Ascendancies Read Free

ominously different from classical literature, in that it’s machine-assisted and basically infinite in scope. Websurfing bears the relationship to reading that movies do to oil-paint. Email, web-posts, digital photographs, streaming speeches on video.… The web has no ends, no beginnings, no arc of development, no denouement, no plot. The web has no center, no heart. The web has data. It has tags and terms. Increasingly, the web has something like a native semantics. As a tech journalist and futurist, I’m fascinated; as a literateur, I look on these developments with alarmed misgivings. They’re just not well understood. I ought to be in the business of understanding a transition like that. Frankly, I can’t say that I do.
    It worries me that the Internet suits my own sensibilities so much better than ink on paper ever did. These stories of mine are still “stories,” but instead of being well-contained verbal contrivances, disciplined and redolent of literary-cultural sensemaking, Sterling texts generally look-and-feel like they could do with some hotlinks and keywords. Maybe a scrollbar.
    Sterling stories are nets of ideas and images that have been bent, tucked and pruned into a pocket world. Their literary sensibility—and they do have one—is in the worldbuilding. It’s about the settings, the semiotics. And the feelings. Not the characters’ feelings—mostly, the key to these stories is the narrator’s feelings. With one brisk exception, the narrator’s not a character within these stories, but he’s the busiest guy in this book. In his lighter moments, he exhibits a certain amiable boyish gusto, like some kid happily mangling encyclopedias. His most common affect, as he razors and duct-tapes, is sinister glee.
    The writer of these pieces, like a lot of comedians, has a rather dark muse. His inner child is the kind of kid that pokes anthills with a stick. The lad just can’t let those ants be; he direly needs to satirize the ants a little, to jolt them out of their mental ant-box. Science fiction writing can be a problematic effort. Annoying ants is not a major literary enterprise. Why? Because ants don’t get illuminated by that artistic intervention; ants are just ants. Imagined worlds have so many phony, sandbox aspects.… science fiction makes head-fakes toward profundity, which too often turn out to be mere sleights of hand, in-jokes, trivial paradoxes, vaudeville.… Like a trained flea-circus, where the fleas are dressed as six-armed Martian swordsmen.
    Sense of wonder? Too short a shelf-life. Blowing people’s minds? Like stage magic, that’s done mostly through misdirection. Happy, upbeat endings? Depends on when you stop telling the story.
    Are there other burning lamentations one might offer about the cruel creative agony and the dire existential limits involved in writing science fiction stories? Well, now that you insist on asking me, yeah. For instance, this big Bruce Sterling collection sure does have a lot of Bruce Sterling in it. My other story collections tend to feature some pleasant collaborations with other writers, which break up that relentless Sterlingness.
    I used to spend rather a lot of my time and energy trying to write stories that nobody else could write. You know: unique, original, ground-breaking, non-derivative work. Young writers suffer anxiety-of-influence, so they attempt a lot of that. Some of these stories are much in that vein. “Finding one’s own voice,” they call that.
    It might also be dignified with the term “self-actualization.” Self-actualization is a conceptual, very writerly game in which one tries to become as much like Bruce Sterling as one can. There’s much to be said for that activity, especially if one actually is Bruce Sterling. However, when a science fiction writer pursues that line of development, in that particularly oracular and eccentric