Asimov's SF, Oct/Nov 2005

by Dell Magazine Authors

  The novel that started it all was William Gibson's Neuromancer, wherein he coined the phrase “The street finds its own uses.” What this meant was that outlaws, the underground, revolutionaries, whatever counterculture might exist, would or should use cutting edge technology for its own illicit, illegal, or revolutionary purposes.

  At the time, in the backwash of the expiring Counterculture with a definite capital C, this was a revolutionary notion, both within the SF microcosm and the cultural macrocosm. Thanks to several things, but chiefly the Viet Nam War, the “underground,” the “counterculture"—call it what you will—of those bygone days was relentlessly technophobic, science and technology being seen as the tools of the fascist Establishment, weapons of the Pentagon and the political right, and its champions “pigs” at the worst, “nerds” when merely deluded.

  That much of this was expressed via a musical form that could not exist without electric guitars, synthesizers, and amplifiers, was overlooked. For, as Gordon Dickson had observed earlier, every culture, countercultures included, has cultural blindnesses, which they may even require in order to continue to exist at all.

  The literature of speculative fiction and the subculture accreted around it was as deeply and passionately split as the political and cultural macrocosm. The technophobic countercultural left regarded the technophilic traditional hard science fiction and its practitioners as right wing crypto-fascist, and the Old Guard regarded the Young Turks as drug-addled Luddite hippies verging on out-and-out commies.

  The Cyberpunks, though, were technophilic, politically left, countercultural outlaws.

  That was the punk of it and that was revolutionary.

  The Cyber of it was perhaps by chance. Gibson's novel, the flagship that launched the Movement, was centered on the technology of the internet and the web before that technology actually existed, even though, as he once confessed to me, he knew very little about actual computers and wrote the whole thing on a manual typewriter.

  Bruce Sterling, not Gibson, swiftly became the main guru and theoretician of the Cyberpunk Movement, and curiously enough, did not write what he preached in his own novels until quite recently. Gibson, Sterling, and Rudy Rucker and Pat Cadigan, who became major Cyberpunk figures, might have been cultural revolutionaries in a certain sense, but were never political in a conventional sense, though John Shirley was.

  Then a couple of cabana boys (I am not making this up) latched onto a quarter of a mil of a rich dentist's money, spent one hundred thousand dollars buying the rights to Neuromancer for a film that never got made, and the rest of the money on professional PR promoting “Cyberpunk,” and the rest is marketing history. Cyberpunk became co-opted into a generic brand to sell everything from rock groups to high-end sneakers, just as “Sympathy for the Devil” and “Blowin’ in the Wind” have long since been remixed into politically caponized elevator Muzak and a recent Shell Oil commercial has co-opted the Summer of Love into a signature for its greener-than-thou solar electricity program.

  Thus Cyberpunk—a science fictional literary movement based on content and theme, with no regard one way or another for literary angle of attack, form, or prose style, transmogrifiable, therefore, into marketing iconography.

  Sic transit gloria mundi.

  A Movement of the second kind.

  To see what I mean by a Movement of the first kind, have a look at New Worlds, a retrospective anthology of stories, poetry, essays, and criticism, edited by Michael Moorcock, editor of the British magazine of the same name through many incarnations, and with a memoir-cum-history of the whole strange trip to date by Moorcock himself.

  This book is, well, staggering. There has never been anything like it. Because there has never been anything like New Worlds, the magazine, or the movement that it spawned, championed, and molded, before or since, and certainly not within the realm of science fiction. Moorcock has delivered up a perfect, if hardly complete, sample of what the so-called “New Wave” was about, along with his masterful, gossipy, ruthlessly honest, and occasionally catty global overview. Even I, who was a significant figure in the story, thanks to the six-part serialization Bug Jack Barron in New Worlds, was poleaxed to be reminded of who Moorcock had published when and what they had written and, yes, drawn and painted.

