Bruce Sterling

Essays. Catscan Columns

CATSCAN 1 "Midnight on the Rue Jules Verne"

A kind of SF folk tradition surrounds the

founding figure of Jules Verne. Everyone knows he was

a big cheese back when the modern megalopolis of

SFville was a 19th-century village. There's a bronze

monument to him back in the old quarter of town, the

Vieux Carre. You know, the part the French built, back

before there were cars.

At midnight he stands there, somewhat the worse

for the acid rain and the pigeons, his blind bronze

eyes fixed on a future that has long since passed him

by. SFville's citizenry pass him every day without a

thought, their attention fixed on their daily grind in

vast American high-rises; if they look up, they are

intimidated by the beard, the grasped lapel, the

flaking reek of Victorian obsolescence.

Everyone here knows a little about old Jules.

The submarine, the moon cannon, the ridiculously

sluggish eighty days. When they strip up the tarmac,

you can still see the cobbles of the streets he laid.

It's all still there, really, the village grid of

SFville, where Verne lived and worked and argued

scientific romance with the whippersnapper H.G. Wells.

Those of us who walk these mean streets, and mutter of

wrecking balls and the New Jerusalem, should take the

time for a look back. Way back. Let's forget old Jules

for the moment. What about young Jules?

Young Jules Verne was trouble. His father, a

prosperous lawyer in the provincial city of Nantes,

was gifted with the sort of son that makes parents

despair. The elder Verne was a reactionary Catholic,

given to frequent solitary orgies with the penitential

scourge. He expected the same firm moral values in his

heir.

Young Jules wanted none of this. It's sometimes

mentioned in the SF folktale that Jules tried to run

away to sea as a lad. The story goes that he was

recaptured, punished, and contritely promised to

travel henceforth "only in his imagination." It sounds

cute. It was nothing of the kind. The truth of the

matter is that the eleven-year-old Jules resourcefully

bribed a cabin-boy of his own age, and impersonated

his way onto a French merchant cruiser bound for the

Indies. In those days of child labor, the crew

accepted Jules without hesitation. It was a mere fluke

that a neighbor happened to spot Jules during his

escape and informed against him. His father had to

chase him down in a fast chartered steam-launch.

This evidence of mulishness seems to have thrown

a scare into the Verne family, and in years to come

they would treat Jules with caution. Young Jules never

really broke with his parents, probably because they

were an unfailing source of funds. Young Jules didn't

much hold with wasting time on day-jobs. He was

convinced that he was possessed of genius, despite the

near-total lack of hard evidence.

During his teens and twenties, Jules fell for

unobtainable women with the regularity of clockwork.

Again and again he was turned down by middle-class

nymphs whose parents correctly assessed him as an art

nut and spoiled ne'er-do-well.

Under the flimsy pretext of studying law, Jules

managed to escape to Paris. He had seen the last of

stuffy provincial France, or so he assumed: "Well," he

wrote to a friend, "I'm leaving at last, as I wasn't

wanted here, but one day they'll see what stuff he was

made of, that poor young man they knew as Jules

Verne."

The "poor young man" rented a Parisian garret

with his unfailing parental stipend. He soon fell in

with bad company--namely, the pop-thriller writer

Alexandre Dumas Pere (author of _Count of Monte

Cristo_, _The Three Musketeers_. about a million

others). Jules took readily to the role of declasse'

intellectual and professional student. During the

Revolution of 1848 he passed out radical political

pamphlets on Paris streetcorners. At night, embittered

by female rejection, he wrote sarcastic sonnets on the

perfidy of womankind. Until, that is, he had his first

affair with an obliging housemaid, one of Dumas'

legion of literary groupies. After this, young Jules

loosened up to the point of moral collapse and was

soon, by his own admission, a familiar figure in all

the best whorehouses in Paris.

This went on for years. Young Jules busied

himself writing poetry and plays. He became a kind of

gofer for Dumas, devoting vast amounts of energy to a

Dumas playhouse that went broke. (Dumas had no head

for finance--he kept his money in a baptismal font in

the entryway of his house and would stuff handfuls

into his pockets whenever going out.)

A few of Jules' briefer pieces--a domestic

farce, an operetta--were produced, to general critical

and popular disinterest. During these misspent years

Jules wrote dozens of full-length plays, most of them

never produced or even published, in much the vein of

would-be Hollywood scriptwriters today. Eventually,

having worked his way into the theatrical

infrastructure through dint of prolonged and

determined hanging-out, Jules got a production job in

another playhouse, for no salary to speak of. He

regarded this as his big break, and crowed vastly to

his family in cheerful letters that made fun of the

Pope.

Jules moved in a fast circle. He started a

literary-artistic group of similar souls, a clique

appropriately known as the Eleven Without Women.

Eventually one of the Eleven succumbed, and invited

Jules to the wedding. Jules fell immediately for the

bride's sister, a widow with two small daughters. She

accepted his proposal. (Given Jules' record, it is to

be presumed that she took what she could get.)

Jules was now married, and his relentlessly

unimaginative wife did what she could to break him to

middle-class harness. Jules' new brother-ln-law was

doing okay in the stock market, so Jules figured he

would give it a try. He extorted a big loan from his

despairing father and bought a position on the Bourse.

He soon earned a reputation among his fellow brokers

as a cut-up and general weird duck. He didn't manage

to go broke, but a daguerreotype of the period shows

his mood. The extended Verne family sits stiffly

before the camera. Jules is the one in the back, his

face in a clown's grimace, his arm blurred as he waves

wildly in a brokerage floor "buy" signal.

Denied his longed-for position in the theater,

Jules groaningly decided that he might condescend to

try prose. He wrote a couple of stories heavily

influenced by Poe, a big period favorite of French

intellectuals. There was a cheapo publisher in town

who was starting a kid's pop-science magazine called

"Family Museum." Jules wrote a couple of pieces for

peanuts and got cover billing. The publisher decided

to try him out on books. Jules was willing. He signed

a contract to do two books a year, more or less

forever, in exchange for a monthly sum.

Jules, who liked hobnobbing with explorers and

scientists, happened to know a local deranged techie

called Nadar. Nadar's real name was Felix Tournachon,

but everybody called him Nadar, for he was one of

those period Gallic swashbucklers who passed through

life with great swirlings of scarlet and purple and

the scent of attar of roses. Nadar was involved in two

breaking high-tech developments of the period:

photography and ballooning. (Nadar is perhaps best

remembered today as the father of aerial photography.)

Nadar had Big Ideas. Jules' real forte was

geography--a date-line or a geodesic sent him into

raptures--but he liked Nadar's style and knew good

copy when he saw it. Jules helped out behind the

scenes when Nadar launched THE GIANT, the largest

balloon ever seen at the time, with a gondola the size

of a two-story house, lavishly supplied with

champagne. Jules never rode the thing--he had a wife

and kids now--but he retired into his study with the

plot-line of his first book, and drove his wife to

distraction. "There are manuscripts everywhere--

nothing but manuscripts," she said in a fine burst of

wifely confidence. "Let's hope they don't end up under

the cooking pot."

_Five Weeks In A Balloon_ was Jules' first hit.

The thing was a smash for his publisher, who sold it

all over the world in lavish foreign editions for

which Jules received pittances. But Jules wasn't

complaining--probably because he wasn't paying

attention.

With a firm toehold in the public eye, Jules

soon hit his stride as a popular author. He announced

to the startled stockbrokers: "Mes enfants, I am

leaving you. I have had an idea, the sort of idea that

should make a man's fortune. I have just written a

novel in a new form, one that's entirely my own. If it

succeeds, I shall have stumbled upon a gold mine. In

that case, I shall go on writing and writing without

pause, while you others go on buying shares the day

before they drop and selling them the day before they

rise. I am leaving the Bourse. Good evening, mes

enfants."

Jules Verne had invented hard science fiction.

He originated the hard SF metier of off-the-rack plots

and characters, combined with vast expository lumps of

pop science. His innovation came from literary

naivete; he never learned better or felt any reason

to. (This despite Apollinaire's sniping remark: "What

a style Jules Verne has, nothing but nouns.")

Verne's dialogue, considered quite snappy for

the period, was derived from the stage. His characters

constantly strike dramatic poses: Ned Land with

harpoon upraised, Phileas Fogg reappearing stage-right

in his London club at the last possible tick of the

clock. The minor characters--comic Scots, Russians,

Jews--are all stage dialect and glued-on beards,

instantly recognizable to period readers, yet fresh

because of cross-genre effects. They brought a proto-

cinematic flash to readers used to the gluey, soulful

character studies of, say, Stendhal.

The books we remember, the books determined

people still occasionally read, are products of Verne

in his thirties and forties. (His first novel was

written at thirty-five.) In these early books, flashes

of young Jules' student radicalism periodically

surface for air, much like the Nautilus. The character

of Captain Nemo, for instance, is often linked to

novelistic conventions of the Byronic hero. Nemo is,

in fact, a democratic terrorist of the period of '48,

the year when the working-class flung up Paris

barricades, and, during a few weeks of brief civil

war, managed to kill off more French army officers

than were lost in the entire Napoleonic campaigns. The

uprising was squelched, but Jules' generation of Paris

'48, like that of May '68, never truly forgot.

Jules did okay by his "new form of the novel."

He eventually became quite wealthy, though not through

publishing, but the theater. (Nowadays it would be

movie rights, but the principle still stands.) Jules,

incidently, did not write the stage versions of his

own books; they were done by professional theater

hacks. Jules knew the plays stank, and that they

travestied his books, but they made him a fortune. The

theatrical version of his mainstream smash, _Michael

Strogoff_, included such lavish special effects as a

live elephant on stage. It was so successful that the

term "Strogoff" became contemporary Paris slang for

anything wildly bravissimo.

Fortified with fame and money, Jules lunged

against the traces. He travelled to America and

Scandinavia, faithfully toting his notebooks. He

bought three increasingly lavish yachts, and took to

sea for days at a time, where he would lie on his

stomach scribbling _Twenty Thousand Leagues_ against

the deck.

During the height of his popularity, he

collected his family and sailed his yacht to North

Africa, where he had a grand time and a thrilling

brush with guntoting Libyans. On the way back, he

toured Italy, where the populace turned out to greet

him with fireworks and speeches. In Rome, the Pope

received him and praised his books because they

weren't smutty. His wife, who was terrified of

drowning, refused to get on the boat again, and

eventually Verne sold it.

At his wife's insistence, Jules moved to the

provincial town of Amiens, where she had relatives.

Downstairs, Mme. Verne courted local society in

drawing rooms crammed with Second Empire bric-a-brac,

while Jules isolated himself upstairs in a spartan

study worthy of Nemo, its wall lined with wooden

cubbyholes full of carefully labeled index-cards. They

slept in separate bedrooms, and rumor says Jules had a

mistress in Paris, where he often vanished for weeks.

Jules' son Michel grew up to be a holy terror,

visiting upon Jules all the accumulated karma of his

own lack of filial piety. The teenage Michel was in

trouble with cops, was confined in an asylum, was even

banished onto a naval voyage. Michel ended up

producing silent films, not very successfully. Jules'

stepdaughters made middle-class marriages and vanished

into straitlaced Catholic domesticity, where they

cooked up family feuds against their scapegrace half-

brother.

Verne's work is marked by an obsession with

desert islands. Mysterious Isles, secret hollow

volcanoes in the mid-Atlantic, vast ice-floes that

crack off and head for the North Pole. Verne never

really made it into the bosom of society. He did his

best, and played the part whenever onstage, but one

senses that he knew somehow that he was Not Like The

Others and might be torn to pieces if his facade

cracked. One notes his longing for the freedom of

empty seas and skies, for a submarine full of books

that can sink below storm level into eternal calm, for

the hollow shell fired into the pristine unpeopled

emptiness of circumlunar space.

From within his index-card lighthouse, the

isolation began to tell on the aging Jules. He had now

streamlined the production of novels to industrial

assembly-work, so much so that lying gossip claimed he

used a troop of ghostwriters. He could field-strip a

Verne book blindfolded, with a greased slot for every

part--the daffy scientist, the comic muscleman or

acrobat, the ordinary Joe who asks all the wide-eyed

questions, the woman who scarcely exists and is

rescued from suttee or sharks or red Indians.

Sometimes the machine is the hero--the steam-driven

elephant, the flying war-machine, the gigantic raft--

sometimes the geography: caverns, coal-mines, ice-

floes, darkest Africa.

Bored, Jules entered politics, and joined the

Amiens City Council, where he was quickly shuffled

onto the cultural committee. It was a natural sinecure

and he did a fair job, getting electric lights

installed, widening a few streets, building a

municipal theater that everyone admired and no one

attended. His book sales slumped steadily. The woods

were full of guys writing scientific romances by now--

people who actually knew how to write novels, like

Herbert Wells. The folk-myth quotes Verne on Wells'

_First Men In The Moon_: "Where is this gravity-

repelling metal? Let him show it to me." If not the

earliest, it is certainly the most famous exemplar of

the hard-SF writer's eternal plaint against the

fantasist.

The last years were painful. A deranged nephew

shot Verne in the foot, crippling him; it was at this

time that he wrote one of his rare late poems, the

"Sonnet to Morphine." He was to have a more than

nodding acquaintance with this substance, though in

those days of children's teething-laudanum no one

thought much of it. He died at seventy-seven in the

bosom of his vigorously quarrelling family, shriven by

the Church. Everyone who had forgotten about him wrote

obits saying what a fine fellow he was. This is the

Verne everyone thinks that they remember: the

greybearded paterfamilias, the conservative Catholic

hardware-nut, the guy who made technical forecasts

that Really Came True if you squint real hard and

ignore most of his work.

Jules Verne never knew he was "inventing science

fiction," in the felicitous phrase of Peter Costello's

insightful 1978 biography. He knew he was on to

something hot, but he stepped onto a commercial

treadmill that he didn't understand, and the money and

the fame got to him. The early artistic failures, the

romantic rejections, had softened him up, and when the

public finally Recognized His Genius he was grateful,

and fell into line with their wishes.

Jules had rejected respectability early on, when

it was offered to him on a plate. But when he had

earned it on his own, everyone around him swore that

respectability was dandy, and he didn't dare face them

down. Wanting the moon, he ended up with a hatch-

battened one-man submarine in an upstairs room.

Somewhere along the line his goals were lost, and he

fell into a role his father might almost have picked

for him: a well-to-do provincial city councilman. The

garlands disguised the reins, and the streetcorner

radical with a headful of visions became a dusty

pillar of society.

This is not what the world calls a tragedy; nor

is it any small thing to have books in print after 125

years. But the path Young Jules blazed, and the path

Old Jules was gently led down, are still well-trampled

streets here in SFville. If you stand by his statue at

midnight, you can still see Old Jules limping home,

over the cobblestones. Or so they say.

CATSCAN 2 "The Spearhead of Cognition"

You're a kid from some podunk burg in Alabama.

From childhood you've been gnawed by vague

numinous sensations and a moody sense of your own

potential, but you've never pinned it down.

Then one joyful day you discover the work of a

couple of writers. They're pretty well-known (for

foreigners), so their books are available even in your

little town. Their names are "Tolstoy" and

"Dostoevsky." Reading them, you realize: This is it!

It's the sign you've been waiting for! This is your

destiny-- to become a *Russian Novelist*!

Fired with inspiration, you study the pair of

'em up and down, till you figure you've got a solid

grasp of what they're up to. You hear they're pretty

well-known back in Russia, but to your confident eye

they don't seem like so much. (Luckily, thanks to some

stunt of genetics, you happen to be a genius.) For

you, following their outline seems simple enough--in a

more sophisticated vein, of course, and for a modern

audience. So you write a few such books, you publish

'em, and people adore them. The folks in 'Bama are fit

to bust with pride, and say you've got Tolstoy beat

all hollow.

Then, after years of steadily growing success,

strange mail arrives. It's from Russia! They've been

reading your stuff in translation, and you've been

chosen to join the Soviet Writers' Union! Swell! you

think. Of course, living in backwoods Alabama, it's

been a little tough finding editions of contemporary

Russian novelists. But heck, Tolstoy did his writing

years ago! By now those Russians must be writing like

nobody's business!

Then a shipment of modern Russian novels

arrives, a scattering of various stuff that has

managed to elude the redtape. You open 'em up and--

ohmiGod! It's ... it's COMMUNISM! All this stupid

stereotyped garbage! About Red heroes ten feet tall,

and sturdy peasants cheering about their tractors, and

mothers giving sons to the Fatherland, and fathers

giving sons to the Motherland ... Swallowing bile,

you pore through a few more at random--oh God, it's

awful.

Then the _Literary Gazette_ calls from Moscow,

and asks if you'd like to make a few comments about

the work of your new comrades. "Why sure!" you drawl

helpfully. "It's clear as beer-piss that y'all have

gotten onto the wrong track entirely! This isn't

literature--this is just a lot of repetitive agitprop

crap, dictated by your stupid oppressive publishers!

If Tolstoy was alive today, he'd kick your numb

Marxist butts! All this lame bullshit about commie

heroes storming Berlin and workers breaking production

records--those are stupid power-fantasies that

wouldn't fool a ten-year-old! You wanna know the true

modern potential of Russian novels? Read some of my

stuff, if you can do it without your lips moving! Then

call me back."

And sure enough, they do call you back. But

gosh--some of the hardliners in the Writers' Union

have gone and drummed you out of the regiment. Called

you all kinds of names ... said you're stuck-up, a

tool of capitalism, a no-talent running-dog egghead.

After that, you go right on writing, even criticism,

sometimes. Of course, after that you start to get

MEAN.

This really happened.

Except that it wasn't Tolstoy and Dostoevsky. It

was H.G. Wells and Olaf Stapledon. It wasn't Russian

novels, it was science fiction, and the Writers' Union

was really the SFWA. And Alabama was Poland.

And you were Stanislaw Lem.

Lem was surgically excised from the bosom of

American SF back in 1976. Since then plenty of other

writers have quit SFWA, but those flung out for the

crime of being a commie rat-bastard have remained

remarkably few. Lem, of course, has continued to

garner widespread acclaim, much of it from hifalutin'

mainstream critics who would not be caught dead in a

bookstore's skiffy section. Recently a collection of

Lem's critical essays, _Macroworlds_, has appeared in

paperback. For those of us not privy to the squabble

these essays caused in the '70s, it makes some eye-

opening reading.

Lem compares himself to Crusoe, stating

(accurately) that he had to erect his entire structure

of "science fiction" essentially from scratch. He did

have the ancient shipwrecked hulls of Wells and

Stapledon at hand, but he raided them for tools years

ago. (We owe the collected essays to the beachcombing

of his Man Friday, Austrian critic Franz

Rottensteiner.)

These essays are the work of a lonely man. We

can judge the fervor of Lem's attempt to reach out by

a piece like "On the Structural Analysis of Science

Fiction:" a Pole, writing in German, to an Austrian,

about French semantic theory. The mind reels. After

this superhuman effort to communicate, you'd think the

folks would cut Lem some slack--from pure human pity,

if nothing else.

But Lem's ideology--both political and literary-

-is simply too threatening. The stuff Lem calls

science fiction looks a bit like American SF--about

the way a dolphin looks like a mosasaur. A certain

amount of competitive gnawing and thrashing was

inevitable. The water roiled ten years ago, and the

judgement of evolution is still out. The smart money

might be on Lem. The smarter money yet, on some

judicious hybridization. In any case we would do well

to try to understand him.

Lem shows little interest in "fiction" per se.

He's interested in science: the structure of the

world. A brief autobiographical piece, "Reflections on

My Life," makes it clear that Lem has been this way

from the beginning. The sparkplug of his literary

career was not fiction, but his father's medical

texts: to little Stanislaw, a magic world of skeletons

and severed brains and colorful pickled guts. Lem's

earliest "writings," in high school, were not

"stories," but an elaborate series of imaginary forged

documents: "certificates, passports, diplomas ...

coded proofs and cryptograms ..."

For Lem, science fiction is a documented form of

thought-experiment: a spearhead of cognition.

All else is secondary, and it is this singleness

of aim that gives his work its driving power. This is

truly "a literature of ideas," dismissing the heart as

trivial, but piercing the skull like an ice-pick.

Given his predilections, Lem would probably

never have written "people stories." But his rationale

for avoiding this is astounding. The mass slaughters

during the Nazi occupation of Poland, Lem says, drove

him to the literary depiction of humanity as a

species. "Those days have pulverized and exploded all

narrative conventions that had previously been used in

literature. The unfathomable futility of human life

under the sway of mass murder cannot be conveyed by

literary techniques in which individuals or small

groups of persons form the core of the narrative."

A horrifying statement, and one that people in

happier countries would do well to ponder. The

implications of this literary conviction are, of

course, extreme. Lem's work is marked by unflinching

extremities. He fights through ideas with all the

convulsive drive of a drowning man fighting for air.

Story structure, plot, human values, characterization,

dramatic tension, all are ruthlessly trudgeon-kicked

aside.

In criticism, however, Lem has his breath, and

can examine the trampled flotsam with a cynical eye.

American SF, he says, is hopelessly compromised,

because its narrative structure is trash: detective

stories, pulp thrillers, fairy-tales, bastardized

myths. Such outworn and kitschy devices are totally

unsuited to the majestic scale of science fiction's

natural thematics, and reduce it to the cheap tricks

of a vaudeville conjurer.

Lem holds this in contempt, for he is not a man

to find entertainment in sideshow magic. Stanislaw Lem

is not a good-time guy. Oddly, for a science fiction

writer, he seems to have very little interest in the

intrinsically weird. He shows no natural appetite for

the arcane, the offbeat, the outre.. He is colorblind

to fantasy. This leads him to dismiss much of the work

of Borges, for example. Lem claims that "Borges' best

stories are constructed as tightly as mathematical

proofs." This is a tautology of taste, for, to Lem,

mathematical proofs are the conditions to which the

"best" stories must necessarily aspire.

In a footnote to the Borges essay Lem makes the

odd claim that "As soon as nobody assents to it, a

philosophy becomes automatically fantastic

literature." Lem's literature *is* philosophy; to veer

from the path of reason for the sake of mere sensation

is fraudulent.

American SF, therefore, is a tissue of frauds,

and its practicioners fools at best, but mostly snake-

oil salesmen. Lem's stern puritanism, however, leaves

him at sea when it comes to the work of Philip K.

Dick: "A Visionary Among the Charlatans." Lem's mind

was clearly blown by reading Dick, and he struggles to

find some underlying weltanschauung that would reduce

Dick's ontological raving to a coherent floor-plan.

It's a doomed effort, full of condescension and

confusion, like a ballet-master analyzing James Brown.

Fiction is written to charm, to entertain, to

enlighten, to convey cultural values, to analyze life

and manners and morals and the nature of the human

heart. The stuff Stanislaw Lem writes, however, is

created to burn mental holes with pitiless coherent

light. How can one do this and still produce a product

resembling "literature?" Lem tried novels. Novels,

alas, look odd without genuine characters in them.

Then he hit on it: a stroke of genius.

The collections _A Perfect Vacuum_ and

_Imaginary Magnitudes_ are Lem's masterworks. The

first contains book reviews, the second, introductions

to various learned tomes. The "books" discussed or

reviewed do not actually exist, and have archly

humorous titles, like "Necrobes" by "Cezary

Strzybisz." But here Lem has found literary

structures--not "stories"--but assemblages of prose,

familiar and comfortable to the reader.

Of course, it takes a certain aridity of taste

to read a book composed of "introductions,"

traditionally a kind of flaky appetizer before the

main course. But it's worth it for the author's sense

of freedom, his manifest delight in finally ridding

himself of that thorny fictive thicket that stands

between him and his Grail. These are charming pieces,

witty, ingenious, highly thought-provoking, utterly

devoid of human interest. People will be reading these

for decades to come. Not because they work as fiction,

but because their form follows function with the

sinister elegance of an automatic rifle.

Here Lem has finessed an irrevocable choice. It

is a choice every science fiction writer faces. Is

the writer to write Real Novels which "only happen to

be" science fiction--or create knobby and irreducible

SF artifacts which are not true "stories," but

visionary texts? The argument in favor of the first

course is that Real Readers, i.e. mainstream ones,

refuse to notice the nakedly science-fictional. How

Lem must chuckle as he collects his lavish blurbs from

_Time_ and _Newsweek_ (not to mention an income

ranking as one of poor wretched Poland's best sources

of foreign exchange) . By disguising his work as the

haute-lit exudations of a critic, he has out-conjured

the Yankee conjurers, had his cake and eaten it

publicly, in the hallowed pages of the _NY Review of

Books_.

It's a good trick, hard to pull off, requiring

ideas that burn so brilliantly that their glare is

overwhelming. That ability alone is worthy of a

certain writhing envy from the local Writers' Union.

But it's still a trick, and the central question is

still unresolved. What is "science fiction," anyway?

And what's it there for?

CATSCAN 3 "Updike's Version"

John Updike has got to be the epitome of

everything that SF readers love to hate. Those slim,

clever, etiolated mainstream novels about well-to-do

_New Yorker_ subscribers, who sip white wine and

contemplate adultery ... Novels stuffed like

Christmas geese with hi-falutin' literary values ...

Mention Updike at a SFWA gig, and you get yawns,

shudders, shakings of the head . . His work affects

science fiction writers like cayenne pepper affects a

pack of bloodhounds.

Why? Because John Updike has everything SF

writers don't. He is, in some very real sense,

everything SF writers aren't.

Certain qualities exist, that novelists are

popularly supposed to possess. Gifts, abilities, that

win An Author respect, that cause folks to back off

and gape just a bit if they find one in a grocery

line. Qualities like: insight into modern culture. A

broad sympathy for the manifold quirks of human

nature. A sharp eye for the defining detail. A quick

ear for language. A mastery of prose.

John Updike possesses these things. He is

erudite. He has, for instance, actually read Isak

Dinesen, Wallace Stevens, Ciline, Jean Rhys, Gunter

Grass, Nabokov and Bellow. Not only has he read these

obscure and intimidating people, but he has publicly

discussed the experience with every sign of genuine

enjoyment.

Updike is also enormously clever, clever to a

point that approaches genius through the sheer

irrepressible business of its dexterity. Updike's

paragraphs are so brittle, so neatly nested in their

comma'ed clauses, that they seem to burst under the

impact of the reader's gaze, like hyper-flaky

croissants.

Updike sees how things look, notices how people

dress, hears how people talk. His eye for the telling

detail can make even golf and birdwatching, the

ultimate yawnable whitebread Anglo pastimes, more or

less interesting. (Okay--not very interesting,

granted. But interesting for the sheer grace of

Updike's narrative technique. Like watching Fred

Astaire take out the garbage.)

It would be enlightening to compare John Updike

to some paragon of science fiction writing.

Unfortunately no such paladin offers himself, so we'll

have to make do with a composite.

What qualities make a great science fiction

writer? Let's look at it objectively, putting aside

all that comfortable bullshit about the virtues

authors are supposed to have. Let's look at the

science fiction writer as he is.

