I grew up on a solid diet of science fiction, and as a young man in the 1970s and 1980s I had a wide range of style to choose from — New Wave, Old Guard, the Cyberpunks. To read them all at once was like the old Evolution of Man posters, the history of the future all in view.
Like the time-traveler who uses knowledge of the future to succeed, I became a technology early-adopter by reading science-fiction. When I saw it happening for real in the 1980s, as limited and clunky as it was, I already knew what it was going to be. Twenty years ago I even lucked into a job in the field, first learning then explaining to others just what “online” was. That job is done.
I am running out of futures.
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Category: essay
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Science fiction as time travel
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Meandering Progress Report Sep 2013
As I wrote a novel with a corporate setting, florid language became dead weight. I needed to make a corporate motif, a slickness half jet-age half cyberpunk.
It took many drafts to make that happen since it was a big story. I resolved not to write like film or for film, but to edit my work into efficiency. Like compression in computing, to convey the richest illusion in the least time without being too lossy.
In the last two years I have taken almost 40% off the first draft manuscript. I may not be good but I am trying hard. One day I will learn to say less from the start.
I am starting to feel done with the manuscript. (more…) -
Better writing through selfishness
Some years ago I attended a conference at Woolly Mammoth Theater in Washington DC on art and democracy. Along with the artists and patrons and at least one historian, many who came were national and local activists for marginalized communities invisible to national culture. They made impassioned pleas for the assembled artists to take the time to bring them and their needs into the spotlight.
I wasn’t kind to the idea. Its fine for people outside to express concern, to channel aid, but artists can’t be anyone’s mouthpieces. Culture requires imagination. It demands oblique correlatives, odd connections, and fantasy, a voice not determined by big-picture grandees but the kind of misfits who stay up all night sweating the details.
I’m not saying writers should be divorced from their societies but they should not try to confuse their role as entertainers and provokers of thought with measurable social value. (more…) -
Science and the Jinx
A recent issue of Science News featured marvelously detailed images of cellular division — images that recently would have been considered impossible, since cell structures are tinier and more delicate than the very light used to image them.
This is a familiar story, the impossible becoming possible. At the moment, following Feynman’s lead, all myopic eyes are on the micro-scale. Even Big Data mainly gets used to target small niches of humanity for advertising, votes, or drone strikes.
I hope I live to see a science of the human herd’s effect on itself. I want a science of the mystical. For example – why are people jinxes?
You know what I mean, even if science doesn’t. Stuff just doesn’t work around some people — computers, traffic, weather, getting to the movies on time. Those who try to compensate for these people wind up completely overboard in situations they would sail through any other day. And you know these people are jinxes. You just do.
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