IGMS Issue 17 (19 page)

So at one point I did address what I thought was a defect in the Cyberpunk movement, that it was all about hardware. It was about silicon and turning yourself into software, and I thought that we were neglecting the organic side of our heritage, and the bodily side, and bio-engineering. I felt we should concentrate more on that.

I think that since then there have been any number of responses to that, whether it was in direct response to me or just other people seeing the same perceived defects. So if you go to that Biopunk entry on Wikipedia, you will see a whole list of great books, like maybe Kathleen Goonan's
Queen City Jazz
series. Rudy Rucker has dealt a little with the topic, as has Peter Watts. So that is something I think still needs to be explored. To me the reason that ten thousand years of literature is still intelligible to us is because basically we are the same human organism that we were, with the same mental capacities and physical capacities. We haven't grown four arms or we haven't added extra lobes to our brains. A lot of superficial things have changed, but our brain/body system has remained consistent for that whole period of time, and so we can mentally and emotionally grok Shakespeare and Plato and anybody else as far back as you want to go.

But the prospect of bio-engineering the human organism, that to me is something that needs to be explored more in science fiction. When you change the baseline human, you put an iron curtain down between the new organism and our past, our entire history.

SCHWEITZER:
The term "Biopunk" to me suggests outlaw, underground, sleazy uses of biotechnology.

Di FILIPPO:
Yes, exactly.

SCHWEITZER:
Rather like Larry Niven's "Organlegger."

Di FILIPPO:
Yes, that's a very good precedent for that type of literature. If you look at something like
Star Trek.
I don't know, canonically, how far in the future
Star Trek
is supposed to happen, how their Star Dates relate to our Christian numbering -

SCHWEITZER:
About A.D. 2300, something like that.

Di FILIPPO:
So it's like 300 years in the future, and there have been no changes in the human baseline condition. They haven't amped up their reflexes -

SCHWEITZER:
Yes, they have, but it's illegal. There are a couple episodes about that. At one point on
Deep Space 9
there was a big scandal because Dr. Bashir was discovered to be a bio-enhanced person.

Di FILIPPO:
So I am not up on the full canon then and I am deficient in a lot of the spin-off viewing. But when you have a space opera set hundreds of years in the future and you don't acknowledge these changes, it seems unconvincing. Even now, with smart drugs, people are using - what is it? - Provigil, the anti-sleep drug. They're using it to stay awake extra periods and hone their reflexes and so on. There has just got to be more of that depicted in the future. You can't just have these starships populated with regular 21
^st
century people. I just don't think it's going to be a reality.

SCHWEITZER:
If you say the word "Singularity" and point a microphone at Vernor Vinge, you're set for the next two hours, but we are approaching that topic. If people are going to be all that much different in the future, how do we write about them comprehensibly?

Di FILIPPO:
You're right. The Singularity is a huge practical and intellectual stumbling block, because if you endorse the notion that there is an iron curtain waiting up ahead of us, beyond which we cannot see, then that effectively limits your story space and your potential for examining the future of mankind. There have been a lot of solutions, each one more or less contrived or awkward. One solution that Vinge himself proposed was different shells within the universe where the Singularity was not permitted to happen within a certain shell of the cosmos. So he could tell stories within that shell because they were within that physical domain, because they were the old, familiar stories that we knew, just within futuristic settings. Then as you moved up his kind of cosmic ladder, things became more and more incomprehensible. So that was one way that he found around it.

I've set stories on an Earth that is more or left deserted, and it's filled with the people who got left behind. The Singularity, as we know, is often called "The Rapture of the Nerds," so this is a kind of post-Rapture story where people are left behind. They weren't subsumed in the Singularity, so you get their story. But once again, as I say, these solutions are kludgy and awkward and they don't really address the problem. It's like showing a human genius, or a human artist of superb talent. When you depict them, you have to depict their stream-of-consciousness or the works they produce. You have to give some sample of it and convince the reader that this really is a genius or an artist of superior powers. How do you do that, because you can only write up to the peak of your own artistry? It's hard to depict a genius on the page. You can show everybody worshipping him, but at some point you have to adduce what he has done to actually be worthy of that. That's the same thing with the Singularity. You've got this entity out there. How do you depict it or make people believe that it's actually superhuman?