Modern culture, for instance. Our SF paladin is

not even sure it exists, except as a vaguely

oppressive force he's evaded since childhood. He lives

in his own one-man splinter culture, and has ever

since that crucial time in childhood--when he was sick

in bed for two years, or was held captive in the

Japanese prison camp, or lived in the Comoros Islands

with monstrous parents who were nuts on anthropology

or astronomy or Trotsky or religion.

He's pretty much okay now, though, our science

fiction author. He can feed himself and sign checks,

and he makes occasional supply trips into the cultural

anchorage of SF fandom, where he refreshes his soul by

looking at people far worse off than he is. But he

dresses funny, and mumbles to himself in the grocery

line.

While standing there, he doesn't listen to the

other folks and make surreptitious authorly notes

about dialogue. Far from it: he's too full of unholy

fire to pay much attention to mere human beings. And

anyway, his characters generally talk about stuff like

neutrinos or Taoism.

His eyes are glazed, cut off at the optic nerve

while he watches brain-movies. Too many nights in too

many cheap con hotels have blunted his sense of

aesthetics; his characters live in geodomes or

efficiencies or yurts. They wear one-piece jumpsuits

because jumpsuits make people one monotonous color

from throat to foot, which allows our attention to

return to the neutrinos--of which, incidentally,

ninety percent of the universe consists, so that the

entire visible world of matter is a mere *froth*, if

we only knew.

But he's learned his craft, our science fiction

paladin. The real nutcases don't have enough mental

horsepower to go where he's gone. He works hard and he

thinks hard and he knows what he's doing. He's read

Kuttner and Kornbluth and Blish and Knight, and he

knows how to Develop an Idea entertainingly and

rigorously, and how to keep pages turning meanwhile,

and by Christ those are no easy things. So there, Mr.

John Updike with your highflown talk of aht and

beautieh. That may be okay for you Ivy League pinky-

lifters with your sissy bemoaning about the Crisis of

Culture ... As if there was going to be a culture

after the millennial advent of (Biotech) (Cybernetics)

(Space Travel) (Robots) (Atomic Energy) (General

Semantics) (Dean Drive) (Dianetics) ...

So--there's the difference. It exists, for

better or worse. None of this is lost on John Updike.

He knows about science fiction, not a hell of a lot,

but probably vastly more than most science fiction

writers know about John Updike. He recognizes that it

requires specialized expertise to write good SF, and

that there are vast rustling crowds of us on the other

side of the cultural spacewarp, writing for Ace Books

and _Amazing Stories_. Updike reads Vonnegut and Le

Guin and Calvino and Lem and Wells and Borges, and

would probably read anybody else whose prose didn't

cause him physical pain. And from this reading, he

knows that the worldview is different in SFville ...

that writers think literature, and that SF writers

think SF.

And he knows, too, that it's not T.S. Eliot's

world any more, if indeed it ever was T.S. Eliot's

world. He knows we live in a world that loves to think

SF, and has thought SF ever since Hiroshima, which was

the ne plus ultra of Millennial Technological Advents,

which really and truly did change the world forever.

So Updike has rolled up his pinstriped sleeves

and bent his formidable intelligence in our direction,

and lo we have a science fiction novel, _Roger's

Version_ by John Updike.

Of course it's not *called* a science fiction

novel. Updike has seen Le Guin and Lem and Vonnegut

crawl through the spacewarp into his world. He's seen

them wriggle out, somehow, barely, gasping and

stinking of rocket fuel. Updike has no reason to place

himself in a position they went to great pains to

escape. But _Roger's Version_ does feature a computer

on its cover, if not a rocketship or a babe in a

bubble helmet, and by heaven it is a science fiction

novel--and a very good one.

_Roger's Version_ is Updike's version of what SF

should be on about. It deals with SF's native

conceptual underpinnings: the impact of technology on

society. The book is about technolatry, about

millennial visionary thinking. This is SF-think as

examined by a classic devotee of lit-think.

It's all there, quite upfront and nakedly

science fictional. It puzzles mainstream commentators.

"It's as though Updike had challenged himself to

convert into the flow of his novel the most resistant

stuff he could think of," marvels the _Christian

Science Monitor_, alarmed to find a Real Novel that

actually deals straightforwardly with real ideas. "The

aggressiveness of Updike's imagination is often a

marvel," says _People_, a mag whose utter lack of

imagination is probably its premier selling point.

And look at this list of author's credits: Fred

Hoyle, Martin Gardner, Gerald Feinberg, Robert

Jastrow. Don't tell me Updike's taken the *science*

seriously. But he has--he's not the man to deny the

devil his due, especially after writing _Witches of

Eastwick_, which would have been called a fantasy

novel if it had been written badly by a nobody.

But enough of this high-flown abstraction--let's

get to grips with the book. There's these two guys,

see. There's Roger Lambert, a middle-aged professor of

theology, a white-wine-sipping adultery-contemplating

intellectual New Englander who probably isn't eighty

light-years removed from John Updike. Roger's a nasty

piece of business, mostly, lecherous, dishonest and

petty-minded, and obsessed with a kind of free-

floating Hawthornian Protestant guilt that has been

passed down for twenty generations up Boston way and

hasn't gotten a bit more specific in the meantime.

And then there's Roger Lambert's antagonist,

Dale Kohler. Dale's a young computer hacker with

pimples and an obnoxious cocksure attitude. If Dale

were just a little more hip about it, he'd be a

cyberpunk, but for thematic reasons Updike chose to

make Dale a born-again Christian. We never really

believe this, though, because Dale almost never talks

Jesus. He talks AND-OR circuits, and megabytes, and

Mandelbrot sets, with all the techspeak fluency Updike

can manage, which is considerable. Dale talks God on a

microchip, technological transcendence, and he was

last seen in Greg Bear's _Blood Music_ where his name

was different but his motive and character were

identical. Dale is a type. Not just a science

fictional type, but the type that *creates* science

fiction, who talks God for the same reason Philip K.

Dick talked God. Because it comes with the territory.

Oh yeah, and then we've got some women. They

don't amount to much. They're not people, exactly.

They're temptresses and symbols.

There's Roger Lambert's wife, Esther, for

instance. Esther ends up teaching Dale Kohler the

nature of sin, which utterly destroys Dale's annoying

moral certitude, and high time, too. Esther does this

by the simple expedient of adulterously fucking Dale's

brains out, repeatedly and in meticulously related

detail, until Dale collapses from sheer weight of

original sin.

A good trick. But Esther breezes through this

inferno of deviate carnality, none the worse for the

experience; invigorated, if anything. Updike tells us

an old tale in this: that women *are* sexuality, vast

unplumbed cisterns of it, creatures of mystery, vamps

of the carnal abyss. I just can't bring myself to go

for this notion, even if the Bible tells me so. I know

that women don't believe this stuff.

Then there's Roger Lambert's niece, Verna. I

suspect she represents the Future, or at least the

future of America. Verna's a sad case. She lives on

welfare with her illegitimate mulatto kid, a little

girl who is Futurity even more incarnate. Verna

listens to pop music, brain-damaging volumes of it.

She's cruel and stupid, and as corrupt as her limited

sophistication allows. She's careless of herself and

others, exults in her degradation, whores sometimes

when she needs the cocaine money. During the book's

crisis, she breaks her kid's leg in a reckless fit of

temper.

A woman reading this portrayal would be

naturally enraged, reacting under the assumption that

Updike intends us to believe in Verna as an actual

human being. But Verna, being a woman, isn't. Verna is

America, instead: dreadfully hurt and spiritually

degraded, cheapened, teasing, but full of vitality,

and not without some slim hope of redemption, if she

works hard and does what's best for her (as defined by

Roger Lambert). Also, Verna possesses the magic of

fertility, and nourishes the future, the little girl

Paula. Paula, interestingly, is every single thing

that Roger Lambert isn't, i.e. young, innocent,

trusting, beautiful, charming, lively, female and not

white.

Roger sleeps with Verna. We've seen it coming

for some time. It is, of course, an act of adultery

and incest, compounded by Roger's complicity in child

abuse, quite a foul thing really, and narrated with a

certain gloating precision that fills one with real

unease. But it's Updike's symbolic gesture of cultural

rapprochement. "It's helped get me ready for death,"

Roger tells Verna afterward. Then: "Promise me you

won't sleep with Dale." And Verna laughs at the idea,

and tells him: "Dale's a non-turnon. He's not even

evil, like you." And gives Roger the kiss of peace.

So, Roger wins, sort of. He is, of course, aging

rapidly, and he knows his cultural values don't cut it

any more, that maybe they never cut it, and in any

case he is a civilized anachronism surrounded by a

popcultural conspiracy of vile and rising noise. But

at least *Dale* doesn't win. Dale, who lacks moral

complexity and a proper grasp of the true morbidity of

the human condition, thinks God can be found in a

computer, and is properly nemesized for his hubris.

The future may be fucked, but at least Dale won't be

doing it.

So it goes, in _Roger's Version_. It's a good

book, a disturbing book. It makes you think. And it's

got an edge on it, a certain grimness and virulence of

tone that some idiot would probably call "cyberpunk"

if Updike were not writing about the midlife crisis of

a theology professor.

_Roger's Version_ is one long debate, between

Updike's Protestantism and the techno-zeitgeist of the

'80s. With great skill, Updike parallels the arcanity

of cyberdom and the equally arcane roots of Christian

theology. It's good; it's clever and funny; it verges

on the profound. The far reaches of modern computer

science--chaos theory, fractals, simulationism,

statistical physics and so on--are indeed theological

in their implications. Some of their spokesmen have a

certain evangelical righteousness of tone that could

only alarm a cultural arbiter like John Updike. There

are indeed heretic gospels inside that machine, just

like there were gospels in a tab of LSD, only more so.

And it's a legitimate writerly task to inquire about

those gospels and wonder if they're any better than

the old one.

So John Updike has listened, listened very

carefully and learned a great deal, which he parades

deftly for his readership, in neatly tended flashes of

hard-science exposition. And he says: I've heard it

before, and I may not exactly believe in that Old

Rugged Cross, but I'm damned if I'll believe these

crazy hacker twerps with their jogging shoes.

There's a lot to learn from this book. It deals

with the entirety of our zeitgeist with a broad-scale

vision that we SF types too often fail to achieve.

It's an interesting debate, though not exactly fair:

it's muddied with hatred and smoldering jealousy, and

a very real resentment, and a kind of self-loathing

that's painful to watch.

And it's a cheat, because Dale's "science" has

no real intellectual validity. When you strip away the

layers of Updike's cyber-jargon, Dale's efforts are

only numerology, the rankest kind of dumb

superstition. "Science" it's not. It's not even good

theology. It's heretic voodoo, and its pre-arranged

failure within this book proves nothing about

anything.

Updike is wrong. He clings to a rotting cultural

fabric that he knows is based on falsehoods, and

rejects challenges to that fabric by declaring "well

you're another." But science, true science, does learn

from mistakes; theologians like Roger Lambert merely

further complicate their own mistaken premises.

I remain unconvinced, though not unmoved, by

Updike's object lesson. His book has hit hard at my

own thinking, which, like that of most SF writers, is

overly enamored of the millennial and transcendent. I

know that the twentieth century's efforts to kick

Updike's Judaeo-Christian WestCiv values have been

grim: Stalin's industrial terror, Cambodia's sickening

Luddite madness, the convulsions today in Islam ...

it was all "Year Zero" stuff, attempts to sweep the

board clean, that merely swept away human sanity,

instead. Nor do I claim that the squalid consumerism

of today's "secular-Humanist" welfare states is a

proper vision for society.

But I can't endure the sheer snobbish falseness

of Updike's New England Protestantism. Never mind that

it's the legacy of American letters, that it's the

grand tradition of Hawthorne and Melville, that it's

what made America great. It's a shuck, ladies and

gentlemen. It won't wash. It doesn't own the future;

it won't even kiss the future goodbye on its way to

the graveyard. It doesn't own our minds any more.

We don't live in an age of answers, but an age

of ferment. And today that ferment is reflected

faithfully in a literature called science fiction.

SF may be crazy, it may be dangerous, it may be

shallow and cocksure, and it should learn better. But

in some very real way it is truer to itself, truer to

the world, than is the writing of John Updike.

This is what has drawn Updike, almost despite

himself, into science fiction's cultural territory.

For SF writers, his novel is a lesson and a challenge.

A lesson that must be learned and a challenge that

must be met.

CATSCAN 4 "The Agberg Ideology"

To speak with precision about the fantastic is

like loading mercury with a pitchfork. Yet some are

driven to confront this challenge. On occasion, a

veteran SF writer will seriously and directly discuss

the craft of writing science fiction.

A few have risked doing this in cold print.

Damon Knight, for instance. James Blish (under a

pseudonym.) Now Robert Silverberg steps deliberately

into their shoes, with _Robert Silverberg's Worlds of

Wonder: Exploring the Craft of Science Fiction_

(Warner Books, 1987, $17.95).

Here are thirteen classic SF stories by well-

known genre authors. Most first appeared in genre

magazines during the 1950s. These are stories which

impressed Silverberg mightily as he began his career.

They are stories whose values he tried hard to

understand and assimilate. Each story is followed by

Silverberg's careful, analytical notes.

And this stuff, ladies and gents, is the SF

McCoy. It's all shirtsleeve, street-level science

fiction; every story in here is thoroughly crash-

tested and cruises like a vintage Chevy.

_Worlds of Wonder_ is remarkable for its sober

lack of pretension. There's no high-tone guff here

about how SF should claim royal descent from Lucian,

or Cyrano de Bergerac, or Mary Shelley. Credit is

given where credit is due. The genre's real founders

were twentieth-century weirdos, whacking away at their

manual typewriters, with amazing persistence and

energy, for sweatshop pay.

They had a definite commonality of interest.

Something more than a mere professional fraternity.

Kind of like a disease.

In a long, revelatory introduction, Silverberg

describes his own first exposure to the vectors of the

cultural virus: SF books.

"I think I was eleven, maybe twelve ... [The]

impact on me was overwhelming. I can still taste and

feel the extraordinary sensations they awakened in me:

it was a physiological thing, a distinct excitement, a

certain metabolic quickening at the mere thought of

handling them, let alone reading them. It must be like

that for every new reader--apocalyptic thunderbolts

and eerie unfamiliar music accompany you as you lurch

and stagger, awed and shaken, into a bewildering new

world of ideas and images, which is exactly the place

you've been hoping to find all your life."

If this paragraph speaks to your very soul with

the tongue of angels, then you need this anthology.

Buy it immediately, read it carefully. It's full of

home truths you won't find anywhere else.

This book is Silverberg's vicarious gift to his

younger self, the teenager described in his

autobiographical introduction: an itchy, over-bright

kid, filled with the feverish conviction that to

become a Science Fiction Writer must surely be the

moral pinnacle of the human condition.

And Silverberg knows very well that the kids are

still out there, and that the virus still spreads. He

can feel their hot little hands reaching out

plaintively in the dark. And he's willing, with a very

genuine magnanimity, to help these sufferers out. Just

as he himself was helped by an earlier SF generation,

by Mr. Kornbluth, and Mr. Knight, and Mr. and Mrs.

Kuttner, and all those other rad folks with names full

of consonants.

Silverberg explains his motives clearly, early

on. Then he discusses his qualifications to teach the

SF craft. He mentions his many awards, his fine

reviews, his length of service in the SF field, and,

especially, his success at earning a living. It's a

very down-home, pragmatic argument, with an aw-shucks,

workin'-guy, just-folks attitude very typical of the

American SF milieu. Silverberg doesn't claim superior

knowledge of writerly principle (as he might well). He

doesn't openly pose as a theorist or ideologue, but as

a modest craftsman, offering rules of thumb.

I certainly don't scorn this offer, but I do

wonder at it. Such modesty may well seem laudable, but

its unspoken implications are unsettling. It seems to

show an unwillingness to tackle SF's basic roots, to

establish a solid conceptual grounding. SF remains

pitchforked mercury, jelly nailed to a tree; there are

ways to strain a living out of this ichor, but very

few solid islands of theory.

Silverberg's proffered definition of science

fiction shows the gooeyness immediately. The

definition is rather long, and comes in four points:

1. An underlying speculative concept,

systematically developed in a way that amounts to an

exploration of the consequences of allowing such a

departure from known reality to impinge on the

universe as we know it.

2. An awareness by the writer of the structural

underpinnings (the "body of scientific knowledge") of

our known reality, as it is currently understood, so

that the speculative aspects of the story are founded

on conscious and thoughtful departures from those

underpinnings rather than on blithe ignorance.

3. Imposition by the writer of a sense of

limitations somewhere in the assumptions of the story

...

4. A subliminal knowledge of the feel and

texture of true science fiction, as defined in a

circular and subjective way from long acquaintance

with it.

SF is notoriously hard to define, and this

attempt seems about as good as anyone else's, so far.

Hard thinking went into it, and it deserves attention.

Yet point four is pure tautology. It is the Damon

Knight dictum of "SF is what I point at when I say

`SF,'" which is very true indeed. But this can't

conceal deep conceptual difficulties.

Here is Silverberg defining a "Story." "A story

is a machine that enlightens: a little ticking

contrivance ... It is a pocket universe ... It is

an exercise in vicarious experience ... It is a

ritual of exorcism and purgation. It is a set of

patterns and formulas. It is a verbal object, an

incantation made up of rhythms and sounds."

Very fluent, very nice. But: "A science fiction

story is all those things at once, and something

more." Oh? What is this "something more?" And why does

it take second billing to the standard functions of a

generalized "story?"

How can we be certain that "SF" is not, in fact,

something basically alien to "Story-telling?" "Science

fiction is a branch of fantasy," Silverberg asserts,

finding us a cozy spot under the sheltering tree of

Literature. Yet how do we really know that SF is a

"branch" at all?

The alternative would be to state that science

fiction is not a true kind of "fiction" at all, but

something genuinely monstrous. Something that limps

and heaves and convulses, without real antecedents, in

a conceptual no-man's land. Silverberg would not like

to think this; but he never genuinely refutes it.

Yet there is striking evidence of it, even in

_Worlds of Wonder_ itself. Silverberg refers to

"antediluvian SF magazines, such as _Science_ Wonder

Stories from 1929 and _Amazing Stories_ from 1932 . .

. The primitive technique of many of the authors

didn't include such frills as the ability to create

characters or write dialogue ... [T]he editors of

the early science fiction magazines had found it

necessary to rely on hobbyists with humpty-dumpty

narrative skills; the true storytellers were off

writing for the other pulp magazines, knocking out

westerns or adventure tales with half the effort for

twice the pay."

A nicely dismissive turn of phrase. But notice

how we confront, even in very early genre history, two

distinct castes of writer. We have the "real

storytellers," pulling down heavy bread writing

westerns, and "humpty-dumpty hobbyists" writing this

weird-ass stuff that doesn't even have real dialogue

in it. A further impudent question suggests itself: if

these "storytellers" were so "real," how come they're

not still writing successfully today for _Argosy_ and

_Spicy Stories_ and _Aryan Atrocity Adventure_? How

come, among the former plethora of pulp fiction

magazines, the science fiction zines still survive?

Did the "storytellers" somehow ride in off the range

to rescue Humpty Dumpty? If so, why couldn't they

protect their own herd?

What does "science fiction" really owe to

"fiction," anyway? This conceptual difficulty will

simply not go away, ladies and gentlemen. It is a

cognitive dissonance at the heart of our genre. Here

is John Kessel, suffering the ideological itch,

Eighties version, in _SF Eye_ #1:

"Plot, character and style are not mere icing .

. . Any fiction that conceives of itself as a vehicle

for something called `ideas' that can be inserted into

and taken out of the story like a passenger in a

Toyota is doomed, in my perhaps staid and outmoded

opinion, to a very low level of achievement."

A "low level of achievement." Not even Humpty

Dumpty really wants this. But what is the "passenger,"

and what are the "frills?" Is it the "storytelling,"

or is it the "something more?" Kessel hits a nerve

when he demands, "What do you mean by an `idea'

anyway?" What a difficult question this is!

The craft of storytelling has been explored for

many centuries, in many cultures. Blish called it "a

huge body of available technique," and angrily

demanded its full use within SF. And in _Worlds of

Wonder_, Silverberg does his level best lo convey the

basic mechanics. Definitions fly, helpful hints

abound. A story is "the working out of a conflict." A

story "has to be built around a pattern of

oppositions." Storytelling can be summed up in a

three-word formula: "purpose, passion, perception."

And on and on.

But where are we to find the craft of the

"something more"? What in hell *is* the "something

more"? "Ideas" hardly begins to describe it. Is it

"wonder"? Is it "transcendence"? Is it "visionary

drive," or "conceptual novelty," or even "cosmic

fear"? Here is Silverberg, at the very end of his

book:

"It was that exhilaration and excitement that

drew us to science fiction in the first place, almost

invariably when we were very young; it was for the

sake of that exhilaration and excitement that we took

up the writing of it, and it was to facilitate the

expression of our visions and fantasies that we

devoted ourselves with such zeal to the study of the

art and craft of writing."

Very well put, but the dichotomy lurches up

again. The art and craft of writing *what*, exactly?

In this paragraph, the "visions and fantasies" briefly

seize the driver's seat of the Kessel Toyota. But they

soon dissipate into phantoms again. Because they are

so ill-defined, so mercurial, so desperately lacking

in basic conceptual soundness. They are our stock in

trade, our raison d'etre, and we still don't know what

to make of them.

_Worlds of Wonder_ may well be the best book

ever published about the craft of science fiction.

Silverberg works nobly, and he deserves great credit.

The unspoken pain that lies beneath the surface of his

book is something with which the genre has never

successfully come to terms. The argument is as fresh

today as it was in the days of _Science Wonder

Stories_.

This conflict goes very deep indeed. It is not a

problem confined to the craft of writing SF. It seems

to me to be a schism of the modern Western mindset, a

basic lack of cultural integration between what we

feel, and what we know. It is an inability to speak

naturally, with conviction from the heart, of the

things that Western rationality has taught us. This is

a profound problem, and the fact that science fiction

deals with it so directly, is a sign of science

fiction's cultural importance.

We have no guarantee that this conflict will

*ever* be resolved. It may not be resolvable. SF

writers have begun careers, succeeded greatly, grown

old and honored, and died in the shadow of this

dissonance. We may forever have SF "stories" whose

narrative structure is buboed with expository lumps.

We may always have escapist pulp adventures that avoid

true imagination, substituting the bogus exoticism

that Blish defined as "calling a rabbit a `smeerp.'"

We may even have beautifully written, deeply

moving tales of classic human conflict--with only a

reluctant dab of genre flavor. Or we may have the

opposite: the legacy of Stapledon, Gernsback, and Lem,

those non-stories bereft of emotional impact and human

interest, the constructions Silverberg rightly calls

"vignettes" and "reports."

I don't see any stories in _Worlds of Wonder_

that resolve this dichotomy. They're swell stories,

and they deliver the genre payoff in full. But many of

them contradict Silverberg's most basic assertions

about "storytelling." "Four in One" by Damon Knight is

a political parable whose hero is a rock-ribbed

Competent Man whose reactions are utterly nonhuman.

"Fondly Fahrenheit" by Alfred Bester is a one-shot

tour-de-force dependent on weird grammatical

manipulation. "Hothouse" by Brian Aldiss is a

visionary picaresque with almost no conventional

structure. "The New Prime" by Jack Vance is six

jampacked alien vignettes very loosely stitched

together. "Day Million" showcases Frederik Pohl

bluntly haranguing his readers. It's as if Silverberg

picked these stories deliberately to demonstrate a

deep distrust of his own advice.

But to learn to tell "good stories" is excellent

advice for any kind of writer, isn't it? Well-

constructed "stories" will certainly sell in science

fiction. They will win awards, and bring whatever fame

and wealth is locally available. Silverberg knows this

is true. His own career proves it. His work possesses

great technical facility. He writes stories with

compelling opening hooks, with no extraneous detail,

with paragraphs that mesh, with dialogue that advances

the plot, with neatly balanced beginnings, middles and

ends.

And yet, this ability has not been a total Royal

Road to success for him. Tactfully perhaps, but rather

surprisingly, _Worlds of Wonder_ does not mention

Silverberg's four-year "retirement" from SF during the

'70s. For those who missed it, there was a dust-up in

1976, when Silverberg publicly complained that his

work in SF was not garnering the critical acclaim that

its manifest virtues deserved. These were the days of

_Dying Inside_, _The Book of Skulls_, _Shadrach in the

Furnace_--sophisticated novels with deep, intense

character studies, of unimpeachable literary merit.

Silverberg was not alone in his conclusion that these

groundbreaking works were pearls cast before swine.

Those who shared Silverberg's literary convictions

could only regard the tepid response of the SF public

as philistinism.

But was it really? Critics still complain at him

today; take Geoff Ryman's review of _The Conglomeroid

Cocktail Party_, a recent Silverberg collection, in

_Foundation_ 37. "He is determined to write

beautifully and does ... He has most of the field

beaten by an Olympic mile." And yet: "As practiced by

Silverberg, SF is a minor art form, like some kinds of

verse, to be admired for its surface polish and

adherence to form."

This critical plaint is a symptom of hunger for

the "something more." But where are we to find its

mercurial secrets? Not in the storytelling alembics of

_Worlds of Wonder_.

Why, then, is Silverberg's book so very valuable

to the SF writer of ambition? There are many reasons.

Silverberg's candid reminiscences casts vital light

into the social history of the genre. The deep

structures of our subculture, of our traditions, must

be understood by anyone who wants to transcend them.

To have no "ideology," no theory of SF and its larger

purposes, is to be the unknowing puppet of its

unwritten rules. These invisible traditions are

actually only older theories, now disguised as common

sense.

The same goes for traditional story values.

Blatant solecisms are the Achilles heel of the wild-

eyed SF visionary. If this collection teaches

anything, it's that one can pull the weirdest,

wackiest, off-the-wall moves in SF, and still win big.

But one must do this deliberately, with a real

understanding of thee consequences. One must learn to

recognize, and avoid, the elementary blunders of bad

fiction: the saidbookisms, the point-of-view

violations, the careless lapses of logic, the

pointless digressions, the idiot plots, the insulting

cliches of character. _Worlds of Wonder_ is a handbook

for accomplishing that. It's kindly and avuncular and

accessible and fun to read.

And some readers are in special luck. You may be

one of them. You may be a young Robert Silverberg, a

mindblown, too-smart kid, dying to do to the innocent

what past SF writers have done to you. You may be

boiling over with the Holy Spirit, yet wondering how

you will ever find the knack, the discipline, to put

your thoughts into a form that compels attention from

an audience, a form that will break you into print. If

you are this person, _Worlds of Wonder_ is a precious

gift. It is your battle plan.

CATSCAN 5 "Slipstream"

In a recent remarkable interview in _New

Pathways_ #11, Carter Scholz alludes with pained

resignation to the ongoing brain-death of science

fiction. In the 60s and 70s, Scholz opines, SF had a

chance to become a worthy literature; now that chance

has passed. Why? Because other writers have now

learned to adapt SF's best techniques to their own

ends.

