienting effect; as soon as Willy caught a whiff of it, his ears started buzzing and the objects around him took on a jellied, peyote solidity.
Now the burning slugs turned on their tormentors, engulfing them like psychedelic kamikaze napalm. There was great screaming from the victims, screams that were weirdly,
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hideously ecstatic. And then the mob's few survivors h
ad fled, and the rest of the slugs had wormed off into the flickering night. Willy and Ulam split the scene as well.58
Cyberpunk lives!
Appeared as "Letters From Home" in
The New York Review of Science Fiction, #113, January 1998.
58.Freeware, pp, 154156.
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Interview with Ivan Stang
Ivan Stang is the High Scribe and co-founder of the Church of the SubGenius, a kind of dadaist religion that centers around the iconic image of a '50s-style pipe-smoking man named "Bob." Attracted by some small zine ads promising slack, I myself joined the Church of the SubGenius in 1982. It cost me a dollar to get hold of the classic SubGenius Pamphlet #1, and soon after that, Stang ordained me by mail in exchange for copies of some of my books.59
Over the years I've met Stang (not his real name) in person a few times, which is always a great experience. He's a true media artist and wonderfully intelligent force against all things pink - "pink" being a SubGenius word for all the dumb, repressive and soulless aspects of our society.
Stang started our telephone interview with a disclaimer.
Stang: Don't interview me. The article should be about the Church of the SubGenius, not about me. I'm just a part of the Church, though perhaps the hardest working part. I want to keep it clear that "Bob" comes first, not me.
RR: I often feel a lack in my life these days, Ivan. Can "Bob" actually fill the hunger for religion?
Stang: No, he can't. For that you need, "Yoko and me." As Charlie Manson used to say, "I trust the only one who's left to trust . . . me."
RR: One thing that makes me not take "Bob" completely seri-
59. The amazing SubGenius Pamphlet #1 is still available by sending one dollar to "the sacred box number" of the SubGenius Foundation, PO BOX 140306, Dallas, TX 75214. Or you can view the Pamphlet for free on the Web at http://www.subgenius. com. There's lots of other goodies at this site; one can, for instance, access Stang's taped "Hour of Slack" radio shows via online streaming audio. Two other good sources of information are the SubGenius Foundation books: The Book of the SubGenius, Simon and Schuster, New York 1987, and Revelation X, Fireside, New York 1994.
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A cellular automaton rule called "Bob."
(Image generated by Cellab.)
ously is that when I'm in a hospital thinking I might die, I feel more like praying to Jesus than to "Bob."
Stang: There's nothing wrong with repenting on your death bed. It's all a "just in case" thing anyway. Pray to Jesus just in case there's an afterlife. Pray to "Bob" just in case there's an X-day and the saucers come to kill all the normals.
RR: When is X-day?
Stang: July 5, 1998, 7 o'clock in the morning at the International Date Line. California will be the last ruptured. You can watch X-day on TV for nearly a full day before it hits you. Watching X-day in progress may be "Bob's" biggest test of faith. You may not like what you see. You may feel like burning your Church of the SubGenius membership card.
We're not going to end up like the Jehovah's Witnesses who are always predicting the end of the world and making fools of themselves. We have several outs. We may end up having to have a big X-day party every year.60
60. When the Earth didn't come to an end on July 5, 1998, Stang's assembled followers tarred and feathered him, using pink feathers. Stang now explains that his prediction was a simple mix-up: he happened to read the paper with the X-day date upside down, and the true year of "Bob's" coming will be 8661! In the meantime, X-day is still celebrated every year.
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RR: What about the Church's new book, Revelation X?
Stang: Our first book, The Book of the SubGenius, showed the glory that is "Bob." It had more sheer bullshit than the Book of Mormon. But Revelation X shows the danger that is "Bob." Thanks to our art director Paul Mavrides, it's really really sick, it's like a Jehovah's Witness comic book.
RR: What have you been doing this summer?
Stang: I did a wedding in Chicago on the beach, a classic hippie wedding. Then I was in two SubGenius events, Portland and Seattle X-day celebrations, both awful, both controlled by local fans and done not the way we would have done it. Then I went to Dragoncon in Atlanta, which was great, a science fiction convention, they paid me and brought in Philo Drummond and his Zappaesque band The Swinging Love Corpses. They had Janor Hypercleats there to preach. And Susie the Floozie. She's our latest woman SubGenius preacher and she's great. She's an ex-stripper.
RR: Did you fuck her?
Stang: (Outraged.) I haven't fucked her and I wouldn't. I'm married, and if I did I wouldn't tell you. I have hefted her tits though, her bare nekkid tits, they're all any guy could ask for. She preaches about her personal experiences with Connie Dobbs, "Bob"'s primary wife. After Dragoncon, I went to a pagan event, they say it's the biggest pagan gathering in the country. It's called Starwood, it's held in far western rural New York. Tim Leary and Terence McKenna and Robert Anton Wilson have all been there. I run across them all the time. The drug addled philosophers; they always bum cigarettes from me. I smoke Merits except now I just quit. At Starwood I was on with Dr. Legume of Philadelphia and Reverend Bleepo Abernathy of New York City. It was broadcast live on FM.
RR: Were you stoned?
Stang: (Increasingly testy.) I never fool with cheap conspiracy street drugs when I'm working. After the show that's a whole different thing. The kind of things I end up taking are still legal. Toad venom and Hawaiian woodrose and San Pedro cactus. I took some of that at Starwood. It's an aphrodisiac, like yohimbine. Instant hard-on. Of course my wife wasn't there, so I had to sit in my tent and beat off.
RR: Describe your childhood and adolescence.
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Stang: Well. I'd say the main aspects were my Mammy and Pappy and the Three Stooges and Bugs Bunny. This was a barely middle-class Fort Worth neighborhood and if you saw a black person or a Mexican that was a big deal, it was something you'd tell your friends about. I had pretty much of a rationalist upbringing. My parents quit going to church when the preacher told them they shouldn't drink. I got pretty good grades, read monster comics and read H.G. Wells. I even drew comics, but when I was twelve I burned all these comics because we were moving to a new town (Dallas) and I wasn't going to be weird anymore. I decided I was going to be normal. Luckily it didn't take.
RR: Something must have happened in high school?
Stang: I'd been making movies since I was ten. By the time I got to high school I started winning awards for these claymation films I'd made. I was already a celebrity and a has-been by the time I was twenty. I'd won these awards all over the world.
What really happened in high school - I hit puberty at the age of five - I was really ready for female companionship, but my parents put me in a private school that was all male. All I could do was beat off and make violent horror movies. And then I was going to be the next Orson Welles, and I started doing like really weird art films. About the age of sixteen I switched from being a nice dutiful boy to being a bad hippie.
RR: That sounds like drugs.
Stang: Well yeah. I took LSD before I'd ever even tried a beer. That's what definitely what took me away from the monster movies and into art films. Plus about that time Frank Zappa appeared and Jimi Hendrix, and I discovered R. Crumb and underground comix. My main ambition for a time was to be accepted by these guys who do underground comix. That's one of the only goals I've achieved. By the time I was 26 I was married and struggling in sweatshop companies doing cheesy business films. But I had written that first SubGenius pamphlet which as far as I'm concerned was equal to doing Citizen Kane. The first place I sent that thing was the underground comix publishers. The owners threw them out, but two of the artists fished copies out of the trash can, Paul Mavrides at Ripoff Press and Jay Kinney at Last Gasp. Those two guys were a big help.
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They were the first professional artist types I knew.
