Future on Fire

by Orson Scott Card

  Home again, the horizons of the Old Orleans marshlands once more rode high in his visual field, and he felt the familiar infusion of subtropical heat and muggy humidity and low barometric pressure. Once again he wriggled his bare toes deep into the mats of dewy Saint Augustine grass on the lawns around his home. He saw the snakes, fat as fire hoses, sleeping on the bayou flats, caught a hundred-pound gar, ate a bucket of crawfish, and took his pirogue deep into the swamps at dawn, where a huge owl flew low past him in the most profoundly feathered silence. Somewhere, a thousand miles up on the face of the globe, and three thousand feet higher above the sea, lay the memories of his brief and exciting gladiatorial exploits. I am organic with this place, he thought as he looked down into the black waters of the bayou, and it is here I will stay. I am atomic, yes. I am molecular, organic, tendinous, muscular, bipedal, kinesthetic, somesthetic, vestibular, and human. And there is a wholeness, a natural integrity in being human that I must cleave to. There are the men and there are the machines, and I am a man.

  Green Days in Brunei

  by Bruce Sterling

  Introduction

  Most people try to understand the world, and then adapt to it. A few people try to understand the world and, dissatisfied with what they find, change the world to fit their vision of what it ought to be.

  Bruce Sterling is out to change the world. Not necessarily by reaching for power directly—that is the path followed by Fidel, Ho, Lenin, Mao, Robespierre, Caesar, and William the Conqueror. Sterling knows that the common people are usually unaffected by the change of leadership—and when the change really is revolutionary, there’s usually a lot more egg-breaking than omelet-making, and the bills are always paid by the common people. Revolution is rarely an altruistic business.

  Sterling has followed, so far, the other path—not revolution but transformation. Sterling, so far, is a storyteller, not a guerrilla. A storyteller changes the world by teaching people to see the world differently, by changing the meanings of common events; when readers come to believe in the world as the storyteller presents it to them, their behavior changes to reflect their new understanding of How Things Work. Sterling seems to be following the path toward transformation used by Rousseau, Marx, Locke, Hobbes, Jesus, Buddha, and Mohammed.

  Sterling was drawn to tell his transformative stories through science fiction at least in part because science fiction alone of the literary genres allows an author to create a realistic changed world. But in order to use science fiction, Sterling first had to wake up the field to its own possibilities.

  Sterling came to a genre that for many years had suffered from a serious lack of intelligent invention. The best young writers—the ones who should be re-envisioning the future—tended to treat future worlds and alien worlds as mere devices. Cardboard worlds were slapped together, with all the credibility and staying power of huts in a São Paulo favela. Then these writers devoted all their effort to character studies and literary experimentation. And the writers who were not the best seemed to be in love with technology and completely ignorant of the forces that actually tear and build in the real world of human beings.

  In short, few science fiction writers seemed to understand the power and responsibility that could be theirs if they would only use it. Worse yet, the audience had become quite content with science fiction that had no connection with the real world. The audience was unprepared to receive pointed satires and realistic extrapolations, stories that called for and warned of proximate social change. Science fiction was the tool that Sterling had to use, and yet it was a tool whose intellectual edge was so blunted by misuse and dulled by neglect that he first had to do some grinding within the field in order to do any transforming outside it. He had to create a fit audience for his own stories, and to do that he had to enlist other writers, willing or not, in his camp.

  He began with a writers workshop and a magazine. The Turkey City Writers Workshop in Austin, Texas, gathered many talented and some brilliant writers, and because he had such clear vision and powerful expression, Sterling quickly had them examining each other’s stories not only for literary shortcomings, but also for failures of extrapolation. It was not enough to show a few changes in the future. All changes lead to more changes—Sterling demanded that writers think through the consequences of change in their fictional futures, and find the consequences of consequences, many layers deep. Sterling also found a writer with the talent and intelligence and sheer force of will to match his—Lew Shiner—and through mutual abrasion they sharpened each other, then, together, turned their shining blades on the science fiction world outside.