SCHWEITZER:
I think it's the same way you depict gods or demi-gods or the like. I can't go into great detail here, but one reason I have always been dissatisfied with
Stranger in a Strange Land
is that you have to take everybody's word for it that Valentine Michael Smith is all that special. You can't
feel
it.

Di FILIPPO:
That's the problem I'm talking about.

SCHWEITZER:
Now, Gore Vidal in his novel
Messiah
solved this problem very quickly. He wrote about the creation of a new religion, but got his messiah out of the picture quickly, then wrote about all the quarrelling disciples. So what you do is write about the other people reacting to the genius, rather than about the genius.

Di FILIPPO:
The thing about the Singularity is not to say that it is the only feature of the future universe. Say it comes into being locally, on a planet or in space, or whatever. There is still the rest of the universe to write about. The Singularity can be something like a black hole. It can be something that every other character, the rest of the universe has not ramped up to yet, so they are viewing the Singularity from the outside. Plotwise it can figure either negligibly or to a large degree, depending on your needs. So the Singularity can almost function like an astronomical black hole. It's there. You can't get at it. It has an effect if you get too close, but you can tell stories around it, at a distance.

SCHWEITZER:
To bring up
Star Trek
again for a second, aren't the Borg the people who have passed the Singularity?

Di FILIPPO:
There you go. [Laughs.] The Borg are probably not the model we want for ourselves. Or you could always deny it. The Singularity is just a theory. It's not a law of the universe. It's a theory with some justification behind it, or some line of logic behind it, so you could always deny the Singularity and say it's not possible and that human consciousness or machine consciousness will never reach these dimensions so that they become unfathomable.

SCHWEITZER:
Or it may that once it happens everyone will take it for granted. One of the great science fiction stories on this subject is "The Shape of Things That Came" by Richard Deming. Have you ever read it?

Di FILIPPO:
No.

SCHWEITZER:
Most of us when we were kids got a two-volume Groff Conklin set from the Book Club,
A Treasury of Great Science Fiction.

Di FILIPPO:
Yeah, of course.

SCHWEITZER:
In that there is a quite short story, first published in 1951, about a man from Victorian times who invents the "time-nightshirt" and goes to see the future, then returns to his own time and writes about 1950, where they have cars and airplanes and telephones, and so on. His editor back in 1890 says, "This is very imaginative and wonderful extrapolation, but what I can't believe is that anyone would ever take these things
for granted.
"

Di FILIPPO:
That's wonderful. We are living, as a lot of people have noticed, in a science fiction world. It has crept up on us. It hasn't assumed the full dimensions of jet packs and food pills and so on that was present in a lot of Golden Age SF, but like the frog in boiling water, we have succumbed to this future without quite realizing that it is a science-fictional future. Try explaining much of what we take for granted to someone from, even, 1960. I think they would just look at you as if you were insane. It's an ongoing process. We are inventing the future day-by-day, and assimilating it almost as quickly, I think.

SCHWEITZER:
You ask a sixteen-year-old to explain to someone who is fifty what that little thing they're operating with their thumbs is.

Di FILIPPO:
This brings up another whole point, which Charles Stross has brought up on his blog. He did a post about the impossibility or near-impossibility of writing short-term future SF. That is what he is currently working on. He is working on a sequel to his novel
Halting State.
That was near-future SF. It took place like, whenever - five, seven, twelve years into the future, and involved theft of virtual currency. That was the McGuffin at the heart of it. There was this gaming world like Second Life and someone broke into the virtual bank and stole the virtual money. The straight cops who had no idea what this was all about and were just baffled. Is this a real crime? Can we prosecute? How do we go about solving it? So within months of the publication of
Halting State,
that actually happened. There have been several robberies of virtual banks. So Charles Stross said, "Well, my novel was outmoded six months after it came out. Now I've got to write the sequel, and I am just stumped, because two weeks later I am still in the middle of the novel and the thing put in chapter one has come true." So he had an interesting post about this, which you can easily find if you go to his blog, claiming that the pace of change is accelerating so fast that it makes it very hard for the SF writer who wants to deal realistically with current trends. It is impossible to stay abreast of it, given the year-long cycle of manuscript to published book.

