One of the more peculiar, more semiconscious exercises I practiced, early in my fiction-writing career, consisted of reading record reviews in, say, Melody Maker, while pretending that I was actually reading a review of a new science fiction novel. I would later attempt to recall that novel, my sense of it from the review, as a species of writing-prompt.
Steely Dan's recordings had never required that extra step, as I had from very first listening assumed them to be producing a remarkable species of narrative fiction. The popularity of their music, back when, had amazed me, as anything I liked that much wasn't supposed to be that popular. I assumed that that was because most listeners scarcely brushed against the complexly strung razor-wire of the lyrics, dressed as they were in Kandy Apple jazzgloss. Becker and Fagen remain, most days, my favorite twentieth-century lyricists, to the frank dismay of friends in the Punk camp, who absolutely don't get it. Never mind. We find it where we find it, inspirationwise.
Over a decade after I wrote this, it was my very great pleasure to get to know Mr. Becker somewhat, and to meet Mr. Fagen all too briefly. Never have my culture-heroes proven less disappointing.
I ONCE WROTE A SCREENPLAY which featured a stoical, traditionalist Yakuza boss, exiled, in my near-future scenario, to the frozen, cockroach-ridden wastes of a dystopian Newark, New Jersey. Clenched like a fist around his grief at the loss of his daughter, he soldiers on, like a Roman legionary with a death wish the size of a Volkswagen on his shoulder. Meanwhile, his decadent, hotshot young understudy, a bio-tech dandy with a lethal thumb implant, watches for the earliest, easiest opportunity to kill him.
Where, I now wonder, did I find this character, this hard, immaculate man with his hidden inner wound? I had not, at that time, seen any Yakuza films, although I was aware of the genre by some species of pop-culture osmosis. And I had sensed that the roots of that genre would somehow be tangled in a rich mulch of American westerns and gangster films. I was somehow aware of the character as a re-importation. As a friend likes to say, there's often something in a good translation that can't quite be captured in the original. But where did my tough and tragic Yakuza boss come from?
He came, somehow, from the films of Takeshi Kitano, which I had not yet seen. He arrived as the crystalline, free-floating essence of an idea or stance. He owed everything to "Beat" Takeshi, a Japanese pop figure of such unstintingly multitalented eclecticism that we have no equivalent, nobody even close. ("They only want you to be the one thing," Mick Jagger once told me, speaking of his own acting career.) Writer, producer, director, actor, television personality, comedian . . . But I knew nothing of that, as I wrote. Nor could I know that Takeshi, whose gravitas would one day tug at the film with the pull of a black hole, was said to be both a very great actor and the most famous man in Japan. Both of which, now I know, were and are true.
Fast-forward to a vast, freezing, dilapidated factory building on the outskirts of Toronto, in which has been constructed a segment of my dystopian near-future Newark, an aerial shantytown slung beneath a bridge. Here, amid cameras and crew and the patchwork of our junkyard set, I watch Takeshi prepare to portray my Yakuza boss.
I'm terrified. I've only just seen, for the first time, the day before, actors portraying characters I've written. And now Takeshi strikes me as a tulpa, a materialized thought-form, sentient plasm of whatever cross-cultural meme generated this character through me. I don't believe he's acting. As if to reinforce this, his entourage of smooth-faced, unblinking young associates dress as if in imitation of his character's costume. Or, rather, as if they had no need for imitation, being already there. Like the character, they are all buttoned into beautifully cut cashmere overcoats. Black.
I never saw Takeshi again, and then, months later, I heard that he had been terribly injured in a motorcycle accident, and was at first not expected to live, and then, when he did live, was not expected to be able to act again.
It made me very sad.
I thought of all this, this past summer, as I watched his film Brother in the Vancouver Film Festival, one of the only films I've seen which captures the micron-thin veneer of city-over-desert that one sees constantly in the parts of Los Angeles one never sees in films. Takeshi had survived his motorcycle crash, with the newly limited mobility of his features turned to full advantage as he takes us on his character's somberly delirious kamikaze run into a simpler and more hauntingly realized vision of night-side America than our own directors have given us for quite a long time.
