Collected Essays (3 page)

The wonderful music of the Ramones is a good example of a message with low complexity but high depth. Think in terms of Garage Music. Some guys get a really easy tune—like “Louie, Louie,”—and they play it and replay it every Friday, and whenever else they can practice. And after a year, they really play an incredible “Louie, Louie.” It’s gotten
deep
. On the other hand, a simple note-for-note plagiarism of the Kingsmen’s “Louie, Louie” has a low depth—it derives quickly from the Kingsmen program.

Books like
Neuromancer
and
Schismatrix
have a low-complexity/high-depth feel to them. I think it’s reasonable to think of them as logically deep, because what the authors have done is to start with some fairly standard SF notions—robots, weird drugs, space colonies—and to then think and think about these notions until the final product is very highly exfoliated.

At this point it begins to look like I’m just saying that good books read as if they’ve been through a lot of rewrites, which is not such hot news. Still, I do think there is something to this—to the Garage Music notion of SF, if you will—the basic thesis being that right now a good way to be writing SF is to keep going back to the beat old clichés, back to the robots and the brain-eaters and the starships, and to reinvent the field just from that, by thinking harder and harder about what it can do. Maybe you don’t really have to be a “punk” to be stoned, unemployable, and/or stubborn enough to spend enough time in that garage.

In reading fine cyberpunk literature, it’s the realness and the tactility of the scene that really matters. In the old
Mad
magazine—and again in the underground comix of the ‘60s—what was great was all the little things to look at in the frames, the so-called “eyeball kicks.” It takes time to work all the little touches out, and that is where we see logical depth, a.k.a. craftsmanship.

Sociologically, the real point of inventing “movements” is to attract attention. At the most, a label like “cyberpunk” can serve only to get people to read the work of individual authors, and at that point the authors are on their own, as usual.

But still…the concept of cyberpunk is energizing. There are other quite different styles of SF, for instance the
transrealist
style epitomized by Phil Dick. For a transrealist, SF is a type of autobiography. I was happy, writing
Wetware
, to get away from the transrealism of my book
The Secret of Life
and go for the dense eyeball kicks of cyberpunk.

Cyberpunk suggests, once again, that SF really can be about the world and not just about the author’s mind. For me, the best thing about cyberpunk is that it taught me how to enjoy shopping malls, which used to terrify me. Now I just pretend that the whole thing is two miles below the moon’s surface, and that half the people’s right-brains have been eaten by roboticized steel rats. And suddenly it’s
interesting
again.

Note on “What is Cyberpunk?”

Written 1985.

Appeared in
REM
, #3, February, 1986.

“What is Cyberpunk?” sprang from my experience of being on the first-ever science-fiction convention “Cyberpunk” panel in Austin, 1985. John Shirley and I stayed at Bruce Sterling’s house that time and had a wonderful time. I remember one great moment with Shirley leaning out of our car window and hollering, “Y’all ever ate any live brains?” at some bewildered Texans.

The audience response to our panel was so incredibly hostile that Shirley and Sterling walked out, and afterwards Shiner was saying, “Well, after that I guess cyberpunk is dead. Wow, that sure was a short-lived thing.” I wrote “What Is Cyberpunk?” to clearly join and support the cause.

REM
was a zine published by my writer-friend Charles Platt. I added the postscript to the article in response to a letter from a reader, so I suppose the postscript must have appeared in issue #4.

The
Mondo 2000
editors latched onto my phrase “How fast are you? How dense?” and used it in their ad campaigns and on some of their T-shirts.

Gnarly SF

In this essay, I’ll talk about how I write science fiction. I’ll be talking about levels of complexity, focusing on what I call the gnarly zone. And I’ll get into four particular techniques that I refer to as transrealism, monomyths, power chords, and thought experiments. So let me set the stage with a diagram.

What is Gnarl?

I use
gnarl
in an idiosyncratic and somewhat technical sense; I use it to mean a level of complexity that lies in the zone between predictability and randomness.

The original meaning of “gnarl” was simply “a knot in the wood of a tree.” In California surfer slang, “gnarly” came to describe complicated, rapidly changing surf conditions. And then, by extension, something gnarly came to be anything with surprisingly intricate detail. As a late-arriving and perhaps over-assimilated Californian, I get a kick out of the word.

Do note that “gnarly” can also mean “disgusting.” Soon after I moved to California in 1986, I was at an art festival where a caterer was roasting a huge whole pig on a spit above a gas-fired grill the size of a car. Two teen-age boys walked by and looked silently at the pig. Finally one of them observed, “Gnarly, dude.” In the same vein, my son has been heard to say, “Never ever eat anything gnarly.” And having your body become old and gnarled isn’t necessarily a pleasant thing. But here I only want to talk about gnarl in a good kind of way.

Clouds, fire, and water are gnarly in the sense of being beautifully intricate, with purposeful-looking but not quite comprehensible patterns. And of course all living things are gnarly, in that they inevitably do things that are much more complex than one might have expected. As I mentioned, the shapes of tree branches are the standard example of gnarl. The life cycle of a jellyfish is way gnarly. The wild three-dimensional paths that a humming-bird sweeps out are kind of gnarly too, and, if the truth be told, your ears are gnarly as well.

I’m a writer first and foremost, but for much of my life I had a day-job as a professor, first in mathematics and then in computer science. Although I’m back to being a freelance writer now, I spent twenty years in the dark Satanic mills of Silicon Valley. Originally I thought I was going there as a kind of literary lark——like an overbold William Blake manning a loom in Manchester. But eventually I went native on the story. It changed the way I think. I drank the Kool-Aid.

