Página Axxón Axxón 166

Interview with
Bruce Sterling

por Equipo Axxón
(English Version)

 

Axxón: How big are the similiarities and differences between the cyperpunk world of computers inserted in personal lives, nets connecting people and electronic implants that you and other authors imagined when the movement was emerging and the world we are living in now? Could you point out some key items in which both scenes are very much alike and others in which they differ?

Bruce Sterling: Well, there was never just one single "cyberpunk world of computers." For instance, I always thought Pat Cadigan had a really interesting and unique "cyberpunk world of computers" where people use computers to explore one another's psychic landscapes. Of course, nothing like that has remotely come to pass in real life, but as science fiction, Pat's MINDPLAYERS book was some cool, visionary material.

The classic cyberpunk motif of an electronic implant notion is a non-starter. Even tiny little RFID chip implants don't make any sense as a real-world technology. It's not practical to have subcutaneous computer equipment directly interacting with wet, salty human flesh. Machinery just ages too fast to belong inside a body, a human body which can live for eighty years. Implants makes good sense on the page as a literary metaphor. As a technology, that is a bust.

Another missing cyberpunk bet was feudal corporations where people had fanatical, lifelong devotion to their corporate employers. That Japanese model of cultural development didn't work even in Japan. Corporations aren't stronger than nations. Corporations are frail and weak. Investors and shareholders are much stronger than corporations.

One thing cyberpunk got very right was that nation-states are in decline. Nation-states are really dangerously in decline now. There are increasing regions of the world where law-and-order has failed almost completely and life is sinister and cheap. People complained at the time that cyberpunk had a dark imagining of the future, but it's hard to find a cyberpunk work ever printed that's as dark as Iraq is right now. If anything, our work is proving too cheery and upbeat for a world like today's.

Axxón: Schismatrix was published in Spanish only last year, twenty years after its original edition. In this novel, you display an dazzling diversity of records and perceptions and you dare to create amazingly complex futures. Do you still envision a future with the same speculative orientation or do you assume that these last twenty years and their whimsical modification of reality have shot variables out in a completely different direction?


Bruce Sterling: I've never been a historical determinist. I try to do plausible scenarios that can expand the parameters of people's thinking. You can't predict the future, but you can expand people's ability to interpret what might happen, or what did happen, or what is happening now. That's one reason why I like to write a lot of work set in the past, as well as the future. There is no single ordained future and there is no single ordained "past," either. You could write a speculative novel about the Conquistadors that was from the point of view of Montezuma, or Cortez, or Malinche. Those three works, set in the same historical moment, would scarcely have a single word or idea in common. Malinche, who was an interpreter, might have something of a middle-ground position, but I can guarantee you that Malinche had very little idea of what was really happening during the Conquest of Mexico. The last thing in the world she ever expected was to become the mistress of a white invader with a gun and a horse. I'm sure she thought it was dazzlingly diverse and amazingly complex.


Axxón: In your universe of a Humanity divided into Shapers and Mechs, both forms of evolution sound very plausible. From your private point of view, not so much as an author but as a person with social, technical and scientific knowledge, which way of modifying the human being do you think is more likely to appear in a short time? And, if both appear and the same division exists, do you think either one will be able to impose its predominance?

Bruce Sterling: I'd be betting on the genetic modifications carrying the day. There are some very interesting prosthetics around nowadays, but I don't think that mechanical augmentations are really likely to severely modify people in a permanent, irrevocable way. But hormones, neural behavior, mood, metabolism, aging processes... those things really define humanity. They're central to our being.


Axxón: To what extent do you think a literature that proposes extreme —and sometimes revolutionary— assumptions about society and around the effects of scientific-technological development on the creatures who live on this planet can exert a real impact and influence the decisions of power holders? Do you think that one day the situation may turn out to be so dramatic that the Comittee of Powerful Nations to Save the Planet will say: "You, Sterling (or Mieville or Bisson or other sci-fi writer), what are the specific proposals you can produce, since you have spent your life trying to tell us how the future would be?"

Bruce Sterling: Well, if I were a power-broker, I might well listen to visionaries, but I certainly wouldn't give futurists or science fiction writers any executive power. Former American Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich is a science fiction writer. He's a terrible politician with dreadful ideas about how the future should be. The guy was a political disaster.