  The magazine was Cheap Truth. Sterling mailed it to a few regulars, but since it would do him no good to preach to the choir, he also mailed it to many people who he believed ought to receive it—in other words, the very people he was criticizing, the very people whom he most wanted to change. He also encouraged people to copy and reprint the magazine freely, so it received a much wider circulation than he could have paid for.

  I’m not sure why Sterling chose to keep most of it pseudonymous, concealing the identities of the contributors, but it was a correct and effective choice. Science fiction is such a clubby genre that few critics dare to speak bluntly, and those that do are often beaten down. Furthermore, writers tend to take the words of “big names” seriously and ignore comments by “nobodies”—regardless of the relative intelligence or truth of the things they say. When Sterling and Shiner started out, they were, in terms of fame, nobody. But when Sterling wrote as Vincent Omniaveritas and Lew Shiner as Sue Denim, they weren’t nobody, they were Nobody, and therefore Somebody. The personas they created took on lives of their own; I think it’s fair to say that for a period of several years, two nonexistent persons were the most influential and exasperating critics in science fiction. Their ideas were listened to; prominent writers felt obliged to answer them. I believe that if the same words had been published under the names Sterling and Shiner, their motives and careers would have been attacked and their ideas largely ignored.

  They were not ignored. Sterling continued to correspond with William Gibson, who had already begun on his own to create stories in an unusually well-extrapolated future, and they influenced each other greatly through collaborations and mutual criticism. Some writers came aboard the Movement as the natural culmination of long personal struggles—for instance, John Shirley, Rudy Rucker, Michael Swanwick. Others, unfortunately, caught on that this was Something Important, but were never able to muster the intelligence to accomplish in their fiction what Sterling called for; even they were useful, though, as they joined the cheering section and helped call attention to the Movement.

  Some of the writers who were attacked took it very personally and have yet to forgive Sterling and Shiner for the cruelty of their rhetoric; Sterling is a man of conscience, and this may be part of the reason why he recently shed the Vincent Omniaveritas persona with obvious relief. However, many of the gifted young writers who were under attack had the wisdom and humility to recognize that there was truth in what Cheap Truth said. They did not join Sterling’s movement, but they allowed their fiction to respond to Sterling’s concerns, not because they feared attack, but because they themselves had come to share some of those concerns. You can see that at least some stories of John Kessel, Kim Stanley Robinson, James Patrick Kelly, and many others have a greater rigor in world-creation, an increased socio-political awareness; they do not necessarily wish to change the world in the ways Sterling wants to, but they have acquired from Sterling some of the tools with which to change it.

  Now, gradually, the audience is changing. The movement is not “Cyberpunk” anymore—it is much broader than that, while the name “Cyberpunk” has been co-opted to become the latest fad among the shallowest of artists in many fields who always seize on novelty, having long since given up on truth. Within science fiction, however, Sterling himself has said that by the time everyone heard of “Cyberpunk,” the movement—as a discrete group with
in the field—was already over. Much of Sterling’s ideology has already become a part of what “everyone knows” is necessary in “good science fiction.” An ideology that everyone believes had stopped belonging to the person who first uttered it.

  But the Movement was something Sterling did, not who Sterling was or is. For even as he publicly demanded greater rigor in one area of sf writing, he privately took himself through a literary course of studies that would daunt most of us. No two of his published short stories were alike. Rather than work repeatedly within one literary tradition, as Gibson did, Sterling wrote stories in every tradition, stories that at once mastered and subverted all the requirements of that tradition. His “Little Magic Shop,” for instance, is a wonderful magic-shop story. It also ridicules all magic shop stories, revolts against traditional expectations, and brings in completely unrelated techniques so that the audience is dizzy by the end. By now there is hardly a tradition he hasn’t explored.

