Creators of science fict.., p.18
Creators of Science Fiction, page 18
It is arguable that works like Cosm are what Benford does best—or, at least, that they are the one thing he does conspicuously better than anyone else. What is truly remarkable about his work is, however, its awesome range. He has tried harder than any other contemporary sf writer, and far harder than any other writer of hard sf, to explore all the potentialities that the genre has to offer. The spectrum of his works includes a few enterprises that some critics have considered to be beneath the dignity of a real writer—especially a self-declared amateur who has a taxing and worthwhile day job—but Benford has always seen such exploits as contributing to Shared World anthologies and writing belated sequels to other people’s books as intellectual and artistic challenges. In addition to those items already mentioned he and Mark O. Martin contributed a novella, “The Trojan Cat”, and a full-length novel, “A Darker Geometry” to the sixth and seventh volumes of Man-Kzin Wars (1994 & 1995), based on Larry Niven’s scenario. Like any true scientist, Benford has always been willing to try such experiments, just to see how they come out. His amateurism is not the kind that despises money-making, but the kind that can embark upon any enterprise at whim, without any need to fear the consequences of occasional failure.
Given this, it is not surprising that Benford’s very best work constitutes an ongoing celebration of curiosity as a motive force and enterprise as an attitude of mind. This can be seen very clearly in Timescape and Cosm, and in the long series built on the seed of “In the Ocean of Night”, but it does not diminish Benford in the slightest to suggest that it shows most nakedly in some of his collaborative pieces, including If the Stars are Gods, “Proserpina’s Daughter” and their most striking successor: “A Cold, Dry Cradle” (1997, written with Elisabeth Malartre). This heartfelt hard sf story accepts James Lovelock’s judgment of the implications of its chemically-neutral atmosphere and the scant findings of the Viking lander, but begs leave to argue that there is still a possibility not merely of finding life on Mars but of finding precious enlightenment there.
In one of the commentaries in In Alien Flesh, Benford borrows an analogy applied by Robert Frost to the writing of free verse in order to characterise the writing of sf without a proper scientific conscience as “playing tennis with the net down”. He is a writer who has always tried to play with the net up, but not to allow its presence to inhibit him in his stylistic experiments. It is as well to remember, though, that to think of any kind of conscience merely as a restriction is rather misleading. The point of a conscience is that it also works constructively towards the cause and security of some crucial good. The conscience of hard sf works towards the cause and security of enlightenment, and Benford’s work in that cause can stand comparison with any modern writer in any field.
Bruce Sterling
Michael Bruce Sterling was born in Brownsville, Texas on 14 April 1954. His parents moved to the gulf coast when he was three and he lived in various coastal refinery towns until he was fifteen. His father, a mechanical engineer, then obtained work in India, and Sterling spent a good deal of the following two-and-a-half years in various Far Eastern locations. He completed his formal education at his father’s alma mater, the University of Texas, Austin, graduating in 1976 with a B.A. in Journalism. He married Nancy Baxter in 1979.
Sterling’s first science fiction story, “Man-Made Self”, appeared—somewhat mangled by the printer—in Lone Star Universe (1976), an anthology of Texan sf edited by George W. Proctor and Steven Utley. That anthology was introduced by Harlan Ellison, who was later to issue Sterling’s first novel, Involution Ocean (1978 but dated 1977) in the short-lived “Harlan Ellison Discovery Series”. Ellison explains in his introduction to the latter volume that in 1974, when he was a guest at one of the “Turkey City Workshops” in which Sterling regularly took part, he had also bought the first story Sterling ever sold. Unfortunately, he bought it for The Last Dangerous Visions, which has not yet seen print. In the intervening quarter-century Sterling has become one of the leading figures in the science fiction genre. He writes with admirable literary elegance and a fine wit; he is also a remarkably astute cultural commentator, second to none in his grasp of the keenness of the cutting edge of technological progress and the velocity with which that progress is likely to proceed. His passionate promotion of a new kind of science fiction adapted to a revolutionary new era in technology and popular culture enabled him to attain near-legendary status as the compiler of one of the key cultural products of the current fin-de-siècle, Mirrorshades: The Cyberpunk Anthology (1986).