I've been really worried about the Greenhouse Effect since I wrote my greenhouse disaster-novel HEAVY WEATHER in the early 1990s. I know a lot about the subject. Suppose there really is a greenhouse disaster and all hell breaks loose. Will important people care about what I thought about the subject? Maybe. They'd put me on some kind of advisory board. If the situation were bad enough, I might get drafted. But I'm not going to be made Secretary of Energy or given the power to reform the fossil-fuel industriy. I'm never going to be signing budgets or directing emergency rescue work. Any specific proposals I made about policy would still have to work their way through some real-world political, economic and industrial power structure.

So even if I reach into my magic bag of sci-fi tricks and say, "Look! I've got cold fusion, and it really works!" then somebody would have to design cold fusion devices, and apply those, and move the proposal into a mass-consumption heavy industry. Great ideas and clear visions of plausible future events don't make people into power players. People become power player through time-honored processes such as forming networks of alliances, assembling many trusted subordinates, proving administrative capacity in dramatic circumstances, showing an ability to act as honest-broker among competing interest groups, and great skill at dividing up spoils and pacifying rivals -- that sort of thing. I understand that. That doesn't mean that I myself can DO it. I wouldn't WANT to do it. Because I've seen it bungled.

Einstein, Oppenheimer and Vannevar Bush knew that an atomic bomb could be built. Science fiction writers knew it, too. That was an extreme, visionary idea with far-fetched, revolutionary implications. The scientists made a specific proposal to the power structure. The Bomb happened in real life and transformed the world, but the visionaries didn't become Presidents. There wasn't any need for that, really. That wouldn't have helped.


Axxón: When you spoke about writing a specultative novel about the Conquistadors of the new world from Montezuma or Cortez or Malincheīs point of view, did you mean that you have taken an interest in pre-Columbian cultures? If thatīs the case, is the development of some history set in that context among your projects, or the example was really pointing at the diversity of points of view within the same fiction?

Bruce Sterling: Well, I'm from Texas. Of course I'm interested in Mexico. I don't plan to write any historical fiction about Aztecs, but I don't doubt that I could do it.

A really interesting challenge would be to write about Mexico today from the point of view of an Aztec.


Axxón: You have already mentioned Heavy Weather (1994) and the greenhouse effect. In Holy Fire (1996), the power is in the hands of a gerontocracy interested in the development of a medical technology which allows life-span lengthening. while young people are doomed to alienation. But in your latest novel published in Spanish, Distraction (1998), your setup and approach seem to have changed direction compared to some aspects of your former work, using satiric resources and taking catastrophes with some humor. Is that so? And in that case, do Zeitgeist (2000) and The Zenith Angle (2004) have the same or similar characteristics, or do they return to the distopic path?

Bruce Sterling: Dystopia has never been of any interest to me. I used to live in South India, surrounded by millions of people in utter poverty and commonly afflicted by disease. I don't think I've ever read a science fiction "dystopia" that was as dystopic as that real-life experience... and yet, that wasn't hopelessness. Life in south India has been getting better steadily. The people of India have never had a better grip on their own destiny than they do now. I lived there long enough that I have patriotic feelings about India. I truly feel proud of them.

And of course life is funny. Even a horrible life is funny. People used to crack jokes in concentration camps. People don't survive catastrophes by getting all sober and morbid. They survive catastrophes by understanding that life has inherently catastrophic aspects. Getting born, for instance. What are the odds against that? In some sense, getting born and coming into existence is some kind of ultimate comic calamity.

Axxón: The short stories you have written are not so many, in proportion to the number of novels, and many of them were written in collaboration with Gibson. Shiner, Rucker, Di Filippo, Kessel. Can you tell us about both experiences, writing stories and writing them in collaboration with others?


Bruce Sterling: I always wish I could write more short stories. I have dozens of ideas for them, but it's hard to find the time. Quite often it helps me to find someone else who can help me.

Lately people have started complaining that I'm writing short stories that don't sound like Bruce Sterling. This is a healthy sign, I think.


Axxón: At some point, William Gibson was part of a "Think Tank", together with different specialists, artists and intellectuals who were assigned to define possible scenarios in the future world. I have the vague notion that you were there too, but Iīm not sure. If you were there, or if only Gibson was there but you know something about it, what conclusions (interesting or otherwise, as viewed by somebody in our genre) were drawn up by that "Think Tank"?

