Under Heavy Weather:
An Interview with Bruce Sterling
conducted by Dwight Brown, Lawrence Person and Michael Sumbera
Under Heavy Weather: An Interview with Bruce Sterling conducted by Dwight Brown, Lawrence Person and Michael Sumbera |
| The Interview concludes with Part 3. Link to Part One or Part Two. | |
| Lawrence Person: | Jump back to culture for a minute, and the question we ask everyone. What sort of things do you read for pleasure these days, and what sort of music do you listen to? |
| Bruce Sterling: | Uhm, I still listen to Japanese pop music, I've got a lot of that. |
| LP: | Shonen Knife, or...? |
| BS: | No, no, Shonen Knife actually aren't very good. There's a band
called Essex, which is sort of a techno-band, I've been listening to them a
lot lately. Salon Music,--I've got the complete Salon Music discography on
CD. I actually wrote the liner notes for the Salon Music reissue in Tokyo.
I'm close to the artists. Stuff I get in the mail, people send me lots of
tapes and demos--I get lots of wannabe tapes from band members and stuff. I
got a Front 242 tape a while ago, which I thought was very nice. I just got
put on their gimmie list for some reason.
As for what I read, I read magazines. I read Science, I read Nature, I read Telephone Engineer and Management, I read TeleConnect, I read Security Management, I read Whole Earth Review, I read Wired, I read Mondo, I read Boing Boing, I read Science Fiction Eye...I read the Manchester Guardian Weekly. Good magazine--it's a newsmagazine, a newspaper, but it's a weekly summary. What else? Lots of weird stuff. |
| LP: | In a Science Fiction Eye column, you mentioned what you called an emerging genre called "slipstream"... |
| BS: | Yeah. |
| LP: | Do you think that's real, and do you read a lot of it? |
| BS: | I think it's real. I mean, Mark Leyner was here, yesterday, wasn't it? |
| LP: | Yeah. |
| BS: | Mark Leyner's, like, the ultimate slipstream writer. And, you know, I think that guy has an audience. I went to his signing at Europa Books, and there were people in the audience who I'd never seen before. There were a lot of the EFF crowd and the local Europa cyber-activist types--I know all those guys by name. But there were people there who I have no fucking idea what their backgrounds were. I mean, presumably they're lit people of some kind. But if you read Leyner's work, it's sort of classically slipstream. I mean, a) there's no plot, b) it's very heavily informed by a weird kind of pop culture snippet, it's very blipvertish, it has a very experimental prose style. It's intensely postmodern and intensely readable and interesting. Leyner's a bright, accomplished guy, and I think he's working in something that I could only call a genre. I don't know what else you would call it. It's a way of writing that's really, really different from other ways of writing. It feels like a genre and it looks like a genre, and it's got an audience like a genre's got--it doesn't have a name, unless you call it slipstream. Which is not really that great a name, but I don't know what the hell he calls it. |
| LP: | Who else would you shoehorn in under the slipstream rubric? |
| BS: | Well, Kathy Acker. She's pretty well known, and her stuff reads a lot like Leyner's stuff. But a lot of people have done stuff that's sort of slipstream, but they'll also do something else. Slipstream is hard to get published and marketed. I did that list of them once in that column, but I really don't pay that much attention to it, frankly. I read Mark Leyner, I thought Et Tu, Babe was really a pretty funny book. I'll probably read his next book, but I'm not what you'd call a Leyner devotee. I'm not gonna go searching out his magazine articles or anything. I'm not a slipstream writer! I'm a science fiction writer! I recognize the merit in it, and that it's interesting, and that it's difficult to do, and that it takes a level of art and craft that I respect, but I'm not gonna do it. It's just not what I do. |
| LP: | How do you think society as a whole is going to evolve in the face of what you've dubbed "permanent technological revolution"? |
| BS: | I don't know. It could go any of a bunch of different ways. I watch computer networking now, because I happen to know something about it. Maybe if I were really a hip guy, I'd be watching something else. Genetic engineering, superconductivity...there are these things that are sitting there, waiting in the wings, any one of which has the potential to turn society upside down. It seems to me like networking is the thing that's really happening at the moment. I wouldn't be too terribly surprised if networking turned out to be the kind of flash-in-the-pan that the space program was. I mean, we've still got space--everybody's got one now, right? Korea's got a space program. They can launch stuff. They've got weather satellites. They got comm satellites. They got military satellites, communications satellites. Bunches of stuff. We don't have a manned base on Mars. You might end up with this thing where the Internet is all around, and a lot of people do use it, but not everybody uses it, you know? And a lot of people use cable television, and some have interactive cable television, but not everybody. A lot of people have computers on their desk, a lot of people don't have computers, don't like 'em, never use 'em, still live. I can't really tell you what the upshot of that is gonna be. I can speculate. It could go in a bunch of different directions at once. I wouldn't be surprised if you ended up with some places, some areas, that were extremely wired, where telecommunications was just omnipresent and a part of everybody's everyday life, and you might go down the coast a few miles and find a place where televisions were illegal. |
