Collected Essays
Page 3
In order to present some ideas about how gnarl applies to literature in general, and to science-fiction in particular, I’m going to make up four tables to summarize ho gnarliness makes its way into science-fiction in four areas: subject matter, plot, scientific speculation, and social commentary.
In drawing up my tables, I found it useful to distinguish between low gnarl and high gnarl. Low gnarl is close to being periodic and predictable, while high gnarl is closer to being fully random.
Keep in mind that I’m not saying any particular row of the table is absolutely better than the others. My purpose here is taxonomic rather than prescriptive. Rather than using the words “predictable” and “random” to refer to the lowest and highest levels of complexity, one might use the less judgmental words “classic” and “surreal.”
Just so you have a general idea of what I’ll be talking about, here’s how I see some of my favorite authors as located on the complexity spectrum:
Complexity
Sample Authors.
Somewhat
Predictable,
Classic
Classic, Golden Age F&SF. J.R.R. Tolkein, Isaac Asimov, Kage Baker.
Low Gnarl
Robert Heinlein, William Gibson, Bruce Sterling, Cory Doctorow, Karen Joy Fowler.
High Gnarl
Charles Stross, Robert Sheckley, Phillip K. Dick, Eileen Gunn.
Somewhat
Random,
Surreal
Douglas Adams, John Shirley, Terry Bisson.
Let me stress again that I like the work of all the authors in this table very much. Otherwise I wouldn't mention them at all. The point here is to discuss various modes and approaches. Note that some authors may write novels in various modes—Terry Bisson’s Pirates of the Universe for instance, is high gnarl and transreal, while his The Pickup Artist is a surreal shaggy-dog story. Also note that any given novel may have different complexity levels relative to the four columns.
In any case, if you disagree with my classifications, so much the better—my main goal is to offer a tool for thought.
Subject Matter and Transrealism
Regarding the kinds of characters and situations that one can write about, my sense is that we have a four-fold spectrum of possible modes: simple genre writing with stock characters, mimetic realism, the heightened kind of realism that I call transrealism, and full-on fabulation. Both realism and transrealism lie in the gnarly zone. Speaking specifically in terms of subject matter, I’d be inclined to say that transrealism is gnarlier, as it allows for more possibilities.
Complexity
Subject Matter
Predictable
Genre literature modeled on existing books or folktales.
Low Gnarl
Realism, modeled on the actual world, or on a closely imagined fictional world.
High Gnarl
Transrealism, in which the author’s personal experience is enhanced by transcendent elements.
Random
Fabulation, fantasy, or science fiction of unreal worlds.
What do I mean by transrealism? Early in my writing career, my friend Gregory Gibson advised, “It would be great to write science fiction and have it be about your everyday life.” I took that to heart. The science fiction novels of Philip K. Dick were an inspiration on this front as well.
In 1983, having read a remark where the writer Norman Spinrad referred to Dick’s novel A Scanner Darkly as “transcendental autobiography, ” I came up with the term transrealism, to represent a synthesis between fantastic fabulation (trans) and closely observed character-driven fiction (realism), and I began advocating a transrealist method of writing.
Trans. Use the SF and fantasy tropes to express deep psychic archetypes. Put in science-fictional events or technologies which reflect deeper aspects of people and society. Manipulate subtext.
Realism. Possibly include a main character similar to yourself and, in any case, base your characters on real people you know, or on combinations of them.
Twenty novels later, I no longer feel I have to go whole hog with transrealism and cast my friends and family into my books. I think they got a little tired of it. For awhile there, I was like Ingmar Bergman, continually making movies with the same little troupe of actors/family/friends. These days I’m more likely to collage together a variety of observed traits to make my characters, like a magpie gathering up bright scraps for a nest.
I’ve come to think that you can in fact write transreally without overtly using your own life or specific people that you know. Even without having any characters who are particularly like myself, I can write closely observed works about my own life experiences. And if I’m transmuting these experiences with the alchemy of science fiction, the result is transreal. So I might restate the principles of transrealism like this.
Trans. The author raises the action to a higher level by infusing magic or weird science, choosing tropes so as to intensify and augment some artistically chosen aspects of reality. Trans might variously stand for transfigurative, transformative, transcendental, transgressive, or transsexual.
Realism. The author uses real-world ideas, emotions, perceptions that he or she has personally experienced or witnessed.
Looking back, here’s a list of my most fully transreal works, which are those featuring a character modeled in some way on me. On each line I list a book title, my character’s name in the book, and the character’s approximate age in the course of the book.
The Secret of Life, “Conrad Bunger”, 16-21.
Spacetime Donuts, “Vernor Maxwell”, 21-26.
White Light, “Felix Rayman”, 26-32.
The Sex Sphere, “Alwin Bitter”, 32-34.
Complete Stories (the “Killeville” short stories in particular). Various names. 34-40.
The Hacker and the Ants, “Jerzy Rugby”, 40-46.
