Essays. Catscan Columns

by Bruce Sterling

  I don’t know whether distributing the book electronically will damage its commercial prospects as a printed book. People always ask me this question — as if generating cash-in-hand were my only conceivable reason for writing a book. I doubt there is any real way to judge the effect on sales. The paperback has only been out since November; but even if the print version stopped selling entirely, that wouldn’t prove anything. HACKER CRACKDOWN was very topical, involving a contemporary scandal in a community which, though spreading rapidly, is still very limited in scope and influence. Books of that sort tend to have a short shelf-life. In fact, that was the main reason I gave the book away fairly rapidly. There’s not much point in giving something away something no longer useful.

  I wouldn’t recommend that every author should give books away online. It was an experiment on my part, a literateur’s way of literarily probing the Net. I do believe that a day must come when online electronic text profoundly changes the structure and economics of print publishing. But I believe that day is still a ways off — maybe even decades off. The nature of electronic text, and of the networks that distribute it, is so volatile, so full of unknown factors, that I can’t make a balanced judgment about the probabilities, and I don’t think anyone can. I wouldn’t be surprised ten years from now if all books worthy of serious attention were routinely placed on the Internet. And I wouldn’t be surprised if the Internet itself ceased to exist and cypherpunks were being grilled in hearings by the House Unamerican Activities Committee circa 2005. The Net could go any of dozens of ways, and though I have some pretty firm ideas of the ways I would like it to go, I don’t flatter myself that I have much influence on the vast amoebic movement of this enormous beast.

  In the meanwhile, I haven’t given away any of my novels, and have no plans to. I might give away a novel on Internet if it seemed a useful gesture, but it doesn’t. Frankly, I doubt whether there is any real interest at all on the Net in science fiction novels, by me or by anyone else — unless those books are somehow intimately and thoroughly involved with the Net. The Net is interested in the Net — netspiders are, in that sense, much like ham radio people — people who bounce signals off the ionosphere all the way to Madagascar so as to ask: “Well - - what kinda hamshack ya got?”

  I myself would have next-to-no interest in an SF book online, even if it were free, and the idea of paying for one is ludicrous. I have a free copy of Gibson’s Voyager books on disk, and though they’re said to be elegant examples of electronic publishing, I can’t make the time even to load them into the Macintosh and see how they look. If some other colleague offered a novel online, I’m almost certain that I’d wait for a print version before I read it. I can’t say why I feel this peculiar repugnance, really; it may be sheer antiquated nonsense on my part. But it’s not a “prejudice” by any means — it’s firmly based on years of hands-on judgement. I don’t think novels function as electronic text — I feel this very strongly, and I think it’s a very general opinion. It’s something to do with the surround — with the peculiar sense that while consuming electronic text one is missing certain essential vitamins.

  I don’t want to read novels while I’m sitting at my desk and staring rigidly into a screen. Laptops are little better; they leave you tethered to a wall and/or worried about your battery. Improving the tech may help — but enthusiasts have been saying that for years. Better display may only illuminate the deeper discords in the nature of electronic text.

  I don’t read novels and stories online, but I do scroll through unbelievable amounts of electronic text. The difference is in the material. Electronic text is not literature, it’s not even genre literature, it’s paraliterature, in the way that electronic “conversation” is a peculiar kind of subsensory perception, a human intercourse so antiseptically safe as to have membraned out the entire human body. Speech and e-text and print are “all words,” but only in a very basic sense — like in the way that ice and steam and water are all H2O.

  My relationship to my online readers is a relationship of sorts: a narrow and peculiarly restricted kind of relationship. It’s very much like the relationship between an author at a bookstore signing and the line of people with his books. Ninety percent of the people who write me online ask for nothing more than a ritual acknowledgement of their existence. They say “thank you for writing this” and I reply “you’re quite welcome” and they depart the electronic premises forever, quite satisfied. It’s very much like the bookstore fan who wants his copy of ISLANDS IN THE NET inscribed “To Jim.” Not because he expects me to remember that his name is Jim, or even that I ever met him; what he wants is a ritual validation of his personhood by someone he regards as a celebrity. Nothing wrong with this; it’s part of the game, part of society, and e-mail serves this function very well. In fact, as an author I’d have to say that e-mail is the best method I’ve ever found for dealing with the public.