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Harlan Ellison’s introduction to Involution Ocean records that the first version of the story was a novelette entitled “Moby Dust”. The abandoned title acknowledges the story’s formal debt to Herman Melville, although Ellison quotes the author’s judgment that his principal influences in writing it were Clark Ashton Smith, Larry Niven, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and Ellison himself. The novel is set on the colony world of Nullaqua, whose only habitable region lies at the bottom of a crater some five hundred miles across, in which ninety percent of the world’s atmosphere is concentrated. This region consists of an “ocean” of extremely fine dust dotted with various island chains. The Nullaquan dustwhale is the only known source of the psychotropic drug syncophine, also known as Flare. Because Flare has been proscribed, the descendants of the religious fanatics who first settled the world have done their best to put an end to an era in which dust-masked privateers sailed the Sea of Dust in great trimarans in search of the alien leviathans—but the opportunity still remains for a group of ill-assorted travelers to undertake one last great adventure. The novel’s plot is an account of the mixed motives and various fortunes of the expeditionaries.
Sterling’s attempt to marry the imaginative adventurism of Clark Ashton Smith to the technophilic hardness of Larry Niven was typical of his ambition. Smith had taken the world-view of the French Decadent Movement of the nineteenth-century fin-de-siècle to the illimitable stages of cosmic fantasy and genre science fiction, while Niven, in the “Gil Hamilton” series, had been one of the first writers to attempt to analyze the social changes that were likely to flow from the combined effects of sophisticated biotechnology and information technology. Involution Ocean is a neo-Decadent fantasy of the far future, which owes far more to Smith than Niven, but the settings of Sterling’s subsequent works of fiction were to move gradually closer to home. The majority eventually settled in a near future in which the social and political institutions of the present day are still struggling—with grotesque ineffectuality—to cope with a deluge of scientific innovations, but they never abandoned the colorful and ironic flamboyance of Decadent sensibility.
Sterling’s second novel, The Artificial Kid (1980), is set on the watery but island-strewn world of Reverie. Its eponymous hero is a young “combat artist” whose adventures in a Decriminalized Zone where almost anything goes are assiduously chronicled by robot cameras. The resultant videotapes are edited for use as entertainment by legions of fans. Many of the elements of Involution Ocean reappear in The Artificial Kid, in much the same balance; drugs function as a double-edged means of liberation and religion as an essentially farcical but nevertheless powerful repressive force. The secrets of the Elder Culture, some of whose relics were marginally featured in the earlier novel, play a more prominent part here, refracted through the Gestalt theories of the protagonist’s “tutor and mentor” Professor Crossbow. The climactic journey that takes the novel’s leading characters into the heart of the alien Mass and out again is a baroque odyssey similar to that which supplied the plot of Involution Ocean.
The elaborate description of the protagonist provided in the first chapter of The Artificial Kid is strongly reminiscent of various heroes featured in the work of Samuel R. Delany, who were also deployed in exotic myth-infected milieux. The Kid dresses to impress, carries a customized weapon (a “nunchuck”) which he uses artfully and judiciously, has a similarly quasi-fetishistic association with various other technical gadgets, moves with “resilient grace” and is irrepressibly precocious. He does not actually wear mirrorshades, but he is the kind of character custom-designed to fit almost everything that mirrorshades came to symbolize when it became the insiders’ shorthand term for the literary movement whose prime movers were Sterling and William Gibson.
Sterling’s own core contribution to the sf of the early 1980s was the Shaper/Mechanist series, whose earliest elements—”Spider Rose” (1982), “Swarm” (1982) and “Cicada Queen” (1983)—appeared alongside the story series which Gibson began with “Johnny Mnemonic” (1981). Sterling was later to recall that he had read Gibson’s Neuromancer (1985) in manuscript “in 1982 or 1983” while he was guiding his own series towards the climax it eventually attained—following “Sunken Gardens” (1984) and the patchwork “Twenty Evocations” (1984)—in Schismatrix (1985; reprinted with the short stories as Schismatrix Plus, 1996).
Sterling’s series details the rapid expansion through the solar system of various “posthuman” populations, loosely categorized as Shapers (a term of description applied to those groups who have remade themselves primarily by genetic engineering) and Mechanists (those groups who have remade themselves by extensive cyborgization). These main categories are elaborately subdivided into many splinter-societies organized according to a wide range of political and religious creeds. Their most extreme examples are very bizarre indeed, the ultimate mechanists being immobile and immortal “wireheads” equipped with all manner of mechanical senses while the most exotic Reshaped individuals are more alien than the actual alien species whose presence within and without the solar system complicates the human expansion into space.