  At the same time, Sterling was also learning how to tell stories well. Contrary to a common impression, Sterling wasn’t born knowing everything. He only knows everything today because he has read and studied everything. Perhaps you doubt me—this only shows you have not conversed with him. Sterling’s first novels, while they were fine examples of world-creation, were extremely weak as stories. A lesser writer, noticing that Schismatrix remained inaccessible or uninteresting to most readers, might have said, “Well, then, to hell with them!” But Sterling, you’ll remember, is out to change the world. You can’t change the world if you can’t get the world to listen.

  Sterling’s most recent novel, Islands in the Net, shows a nearly perfect mastery of every aspect of storytelling. Even if a reader cares nothing about serious extrapolation, Islands is a wonderful read. It’s a love story, a political thriller, a quest; it’s a hero-tale that is truthful to the core. None of this is cynically added on—Sterling is not a hack, trying to discover the formula for financial success. Indeed, Islands is still so intellectually and emotionally demanding that I doubt it will sell to an audience of Ludlumesque proportions. What Islands does, though, is speak powerfully to the best audience. The audience that is willing to think, willing to feel, willing to let a story change them. And, given what I have seen of Sterling already, I expect that future books will be even better, by every standard of measure. For unlike many who have the wish to remake the world in their own image, Sterling also is willing to remake himself in order to fit his ideals, instead of deforming his ideals to fit his own weaknesses. If you disagree with Sterling, you must recognize that this is what makes him most dangerous. He will not allow even himself to stand in the way of what he wants to accomplish.

  I met Sterling at Sycamore Hill. (The fact that John Kessel and Mark Van Name invited him and the fact that he came make it clear that the conflict between them, though real, was not personal; these are men of passion and ideals and ideas, and they respect others who have the same fire inside.) We did not become intimates; nor did we convert each other. We are both too committed to distinct ideological programs for that. But we did share several brief conversations and one long one. By my own choice I mostly questioned and listened (an assertion that some will doubt, but it’s true). I had long since given up on finding any writer—in or out of science fiction—who had a firm grasp of history, of the interplay of peoples and nations and individuals in the real world. Writers who attempted to deal with historical issues usually embarrassed themselves. Never mind nations—I even despaired of finding many writers who understood how families worked.

  But Sterling clearly understood. Sterling saw the whole picture. More, he saw things from angles that had never been available to me. The more he spoke, the more I realized that he had the firmest grasp on large-scale reality of any person I’ve ever met, including me. We live in the same conceived world, I realized; we recognize many of the same diseases afflicting it. And even though we sometimes disagree strongly on the treatment and the cure, the world we want to end up living in is profoundly similar. In short, if Sterling succeeds in changing the world as he wants to, I’ll be glad of it.

  The story you are about to read is the first of his published works to demonstrate Sterling’s full powers—as extrapolator, satirist, and storyteller. “Green Days in Brunei” is so full of details of world-creation that lesser writers could make careers out of writing Analog stories based on ideas that Sterling tosses away. Yet the detail never interferes with the story. After all that I’ve said about ideology and transformation, you can read “Green Days” for the sheer fun of it; or you can read it for excitement; or you can read it for its deeply plausible future; or you can read it for the political philosophy; or you can read it for its evocation of a non-western society trying to adapt to the technological world without being consumed by it; or you can read it for the discovery of character; or you can read it for the crystalline language that enhances the story without ever distracting from it.

  If, instead of having several volumes, I could show you the 1980s through the work of only one writer, the writer I would point to would be Bruce Sterling. More than any other writer since Robert Heinlein, Sterling has reinvented science fiction in his own time and set it on a new course for the future.

  Two men were fishing from the corroded edge of an offshore oil rig. After years of decrepitude, the rig’s concrete pillars were thick with barnacles and waving fronds of seaweed. The air smelled of rust and brine.

  “Sorry to disturb your plans,” the minister said. “But we can’t just chat up the Yankees every time you hit a little contretemps.” The minister reeled in and revealed a bare hook. He cursed mildly in his native Malay. “Hand me another bait, there’s a good fellow.”