"And," says Scholz, "They make us look sick.

When I think of the best `speculative fiction' of the

past few years, I sure don't think of any Hugo or

Nebula winners. I think of Margaret Atwood's _The

Handmaid's Tale_, and of Don DeLillo's _White Noise_,

and of Batchelor's _The Birth of the People's Republic

of Antarctica_, and of Gaddis' _JR_ and _Carpenter's

Gothic_, and of Coetzee's _Life and Times of Michael

K_ ... I have no hope at all that genre science

fiction can ever again have any literary significance.

But that's okay, because now there are other people

doing our job."

It's hard to stop quoting this interview. All

interviews should be this good. There's some great

campy guff about the agonizing pain it takes to write

short stories; and a lecture on the unspeakable horror

of writer's block; and some nifty fusillades of

forthright personal abuse; and a lot of other stuff

that is making _New Pathways_ one of the most

interesting zines of the Eighties. Scholz even reveals

his use of the Fibonacci Sequence in setting the

length and number of the chapters in his novel

_Palimpsests_, and wonders how come nobody caught on

to this groundbreaking technique of his.

Maybe some of this peripheral stuff kinda dulls

the lucid gleam of his argument. But you don't have to

be a medieval Italian mathematician to smell the reek

of decay in modern SF. Scholz is right. The job isn't

being done here.

"Science Fiction" today is a lot like the

contemporary Soviet Union; the sprawling possessor of

a dream that failed. Science fiction's official dogma,

which almost everybody ignores, is based on attitudes

toward science and technology which are bankrupt and

increasingly divorced from any kind of reality. "Hard-

SF," the genre's ideological core, is a joke today; in

terms of the social realities of high-tech post-

industrialism, it's about as relevant as hard-

Leninism.

Many of the best new SF writers seem openly

ashamed of their backward Skiffy nationality. "Ask not

what you can do for science fiction--ask how you can

edge away from it and still get paid there."

A blithely stateless cosmopolitanism is the

order of the day, even for an accredited Clarion grad

like Pat Murphy: "I'm not going to bother what camp

things fall into," she declares in a recent _Locus_

interview. "I'm going to write the book I want and see

what happens ... If the markets run together, I

leave it to the critics." For Murphy, genre is a dead

issue, and she serenely wills the trash-mountain to

come to Mohammed.

And one has to sympathize. At one time, in its

clumsy way, Science Fiction offered some kind of

coherent social vision. SF may have been gaudy and

naive, and possessed by half-baked fantasies of power

and wish-fulfillment, but at least SF spoke a

contemporary language. Science Fiction did the job of

describing, in some eldritch way, what was actually

*happening*, at least in the popular imagination.

Maybe it wasn't for everybody, but if you were a

bright, unfastidious sort, you could read SF and feel,

in some satisfying and deeply unconscious way, that

you'd been given a real grip on the chrome-plated

handles of the Atomic Age.

But *now* look at it. Consider the repulsive

ghastliness of the SF category's Lovecraftian

inbreeding. People retched in the 60s when De Camp and

Carter skinned the corpse of Robert E. Howard for its

hide and tallow, but nowadays necrophilia is run on an

industrial basis. Shared-world anthologies. Braided

meganovels. Role-playing tie-ins. Sharecropping books

written by pip-squeaks under the blazoned name of

established authors. Sequels of sequels, trilogy

sequels of yet-earlier trilogies, themselves cut-and-

pasted from yet-earlier trilogies. What's the common

thread here? The belittlement of individual

creativity, and the triumph of anonymous product. It's

like some Barthesian nightmare of the Death of the

Author and his replacement by "text."

Science Fiction--much like that other former

Vanguard of Progressive Mankind, the Communist Party--

has lost touch with its cultural reasons for being.

Instead, SF has become a self-perpetuating commercial

power-structure, which happens to be in possession of

a traditional national territory: a portion of

bookstore rackspace.

Science fiction habitually ignores any challenge

from outside. It is protected by the Iron Curtain of

category marketing. It does not even have to improve

"on its own terms," because its own terms no longer

mean anything; they are rarely even seriously

discussed. It is enough merely to point at the

rackspace and say "SF."

Some people think it's great to have a genre

which has no inner identity, merely a locale where

it's sold. In theory, this grants vast authorial

freedom, but the longterm practical effect has been

heavily debilitating. When "anything is possible in

SF" then "anything" seems good enough to pass muster.

Why innovate? Innovate in what direction? Nothing is

moving, the compass is dead. Everything is becalmed;

toss a chip overboard to test the current, and it sits

there till it sinks without a trace.

It's time to clarify some terms in this essay,

terms which I owe to Carter Scholz. "Category" is a

marketing term, denoting rackspace. "Genre" is a

spectrum of work united by an inner identity, a

coherent esthetic, a set of conceptual guidelines, an

ideology if you will.

"Category" is commercially useful, but can be

ultimately deadening. "Genre," however, is powerful.

Having made this distinction, I want to describe

what seems to me to be a new, emergent "genre," which

has not yet become a "category."

This genre is not "category" SF; it is not even

"genre" SF. Instead, it is a contemporary kind of

writing which has set its face against consensus

reality. It is a fantastic, surreal sometimes,

speculative on occasion, but not rigorously so. It

does not aim to provoke a "sense of wonder" or to

systematically extrapolate in the manner of classic

science fiction.

Instead, this is a kind of writing which simply

makes you feel very strange; the way that living in

the late twentieth century makes you feel, if you are

a person of a certain sensibility. We could call this

kind of fiction Novels of Postmodern Sensibility, but

that looks pretty bad on a category rack, and requires

an acronym besides; so for the sake of convenience and

argument, we will call these books "slipstream."

"Slipstream" is not all that catchy a term, and

if this young genre ever becomes an actual category I

doubt it will use that name, which I just coined along

with my friend Richard Dorsett. "Slipstream" is a

parody of "mainstream," and nobody calls mainstream

"mainstream" except for us skiffy trolls.

Nor is it at all likely that slipstream will

actually become a full-fledged genre, much less a

commercially successful category. The odds against it

are stiff. Slipstream authors must work outside the

cozy infrastructure of genre magazines, specialized

genre criticism, and the authorial esprit-de-corps of

a common genre cause.

And vast dim marketing forces militate against

the commercial success of slipstream. It is very

difficult for these books to reach or build their own

native audience, because they are needles in a vast

moldering haystack. There is no convenient way for

would-be slipstream readers to move naturally from one

such work to another of its ilk. These books vanish

like drops of ink in a bucket of drool.

Occasional writers will triumph against all

these odds, but their success remains limited by the

present category structures. They may eke out a fringe

following, but they fall between two stools. Their

work is too weird for Joe and Jane Normal. And they

lose the SF readers, who avoid the mainstream racks

because the stuff there ain't half weird enough. (One

result of this is that many slipstream books are left-

handed works by authors safely established in other

genres.)

And it may well be argued that slipstream has no

"real" genre identity at all. Slipstream might seem to

be an artificial construct, a mere grab-bag of

mainstream books that happen to hold some interest for

SF readers. I happen to believe that slipstream books

have at least as much genre identity as the variegated

stock that passes for "science fiction" these days,

but I admit the force of the argument. As an SF

critic, I may well be blindered by my parochial point-

of-view. But I'm far from alone in this situation.

Once the notion of slipstream is vaguely explained,

almost all SF readers can recite a quick list of books

that belong there by right.

These are books which SF readers recommend to

friends: "This isn't SF, but it sure ain't mainstream

and I think you might like it, okay?" It's every man

his own marketer, when it comes to slipstream.

In preparation for this essay, I began

collecting these private lists. My master-list soon

grew impressively large, and serves as the best

pragmatic evidence for the actual existence of

slipstream that I can offer at the moment.

I myself don't pretend to be an expert in this

kind of writing. I can try to define the zeitgeist of

slipstream in greater detail, but my efforts must be

halting.

It seems to me that the heart of slipstream is

an attitude of peculiar aggression against "reality."

These are fantasies of a kind, but not fantasies which

are "futuristic" or "beyond the fields we know." These

books tend to sarcastically tear at the structure of

"everyday life."

Some such books, the most "mainstream" ones, are

non-realistic literary fictions which avoid or ignore

SF genre conventions. But hard-core slipstream has

unique darker elements. Quite commonly these works

don't make a lot of common sense, and what's more they

often somehow imply that *nothing we know makes* "a

lot of sense" and perhaps even that *nothing ever

could*.

It's very common for slipstream books to screw

around with the representational conventions of

fiction, pulling annoying little stunts that suggest

that the picture is leaking from the frame and may get

all over the reader's feet. A few such techniques are

infinite regress, trompe-l'oeil effects, metalepsis,

sharp violations of viewpoint limits, bizarrely blase'

reactions to horrifically unnatural events ... all

the way out to concrete poetry and the deliberate use

of gibberish. Think M. C. Escher, and you have a

graphic equivalent.

Slipstream is also marked by a cavalier attitude

toward "material" which is the polar opposite of the

hard-SF writer's "respect for scientific fact."

Frequently, historical figures are used in slipstream

fiction in ways which outrageously violate the

historical record. History, journalism, official

statements, advertising copy ... all of these are

grist for the slipstream mill, and are disrespectfully

treated not as "real-life facts" but as "stuff," raw

material for collage work. Slipstream tends, not to

"create" new worlds, but to *quote* them, chop them up

out of context, and turn them against themselves.

Some slipstream books are quite conventional in

narrative structure, but nevertheless use their

fantastic elements in a way that suggests that they

are somehow *integral* to the author's worldview; not

neat-o ideas to kick around for fun's sake, but

something in the nature of an inherent dementia. These

are fantastic elements which are not clearcut

"departures from known reality" but ontologically

*part of the whole mess*; "`real' compared to what?"

This is an increasingly difficult question to answer

in the videocratic 80s-90s, and is perhaps the most

genuinely innovative aspect of slipstream (scary as

that might seem).

A "slipstream critic," should such a person ever

come to exist, would probably disagree with these

statements of mine, or consider them peripheral to

what his genre "really" does. I heartily encourage

would-be slipstream critics to involve themselves in

heady feuding about the "real nature" of their as-yet-

nonexistent genre. Bogus self-referentiality is a very

slipstreamish pursuit; much like this paragraph itself,

actually. See what I mean?

My list is fragmentary. What's worse, many of

the books that are present probably don't "belong"

there. (I also encourage slipstream critics to weed

these books out and give convincing reasons for it.)

Furthermore, many of these books are simply

unavailable, without hard work, lucky accidents,

massive libraries, or friendly bookstore clerks in a

major postindustrial city. In many unhappy cases, I

doubt that the authors themselves think that anyone is

interested in their work. Many slipstream books fell

through the yawning cracks between categories, and

were remaindered with frantic haste.

And I don't claim that all these books are

"good," or that you will enjoy reading them. Many

slipstream books are in fact dreadful, though they are

dreadful in a different way than dreadful science

fiction is. This list happens to be prejudiced toward

work of quality, because these are books which have

stuck in people's memory against all odds, and become

little tokens of possibility.

I offer this list as a public service to

slipstream's authors and readers. I don't count myself

in these ranks. I enjoy some slipstream, but much of

it is simply not to my taste. This doesn't mean that

it is "bad," merely that it is different. In my

opinion, this work is definitely not SF, and is

essentially alien to what I consider SF's intrinsic

virtues.

Slipstream does however have its own virtues,

virtues which may be uniquely suited to the perverse,

convoluted, and skeptical tenor of the postmodern era.

Or then again, maybe not. But to judge this genre by

the standards of SF is unfair; I would like to see it

free to evolve its own standards.

Unlike the "speculative fiction" of the 60s,

slipstream is not an internal attempt to reform SF in

the direction of "literature." Many slipstream

authors, especially the most prominent ones, know or

care little or nothing about SF. Some few are "SF

authors" by default, and must struggle to survive in a

genre which militates against the peculiar virtues of

their own writing.

I wish slipstream well. I wish it was an

acknowledged genre and a workable category, because

then it could offer some helpful, brisk competition to

SF, and force "Science Fiction" to redefine and

revitalize its own principles.

But any true discussion of slipstream's genre

principles is moot, until it becomes a category as

well. For slipstream to develop and nourish, it must

become openly and easily available to its own

committed readership, in the same way that SF is

today. This problem I willingly leave to some

inventive bookseller, who is openminded enough to

restructure the rackspace and give these oppressed

books a breath of freedom.

THE SLIPSTREAM LIST

ACKER, KATHY - Empire of the Senseless

ACKROYD, PETER - Hawksmoor; Chatterton

ALDISS, BRIAN - Life in the West

ALLENDE, ISABEL - Of Love and Shadows; House of Spirits

AMIS, KINGSLEY - The Alienation; The Green Man

AMIS, MARTIN - Other People; Einstein's Monsters

APPLE, MAX - Zap; The Oranging of America

ATWOOD, MARGARET - The Handmaids Tale

AUSTER, PAUL - City of Glass; In the Country of Last Things

BALLARD, J. G. - Day of Creation; Empire of the Sun

BANKS, IAIN - The Wasp Factory; The Bridge

BANVILLE, JOHN - Kepler; Dr. Copernicus

BARNES, JULIAN - Staring at the Sun

BARTH, JOHN - Giles Goat-Boy; Chimera

BARTHELME, DONALD - The Dead Father

BATCHELOR, JOHN CALVIN - Birth of the People's Republic of Antarctica

BELL, MADISON SMARTT - Waiting for the End of the World

BERGER, THOMAS - Arthur Rex

BONTLY, THOMAS - Celestial Chess

BOYLE, T. CORAGHESSAN - Worlds End; Water Music

BRANDAO, IGNACIO - And Still the Earth

BURROUGHS, WILLIAM - Place of Dead Roads; Naked Lunch; Soft Machine; etc.

CARROLL, JONATHAN - Bones of the Moon; Land of Laughs

CARTER, ANGELA - Nights at the Circus; Heroes and Villains

CARY, PETER - Illywhacker; Oscar and Lucinda

CHESBRO, GEORGE M. - An Affair of Sorcerers

COETZEE, J. M. - Life and rimes of Michael K.

COOVER, ROBERT - The Public Burning; Pricksongs & Descants

CRACE, JIM - Continent

CROWLEY, JOHN - Little Big; Aegypt

DAVENPORT, GUY - Da Vincis Bicycle; The Jules Verne Steam Balloon

DISCH, THOMAS M. - On Wings of Song

DODGE, JIM - Not Fade Away

DURRELL, LAWRENCE - Tunc; Nunquam

ELY, DAVID - Seconds

ERICKSON, STEVE - Days Between Stations; Rubicon Beach

FEDERMAN, RAYMOND - The Twofold Variations

FOWLES, JOHN - A Maggot

FRANZEN, JONATHAN - The Twenty-Seventh City

FRISCH, MAX - Homo Faber; Man in the Holocene

FUENTES, CARLOS - Terra Nostra

GADDIS, WILLIAM - JR; Carpenters Gothic

GARDNER, JOHN - Grendel; Freddy's Book

GEARY, PATRICIA - Strange Toys; Living in Ether

GOLDMAN, WILLIAM - The Princess Bride; The Color of Light

GRASS, GUNTER - The Tin Drum

GRAY, ALASDAIR - Lanark

GRIMWOOD, KEN - Replay

HARBINSON, W. A. - Genesis; Revelation; Otherworld

HILL, CAROLYN - The Eleven Million Mile High Dancer

HJVRTSBERG, WILLIAM - Gray Matters; Falling Angel

HOBAN, RUSSELL - Riddley Walker

HOYT, RICHARD - The Manna Enzyme

IRWIN, ROBERT - The Arabian Nightmares

ISKANDER, FAZIL - Sandro of Chegam; The Gospel According to Sandro

JOHNSON, DENIS - Fiskadoro

JONES, ROBERT F. - Blood Sport; The Diamond Bogo

KINSELLA, W. P. - Shoeless Joe

KOSTER, R. M. - The Dissertation; Mandragon

KOTZWINKLE, WILLIAM - Elephant Bangs Train; Doctor Rat, Fata Morgana

KRAMER, KATHRYN - A Handbook for Visitors From Outer Space

LANGE, OLIVER - Vandenberg

LEONARD, ELMORE - Touch

LESSING, DORIS - The Four-Gated City; The Fifth Child of Satan

LEVEN, JEREMY - Satan

MAILER, NORMAN - Ancient Evenings

MARINIS, RICK - A Lovely Monster

MARQUEZ, GABRIEL GARCIA - Autumn of the Patriarch; One Hundred Years of Solitude

MATHEWS, HARRY - The Sinking of the Odradek Stadium

McEWAN, IAN - The Comfort of Strangers; The Child in Time

McMAHON, THOMAS - Loving Little Egypt

MILLAR, MARTIN - Milk, Sulphate and Alby Starvation

MOONEY, TED - Easy Travel to Other Planets

MOORCOCK, MICHAEL - Laughter of Carthage; Byzantium Endures; Mother London

MOORE, BRIAN - Cold Heaven

MORRELL, DAVID - The Totem

MORRISON, TONI - Beloved; The Song of Solomon

NUNN, KEN - Tapping the Source; Unassigned Territory

PERCY, WALKER - Love in the Ruins; The Thanatos Syndrome

PIERCY, MARGE - Woman on the Edge of Time

PORTIS, CHARLES - Masters of Atlantis

PRIEST, CHRISTOPHER - The Glamour; The Affirmation

PROSE, FRANCINE - Bigfoot Dreams, Marie Laveau

PYNCHON, THOMAS - Gravity's Rainbow; V; The Crying of Lot 49

REED, ISHMAEL - Mumbo Jumbo; The Terrible Twos

RICE, ANNE - The Vampire Lestat; Queen of the Damned

ROBBINS, TOM - Jitterbug Perfume; Another Roadside Attraction

ROTH, PHILIP - The Counterlife

RUSHDIE, SALMON - Midnight's Children; Grimus; The Satanic Verses

SAINT, H. F. - Memoirs of an Invisible Man

SCHOLZ, CARTER & HARCOURT GLENN - Palimpsests

SHEPARD, LUCIUS - Life During Wartime

SIDDONS, ANNE RIVERS - The House Next Door

SPARK, MURIEL - The Hothouse by the East River

SPENCER, SCOTT - Last Night at the Brain Thieves Ball

SUKENICK, RONALD - Up; Down; Out

SUSKIND, PATRICK - Perfume

THEROUX, PAUL - O-Zone

THOMAS, D. M. - The White Hotel

THOMPSON, JOYCE - The Blue Chair; Conscience Place

THOMSON, RUPERT - Dreams of Leaving

THORNBERG, NEWTON - Valhalla

THORNTON, LAWRENCE - Imagining Argentina

UPDIKE, JOHN - Witches of Eastwick; Rogers Version

VLIET, R. G. - Scorpio Rising

VOLLMAN, WILLIAM T. - You Bright and Risen Angels

VONNEGUT, KURT - Galapagos; Slaughterhouse-Five

WALLACE, DAVID FOSTER - The Broom of the System

WEBB, DON - Uncle Ovid's Exercise Book

WHITTEMORE, EDWARD - Nile Shadows; Jerusalem Poker; Sinai Tapestry

WILLARD, NANCY - Things Invisible to See

WOMACK, JACK - Ambient; Terraplane

WOOD, BARI - The Killing Gift

WRIGHT, STEPHEN - M31: A Family Romance

CATSCAN 6 "Shinkansen"

Let me tell you what the 21st Century feels like.

Imagine yourself at an international conference of industrial designers in

Nagoya, Japan. You're not an industrial designer yourself, and you're not

quite sure what you're doing there, but presumably some wealthy civic-

minded group of Nagoyans thought you might have entertainment value, so

they flew you in. You're in a cavernous laser-lit auditorium with 3,000

assorted Japanese, Finns, Germans, Americans, Yugoslavs, Italians, et al., all

wearing identical ID badges, except for a trenchant minority, who have

scribbled "Allons Nagoya" on their badges so that everybody will know

they're French.

There's a curved foam plug stuck in your ear with a thin gray cord

leading to a black plastic gadget the size of a deck of cards. This is an "ICR-

6000 Conference Receiver." It's a five-channel short-range radio, with a

blurry typed serial number stuck to it with a strip of Scotch Tape. You got

the receiver from a table manned by polite young hostesses, who were

passing out vast heaps of these items, like party favors. Of the five channels

offered, Number 1 is Japanese and Number 2 is, purportedly, English. You get

the strong impression that the French would have preferred Number 3 to be

French, but the Conference offers only two "official languages" and channels

3, 4 and 5 have static.

Muted festivities begin, in the best of taste. First a brief Kabuki skit is

offered, by two expatriate Canadians, dressed in traditional robes. Ardent

students of the Kabuki form, the two Canadians execute ritual moves of

exacting precision, accompanied by bizarre and highly stylized verbal

bellowing. They are, however, speaking not Japanese but English. After some

confusion you realize that this piece, "The Inherited Cramp," is meant to be a

comic performance. Weak culture-shocked chuckles arise here and there

from the more adventurous members of the audience. Toward the end you

feel that you might get used to this kind of thing if you saw enough of it.

The performance ends to the warm applause of general relief. Assorted

bigwigs take the stage: a master of ceremonies, the keynote speaker, the

Mayor of Nagoya, the Speaker of the City Council, the Governor of the

Prefecture. And then, accompanied by a silverhaired retainer of impressive

stolid dignity, comes the Crown Prince of Japan.

Opening ceremonies of this kind are among the many obligations of this

patient and graceful young aristocrat. The Crown Prince wears a truly

immaculate suit which, at an impolite guess, probably costs as much as a

small car. As a political entity, this symbolic personage is surrounded by

twin bureaucracies of publicity and security. The security is not immediately

evident. Only later will you discover that the entire building has been

carefully sealed by unobtrusive teams of police. On another day, you will

witness the passage of the Prince's motorcade, his spotless armored black

limousine sporting the national flag, accompanied by three other limos of

courtier-bodyguards, two large squads of motorcycle policemen, half-a-

dozen police black-and-whites, and a chuttering surveillance helicopter. As

you stand gawking on the sidewalk you will be questioned briefly, in a

friendly fashion, by a plainclothes policeman who eyes the suspicious bag

you carry with a professional interest.

At the moment, however, you are listening to the speeches of the Nagoya

politicians. The Prince, his posture impeccable, is also listening, or at least

pretending it with a perfect replica of attention. You listen to the hesitant

English on Channel Two with growing amazement. Never have you heard

political speeches of such utter and consummate vacuity. They consist

entirely of benevolent cliche'. Not a ripple of partisan fervor, not a hint of

ideological intent, colors the translated oratory. Even the most vapid

American, or even Russian, politician cannot resist a dig at a rival, or an in-

crowd reference to some partisan bit of political-correctness--but this is a

ritual of a different order. It dawns on you that nothing will be said. These

political worthies, sponsors and financiers of the event, are there to color the

air with harmless verbal perfume. "You're here, we're here"--everything that

actually needs to be said has already been communicated nonverbally.

The Prince rises to deliver a brief invocation of even more elevated and

poetic meaninglessness. As he steps to the podium, a torrent of flashbulbs

drenches the stage in stinging electrical white. The Prince, surely blinded,

studies a line of his text. He lifts his chin, recites it, and is blinded again by

the flashes. He looks back to the speech, recites a paragraph in a firm voice

with his head lowered, then looks up again, stoically. Again that staccato

blast of glare. It dawns on you that this is the daily nature of this young

gentleman's existence. He dwells within a triple bell-jar of hypermediated

publicity, aristocratic decorum, and paramilitary paranoia. You reflect with a

mingled respect and pity on the numerous rare personages around the

planet who share his unenviable predicament. Later you will be offered a

chance to meet the Prince in a formal reception line, and will go out of your

way to spare him the minor burden of your presence. It seems the least you

can do.

Back in your hotel room, the vapid and low-key Japanese TV is

interrupted by news of a severe California earthquake. By morning swarms

of well-equipped Japanese media journalists will be doing stand-ups before

cracked bridges in San Furansisko and Okran. Distressed Californian natives

are interviewed with an unmistakable human warmth and sympathy.

Japanese banks offer relief money. Medical supplies are flown in. No

particular big deal is made of these acts of charitable solidarity. It's an

earthquake; it's what one does.

You leave Nagoya and take the Shinkansen bullet-train back to Tokyo. It's

a very nice train, the Shinkansen, but it's not from Mars or anything. There's

been a lot of press about the Shinkansen, but it looks harmless enough,

rather quaint actually, somewhat Art Deco with lots of brushed aircraft

aluminum and stereo ads featuring American popstars. It's very clean, but

like all trains it gets too cold inside and then it gets too hot. You've heard

that bullet-trains can do 200 miles an hour but there's no way the thing tops

130 or so, while you're aboard it. You drink a ten percent carbonated peach

soda and listen to your Walkman. The people inside this purported technical

marvel demonstrate the absolute indifference of long habit.

A friend meets you in Tokyo. You board a commuter subway at rush-

hour. It is like an extremely crowded rolling elevator. Everyone hangs limply

from straps with inert expressions suggesting deep meditation or light

hypnosis. Impetus rolls through the tightly-packed bodies like currents

through a thick stand of kelp. It occurs to you that this is the first time you

have been in Japan without attracting vaguely curious glances as a foreigner.

Nobody is looking at anybody. Were any physical threat or commotion

offered on this subway, the situation would swiftly be nightmarish. But since

nobody stirs, the experience is actually oddly soothing.

You have a dinner appointment with a Japanese rock band. You meet in a

restaurant in a section of Tokyo somewhat akin to, say, Greenwich Village in

1955. Its narrow, crooked streets are full of students, courting couples,

coffee-shops. There's a bit of graffiti here and there--not the lashing, crazed

graffiti of American urban areas, but enough to convey a certain heightened

sense of dissidence.

You and your friend meet the two rock stars, their A&R man, and their

manager. The manager drifts off when he realizes that there is no threat of

any actual business transpiring. You're just a fan. With some translation help

from your friend you eagerly question the musicians. You long to know

what's cooking in the Tokyo pop-music scene. It transpires that these

particular rockers listen mostly to electronic European dance music. Their

biggest Japanese hit was a song about Paris sung in English.

One of the rockers asks you if you have ever tried electronic brain

stimulation. No, you say--have you? Yes, but it wasn't much good, really. You

recall that, except for occasional problems with junior yakuza bikers high on

cheap Korean speed, Japan hasn't much of a "drug-problem." Everyone sighs

wistfully and lights more cigarettes.

The restaurant you're in offers an indeterminate nonethnic globalized

cuisine whose remote ancestry may have been French. The table is laid like,

say, London in 1880, with butterballs in crystal glass dishes, filigreed forks

as heavy as lead, fish-knives, and arcanely folded cloth napkins. You ask the

musicians if this restaurant is one of their favorite dives. Actually, no. It's

'way too expensive. Eating in posh restaurants is one of those things that one

just doesn't do much of in Japan, like buying gift melons or getting one's suit

pressed. A simple ham and egg breakfast can cost thirty bucks easy--thirty-

five with orange juice. Sane people eat noodles for breakfast for about a

buck and a half.