| LP: | You've shown, in your SF Eye columns and in The Difference Engine, a real fascination with history, especially 19th Century history. What do you think the sort of technological upheavals they experienced have to say about the possibilities for our future? |
| BS: | Well, it was an industrial revolution. I think we're having a kind of post-industrial revolution now. The whole basis of employment is changing. Stuff like the collapse of IBM and Sears, and the collapse of General Motors, those are very significant events. In a way those are inheritances from the 19th Century, the idea that you're gonna have these huge areas where enormous numbers of people get together in the same physical locale in order to move things with their hands. That may just be a way of social organization, that's passed its prime. I wouldn't be surprised if people still did it--I mean, the Industrial Revolution didn't make people stop farming. Before it, most people farmed, after it, most people worked in industry. I wouldn't be surprised if that sort of thing happened. In 50 years you might find a lot of people farming, a lot of people working in industry, and a lot of people just basically being mouse potatos--as Wired likes to call 'em. You know, people with just this thing on their desks, and they sort of go in there and just go clickety-clack, clickety-clack, the way people used to do a loom in their house, and they're tending some tiny part in some vast electronic beast. And then money arrives: "Oh, look, darling, the ChipCo credits are here." You know? They mail order something, and the FedEx guy shows up, and they're living, I don't know where in Hell...Sodom, some giant arcology or some helicopter landing pad somewhere in the radioactive waste dump. But it's pretty clear something's changing. If you look at the 19th Century, the 19th Century is a useful analog for the 21st. Because it really was the first time that technology really hit so hard and so fast that it just turned everything inside out in a lifetime. Although technology moves a lot faster now, people are more used to it, yet the level of cognitive distress is about the same. The level of culture shock is about equivalent. The level of hurt people are experiencing, hurt and surprise. In the 19th Century people were really surprised to see something happen in 10 years. And now they're really surprised to see something happen in 10 months. |
| LP: | Same level of information sickness. |
| BS: | Yeah. Same level of information sickness. |
| LP: | I notice your shirt has a lot of Lovecraftian motifs... |
| BS: | Yeah. |
| LP: | What is it you like about Lovecraft's work? |
| BS: | He was a really imaginative guy. He really had the Stygian fire. And he didn't let anything or anybody get in his way, including his own survival. He was perfectly willing to eat spaghetti out of a can for months on end until he died of Bright's disease. He was really very, very dedicated to his craft, and he really was consumed by his own imagination. I like the way he was just able to let it rip. I am an admirer of his, I think of him as being one of my spiritual ancestors. It's useful for me to keep that in mind, because I feel that I can learn things by his experience. I have often taken courage from his example. Thinking, you know, what's the worst thing that could possibly happen to me? I'll just end up eating spaghetti out of a can until I die of malnutrition. |
| LP: | What a cheerful thought. |
| BS: | Well, that's the worst thing, you know? If you can envision the worst thing, if you can put a face on your fear, then you can deal with it better. |
| LP: | Who are some of your other spiritual ancestors? H.G. Wells? |
| BS: | Verne. I'm getting very into Verne these days. He's an interesting guy. I kind of think of Mary Elizabeth Braddon as being one of my spiritual ancestors, actually. She's a genre writer. She was a pioneer of this genre, Victorian genre called "sensation novels". They were the first really massively popular and fairly well-written shocker books. She was a real Boho. She led a very unconventional life, and she became extremely well-known and rather influential. Dead reputation now. |
| LP: | Sort of like a 19th Century In Cold Blood? |
