Not A Blog™

Bruce Sterling is one of those writers I’ve heard many good things about, yet still never bothered to read. There are many of these authors on my list. Often I read their nonfiction futurist work and thus satiated, I don’t round out my knowledge of their oeuvre with a smattering of prose. I continue to work on this, and Visionary in Residence was purchased specifically with this deficiency in mind.

Unfortunately, it seems many of the authors whose science fiction I’ve read are much better essayists (or speakers, etc) than science fiction authors. I couldn’t tell you exactly where the disconnect happens—and even worse, it makes me wonder if I’m not in the same boat. For me to criticize these people who have done so many great things because their prose tends toward the ultraviolet end of the spectrum seems picayune. I suppose the thing to keep in mind is that folks like Sterling often do have absolutely brilliant ideas, they just don’t always translate well to Dick and Jane.

The title, Visionary in Residence, comes from Sterling’s job title while teaching at the Art Center College of Design in California. It’s appropriate for the book, because the stories in Visionary are not only your typical science fiction narratives, but often explore the themes of artistic and industrial design, as well. In fact, very few of the stories would be considered “general” science fiction. Although arranged thematically, they span many different genres and topics.

Foremost, this book is a collection of ideas. The concepts presented are the speculative and transhuman themes which typify Sterling’s work in general, and they’re thought provoking. What they really served to do is make me more interested in Sterling’s nonfiction which I haven’t read, such as Tomorrow Now. To the detriment of Visionary, however, the stories don’t do the themes justice.

I suppose it’s partially my fault for not starting with the classic cyberpunk Sterling. Along with Gibson and Cadigan and a few other authors, he’s considered to be one of the founders of cyberpunk, and he edited a large anthology of cyberpunk fiction called Mirrorshades. From what I’ve read, he really was quite the pensmith—in 1986.

Although published twenty years later, Visionary doesn’t exactly feel like something from a washed up science fiction author, but like something by a nonfiction author who still wants to maintain his “science fiction author” status. He wants to get that new prose collection out there and he knows his reputation can do that for him, so he seems less concerned about the actual story part of the stories and more about making sure he has a sufficient number of words to fill a book.

Let’s talk endings. Sterling’s endings can be summed up in one word: optional. The end of the story comes about not so much because the plot was wrapped up and theme exploited, but because he just stopped writing. In more than one instance, it was almost like he wrote himself into a convoluted (though interesting) plot so twisted, that to tie up everything into a real ending would require significantly more words than Sterling felt like writing at the time. Enter Literary Pet Peeve #2: the Deus Ex Machina.

Sterling uses the non-conscious technological version, of course, but it’s the same thing. Junk DNA is the most egregious offender. The details of the story don’t seem important, but it’s hard to convey the true absurdity of this ending without reading it first hand. It starts out as a fantastical but plausible take on human “junk DNA”—the parts of the DNA chain which don’t appear to do anything. It acts as a believable plot driver throughout the story—until the end when it suddenly takes on supernatural powers.

Two guys get poisoned with a concoction of modified junk DNA, but the doses they each take were designed to kill the other. (Person A gets the poison intended for Person B and vice versa.) Rather than a) doing nothing or b) causing some sort of believable harm, it turns into a deoxyribonucleic deus ex machina. What happens is so incredibly stupid I can’t even believe I’m about to type it.

The poisoning causes both men to mutate instantly and hugely. They grow into disgusting fat things, then merge into one organic blob of shock-value and then—Jesus Christ—and then they turn into a flying saucer. Some other unimportant stuff happens, they pull a Wesley Crusher—i.e. prepare to transcend to a higher dimension—and then The End.

Seriously, Bruce. What the hell?

The problem isn’t so much that the story has such an impossible-to-believe ending, but that it’s completely inappropriate for the tone set by the rest of the story. It’s a believable story, up to the time-and-space transcending flying saucer flesh blob. The phrase “time-and-space transcending flying saucer flesh blob” is one I should never have needed to write. No one should ever have had to read it, either. But Mr. Visionary pulls this one out from between his own time-and-space transcending flesh blobs and presents it as a legitimate conclusion to the tale.

Literary Pet Peeve #7, The Personal Dictionary, also makes a grand showing, nicely complimented by its partner, LPP #5, Confusing Equals Exotic syndrome. The story is The Scab’s Progress, and in true C=E style, it sounds impressive, but when you cut through the technobabble, it has little substance.

The story is about two “scabs”, or bio-hackers. I have to explain what these are is in the context of this story. They are people who go around to bioresearch laboratories and steal fleshy blobs of DNA (this is a reoccurring theme you may have noticed) in order to experiment with, and increase their karmic status on teh future interwebz. When you compare this to today, it would be like hackers breaking into nuclear power plants to secure sources of uranium on which to experiment in order to impress chemistry geeks on Slashdot. It’s essentially like what it would be if 1986 Sterling were trying to predict what 2006 hackers would be doing, except we’re dealing with 2006 Sterling and he uses Personal Dictionary cum C=E Syndrome to obfuscate the fact that the plot is dumb.

In the story, there’s a meltdown at the nuclear plant—er, I mean, there’s a biogenetic outbreak at the bio research facility and two console cowboys—no, wait, two scabs surf the ‘net—er, no, they drive their organically powered car to the place, break the ICE—I mean break through the defenses and find some crazy sentient AI. WAIT! No, I meant they find the ultimate crazy blob of DNA.

Actually, you know what? Just take any cyberpunk story written between 1984 and 1991 and do a find and replace. Change “console cowboys” to “scab”; “AI” to “gross-out blob of DNA”; and “zeppelin” to “bio-zep”. Stick “ribo” any place you would use “cyber” (Ribosex—it’s the future!), change those mirror shades to genetically enhanced eyeballs and electrical feedback loops that fry one’s brain to physics-defying mutations that cause one’s brain to explode to the uncontrollable growth of gray matter. That’s this story.

It highlights exactly the problem with both the Personal Dictionary and C=E Syndrome: if you don’t have a story to tell, using more big words doesn’t suddenly make the story “visionary”. Sterling says he thinks the next wave of technology won’t be “cyber” but “ribo”: DNA and nanotech and that fun stuff. That’s great. He’s probably even right. But that doesn’t mean he can get away with riboizing his gerunds when he doesn’t have a reason to be using gerunds in the first place.

Not all the stories reach this level of false complexity. A few are quite good. Even the goofy Luciferase was a creative and well done take on the “disadvantaged guy gets the girl” love story. There are ideas in the book worth considering, and there are stories worth reading, but as a whole I found it very uneven in terms of quality and interestingness.

Visionary in Residence reminded me of that old music industry trick: throwing a few nice pieces in with a bunch of crap, and forcing people to buy the complete package. The stories in this book were, of course, written for different markets, and probably subject to length restrictions and severe editing. So it’s not the case, as with some albums, where Sterling wrote a few stories as filler for the one or two good ones he had to offer. Rather, the book is somewhere between a lousy album, and the scrap from a slaughterhouse. There’s some good stuff in there, but ultimately you’re getting a lot of the ribojunk that nobody else wanted.

-Ted