  J.G. Ballard's “condensed novels,” the short stories which made his transition from an author of merely excellent SF disaster novels into the major stylist, formalist, and literary figure he is today. Early poetry by D.M. Thomas. Brian Aldiss’ stylistically revolutionary Acid Head War stories, collected in the Lysergically Joycean, metaphysically Gurdjieffian novel Barefoot in the Head. Mervyn Peake when he was languishing in obscurity. The first art by Escher ever to appear in an English-language publication. Dick, Brunner, Ellison, Delany. Thomas M. Disch's Camp Concentration. The early stories of M. John Harrison, John T. Sladek, James Sallis. Apparently the very first Gene Wolfe story ever to be published. The Jerry Cornelius Cycle. Art criticism. Literary criticism by John Clute and diverse hands including Moorcock, and even Ballard on Mein Kampf.

  On and on and on.

  Obviously not all of the above could be included in the anthology. Moorcock apologizes in some detail for what and who isn't, and, amusingly and amazingly enough, even admits to publishing a few things really not to his own personal taste as a reader, as a sigil of the catholicity of his and beyond his—the magazine's and the movement's—literary intent.

  And New Worlds, Moorcock, and the literary movement in question, did have a literary as well as a cultural intent, a mission so enormous that it could never have been realized in its entirety.

  Moorcock himself describes it at greater length and in finer detail in his introduction, and probably better, too than I can do here. So, briefly and simply, Moorcock and the rest of us believed that the cleavage between so-called “serious literary fiction” and so-called “popular fiction,” even greater in Britain with Leavis's official “canon” than in the United States, was not only artificial and false, but detrimental to both. What had been popular fiction in the mode of Dickens and Hemingway and Melville was degenerating into empty genre formula, and serious literary fiction had lost its appeal to general readers thanks to deconstructionism, slavishness to academic formal norms, a disinterest in telling real stories, and a loss of the courage to tackle the great themes and questions of the age.

  Or, as I said somewhere, “science fiction treats the great issues in a trivial manner, while so-called serious literature applies its great literary powers to the contemplation of the lint in its own navel."

  Little, unfortunately, has changed in so-called serious mainstream literature between then and now, but it is hard for the reader of today to understand what science fiction was like at the turn of the 1960s. Science fiction was regarded by publishers and librarians as “Young Adult Fiction.” The critical contention in the genre at the time was that it should be written in “transparent prose"—that is, “style free” prose that disappeared from the reader's consciousness entirely in order to convey the events of the plot in clear simple terms, à la literary television. It could not be specifically or passionately political, not engage. No four-letter words. No sexual description.

  To see what I mean, you could read Bug Jack Barron, which has just been reissued thirty-five years later, and try to imagine in a present context why it was excoriated as perverted and degenerate in 1968, when it was a cause célèbre. I doubt if you would find anything particularly shocking now, except, perhaps, the prose style.

  All this New Worlds set out to change, by publishing fiction open to stylistic experimentation, and freed from any taboos as to content. Moorcock also had a theory about the uses of prose itself, too complex to go too deeply into here or even in his introduction to the anthology. Briefly, rather than being confined to “transparent” narration of the surface phenomenology of the story, the prose line could skip allusively along its surface or swim in the iconographic and archetypal imagery beneath it, rather
in the manner of poetry. Which perhaps was why the magazine paid serious attention to serious poetry, too.

  Since New Worlds began as a science fiction magazine and the writers in question mostly began as “science fiction writers,” the fusion between “serious literary fiction” and “science fiction” that it sought to attain, the new literature that it sought to call forth, was a fusion between “SF” and serious literature at large.

  In that, unsurprisingly, the revolution failed, although these days many so-called “mainstream writers” are attempting some sort of science fiction. But because most of them are willfully ignorant of three quarters of a century of what has been done with the thematic material—indeed, that writers fully their equal have been using it for decades—most of them are even ignorant of what the material is. Most of what they are writing is well-written, but otherwise primitive, versions of what the better SF magazines were publishing in the 1950s, as if painters of great technical skill and even genius were trying to reproduce the work of Renaissance and Baroque artists without ever seeing any of their work or even realizing that their techniques already existed.