Wanting to press this queer situation to the limit, you order the squid. It

arrives and it's pretty good. In fact, the squid is great. Munching a tentacle in

wine-sauce you suddenly realize that you are having a *really good time*.

Having dinner with a Japanese rock band in Tokyo is, by any objective

standard, just about the coolest thing you've ever done!

The 21st Century is here all around you, it's happening, and it's craziness,

but it's not bad craziness, it's an *adventure*. It's a total gas. You are seized

by a fierce sense of existential delight.

Everybody grins. And the A&R man picks up the tab.

Shinkansen Part Two:

The Increasingly Unstrange Case of

Lafcadio Hearn and Rick Kennedy

I was in Japan twice in 1989--two weeks in all. Big deal. This jaunting

hardly makes me an "Old Japan Hand."

But I really wanted to mimic one in this installment of CATSCAN. So I

strongly considered beginning with the traditional Westerner's declaration

that I Understand Nothing About Japan or the Japanese: boy are they ever

mystical, spiritual and inscrutable; why I've been a-livin' here nigh twenty

year with my Japanese wife, Japanese job, Japanese kids and I'm just now a-

scratchin' the surface of the baffling Yamato kokutai ...

These ritual declarations by career Nipponologists date 'way back to the

archetypal Old Japan Hand, Lafcadio Hearn (aka Yakumo Koizumi) 1850-

1904. Not coincidentally, this kind of rhetoric is very useful in making

*yourself* seem impressively mystic, spiritual and inscrutable. A facade of

inscrutable mysticism is especially handy if you're anxious to hide certain

truths about yourself. Lafcadio Hearn, for instance--I love this guy Hearn,

I've been his devotee for years, and could go on about him all day--Hearn

was your basic congenital SF saint-perv, but in a nineteenth century

environment. Hearn was, in brief, a rootless oddball with severe personality

problems and a pronounced gloating taste for the horrific and bizarre. Born

of a misalliance between a British officer and a young Greek girl, Hearn

passed a classically miserable childhood, until fleeing to America at nineteen.

As a free-lance journalist and part-time translator, penniless, shabby,

declasse' and half-blind, Hearn knocked around all over for years--

Cincinnati, New Orleans, the Caribbean--until ending up in Japan in 1890.

There Hearn made the gratifying discovery that the Japanese could not

tell that he was a weirdo. At home Hearn was alien; in Japan, he was merely

foreign. The Meiji-era Japanese respectfully regarded the junketing Hearn as

an influential man of letters, an intellectual, a poet and philosopher, and they

gave him a University position teaching literature to the rising new

generation. Hearn (a man of very genuine talent, treated decently for

perhaps the first time in his life) responded by becoming one of Japan's first

and foremost Western popularizers, emitting reams about Shintoism and

ghosts and soul-transference and the ineffableness of everythinghood.

Hearn had always been pretty big on ineffableness, but Japan seemed to

fertilize the guy's eccentricities, and he became one of the truly great fantasy

writers of all time. If you don't know Hearn's work, you owe it to yourself to

discover it: _Kokoro_, _Gleanings in Buddha-Fields_, _Shadowings_,

_Kwaidan_, _Kotto_, all marvelous books (thoughtfully kept in print by

Tuttle Books, that paragon of crosscultural publishers). Hearn's dark

fantasies rival Dunsany and Lovecraft in their intense, brooding

idiosyncrasy; and as a bonus, his journalistic work contains long sustained

passages of close observation and penetrating insight, as well as charming

period flavor.

What did the Japanese make of all this? Well, after many years, the

authorities finally caught on and fired Hearn -- and they had one of the first

Tokyo University riots on their hands. Hearn was impossible to deal with, he

was a paranoiac with a mean streak a mile wide, but his students genuinely

loved the guy. Hearn really spoke to that generation--the generation of

Japanese youth who found themselves in universities, with their minds

permanently and painfully expanded with queer foreign ideas. Here was one

sensei who truly knew their paradoxical sorrows, and shared them. Hearn's

appeal to the new Japan was powerful, for he was simultaneously

ultramodern and sentimentally antiquarian--an exotic patriot--a Western

Orientalist--a scientific mystic.

Lafcadio Hearn loved Japan. He married a Japanese woman, had Japanese

children, took a Japanese name, and was one of the bare handful of

foreigners ever granted Japanese citizenship. And yet he was always a loner,

a congenital outsider, viewing everyone around him through ever-thickening

lenses of his peculiar personal philosophy. Paradoxically, I believe that

Lafcadio Hearn chose to stay in Japan because Japan was the place that

allowed him to become most himself. He reached some very personal

apotheosis there.

But now let's compare the nineteenth-century Hearn to a contemporary

"Old Japan Hand," Rick Kennedy, author of _Home, Sweet Tokyo_ (published,

rather tellingly, by Kodansha Books of Tokyo and New York). Rick Kennedy,

an employee of the globe-spanning Sony Corporation, writes a weekly

column for the English-language "Japan Times." _Home, Sweet Tokyo_ is a

collection of Kennedy's columns. The apt subtitle is "Life in a Weird and

Wonderful City."

Compared to Hearn, Kennedy has very little in the way of philosophical

spine. This is a magpie collection. Kennedy has an eye for the peculiar that

rivals Hearn's, but no taste at all for the dark and horrific. _Home, Sweet

Tokyo_ is in fact "sweet" and rather cute, with all the boisterous charm of

the upwardly mobile bourgeoisie. There are satires, parodies, in-jokes,

vignettes of daily life in the great metropolis.

And there are interviews, profiles, of the people of Tokyo. Folks of all

sorts: professional pachinko-players, the white-gloved guys who scrub the

subway trains, the dignified chefs of top Tokyo restaurants, office-girls

gamely searching for a rung on a very male corporate ladder.

Hearn did a similar sort of exploratory prying in Japan's nooks and

byways, but the flavor of his reportage is entirely different. Hearn's

Japanese subjects tend to be elfin, evasive personages, alluding to grave

personal tragedies with a flicker of an eyelid and a few stoic verses. Hearn's

subjects are not fully individuated men and women, but incarnated

principles, abstractions, a source for social insights that can degenerate at a

careless touch into racist or jingoistic cliche'.

Kennedy, in stark contrast, treats people as people, hail fellows well met.

As a consequence, his Japan comes across rather like a very crowded but

well-heeled Kiwanis Club. He lacks a morbid interest in life's extremities; but

at least he never lashes his subjects to the Procrustean bed of stereotype. He

looks clear-eyed at postmodern Japan in all its individual variety: eldritch

rural grannies and megalopolitan two-year-olds, uptight accountants and

purple-haired metal kids, Shinto antiquarians and red-hot techno-

visionaries, rarefied literati and dumb-ass TV stars.

This is a Japan which can no longer be tidily filed away under "I" for

"Inscrutable" by a WestCiv Establishment with the self-appointed task of

ordering the world. Japan today is an intensely globalized society with sky-

high literacy, very low crime, excellent life-expectancy, tremendous fashion-

sense, and a staggering amount of the electronic substance we used to call

cash. After centuries of horrific vicissitudes and heartbreaking personal

sacrifice, the Japanese are fat, rich, turbo-charged, and ready to party down.

They are jazzing into the 21st-Century global limelight in their velcro'd

sneakers, their jeans stuffed with spare film-packs and gold-plated VISA

cards. Rick Kennedy's book makes it absolutely clear why the Japanese *fully

deserve* to do this, and why all those Japan-bashing sourpuss spoilsports

ought to lighten up and give 'em room to shine.

Like Hearn, Kennedy has a Japanese wife, Japanese children, an intense

commitment to his adopted home. What has happened in the meantime (i.e.,

during the 20th century) is a slow process of "un-strange-ing," of

deromanticism, de-exoticism, a change from watery dream-colors to the

sharp gleam of flashbulbs and neon. It is a process that science fiction

people, as romantics, are likely to regard with deep ambiguity. We are much

cozier with the Hearns of the world than the brisk and workaday Kennedys.

And yet I must return to Hearn's Paradox: that his attempt to "woo the

Muse of the Odd," as he put it, was not a true marriage, but a search for self-

realization. Kennedy, unlike Hearn, can embrace Otherness without seeking

moral lessons and mystic archetypes. Kennedy, unlike Hearn, can imagine

himself Japanese. He goes farther yet, for Kennedy knows that if he *were*

Japanese, he would not live in Tokyo. A Japanese Rick Kennedy, he says,

would head at once for Los Angeles, that weird and wonderful city, with its

exotic Yankee luxuries of crowd-free tennis courts and private swimming

pools.

And this, it seems to me, is a very worthy insight. This is a true,

postmodern, global cosmopolitanism, rather than Hearn's romantic quest for

Asian grails and unicorns. Cosmopolitanism offers little in the way of spine-

chilling visionary transcendence. Instead, the glamour of Otherness is

internalized, made part of the fabric of daily life. To the global cosmopolite--

an eternal expatriate, no matter what his place of birth--there are no

certainties, no mystic revelations; there are only fluctuating standards of

comparison. The sense-of-wonder is not confined to some distant realm of

Zen or Faerie, safely idealized and outside oneself; instead, *normality itself*

seems more or less disjointed and disquieting, itchy with a numinous glow of

the surreal, "weird and wonderful," as Kennedy says--with the

advantage/drawback that this feeling *never goes away*.

I would urge on every science fiction person the rich experience of

reading Lafcadio Hearn. I share his fascination with thee culture of historical

Japan, the world before the black ships; like Hearn I can mourn its loss. But

it's dead, even if its relics are tended in museums with a nervous care. SF

people need to dote a little less on the long-ago and far-away, and pay more

robust attention to the living: to the elaborate weirdness at work in our own

time. Writers of serious science fiction need to plunge out there into the

bustle and do some basic legwork and come up with some futures people can

believe in. We need to address a new audience: not just the usual SF faithful,

but the real no-kidding folks out there, the global populace, who can see an

old world order disintegrating every time they turn on the TV, but have no

idea what to make of it, what to think about it, what to do. We need to go

beyond using exotic foreigners as templates for our own fantasies; we need

to find the common ground of common global issues. At the very first and

least, we need to demand more translation-work within our own genre. We

need to leap the Berlin Walls of national marketing and publishing. We need

to get in touch.

The walls are going down all over the world, and soon we'll all be in each

other's laps. Japan's just one country, it's not the be-all and end-all. But

Japan is very crowded, with strictly limited resources; because of that, Japan

today is a dry run under 21st-century conditions. It's not the only such

model; Lebanon and El Salvador are small and crowded too. These places

model possible futures; they are choices we can make. It's all the choice

between a sake bash in the Tokyo Disneyland and a hostage-seizure in a

bombed-out embassy. We must learn from these successes and mistakes;

learn about other people, learn from other people, learn to *be* other people.

We can do it. It's not all that hard. It's fun, even. Everybody can help. It

doesn't take transcendent effort or coaching by cultural pundits. Do one six-

billionth of the work of global understanding, and you have every right to

feel proud of yourself.

The subworld of SF has the advantage of (limited) international appeal,

and can do good work here. If we don't do something, some earnest attempt

to understand and explicate and shape the future--the *real* future,

everybody's future, starting *now*--then in all honesty we should abandon

"Science Fiction" as a genre. We shouldn't keep the rags and tatters of the

thing, while abandoning its birthright and its best native claim to intellectual

legitimacy. There are many worthy ways to write fiction, and escapist genres

aplenty for people who want to write amusing nonsense; but this genre

ought to stand for something.

SF can rise to this challenge. It ain't so tough. SF has risen from the

humblest of origins to beat worse odds in the past. We may be crazy but we

ain't stupid. It's a little-known fact (in which I take intense satisfaction) that

there are as many subscribers to *SF Eye* in Japan as there are in the US and

Canada. It's a step. I hope to see us take many more. Let's blunder on out

there, let's take big risks and make real mistakes, let's utter prophecies and

make public fools of ourselves; we're science fiction writers, that's our

goddamn job. At least we can plead the limpid purity of our intentions.

Yoroshiku onegai itashimasu.

CATSCAN 7 "My Rihla"

Abu 'Abdallah ibn Battuta, gentleman and

scholar, late of Tangier, Morocco, has been dead for

six hundred and thirty years. To be remembered under

such circumstances is a feat to compel respect.

Ibn Battuta is known today because he happened

to write a book--or rather, he dictated one, in his

retirement, to a Granadian scribe--called _A Gift to

the Observers, Concerning the Curiosities of Cities

and the Marvels Encountered in Travels_. It's more

often known as "The Rihla of Ibn Battuta," rihla being

an Arabic literary term denoting a pious work

concerned with holy pilgrimage and foreign travel.

Sometimes known as "the Marco Polo of Islam,"

Ibn Battuta claimed to have traveled some seventy

thousand miles during the years 1325-1354, visiting

China, Arabia, India, Ghana, Constantinople, the

Maldive Islands, Indonesia, Anatolia, Persia, Iraq,

Sicily, Zanzibar ... on foot, mind you, or in camel

caravans, or in flimsy medieval Arab dhows, sailing

the monsoon trade winds.

Ibn Battuta travelled for the sake of knowledge

and spiritual advancement, to meet holy men, and to

listen to the wisdom of kings, emirs, and atabegs. On

occasion, he worked as a judge or a courtier, but

mostly he dealt in information--the gossip of the

road, tales of his travels, second-hand homilies

garnered from famous Sufi mystics. He covered a great

deal of territory, but mere exploration was not the

source of his pride.

Mere distance mattered little to Ibn Battuta -- in

any case, he had a rather foggy notion of geography.

But his Moslem universe was cosmopolitan to an extent

unrivalled 'till the modern era. Every pious Moslem,

from China to Chad, was expected to make the holy

pilgrimage to Mecca--and they did so, in vast hordes.

It was a world on the move. In his twenty-year

peregrinations. Ibn Battuta met the same people again

and again. An Arab merchant, for instance, selling

silk in Qanjanfu, China, whose brother sold tangerines

in Fez (or fezzes in Tangier, presumably, when he got

the chance). "How far apart they are," Ibn Battuta

commented mildly. It was not remarkable.

Travel was hazardous, and, of course, very slow.

But the trade routes were open, the caravanserais--

giant government-supported hotels, sometimes capable

of housing thousands--were doing a brisk trade from

Cairo to Delhi to Samarkand. The locals were generally

friendly, and respectful of learned men--sometimes, so

delighted to see foreigners that they fell upon them

with sobs of delight and fought for the prestige of

entertaining them.

Professor Ross Dunn's narrative of _The

Adventures of Ibn Battuta_ made excellent, and perhaps

weirdly apt, reading last April, as I was traveling

some thirty thousand feet above the North Atlantic in

the boozy tin-can comfort of a KLM 747.

"God made the world, but the Dutch made

Holland." This gross impiety would have shocked the

sufi turban off the valorous Ibn Battuta, but we live

today, to paraphrase Greg Bear, in a world of things

so monstrous that they have gone past sin and become

necessity. Large and prosperous sections of the

Netherlands exist well below sea level. God forbid the

rest of us should have to learn to copy this trick,

but when I read the greenhouse-warming statistics I

get a shuddery precognitive notion of myself as an

elderly civil-defense draftee, heaving sandbags at the

angry rising foam ...

That's not a problem for the Dutch at the

moment. They do, however, currently find themselves

confronting another rising tide. "The manure surplus."

The Dutch are setting up a large government agro-

bureaucracy to monitor, transport, and recycle, er,

well, cowshit. They're very big on cheese, the Dutch,

but every time you slice yourself a tasty yellow wedge

of Gouda, there is somewhere, by definition, a

steaming heap of manure. A completely natural

substance, manure; nitrogen, carbon and phosphorous,

the very stuff of life--unless *there's too much of it

in one place at the same time*, when it becomes a

poisonous stinking burden. What goes around, comes

around--an ecological truism as painful as

constipation. We can speculate today about our own six

hundred year legacy: not the airy palaces of the

Moorish Alhambra, I'm afraid, or the graceful spires

of the Taj Mahal, but billions of plastic-wrapped

disposable diapers, mashed into shallow graves ...

So I'm practicing my Arab calligraphy in my

scholarly cell at the Austin madrassa, when a phone

call comes from The Hague. Over the stellar hiss of

satellite transmission, somebody wants me and my

collaborator to talk about cyberspace, artificial

reality, and fractals. Fair enough. A month later I'm

sipping Coke and puffing Dunhills in tourist class,

with a bag full of computer videotapes crammed in the

overhead bin, outdistancing Ibn Battuta with no effort

more strenuous than switching batteries in a Walkman.

Aboard the plane, I strike up a discussion with

a young Italian woman--half-Italian, maybe, as her

father is an Iranian emigre'. She calls herself a

"Green," though her politics seem rather strange--she

sympathizes openly with the persecuted and

misunderstood white Afrikaaners, for instance, and she

insists that the Ayatollah Khomeini was an agent of

British Intelligence. I have a hard time following

these arguments, but when it comes to the relations of

the US and Europe, her sentiments are clear enough.

"After '92, we're going to kick your ass!" she tells

me.

Unheard of. Europeans used to marvel humbly over

our astonishing American highway system and the fact

that our phones work (or used to). That particular

load of manure is now history. The Europeans are

happening now, and they know it. 1989 was a pivotal

year for them, maybe the most momentous popular

upheaval since 1789.

This century has not been a good one for Europe.

Since 1914, the European body-politic has been

wheezing along on one lung, a mass of fresh scar

tissue when it wasn't hemorrhaging blood and bile. But

this century, "The American Century," as we used to

call it in 1920 when there was a lot of it still

before us, is almost gone now. A lot can happen in a

century. Dynasties rise and fall. Philosophies

flourish and crumble. Cities rise, thrive, and are

sacked by Mongols and turned to dust and ghosts.

But in Europe today, the caravanserais are open.

National borders in Europe, which provoked the brutal

slaughter of entire generations in '14 and '44, have

faded to mere tissues, vaporous films, riddled

through-and-through with sturdy money-lined conduits

of trade, tourism, telecommunications. Soon the twelve

nations of the European Community will have one

passport, perhaps one currency. They look to the

future today with an optimism they have not had since

"the lamps went out all over Europe" in World War One.

(Except perhaps for one country, which still remains

mired in the Cold War and a stubborn official

provincialism: Britain. The Dutch feel sorry for

Britain: declining, dirty, brutalized, violent and

full of homeless--far too much, in short, like their

too-close friends, the Americans.)

My Italian acquaintance introduces me to her

mother, who is a passionate devotee of Shirley

MacLaine. Mom wears an Iranian gold bracelet the size

of rappers' jewelry, a diamond-studded knuckleduster.

Her husband, the Iranian emigre', is an architect. His

family was close to the Shah, and is now a scattered

Moslem hejira in a dozen Western capitals, plotting

vengeance in desultory fashion, like so many White

Russians in 1929. They may have a long wait. Father

looks rather tired.

Off the plane, jet-lagged to hell and gone, in

Amsterdam. A volunteer for the Image and Sound

Festival drives me to The Hague in a very small car on

a very large autobahn. Windmills here and there. Days

later I inspect a windmill closely, a multistory

preindustrial power-station of sailwork, levers, gears

and thatch. An incarnation of a late-medieval tech

that America simply never possessed. A somehow

monstrous presence fit to scare the hauberk off Don

Quixote.

The Hague is a nineteenth-century government

town of close-packed four-story townhouses. The

pavements, built on sand, ripple and warp like the

sagging crust of an old pie. Advertisements in the

bus-stops brutally abolish any air of the antique,

though: "Mag ik u iets persoonlijks faxen? De Personal

Fax van Canon. CANON--Meeten al een Voorsprong!" Dutch

is close enough to English to nag at the ear, but it's

landmined with liquid vowels and odd gutturals. The

streets--"straats"--are awash with aging Euro baby-

boomers, leavened with a Dutch-born populace of

imperial emigres -- Dutch-Indonesian, Dutch-Surinamese,

Dutch-Chinese.

On Wednesday, Moluccan separatists bombarded the

Indonesian embassy, near my hotel, with Molotov

cocktails. A dozen zealots were injured. Nobody

outside Holland and Indonesia know much about the

Moluccans, an Asian Moslem ethnic group with a

nationalistic grievance. They'd love to raise hell at

home in Indonesia, but when they do they're shot out

of hand by fascist police with teeth like Dobermans,

so they raise a stink in the old Mother Country

instead, despite the fact that Holland can do almost

nothing for them. Europe is full of exiles--and full

of its own micro-nations: the Flemish, the Magyars,

Gypsies, Corsicans and Bretons, Irish who remember

Cromwell, Jews who remember Nebuchadnezzar, Basques

who remember Hannibal, all like yesterday.

Ibn Battuta's world was similarly polyglot, and

divided into "nations," too, run by mamelukes and

moghuls who doted on tossing dissidents to packs of

ravenous man-eating dogs. Muhammed Tughlug, the

radiant Sultan of Delhi, punished rebels (very loosely

defined) by having them cut in half, skinned alive,

and/or tossed aloft by trained elephants with swords

strapped to their tusks. It was bad news to cross

these worthies, and yet their borders meant little,

and ethnicity even less. A believer was a citizen

anywhere in Islam, his loyalties devoted to

Civilization--the sacred law of the Prophet--and then

to his native city. Ibn Battuta was not a "Moroccan"

countryman or a "Berber" ethnic, but first a learned

Islamic scholar, and second a man of Tangier.

It may soon be much the same in Europe--a vague

attachment to "Western democratic ideals," while one's

sense of patriotism is devoted, not to one's so-called

country, but to Barcelona or Amsterdam, Marseille or

Berlin. (Cities, mind you, with populations every bit

as large as entire nations of the medieval world.) At

this period in history, the aging institution of the

nation-state is being torn from above and below--below

by ethnic separatists, above by the insistent demands

of multinational commerce and the global environment.

Is there a solution for the micronations--

besides, that is, the dark horrific example of the

"Final Solution?" Maybe. Let the Lithuanians "go"--

give them "freedom"--but with no local currency, no

local army, no border tariffs or traffic control, no

control over emigration, and with the phones and faxes

open 24 hours a day. What is left? City-level

government, in a loose ecumenicum.

A good trick, if anyone could pull it off. It's

contrary to our recent political traditions, so it

seems far-fetched and dangerous. But it's been done

before. Six hundred years ago, in another world ...

The fourteenth century, what Barbara Tuchman called _A

Distant Mirror_.

In Alanya, a city of medieval Anatolia, Ibn

Battuta had his first introduction to the interesting

organization known as the fityan. He was invited to

dinner by a remarkably shabby man in an odd felt hat.

Ibn Battuta accepted politely, but doubted that the

young fellow had enough money to manage a proper

feast.

His interpreter laughed, for the shabby young

man was a powerful sheik of the fityan. "The fityans

were corporations of unmarried young men representing

generally the artisan classes of Anatolian towns ...

The code of conduct and initiation ceremonies were

founded on a set of standards and values that went by

the name of futuwwa ... referring in concept to the

Muslim ideal of the `youth' (fata) as the exemplary

expression of the qualities of nobility, honesty,

loyalty and courage. The brothers of the fityan were

expected to lead lives approaching these ideal

qualities, including demonstrations of generous

hospitality to visiting strangers ... By the

thirteenth or fourteenth centuries, the fityan

associations existed in probably every Anatolian town

of any size. In an era of political upheaval and

fragmentation ... the fityan were filling a crucial

civic function of helping to maintain urban

cohesiveness ..."

Far from humble poverty, Ibn Battuta found his

medieval youth-culture hosts occupying a fine downtown

lodge crammed with pricey Byzantine rugs and Iraqi

glassware. The lads were dressed to the nines in long

cloaks, boots, knife-decked cummerbunds and snazzy

white bonnets with pointed white peaks two feet high.

"They brought in a great banquet, with fruits and

sweetmeats, after which they began their singing and

dancing." He was "greatly astonished at their

generosity and innate nobility."

No more so, perhaps, than myself and my Canadian

caravan companion when we found ourselves in a

retrofitted nineteenth-century stove factory downtown

in The Hague. Now a filmhouse, it was crammed with

young Dutch media-devotees in the current

multinational fityan get-up of black jeans and funny

haircuts. Their code of conduct was founded in a set

of standards and values that goes by the name of

"cool." Six hundred years from now, the names of Mark

Pauline, Laurie Anderson and Jean Baudrillard may mean

little, but at the moment they are the stuff of a

Sufi-like mystical bond.

We gave them a few names and second-hand

homilies: Mandelbrot, ART-MATRIX, _Amygdala_, Jaron

Lanier, Ryoichiro Debuchi--with addresses and fax

numbers. We are pagans, of course, and we have video

screens; but basically little happened that would have

surprised the lads of the fityan--except for the

shocking anomaly that many of us were women.

In his travels through Anatolia, Ibn Battuta

stayed with no less than 25 separate fityans. But

then, he was a professional.

In my time off, I tramped the streets seeking

the curiosities of cities and the marvels encountered

in travels. Would the hashish have surprised Ibn

Battuta? I rather doubt it. You can buy hashish in The

Hague in little plastic bags, for about six bucks a

pop, quite openly. A hole-in-the-wall place called The

Jukebox offers a varied menu: Senegalese marijuana,

Swazie, Columbian, Sensemilla ... and various global

subspecies of hash: Chocolata, Ketama, Kabul, Sputnik,

Zero-Zero ... It's a teenage thing, bubblegum.

They're not allowed in bars, Dutch teenagers. They

have to smoke this harmless hashish stuff instead.

They seem rather moody and somber about it, for they

don't kick up their heels, scream, giggle, or frighten

the horses. They just get red-eyed and a bit sluggish,

and listen to old Motown records while sipping orange

soda and playing of all things, backgammon. They huff

hash like monsters and nobody thinks a damn thing of

it. Shocking.

In the Maldive Islands, Ibn Battuta was

appointed a judge. The lax and easy life of the

tropical Indian seas offended his sense of propriety.

Once he sentenced a thief to have his right hand

severed, a standard punishment by the sacred law, and

several sissy Maldivans in the council hall fainted

dead away at the sight of it. The women were worse

yet. Most Maldivan women, he related, "wear only a

waist-wrapper which covers them from the waist to the

lowest part, but the remainder of their body remains

uncovered. Thus they walk about in the bazaars and

elsewhere. When I was appointed judge there, I strove

to put an end to this practice and commanded the women

to wear clothes; but I could not get it done. I would

not let a woman enter my court to make a plaint unless

her body were covered; beyond this, however, I was

unable to do anything."

Poor fellow. Later in his career Ibn Battuta had

the good luck to accompany a slave-train of six

hundred African women as they were force-marched

across the blistering Sahara. There was a great deal

of money in the slave-trade; its master-traders were

very well-respected. Ibn Battuta owned several slaves

in his career, but he was an unlucky master; they

could not keep up with his restless migrations, and

drowned, or froze, or fell ill, or were sold. He does

not keep count of the number of children he sired, but

there were many, mostly by slave-women.