Saucer Wisdom, “Rudy Rucker”, 46-51.
By the way, in hopes of selling to a larger market, and with my blessing, Tor Books marketed Saucer Wisdom as a non-fiction book of futurology. But I think it’s more accurate to call this book a novel too—in somewhat the same sense that Vladimir Nabokov’s Pale Fire is a novel rather than a long poem with annotations.
Over the years, I’ve gained enough writerly craft to start using characters who are assembled from bits and pieces of the real world—without being a particularly close match for any one person. These days I’m more likely to collage together a variety of observed traits to make my characters. Like a magpie gathering up bright scraps for a nest. One way to gather scraps for characters is to jot down gestures and remarks that you see or hear on the street. This is the method that Jack Kerouac called “sketching”. And sometimes I even let myself make things up out of whole cloth.
Earlier in my career, it seemed important to put a character like me into my novels, and to depict the people around me. This is due in part to a young writer’s egotism—what could be more important than one’s own personal experience!
As my mentor Robert Sheckley remarked in his preface to my story collection Transreal! “A writer’s first problem is how to write. His second is how to write a story. His third is how to write about himself.”
I no longer feel as strong an urge to directly depict myself in my fiction. But even without a specifically Rudoid character, my books can be transreal. My Ware novels are full of refracted images of my life when I was writing them, as John Roche points out in “Beat Zen, Alien Zen: Varieties of Transreal Experience in Rudy Rucker’s Ware Novels.” Although there’s nothing of present-day California in As Above, So Below, my historical novel about Peter Bruegel, I came to identify so deeply with Bruegel that I put very much of myself into his character depiction. And the same thing happened when I represented Edgar Allan Poe in my alternate history The Hollow Earth.
Turning to some of my later novels, although Spaceland was transreally based on life in Silicon Valley, I went ahead and made the main character Joe Cube quite unlike me—I m
ade him a not-too-bright middle-manager. Since the action of the book involves having Joe explore higher dimensions, I thought that the reader might find it more congenial to have Joe be non-mathematical, so as better to mirror the puzzlement that the reader might feel.
My epic quest novel Frek and the Elixir would seem to be a complete fabulation: it’s set in the year 3003 and involves travel to utterly alien worlds. But Frek’s hometown is transreally modeled on the town of Lynchburg, Virginia, where I raised my children, and Frek himself includes elements of my own childhood memories as well as images of my son. Frek’s personal difficulties with his father mirror both my own relations with my father and my son’s relations with me. And the political subtext of the book is a direct expression of my feelings about Y2K America.
My next novel Mathematicians In Love is set once again the contemporary Bay Area of California, and my main characters are young mathematicians incorporating many characteristics of people I’ve known. The main character shares much of my sensibility, but his life experiences are quite different from mine.
One practical reason for no longer putting my life into my books has to do with something John Updike talks about: a writer’s problem of bit-by-bit using up his or her past. And it may be that as I get older, the more recent parts of my life become less interesting to describe—or in any case less interesting to my youngish target audience.
In any case, the point is that you can write transreally without overtly using your own life or specific people that you know. Even without having any characters who are particularly like yourself, you can write closely observed works about your own life experiences. And if you’re transmuting these experiences with the alchemy of science fiction, the result is transreal.
To this point, in his afterword to his great transreal novel, A Scanner Darkly, Philip K. Dick writes, “I myself, I am not a character in this novel; I am the novel.”
Thinking of Philip K. Dick brings a caveat to mind. A transrealist author really does need to model most of his characters upon observations of people other than himself or herself. For in Philip K. Dick’s less successful novels, such as A Crack In Space, there is a tendency for quite a few of the male characters to be of a similar type: gloomy, self-doubting, and easily cowed by authorities or by powerful women. One supposes that these might all be images of Phil himself. A book with too many examples of the same kind of character feels airless.
Monomyth and Emerging Plots
In this section, I’ll discuss a four-fold range of plot structures.
Complexity
Plot
Predictable
A plot that hews to a standard formula. Monomyths.
Low Gnarl
A plot structure embodying a real-world flow of events. “Life is stranger than fiction.”
High Gnarl
A plot obtained by starting with a real-life story and enhancing it, as in a fairy tale.
Random
Like a shaggy-dog story, possibly based on dreams or collage-like juxtapositions.
At the low end of complexity, we have standardized plots, at the high end, we have no large-scale plot at all, and in between we have the gnarly somewhat unpredictable plots. These can be found in two kinds of ways, either by mimicking reality precisely, or by amplifying reality with incursions of psychically meaningful events.
It’s often said that there’s only a few basic story patterns. Suppose we use the nice word “monomyth” to stand for “story pattern”. (Strictly speaking, there should maybe be only one monomyth, but I think it’s clear enough what I mean by pluralizing the word.)