| BS: | No, no, they were mostly about sex. I mean, the subtext of them was adultery. If not adultery, bigamy. They were proto-feminist novels in a funny kind of way. They were very transgressive in a very intimate way. She's an obscure figure, but I'm into obscure figures. I like Lafcadio Hearn a lot. You know, Japanophile and journalist. Some of Hearn's early journalism stuff is way out stuff. When he was 20 years old writing for Cincinnati newspapers, he'd do things like go out and visit the darkies quarter in 1880 and come back and report on it in great detail. He would just go out, and he would look at things that people were unwilling to look at. He did a report on a slaughterhouse once. He goes into this abattoir, and just...poetically comprehends what's going on there, and then puts it in the newspaper. And there's nothing in it that's obscene. There's nothing in it that's even abnormal--thousands and thousands of animals are butchered every day--I mean, we just ate some. But he just makes the invisible visible in this way that's so fucking shocking and alienating, you just can't believe what you're reading. It's like, "My God!" It's just a way of approaching the audience, that gives an intensely science-fictional thrill, that really makes the familiar unfamiliar and reveals the alien in life. He was good. |
| LP: | Stanislaw Lem? |
| BS: | I read Lem. He's an interesting figure, but I don't really feel much of a sense of blood identification with him. I'm talking about people I'd be happy to claim as ancestors. Like, if I found out that Mary Elizabeth Braddon was actually my great-great-grandmother, I'd be really pleased. |
| LP: | How about Bester? |
| BS: | I like Bester. Bester was an interesting writer. He was a very hip, very counterculture guy. It's interesting to see what people can do who are as with it as Bester, in a science fictional milieu. Bester was not a pocket protector kind of guy. He was very perceptive and very unafraid. It's a pity that he ended so badly. But, what the Hell, he probably would have ended badly if he'd been a plumber. Just what I thought of Avram Davidson, I was very sorry to see him die. I was in correspondence with him for a while there. I was even doing some library research with him for a while. He's a unique figure. He was quite ruthless in defending the purity of his own imagination. He did whatever it took to keep his imagination alive. He didn't care what the hell happened. He was perfectly willing to eat sardines off the floor until he died. Just in order to, like, be in touch with the muse. A uniquely gifted character. Not a hard-boiled commercial writer. Guys like that get on my nerves, they really do. People who say, "I know what the public wants, and I want to supply it." It's the Joe SixPack argument Heinlein made: "He can buy my novel, or else he can go out and buy a six-pack. And, by golly, my book, my novel's got to be more entertaining to him than a six-pack of beer." It's like, can't you aim any higher than a fucking six-pack of beer? You ought to be writing novels that that guy would be willing to give up his life for. He ought to die, on the barricades, with your novel in his hand. You ought to be able to lift this poor fucker out of the slough of his despond. You ought to put some ideas in his mind that he'll never get rid of. You shouldn't be out there thinking, "Wow, man, I gotta have his $2.95." |
| LP: | So, you're- |
| BS: | I mean, what the fuck kind of ambition is that? |
| LP: | So, you're out to change people's lives and thinking? |
| BS: | Well, I'm saying you ought to, I'm not saying that I think you will. When people start dying on the barricades with author's novels in their hands, usually shit is going down, like in Yugoslavia. You've got all these fucking Yugoslavian intellectuals, these Serbs. A lot of these fuckers who are running those Serbian armies, they're like...novelists! They're historical novelists. They're generals now. And they're writing all these novels about, "Oh, we are Serb. We are the Serbist of the Serbs. In the 11th Century, we were so Serbian, that we...", you know? It just makes you sick. It's a blood and soil ideology... |
| LP: | On the flip side of that box you have Havel... |
| BS: | Thank god for Havel. I'm a big admirer of Havel's. I wouldn't want to go through what he went through. I really think he's probably a better politician than he was a writer, many people say that. But under some other circumstance than the one he was born into, he probably simply could have become a pretty good politician, and never had to write any plays. It's not like writers never become politicans. Disraeli was one. He wrote some pretty good novels, Disraeli. You should read Sybil, or The Two Nations. That's a good book. Coningsby. That's some pretty rad stuff Disraeli did. You can be a politician and be a pretty bright and creative person. But I don't want to become a politician. I mean, I have a political involvement, I hang out with EFF, and I'm in the civil liberties scene and all that--but if it ever gets to the point where there are tanks in the street around here, I'm probably gonna be shot early on. I hope to God that never happens. |
| LP: | One of the first ones up against the wall, huh? |
| BS: | Yeah. Well, not one of the first, they'll get others. They'll get people who actually own guns first. I would not be surprised. Real civil trouble could break out in America. The 1960's are not that far away. The 1950's are not that far away. I just read John Henry Faulk's biography. The funny thing about Faulk is, people don't realize he was ruined by a trade union. There was this fucking motion picture trade union that was under the total control of McCarthyites. And he wanted to throw them out, so he ran for presidency of this trade union, and they deliberately destroyed him with the red smear. He won some money from them after, like, six, seven years in the courts. But it essentially destroyed his career. He was rendered a non-person. Shit like that can happen. That's the sort of thing that's really likely to happen to artists in the United States. If you're an artist in the United States, you're really not that likely to be shot or arrested. But you could have your career destroyed. You could essentially be silenced through extraordinary means. <pause> Something like a drug bust, that would be good. |