  I have a hard time maintaining friendships via e-mail alone. Though I get a lot of e-mail from friends, I have no sustained relationship with any person whom I’ve met only by and through e-mail. I’ve heard of this being done, but I’ve never done it myself. I uncharitably speculate that it’s because I already have a life.

  I can already sense the nature of my next major online challenge. I will have to deal with the consequences of a spectacularly growing Internet and my slowly growing notoriety within it. Increasing traffic on the Information Highway is slowly but surely overwhelming me. Lately, I have begun logging onto my home system, the WELL, every day; not by choice but by necessity. I’ve become much better at online research, and my use of my online time is much more efficient. But there are limits, and the limits are visibly approaching.

  I’ll never forget the strange chill I felt when I once logged onto the WELL after a brief absence and found 115 pieces of mail awaiting me — every one of which was interesting. There was simply nothing left to skip. I was captivated by all of it, and it was all there right at my fingertips, and I suddenly understood why certain unlucky souls rupture their wrist tendons at the keyboard.

  An hour a day online is hard work, but I feel it’s worth it; the stuff I get online is no longer soup, I’m getting real cubes of bouillon online, nuggets of information of intense interest that are unattainable anywhere else. But if this goes on I’ll be beaten to a pulp; I’ll be pelted into a coma with little croutons of incoming data. Somehow I’m going to have to find a way to make it stop. And it’s not just dry data that is getting out of hand, but the socialization, the increasing demands online for my personal attention. As more and more people obtain my net-address, my replies must become briefer and briefer. The crush of the virtual crowd will eventually overwhelm me.

  When that happens, I believe I’ll have to take stern measures. I could simply ignore unsolicited mail. But that seems a stopgap measure. I’ll probably have to drop my current online identity, and go back online incognito. It’s a pretty problem in virtual etiquette: who will get my new address and who will have to be dropped? How will I convince people to maintain the secrecy of my new ID when the whole raison d’etre of the infobahn is instant access to anybody anywhere anytime?

  I don’t know yet. But if I keep at it I’m sure I’ll learn something.

  CATSCAN 14 “Memories of the Space Age”

  Back in the heyday of the twentieth century, you couldn’t keep a space hero out of network television or off the glossy pages of LIFE and LOOK. Nowadays LIFE and LOOK are as dead as Yuri Gagarin. Even the TV networks are assuming a rather sickly post-digital hue.

  Space news out of the USSR — a defunct entity itself looking very true to LIFE — no longer kicks up nine-day Sputnik wonders, no longer appears in major monthlies. It’s to be found instead in the workaday pages of IEEE SPECTRUM, a specialized magazine for electronics engineers.

  In March 1995, longtime cosmonaut-watcher and NASA engineer James Oberg engaged in an extensive first-hand tour of the formerly Soviet launch sites and space complexes. Oberg is a re
cognized Soviet Space expert, somtime NOVA host on PBS, special consultant to the Sotheby’s auction house for Soviet space memorabilia, and the author of the definitive tome RED STAR IN ORBIT (Random House 1981). His article appeared in the December 1995 issue of SPECTRUM.

  For decades during the Cold War and Space Race, Oberg basically used the techniques of other career Kremlinologists — rumors, defectors, body counts, overheard radio telemetry, May Day parade stands, and informed speculation.

  But with the USSR defunct, Oberg simply breezed into the legendary Baikonur cosmodrome with camera, videocam and notebook in hand — and what a story Oberg has to tell.

  The Russian space centers haven’t quite caught on to the unromantic fact that the century has left Khrushschev and Gagarin behind. The space facilities still boast a plethora of hammers and sickles, with the names and profiles of Lenin, Kalinin and other Old Bolsheviks. A certain nostalgia is only to be expected, as the space worker corps is littered with deadwood. Most of Russia’s current top space experts are men in their 60s and 70s, a Brezhnev-style gerontocracy of rocket-science.