SCHWEITZER:
This is not a new thing. Some books just ride past that sort of problem without any difficulty. The example that comes to my mind is Tom Disch's
Camp Concentration
which is set in 1975. It was published first serially in 1967, but certainly by the time most people had read the book it was "obsolete." I don't think this slowed it down much.

Di FILIPPO:
Well great art will hold up, for sheer narrative value. That is why we still can read with pleasure the Golden Age SF which
has
been superseded. We read about some hypothetical Moon-landing, and we know it doesn't match reality, but we still enjoy the story for the sake of story. Think of the Hal Clement story, "Dust," in which the moondust sticks to the visor. We know that didn't happen, but it's still a suspenseful and intriguing puzzle story.

So, yeah, great works of art still give us pleasure on many levels even if their predictive elements have fallen short. Charlie may be
angst
ing a little too much, because, as you say, it has always been an issue. I always remember that great anecdote about the Asimov story, in which the reason that mankind could never get to the top of Mt. Everest is that there was an alien base on top. The story saw print in a magazine the same month that Hilary reached the summit of Mt. Everest, so Isaac said that he was very disappointed that his timing had been off on that one.

SCHWEITZER:
It could have been worse. It could have been printed a month later. But today we'd say it was all part of a conspiracy cover-up. But we approach a serious subject here. All this stuff about the Singularity and the inability to cope with the near future is turning into a consensus in science fiction, and if we have a consensus about what the future is going to be like, it might be science fiction that comes grinding to a halt. So maybe the task of the writer is to subvert the whole thing.

Di FILIPPO:
That's a very important point, Darrell. Any consensus should be distrusted. It's like that bumper-sticker, SUBVERT THE DOMINANT PARADIGM. What was that French critic, who back in the '60s and '70s argued that science fiction was wasting its energies writing all these separate futures and we needed to get together and establish a consensus future? It was Jacques Sadoul . . .?

SCHWEITZER:
Someone brought up that idea in American fandom in the 1940s and it was very sensibly laughed down.

Di FILIPPO:
Yeah, so that notion that science fiction could be made much stronger and do a better job if it narrowed its options seems to me insane. What you want is to let a thousand flowers bloom. That's the whole point of science fiction, that the alternatives that it can propose are endless and boundless, so you get that hybrid vigor as the different scenarios interfertilize. If you narrow it down to where, yes, the Singularity
must
occur and I have to acknowledge it in my fiction, you're right. It's a lack of diversity of possibility.

SCHWEITZER:
Given the infinite number of possibilities, why do so many science fiction writers of late seem to be shying away from the future? Some have suggested that the whole alternate history thing is simply a way to avoid writing about the future.

Di FILIPPO:
That is a major defect in the current marketplace, or the marketplace of ideas, maybe. The old style - let's use Heinlein as the main exponent of it - that old Heinlein style of SF has disappeared. I think writers succumb to despair and they are absorbing the cultural malaise that we're in, and that should not be their job, I think that especially in science fiction we need to be a counterforce to counterbalance the gloom and doom and cultural malaise that's out there. But you know what it is. . . . There is probably a term for this in philosophy, or in physics for all I know. This has always struck me. The universe has a very narrow set of conditions for most things to go right, whereas the conditions for things to go wrong are almost infinite. If you have a teacup, there is basically only one way to keep it safe on the shelf. There are a million ways for it to get broken. That unfortunately is the way the universe is set up. I often think about the multiplier effect of this too. You take that fellow who violated airport terminal security in New York. It was the young Asian man who wanted to say goodbye to his girlfriend, and so he ducked under the security rope. Now his little action of ducking under that security rope shut down the terminal. It has a multi-million-dollar consequence, and it impacted the lives of literally thousands of people. What simple action could you or I take which would have a
beneficial
effect of that nature? How could we duck under a rope and instantly add millions of dollars to the Gross National Product and benefit the lives of thousands of people? It's just not possible. The universe is a perverse entity where simple actions can cause tremendous damage, but the same simple actions generally cannot cause tremendous benefit.