  But within the field of science fiction, which has now become the expanded universe of speculative fiction, or just “SF,” the revolution succeeded hands down. All you have to do is read a random sample of what was published as “SF” before 1965 or so and what is being published now and you'll see what I mean.

  A revolution of the first kind. Mao's notion of the permanent revolution as an ongoing process without an end product. Unlike Cyberpunk, not based on any specific imagery or iconography or content, and therefore incapable of becoming a mainstream generic marketing brand, but for the same reason incapable of co-option. A genie that cannot be stuffed back in the bottle.

  And now we may have the beginnings of another one.

  Not in science fiction, but in fantasy.

  The so-called “New Weird"—apparently dubbed so by China Miéville, its Gibson and Sterling rolled into one.

  Okay, it's a dumb name on more than one ground. An adjective used as a noun. And after all, there's nothing exactly new about things weird, literary or otherwise. On the other hand, the Cyberpunks didn't like being called Cyberpunks, and everyone dubbed a “New Wave” writer insisted that he or she wasn't, and by now we are probably stuck with it.

  Nevertheless, I do believe that Miéville is onto something.

  Something big.

  But weird has nothing to do with it, and needless, or apparently not so needless, to say, “The New Weird” is an oxymoron. There is nothing new about weirdness, and far less so in the literary realm of speculative fiction. Take Rudy Rucker, for example; there's no writer of any sort of speculative fiction who can top Rucker for weirdness. How can there be?

  Look at Frek and the Elixir for a typical example. Colin Greenland, Roland C. Wagner, and others have revived space opera as a literary form by inventing a kind of post-modern space opera; space opera that admits it's space opera, which is to say a form of fantasy that uses the old space opera tropes, imagery, set-ups, and situations to tell “weird” science fiction stories that more or less admit that they don't give a damn about existing in the realm of the possible. Rucker goes this one better by using his alternate incarnation as a mathematician to set his stories within multiple and endlessly mutating literary realities that a reader can barely even comprehend without equivalent mathematical knowledge.

  Well, not quite. Rucker is also perhaps the best explicator of abstruse theoretical math for the mathematically unwashed masses, and he does this by using his skill as a science fiction writer to concretize theory into alternate realities that the non-mathematician can inhabit in the imagination.

  In novels like Frek and the Elixir he does the reverse; putting his viewpoint character, and therefore the reader, through seemingly endless realities within realities within realities that would be pure fantasy of the weirdest possible sort were they not conjured up out of theoretical mathematical systems that have no possible “existence” in the phenomenological realm, and are therefore even weirder.

  Frek is a kid on a future Earth where biotech has reduced the biosphere to a few brand name organisms, a society secretly ruled by a brain-like thingy. A tiny flying saucer, made so by dimensional manipulation, appears under his bed, an alien emerges, escapes, transmogrifies into various dimensional and physical avatars. Frek follows as it is chased by the avatars of the authorities. It turns out that various aliens from various planets and dimensions are vying to become the exclusive producers of a kind of telepathic television whereby the doings and minds of the inhabitants of Earth become a reality TV soap opera for the delectation of the galactic and transdimensional masses.

  Off Frek goes in a space, time, and dimension-warping living alien flying saucer with one of the would-be producers, pursued by others, through endlessly varying and mutating mathematically constructed space-time dimensions, seeking out the elixir of the title that will somehow recreate the terrestrial biosphere, while also pursuing a mission to rescue humanity from being reduced to playing reality TV in transgalactic prime time.

  I will not attempt to summarize any further. It would be futile; Frek and the Elixir basically uses the hoary save-the-universe plot skeleton to run Frek and the reader through endless mathematical-based schtick that gets phenomenologically weirder and weirder as the mathematical systems upon which it is based get more and more abstruse. It's great good fun, but the problem is that at 475 pages, it's way too long for such a simple story to keep holding at least this reader's interest to the very end.

  Flatland on Lysergic Acid.

