May 2004 Archives
Trekked to the Har Mare Barnes and Noble this afternoon to see Bruce Sterling in personal performance. He's on tour promoting his new book The Zenith Angle. I decided to go because he's one of my favorite science fiction authors, part of the cyberpunk wave that broke in the 1980s and presaged a lot of the craziness that is the internet and computer technology.
Bruce (notice how the weblog medium makes it almost impossible to refer to people by anything other than their first name, Mr. Sterling seems way too formal) began talking about the genesis of "The Zenith Angle":http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0345460618/ in an "article":http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/10.04/sdi.html?pg=1 he did for Wired magazine about missile defense. Apparently the people who work on missile defense are a lot like science fiction writers, constanly dreaming up plausible sounding threats and then selling them to the politicians. I particularly liked the descrpition of the Iron Triangle between defense company funded think tanks which come up with the threats, Congress which gives the money to defense companies to fight the threats, and the compainies that send the money back into the think tanks to come up with new threats. The best quote about spooks "You can tell the extroverts at the NSA because they're the one's looking at the other person's shoes instead of their own."
Sterling (broke my own observation, maybe it's just the missing title) described his new novel as a technothriller and then went into a bit of a discussion about the difference between technothrillers and science fiction, the gist of which seems to be the difference between keeping the weapon-cum-McGuiffin safe from the public versus celebrating the new technology and its potential for good and harm. He read a short story he was asked to write for "Amazing SF":http://www.rainfall.com/posters/scifimag/catalog1.htm magazine, which is apparently launching yet again for the dozenth time or so since it first began. Naturally the story was about resurrection. Mostly it reminded me of the "Twilight Zone episode":http://www.scifi.com/twilightzone/episodes/season2.html in which a couple of criminals hide out in hibernation chambers inside of a cave and then come out to try and take over the world. In Sterling's take he pushed the time out further into Stapledonian scales until the loop from first to ultimate man became some strange kind of parodic trope. It kept me smiling throughout.
During the question period two people, out of an audience of 15-20, asked about intellectual property. I think this means that the issue of IP has reached saturation inside the geek intelligentsia. Bruce basically said that it's trench warfare now in the intellectual property, where the issue has moved on from being like Bosnia to being like Iraq, actual blood is on the ground. He didn't seem to be very optimistic that any great triumphs would be won by the Linux open sourch geeks over the armies of lawyers likely to be deployed in the name of putting Mickey Mouse into thousand year hyperbaric protection chamber. He admitted that most writers borrow ideas from other sources, The Zenith Angle being a perfect example. He also threw out a neologism he credited to Brian Eno "scenius," which seemed to be a term for the genius of a scene. In music he said the good ideas came from small groups misreading the performances of others, and then taking that misreading and putting it into their own form, thus creating a new scene. "Harold Bloom":http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0195112210/ and the other anxious mavens of deconstruction would be proud to hear their ideas beating on.
Bruce has a "blog":http://blog.wired.com/sterling/ at Wired magazine and snapped a few pictures of "downtown":http://wiredblogs.tripod.com/sterling/index.blog?entry_id=313177 Minneapolis "before":http://wiredblogs.tripod.com/sterling/index.blog?entry_id=313191 the "reading":http://wiredblogs.tripod.com/sterling/index.blog?entry_id=313193.
Late last week was the nadir of my despair about current events. It's hard to imagine how the images and stories of abuse from Iraq could be worse. When I heard yesterday about the beheading of an American I just felt sick. If American exceptionalism is to have any real cachet it must be because we hold ourselves to a higher standard than the rest of the world.
While wallowing in despair about current events last week I was listening to Steely Dan and the Gang of Four, two items that perfectly captured my sense of decadence and despair. Instead of NPR my CD player blared out "The Boston Rag" and "Show Biz Kids" while going to work; "Natural's Not In It" and "I Found that Essence Rare" on the way home.
The appeal of Steely Dan is a strange one. In college (90-94) the common denominator of my generations musical culture was the 1980s. I hated that decade every time "Safety Dance" got played at some party. My antipathy has died off a bit since then, but not by much. I don't remember anyone else who enjoyed the Dan. My interest had roots in memory, "Deacon Blues" and "Peg" are two of the earliest pop songs I remember hearing on the radio. As the years wore on I grew to enjoy Fagan's deadpan delivery of the scathing lyric, and combination of fatalism and cynicism that never seems to be out of style.
I discovered the Gang of Four in the middle of the 1990s. I'm not sure where I first heard of them. I think it had something to do with the Infinite Zero label that had rereleased Solid Gold and Entertainment. Entertainment in particular is a brilliant album, going from one blistering condemnation of the world to another. They, too, were working at the end of the 1970s and the beginning of the 1980s like Steely Dan, which may or may not be a coincidence. Perhaps the 1970s had the same aura of exhaustion that seems to be the only response I can muster to the present day.