The aliens provide important points of comparison throughout the series as Sterling and his many characters attempt to figure out what, if anything, is truly fundamental to the concept of “humanity”—and what, if anything, is worth preserving therefrom. The hive-intelligence of “Swarm” poses a challenge to a Shaper who believes that the preservation of individuality is both possible and desirable. The reptilian Investors, who barter artifacts and life-forms of many different kinds for human goods and art-works, offer a similar challenge the Mechanist protagonist of “Spider Rose”, in the form of a carefully-tailored genetic artifact that eventually becomes reincarnate within her own flesh and mind.
A key location in the Shaper/Mechanist series is the space habitat C-K (Czarina-Kluster), whose central Palace is established to house the exiled Investor “Cicada Queen”. It rapidly accumulates a host of “subbles” (bubble suburbs), eventually becoming host to a People’s Corporate Republic. C-K, which is also an important setting in Schismatrix, becomes a temporary oasis of calm in the Shaper/Mechanist conflict, although it is by no means immune to the fallout of their various philosophical and commercial differences. Its moral and intellectual climate is advanced beyond those of the inner system’s more tradition-bound locales, and although it is by no means a Utopia it represents Sterling’s first major experiment in constructive social design. The ready access that C-K’s inhabitants have to Investor technologies—by courtesy of the renegade Queen—places it at the cutting edge of the Posthumanist quest, providing a platform for the Lifesiders who oppose the more radical forms of Posthumanism and are intent on terraforming Mars—a project whose intermediate phases are described in “Sunken Gardens”. C-K also offers a home to such extreme Mechanist sects as the Lobsters, the Spectral Intelligents and the Blood Bathers.
By the end of the extraordinarily complicated Schismatrix—whose hero’s extended odyssey through the rapidly changing solar system covers 170 years of future history in less than 300 pages—humankind has broken up into a whole series of daughter species, or “clades”, none of which can claim to be sole carrier of the torch of destiny. The odyssey of the novel’s hero, Abelard Lindsay, takes him from the Mare Tranquillitatis People’s Circumlunar Zaibatsu to the spaceship Red Consensus, the asteroid Esairs 89-XII, the Shaper “city-state” of Goldrich-Tremaine in the Rings of Saturn, an Investor trading ship and back to the asteroid belt’s Dembowska Cartel before the plot revisits Czarina-Kluster. In the process, Lindsay witnesses and plays his own small part in the evolution of the Schismatrix: the system-wide society in which all the post-human factions can live in relative harmony.
In the final chapter of the novel Lindsay returns “home” to Earth, but that is only the opening of a final sequence of moves which takes him far abroad again. He visits the exhausted Earth—which has already begun its own process of self-renewal—merely in order to draw genetic material from its oceanic womb: material that will be transformed by the “angelic” Lifesiders to provide the Jovian satellite Europa with an ecosystem. The conclusion of the chapter is set in CircumEuropa as the new world awaits its transformation, and it finds Lindsay in the company of the mysterious Presence, looking outwards to “the final transcendance [sic]” and to the as-yet-unattained state of being in which it will not matter whether or not the Final Questions ever obtain the Final Answers.
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It was Gardner Dozois, the editor of Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine, who popularized the term “cyberpunk” as a label for the kind of character that was foreshadowed in the Artificial Kid and became the symbol of the new sf that Sterling and William Gibson were trying to write. (In 1983 Amazing had published a story called “Cyberpunk” by Bruce Bethke which had applied the label to a different kind of individual, but Dozois might not have seen it.) Typically, Sterling had moved on so rapidly that he never used another leading character of the same caricaturish kind as the Artificial Kid, even in a carefully tuned-down version; Abelard Lindsay is cut from different cloth. Sterling left the sophistication of the new outlaw breed to William Gibson, whose “very technical boy” Johnny Mnemonic and cyberspace cowboy Bobby Quine became the archetypal cyberpunks. It is entirely appropriate to the nature of the movement that by the time Cyberpunk became firmly established as a key descriptive term, in 1985, all the writers involved were insistent that it was already obsolete.
