#1: Regarding my recent reviews of Jeanette Winterson’s The Stone Gods, Jo Waltonnails my opinion to the floor:

The techniques of writing and reading [science fiction] have developed in that time. Old things sometimes look very clunky, as if they’re inventing the wheel—because they are. Modern SF assumes. It doesn’t say “The red sun is high, the blue low because it was a binary system.” So there’s a double problem. People who read SF sometimes write SF that doesn’t have enough surface to skitter over. Someone who doesn’t have the skillset can’t learn the skillset by reading it. And conversely, people who don’t read SF and write it write horribly old fashioned clunky re-inventing the wheel stuff, because they don’t know what needs explanation. They explain both too much and not enough, and end up with something that’s just teeth-grindingly annoying for an SF reader to read.

Exactly right, and that’s what’s wrong with everything fromWinterson’s The Stone Gods to the atrocious “science fiction” of e-book only romance writers like Jet Mykles and Reese Gabriel.

#2: The Five Stages of Publishing. See, I skipped down to acceptance right from the beginning. And it’s always worked for me.

#3: I’ve been writing again, and it’s been an iffy thing. The skill comes and goes like a guilty whoremonger. But I received an invitation for an anthology of “Queerpunk,” and have been thinking about how to work cyberpunk, homosexuality, near-future transhumanism, and I think I have an opening:

I met him in the one place where we could possibly have met: on a de-orbiting shuttle. I was coming back from another freelance job in orbit, all wracked out and drained but carrying so much new knowledge it had weight. He had a suit, and a tie, and all the signs of a lunar career.  We’d have never met if it hadn’t been for the blackout, that fifteen minutes of silence when you’re cut off from the net.  We were forced to talk to each other.  Hell, we were forced to notice each other.  Which wouldn’t have happened without the blackout.

Our seats were side by side.  But he had all the newest stuff, corporate double-signed and encrypted with Diffie Hellman Six, every one of them with a publicly visible EULA and the checkmark box visible should the Pirate Corps come looking.  And me?  Diffie Hellman nine but GPL’d, man… all the way.

I’m not sure where to go from there. I know I have to get them into bed and emotionally involved, but what’s the plot? Hmm…

The Stone Gods is science fiction written as an excuse to do whatever the hell she wants, without regard for the reader’s sense of continuity or rationale.  The sense of used furniture is stronger than ever.

Winterson is trying to do too much: she’s trying to tell a love story.  She’s trying to tell a story of ecological disaster.  She’s trying to tell a story about fatalism, and about how fatalism is the only logical attitude to take given Mankind’s tendency to destroy himself.    Individual death is a metaphor for the world’s end– not in an entropic sense, but in a personal one, and an immediate one.

Toward the end of the book her lyricism returns, coupled with some really stupid scenes stolen from the worst post-apocalyptic fiction you could possibly imagine.  Think Shirow’s Appleseed, watched without translation or subtitles, and the author then tries to re-write what she saw as farce.   That’s where it’s going.

But the ending makes me cry because the writing is so good, even if the writer is telling you the character is hallucinating as she dies.   But Winterson makes me cry reliably.  I wouldn’t waste my time reading her “science fiction” ever again.  If you love breathtakingly beautiful writing, check out The World, And Other Places, her collection of short stories.  Each is small, worth your time, and not an insult to your intelligence.

If you’re a fan of the Singularity, here are two stories told from opposite sides of the fence: Gentle Seduction by Marc Stiegler is an early, and hopeful, depiction of the Singularity.  It starts as a riff on the seminal trans-Singularity movie Brainstorm, and moves on from there, reflecting on the character of a woman who we normally wouldn’t have thought of one of us– and it is her quality as someone not interested in the rapture of the nerds that makes her so pivotal to our success. The other is by Peter Watts, so expect nastiness, and Watts delivers: The Things is John Carpenter’s The Thing as told from the point of view of the monster. Watts manages to make us sympathetic to the creature, even when leading to an even more horrific conclusion than what Carpenter delivered.

I wanted to participate– some of them are real groaners.  Much to my frustration, I found that I couldn’t.