I taught software engineering courses to computer science students at San Jose State University for over twenty number of years, and there’s a relevant phenomenon I want to mention. In the 1990s, programmers began using “objects” in their programs, where objects are encapsulated high-level software constructs that are easier to use than the rats-nests of low-level code that they replace. In the 2000s there’s been a movement towards a still higher-level approach known as “software patterns.” The idea is that most programs can be viewed as plugging together certain standard kinds of objects into one of several standard arrangements. A pattern is the notion of hooking together some objects in a certain way.
In literature, the “objects” are the stock characters, the classic situations, the props and devices. And the standard ways of hooking them together are the story patterns or monomyths. Here are a few examples.
Three Wishes. I used this in Master of Space and Time. There were three wishes, and the pattern was comparable to the folktale “The Peasant and the Sausage.” The Secret of Life is also about a series of wishes, in this case there were five, and it’s modeled on the classic children’s book, The Five Chinese Brothers, written by Claire Huchet Bishop and illustrated by Kurt Wiese.
Love Quadrilateral: In setting up Spaceland, I used the notion of two couples who swap partners, and then try and swap back.
Campbell’s Monomyth. In order to give my most recent novel Frek and the Elixir a nice mythic feel, I modeled the book on the specific “monomyth” template described in Joseph Campbell’s classic The Hero with A Thousand Faces (as George Lucas is said to have done for Star Wars.) Frek and the Elixir was designed from the ground up to match the monomyth so as to give the book the greatest possible resonance.
Campbell’s archetypal myth includes seventeen stages. By combining two pairs of stages, I ended up with fifteen chapters. And I matched my chapters to the Cambellian monomyth stages.
Looking back over my other novels, I was surprised to see how many of them had monomythic patterns in them—it’s hard in fact to avoid them. For instance, the odd-sounding “The Belly of the Whale” stage of Campbell’s monomyth occurs as a faster-than-light trip in White Light, as a boat ride down a river in The Hollow Earth, as a stint inside a hyperspherical creature named Om in Realware, as a ride inside Kangy the hyperspace cuttlefish in Spaceland, and so on.
It’s worth mentioning that even though I consciously used the monomyth to plot the chapters of Frek and the Elixir, I had to work as hard as ever to figure out the details. There’s no substitute for simulation.
As I keep saying, a characteristic feature of any complex process is that you can’t look at what’s going on today and immediately deduce what will be happening in a few weeks. It’s necessary to have the world run step-by-step through the intervening ticks of time. Gnarly processes are unpredictable; they don’t allow for short-cuts.
Let me say a bit about plots and outlining. I used to maintain that it was better not to plot my novels in advance. But maybe I was just making a virtue of a vice. I denigrated plot outlines because I didn’t like working on them, preferring to jump right into the writing.
One might defend the practice of not having a precise outline by speaking in terms of the gnarl. To wit, a characteristic feature of any complex process is that you can’t look at what’s going on today and immediately deduce what will be happening in a few weeks. It’s necessary to have the world run step-by-step through the intervening ticks of time. Gnarly computations are unpredictable; they don’t allow for short-cuts. In other words, the last chapter of a novel with a gnarly plot is, even in principle, unpredictable from the contents of the first chapter. You have to write the whole novel in order to discover what happens in the last chapter.
This said, I’ve also learned that if I start writing a novel with no plot outline at all, two things happen. First of all, the readers can tell. Some will be charmed by the spontaneity, but some will complain that the book feels improvised, like a shaggy-dog story. Second, if I’m working without a plot outline, I’m going to experience some really painful and anxious days when everything seems broken, and I have no idea how to proceed. I’ve heard Sheckley refer to these periods in the compositional process as “black points.” Writing an outline makes it easier on me. Perhaps it’s a matter of mature craftsmanship versus youthful passion.
These days, even
before I start writing a new book, I create an accompanying notes document in which I accumulate outlines, scene sketches and the like. These documents end up being very nearly as long as my books, and when the book comes out, I usually post the corresponding notes document online for perusal by those few who are very particularly interested in that book or in my working methods. (Links to these notes documents and some of my essays can be found on my writing page.)
Even with an outline, I can’t be quite sure about the twists and turns my story will take. How precise, after all, is an outline? William Burroughs used to say a novel is a map of a territory. But an outline is only a map of a map.
In the end, only the novel itself is the perfect outline of the novel. Only the territory itself can be the perfect map. In this connection, I think of Jorge Luis Borges’s one-paragraph fiction, “On Exactitude in Science,” that contains this sentence: “In time, those Unconscionable Maps no longer satisfied, and the Cartographers Guilds struck a Map of the Empire whose size was that of the Empire, and which coincided point for point with it.”
Regarding the outline, I think of a novel’s structure as breaking into four increasingly fine levels: parts, chapters, scenes, and actions. I start with a story arc, describing how the parts fit together. I break the parts into chapters and outline the chapters one by one. As I work on a chapter’s outline, I break it into scenes, trying to outline the individual scenes themselves. But as for the actions that make up a scene, more often than not I simply visualize these and describe what I “see.”