Toughness has been rather out of fashion, as a masculine virtue, and Takeshi simultaneously radiates it and suggests its wounded core. There can in fact be no depiction of genuine toughness (not brutality but a sort of excess of substance, of soul-stuff) without this concomitant indication of that wound, else the piece becomes simply the pornography of fascism.
Takeshi is simultaneously tougher and more wounded than you or I will ever be. Given the ever deeper and more precise reach of the spectral hand of marketing, I suspect that he's tougher and more wounded than any Hollywood star is ever likely to be allowed to be.
When I wrote this, I hadn't yet realized that Bruce Sterling, when he spoke of translations, was paraphrasing Jorge Luis Borges.
If you'd like to see a Takeshi Kitano film, I recommend Sonatine.
Johnny Mnemonic, as cut for the film's Japanese release, is some minutes longer, all of that in the service of delivering more Takeshi Kitano, and is of course the better for it.
SAY IT'S MIDWAY through the final year of the first decade of the twenty-first century. Say that, last week, two things happened: Scientists in China announced successful quantum teleportation over a distance of ten miles, while other scientists, in Maryland, announced the creation of an artificial, self-replicating genome. In this particular version of the twenty-first century, which happens to be the one you're living in, neither of these stories attracted a very great deal of attention.
In quantum teleportation, no matter is transferred, but information may be conveyed across a distance, without resorting to a signal in any traditional sense. Still, it's the word "teleportation," used seriously, in a headline. My "no kidding" module was activated: "No kidding," I said to myself, "teleportation." A slight amazement.
The synthetic genome, arguably artificial life, was somehow less amazing. The sort of thing one feels might already have been achieved, somehow. Triggering the "Oh, yeah" module. "Artificial life? Oh, yeah."
Though these scientists also inserted a line of James Joyce's prose into their genome. That triggers a sense of the surreal, in me at least. They did it to incorporate a yardstick for the ongoing measurement of mutation. So James Joyce's prose is now being very slowly pummeled into incoherence by cosmic rays.
Noting these two pieces of more or less simultaneous news, I also noted that my imagination, which grew up on countless popular imaginings of exactly this sort of thing, could produce nothing better in response than a tabloid headline: SYNTHETIC BACTERIA IN QUANTUM FREE-SPACE TELEPORTATION SHOCKER.
Alvin Toffler warned us about Future Shock, but is this Future Fatigue? For the past decade or so, the only critics of science fiction I pay any attention to, all three of them, have been slyly declaring that the Future is over. I wouldn't blame anyone for assuming that this is akin to the declaration that history was over, and just as silly. But really I think they're talking about the capital-F Future, which in my lifetime has been a cult, if not a religion. People my age are products of the culture of the capital-F Future. The younger you are, the less you are a product of that. If you're fifteen or so, today, I suspect that you inhabit a sort of endless digital Now, a state of atemporality enabled by our increasingly efficient communal prosthetic memory. I also suspect that you don't know it, because, as anthropologists tell us, one cannot know one's own culture.
The Future, capital-F, be it crystalline city on the hill or radioactive postnuclear wasteland, is gone. Ahead of us, there is merely . . . more stuff. Events. Some tending to the crystalline, some to
the wasteland-y. Stuff: the mixed bag of the quotidian.
Please don't mistake this for one of those "after us, the deluge" moments on my part. I've always found those appalling, and most particularly when uttered by aging futurists, who of all people should know better. This newfound state of No Future is, in my opinion, a very good thing. It indicates a kind of maturity, an understanding that every future is someone else's past, every present someone else's future. Upon arriving in the capital-F Future, we discover it, invariably, to be the lower-case now.