Here’s the real truth: I haven’t written anything new since April.  Mostly, that’s because, as I wrote in my previous post, people pay me more to write code these days.  But there seems to be something else going on.  I’m not sure entirely what it is, but it bugs me.  I sit down to write and nothing comes to the fingers.  I do what I’m supposed to do when that happens: I write anyway.  I write crap.  And I mean, real crap. (Okay, some of you might actually want to read a scene involving Wish, a Sterling Y, and a bit of llerkin nobility, but the dialogue there sucks, people)

And many of the novel ideas I had to work with just seem to be equally dead.  A retelling of the Superman story as STL warfare between back-to-the-soil types and posthumans?  Completely hung up on the “just another Anglo writer” complex.  Moon Sun Dragons?  Not enough ideas for a book, not enough eyeball kick for a movie.  Caprice Starr?  Boring.  Automatic Sweetheart?  “Steampunk is so last year.”  The Last Year of the Cat?  “Nobody will ever take catgirls seriously, no matter how much Sarah Waters, Camille Paglia, and Bram Dysktra you throw in there.”  Janae?  “Too obvious.”

Bleah.  Someone find me my mojo, ne?

But as I was reading, the love scene started and the characters got into positions and suddenly it turns out, completely unremarked-upon before this, that the woman in the story is black.  I was at first annoyed by this revelation: how did the idiot author let the story get this far along before dropping this little bombshell?  And then I recalled, annoying myself further, that that had been part of the point of the damn series.  Bombshells like that were the fun stuff of the Journal Entries.   I had enjoyed tweaking the audience by doing exactly that: dropping in details that the characters themselves wouldn’t have cared about until it mattered, not bothering to announce the color of another character’s skin as an identifier but rather as a source of pleasure, an aesthetic quality independent of personality, or culture, or expectation.  I was pleased to note that the trick had worked.

Then I became further annoyed with myself for feeling tweaked by my previous self.  I wonder what other annoyances I’ll have to grind away at in the future, to get back to my former egalitarian gorgeous self?

It’s that, for the past twenty years– longer, if we add in all the forward-looking material from Asimov through the early Cyberpunks (and even the proto-Biopunks like Rucker and Hansen)– there has been a serious, ongoing conversation within the SF writing and reading community about the consequences of our current setting.  We look at Real Dolls and bad phone voicejail trees, at insurance companies giving breaks to people who install GPS trackers on their cars, at the breaking point of Moore’s law and the attempts to keep going, and extrapolate out from there.  This conversation extends from Charlie Stross to Adam Warren (author of Hypervelocity, the most underappreciated posthuman novel of 2007, and inventor of the term “tachycognitive”), from Greg Egan to Masamune Shirow, and Elezier Yudkowski to, er, me.   We’ve been at this for most of our adult lives, thinking about what it means to share our cognosphere with thinking creatures of another substrate, and the moral and human consequences of creating those creatures out of whole silicon and steel.

Winterson apparently is unaware of that conversation.  She treats SF as if it were a Western In Space, a place where she can dodge the “real world” and write whatever she wants, without justification, explanation or extrapolation.  She didn’t do her research.  She didn’t reach out to anyone who reads SF and say, “What’s the state of the art in thinking about these topics?” or “Here’s where I’ve gone with my manuscript, what do you think?”  None of her pre-readers, if she had any, were SF fans.  Nobody pointed her at Accelerando, or Diaspora, or Ghost In The Shell, or even The Journal Entries.  Those are the state-of-the-art for the conversation about human/machine interaction.  Winterson was unaware, and chose to remain so.   I guess I expected better.

This is my day. This is Rome. I need to be as true as an animal and as wise as a saint. I shall need the luck of the devil if I am to hold it all in my hands.

‘Ciao Bella!’ My grocer throws me an apple – a model of the world in little, original sin, and the spinning globe, and just an apple.

This day. Don’t drop it. It will be gone soon enough.

(from Winterson’s A Roman Short Story, first published in Weekend Magazine, Jan 2004)

About the only writer I can compare her to, in my recent experience, is SF writer Justina Robson, who often acheive similar lyrical and metaphorical miracles with her own work. I especially like the following because, having been introduced as a work of SF, Robson’s names of things are so damned evocative:

Seraphs brought the news to General Machen first. They confirmed a sighting of Isol as she stole their wing space in the stratosphere and brushed sensor fields with the Heavy Angels surrounding Idlewild Base. They signalled him in official encrypted code.