  Rucker has called this sort of thing “Free Form,” but that's exactly what it isn't. The form here is mathematical, and it is quite rigorous, the mathematical rigor being used to give some form of coherence to the utter weirdness. At shorter length, and with better story, this has worked well for Rudy Rucker, but form is not story, and in Frek and the Elixir, at least for my taste, there is not enough of it to carry the weirdness to the end.

  Nevertheless, if you will grant mathematics the status of a science, and there are people who will claim it is the “hardest” science of all, since without it the so-called “hard sciences” could not really function, this is science fiction, not fantasy. And it proves that science fiction can be weirder than any conceivable fantasy, “the New Weird” included.

  There is nothing new about weirdness in fantasy either, nor is it really possible to top, say, Jack Vance in this regard, though with Black Brillion Matthew Hughes comes pretty close to equaling him. “A witty new adventure in the gorgeous, ironic style of Jack Vance,” sez the blurb on the galleys, and for once the copy writer has got it just right.

  Vance made his reputation with The Dying Earth and much later wrote a sort of sequel called variously The Eyes of the Overworld and Cugel the Clever, both set so far in the future that the distinction between “science fiction” and “fantasy” becomes utterly moot, as witness that Vance's “science fiction” or “space opera” is entirely of a piece with this “fantasy."

  Weird aliens or weird conjured creatures, what is really the literary difference? Made up far-future science or made up magic function exactly the same literarily; after all, Arthur C. Clarke has proclaimed that “any science sufficiently advanced will seem like magic,” and so any magic can easily enough function as bullshit-super science within the confines of a story.

  In phenomenological terms, Vance's settings, worlds, science, magic, are really no weirder than the usual sort of such stuff. But from the beginning, Vance has realized that nothing can be as weird or outré as the possible twists, turns, warp-ages, ironies, delusions, religions, and quirks of consciousness, human or alien, that exist outside and beyond any material phenomenology, and the cultures, societies, and political systems they therefore create.

  Vance's story lines generally consist of roguish scams, counter-scams, and counter-counter-scams by roguish, likeable, but generally unprincipled
characters, or characters laboring under an arcane set of cultural and political assumptions, often based upon the ironic education of some naïf.

  Vance is an ironist, but not of the Swiftian variety; he's a good-natured, good-humored ironist, a warm-hearted ironist, perhaps ironically in spite of himself, thus proving that such a thing is possible. This is one of the weirdest angles of attack in all literature, and therefore immensely enjoyable even when the story line is thin, for what he writes is character-based fiction despite its mordant seemingly surface tone.

  Made even more so because Vance is not only a master stylist whose prose line would be entertaining were he knocking out novelizations of Star Trek or the Fresh Prince of Bel-Air, but because his style, with its baroque structure and cadences and uncommon word choices, its sly orotondness, is the perfect and perfectly tuned instrument on which to play his chosen music.

  Whether Hughes is deliberately mimicking Vance's style only he knows. But while he is not quite up to Vance as a stylist, he's chosen the right sort of instrumental voice for Black Brillion—ironic like Vance only somewhat less so, mordant but a bit more mildly, less baroque—to tell a Vanceian sort of complex double-dealing caper story set in a Vanceian sort of future world and replete with Vanceian rogues and a Vanceian naïf, while making it all his own by delving rather deeper into psychological and metaphysical depths.

  What Black Brillion proves is not only that this mode does not have to be the exclusive literary property of Jack Vance, but that there is really no new weirdness under the speculative fictional sun.

  China Miéville has proclaimed that at least one purpose of the New Weird is to free fantasy from the conventions of the usual stuff—the elves and magicians, the medieval social and political structures, the neo-Arthurian and neo-Tolkienesque givens. But he doesn't seem to acknowledge that while such conventional genre fiction is indeed what dominates the fantasy racks in the book stores and the fanaticism of the fans, this literary mission has long since been accomplished by the urban fantasies of Harlan Ellison, and Fritz Leiber years before him, and a host of others, not to mention such obscure fantasists as Stephen King, or Peter Straub.