Schismatrix is more ambitious in many ways than Neuromancer, and is certainly one of the landmark works of modern sf, but it is not entirely surprising that it was the latter novel that won the awards and attracted the lion’s share of critical attention. While Gibson provided a generation of would-be cyberpunks with the vocabulary of ideas required to crystallize their image and creed, Sterling reached into more distant realms of possibility so strange and so discomfiting that the vast but safely-enclosed vistas of cyberspace seemed cozy by comparison.
Between 1984 and 1986 Sterling produced the fanzine Cheap Truth, where he pontificated extensively—employing the polemical persona of “Vincent Omniaveritas”—about the nature and significance of the Movement of which he and Gibson were a part, along with Lewis Shiner, John Shirley and Rudy Rucker. The climax of this endeavor—which established that although Gibson might be reckoned the Messiah of 1980s sf, Sterling was the hard-working Saint Paul who actually took the message on the road—was Mirrorshades: The Cyberpunk Anthology. This seminal collection featured all the aforementioned writers alongside Pat Cadigan, Tom Maddox and the more marginal figures of Greg Bear, James Patrick Kelly, Marc Laidlaw, and Paul Di Filippo.
Sterling’s introduction to the anthology pays appropriate homage to cyberpunk’s precursors within the sf field and draws crucial analogies to parallel cultural movements, especially those manifest in rock music, before providing the definitive explanation of the Movement’s nature and ambitions:
“Technical culture has gotten out of hand. The advances of the sciences are so deeply radical, so disturbing, upsetting, and revolutionary that they can no longer be contained. They are surging into culture at large; they are invasive; they are everywhere. The traditional power structures, the traditional institutions, have lost control of the pace of change.
“And suddenly a new alliance is becoming evident: an integration of technology and the Eighties counterculture. An unholy alliance of the technical world and the world of organized dissent—the underground world of pop culture, visionary fluidity and street-level anarchy....
“The hacker and the rocker are this decade’s pop-culture icons, and cyberpunk is very much a pop phenomenon: spontaneous, energetic, close to its roots....
“For the cyberpunks...technology is visceral. It is not the bottled genie of remote Big Science boffins; it is persuasive, utterly intimate. Not outside us, but next to us. Under our skin; often, inside our minds.” (pp. x-xi)
The idea of cyberpunk fiction had an instant appeal to people ambitious to be the architects of a new “cyberculture”, whose instruments of propaganda were such magazines as Mondo 2000 and Wired. The former proclaimed Sterling a hero, while the latter welcomed his journalistic input. By 1987, however, the first issue of the fanzine Science Fiction Eye began its list of contents with a “Requiem for the Cyberpunks”, reproduced a Science Fiction Research Association panel discussion of “Cyberpunk or Cyberjunk” (in which Norman Spinrad tried belatedly to secure his contention that “Neuromantics” would have been much a better label for the Movement’s members) and promulgated “The Humanist Manifesto”, issued in reaction against Sterling’s Mirrorshades introduction by John Kessel, following a lead offered by Michael Swanwick. Sterling—whose interview with Takayuki Tatsumi was advertised as the last phase of the magazine’s “cyberpunk autopsy”—agreed to serve as a regular columnist for Science Fiction Eye, but with characteristic insouciance he ignored the unfolding furore and devoted his opening contribution to a commentary on the works of Jules Verne.
The term “cyberpunk” also had an instant appeal to academics of a postmodernist stripe, who were anxious to get a fashionably-labeled theoretical grip on contemporary popular culture. Larry McCaffery, the editor of a massively comprehensive guide to Postmodern Fiction (1986), produced Storming the Reality Studio: A Case Book of Cyberpunk and Postmodern Fiction (1991), an anthology far more wide-ranging and far more grandiose than Mirrorshades, which mixed stories by the bona fide cyberpunks with fiction by the likes of Kathy Acker, J. G. Ballard, William S. Burroughs, Don DeLillo, and Thomas Pynchon, and non-fiction by Jean Baudrillard, Jacques Derrida, Timothy Leary, and others. The rapidity with which the movement was embalmed for academic inspection and critically dissected was entirely in keeping with its own theories about the flow of modern culture.