What atrocities are we committing today, that we

too take in stride?

History lives in the Mauritshuis, shelter to a

horde of Rembrandts and Vermeers. Portraits--with that

pre-photographic intensity that an image had when it

was one-of-a-kind, likely the only visual record of

the sitter that would ever be made. The portraits are

formalized, flattering, very studied, and they lie a

lot. The children of the rich pick garlands of flowers

in unlikely getups of velvet and chiffon, expensive

fabrics that a grass-stain would ruin forever. This

kind of portraiture is a dead visual language now, and

when the language no longer works, the lies become

evident, like someone else's old propaganda.

It was a rich and earthy life. Leather, wood,

wool, bloody still-life heaps of slaughtered game. A

woman in satin rides side-saddle with a boar-spear in

one dainty gauntlet. Huntsmen let fly with flintlock

muskets at a foam-snorting pig. The sky has never

known an airplane; these are clouds that have never

been seen from above, fleecy and untainted by smog.

But there is honesty, too. Vermeer's famous Girl

in a Blue Turban is not posed, but caught in an

instant in the mind's eye. She is plainly dressed, and

her sweet frail face strikes the viewer in a sudden

rush, the very opposite of all those formal images of

Dutch aristos with unearned power and too much

jewelry.

Here are Rembrandt's self-portraits--a big-nosed

kid of twenty-two or so, striking a pose in fake-

looking armor, the detail excellent, but perhaps a bit

forced. Transmuted by time and experience, he becomes

a big-nosed saggy-eyed veteran, a gold pendant in one

earlobe. Less youth--but more gold. And a lightening-

quick brushwork that catches the play of light with an

almost frightening ease.

Flattery was their stock in trade. They knew it

was a shuck, a stunt, a trick. Ever notice how good

artists can make each other look? With their palettes

hooked over their thumbs they resemble philosopher-

kings. The big money was in flattery, but they were

restless. Here and there real-life boils out in a

rush. J. V. D. Heyde (1637-1712) paints the Jesuit

Church of Dusseldorf. A couple of black-clad Jesuits

tramp the street talking, very likely up to no good. A

beggar-woman nurses a baby, with an older kid taking

alms in the gutter. Who is the father? Ibn Battuta?

Some working-stiff and his wife push a monster

wheelbarrow up the hill, putting their backs into it.

Dogs piss and tussle, and loungers bowl ninepins in

the public square.

F. van Mieris (1635-1681) clearly spent a lot of

time in bars. Here, taken from low-life, is a wasted

blonde barmaid in a white dress, pouring wine for a

redheaded captain-at-arms. In the doorway, a red dog

fucks a white bitch, a symbol as stone-obvious as

being hit in the head with a bung-starter.

A block away from the Mauritshuis is a shopping

district, the streets bent and skinny and pre-

automotive, an open-air mall. MEGA WORLD

COMPUTERWINKELS, reads the sign outside the software

shop. Soon all Europe will be mega world

computerwinkels, cool nets of data, a cybernetic

Mecca. Our Mecca will be electronic, and you'll be a

nobody 'till you've made that sacred pilgrimage.

We look to the future. Extrapolation is

powerful, but so is analogy, and history's lessons

must be repeated helplessly, until they are seen and

understood and deliberately broken. In 54 Javastraat,

the Ambassade van Iran has telecameras trained on its

entrances. A wounded Islam is alive and convulsing in

fevered spasms.

65 Zeestraat contains the Panorama Mesdag, the

nineteenth century's answer to cyberspace. Tricks of

light are harnessed to present a vast expanse of

intricately painted, cunningly curved canvas, 360

degrees in the round. It presents, to the stunned eye,

the seaside resort of Scheveningen, 1881 A.D. You

stand on the center on a round wooden platform, a kind

of faux-beachhouse, fenced in by railings; at your

feet stretches an expanse of 100% real sand, studded

with torn nets, rusting anchors, washed-up wooden

shoes, fading cunningly into the canvas. This must

surely be Reality--there's trash in it, it has to be

real. The Panorama's false horizon will not sit still

for the eye, warping in and out like a mescaline trip.

Coal smoke hangs black and static from a dozen painted

stacks, the bold ancestry of our current crimes

against the atmosphere.

There used to be dozens of these monster

Panoramas, in Paris, Hamburg, London. The Panorama is

a dead medium, as dead as the stereograph, whose

ungainly eye-gripping tin hood is now reborn as the

head-wrapping Sony Watchmans of Jaron Lanier's Virtual

Reality.

It all returns. The merchants and pilgrims of

Ibn Battuta's flourishing Islam push their trade-

routes farther, farther. Trade expands, populations

swarm, laws and libraries grow larger and more

refined. At length trade opens to an obscure corner of

Siberia, where a certain species of rodent harbors a

certain flea.

Ibn Battuta witnesses the result, without ever

understanding it. June, 1348: travellers tell him of a

virulent unknown disease raging in Gaza, a thousand

people dying every day. Swellings appear in groin and

neck and armpits, with nausea and delirium. If it

takes to the lungs, the victim spits blood and dies

within hours. In the town of Homs, in Syria, Ibn

Battuta is engulfed by the wave of Black Death. Three

hundred die on the day of his arrival there.

In Damascus, two thousand are dying each day and

the great polyglot metropolis has shuddered to a halt.

The amirs, the sharifs, the judges, and all the

classes of the Moslem people, have assembled in the

Great Mosque to supplicate God. After a night of

prayer, they march out at dawn, barefoot, the Holy

Koran in their hands. And then:

"The entire population of the city joined in the

exodus, male and female, small and large, the Jews

went out with their book of the law and the Christians

with their Gospel, their women and children with them;

the whole concourse of them in tears and humble

supplications, imploring the favor of God through His

Books and His Prophets."

As the pestilence lurches from city to city,

from mosque to caravanserai, the afflicted scatter in

terror, carrying their fleas like pearls throughout

the vast linked network of the civilized world. From

China to the Atlantic coast, Ibn Battuta's world is

one, and therefore terribly vulnerable. The Great Wall

of China is no defense; and Europe's foremost traders,

the cosmopolitan Genoans and Venetians, will ship a

cargo of death throughout the Mediterranean. Paris,

Barcelona, Valencia, Tunis, Cairo, Damascus, Aleppo

and Bordeaux will all suffer equal calamity in the

dreadful spring and summer of 1348. Their scientific

experts, those doctors who survive, will soberly

advise their patients to apply egg yolks to the

buboes, wear magical amulets, and have their sickbeds

strewn with fresh flowers.

Ibn Battuta is now forty-five. Perhaps unnerved

by the plague, he decides to return home to Tangier

after twenty-five years on the road. For a while, the

seasoned traveller outruns the horror, but it soon

catches up with him again. When he reaches Tangier at

last, the Death has come and gone. His father has been

dead for fifteen years. But the plague has killed his

aged mother. He misses her by mere months.

The havoc is unspeakable, beyond imagination.

The Plague will return again in the next generation,

and the next again, emptying cities and annihilating

dynasties. The very landscape will change: irrigation

canals will silt up, grass will grow over the trade-

roads, forests will grow in old villages. It is

Apocalypse.

Life will, nevertheless, go on. Civilization,

pruned back bloodily and scourged by God Himself,

refuses to collapse. History lurches under the blow,

changes course--and moves on. A century of horror will

fade, and, unguessed by anyone, a Renaissance beckons...

Ibn Battuta will meet a young Muslim poet from

Spain, named Ibn Juzayy. Together they will compose a

formal rihla of his travels. He works from memory--a

vivid and well-trained memory, for Ibn Battuta, as a

scholar of repute, can recite the entire Koran

unaided, as well as many canons of the sacred law.

Nevertheless, some poetic license will be taken, some

episodes distorted, mis-remembered, or confused, some

outright lies told. The great traveller will be

regarded by many as a charlatan, or as a mere

entertainer, a spinner of fantastic tales.

His Rihla will be little known until the

nineteenth century, when European scholars discover it

with astonishment and wonder.

CATSCAN 9 "Digital Dolphins in the Dance of Biz"

"It's the crystallization of a community!" the organizer exulted. He

was a skinny, manic, handwaving guy, with a glittering eye and a sly toothy

grin. He wore slacks, a zippered shirt of a color not found in nature, and a

two-foot-tall novelty cowboy-hat, of bright purple felt, with a polka-dot

hatband.

The "community" in question were computer game designers,

swarming in a big roadside hotel in Silicon Valley, for four days in March

1991. There were close to four hundred of them. Time once again for

"Computer Game Developers' Conference." This was the Fifth Annual gig, and

the biggest one yet for "gaming professionals," and the best yet, maybe even

the richest yet -- but, according to what I heard over the wine and cheese, it

was somewhat less weird than the earlier ones. Almost dignified by

contrast, almost professional. Some side-effect of all that "crystallization,"

presumably....

Five brief years ago, the very first such game-design conference had

been conjoined in Chris Crawford's living room, and with room to spare. Mr.

Crawford was the gentleman in the purple twenty-gallon hat.

I recognized the funny-hat syndrome. Made me feel right at home.

When I first met Damon Knight, at Clarion, this legendary SF critic, editor and

organizer had shown up with a big white bushel-basket beard, half-a-dozen

hollow plastic baseball bats, and great bounding bag full of rubber

superballs, which he proceeded to fling into the hallways and whack with

vim. Damon Knight, as a turbo-weirdo, a veritable ne plus ultra of cracked

genre loon, does not even have to try to pass for normal. And neither does

Chris Crawford. This is pretty much what genuine "power" and "influence"

look like, in a milieu of creative lunatics.

Chris Crawford is founder of the gaming conference, author of three

books and thirteen computer games, and the premier critic, theorist, and

analyst for THE JOURNAL OF COMPUTER GAME DESIGN: "The finest periodical

dedicated to computer game design -- the longest-running periodical

dedicated to computer game design -- the ONLY periodical dedicated to

computer game design!"

Computer gaming, like science fiction, has old roots; they even share a

common ancestor in H.G. Wells, a great player of simulation war-games.

But as a conscious profession, "computer game design" is only five years old.

Science fiction writing as a conscious profession dates back to Knight's

founding of the Milford Conference in 1956, followed, almost ten leisurely

years later, by his establishment of the SFWA. The metabolism of computer

gaming is very swift. Science fiction writers are to computer game

designers as mosasaurs are to dolphins.

So, I had arrived in San Jose at the functional equivalent of a SFWA

gig. A neatly desktop-published programme announced, on page one, "Our

Goals for the Conference: * to foster information exchange among

professionals in the computer game development industry, * to strengthen

the network of personal relationships in the computer game development

community, * to increase artistic and financial recognition for computer game

developers, and * to enhance the quality of entertainment software."

Instantly recognizable SFWA committeespeak -- people trying hard to

sound like serious professionals. Let's hear those goals again, in actual

English: * to hang out and gossip; * to meet old friends again; * to try to

figure out some way to make more money and fame from obstreperous

publishers, crooked distributors, and other powerful sons-of-bitches; and,

(last and conspicuously least) * to kind of try and do a better job artistically.

Pretty much the same priorities as any Nebula gig.

The attendees were younger, different demographics than the SFWA,

but then their pursuit is younger, too. They looked a little different: still

mostly white guys, still mostly male, still mostly myopic, but much more of

that weird computer-person vibe: the fuzzy Herman Melville beards, the

middle-aged desk-spread that comes from punching deck sixty hours a

week, whilst swilling endless Mountain Dews and Jolt Colas, in open console-

cowboy contempt of mere human flesh and its metabolic need for exercise

and nutrition... There were a few more bent engineers, more techies gone

seriously dingo, than you'd see at any SFWA gig. And a faint but definite

flavor of Hollywood: here and there, a few genuinely charismatic operators,

hustlers, guys in sharp designer suits, and career gals who jog, and send

faxes, and have carphones.

As a group, they're busily recapitulating arguments that SF had

decades ago. The number one ideological struggle of CGDC '91 -- an actual

panel debate, the best-attended and the liveliest -- concerned "depth of play

versus presentation." Which is more important -- the fun of a game, its

inherent qualities of play -- or, the grooviness of its graphics and sound, its

production values? This debate is the local evolutionary equivalent of

"Sense of Wonder" versus "Literary Excellence" and is just about as likely to

be resolved.

And then there's the ever-popular struggle over terminology and

definition. ("What Is Science Fiction?") What is a "computer-game?" Not

just "videogames" certainly -- that's kid stuff ("sci-fi"). Even "Computer

Games" is starting to sound rather musty and declasse', especially as the

scope of our artistic effort is widening, so that games look less and less like

"games," and more and more like rock videos or digitized short films.

Maybe the industry would be better off if we forgot all about "games," and

suavely referred to our efforts as "computer entertainment" ("speculative

fiction").

And then there are the slogans and the artistic rules-of-thumb.

"Simple, Hot, and Deep." A game should be "simple": easy to learn, without

excess moving parts and irrelevant furbelows to burden the player's

comprehension. It should be "hot" -- things should happen, the pace should

not lag, it should avoid dead spots, and maintain interest of all players at all

times. And it should be "deep" -- it should be able to absorb as much

strategic ingenuity as the player is willing to invest; there should be layer

after layer of subtlety; it should repay serious adult attention. "An hour to

learn, a lifetime to master."

And: "Throw the first one away." Game design is an iterative process.

Games should be hammered into shape, tested, hammered again, tested

again. The final product may bear as little relation to the original "idea" as

the average Hollywood film does to the shooting script. Good game-testers

can be as vital and useful as good editors in fiction; probably more so.

There are other issues of artistic expression. There is, for instance,

censorship, both external, and self-imposed. Young kids like computer

games; even quite sophisticated games end up in the hands of little kids, and

are designed accordingly. The game "Maniac Mansion" was pulled from the

shelves of the Toys-R-Us chain because (horror) it had the word "lust" on the

box!

"Hidden Agenda" is a very innovative and highly politicized

simulation game, in which the player must take the role of President of a

small and turbulent Central American country, menaced by internal violence

and Cold War geopolitics. "Hidden Agenda" is universally admired, but had

a hard time finding a publisher.

There was an earnest panel on ethics in graphic violence. When a

villain is shot in a game, should the designer incorporate digitized blood and

guts in the scene? Some game designers feel quite disturbed about "the

Nintendo War" in the Gulf, in much the way that some SF writers felt, some

years back, about the advent of Reagan's "Star Wars." "Space exploration"

had seemed a noble thing, until the prospective advent of orbital x-ray laser

fortresses. Was this what all our shiny rocket ships were supposed to be

about, in the end? Now game designers feel a similar sneaking guilt and a

similar sense of betrayal, suspecting that videogames have in fact cheapened

violence, and made inflicting death-by-computer seem a fine occupation for

American youth. It seems perfectly fine to kill "enemies" with cybernetic

air-strikes, as long as their blood doesn't actually splatter the VDT screen...

And then there's pornography, already present in the burgeoning CD-

ROM market. If you're playing strip-poker with a virtual digitized Playboy-

model, is that harmless fun-for-guys stuff, with nobody exploited, nobody

hurt? Or is it some kind of (gulp) hideously oppressive dehumanized

computer-assisted sex-objectification?

And then, of course, there's business. Biz. Brass tacks. Your

average game designer makes rather more than your average SFWA

member. It's still not a living wage. The gamers have to work harder, they

have more specialized skills, they have less creative control, and the pace is

murderous. Sixty-hour-weeks are standard in the industry, and there's no

such thing as a "no-layoffs" policy in the software biz. Everybody wants to

hire a hard-working, technically talented enthusiast; having found such a

person, it is standard to put him on the "burnout track" and work him to

collapse in five years flat, leaving the staggering husk to limp away from

"entertainment" to try and find a straight job someplace, maintaining C code.

As "professionalism" spreads its pinstriped tentacles, the pioneers and

the lone wolves are going to the wall. There is "consolidation" in the

industry, that same sinister development that has led written SF deeper and

deeper into the toils of gigantic multinational publishing cartels and

malignant bookstore chains. "Software chains" have sprung up: Babbage's,

Electronic Boutique, Walden Software, Soft Warehouse, Egghead. The big

game publishers are getting bigger, the modes of publishing and distribution

are calcifying and walling-out the individual entrepreneur.

"Sequelism" is incredibly common; computer gaming builds off

established hits even more shamelessly than SF's nine-part trilogy-trilogies.

And "games" in general are becoming more elaborate: larger teams of

specialized workers tackling pixel animation, soundtrack, box design; more

and more man-hours invested into the product, by companies that now look

less like young Walt Disney drawing in a tabletop in Kansas, and much more

like old Walt Disney smoking dollar cigars in Hollywood. It's harder and

harder for a single creative individual, coming from outside, to impose his

vision on the medium.

Some regard this development as a healthy step up the ladder to the

Real Money: Lucasfilm Games, for instance, naturally wants to be more like

its parent Lucasfilm, and the same goes for Walt Disney Computer.

But others suspect that computer-gaming may suffer artistically (and

eventually financially) by trying to do too much for too many. Betty Boop

cartoons were simple and cheap, but were tremendously popular at the time

of their creation, and are still cherished today. Fleischer Studios came a

cropper when they tried to go for full-animation feature films, releasing

bloated, overproduced bombs like GULLIVER that tried and failed to appeal

to a mass audience.

And then there is The Beast Men Call 'Prodigy.' Prodigy is a national

computer network that has already absorbed nine hundred million dollars of

start-up money from IBM and Sears. Prodigy is, in short, a Major Player. In

the world of computer gaming, $900,000,000 is the functional equivalent of

nuclear superpower status. And Prodigy is interested in serious big-time

"computer entertainment." Prodigy must win major big-time participation

by straight people, by computer illiterates. To survive, it must win an

entirely new and unprecedently large popular audience.

And Prodigy was at the gaming conference to get the word out.

Prodigy subscribers play twelve thousand games of "Chief Executive Officer"

every day! What Prodigy wants is, well, the patronage of Normal People.

Nothing offensive, nothing too wacky, nothing too weird. They want to be

the Disney Channel of Cyberspace. They want entirely new kinds of

computer games. Games that look and smell like primetime TV, basically. A

crisply dressed Prodigy representative strongly urged game-designers

present to "lose the Halloween costumes." Forget "the space stuff" and "the

knights in armor." Prodigy wants games normal folks will play, something

that reflects general American experience. Something like... hmmm... "a high

school popularity contest."

The audience seemed stunned. Scarcely a human being among them,

of either sex, could have ever won a high school popularity contest. If they'd

ever been "popular," they would never have spent so much time in front of

computers. They would have been out playing halfback, or getting laid, or

doing other cool high-school things -- doing anything but learning how to

program. Not only were they stunned, but they rather resented the

suggestion; the notion that, after years of trying to be Frank Frazetta, they

were suddenly to become Norman Rockwell. I heard sullen mutterings later

about "Ozzie and Harriet Prodigy droids."

And yet -- this may well be The Future for "computer

entertainment." Why the hell does prime-time TV look as bad and stupid as

it does? There are very good reasons for this; it's not any kind of accident.

And Prodigy understands those reasons as well or better than any wacko

gamedesigner in a big purple hat.

Bleak as this future prospect may seem, there was no lack of

optimism, the usual ecstatic vaporware common to any business meeting of

"computer people." Computer game designers have their faces turned

resolutely to the future; they have little in the way of "classics." Their grails

are all to come, on the vast resistless wings of technological advance. At the

moment, "interactive characters" in games, characters that behave

realistically, without scripts, and challenge or befriend the player, are

primitive and scarcely workable constructs. But wait till we get Artificial

Intelligence! Then we'll build characters who can carry out dramas all by

themselves!!

And games are becoming fatter and more elaborate; so much so that

the standard money-making target machine, the cheap IBM-PC clone with

the 16-bit 8088 chip running at five megahertz, is almost unable to hold

them. Origin's state-of-the-art "Wing Commander" game can take up half a

hard disk. But bigger machines are coming soon. Faster, with much better

graphics. Digital sound as good as stereos, and screens better than TV!

Cheap, too!

And then there's CD-ROM. Software, recorded on a shiny compact

disk, instead of bloated floppies and clunking hard disks. You can put

fifteen hundred (1500!) Nintendo cartridge games onto one compact disk --

and it costs only a dollar to make! Holy Cow!

The industry is tough and hardened now. It survived the Great Crash

of 1984, which had once seemed the end of everything. It's crewed by

hardy veterans. And just look at that history! Why, twenty years ago there

was nothing here at all; now computer entertainment's worth millions! Kids

with computers don't do anything much with them at all, except play games

-- and their parents would admit the same thing, if they told the truth. And

in the future -- huge games, involving thousands of people, on vast modem-

linked networks! Of course, those networks may look much like, well,

Prodigy....

But even without networks, the next generation of PCs will be a thing

of dazzlement. Of course, most everything written for the old PC's, and for

Macs and Amigas and such, will be unceremoniously junked, along with the

old PC's themselves. Thousands of games... thousands of man-hours of labor

and design... erased from human memory, a kind of cultural apocalypse...

Everything simply gone, flung out in huge beige plastic heaps like junked

cars. Dead tech.

But perhaps "cultural apocalypse" is overstating matters. Who cares if

people throw away a bunch of obsolete computers? After all, they're

obsolete. So what if you lose all the software, too? After all, it's just

outdated software. They're just games. It's not like they're real art.

And there's the sting.

A sting one should remember, and mull upon, when one hears of

proposals to digitize the novel. The Sony reader, for instance. A little hand-

held jobby, much like its kissing cousin the Nintendo Game Boy, but with a

print-legible screen.

Truck down to the local Walden Software, and you buy the local

sword-and-planet trilogy right on a disk! Probably has a game tie-in, too:

read the book; play the game!

And why stop there? After all, you've got all this digital processing-

power going to waste.... Have it be an illustrated book! Illustrated with

animated sequences! And wait -- this book has a soundtrack! What genius!

Now even the stupidest kid in the block is gonna want to learn to read. It's a

techical fix for the problem of withering literature!

And think -- you could put a hundred SF books on a compact disk for

a buck! If they're public domain books.... Still, if there's enough money in it,

you can probably change the old-fashioned literary copyright laws in your

favor. Failing that, do it in Taiwan or Thailand or Hong Kong, where software

piracy is already deeply embedded in the structure of business. (Hong Kong

pirates can steal a computer game, crack the software protection, and

photocopy the rules and counters, and sell it all back to the US in a ziplock

baggie, in a week flat. Someday soon books will be treated like this!)

Digital Books for the Information Age -- books that aspire to the

exalted condition of software! In the, well, "cultural logic of postmodern

capitalism," all our art wants to be digital now. First, so you can have it.

Replicate it. Reproduce it, without loss of fidelity. And, second -- and this is

the hidden agenda -- so you can throw it away. And never have to look at

it again.

How long will the first generation of "reading-machines" last? As long

as the now utterly moribund Atari 400 game machine? Possibly. Probably

not. If you write a "book" for any game machine -- if you write a book that

is software -- you had better be prepared to live as game software people

live, and think as game software people think, and survive as game

software people survive.

And they're pretty smart people really. Good fun to hang out with.

Those who work for companies are being pitilessly worked to death. Those

who work for themselves are working themselves to death, and, without

exception, they all have six or seven different ways of eking out a living in

the crannies of silicon culture. Those who own successful companies, and

those who write major hits, are millionaires. This doesn't slow down their

workaholic drive though; it only means they get bigger and nicer toys.

They're very bright, unbelievably hard-working, very put-upon; fast

on their feet, enamored of gambling... and with a sadly short artistic

lifespan. And they're different. Very different. Digital dolphins in their

dance of biz -- not like us print-era mosasaurs.

Want a look at what it would be like? Read THE JOURNAL OF

COMPUTER GAME DESIGN (5251 Sierra Road, San Jose, CA 95132 -- $30/six

issues per year). It's worth a good long look. It repays close attention.

And don't say I didn't warn you.

CATSCAN 10 "A Statement Of Principle"

I just wrote my first nonfiction book. It's called THE HACKER

CRACKDOWN: LAW AND DISORDER ON THE ELECTRONIC FRONTIER. Writing this

book has required me to spend much of the past year and a half in the

company of hackers, cops, and civil libertarians.

I've spent much time listening to arguments over what's legal,

what's illegal, what's right and wrong, what's decent and what's

despicable, what's moral and immoral, in the world of computers and

civil liberties. My various informants were knowledgeable people who

cared passionately about these issues, and most of them seemed well-

intentioned. Considered as a whole, however, their opinions were a

baffling mess of contradictions.

When I started this project, my ignorance of the issues involved

was genuine and profound. I'd never knowingly met anyone from the

computer underground. I'd never logged-on to an underground bulletin-

board or read a semilegal hacker magazine. Although I did care a great

deal about the issue of freedom of expression, I knew sadly little about

the history of civil rights in America or the legal doctrines that

surround freedom of the press, freedom of speech, and freedom of

association. My relations with the police were firmly based on the

stratagem of avoiding personal contact with police to the greatest

extent possible.

I didn't go looking for this project. This project came looking

for me. I became inextricably involved when agents of the United States

Secret Service, acting under the guidance of federal attorneys from

Chicago, came to my home town of Austin on March 1, 1990, and

confiscated the computers of a local science fiction gaming publisher.

Steve Jackson Games, Inc., of Austin, was about to publish a gaming-book

called GURPS Cyberpunk.

When the federal law-enforcement agents discovered the electronic

manuscript of CYBERPUNK on the computers they had seized from Mr.

Jackson's offices, they expressed grave shock and alarm. They declared

that CYBERPUNK was "a manual for computer crime."

It's not my intention to reprise the story of the Jackson case in

this column. I've done that to the best of my ability in THE HACKER

CRACKDOWN; and in any case the ramifications of March 1 are far from

over. Mr Jackson was never charged with any crime. His civil suit

against the raiders is still in federal court as I write this.

I don't want to repeat here what some cops believe, what some

hackers believe, or what some civil libertarians believe. Instead, I

want to discuss my own moral beliefs as a science fiction writer --

such as they are. As an SF writer, I want to attempt a personal

statement of principle.

It has not escaped my attention that there are many people who

believe that anyone called a "cyberpunk" must be, almost by definition,

entirely devoid of principle. I offer as evidence an excerpt from Buck

BloomBecker's 1990 book, SPECTACULAR COMPUTER CRIMES. On page 53, in a

chapter titled "Who Are The Computer Criminals?", Mr. BloomBecker

introduces the formal classification of "cyberpunk" criminality.

"In the last few years, a new genre of science fiction has arisen

under the evocative name of 'cyberpunk.' Introduced in the work of

William Gibson, particularly in his prize-winning novel NEUROMANCER,

cyberpunk takes an apocalyptic view of the technological future. In

NEUROMANCER, the protagonist is a futuristic hacker who must use the

most sophisticated computer strategies to commit crimes for people who

offer him enough money to buy the biological creations he needs to

survive. His life is one of cynical despair, fueled by the desire to

avoid death. Though none of the virus cases actually seen so far have

been so devastating, this book certainly represents an attitude that

should be watched for when we find new cases of computer virus and try

to understand the motivations behind them.

