Bruce Sterling - The Wonderful Power of Storytelling

This is a lesson about cultural expression nowadays that has applications to everybody. This is part of living in the Information Society. Here we are in the 90s, we have these tremendous information-handling, information-producing technologies. We think it's really great that we can have groovy unleashed access to all these different kinds of data, we can own books, we can own movies on tape, we can access databanks, we can buy computer-games, records, music, art.... A lot of our art aspires to the condition of software, our art today wants to be digital... But our riches of information are in some deep and perverse sense a terrible burden to us. They're like a cognitive load. As a digitized information-rich culture nowadays, we have to artificially invent ways to forget stuff. I think this is the real explanation for the triumph of compact disks.

Compact disks aren't really all that much better than vinyl records. What they make up in fidelity they lose in groovy cover art. What they gain in playability they lose in presentation. The real advantage of CDs is that they allow you to forget all your vinyl records. You think you love this record collection that you've amassed over the years. But really the sheer choice, the volume, the load of memory there is secretly weighing you down. You're never going to play those Alice Cooper albums again, but you can't just throw them away, because you're a culture nut.

But if you buy a CD player you can bundle up all those records and put them in attic boxes without so much guilt. You can pretend that you've stepped up a level, that now you're even more intensely into music than you ever were; but on a practical level what you're really doing is weeding this junk out of your life. By dumping the platform you dump everything attached to the platform and my god what a blessed secret relief. What a relief not to remember it, not to think about it, not to have it take up disk-space in your head.

Computer games are especially vulnerable to this because they live and breathe through the platform. But something rather similar is happening today to fiction as well.... What you see in science fiction nowadays is an amazing tonnage of product that is shuffled through the racks faster and faster.... If a science fiction paperback stays available for six weeks, it's a miracle. Gross sales are up, but individual sales are off... Science fiction didn't even used to be *published* in book form, when a science fiction *book* came out it would be in an edition of maybe five hundred copies and these weirdo Golden Age SF fans would cling on to every copy as if it were made of platinum.... But now they come out and they are made to vanish as soon as possible. In fact to a great extent they're designed by their lame hack authors to vanish as soon as possible. They're cliches because cliches are less of a cognitive load. You can write a whole trilogy instead, bet you can't eat just one... Nevertheless they're still objects in the medium of print. They still have the cultural properties of print.

Culturally speaking they're capable of lasting a long time because they can be replicated faithfully in new editions that have all the same properties as the old ones. Books are independent of the machineries of book production, the platforms of publishing. Books don't lose anything by being reprinted by a new machine, books are stubborn, they remain the same work of art, they carry the same cultural aura. Books are hard to kill. MOBY DICK for instance bombed when it came out, it wasn't until the 1920s that MOBY DICK was proclaimed a masterpiece, and then it got printed in millions. Emily Dickinson didn't even publish books, she just wrote these demented little poems with a quill pen and hid them in her desk, but they still fought their way into the world, and lasted on and on and on. It's damned hard to get rid of Emily Dickinson, she hangs on like a tick in a dog's ear. And everybody who writes from then on in some sense has to measure up to this woman. In the art of book-writing the classics are still living competition, they tend to elevate the entire art-form by their persistent presence.

I've noticed though that computer game designers don't look much to the past. All their idealized classics tend to be in reverse, they're projected into the future. When you're a game designer and you're waxing very creative and arty, you tend to measure your work by stuff that doesn't exist yet. Like now we only have floppies, but wait till we get CD-ROM. Like now we can't have compelling lifelike artificial characters in the game, but wait till we get AI. Like now we waste time porting games between platforms, but wait till there's just one standard. Like now we're just starting with huge multiplayer games, but wait till the modem networks are a happening thing. And I -- as a game designer artiste -- it's my solemn duty to carry us that much farther forward toward the beckoning grail....

For a novelist like myself this is a completely alien paradigm. I can see that it's very seductive, but at the same time I can't help but see that the ground is crumbling under your feet. Every time a platform vanishes it's like a little cultural apocalypse. And I can imagine a time when all the current platforms might vanish, and then what the hell becomes of your entire mode of expression? Alan Kay -- he's a heavy guy, Alan Kay -- he says that computers may tend to shrink and vanish into the environment, into the walls and into clothing.... Sounds pretty good.... But this also means that all the joysticks vanish, all the keyboards, all the repetitive strain injuries.

I'm sure you could play some kind of computer game with very intelligent, very small, invisible computers.... You could have some entertaining way to play with them, or more likely they would have some entertaining way to play with you. But then imagine yourself growing up in that world, being born in that world. You could even be a computer game designer in that world, but how would you study the work of your predecessors? How would you physically *access* and *experience* the work of your predecessors? There's a razor-sharp cutting edge in this art-form, but what happened to all the stuff that got sculpted?

As I was saying, I don't think it's any accident that this is happening.... I don't think that as a culture today we're very interested in tradition or continuity. No, we're a lot more interested in being a New Age and a revolutionary epoch, we long to reinvent ourselves every morning before breakfast and never grow old. We have to run really fast to stay in the same place. We've become used to running, if we sit still for a while it makes us feel rather stale and panicky. We'd miss those sixty-hour work weeks.

And much the same thing is happening to books today too.... Not just technically, but ideologically. I don't know if you're familiar at all with literary theory nowadays, with terms like deconstructionism, postmodernism.... Don't worry, I won't talk very long about this.... It can make you go nuts, that stuff, and I don't really recommend it, it's one of those fields of study where it's sometimes wise to treasure your ignorance.... But the thing about the new literary theory that's remarkable, is that it makes a really violent break with the past.... These guys don't take the books of the past on their own cultural terms. When you're deconstructing a book it's like you're psychoanalyzing it, you're not studying it for what it says, you're studying it for the assumptions it makes and the cultural reasons for its assemblage.... What this essentially means is that you're not letting it touch you, you're very careful not to let it get its message through or affect you deeply or emotionally in any way. You're in a position of complete psychological and technical superiority to the book and its author... This is a way for modern literateurs to handle this vast legacy of the past without actually getting any of the sticky stuff on you. It's like it's dead. It's like the next best thing to not having literature at all. For some reason this feels really good to people nowadays.