The best science fiction has always known that, but it was a sort of cultural secret. When I began to write fiction, at the very end of the Seventies, I was fortunate to have been taught, as an undergraduate, that imaginary futures are always, regardless of what the authors might think, about the day in which they're written. Orwell knew it, writing Nineteen Eighty-Four in 1948, and I knew it writing Neuromancer, my first novel, which was published in 1984.
Neuromancer, though it's careful never to admit it, is set in the 2030s, when there's something like the Internet, but called "cyberspace," and a complete absence of cell phones, which I'm sure young readers assume must be a key plot-point. More accurately, there's something like cyberspace, but called "cyberspace," but that gets confusing. I followed Neuromancer with two more novels set in that particular future, but by then I was growing frustrated with the capital-F Future. I knew that those books were actually about the 1980s, when they were written, but almost nobody else seemed to see that.
So I wrote a novel called Virtual Light, which was set in 2006, which was then the very near future, and followed it with two more novels, each set a few imaginary years later, in what was really my take on the 1990s. It didn't seem to make any difference. Lots of people assumed I was still writing about the capital-F future. I began to tell interviewers, somewhat testily, that I believed I could write a novel set in the present, our present, then, which would have exactly the affect of my supposed imaginary futures. Hadn't J. G. Ballard declared Earth to be the real alien planet? Wasn't the future now?
SO I DID. In 2001, I was writing a book that became Pattern Recognition, my seventh novel, though it only did so after 9-11, which I'm fairly certain will be the real start of every documentary ever to be made about the present century. I found the material of the actual twenty-first century richer, stranger, more multiplex, than any imaginary twenty-first century could ever have been. And it could be unpacked with the toolkit of science fiction. I don't really see how it can be unpacked otherwise, as so much of it is so utterly akin to science fiction, complete with a workaday level of cognitive dissonance we now take utterly for granted.
Zero History, my ninth novel, will be published this September, rounding out that third set of three books. It's set in London and Paris, last year, in the wake of global financial collapse.
I wish that I could tell you what it's about, but I haven't yet discovered my best likely story, about that. That will come with reviews, audience and bookseller feedback (and booksellers are especially helpful, in that way). Along with however many interviews, these things will serve as a sort of oracle, suggesting to me what it is I've been doing for the past couple of years.
If Pattern Recognition was about the immediate psychic aftermath of 9-11, and Spook Country about the deep end of the Bush administration and the invasion of Iraq, I could say that Zero History is about the global financial crisis as some sort of nodal event, but that must be true of any 2010 novel with ambitions on the 2010 zeitgeist. But all three of these novels are also about that dawning recognition that the future, be it capital-T Tomorrow or just tomorrow, Friday, just means more stuff, however peculiar and unexpected. A new quotidian. Somebody's future, somebody else's past.
Simply in terms of ingredients, it's about recent trends in the evolution of the psychology of luxury goods, crooked former Special Forces officers, corrupt military contractors, the wonderfully bizarre symbiotic relationship between designers of high-end snowboarding gear and manufacturers of military clothing, and the increasingly virtual nature of the global market.
I called it Zero History because one of the characters has had a missing decade, during which he paid no taxes and had no credit cards. He meets a federal agent, who tells him that that combination indicates to her that he hasn't been up to much good, the past ten years. But that quotidian now finds him. Events find him, and he starts to acquire a history. And, one assumes, a credit rating, and the need to pay taxes.
It's also the first book I've written in which anyone gets engaged to be married.
A book exists at the intersection of the author's subconscious and the reader's response. An author's career exists in the same way. A writer worries away at a jumble of thoughts, building them into a device that communicates, but the writer doesn't know what's been communicated until it's possible to see it communicated.
After thirty years, a writer looks back and sees a career of a certain shape, utterly unanticipated.
It's a mysterious business, the writing of fiction, and I thank you all for making it possible.