"The New York Times's John Markoff, one of the more perceptive and

accomplished writers in the field, has written than a number of computer

criminals demonstrate new levels of meanness. He characterizes them, as

do I, as cyberpunks."

Those of us who have read Gibson's NEUROMANCER closely will be

aware of certain factual inaccuracies in Mr. BloomBecker's brief review.

NEUROMANCER is not "apocalyptic." The chief conspirator in NEUROMANCER

forces Case's loyalty, not by buying his services, but by planting

poison-sacs in his brain. Case is "fueled" not by his greed for money

or "biological creations," or even by the cynical "desire to avoid

death," but rather by his burning desire to hack cyberspace. And so

forth.

However, I don't think this misreading of NEUROMANCER is based on

carelessness or malice. The rest of Mr. BloomBecker's book generally is

informative, well-organized, and thoughtful. Instead, I feel that Mr.

BloomBecker manfully absorbed as much of NEUROMANCER as he could without

suffering a mental toxic reaction. This report of his is what he

actually *saw* when reading the novel.

NEUROMANCER has won quite a following in the world of computer

crime investigation. A prominent law enforcement official once told me

that police unfailingly conclude the worst when they find a teenager

with a computer and a copy of NEUROMANCER. When I declared that I too

was a "cyberpunk" writer, she asked me if I would print the recipe for a

pipe-bomb in my works. I was astonished by this question, which struck

me as bizarre rhetorical excess at the time. That was before I had

actually examined bulletin-boards in the computer underground, which I

found to be chock-a-block with recipes for pipe-bombs, and worse. (I

didn't have the heart to tell her that my friend and colleague Walter

Jon Williams had once written and published an SF story closely

describing explosives derived from simple household chemicals.)

Cyberpunk SF (along with SF in general) has, in fact, permeated

the computer underground. I have met young underground hackers who use

the aliases "Neuromancer," "Wintermute" and "Count Zero." The Legion of

Doom, the absolute bete noire of computer law-enforcement, used to

congregate on a bulletin-board called "Black Ice."

In the past, I didn't know much about anyone in the underground,

but they certainly knew about me. Since that time, I've had people

express sincere admiration for my novels, and then, in almost the same

breath, brag to me about breaking into hospital computers to chortle

over confidential medical reports about herpes victims.

The single most stinging example of this syndrome is "Pengo," a

member of the German hacker-group that broke into Internet computers

while in the pay of the KGB. He told German police, and the judge at

the trial of his co-conspirators, that he was inspired by NEUROMANCER

and John Brunner's SHOCKWAVE RIDER.

I didn't write NEUROMANCER. I did, however, read it in

manuscript and offered many purportedly helpful comments. I praised

the book publicly and repeatedly and at length. I've done everything I

can to get people to read this book.

I don't recall cautioning Gibson that his novel might lead to

anarchist hackers selling their expertise to the ferocious and repulsive

apparat that gave the world the Lubyanka and the Gulag Archipelago. I

don't think I could have issued any such caution, even if I'd felt the

danger of such a possibility, which I didn't. I still don't know in

what fashion Gibson might have changed his book to avoid inciting

evildoers, while still retaining the integrity of his vision -- the very

quality about the book that makes it compelling and worthwhile.

This leads me to my first statements of moral principle.

As a "cyberpunk" SF writer, I am not responsible for every act

committed by a Bohemian with a computer. I don't own the word

"cyberpunk" and cannot help where it is bestowed, or who uses it, or to

what ends.

As a science fiction writer, it is not my business to make people

behave. It is my business to make people imagine. I cannot control

other people's imaginations -- any more than I would allow them to

control mine.

I am, however, morally obliged to speak out when acts of evil are

committed that use my ideas or my rhetoric, however distantly, as a

justification.

Pengo and his friends committed a grave crime that was worthy of

condemnation and punishment. They were clever, but treacherously

clever. They were imaginative, but it was imagination in a bad cause.

They were technically accomplished, but they abused their expertise for

illicit profit and to feed their egos. They may be "cyberpunks" --

according to many, they may deserve that title far more than I do -- but

they're no friends of mine.

What is "crime"? What is a moral offense? What actions are evil

and dishonorable? I find these extraordinarily difficult questions. I

have no special status that should allow me to speak with authority on

such subjects. Quite the contrary. As a writer in a scorned popular

literature and a self-professed eccentric Bohemian, I have next to no

authority of any kind. I'm not a moralist, philosopher, or prophet.

I've always considered my "moral role," such as it is, to be that of a

court jester -- a person sometimes allowed to speak the unspeakable, to

explore ideas and issues in a format where they can be treated as games,

thought-experiments, or metaphors, not as prescriptions, laws, or

sermons.

I have no religion, no sacred scripture to guide my actions and

provide an infallible moral bedrock. I'm not seeking political

responsibilities or the power of public office. I habitually question

any pronouncement of authority, and entertain the liveliest skepticism

about the processes of law and justice. I feel no urge to conform to

the behavior of the majority of my fellow citizens. I'm a pain in the

neck.

My behavior is far from flawless. I lived and thrived in Austin,

Texas in the 1970s and 1980s, in a festering milieu of arty crypto-

intellectual hippies. I've committed countless "crimes," like

millions of other people in my generation. These crimes were of the

glamorous "victimless" variety, but they would surely have served to put

me in prison had I done them, say, in front of the State Legislature.

Had I lived a hundred years ago as I live today, I would probably

have been lynched by outraged fellow Texans as a moral abomination. If

I lived in Iran today and wrote and thought as I do, I would probably be

tried and executed.

As far as I can tell, moral relativism is a fact of life. I

think it might be possible to outwardly conform to every jot and tittle

of the taboos of one's society, while feeling no emotional or

intellectual commitment to them. I understand that certain philosophers

have argued that this is morally proper behavior for a good citizen.

But I can't live that life. I feel, sincerely, that my society is

engaged in many actions which are foolish and shortsighted and likely to

lead to our destruction. I feel that our society must change, and

change radically, in a process that will cause great damage to our

present system of values. This doesn't excuse my own failings, which I

regret, but it does explain, I hope, why my lifestyle and my actions are

not likely to make authority feel entirely comfortable.

Knowledge is power. The rise of computer networking, of the

Information Society, is doing strange and disruptive things to the

processes by which power and knowledge are currently distributed.

Knowledge and information, supplied through these new conduits, are

highly corrosive to the status quo. People living in the midst of

technological revolution are living outside the law: not necessarily

because they mean to break laws, but because the laws are vague,

obsolete, overbroad, draconian, or unenforceable. Hackers break laws

as a matter of course, and some have been punished unduly for relatively

minor infractions not motivated by malice. Even computer police,

seeking earnestly to apprehend and punish wrongdoers, have been accused

of abuse of their offices, and of violation of the Constitution and the

civil statutes. These police may indeed have committed these "crimes."

Some officials have already suffered grave damage to their reputations

and careers -- all the time convinced that they were morally in the

right; and, like the hackers they pursued, never feeling any genuine

sense of shame, remorse, or guilt.

I have lived, and still live, in a counterculture, with its own

system of values. Counterculture -- Bohemia -- is never far from

criminality. "To live outside the law you must be honest" was Bob

Dylan's classic hippie motto. A Bohemian finds romance in the notion

that "his clothes are dirty but his hands are clean." But there's

danger in setting aside the strictures of the law to linchpin one's

honor on one's personal integrity. If you throw away the rulebook to

rely on your individual conscience you will be put in the way of

temptation.

And temptation is a burden. It hurts. It is grotesquely easy to

justify, to rationalize, an action of which one should properly be

ashamed. In investigating the milieu of computer-crime I have come into

contact with a world of temptation formerly closed to me. Nowadays, it

would take no great effort on my part to break into computers, to steal

long-distance telephone service, to ingratiate myself with people who

would merrily supply me with huge amounts of illicitly copied software.

I could even build pipe-bombs. I haven't done these things, and

disapprove of them; in fact, having come to know these practices better

than I cared to, I feel sincere revulsion for them now. But this

knowledge is a kind of power, and power is tempting. Journalistic

objectivity, or the urge to play with ideas, cannot entirely protect

you. Temptation clings to the mind like a series of small but nagging

weights. Carrying these weights may make you stronger. Or they may

drag you down.

"His clothes are dirty but his hands are clean." It's a fine

ideal, when you can live up to it. Like a lot of Bohemians, I've gazed

with a fine disdain on certain people in power whose clothes were clean

but their hands conspicuously dirty. But I've also met a few people

eager to pat me on the back, whose clothes were dirty and their hands as

well. They're not pleasant company.

Somehow one must draw a line. I'm not very good at drawing lines.

When other people have drawn me a line, I've generally been quite

anxious to have a good long contemplative look at the other side. I

don't feel much confidence in my ability to draw these lines. But I

feel that I should. The world won't wait. It only took a few guys

with poolcues and switchblades to turn Woodstock Nation into Altamont.

Haight-Ashbury was once full of people who could trust anyone they'd

smoked grass with and love anyone they'd dropped acid with -- for about

six months. Soon the place was aswarm with speed-freaks and junkies,

and heaven help us if they didn't look just like the love-bead dudes

from the League of Spiritual Discovery. Corruption exists, temptation

exists. Some people fall. And the temptation is there for all of us,

all the time.

I've come to draw a line at money. It's not a good line, but

it's something. There are certain activities that are unorthodox,

dubious, illegal or quasi-legal, but they might perhaps be justified by

an honest person with unconventional standards. But in my opinion,

when you're making a commercial living from breaking the law, you're

beyond the pale. I find it hard to accept your countercultural

sincerity when you're grinning and pocketing the cash, compadre.

I can understand a kid swiping phone service when he's broke,

powerless, and dying to explore the new world of the networks. I don't

approve of this, but I can understand it. I scorn to do this myself,

and I never have; but I don't find it so heinous that it deserves

pitiless repression. But if you're stealing phone service and selling

it -- if you've made yourself a miniature phone company and you're

pimping off the energy of others just to line your own pockets -- you're

a thief. When the heat comes to put you away, don't come crying

"brother" to me.

If you're creating software and giving it away, you're a fine

human being. If you're writing software and letting other people

copy it and try it out as shareware, I appreciate your sense of trust,

and if I like your work, I'll pay you. If you're copying other people's

software and giving it away, you're damaging other people's interests,

and should be ashamed, even if you're posing as a glamorous info-

liberating subversive. But if you're copying other people's software

and selling it, you're a crook and I despise you.

Writing and spreading viruses is a vile, hurtful, and shameful

activity that I unreservedly condemn.

There's something wrong with the Information Society. There's

something wrong with the idea that "information" is a commodity like a

desk or a chair. There's something wrong with patenting software

algorithms. There's something direly meanspirited and ungenerous about

inventing a language and then renting it out to other people to speak.

There's something unprecedented and sinister in this process of creeping

commodification of data and knowledge. A computer is something too

close to the human brain for me to rest entirely content with someone

patenting or copyrighting the process of its thought. There's

something sick and unworkable about an economic system which has already

spewed forth such a vast black market. I don't think democracy will

thrive in a milieu where vast empires of data are encrypted,

restricted, proprietary, confidential, top secret, and sensitive. I

fear for the stability of a society that builds sandcastles out of

databits and tries to stop a real-world tide with royal commands.

Whole societies can fall. In Eastern Europe we have seen whole

nations collapse in a slough of corruption. In pursuit of their

unworkable economic doctrine, the Marxists doubled and redoubled their

efforts at social control, while losing all sight of the values that

make life worth living. At last the entire power structure was so

discredited that the last remaining shred of moral integrity could only

be found in Bohemia: in dissidents and dramatists and their illegal

samizdat underground fanzines. Their clothes were dirty but their hands

were clean. The only agitprop poster Vaclav Havel needed was a sign

saying *Vaclav Havel Guarantees Free Elections.* He'd never held

power, but people believed him, and they believed his Velvet

Revolution friends.

I wish there were people in the Computer Revolution who could

inspire, and deserved to inspire, that level of trust. I wish there

were people in the Electronic Frontier whose moral integrity

unquestionably matched the unleashed power of those digital machines. A

society is in dire straits when it puts its Bohemia in power. I tremble

for my country when I contemplate this prospect. And yet it's possible.

If dire straits come, it can even be the last best hope.

The issues that enmeshed me in 1990 are not going to go away. I

became involved as a writer and journalist, because I felt it was right.

Having made that decision, I intend to stand by my commitment. I

expect to stay involved in these issues, in this debate, for the rest

of my life. These are timeless issues: civil rights, knowledge,

power, freedom and privacy, the necessary steps that a civilized society

must take to protect itself from criminals. There is no finality in

politics; it creates itself anew, it must be dealt with every day.

The future is a dark road and our speed is headlong. I didn't

ask for power or responsibility. I'm a science fiction writer, I only

wanted to play with Big Ideas in my cheerfully lunatic sandbox. What

little benefit I myself can contribute to society would likely be best

employed in writing better SF novels. I intend to write those better

novels, if I can. But in the meantime I seem to have accumulated a few

odd shreds of influence. It's a very minor kind of power, and doubtless

more than I deserve; but power without responsibility is a monstrous

thing.

In writing HACKER CRACKDOWN, I tried to describe the truth as

other people saw it. I see it too, with my own eyes, but I can't yet

pretend to understand what I'm seeing. The best I can do, it seems to

me, is to try to approach the situation as an open-minded person of

goodwill. I therefore offer the following final set of principles,

which I hope will guide me in the days to come.

I'll listen to anybody, and I'll try to imagine myself in their

situation.

I'll assume goodwill on the part of others until they fully earn

my distrust.

I won't cherish grudges. I'll forgive those who change their

minds and actions, just as I reserve the right to change my own mind and

actions.

I'll look hard for the disadvantages to others, in the things that

give me advantage. I won't assume that the way I live today is the

natural order of the universe, just because I happen to be benefiting

from it at the moment.

And while I don't plan to give up making money from my ethically

dubious cyberpunk activities, I hope to temper my impropriety by giving

more work away for no money at all.

CATSCAN 11 "Sneaking For Jesus 2001"

Conspiracy fiction. I've come across a pair of especially remarkable

works in this odd subgenre lately.

Paul Di Filippo's treatment of the conspiracy subgenre, " My Brain

Feels Like A Bomb" in SF EYE 8, collected some fine, colorful

specimens. Di Filippo theorizes that the conspiracy subgenre, anchored

at its high end by GRAVITY'S RAINBOW and FOUCAULT'S PENDULUM and at

its low end by quite a lot of cheesy sci-fi and gooofy spy thrillers,

is unique to the twentieth-century, and bred by our modern

(postmodern?) inability to make sense of an overwhelming flow of

high-velocity information.

This may be true. I'm not inclined to challenge that sociological

assessment, and can even offer some backup evidence. Where is that

postmodern flow of information more intense, and less basically

comprehensible, than in the world of computing? Thus is bred the

interesting sub-subgenre of computer paranoia fiction -- hacker

conspiracy! I now propose to examine two such works: the movie (and

book) SNEAKERS, and the novel (and prophesy?) THE ILLUMINATI.

Let's take the second item first, as it's much the more remarkable of

the two. The ILLUMINATI in question today has nothing to do with the

Robert Anton Wilson ILLUMINATI series; in fact, its weltanschauung is

utterly at odds with Wilson's books. Wilson's paranoid yarn is

basically a long, rambling, crypto-erudite hipster rap-session, but

Larry Burkett's ILLUMINATI is a fictional work of evangelical Christian

exegesis, in which lesbians, leftists, dope addicts and other tools of

Satan establish a gigantic government computer network in the year

2001, with which to exterminate all Southern Baptists.

I recommend this novel highly. Larry Burkett's ILLUMINATI has already

sold some 100,000 copies through Christian bookstores, and it seems to

me to have tremendous crossover potential for hundreds of chuckling

cyberpunk cynics. To my eye it's a lot more mind-blowing than any of

Wilson's books.

The Robert Anton Wilson oeuvre is perenially in print in New Age

bookstores, and quite well known in the SF category racks. Therefore

the CATSCAN reader may already be aware that the so-called "Illuminati"

were a freethinking secret society purportedly founded in the 1770s,

who had something to do with Freemasonry and were opposed to

established Church authority in Europe.

So far, so good. It's not surprising that a with-it hipster dude like

R.A. Wilson would use the historical Illuminati as a head-trip

springboard to mock All Things Establishment. The far more surprising

matter is that some evangelical Christians, such as the Reverend Pat

Robertson, not only take the 217-year-old and extremely dead

Illuminati seriously, but are also currently dominating the social

agenda of the Republican Party. Reverend Robertson's latest

"non-fiction" tome, THE NEW WORLD ORDER, is chock-a-block with

straightfaced and utterly paranoiac Illuminati-under-the-bed

terrormongering. Robertson publicly credits the "satanic" Illuminati

conspiracy with direct authorship of the French Revolution and the

Bolshevik uprising, as well as sponsorship of the Trilateral Commission

and the comsymp "Eastern Establishment" generally. The good Reverend

also expresses the gravest possible reservations about the occult

Masonic insignia on the back of the one-dollar bill.

George Bush himself, best-known public advocate of a "New World Order,"

is cast under suspicion in Robertson's work as an Illuminati tool, and

yet Bush gave his accuser prime-time TV in his party's National

Convention. One can only marvel!

As a comparative reality-check, try and imagine Robert Anton Wilson

delivering his Hail Eris rap at a Democratic Party Convention (while

the audience, nodding on national television, listens in sober respect

and acts really glad to be clued-in). Odd enough for you? Now

imagine ontological anarchists re-writing the Democratic Party platform

on abortion, sexual behavior, and federal sponsorship of the arts.

Larry Burkett has taken this way-out sectarian extremist theo-gibberish

and made it into a techno-thriller! The result is a true mutant among

novels. How many science fiction novels begin with a disclaimer like

this one?

"My biggest concern in writing a novel is that someone may read too

much into it. Obviously, I tried to use as realistic a scenario as

possible in the story. But it is purely fictional, including the

characters, events, and timing. It should not be assumed that it is

prophetic in any regard. As best I know, I have a gift for teaching, a

talent for writing, and no prophetic abilities beyond that of any other

Christian."

I was so impressed by this remarkable disclaimer of Mr Burkett's that I

tracked down his address (using the CompuServe computer network) and I

succeeded in interviewing him by phone for this column. I learned

that Mr Burkett has received some six thousand letters about his novel

ILLUMINATI from eager readers, many of them previously aware of the

Illuminati menace and eager to learn yet more. And yes, many of those

readers do believe that the Mr. Burkett novel is an inspired

prophecy, despite his disclaimer, and they demand his advice on how to

shelter themselves from the secret masters of the coming Satanic

computer-cataclysm.

Even more remarkably, a dozen correspondents claimed to have once been

Illuminati themselves, and they congratulated Mr. Burkett on his

insights into their conspiracy! Mr. Burkett described this last

category as featuring "three or four letters that were fairly lucid."

Mr. Burkett himself seems quite lucid. He was clearly "having some

fun" with notions he considers serious but not all *that* serious, and

in this he is not much different from many other SF authors with active

imaginations and vaguely politicized concerns. Now a financial

consultant, Mr. Burkett was once a NASA project manager, and dealt with

early mainframe systems for the Gemini and Mercury missions. As a

father, grandfather, best-selling author and head of a successful

investment-counseling firm, Mr. Burkett seemed to me to have at least

as firm a grip on consensus reality as say, Ross Perot. In talking to

Mr Burkett I found him a calm, open and congenial gentleman.

However, Mr. Burkett is also a committed "dispensational Christian" and

he believes sincerely that abortion is an act of murder. He is

therefore living in a basically nightmarish society in which hundreds

of thousands of innocent human beings are gruesomely murdered through

no fault of their own. I believe that Mr. Burkett considers abortion

so great an evil that it could not possibly have been inflicted on our

society by any merely human agency. It can only be understood as part

of an ancient, multi-generational conspiracy, planned and carried out

by the immortal and evil Adversary of Mankind through his mortal

cats-paws on Earth.

From the pyramid-eye point of view of this belief-system, it makes good

tub-thumping common-sense to assume that "Secular Humanism" is a single

monolithic entity -- even if its own useful-idiot liberal dupes seem

more-or-less unaware of their own true roles in Satan's master-plan.

All enemies are agents willy-nilly of The Enemy, and their plans run

toward a single end: the establishment of Satan's Kingdom on Earth.

In the words of Reverend Robertson (NEW WORLD ORDER p 6): "A single

thread runs form the White House to the State Department to the Council

on Foreign Relations to the Trilateral Commission to secret societies

to extreme New Agers. There must be a new world order. It must

eliminate national sovereignty. There must be world government, a

world police force, world courts, world banking and currency, and a

world elite in charge of it all."

Of course, if you are going to string all important global events onto

"a single thread," you are going to end up with an extremely variegated

necklace. When you formally assemble the whole farrago into the pages

of a thriller-novel, as Mr. Burkett does, the result is like Lovecraft

on laughing-gas. Mr. Burkett's fictional technique owes far more to

his favorite authors, Tom Clancy and Michael Crichton, than it does to

any genre SF writer. Mr Burkett is not himself an SF reader.

Nevertheless, his material itself is so inherently over-the-top that

his book resembles the Call of Cthulhu far more than a hunt for Red

October.

The pace is whiplash-fast and the set-up entirely mindboggling. In

the year 2001, the President, an Illuminati puppet "liberal," stages a

coup against Congress in the midst of economic collapse and massive

urban riots. The Mossad are bugging the White House and building a

cobalt super-bomb with the Red Chinese. We learn that the Illuminati

began as Druids and transmuted into Freemasons; the wily Jews, of

course, have known all about the Illuminati for centuries, though never

bothering to inform us goyim. The gay Governor of California is a

feminist church-taxing coke addict. The "liberal" President sells

"brain-dead" crack babies to fetal-tissue medical entrepreneurs.

Meanwhile, evil liberal civil-libertarians tattoo everyone's right hand

with the scanner-code of the Beast 666. It just goes on and on!

The yummiest item in the whole stew, however, is the identity of the

book's hero, one Jeff Wells. Jeff's a computer hacker. A genius

hacker for Christ. Somewhat against his will and entirely without any

evil intent, Jeff was recruited to design and build the gigantic

Data-Net financial network, which the Illuminati secular one-worlders

then use to consolidate power, and to pursue and harass innocent

Christian activists. When Jeff discovers that the feds are using his

handiwork to round up Baptists and ship them by the trainload to dismal

gulags in Arizona, he drops out of the system, goes deep underground,

and joins the Christian revolutionary right.

With the moral guidance of a saintly televangelist, Jeff, using his

powerful and extremely illegal computer-intrusion skills, simply chops

up Data-Net like a cook deboning a chicken. In defence of his Savior,

Jeff basically overthrows the US Government by digital force and

violence. He defrauds the government of billions of dollars. He

creates thousands of false identities. He deliberately snarls train

traffic and airport traffic. He spies on high government officials,

tracking their every move. The Pentagon, the Secret Service and the

FBI are all rendered into helpless fools through Jeff's skillful

tapping of a keyboard. It's like a Smash-the-State Yippie

phone-phreak's wet-dream -- and yet it's all done in defense of

family-values.

One shuts Mr. Burkett's book regretfully and with a skull-tingling

sensation of genuine mind-expansion.

But let's now leave ILLUMINATI for a look at somewhat more actual and

far more commercially successful Yippie phone-phreak wet-dream, the

film (and novel) SNEAKERS. As it happens, the movie tie-in novel

SNEAKERS (by one "Dewey Gram," a name that sounds rather suspicious)

is somewhat uninspired and pedestrian (especially in comparison to

ILLUMINATI). The book has a slightly more graphic sexual-voyeur

sequence than the movie does, and some mildly interesting additional

background about the characters. The SNEAKERS novel seems to have

been cooked-up from an earlier screenplay than the shooting-script.

You won't miss much by skipping it entirely.

The sinister Liberal Cultural Elite (and their vile Illuminati

puppet-masters) must take great satisfaction in comparing the audience

for a Hollywood blockbuster like SNEAKERS with the relatively tiny

readership for the eager though amateurish ILLUMINATI. ILLUMINATI was

written in eight weeks flat, and will have a devil of a time reaching

anybody outside an evangelical chain-store. SNEAKERS, by contrast,

cost millions to make, and has glossy posters, promo lapel buttons,

pre-release screenings, TV ads, and a video release on the way, not to

mention its own book tie-in.

SNEAKERS will also be watched with a straight face and genuine

enjoyment by millions of Americans, despite its "radical" attitude and

its open sympathies with 60s New Leftist activism. ILLUMINATI will

have no such luck. Even after twelve solid years of Reaganism, in

which the federal government was essentially run by panic-stricken

astrologers and the Republican Party kowtowed utterly to its fringe-nut

element, it's still unthinkable that a work like ILLUMINATI could

become a mainline Hollywood film. Even as a work of science fiction,

ILLUMINATI would simply be laughed off the screen by the public. Even

R. A. Wilson's ILLUMINATI would have a better chance at production.

Margaret Atwood's HANDMAID'S TALE, which promotes anti-network paranoia

from a decidedly leftist/feminist perspective, actually made it to the

screen! The Burkett ILLUMINATI's theocratic nuttiness is simply too

ludicrous.

SNEAKERS is a professional piece of Hollywood entertainment and a

pleasant movie to watch. I'm not one of those who feels that Hollywood

movies should be required to teach moral lessons, or to heighten public

taste, even to make basic sense. Hey, let Hollywood be Hollywood:

SNEAKERS has some nice production values, a solid cast, some thrills

and some laughs; money spent seeing it is money well spent.

And yet there's a lot to dislike about SNEAKERS anyhow. The entire

effort has a depressing insincerity, and a profound sense of

desperation and defeat that it tries to offset with an annoying

nervous-tic mockery. The problem resides in the very nature of the

characters and their milieu. It's certainly an above-average cast,

with Sidney Poitier, Robert Redford, Dan Aykroyd and River Phoenix, who

are as professionally endearing and charismatic as they can manage.

Yet almost everything these characters actually do is deceitful,

repulsive, or basically beside the point; they seem powerless,

hopeless, and robbed of their own identities, robbed of legitimacy,

even robbed of their very lives.

SNEAKERS is remarkable for its fidelity to the ethos of the computer

underground. It's something of a love-note to the 2600 crowd (who

seem properly appreciative). System-cracker practices like trashing,

canning, and social-engineering are faithfully portrayed. And while

SNEAKERS is remarkably paranoid, that too rather suits its own milieu,

because many underground hackers are in fact remarkably paranoid,

especially about the NSA, other techie feds, and their fellow hackers.