I derived my notion of gnarl from the work of the computer scientist Stephen Wolfram. I first met him in 1984, interviewing him for a science article I was writing. He made a big impression on me, and introduced me to the dynamic graphical computations known as cellular automata, or CAs for short. The so-called Game of Life is the best-known CA. You start with a few lit-up pixels on a computer screen. Each pixel “looks” at the eight nearest pixels, counts how many are “on” and adjusts its state according to this total, using a fixed rule. All of the pixels do this at once, so the screen behaves like a parallel computation. The patterns of dots grow, reproduce, and/or die, sometimes generating persistent moving patterns known as gliders. I became fascinated by CAs, and it’s thanks in part to Wolfram that I switched from teaching math to teaching computer science.

Wolfram summarized his ideas in his thick 2002 tome,
A New Kind of Science
. To me, having known Wolfram for many years by then, the ideas in the book seemed obviously true. I went on to write my own nonfiction book,
The Lifebox, the Seashell, and the Soul
, partly to popularize Wolfram’s ideas, and partly to expatiate upon my own notions of the meaning of computation. A work of early geek philosophy. Most scientists found the new ideas to be—as Wolfram sarcastically put it—either trivial or wrong. When a set of ideas provokes such resistance, it’s a sign of an impending paradigm shift.

So what does Wolfram say?

He starts by arguing that we can think of any natural process as a computation, that is, you can see anything as a deterministic procedure that works out the consequences of some initial conditions. Instead of viewing the world as made of atoms or of curved space or of natural laws, we can try viewing it as made of computations. Keep in mind that a “computer” doesn’t have to be made of wires and silicon chips in a box. It can be any real-world phenomenon you like. Does this make the world dull? Far from it.

Having studied a very large number of visually interesting computations called cellular automata, Wolfram concluded that there are basically three kinds of computations and three corresponding kinds of natural processes.

Predictable
. Processes that are ultimately without surprise. This may be because they eventually die out and become constant, or because they’re repetitive. Think of a checkerboard, or a clock, or a fire that burns down to dead ashes.

Gnarly
. Processes that are structured in interesting ways but are nonetheless unpredictable. Here we think of a vine, or a waterfall, or the startling yet computable digits of pi, or the flow of your thoughts.

Random
. Processes that are completely messy and unstructured. Think of the molecules eternally bouncing off each other in air, or the cosmic rays from outer space.

The gnarly middle zone is where it’s at. Essentially all of the interesting patterns in physics and biology are gnarly. Gnarly processes hold out the lure of being partially understandable, but they resist falling into dull predictability.

Anything involving fluids can be a rich source of gnarl—even a cup of tea. The most orderly state of a liquid is, of course, for it to be standing still. If one lets water run rather slowly down a channel, the water moves smoothly, with a predictable pattern of ripples.

As more water is put into a channel, the ripples begin to crisscross and waver. Eddies and whirlpools appear—and with turbulent flow we have the birth of gnarl.

Once a massive amount of water is poured down the channel, we get a less interesting random-seeming state in which the water is seething.

Now, the pay-off for this whole ine of thought is that it becomes possible, via some computer-science legerdemain, to argue that
all
of the interesting processes of nature are inherently
unpredictable
.

What, by the way, do I mean by “predicting a process”? This means to have some procedure for determining the processes result very much faster than the time it takes to simply let the process run. Saying that a gnarly process is unpredictable, means there are no quick short-cut methods for finding out what the process will do. The only way to really find out what the weather is going to be like tomorrow is to wait twenty-four hours and see. The only way for me to find out what I’m going to put into the final paragraph of a book is to finish writing the book.

It’s worth repeating this point. We will never find any magical tiny theory that allows us to make quick pencil-and-paper calculations about the future. Sometimes scientists—or science-fiction writers—have speculated that there’s some compact master-formula capable of predicting the future with a few strokes of a pencil. And many still have an internal faith in some slightly more sophisticated restatement of this.

But we have no hope of control. On the plus side, the gnarly is a bit better behaved than the fully random. We can’t predict the waves, but we can hope to ride them.

As a reader, I’ve always sought the gnarl, that is, I like to find odd, interesting, unpredictable kinds of books, possibly with outré or transgressive themes. My favorites would include Jack Kerouac and William Burroughs, Robert Sheckley and Phil Dick, Jorge-Luis Borges and Thomas Pynchon.

Once again, a gnarly process is complex and unpredictable without being random. If a story hews to some very familiar pattern, it feels stale. But if absolutely anything can happen, a story becomes as unengaging as someone else’s dream. The gnarly zone lies at the interface between logic and fantasy.

William Burroughs was an ascended master of the gnarl. He believed in having his work take on an autonomous life to the point of becoming a world that the author inhabits. “The writer has been there or he can’t write about it… [Writers] are trying to create a universe in which they have lived or where they would like to live. To write it, they must go there and submit to conditions that they might not have bargained for.” (From “Remembering Jack Kerouac” in
The Adding Machine: Selected Essays
, Seaver Books 1986.)…

In order to present some ideas about how gnarl applies to literature in general, and to science-fiction in particular, I’m going to make up four tables to summarize ho gnarliness makes its way into science-fiction in four areas: subject matter, plot, scientific speculation, and social commentary.

In drawing up my tables, I found it useful to distinguish between
low gnarl
and
high gnarl
. Low gnarl is close to being periodic and predictable, while high gnarl is closer to being fully random.