Bruce Sterling: I've been in literally dozens of "think tanks." It's been of a lot of use to me to be involved in futurist scenarios. When I was in design school, I spent a lot of my time teaching futurist techniques to design students. I'd recommend a book called THE ART OF THE LONG VIEW by Peter Schwartz if you are really interested. Futurism has some relationships to science fiction, but it's not literary.


Axxón: In your novels and stories you have advanced to the point of pushing the limits of science fiction. Other writers hace done something of the like, in different directions. Whatīs your opinion about the attrempts to modify the genreīs guidelines themsleves until they become unrecognizable, as it could be the case with Kurt Vonnegut, Christopher Priest or Stanislaw Lem? On the other hand, and somehow related to the subject: How do you feel about the muffled, or even denied, science fiction of Margaret Atwood, Philip Roth, Michel Houellebecq o Kazuo Ishiguro?

Bruce Sterling: I used to fret quite a lot about this issue, but now I feel that, although it's important, it's someone

else's responsibility.


Axxón: In 2000, you started the Viridian Movement, a project that proclaims the end of postmodernism, the need of new ideas after both the failure of left-wing ideologies and the lack of proposals either from them or from a right-wing ideology which seems to be controlling everything. Whatīs the point this initiative has reached? Do you think that, to some extent, you and your people in the project have been able to set up some positive ideas that may offset hopelessness in these times of gloom?

Bruce Sterling: When it comes to climate change, being gloomy and hopeless do not get you off the hook. Storms and rising water will destroy your house. It doesn't matter if you have positive ideas or negative ideas; when the levee breaks, you have to move. That's not an ideological matter. It's a practical matter. Right-wing ideologues have homes that wash away, just like left-wing people do.

Do you want more levee-breaking or less levee-breaking? Would you like people in southern Argentina to be sunburned and blinded by ozone holes, or not sunburned and blinded? That's the choice. What does feeling hopeless have to do with that? Nothing much.

Hope, properly understood, doesn't mean that the world changes and becomes perfectly gratifying to you. Hope means that you understand that you are doing something that makes sense and seems to be a proper course of action. I'm a writer and a journalist. I should understand obscure matters and tell people about them in a way that makes them clearer. Some Viridian ideas are profound and useful and some are obscure and silly, but I make it my business to spread them. And yes, they do spread.


Axxón: You have lived in India and have been in contact with different realities; you have said you are used to reading writers from that country, from Turkey and Europe, and you take part in multinational forums. Whatīs your view, in case you have an opinion about it at all, on what Latin Americans are trying to do on the subject of speculative literature? Do you feel it will ever be possible for the American market to be receptive to the works written outside its linguistic area, even on a small-scale basis?

Bruce Sterling: It's always interesting to see what works will jump the translation barrier.

Most non-American writers I know who seem really anxious to be read in America don't want to speak to American readers. They're not interested in American society per se. Mostly, they just want to somehow magically enter in a really big, global, literary market where there's some likelihood of being paid for their works.

These writers don't sit down and say: "today, I'm going to write something that a foreigner would *have to read* -- something that really matters to foreigners, something that is crucial to their well-being." If they were to try that, they'd actually have to *understand* foreigners -- read their books, watch their movies, maybe even marry one. Very few writers have any such ambition. They want to the world to come notice them and their wonderfulness. They don't want to harm their own equanimity by learning that the world is full of billions of people who have no good reason to read them.

The Latin American literary market has a lot of trouble even within its *own* linguistic area; for instance, it's hard to get Brazilian writers seriously interested in Mexican writers. If there were a single, unified, Latin American literary market, they'd be some of the richest and best-read writers in the world.

Compared to Norwegian, Danish, Czech, that's a huge linguistic area.

People all over the world watch Brazilian and Mexican soap operas. They don't watch them because they are Brazilian and Mexican. Nobody's running around trying to make global TV viewers "more receptive" to Mexican television. They watch Mexican television because they do what everybody's soap operas do, only they're somehow even soapier.


Axxón: Finally, we would like a final comment about literature, society, the universe or whatever you consider appropriate, and we thank you very much for your kind attention to Axxónīs request.

Bruce Sterling: Every day is a gift.


Interview by "Equipo Axxón": Claudia De Bella, Eduardo J. Carletti and Sergio Gaut vel Hartman.

Illustrated by Valeria Uccelli
Axxón 166 - september 2006

 
Página Axxón Axxón 166