Hacking complex computer systems from the outside -- maintaining a

toehold within machinery that doesn't belong to you and is not obedient

to your own purposes -- tends by its nature to lead to a rather

fragmentary understanding. This fragmentary knowledge, combined with

guilty fear, is a perfect psychological breeding-ground for a deeply

paranoid outlook. Knowledge underground takes the form of a hipster's

argot, rules of thumb, and superstitious ritual, combined with large

amounts of practised deceit. And that's the way the SNEAKERS cast

basically spend their lives: in pretense and deception, profoundly

disenchanted and utterly disenfranchised. Basically, not one person

among them can be trusted with a burnt-out match. Even their

"robberies" are fakes; they lie even to one another, and they risk

their lives, and other people's, for peanuts.

SNEAKERS, in which anagrams play a large thematic role, is itself an

anagram for NSA REEKS. The National Security Agency is the largest

target for the vaguely-leftist, antiauthoritarian paranoia expressed by

the film. The film's sinister McGuffin is an NSA-built super-decryptor

device. (This super-decryptor is a somewhat silly gimmick, but that

shouldn't be allowed to spoil the story. Real cryptography enthusiasts

will probably be too busy laughing at the decryptor's mad-genius

inventor, a raunchy parody of real-life cryptographer Whitfield

Diffie.) The IRS, though never mentioned overtly, also comes in for

some tangential attack, since the phone number of one of the IRS's

California offices is given out verbally during the film by an

attractive young woman, who claims that it's her home phone number.

This deliberate bit of mischief must have guaranteed the IRS a lot of

eager phone-phreak action.

Every conspiracy must have a Them. In the black-and-white world of

ILLUMINATI, all forms of opposition to Goodness must be cut from the

same Satanic cloth, so that Aleister Crowley, Vladimir Lenin and David

Rockefeller are all of one warp and woof. SNEAKERS, by contrast, is

slightly more advanced, and features two distinct species of Them.

The first Them is the Hippie-Sold-Out Them, a goofy role gamely played

by Ben Kingsley as a Darkside Yuppie Hacker Mafioso, a kind of

carnivorous forty-something Bill Gates. The second species of Them is

the enonymously reeking NSA, the American shadow-spook elite,

surprisingly personified by a patriarchal James Earl Jones in an oddly

comic and comforting Wizard of Oz-like cameo.

Both these Thems are successfully fooled by the clever Sneakers in bits

of Hollywood business that basically wouldn't deceive a bright

five-year-old, much less the world's foremost technical espionage

agency and a security-mad criminal zillionaire.

But these plot flaws are no real objection. A more genuine objection

would be the entire tenor of the film. The film basically accomplishes

nothing. Nothing actually happens. No one has to change their mind

about anything. At the end, the Hacker Mafioso is left at large, still

in power, still psychotic, and still in command of huge sums and vast

archives of illicit knowledge and skill. The NSA, distributing a few

cheap bribes, simply swears everybody to secrecy, and retreats safely

back into the utter undisturbed silence of its Cold War netherworld. A

few large issues are raised tangentially, but absolutely nothing is

done about them, and no moral judgements or decisions are made. The

frenetic plotting of the Sneaker team accomplishes nothing whatsoever

beyond a maintenance of the status quo and the winning of a few toys

for the personnel. Redford doesn't even win the token girl. It seems

much ado about desperately little.

Then, at the very end, our hero robs the Republican Party of all its

money through computer-fraud, and distributes it to worthy left-wing

causes. Here something has actually happened at last, but it's a

dismal and stupid thing. It's profoundly undemocratic, elitist, and

hateful act; only a political idiot could imagine that a crime of this

nature would do a minute's worth of real good. And even this

psychotic provocation has the look of a last-minute tag-on to the

movie; in the book, it doesn't even occur.

The film makes two stabs at Big Message. There's a deliberate and

much-emphasized Lecture at the Foot of the Cray, where the evil

Darkside Hacker explains in slow and careful capital letters that the

world in the 90s has become an Information Society and has thus become

vulnerable to new and suspiciously invisible forms of manipulation.

Beyond a momentary spasm of purely intellectual interest, though, our

hero's basic response is a simple "I know. And I don't care." This

surprisingly sensible remark much deflates the impact of the

superhacker-paranoia scenario.

The second Big Message occurs during a ridiculously convenient

escape-scene in which our hero defies the Darkside Hacker to kill him

face-to-face. The bad-guy, forced to look deep inside his own

tortured soul, can't endure the moral responsibility involved in

pulling a trigger personally. The clear implication is that sooner or

later somebody has to take a definite and personal responsibility for

all this abstract technologized evil. Unfortunately this is sheer

romantic hippie nonsense; even Adolf Eichmann has it figured that it

was all somebody else's fault. The twentieth century's big-time evils

consisted of people pushing papers in a distant office causing other

people to die miles away at the hands of dazed functionaries.

Tomorrow's button-pushers are likely to be more remote and insulated

than ever; they're not going to be worrying much about their cop-outs

and their karma.

SNEAKERS plays paranoia for slapstick laughs in the character of Dan

Aykroyd, who utters a wide variety of the standard Space-Brother nutty

notions, none of them with any practical implications whatsoever.

This may be the worst and most discouraging aspect of the

conspiratorial mindset -- the way it simultaneously flatters one's own

importance and also makes one willing to do nothing practical and

tangible. The conspiracy theorist has got it all figured, he's got

the inside angles, and yet he has the perfect excuse for utter cynical

torpor.

Let's just consider the real-world implications of genuine

conspiratorial convictions for a moment. Let's assume, as many people

do, that John Kennedy really was shot dead in a 'silent coup' by a US

government cabal in 1963. If this is true, then we Americans clearly

haven't run our own national affairs for at least thirty years. Our

executive, our Congress, our police and our bureaucracies have all been

a fraud in the hands of elite and murderous secret masters. But if

we're not running our own affairs today, and haven't for thirty years,

then how the heck are we supposed to start now? Why even try? If the

world's fate is ineluctably in the hands of Illuminati, then what real

reason do we have to meddle in public matters? Why make our thoughts

and ideas heard? Why organize, why discuss public policy, why make

budgets, why set priorities, why vote? We'll just get gypped anyhow.

We'd all be better off retired, in hiding, underground, in monasteries,

in purdah, or dead.

If the NSA's tapping every phone line and reading every license-plate

from orbit, then They are basically omniscient. They're watching us

every moment -- but why do they bother? What quality, besides our own

vanity, would make us important enough to be constantly watched by

Secret Masters? After all, it's not like we're actually intending to

*accomplish* anything.

Conspiracy is for losers. As conspiracy freaks, by our very nature

we'll always live on the outside of where it's Really Happening.

That's what justifies our existence and allows us to tell Ourselves

apart from Them. Unlike people in the former Eastern Bloc, who

actually were oppressed and monitored by a sinister power-elite, we

ourselves will never *become* what's Really Happening, despite our

enormous relative advantages. Maybe we can speculate a little

together, trade gossip, scare each other silly and swap outlandish

bullshit. We can gather up our hacker scrapbooks from the office trash

of the Important and Powerful. We can press our noses to the big

mirrorglass windows. Maybe it we're especially daring, we can fling a

brick through a window late one night and run like hell. That'll prove

that we're brave and that we really don't like Them -- though we're not

brave enough to replace Them, and we're certainly not brave enough to

become Them.

And this would also prove that no sane person would ever trust us with

a scintilla of real responsibility or power anyway, over ourselves or

anyone else. Because we don't deserve any such power, no matter from

what angle of the political spectrum we happen to emerge. Because

we've allowed ourselves the ugly luxury of wallowing in an enormous

noisome heap of bullshit. And for being so stupid, we deserve whatever

we get.

CATSCAN 12 "Return to the Rue Jules Verne"

These people are not my spiritual ancestors. I know

my real spiritual ancestors -- they were the Futurians and

the Hydra Club. But although these people are a century

and a half gone, and further distanced by language,

culture and a mighty ocean, something about them -- what

they did, what they felt, what they were -- takes me by

the throat.

It won't let go. My first Catscan column, "Midnight

on the Rue Jules Verne," made much ado of this milieu, and

of one of its members, Felix Tournachon (1820-1910).

Tournachon, when known at all today, is best-known as

"Nadar," a pseudonym he first adopted for his Parisian

newspaper work in the 1840s. Nadar was a close friend of

the young Jules Verne, and he helped inspire Verne's first

blockbuster period techno-thriller, FIVE WEEKS IN A

BALLOON.

Nadar and Verne were contemporaries, both of them

emigres to Paris with artistic ambitions, a taste for hard

work, and a pronounced Bohemian bent. Nadar and Verne

further shared an intense interest in geography, mapping,

and aviation. Verne's influence on Nadar was slim, but

Nadar impressed Verne mightily. Nadar even featured as

the hero of one of Verne's best-known novels, FROM THE

EARTH TO THE MOON, as the thinly anagrammed "Michael

Ardan."

Thanks to the efforts of my good friend Richard

Dorsett (a rare book dealer by trade) I have come into

possession of a book called simply NADAR, a collection of

359 of Monsieur Tournachon's pioneering nineteenth-century

photographs, assembled in 1976 by Nigel Gosling for Alfred

A Knopf. I knew that Nadar had been a photographer,

among his other pursuits as an aeronaut, journalist,

caricaturist, author, man-about-Paris, and sometime

inspiration for a prototypical science-fiction writer.

But I never realized that Nadar was *this good!*

Nadar's photographic record of his Parisian

contemporaries is the most potent and compelling act of

social documentation that I've ever seen.

Nadar, and his studio staff, photographed nineteenth-

century Parisians by the hundreds, over many decades,

first as a hobby, and later as as a highly successful

commercial venture. But Nadar had a very special eye for

the personalities of his friends -- the notables of Paris,

the literati, musicians, poets, critics, and political

radicals.

These are the people who invented "la vie de Boheme."

They invented the lifestyle of the urban middle-class

dropout art-gypsy. They invented its terminology and its

tactics. They brought us the "succes de scandale," the

now time-honored tactic of shocking one's audience all the

way to the bank. And the "succes d'estime," the edgy and

hazardous life of the critics' darling. The doctrine of

art for art's sake was theirs too (thank you, Theophile

Gautier). And the ever-helpful notion of *epater les

bourgeoisie,* an act of consummately modern rebellion

which is nevertheless impossible without a bourgeoisie to

epater, an act which the bourgeoisie itself has lavishly

financed for decades in our culture's premiere example of

Aldissian enantiodromia -- the transformation of things

into their opposites.

The Paris Bohemians were the first genuine

industrial-scale counterculture. This was the culture

that created Jules Verne. It deserves a great deal of the

credit or blame for origination of the genres of horror,

fantasy, and science fiction. It has a legitimate claim

on our attention and our loyalties.

Jules Verne enjoys a minor role in this book of

Nadar's photographs. Verne is on page 230.

One good look at Verne's perceptive portrait by Nadar

is enough to make you understand why Jules became an

Amiens city councilman, rather than drinking himself to

death or dying of syphilis in approved period Bohemian

fashion. Verne was a science fiction writer, and a great

one. Anyone reading SF EYE possesses big juicy chunks of

Verne's memetics, whether you know it or not. But unlike

many of Nadar's other friends -- people such as Proudhon

(page 171) and Bakunin ( page 175) and Journet (page 127)

-- Jules Verne was not a driven maniac. Jules Verne was

clearly quite a nice guy. He projects an air of well-nigh

Asimovian polymathic jollity. He's having a good time at

the Nadar studio; he's had to visit his barber, and he's

required to sit still quite a while in a stiff new suit,

but you can tell that Verne trusts the man behind the

camera, and that he's cherishing a sense of humor about

this experience.

This is not a tormented soul, not a man to batter

himself to death against brick walls. Jules Verne has the

look of a man who has hit four or five brick walls in his

past, and then bought a map and a compass and paid some

sustained attention to them. He looks like someone you

could trust with your car keys.

The perfect complement to Nadar's photography is

Jerrold Seigel's *BOHEMIAN PARIS: Culture, Politics, and

the Boundaries of Bourgeois Life 1830-1930* (published

in 1986). Almost every individual mentioned in Professor

Seigel's book had a portrait taken by Nadar. Seigel's is

a fine book which I have read several times; I consider

it the single most useful book I have ever seen for

denizens of a counterculture.

Professor Seigel's book has quite a bit to say about

Nadar and his circle, and about the theory and practice of

Bohemianism generally. Professor Seigel's book is

especially useful for its thumbnail summary of what might

be called the Ten Warning Signs of Bohemianism. According

to Seigel, these are:

1. Odd dress.

2. Long hair.

3. Living for the moment.

4. Sexual freedom.

5. Having no stable residence.

6. Radical political enthusiasms.

7. Drink.

8. Drugs.

9. Irregular work patterns.

10. Addiction to nightlife.

As Seigel eloquently demonstrates, these are old

qualities. They often seem to be novel and faddish, and

are often denounced as horrid, unprecedented and aberrant,

but that's because, for some bizarre and poorly explored

reason, conventional people are simply unable to pay

serious and sustained attention to this kind of behavior.

Through some unacknowledged but obviously potent

mechanism, industrial society has silently agreed that

vast demographic segments of its population will be

allowed to live in just this way, blatantly manifesting

these highly objectionable attitudes. And yet this

activity will never be officially recognized -- it simply

isn't "serious." There exists a societal denial-

mechanism here, a kind of schism or filter or screen that,

to my eye at least, is one of the most intriguing

qualities that our society possesses.

In reality, these Ten Warning Signs are every bit as

old as industrial society. Slackers, punks, hippies,

beatniks, hepcats, Dead End kids, flappers, jazz babies,

fin-de-siecle aesthetes, pre-Raphaelites, Bohemians --

this stuff is *old.* People were living a vividly

countercultural life in Bohemian Paris when the house in

which I'm writing these words was a stomping ground for

enormous herds of bison.

Two qualities about Bohemian Paris strike me very

powerfully. First, the very aggressive, expansive and

ambitious nature of this counterculture. With a few

exceptions, the denizens of Bohemian Paris, though small

in number, were not people hiding their light under a

bushel. Some of them were obscure, and deservedly so, but

there was nothing deliberately hermetic about them; much

of their lives took place in very public arenas such as

cafes, cabarets and theatres. They feuded loudly in the

newspapers and journals, and to whatever extent they

could, they deliberately manipulated critics, maitresses

de salon and other public tastemakers. They bent every

effort to make themselves public figures, and if they

achieved fame they used it, to radical ends. Many of them

declared themselves ready to take to the streets and

literally seize power from the authorities. And thanks to

the convulsive nature of 19th-century French politics,

many of them actually had the opportunity to try this.

The second remarkable quality about the vie de boheme

was its high lethality. This was an era of high death-

rates generally, but "living on the edge" before Pasteur

was a shockingly risky enterprise. Promiscuous sex was

particularly deadly. Bohemia's foremost publicity-man,

Henri Murger, died at thirty-eight, complaining weakly of

the rotting stench in his room, so far gone from

syphilitic paresis that he didn't realize that the stench

came from his own flesh. Bohemia's most gifted poet,

Charles Baudelaire, was rendered mute by paresis before

succumbing at 46. Jules de Goncourt, art critic,

journalist, novelist, and diarist succumbed to syphilitic

dementia at 40. And then there was the White Plague,

tuberculosis, reaping Rachel the great tragedienne as well

as the fictional "Mimi," the tragic soubrette of Puccini's

opera La Boheme, which was based on the Murger stories,

themselves based firmly on Murger's daily life.

If Jerrold Seigel's BOHEMIAN PARIS has a hero, it's

Henri Murger, also known as "Henry Murger," who was the

first to fictionally treat the Vie de Boheme -- in a

series of stories for a radical Paris newspaper

marvellously titled *Le Corsaire-Satan.* Nadar also

wrote for *Le Corsaire-Satan,* and Nadar photographed

Murger in 1854. Murger appears on page 53 as a balding,

pop-eyed, bearded and much put-upon chap dressed entirely

in black. Besides the syphilis that eventually killed

him, Murger also suffered from an odd disease known as

purpura which turned his skin quite purple "every week at

a regular day and hour." The impact of Nadar's

sympathetic portrait is, if anything, intensified by the

fact that the collodion surface of the photographic plate

has cracked along the bottom, trapping the doomed Murger

in a spiderweb of decay.

Murger founded a Bohemian club called the Water-

Drinkers. Jules Verne had his own circle, the Eleven

Without Women. Victor Hugo led the Cenacle group, and

Hugo's disciple Theophile Gautier, a great wellspring of

Bohemian attitude, led a successor group called the Petite

Cenacle. The Goncourt brothers founded the Magny circle

and attended the salon of Princess Mathilde Bonaparte, the

premiere aristo bluestocking of the Second Empire.

Baudelaire, Gautier and a vicious satirist named Alphonse

Karr started the Club des Hashischiens, dabbling in opium

and hash in the 1850s.

Groups, clubs, salons and movements were the basic

infrastructure of Bohemia. The bonds of counterculture

were highly informal, highly personal, highly tribal. It

was a tightly-knit society in which personality loomed

large. It was almost possible to make an entire career

merely through prolonged and determined hanging-out.

Nadar manifested a positive genius for this sort of

activity. In his early years in the 1840s, Nadar

oscillated between the literary circles of Murger and

Baudelaire. But by 1865, Nadar boasted, probably quite

accurately, that he knew 10,000 Parisians personally.

Nadar possessed enormous personal charisma; except for his

own kin, he apparently never made an enemy, and everyone

who ever met him remembered him very well.

Nadar began his Parisian career as a newspaper

caricaturist. His caricatures, collected in a whopping

tome called NADAR DESSINS ET ECRITS (Paris 1979) show a

certain inky liveliness and keen eye for the ludicrous,

but he was no Daumier. His career in journalism was

highly unstable. Most of the magazines Nadar wrote and

cartooned for either collapsed in short order from public

disinterest or were shut down by the government for

radical sedition. This signally failed to discourage

Nadar, however. Around 1850 he hatched a grand scheme to

personally document every celebrity in Paris, in a monster

project to be called "Pantheon Nadar."

Even with help, it was far beyond his ability to

complete this "Pantheon," and the project eventually

foundered -- but not before Nadar had met and sketched

some 300 prominent literateurs, journalists, critics and

tastemakers. He left knowing every last one of them by

their first names.

While trying to upgrade the art of caricature to an

industrial scale, Nadar, in 1853, stumbled into the

dawning world of photography. He originally saw

photography as a means of swiftly documenting celebrities

for later caricature by hand, but he swiftly realized that

he could dump the tiresome ink-work entirely and go

straight for real-life portraiture in a glamorous new

medium.

Nadar wrote fifteen books, including novels and

memoirs, and was a prominent aviation pioneer, but

photography proved to be the closest thing he had to a

true metier. Though he did patent an artificial lighting

system in 1861, Nadar was not a major technical pioneer in

photography -- not a Daguerre or a Fox-Talbot. He had

contemporary commercial rivals, as well: Antony Adam-

Solomon, Pierre Petit, Etienne Cajart, and others.

Nadar's genuine pioneer status lay in his

appropriation of this new technology into unexpected

contexts. He was the first to take a picture from the

air, the first to take a picture underground, the first to

take a picture by artificial light.

And he was the first to appropriate this technical

innovation and bend it to the purposes of the Bohemian

art-world. This was an archetypal case of the Rue Jules

Verne finding its own uses for things. Nadar stated his

philosophy of photography in 1856, when he rudely sued

his own younger brother for sole ownership of the (now

thriving) Nadar photographic atelier trade-name.

"The theory of photography can be learnt in an hour

and the elements of practicing in a day.... What cannot

be learnt is the sense of light, an artistic feeling....

What can be learnt even less is the moral grasp of the

subject -- that instant understanding which puts you in

touch with the model, helps you to sum him up, guides you

to his habits, his ideas and his character and enables you

to produce, not an indifferent reproduction, a matter of

routine or accident such as any laboratory assistant could

achieve, but a really convincing and sympathetic likeness,

an intimate portrait."

It's pleasant to see how this rhetoric works. Theory

means little, practice less. Successfully shifting the

terms of debate from the technical to the artistic robs

actual photographic experts of all their cultural

authority. In an instant, the technology's originators

dwindle into the miserable nerdish status of the

"laboratory assistant."

The crux of photography now becomes a matter of

innate talent, a question of personal gifts. Inspiration

knows no baud rate. As Nadar remarked later: "In

photography as in everything else there are people who

know how to see and others who don't even know how to

look." This is a splendid kind of audacity, the sign of a

subculture which is not beleaguered and defensive but

confident, alert and aggressively omnivorous.

It's a mark of Nadar's peculiar genius that he was

able to devour photography and thrive while digesting it,

rather than recoiling in future shock like his

contemporary and close friend Baudelaire. In 1859

Baudelaire wrote a long screed against photography, in

which he decried its threat to aesthetics and the avante-

garde.

"...(I)t is nonetheless obvious that this industry, by

invading the territories of art, has become art's most

mortal enemy.... If photography is allowed to supplement

art in some of its functions, it will soon have supplanted

or corrupted it altogether, thanks to the stupidity of the

multitude that is its natural ally."

Baudelaire nevertheless posed for Nadar's camera. In

fact Baudelaire admired Nadar very much, aptly describing

Nadar as an "astounding example of vitality."

Baudelaire's photo is on page 67 and Nadar's portrait of

the author of FLOWERS OF EVIL is without any doubt the

single most remarkable image in the Nadar collection.

Despite the fact that he has stuffed one mitt into an

oversized double-breasted coat in Napoleonic fashion,

Baudelaire looks shockingly contemporary. It's a face

that you could see tomorrow in SPY or SPIN or INTERVIEW,

sharp, slightly contemptuous, utterly self-possessed.

The photograph is 1855, two years before the police

seizure and legal condemnation of FLOWERS OF EVIL.

The Goncourt Brothers said that Baudelaire had "the

face of a maniac, a voice that cuts like steel." There is

no recorded trace of his voice, but the face Nadar

preserved for us is indeed maniacal -- which is to say,

the face of someone not from the Goncourts' century, but

rather from our own. Baudelaire looked like a maniac

because he looks just like one of us.

FLOWERS OF EVIL is probably the greatest literary

monument of the Paris Bohemia, a book which after 136

years remains in many ways novel, frightening and

unsettling. Today it's not the frank eroticism and

deliberate blasphemy which disturb -- although "Les

Bijoux," a chop-licking description of Baudelaire's

mistress lolling around on a divan naked under her stage

jewelry, remains remarkably hot and bothersome.

It's not the period elements that sting, but that

vibrant underlying mania. Just test the potency of the

following lines, an invocation to Death in "Le Voyage,"

the last poem in Fleurs du Mal:

"O Death, old captain, it is time! Lift anchor!

This land wearies us, o Death, let us set sail!

Even though sky and sea are black as ink,

Our hearts you know are filled with light!

Pour out your poison to strengthen us!

Our brains are so scorched with flame that we want

To plunge to the depths of the abyss, what matter if

it be Hell or Heaven?

-- To the bottom of the Unknown to find something

*new!*

For all his pop-star world-weary aesthetic posing --

Nadar describes Baudelaire as favoring excessively flared

black jackets, red scarves, pink gloves and shoulder-

length curling hair -- Baudelaire clearly *meant* this.

He'll immolate himself, run any mad risk to break through

consensus reality, to smash the ennui of civilization and

all mortal limits in the slim hope of achieving some

completely unknown form of ontological novelty. This is

a junkie's rhetoric, but in an odd and menacing way quite

timeless. It's a declaration one might take to heart

today just before eating a double-handful of untested

smart-drugs, and it could serve just as well as the

rhetoric of some 22nd-century posthuman deliberately

tweaking his own genetics. In some profound sense, it

does not bode well for humanity that we are capable of

producing a work like Fleurs du Mal.

"If rape, poison, the dagger, and arson have not yet

embroidered their pleasing designs on the banal canvas of

our wretched destinies, it's because (alas!) we lack the

courage to act otherwise." Put it this way -- this is not

the guy to trust with your car keys.

Immediately after Baudelaire's amazing portrait comes

another extremely striking Nadar image. It's a studio

nude of Christine Roux, a cafe singer and minor-league

courtesan who ran in the Murger circle and was talked out

of her clothes by Nadar in 1855. She also features as

"Musette" in Murger's *Scenes de la Vie de Boheme,* in

which she is the mistress of "Marcel," himself said to be

based partially on Nadar. Christine stands in a

conventional model's art-posture, weight on one leg, torso

slightly twisted, but her face is hidden in the crook of

her raised right elbow, rendering her effectively

anonymous, a luscious icon for the male gaze.

Murger's fictional treatment of Musette is friendly

and tolerant, but more than a little contemptuous. The

fictional Musette is the standard hooker with a heart of

gold; but Murger's indulgence doesn't hide the fact that

the Paris Bohemia was a society that specialized in

treating women as hired meat. Here's Nadar himself, a

man of wide tolerance, a man of unquestionable

psychological insight, describing Baudelaire's favorite

mistress, the small-time actress and courtesan Jeanne

Duval:

"A tall, almost too tall girl. A negress, or at least

a mulatto: whole packets of ricepowder could not bleach

the copper of the face, neck and hands. A beautiful

creature in fact, of a special beauty which owed nothing

to Phidias. A special dish for the ultrarefined palate.

Beneath the impetuous luxuriance of her ink-black and

curling mane, her eyes, large as soup-plates, seemed

blacker still; her nose was small, delicate, the nostrils

chiselled with exquisite delicacy; her mouth Egyptian....

the mouth of the Isis of Pompeii, with splendid teeth

between prominent and beautifully designed lips. She

looked serious, proud, even a bit disdainful. Her figure

was long-waisted, graceful and undulating as a snake, and

especially remarkable for the exuberant, exceptional

development of the breasts. And this abundance, which was

not without grace, gave her the look of a branch

overloaded with ripe fruit."

Jeanne Duval's sexy as hell. She's a special dish,

she's a soup-plate, she's a statue, she's a snake, she's a

fruit tree; she's anything but a human being. This is the

rhetoric one has to emit in order to treat women the way

women were treated in Bohemian Paris. In FLOWERS OF EVIL,

Baudelaire gloats over Jeanne Duval with a lipsmacking

contempt that is truly painful to witness, declaring her a

beast, a tramp, trash, carrion, and then wallowing in her

at length. One can't help but conclude that Baudelaire

would like Jeanne even better if her head were severed,

although that might reduce the ugly satisfaction he takes

in blaming her for the existence of his own libido.

Musette, her photo placed rather too aptly on page 69,

is a poisoned dish. You have to buy her, and if you catch

anything from her, it's as much as your life is worth.

There's no birth control to speak of, so you may well end

up supporting bastard children or, worse yet, not

supporting them. There will be no meeting of minds here;

it's true Musette can sing a bit, but to marry her would

be an utter disaster, a mesalliance reducing you to a

social laughing-stock. This is skin for money, with a

nice brain-eating tang of Russian roulette tossed in for

spice. And by the way, it's also a mortal sin, which is

no small deal in mid-nineteenth century Catholic France.

Are you really going to do this? Are you going to

spend the money to buy Musette, and take that dire risk of

all that potential misery and hurt, to yourselves and to

her and to your parents and to the next generation, and to

God Himself and the Savior and all the saints and angels

for that matter, merely in order to emptily and

temporarily possess the anonymous female body depicted on

page 69?