  Turner Choi reached into the wooden bait bucket and gave the minister a large dead prawn. “But I need that phone link,” Turner said. “Just for a few hours. Just long enough to access the net in America and download some better documentation.”

  “What ghastly jargon,” said the minister, who was formally known as the Yang Teramat Pehin Orang Kaya Amar Diraja Dato Seri Paduka Abdul Kahar. He was minister of industrial policy for the Sultanate of Brunei Darussalam, a tiny nation on the northern shore of the island of Borneo. The titles of Brunei’s aristocracy were in inverse proportion to the country’s size.

  “It’d save us a lot of time, Tuan Minister,” Turner said. “Those robots are programmed in an obsolete language, forty years old. Strictly Neanderthal.”

  The minister deftly baited his hook and flicked it out in a long spinning cast. “You knew before you came here how the sultanate feels about the world information order. You shall just have to puzzle out this conundrum on your own.”

  “But you’re making weeks, months maybe, out of a three-hour job!” Turner said.

  “My dear fellow, this is Borneo,” the minister said benignly. “Stop looking at your watch and pay some attention to catching us dinner.”

  Turner sighed and reeled in his line. Behind them, the rig’s squatter population of Dayak fisherfolk clustered on the old helicopter pad, mending nets and chewing betel-nut.

  It was another slow Friday in Brunei Darussalam. Across the shallow bay, Brunei Town rose in tropical sunlight, its soaring high-rises festooned with makeshift solar roofs, windmills, and bulging greenhouse balconies. The golden-domed mosque on the waterfront was surrounded by the towering legacy of the twentieth-century oil boom: boxlike office blocks, now bizarrely transmuted into urban farms.

  Brunei Town, the sultanate’s capital, had a hundred thousand citizens: Malays, Chinese, Ibans, Dayaks, and a sprinkling of Europeans. But it was a city under a hush. No cars. No airport. No television. From a distance it reminded Turner of an old Western fairy tale: Sleeping Beauty, the jury-rigged high-rises with their cascading greenery like a hundred castles shrouded in thorns. The Bruneians seemed like sleepwalkers, marooned from the world, wrapped in the enchantment of their ideology.

  Turner baited his hook again, restive at being away fr
om the production line. The minister seemed more interested in converting him than in letting him work. To the Bruneians, the robots were just another useless memento of their long-dead romance with the West. The old robot assembly line hadn’t been used in twenty years, since the turn of the century.

  And yet the royal government had decided to retrofit the robot line for a new project. For technical help, they had applied to Kyocera, a Japanese multinational corporation. Kyocera had sent Turner Choi, one of their new recruits, a twenty-six-year-old Chinese—Canadian CAD-CAM engineer from Vancouver.

  It wasn’t much of a job—a kind of industrial archeology whose main tools were chicken-wire and a ball-peen hammer—but it was Turner’s first and he meant to succeed. The Bruneians were relaxed to the point of coma, but Turner Choi had his future ahead of him with Kyocera. In the long run, it was Kyocera who would judge his work here. And Turner was running out of time.

  The minister, whooping in triumph, hauled hard on his line. A fat, spotted fish broke the surface, flopping on the hook. Turner decided to break the rules and to hell with it.

  The local neighborhood organization, the kampong, was showing a free movie in the little park fourteen stories below Turner’s window. Bright images crawled against the bleak white Bauhaus wall of a neighboring high-rise.

  Turner peered down through the blinds. He had been watching the flick all night as he finished his illegal tinkering.

  The Bruneians, like Malays everywhere, adored ghost stories. The film’s protagonist, or chief horror (Turner wasn’t sure which) was an acrobatic monkey-demon with razor-sharp forearms. It had burst into a depraved speakeasy and was slaughtering drunkards with a tremendous windmilling flurry of punches, kicks, and screeches. Vast meaty sounds of combat, like colliding freight trains packed with beef, drifted faintly upward.