This was given (that is, read aloud with some minimal attempts at appropriate body language) at a box lunch event for booksellers at Book Expo, which used to be called the ABA, for American Booksellers Association, whose oceanic trade fair it is. It's a daunting experience for an author, Book Expo, if only in sheer scale of numbers. You've never seen so many new books, and one's own title the merest raindrop in that sea.
Sorry for the Zero History pitch toward the end, but I had my marching orders.
TIME MOVES IN ONE DIRECTION, memory in another.
We are that strange species that constructs artifacts intended to counter the natural flow of forgetting.
I sometimes think that nothing really is new; that the first pixels were particles of ocher clay, the bison rendered in just the resolution required. The bison still function perfectly, all these millennia later, and what screen in the world today shall we say that of in a decade? And yet the bison will be there for us, on whatever screens we have, carried out of the primal dark on some impulse we each have felt, as children, drawing. But carried nonetheless on this thing we have always been creating, this vast unlikely mechanism that carries memory in its interstices; this global, communal, prosthetic memory that we have been building since before we learned to build.
We live in, have lived through, a strange time. I know this because when I was a child, the flow of forgetting was relatively unimpeded. I know this because the dead were less of a constant presence, then. Because there was once no Rewind button. Because the soldiers dying in the Somme were black and white, and did not run as the living run. Because the world's attic was still untidy. Because there were old men in the mountain valleys of my Virginia childhood who remembered a time before recorded music.
When we turn on the radio in a New York hotel room and hear Elvis singing "Heartbreak Hotel," we are seldom struck by the peculiarity of our situation: that a dead man sings.
In the context of the longer life of the species, it is something that only just changed a moment ago. It is something new, and I sometimes feel that, yes, everything has changed. (This perpetual toggling between nothing being new, under the sun, and everything having very recently changed, absolutely, is perhaps the central driving tension of my work.)
Our "now" has become at once more unforgivingly brief and unprecedentedly elastic. The half-life of media product grows shorter still, till it threatens to vanish altogether, everything into some weird quantum logic of its own, the Warholian Fifteen Minutes becoming a quarklike blink. Yet once admitted to the culture's consensus pantheon, certain things seem destined to be with us for a very long time indeed. This is a function, in large part, of the Rewind button. And we would all of us, to some extent, wish to be in heavy rotation.
And as this capacity for recall (and recommodification) grows more universal, history itself is seen to be even more obviously a construct, subject to revision. If it has been our b
usiness, as a species, to dam the flow of time through the creation and maintenance of mechanisms of external memory, what will we become when all these mechanisms, as they now seem intended ultimately to do, merge?
The end-point of human culture may well be a single moment of effectively endless duration, an infinite digital Now. But then, again, perhaps there is nothing new, in the end of all our beginnings, and the bison will be there, waiting for us.
I would like to take this opportunity to thank Forbes (more properly the editors of Forbes ASAP) for inviting me to write basically anything at all, then not messing with it when I did. I have been mining this piece for over a decade now, most consciously for talks, less consciously but more constantly for fiction.
It was entirely a matter of taking dictation from some part of my unconscious that rarely checks in this directly. I wish that that happened more frequently, but I'll take what I can get.
THE STORY OF FILM begins around a fire, in darkness. Gathered around this fire are primates of a certain species, our ancestors, an animal distinguished by a peculiar ability to recognize patterns.
There is movement in the fire: embers glow and crawl on charcoal. Fire looks like nothing else. It generates light in darkness. It moves. It is alive.
The surrounding forest is dark. Is it the same forest our ancestors know by day? They can't be sure. At night it is another place. Without form, it is that on which our ancestors project the patterns their interestingly mutated brains generate.
This pattern-reading mutation is crucial to the survival of a species that must ceaselessly hunt, ceaselessly gather. One plant is good to eat; it grows in summer in these lowlands. But if you eat its seedpods, you sicken and die. The big, slow-moving river-animal can be surprised and killed, here in these shallows, but will escape in deeper water.