Fuck yes you are. Of course you are. I mean, just

*look* at it!

In the all-too-immortal words of the Brothers

Goncourt: "Men like ourselves require a woman with

little breeding, small education, gay and natural in

spirit, to charm or please us as would an agreeable animal

to which we might become attached. But if a mistress had

a veneer of breeding, or art, or of literature, and

wanted to talk on an equal footing with us about our

thoughts and our feeling for beauty; if she were ambitious

to become the companion of our taste or of the book

gestating within us, she would become for us as unbearable

as a piano out of tune -- and very soon antipathetic."

Nadar reports his last view of Jeanne Duval in 1870,

her graceful undulating exotic tasty carcass propped on

crutches from the ravages of syphilis. Musette died in a

shipwreck in 1860, at age 25.

Here's Theophile Gautier on page 113. He was an

extremely hip and happening guy, Gautier. There's a lot

to be learned from him. He looks very much like a

bouncer in a biker bar. This beefy dude is the

ultrarefined escapist lily-clutching Romantic aesthete who

coined the dictum "only what is useless is beautiful" in

his *Mademoiselle Maupin,* one of the great indecent

books of the nineteenth century. Gautier was a major

pioneer of fantasy as a genre, an arty arch-Romantic who

wrote about Orientalism and female vampires and mystically

revived female mummies and tasty female succubi who jump

off the embroidery in ancient tapestries to fuck the

brains out of undergraduate XIXth-cent. lit-majors, and

yet Nadar's portrait makes it utterly clear that Gautier

is a guy who could swiftly kick the shit out of nine men

out of ten.

At age nineteen, Gautier led the howling Romantic

contingent at the premiere of Victor Hugo's *Hernani* in

1830, the public brawl that marked the end of

NeoClassicism as a theatrical doctrine; and you can see

from his portrait that Gautier wasn't doing anything so

mild as "marking" the end of classicism, he was publicly

breaking its back and was proud and happy to do it.

Gautier's table-talk is the best stuff in the famously

gossipy *Journals* of the Brothers Goncourt. By the 1860s

Gautier had become the most powerful critic in Paris; a

man who wrote operas and ballets and plays and short

stories and novels and travel books and poetry and about a

million crap newspaper columns, and yet he found the time

to eat hash and dominate salons and throw monster parties

at the house of his common-law wife that had, among other

attractions, actual Chinese people in them. Gautier was

writing for the government organ *Le Moniteur* as a

theatre critic and he was the lion of Mathilde Bonaparte's

circle, Mathilde being Napoleon III's cousin and the

Second Empire's officially sanctioned token bluestocking

liberal. Having reached the height of Bohemian public

acceptance Gautier ground out his copy in public and in

private he lived in open scandal and bitched about the

government every chance he got. The stuff he says is

unbelievable, it's a cynical head-trip torrent worthy of

Philip K. Dick.

Picture this: it's 1860. Civil War is just breaking

out in the USA. Meanwhile, Theophile Gautier's at a

literary dinner in the rue Taitbout in a sumptuous

drawing-room lined with padded pigeon-blood silk. He's

drinking twenty-two-year-old champagne and discussing the

immortality of the soul. Gautier addresses a right-wing

Catholic. "Listen, Claudin, " he says, "assume the Sun

was inhabited. A man five feet tall on Earth would be

seven hundred and fifty leagues high on the Sun. That is

to say, the soles of your shoes, assuming you wore heels,

would be two leagues long, a length equal to to the depth

of the ocean at its deepest. Now listen to me, Claudin:

and along with your two leagues of boot soles you would

possess seventy-five leagues of masculinity in the natural

state."

Claudin, shocked, babbles something eminently

forgettable.

"You see," Gautier continues suavely, "the immortality

of the soul, free will -- it is very pleasant to be

concerned with these things before one is twenty-two years

old; but afterward such subjects are no longer seemly.

One ought then to be concerned to have a mistress who does

not get on one's nerves; to have a decent place to live;

to have a few passable pictures on the wall. And most of

all, to be writing well. That is what is important:

sentences that hang together... and a few metaphors. Yes,

a few metaphors. They embellish life."

Gautier divided his time between the literary salons

of Mathilde Bonaparte and La Paiva. La Paiva was a

courtesan, a true grande horizontale, a demimondaine who

had battled her way to the top through sheer chilly grit

and professional self-abnegation. She scared the hell out

of the Brothers Goncourt, who paint her as an aberrant

harpy, but Mathilde was jealous of her nonetheless, and

complained that the litterateurs made so much of

bluestocking demimondaines that the Imperial princess

herself felt unlucky not to have been born "a lustful

drab."

In the last years of his life -- he died in 1872 --

Gautier took a sinecure as Mathilde's official librarian,

something of an apology on her part for not being able to

wedge him into the Academy or get him a sinecure post in

the Empire's rubber-stamp Senate. Gautier was just that

one shade too Bohemian to manage the conventional slate of

honors; but he was not quite so Bohemian that he wasn't of

real use to Mathilde. Mathilde did not have the direct

social power of her cousin's wife, the Empress Eugenie, a

woman Mathilde cordially despised; but if Mathilde

couldn't have the court painters, the ladies-in-waiting,

and the full imperial etiquette, she could nevertheless

reign as Queen of Bluestockings over the literary

counterculture. Mathilde liked books, she liked

painters, she liked music; she was a moderately bright and

cultured woman who could follow an intelligent

conversation and even lead one sometimes; but she knew

how to guard the interests of her family as well. The

Goncourts recorded her tantrum as a salon favorite joined

the staff of an opposition newspaper.

"He owes everything to me," Mathilde screamed. "And

what did I ask in return? I didn't ask him to give up a

single conviction. All I asked was that he keep away from

those people on the *Temps.*"

The "opposition" established by Mathilde's

countercultural noblesse oblige was one of the guises

assumed by power itself; to pay off Theophile Gautier was

to nourish the serpent to one's bosom in the hope of

stroking it to sleep. It was a risky game, but their

lives were risky. The cultural Entente Cordiale between

the Court and Bohemia didn't have to hold together

forever; it only had to hold together long enough. The

entire structure of the Empire itself collapsed in 1870,

crushed in the Franco-Prussian War.

The street may find its own uses for things -- but

Things find their own uses for the street. The Rue Jules

Verne is a two-way avenue, a place where monde and

undermonde can embrace illicitly and swap infections.

While Nadar rose in his balloons to document the city with

his cameras, Napoleon III's Parisian prefect, Baron

Haussman, demolished and rebuilt the landscape below him.

It's thanks to Haussman that we know Paris today as a city

of wide, straight, magnificent boulevards -- the Champ

d'Elysees is one. For Nadar and his contemporaries the

Haussmanization of the city was the truest sign of its

modernization. Nadar's photographic studio was located

in one of these new streets. He dominated the entire

second floor of a new building in the latest taste.

Haussmann's streets were the Rue Jules Verne as a

killing ground. Yes they were elegant, yes they aided the

flow of traffic, but their true raison d'etre was as a

strategic military asset. In 1789, 1830, 1848 the

Parisian populace had barricaded their narrow twisting

streets and foiled the Army. After Haussmann, Paris would

be splayed-out on a lethal command grid where grapeshot

could fly on arrow-straight lines through whole city

blocks, directly through the insubordinate carcasses of

any revolutionary proletariat.

The streets didn't save the regime, though. In 1870

Bismarck's Germans smashed the French armies at Sedan.

Paris was blockaded.

In response, Nadar invented airmail.

In 1859, Napoleon III had offered Nadar 50,000 francs

to take aerial photographs of the Italian front in his

military adventure in Italy; but Nadar was a staunch

radical republican and stoutly refused any bloodmoney from

the imperial war-machine. The disaster of 1870 was a

different matter. As Nadar explained from Paris, via

balloon, to *The Times* in London, destroying the

repugnant Imperial regime was one thing, and rather

understandable; but killing the Parisian populace

wholesale was quite another.

Nadar was normally a highly mannered, rather precious

prose stylist, rarely using one word when ten elegantly

sesquipedalian ones would do; but with his own people at

bayonet-point Nadar apparently concluded that this wasn't

the time for copping aesthetic attitudes. Things had

reached such a point that Nadar's balloons, which he

himself regarded mostly as publicity stunts, were in fact

a last hope. He had invented, and owned, the last means

by which Paris could publicize herself. Under these

circumstances, Nadar addressed humanity at large with as

much directness, simplicity, and clarity as he could

manage. He lacked official backing -- in the blockade of

1870 there was essentially no government left in Paris --

but what he lacked in authority, he made up in simple

eloquence, self-starting nerve, and headline-grabbing

novelty.

Nadar's balloon corps didn't make much real military

difference. Some were shot down; one was blown off to a

fjord in Norway. In any case, balloon traffic could not

hope to match the enormous military significance of German

railroads.

And yet the balloons were there -- and they could fly.

After the debacle of Sedan, Paris had no government, damn

little food, no mail, no official backing, and victorious

enemy guns on all sides -- but anyone in Paris could see

Nadar's balloons. There wasn't much to them, really,

other than straw and hot air and an attitude, but they

were there, and they were flying. They were energetic,

they were optimistic, and they made a bold pretense of

practicality. People have died cheerfully for less. It

was his finest hour.

Nadar outlived everyone in the Pantheon Nadar. His

enormous vitality served him well, and he died two weeks

short of his ninetieth birthday, in 1910. This man, who

showed such preternatural insight into other people, was

not devoid of self-knowledge. As early as 1864, he

described himself well:

"A superficial intelligence which has touched on too

many subjects to have allowed time to explore any in

depth.... A dare-devil, always on the lookout for currents

to swim against, oblivious of public opinion,

irreconcileably opposed to any sign of law and order. A

jack-of-all-trades who smiles out of one corner of his

mouth and snarls with the other, coarse enough to call

things by their real names -- and people too -- never one

to miss the chance to talk of rope in the house of the

hanged man."

Nadar died eighty-three years ago. We have no real

right to claim him -- visionary, aesthete, polemicist,

Bohemian, technologist -- as a spiritual ancestor.

But it might be a damned good idea to adopt him.

CATSCAN 13 "Electronic Text"

In the mid-1980s I bought a modem and began hanging

out on local computer bulletin board systems. I found the

practice intriguing. There seemed to be a lot of

potential online for interesting new forms of cultural

agitation and fanzine work. The proto-Net itself was a

remarkable technical innovation; a kind of primal soup of

unwritten SF scenarios.

After two years I gave up. E-mail from local bulletin

board systems was consuming as much time as my regular

printed mail, but my printed mail far outclassed anything

I could find electronically. My printed mail was much

denser and much more informative than anything available

to me online, and my printed mail was arriving from all

over the world. Electronic text was like a bowl of

homemade soup, but what I required was exotic bouillon

cubes shipped in from every corner of the compass.

I was writing quite a bit for online discussion

groups, but the effort it took to do this well didn't seem

to be well repaid. Printed fanzines and SF magazines

offered a larger and more demographically varied audience

than the computer enthusiasts on local boards. Time

constraints, and the limits of the medium in the mid-80s,

forced me off the net.

In 1990, a much larger and vastly more sophisticated

Net returned with a vengeance and brusquely thrust its

tentacles up through my floorboards. I found it necessary

to get back up to speed in a hurry.

I have now been online steadily -- mostly on the WELL,

CompuServe, and the Internet -- for three years. I've

sampled many other systems -- GEnie, America Online,

Delphi, dozens of local boards -- but WELL, CIS and

Internet seem to best suit my particular interests and

activities. I don't consider myself a netguru, because

I've met some actual netgurus, and I know I'm certainly

not one, because I don't program. But I enjoy the

reputation of a minor netguru because I write for the Net

and about the Net. The entire texture of my literary

enterprise has been altered, probably permanently, by

gopher, ftp, WAIS, World Wide Web, and global e-mail.

I now spend shocking amounts of time online. I used

to carry out a wide literary correspondence through the

mails. That activity is now near death, replaced by

faxes and e-mail. I haven't written a personal letter in

months that wasn't to some modem-deprived soul in Britain,

Russia, Japan, or Mexico.

On-line, however, I'm very active. During 1993, I

accumulated about half a megabyte of e-mail every week.

Since the net-release of the electronic text of my

nonfiction book HACKER CRACKDOWN, that rate has more than

doubled. I'm getting thirty messages a day.

Most of my traffic, thankfully, is not personal e-mail

but electronic magazines. I read a lot of fairly diffuse

local discussion from the EFF-Austin board of directors

emailing list, but I also read many online publications

such as RISKS DIGEST, BITS & BYTES, COMPUTER UNDERGROUND

DIGEST, EFFECTOR, PHRACK, and Arthur Kroker's CANADIAN

JOURNAL OF POLITICAL AND SOCIAL THEORY.

I spend a great deal of time grappling with these

electronic magazines -- these "e-zines." I can't

truthfully say I that actually "read" them. I certainly

don't read them with the focussed attention that I devote

to printed material such as BOARDWATCH or WORLD PRESS

REVIEW or BOING BOING.

Of course, it's possible to leaf quickly through a

print magazine, and most of the print magazines I receive:

SCIENCE, NATURE, SECURITY MANAGEMENT -- receive just that

kind of browsing, cursory treatment. But my relationship

with electronic text is different -- not just cursory,

but cursor-y. I question whether the antique term

"reading" is properly applied to the consumption of

electronic magazines. Traditionally, reading does not

involve scrolling spasmodically down, and occasionally

back up, through an endless piano-player roll of

intangible verbiage. Electronic text lacks the ritual,

sensual elements of print publication: back covers, front

covers, typography, italics, convenient stopping places,

an impending sense of completion -- what one might call

the body language of the printed text. The loss of these

sensory clues has subtle but profound effects on one's

dealings with the text.

I now spend about as much time reading -- or perhaps

"scrolling" is the proper term -- e-zines as I do

reading printed magazines. I've become dependent on e-

zines. I scarcely see how I got along in life before

electronically subscribing to COMPUTER UNDERGROUND DIGEST.

This compendium of unorthodox computer activities now

seems to me a vital part of the mental armamentarium of

every serious-minded adult. The same goes for RISKS

DIGEST, that startling assemblage of bizarre engineering

anecdotes from all over the planet, concerning "risks to

the public in computers and related systems." Reading

RISKS is wonderfully revelatory, much like having the

Wizard of Oz invite you behind the curtain to

confidentially bitch at length that the giant brass bowls

of flame have given him emphysema.

It's easy to see the advantages of e-zines. First,

subscriptions are free (if you discount the cost of the

equipment, that is). Second, as long as you have room on

your hard disk, e-zines are easy to store and don't

wrinkle or rot. Third, with the proper software, you can

word-search all the back issues at once. Fourth, you can

give e-zines away to all and sundry at little or no cost

and without losing your own copies.

The disadvantages, which are grave, take longer to

dawn on you. First, since e-zines don't generate any

revenue for the editor or staffers, they remain hobbyist

activities. True, the perks of not-for-profit fanzine

publication can be very considerable. Jim Thomas and

Gordon Meyer, the editors of CuD, have over 80,000

readers, the functional equivalent of a private

intelligence network tirelessly investigating the global

hacker scene. Jim Thomas and Gordon Meyer are heavy-duty

smoffing cybergurus, but CUD nevertheless doesn't make any

actual money. The publication is mostly written by its

own readers, edited, collated and distributed by Thomas

and Meyer. Since CuD lacks serious investigative

resources, it can't carry out direct journalistic

muckraking. Nor can CuD garner and compile useful

statistics from original sources. It's even questionable

whether any "e-zine" can depend on First Amendment

protection, or on Constitutional freedom for its

nonexistent "press."

The same operational difficulties apply to the

somewhat more sober RISKS DIGEST. Although RISKS is

backed by the venerable and respectable Association for

Computing Machinery, it too is an edited compilation of

comments from its readership. RISKS often reads more like

a lettercol than a publication. And like letter columns

everywhere, the reader-written e-zine tends to attract

monomaniacs with an axe to grind.

E-zines are easy to store; but also easy to ignore.

If you have received an e-zine and successfully stuffed it

into a desktop folder somewhere, you somehow feel as if

you've successfully dealt with it, whether you've actually

read the words in it or not. You can always "get back to

it later," although that "later" rarely comes. When you

are wrapped in the utter immediacy of an electronic text,

the very idea of a "past" is suspect. Instead, you save

your mental energy for the deluge of incoming data still

lurking there invisibly at the edge of the screen.

E-zines aren't magazines. If they *were* magazines,

there would be no conceivable need for print magazines

such as BOARDWATCH or INTERNET WORLD or MORPH'S OUTPOST ON

THE DIGITAL FRONTIER, and yet print magazines about

electronic networks seem to be expanding almost as quickly

as the Internet itself. What's more, the print magazines

are a lot more fun to read than most of the Internet is.

Word-searching electronic text is a very useful

activity, but electronic sieves are peculiarly leaky.

Keywording, grepping and such leads to an odd phenomenon:

database blindness. If you look up, for instance, the

term "toll fraud" on a computer system stuffed with back

issues of COMPUTER UNDERGROUND DIGEST, you may come up

with an enormous number of responses: say, 4,376 hits.

This fantastic bounty of information makes you feel that

you must surely have the whole phenomenon well in hand,

and therefore need look no further. In point of fact, you

can't even manage successfully to fully study the 4,376

electronic references you already have. After thrashing

around a bit, you'll settle for a few pebbles off what

seems to be a vast Newtonian ocean of information.

In reality, however, much vaster resources of untapped

information still exist -- whole alternate oceans. There

may, for instance be dozens of articles about the same

activity which never use the term "toll fraud." Other

sources may treat the subject matter from a radically

different point of view. Mired in your instant and easy

access, you may not ever see other sources, or even think

to look for them.

Copying electronic text is a very simple matter.

It's even simpler than copying software, and people feel

far less compunction about copying text than they do about

software piracy. In my opinion, no textual disclaimers

about "site licenses" or "copyright" can stop people from

swiftly cutting-and-pasting some bit of juicy gossip and

electronically passing or faxing it to a friend. Even

the armed might and omnipresent wiretaps of the KGB or the

Romanian Securitate couldn't stop street gossip. Giving

the reader the powers of editor, publisher and distributor

turns all electronic text into potential street gossip.

This fog, this unstoppable miasma of info, may be bad

news for tyrants -- or at least for tyrants of an older

and creakier breed, anyhow. But no silver lining comes

without a cloud. The confidentiality and accuracy of

electronic text -- whether private e-mail or a general

publication -- cannot be trusted. Even encrypting one's

e-mail, a practice growing in popularity, won't stop the

receiver from decrypting it, reading the plaintext, and

*then* tampering with it and spreading the news to anyone

he chooses. Expecting electronic text to retain its form

and remain within a narrow channel is like trying to ink

a fine line on a paper towel. Everything blots and

spreads.

As a corollary, if you have a wide circle of

acquaintance in cyberspace -- and a narrow circle of

acquaintance isn't much use -- then you are likely to

receive the same breaking news fifteen or twenty times

through fifteen or twenty different sources. This is

annoying. It also tends to overwhelm your native

incredulity, for even the goofiest fifth-hand rumor no

longer seems incredible if it's repeated fifteen times.

As it travels from hand to hand, electronic text can

become corrupted. It's amazing, really, how little

deliberate forgery goes on -- it would seem absurdly easy

to invent horribly incriminating diatribes and pass them

off as the work of others, and yet I've never known this

to happen. However, a lot of "editing" of other people's

electronic text does goes on, usually well-meant, but

often destructive of context and sense.

Let's turn to the pressing peculiarities of online

discussion groups and bulletin board systems.

"Discussions" on bulletin board systems bear even less

relation to actual conversation than e-zines do to actual

magazines. I offer as evidence the puzzling fact that

there has never been an online discussion of science

fiction one tenth so enlightening and interesting as

hanging out in the corner of Kate 'n' Damon's living room.

In fact, I've never found an online "discussion" of

science fiction that was even as tepidly interesting as

the usual SFFWA suite at a regional convention. The

closest the online world comes to a workable discussion of

science fiction is the blather on GEnie, which is as

paralyzingly tedious as the SFWA BULLETIN, *without the

editing.* And while SF writers spawn like salmon out of

regional writing scenes, I'm unaware of any who have

emerged from an entirely online writers' circle. There

may be some -- I've been expecting them for years -- but

I've never seen any. I question whether it's possible.

Since there is no lack of science fiction fans and

writers online, and since people online are no stupider

than people offline, I attribute this lifelessness in SF

online discussion to the inherent limits of the medium.

Bulletin board services are best suited to bulletins.

They serve best in distributing brief bits of commentary

that could fit snugly on a 3X5 index card. In an ongoing

bulletin board flurry of commentary, any piece of text

longer than a couple of screens produces headachy

impatience and a kind of vertigo. Encountering a serious,

well-reasoned essay in the flow of more-or-less idle

chatter produces an effect like a jetskier hitting an

iceberg.

Bulletin boards excel at minor aspects of social

housekeeping, such as swapping addresses, spreading

headlines, breeding rumors, and, especially, exchanging

insults. Bulletin board messages are not genuinely

epistolary in nature. They are better compared to

answering machine messages, CB radio squibs, souvenir

postcards, or stand-up comedy performance complete with

hecklers.

This brings us to the matter of "flaming," those

sudden eruptions of ranting ill-will so common online.

Many online veterans declare flaming to be "juvenile."

Flaming, however, knows no age group. Flamers do tend to

tone it down after a while, but it's not because of their

growing emotional maturity. It's because they've become

inured to the socially ulcerating, inherent constraints of

the medium. And it's surprising how often a livid,

ranting, hateful flame will burst from some previously

somnolent user, someone with a lot of experience who

seemingly ought to know better.

In many ways it's a source of raw astonishment that

anything even resembling a polite community can exist

among anonymous strangers who are swapping electronic text

on screens. This is social interaction with a desperate

flatness of affect. There's no voice, no pitch, stress,

timing or emphasis in online commentary. There's no body

language, no sight, smell, or touch, no pheromones, no

breath of life. The best emotional signal one can send

online is the skeletal revenant of a disarming smile: the

graphically repugnant "emoticon": :-)

There's supposed to be a lot of difference between the

hurtful online statement "You're a moron," and the

tastefully facetious statement "You're a moron :-)". I

question whether this is really the case, emoticon or no.

And even the emoticon doesn't help much in one's halting

interaction with the occasional online stranger who is, in

fact, gravely sociopathic. Online communication can

wonderfully liberate the tender soul of some well-meaning

personage who, for whatever reason, is physically

uncharismatic. Unfortunately, online communication also

fertilizes the eccentricities of hopeless cranks, who at

last find themselves in firm possession of a wondrous

soapbox that the Trilateral Commission and the Men In

Black had previously denied them.

I've never gotten a piece of hate e-mail. I've never

been seriously harassed or threatened by e-mail. I don't

understand why not, and in fact I fully expect it to

happen someday. In the meantime, as with the rarity of

e-forgery, I marvel at the winsome goodwill of the online

community.

However, I've gotten quite a lot of e-mail that, by

all rights, should have been written in crayon by a person

whom a kindly society had deprived of sharp objects. It

can often take several exchanges of e-mail to bring forth

a realization that would have taken perhaps seven seconds

of contact in real life: *this person is unhinged.* The

effect can be disquieting. (Actually, in my personal

experience it's usually more disquieting for the unhappy

wretch e-mailing me, as most amateur madfolk fare rather

poorly when exposed to a science fiction professional --

but the general principle still holds.)

E-mail has great immediacy. Its movement is very

swift, electronically swift, and yet it does not intrude

into the texture of one's life the way a phone call too

often does. You read e-mail at a time when you are ready

to read it, a time when you are mentally prepared for the

experience. This is a very great advantage.

However, there is a subtler time problem with e-mail

-- a synchronization problem. If User Able log on every

day and User Betty logs on once a week, it peculiarly

affects the nature of their online relationship. For

Betty, Able is a steadying, constant presence, someone who

"always sends me mail," while for Able, Betty is a

spasmodic interloper who always wants to talk about last

week's stale news.

The synchrony problem intensifies if User Cecil is

widely distributing text files with his e-mail address

attached. Now Cecil will get e-mail from all over the

world eager to discuss matters he distributed weeks,

months, even years ago. This lack of timeliness on the

part of the reader is not the readers' fault. Once

released, Cecil's texts can be redistributed again and

again by anyone who stumbles across them. Worse yet, any

clues about the date of their creation are often lost or

edited somewhere in the spidery tatters of the

distribution network. Cecil's supposedly lightning-swift

electronic texts can travel as slowly, unexpectedly and

randomly as a messages in bottles.

Another basic temporal difficulty is the performance

crunch. If User Betty has to answer 50 pieces of e-mail

in an hour and User Able handles only five, no amount of

goodwill or eloquence will allow Able and Betty to

communicate on equal terms. Able will feel neglected by

Betty's brusque and hasty replies; Betty will feel

smothered by Able's discursive, insistent meanderings.

Eventually they will come to regard one another as

exploitative attention-vampires.

Over the past three years, I've made increasing use of

the Internet as a vanity press. My CATSCAN columns are

available online; so are my F&SF Science columns. I

deliberately pitched them overboard into the seas of

cyberspace, and the results have been intriguing. While

many people online read the CATSCAN columns -- or at

least, I know that they download them off the WELL gopher

-- I get little direct response from them. Except, that

is, for Catscan Ten, "A Statement of Principle," which

involved the computer underground. The online response

to that particular article was frantic, with e-mail

pouring in from Italy, New Zealand, Singapore, Britain and

every techie campus in the USA; all in all, I must have

gotten five hundred responses.

The response to the Science columns seems to vary in

direct proportion to their relevance to computer science.

A column about the space program, which got a lot of

printed response, aroused very tepid interest online. But

my column "Internet" provoked scores of replies, and seems

to have an electronic reprint life entirely its own. It

keeps re-surfacing again and again, under a variety of

titles and often annoyingly "edited."

On New Years Day 1994, I released the entire text of

HACKER CRACKDOWN electronically, including a new foreword

and afterword.

At first, very little happened, except for large

numbers of timid queries from people who wanted to

reproduce the text electronically and were anxious not to

be crushed by my publisher. After a month, several of the

larger systems had HACKER CRACKDOWN up online and people

began to lose their fear. It's now available on the WELL,

tic.com, ftp.eff.org., from the Gutenberg Project, and is

widely available in Europe. There's a Hypercard version,

and a Newton version, and various compacted versions in

different data formats, and so forth.

At the moment -- mid-February -- I'm getting three or

four direct responses a day, about twenty-five e-mail

HACKER fanletters a week. Most of them come from people

who say they wanted to buy the printed book but couldn't

afford it (teenagers, college students) or who wanted the

book but couldn't find it anywhere (Norwegians,

Icelanders, Germans, Israelis, vision-impaired online

people with electronic readers in their boxes).

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 recognized 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 transcendance-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?