(from Joanna Robson’s Natural History.)

I suppose, when it comes to metaphor, Mark Helprin might come in ahead of Robson, but he’s sorta out of favor now that he’d like to see the Odyssey and Illiad be returned to copyright and profits from their sale somehow channeled to Homer’s children.

I’m about 50 pages into The Stone Gods. The story is set about 150 years from “now”; mankind has achieved FTL and interstellar flight, but it’s a risky proposition and is basically being treated like the Apollo, only longer. The world has divided into three Orwellian states: The Caliphate, the MoscoSino Axis, and the Central Authority. The CA, where our story opens, is basically a humungous shopping mall, a kind of 1984-meets-Brave-New-World mashup. It’s still economically powerful enough that it’s the only state fielding interstellar missions, developing immortality regimens, and building a robot-based economy.

But the population is full of Shiny Happy People, all medically “frozen” to some attractive age– 18 to 24 for most women, 30 to 40 for most men. If you’re not Shiny and Happy, the state will send out Enhancement personnel, which will do what they can to help you find your shiny happiness. If you prove troublesome, they send out Enforcement.

The heroine is a troublemaking misfit who works for Enhancement and owns the Last Organic Farm on the planet.

In those first 50 pages, here’s what Winterson has laid out for us as propositions:

• Since everyone is a beautiful person at the height of their sexual attractiveness, everyone will become jaded. Those who wants to “compete” sexually will become absurdly hypersexualized: penises like pillars, balloon breasts and towering legs, eyes widened and bodies stretched beyond even anime superheroic proportions.
• When that’s not enough, almost all men will resort to pedophilia, young kids being about the only thing “exotic” left in the world. The kids are bought from The Caliphate, which naturally sells them; since they’re not citizens of the Central Authority, nobody really cares what happens to them.
• It’s against the law for women to compete against these children by having their own genecodes fixed below the age of 14. No reason is given for this.
• There are robots everywhere. Most of them are drudgery alleviation machines that do all the work. But there is a super-high-end robot that looks and acts for all the world like a human being, although it’s not and fellow citizens wink and nod and say how remarkable it is that simple silicon can act so human-like and still not be conscious.
• Despite being able to manufacture absolutely “drop dead gorgeous” robots that are outright chattel and perfectly loyal, humans and robots don’t boink. The narrator tells us without blinking an eye that “The penalty for inter-species sex is death.”
• Apparently, US CA law does not hold true on CA starships. None of the astronauts we meet ever face a penalty for boinking their on-board observer robot, one of those super-sexy human models, so often that despite her described better than human self-repairing capability, she “wore out three silicone vaginas.”
• We’re told time and again that robots don’t have feelings, but the robots we do meet frequently describe themselves as having “wants” and “desires” which are, uh, feelings.

There is, in science-fiction writing, a term we use to describe what happens when non-SF writers slum around in our genre: Used Furniture. Rather than invent a background and have to explain it, the writers just goes to the Warehouse Of Old SF and picks out a bunch of tropes with which to decorate her college-apartment plot. It doesn’t really matter, she won’t be there long.

The Stone Gods is such a viciously bad example that, for every one of those points I highlighted above, I had to restrain myself from throwing the book across the room with great force. (It’s a library book.)

The reason I’m mostly so worked up with this is that Winterson is exploring the same space in which I work: immortality, human/robot relationships, interspecies sex. And she’s doing so, so very badly. She’s said in an interview that she likes to write “at the frontiers of common sense,” but good gods, have some common sense about the background. The economics don’t make sense: you can’t have everyone sated into that classic dystopian unproductive consumerist happy stupidity that has been done badly by lots of SF writers (most recently by Jon Armstrong in his book Grey) and have a viable research field producing robots, immortals, and starships. You can’t make me believe that we would degenerate to child-abuse sexual slavery wrapped in nationalist politics, but would somehow come as a nation to impose the death penalty for boinking the toaster.

Even Winterson’s usual voice is missing, that beauty and lyricism somehow replaced with a heart-not-in-it world-weary narrator.