  Many of these veteran space workers have simply outlived the Space Age. They first took up their sacred calling in the 50s and 60s, during the super-secret Sputnik and Vostok days, when technical knowledge was strictly compartmentalized and doled out on a need-to-know basis. Institutional senility is creeping in, as Oberg demonstrates with an anecdote. Last April the Mir space station cosmonauts began showing odd bits and pieces of lost hardware to ground control, asking what these gadgets were. Nobody on the ground had a clue; they couldn’t recognize the gear or even guess its purpose. The machines were still in orbit, but the paper trail was gone.

  The Mir space station itself is ten years old. It has had at least one fire on board. No one has any idea how to “de-orbit” the decaying station safely, but the Russians hope that American money and American technology will keep the station running through the turn of the century. The Soviet tracking ships, which once kept a global communication net running for the sake of space exploration, have been sold, scrapped, or have ended up rotting in the harbors of the breakaway Ukraine. The Mir station can only speak to Russian ground control in ten-to-fifteen minute bursts, broken by up to ten hours of enforced silence as it flies over areas of the globe where Russia no longer has radio presence.

  The USSR had two major launch centers, Baikonur Cosmodrome (aka Tyuratam) and the ultra-secret Plesetsk site. Official fraud claimed that Baikonur existed some 250 kilometers away from the actual site of launches; the launches from Plesetsk were denied entirely and officially proclaimed to be UFOs.

  Like a lot of Russian government military and paramilitary sites, Plesetsk hasn’t been paying its power bills lately, and has sometimes had its power shut off. But Plesetsk is a thriving haven compared to Baikonur, because Plesetsk is at least within the physical territory of the Russian Federation. Baikonur/Tyuratam isn’t so lucky. The launch site of Soviet manned space missions is now entirely within the independent state of Kazakhstan.

  The site, according to Oberg (and his many fine color photos strongly back him up) is in a state of advanced decay. The water is no longer safe to drink, and runs only intermittently. Fires, explosions, and toxic leaks are common. Tumbleweeds (an Asian species) roll unimpeded through the launchpads. Many civilian workers were left unpaid for months on end, and they simply fled. Drafted militia sent in to maintain order broke into rioting and looting through the abandoned, windowless apartment blocks. There haven’t been any new-hires taken on to the space enterprise in at least five years.

  With the near-collapse of security, thousands of Kazakh squatters have moved in to the launch center. They’re still there, defying eviction by Russian and Kazakh military cops and armied militias. The cosmic capital’s thickly-strewn junk-piles, broken fencing and abandoned industrial warehousing made it a positive boon for the Kazakh refugees, peasants fleeing the ecological disaster of the poisoned Aral Sea. The streets of Baikonur are choked with blowing dust from the distant Aral salt flats. The pesticide-thickened runoff from dammed rivers cannot keep the sea from dwindling.

  Amazingly, the veteran Russian space workers, on average well over 50 years old, are still launching rockets from Tyuratam. Their work has been cut back by 90 percent or so, and they’re begging passers-by for canned food and pencils, but the cosmic enterprise staggers on. The fading glamour of space-flight has become one Russia’s few foreign cash-cows.

  The Gagarin Cosmonaut Training Center (“Starry Town,” northeast of Moscow) now sells space-cadet dude-ranch tours to passing Europeans and Yankees, for a thousand dollars a week. European Space Agency “guest cosmonauts,” shot into orbit to man the Mir station, have brought the Russians about $85 million. The Chileans, Finns, and Greeks refused the lure of purchasing a home-grown space hero, but the cash-flush South Koreans might send up a TV reporter soon. And NASA has forked over some $400 million to keep its erstwhile rival active in “International Space Station” activities.

  Western auction houses sell-off Soviet space vehicles and former top-secret documents for cash. Moscow still has 24 operational geostationary spacecraft, but three-fourths of them are beyond their design lifetime. The cosmonaut corps has had massive layoffs, many of them 40-to-50 year-old space heros who have been training for decades but will never have a chance to fly.

  One could go on. One could, for instance, recommend the US Federal document “US-Russian Cooperation in Space” from the Office of Technology Assessment — if the OTA itself had not been recently axed by the US Congress. The late twentieth-century US Congress is deeply unimpressed by shrieks of “Eureka” and “Excelsior” from the US scientific community — what they want to hear are cries of “paydirt” and “competitive advantage.” The Endless Frontier is out — the Almighty Market is in.

