Ascendancies Read Free Page A

science-fictional way, it can be rather trying to the reader. “Okay, fine, pal, nobody but you could have ever conceived of that notion. That was totally, utterly unheard-of. Great. So how come I have to read about that?” Now that you ask, that’s another good question.
    The way that certain SF writers cough up those raw crunchy nuggets of the barely thinkable… well, that’s one of the connoisseur delights of SF as a genre. It’s like whales and their ambergris. Rare and superb in small amounts, rather scary in large beached lumps. Furthermore, as an artistic program, it’s dubious. Suppose you’re radically self-actualized, but you’re also a delusional goofball. Wouldn’t you do better by seeking some cues from objective reality, rather than hearkening always to those magic promptings of the inner self?
    Furthermore: just suppose that, like me, your inner self is, for obscure design-fan reasons, deeply inspired by forks, manhole covers and doorknobs, rather than raucous, technicolor, crowd-pleasing sci-fi gizmos such as robots, rocketships and time machines. If you write a sci-fi book about forks and manhole covers, will that be a great work? No. It won’t. Because forks and manhole covers are not entertaining. They’re boring. Not to you, of course; you adore manhole covers. Manhole covers are very you. But they’re also incredibly boring. They just plain are.
    Original genius, that’s not everything in the world. The world is more significant than the inside of anybody’s head. Sometimes you’re well-advised to just get over yourself.
    If your thoughts were genuinely original—literally unthinkable by other people—then you could never express them in a language sharable with readers. That’s not what writing is about. Literature is a heritage. Language is a commons. Language is centuries old and enriched by thousands of minds. Language and literature need to be treated with a sensitivity and care which doesn’t always mesh with raw, kraken-busting sci-fi aesthetics. I know that, and I further know that, as a writer, I ought to do better at that. Is there any clear sign of my making any progress along that front, within these stories? Am I fighting the good fight here, or am I pretty much part of the problem? I do have to wonder.
    A writer pestered with truly original thoughts would have to make up new nouns, new verbs. Frankly, I do a great deal of that. My writing in this book—in all my books—is cram-full of invented jargon and singular idiolects. It’s a signature riff of mine that I compose a great many words and terms that no mere computer spell-checker understands. I’m trying to get a little subtler about that. It works best when people don’t notice I’m doing it.
    With all this anguished authorly handwringing, you might wonder how stories like these get written at all. But they do get written; they even get finished and sent off to publishers. I got one coming out next month. It’s not in this book, but man, it’s aces. I’ve got a hundred ideas for other ones—really weird ideas—but, well, ideas aren’t stories. As stories, I’ve yet to get them done.
    A Sterling story is generally done—or it stops, at least—when the writer’s inner creative daemon has fully stacked up its Lego blocks.
    Rational analysis is never the strong suit of the inner daemon. The inner daemon is profoundly creative, yet he’s rather stupid. A creative daemon by nature is a rather simple, headstrong being who sees the cosmos as daemon-friendly toy-blocks. The daemon assembles a mental world from a raw confusion into some meaningful coherency. He does that through assembling his blocks. The daemon himself is made of the blocks. He’s not a conscious personality, he’s much lower in the chain-of-being than that; the daemon is a sense-making network, some pre-conscious