Ghost in the Shell

This has always been my favorite picture of Vernor Vinge. I like the way he is sort of secretly peering out from or into a secret world. The interview is good too. Strange Horizons is a really wonderful magazine, in case you're not familiar with it. (Disclosure: I am on the staff, but I still think my opinion somewhat objective).

I was struck by how Vernor Vinge's True Names presages Iain M. Banks' Feersum Endjinn, where reincarnation is possible by uploading one's mind to a data haven called the cryptosphere or simply "the crypt." A constant problem for writers dealing with virtual reality always seems to be the question, "What happens if you die in [the matrix]?" Vinge's consequences are less terminal than those in other novels, perhaps because it's an early instance of this kind of tale or perhaps because the threats in his books often seem tinged with a promise that everything will work out okay or there will be little suffering if things don't.

Still, outside of Vinge's novella, physical death often looms for those who play too dangerously in cyber-reality. Perhaps considerations of virtual death drives considerations of electronic immortality through mind uploading. Or vice-verse. What, then, are the barriers to such an enterprise? The problem must not have to do with the amount of data but the data structure. The Big Blue is working on it, though!

The Screen as Portal to the Real

Everyone always comes back to that first line from Neuromancer: "The Sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel." The line is so compelling that Bono gets to read it aloud in No Maps for These Territories.

What is it about the screen, even devoid of sensible data, that makes it so watchable?

There's something to discern there, whether it's the voices of dead people in Poltergeist or -- wait -- the voices of dead people in White Noise. Static has to mean something, either as a metaphor or as a code (think of electronic voice phenomenon). The screen acts as a portal to other sentiences, whether they're frighteningly never-living (e.g., AIs in films like War Games) or entities that are more living than we are (e.g., an Outside that is the Real in The Matrix). Neuromancer's first line seems to toy with our curiosity about the permeable dead space of the screen. Yes, we're interested in the lives of the characters in the real world of the novel, but aren't we more curious to have the digital world rendered visible?

The Hum(usic)achine

In Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, Dick never directly says that the Penfield Mood Organ is a musical instrument. But the way that characters adjust its dials to induce certain moods (e.g., acknowledgment of husband's wisdom or desire to watch television), it's easy to interpret the device as one that plays music. This is especially true given increasing research that shows a close relationship between the structure of music and the way the brain functions. However, the word "organ" also may imply that it is simply some kind of external, artificial body part a la Existenz.

How would Oliver Sacks read it?

Mirrored Image

Re-reading The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch, I felt very certain its events had taken place in Now Wait for Last Year. Or was it The Martian Timeslip? Maybe I don't really know Dick, not like some other people do. Or maybe Dick's narratives intentionally haunt each other, in the same way that he saw an ancient, more real civilization lurking behind its spectral double: our own. Here, I am thinking of Dick's notion that history stopped moving forward in the 1st Century AD (Rome) and that "the Empire never ended." Am I remembering that phrase correctly from VALIS or am I just thinking of the title of the story that appeared in Astounding Magazine?

Why was I so certain that the phrase "Choosy Choosers Choose Chew-Z" appeared in Stigmata, when it was really something much more simple? There's something about the doubling in Dick that spoils the memory. Something about the possible presents/alternate futures/co-located selves that make it seem like something that isn't there might still really be there somewhere. Is Dick trying to get us to realize how close we are to other possibilities or just to pay more attention to the present Real?

(s)oft machines

Reading The Soft Machine and Blade Runner, a Movie -- sifting through Burrough's intermitternt but sustained celebrations of young men and sex -- helped me better understand Gravity's Rainbow as a form of SF. It isn't just that Pynchon's novel so comfortably embraces the absurd that it begins to take on aspects of the fantastic. Somewhat in the same way, Burroughs' novels clearly embrace the fantastic but are utterly grounded in the real (partially because of the visceral descriptions of sex). It's another one of those times in which SF troublingly, interestingly, inevitably complicates genre boundaries. The connection between these tese texts recalls for me something about what is at the heart of "the speculative present," a term that Bruce Sterling, William Gibson, Michael Swanwick, and others seem to be batting around more and more these days.

Cyberculture and such

Enjoyed reading Gravity's Rainbow (the edition with the Frank Miller cover, though one wouldn't really know it was Frank Miller without being told). A friend yesterday suggested the Neal Stephenson's Crtyptonomicon basically re-writes Pynchon's novel. I'm not sure I would go that far, but certainly the tone shows up there.