I thought, for a while, that Winterson might be trying to achieve a parable, but the encounter in the brothel scene convinced me otherwise. The Heroine has been dispatched to try and make HappyShiny a woman who wants the legal right to be turned into a 12-year-old so her husband will boink her again; the Heroine goes to the pedophile’s brothel– the most popular place in the city, we’re told– to find him and ask how he feels about her court battle. A panoramic tapestry of how All Men Can And Will Abuse The Powerless and Innocent is on full display. Winterson has an Axe To Grind– about men, about progress, about beauty, I can’t tell, but there is an Axe, and in this scene it is Ground until there are angry sparks flying from the writer’s pen.

Look, I write this stuff to: human/robot relationships (even, gasp lesbian human/robot relationships, like Winterson’s). I struggle with a vision for how the human species will survive a post-Transcendence technology, and to do so I limit my vision to showing how humans and near-humans and quasi-humans live in such a place; doing so, I must also struggle with racism and sexism (sometimes, okay, I revel in it too). But I aim my ground axes at stupidity, mostly, and not at stereotypes.

And while I may have started out with Used Furniture, I eventually went out and built my own set with my own two hands. I make no excuses for the results.

Meanwhile, down in Vaginaland, Mr Condom’s beginning to feel a bit iffy. He’s overheating. For some reason, the shagging seems to be twice as fast this evening, and he grimaces as he gets flung willy-nilly in and out of the pink tunnel. He starts getting friction burns, hanging onto Bobby’s stiff penis for dear life, headbutting Georgie’s cervix at 180 beats per minute. ‘Help me!’ he yells in the darkness, feeling himself melting. The sex only seems to be getting faster though, and Mr Condom squeezes his eyes shut as Bobby groans and the friction starts getting unbearable and Mr Condom thinks he’s going to be sick and the searing pain the searing pain and Bobby groans again and suddenly squirts a gallon of white molten lava from his Jap’s eye, exploding through Mr Condom’s heavy reservoir end and Mr Condom screams and screams and vomits ice cream into Georgie’s vagina. Shivering and spasming, Bobby suddenly feels the endorphins kick in and he falls onto the carpet with a happy bump.

And yet, one of the things I’ve learned about writing is that to make a story work for the reader, it requires verisimilitude in the very small.  I don’t have to get the big details correct (and to be honest I didn’t: Highway KKM14 wasn’t finished at the time of the genocide, but I needed a road there), but I did need something the reader could grab onto.  Jake’s real commitment to his cause, and reality suddenly catching up to Maryse’s liberal whimsy, were things I could understand and wrap my head around.  So that’s where the story went.

I don’t want to make it sound like spinach reading– you do it because it’s good for you.  I think it’s a pretty damn good story all on its own.  Without further ado, here’s Bujumbura.

150 people seems to be the maximum number we can treat as people rather than as abstract human beings that need categorizing and simplification in order to manage.  Laws treat human beings simply, as categories rather than as people.  So do companies bigger than 150 people. We need these abstractions to marshall large numbers of people to accomplish things that require so many, but down inside our brains we’re still dealing with the same simple small number of real people.

One the things that occurred to me this morning is that writers might have their monkeysphere slots filled with their own characters.  This might be one of the reasons we’re all so famously isolationist and loner: our slots of friendship capability are limited to those not currently occupied by the characters that haunt our stories.  And I say this because I’ve recently felt as if Ken Shardik, Aaden, and P’nyssa haven’t been as much of my monkeysphere as the rest of the world.  Part of that is because they’ve been pushed out by circumstance: they don’t have twitter feeds and Facebook accounts, they’re not part of the rest of my family’s world.  I didn’t have to keep them away from Omaha, but the kids don’t need to know about them, so dealing with them is a bit like having an affair these days.  I have to go to cafe’s and long train rides to have long conversations with them, catch up on their lives, and push the stories forward.

There are, of course, exceptions: Jay Lake seems to have pretty solid characters and yet maintains a huge monkeysphere of friends.  A skilled politician often has a prodigious memorys and can glad-hand thousands of people, making each feel as if she is a member of his tribe at least long enough to vote for him.   I seem to have a less-than-well-endowed monkeysphere, myself.  It kinda bothers me, but I’m dealing.

So, if you’re a writer: do you believe that your characters take up treasured positions in your Dunbar number of friends?