FutureTense

Two of my favorite novels from the 1990’s weren’t exactly science fiction–and yet they were. Ciphers (1997) by Paul Di Filippo is a truly amazing work, a sprawling, inventive, and complex narrative of conspiracies and magic and science and cultures, weaving in and out of time and space in non-linear, non-traditional, and highly entertaining fashion. It was quite obviously the product of an SF writer, and yet it flew in the face of every standard SF convention, rewriting the book on imaginative fiction. Then there was Cryptonomicon (1999) by Neal Stephenson, an enormous tome ricocheting between a late-nineties present and 1940’s past, mingling contemporary sociopolitical issues with World War II history–and more. A combination of adventure, mystery, secret history, drama, and in some ways speculation…it was most definitely not a science fiction novel. Both books deal with “codes” and secret histories. Both are very big books with well worked-out through-lines, but are broken down into more digestable, flashy, “storyish” chapters. And neither could really be classified, in the pure marketing sense, as science fiction, even though they are clearly books that seemed to have been written with some kind of sideways SF sensibility.

Since those books were published, Bruce Sterling–one of the most reliable practitioners of forward-looking, futuristic SF both as an original cyberpunk and in his later, “post-cyberpunk” works like Holy Fire, Heavy Weather, and Distraction–turned away from SF (sort of) to write Zeitgeist (2000), a contemporary novel with slipstream-ish overtones that takes place in 1999 and, in fact, seems to be an ode to the end of the crazy twentieth century and an ominous, witty glance forward at the next one. Here’s another sprawling, wild, chaotic narrative with an intriguing through-line, but what sticks most in my memory about this book is how truly science fictional he made 1999 feel–more science fictional, in fact, than many dyed-in-the-wool, far future SF novels and stories being published these days. Reading it raised a question for me: how can science fiction truly be examining the future, when many of its writers aren’t even examining the present?

I didn’t actually see it then, but a miniature pattern was emerging, a clandestine little sub-genre of SF–or perhaps not of SF. What to call it? It ain’t exactly slipstream, though it may be some weird third cousin of it. “Science fictional mainstream” is too clunky. For the purposes of this little essay, I’ll just call it “non-SF.” Maybe that’ll do it, since it invokes SF without being SF, just as those three novels did. All three having been written by “lapsed cyberpunks” of one sort or another, it would be hard for their work not to be flavored with SF, wouldn’t it? (Of course Stephenson never really was a true cyberpunk–but the novel that catapulted him into the spotlight was a decidedly cyberpunkish novel called Snow Crash, so we can roll with it. And Di Filippo’s always been too diverse to really be called a pure cyberpunk…but hey, he was in Mirrorshades, right? But I digress.)

Sure enough, following the pattern, is a novel by the kingpin of cyberpunk himself, William Gibson–which is called, conveniently enough, Pattern Recognition (2003). This may be Gibson’s best book yet, and like the other books mentioned, it’s not exactly science fiction. It’s a very contemporary novel of non-SF, or whatever you want to call it. And, like Zeitgeist, it makes the present seem far more futuristic and disorienting than most science fiction does, so that it will most certainly register with SF enthusiasts even as it veers off sideways a bit from the author’s traditional genre focus.

The book’s protagonist is Cayce Pollard, an intriguing global citizen with some bizarre conditions: one, an almost extrasensory knack for instantly recognizing the effectiveness of advertising materials, and two, an inexplicable allergy to certain logos and icons. This has led her into a lucrative, if ironic, career as a freelance marketing consultant and “coolhunter.” Cayce, on assignment in London, is hired by the impossibly named Hubertus Bigend–a powerful marketing mogul–to track down the source of a slowly unveiling film that is being released, segment by segment, on the internet. Cayce, a fanatic intensely interested in this subject anyway, is given financial carte blanche in her quest to track down this mysterious footage, which has become something of an online phenomenon, spawning a subculture of “footageheads” passionately devoted to revealing the source of this film and uncovering its true meaning. Her journey is told in Gibson’s highly stylized, slick, detail-laden prose, and is very much his own work, rife with brand names and science fictional themes, tough characters and a heavy interest in cultures and ideas, their clashes and combinations. The convoluted plot machinations, however, remind me of John LeCarre’, and the underlying sense of paranoia and hidden meanings and bizarre mysteries plays in the imagination like a David Lynch film. But whatever its surface qualities, the book’s true strength is in its theme, its examination of the present as a fascinating, shifting, changing, disorienting time–and a harbinger for a future that is scary, complex, and in some ways unimaginable. Cayce is a complicated, sympathetic, intriguing character and her confusion is the author’s, the reader’s. She’s torn–as her peculiar condition transparently indicates–between complying with and reviling the massive corporations that make her living, and the cultural conditions that make it possible. She can recognize marketing trends and help them come about, even as she finds them distasteful and, in some cases, illness-inducing. She is torn between attraction to a superficial, conventionally attractive colleague (Boone Chu) and a faceless friend she only knows through his passionate online persona (Parkaboy). In a number of ways, then, Cayce is a product of her time, our time, her story distinctly suited toward illuminating the book’s intense focus on the battle between powerful corporations and stubborn cottage industries, the bestseller mentality versus the niche market, the division between what we really want and what we’re told we should want, the push for homogeneity against the scattered forces of diversity. The novel, which revels in the distinct differences between cultures and locations, also contains a creeping subtext that there are forces in the world working to erase those fascinating distinctions, globalize, make everything the same…and perhaps it’s that cautionary aspect (among other things) that contributes to the book’s “science fictional” feel.

It’s not a perfect book. In fact, the wrap-up is in some ways unsatisfying, and in its last few chapters it lost its chance to make my personal Favorite Novels Ever list by unraveling a bit. The destination, alas, is not nearly so interesting as the journey. But then that may be a part of the point, that no effective conclusion can be reached. (Of course, I may be reading into things a bit much…) At any rate, in the end, Gibson has produced a thought-provoking and intriguing novel: part cautionary tale, part spy thriller, part slipstream, part mystery…and not at all SF. Except that it is, or at least, it’s “non-SF.” And, interestingly, it continues the–perhaps very small–trend of visionary science fiction writers who have turned their sights on a target even more fascinating and, in some ways, more unknowable than the future–the present.

This entry was posted on Monday, June 16th, 2003 at 9:34 pm and is filed under Articles & Essays. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.