| Dwight Brown: | Being accused of child molesting. |
| BS: | Yeah, that too. A kid porn accusation. A drug bust. Or a tax thing. They could audit your taxes and suddenly claim that you owe them a quarter of a million dollars, and that can put a real cramp in your style. That'll shut you up for quite a while. <pause> The tax code is so loose and stupid, there are all kinds of different ways they could come up with stuff. The IRS is a very powerful organization. And the ability to resist them is very limited. There are ways to silence people in the U.S. I don't think I'm in any real danger. But I can imagine a situation getting out of control in which I would be in real danger. It would just depend on how things broke. It could happen. |
| DB: | You're sort of implying that you don't see things like the growth of the Net, and the growth of desktop publishing, as making or reducing that problem. You don't seem to be thinking that there's a greater diversity of media, and as such, it's harder to completely silence an individual. |
| BS: | I don't think there is a greater diversity of media. Do you? Maybe on cable TV there is, sort of. But God, those cable TV consortia are just awful monster things. The number of bookstore chains and so forth, it's just a national tragedy what's happened to independent bookstores. The number of independent publishing lines, just down and down and down. The last two years of the recession have been very, very tough on independant bookstores and distributors. Now you see stuff like Europa, occasional alternative bookstores springing up. This town is very lucky in having two, possibly three of 'em. But for a lot of people, B. Dalton's is the only bookstore they've ever known. I'm sorry, but the repertoire of stuff that B. Daltons carries is very limited. Maybe if people get on a network or something, they can see more of a different kind of material. But there's not even that much really good material on networks. Most of the stuff that's on networks is still stuff like Unix password gibberish. Software, hardware, users group stuff. The progress of literature is not dependant on the Internet as yet. That's probably all to the good. |
| LP: | One last question as this tape's running out. What do you think you'll be known for, or hope to be known for, say, a hundred years from now? |
| BS: | Well, I would hope that the genre is still alive a hundred years from now, and that I would be known as another 20th Century science fiction writer. Twentieth, or twentieth and twenty-first. I think that's the best you can hope for. I question whether I would have anything in print at that time. I wouldn't be too surprised if, every once in a while, say, one of my historical fantasies showed up. Because they're the stories that are least moored in a particular time period. Something like Islands In the Net, or anything that's heavily politicized, that is very, very redolent of its period. It will be of questionable relevance to anybody a hundred years from now. I would hope that somebody who was a writer a hundred years from now would have the same kind of feeling toward me that I have towards somebody like, say, Lafcadio Hearn. |
| LP: | So you don't have any ambition to be, say, the Hume or Locke of the post-industrial era? Of technological change? |
| BS: | I've read Hume and Locke, and I'm not of the intellectual caliber of Hume and Locke, okay? I'm just not that smart. |
| LP: | Gee. Makes us depressed. |
| Michael Sambera: | What? |
| LP: | Well, if he's not that smart, it sort of puts us in perspective, huh? |
| MS: | Yeah. |
| BS: | You don't have to be the smartest guy in the world to do good work. You have to play the hand you're dealt. I think you do stuff that feels okay when it comes out. If you can just escape the stupid constraints on your own destiny, and the things that other people want you to do that are no good for you. If you can get that far, you've done very well for yourself. As for the rest of it, it's in the hands of Fate. There are more forgotten good writers then you could shake a stick at. There are people--like, say, Joseph Hergesheimer. Who the fuck is he? Very well known novelist in the teens and twenties and thirties. Like a Michener. Massively popular novelist. Died with pots of money. Just a lovely guy all around. He's dog meat! Nobody reads him. But, you know, that's not to say that in a hundred years the tone of society might not change, and it might be-- "The shockingly neglected, brilliant work of Hergesheimer! Hergesheimer! 20th Century's greatest legacy to the 23rd!" Fashions change. You just throw your bread on the waters, and you should be grateful to be given that chance. |
| -fini- | |
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