  It takes two to do a dramatic, awe-inspiring, cosmic tango. Sense of Wonder As a Foreign Policy no longer cuts any ice in Moscow or Washington. With the collapse of centrally-directed economics as a viable alternative to markets, the entire tenor of civil enterprise has changed, around the planet. It’s no longer Free World Versus Communism, but McWorld Versus Jihad. Even the “Information Superhighway,” the Clinton/Gore Administration’s CyberSpace Race, seems to have no coherent role for any government to play. Bits of the old rhetoric are ritually deployed in Atari Democrat guise, but there is no Cyberspace NASA, no single national goal of landing in the virtual moon, nothing much for Clinton or Gore to do but gosh-wow and deplore the pornography.

  There’s no one to defeat. It’s not surprising to see NASA and its military-industrial allies trying to pump billions in financial energy into the flaccid corpse of the Russian space effort. Without rival knights of the spaceways, what exactly is the point of a manned space program of any kind? How long can Canaveral survive the death of Tyuratam? Do Apollo gantries rust any less completely than the dead Buran space shuttle?

  The twentieth century is almost over now. Hindsight is increasingly possible. We can now recognize a certain kind of rhetoric as being intrinsically “twentieth-century.” It sounds like this:

  “A War to End All Wars. Wings Over the World. A Thousand-Year Reign. Science, the Endless Frontier. Energy Too Cheap To Meter. Miracle Drugs. Sexual Revolution. A Great Leap Forward. Storming the Cosmos.”

  The slogans seemed to emanate from every corner of the ideological compass at the time, but in retrospect they can be recognized as notes in a single piece of period music, a brassy modernist rant. The Soviet Union was born in the twentieth century and died in the twentieth century. It had the worst case of this syndrome ever known, maybe even the worst that will ever be possible. The USSR — scientific, centralized, revolutionary, technocratic, blind to historical continuity, contemptuous of humanity, impossibly enthusiastic — fell headlong for every 20th-century sucker’s game imaginable: Marxism, aviation, electrification, mass industrialism, total warfare, atomic power, space flight.

  The USSR longed for transce
ndance-through-machinery with a deeply religious, unquestioned and formally unquestionable fervor. Other twentieth-century societies shared this cast of mind, but it was the USSR which paid the worst, the most sordid, and the most degrading price for these aspirations. Toward their miserable end, the Soviets were even gasping for the chance to get up to speed on personal computers — even as Chernobyl detonated. The consequences of that terrible act, like so many other 20th century enthusiasms, will easily outlast the 21st century.

  It’s “hubris clobbered by Nemesis,” as Brian Aldiss likes to say. Science fiction was also born in the twentieth century, clutching a rocketship and wailing for the stars.

  If we needed one shining example of a truly prescient 20th century science fiction writer — our one stubborn dissident, denied his tithe of chrome Hugos, yet stubbornly clinging, despite all odds, to the light of reality — then we need look no farther than J. G. Ballard. This great artist of our genre, with his uncanny surrealist insight, has made all the chest-pounding, slide-rule-waving, 60s go-go dancers of the Old Wave look like fossils. His science fiction is still entirely relevant, while theirs has become nostalgic gimmickry to be auctioned-off at Sotheby’s as household 60s kitsch. I can’t imagine Ballard taking much pleasure in this vindication, or even bothering to notice; but surely he deserves some formal recognition for being so entirely right at the wrong time.

  J. G. Ballard, author of “Memories of the Space Age,” could have written James Oberg’s article for him. In fact, he did. Repeatedly. Oberg’s nonfiction article in an engineering magazine is the single most Ballardian piece of text never written by J G Ballard.

  What this means to the rest of us will probably be decided by the first generation to come of age in the next century. Is there still real life in science fiction, or is the aging cadre of veterans merely going through the motions, hoping for miracles? What exactly is the role of “wonder” in a society where cosmic exploration is a matter of cash on the barrelhead? If there’s hope, it surely lies in the young. Not much hope seems evident. But then again, where else has there ever been hope?