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Sci-fi Fo Fum
How the blood of an Englishman-turned-Texan and the vision of a Gulf Coast misfit have rejuvenated the science-fiction universe.
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Motivated by family concerns, Moorcock moved to Central Texas four years ago to a small town he refers to as Lost Pines to maintain a measure of privacy. He was welcomed with open arms, and his most basic needs—a reasonable number of good bookstores and restaurants—were served. Still, he grumbles that Texas “is, compared to London, a cultural wasteland. [But] I’m an old whore basically; I can adapt to anything.” He was intrigued by the voices of Texas fiction—literary and speculative—and the attention focused on Austin. He views contemporary Texas writers as myth builders who are “creating a kind of fiction that is very much going to be characteristic fiction of the twenty-first century.” Sterling, for example, he deems “a good visionary—he’s looking at the pertinence of the twenty-first century.”
Although slowed slightly by poor health, Moorcock remains prolific. He’s finishing a quartet of novels about the Holocaust—emotionally draining and wholly literary efforts. He just completed an ambitious comic book series for DC Comics, Michael Moorcock’s Multiverse. Avon Books published The War Amongst the Angels to enthusiastic acclaim last year; the sprawling story features Lucifer, angels, and mad uncle Michael Moorcock from Texas. And Mojo Press recently published Tales From the Texas Woods. “I’m something of a chameleon. I tend to write about places and then settle in them,” he says. “There are certain places that have incredibly strong mythic resonances, and for some reason, although it’s only been around a couple of hundred years, Texas is one of those [places].”
Six time zones and one generation removed from Michael Moorcock’s London childhood, Bruce Sterling was born in Brownsville in 1954 and grew up in the Houston bedroom community of Texas City. His family moved around a bit, and Sterling, like many uprooted kids, made books a huge part of his world. He too read Robert E. Howard’s adventure fantasies, but by his teens he was a huge fan of the British New Wave. His father, a petroleum engineer, moved the family to southern India when he was fifteen. Sterling calls his three years there “a life-changing thing—very common for science-fiction writers, actually. They’ve either lived in some other culture in their youth or else they’re really, seriously sick for two or three years—introduced to a deeply alternate reality and then reintroduced to the first one.”
India provided a different world perspective. He took correspondence courses instead of attending high school—“I’m missing a big chunk of common American experience”—and proved susceptible to a frightening list of Third World and tropical diseases. Tragedy struck when his mother and two sisters died in a plane crash while returning to Texas from India.
When Sterling himself came home—a skinny kid with long hair, wearing a dashiki and baggy blue jeans—he enrolled in the University of Texas at Austin, majoring in journalism. He fell in with a simpatico crowd at the UT Science Fiction Society: “They were some of the few people who I thought were really odd enough that I could get along with them—not waste much time to get them up to speed about my alien background,” he says. The society’s adviser was Chad Oliver, the first published sci-fi writer that Sterling had any meaningful contact with. “He was a hugely influential figure in the early seventies, when my little wannabe writer buddies and I were hanging out on campus trying to get stuff published. He would recite little war stories from his past—the sort of folklore of the field.”
About that time, a group including Steven Utley, Lisa Tuttle, Tom Reamy, and Howard Waldrop inaugurated the Turkey City writer’s workshop (née the Turkey City Neo-Pro-Rodeo). Each writer submitted a story that was critiqued round-table style by the group. It was blood sport—often brutal and vicious. In retrospect Sterling calls Turkey City “a cradle of cyberpunk.” It helped shape his first two books, 1977’s Involution Ocean and 1980’s The Artificial Kid, both of which were greeted with mixed reviews and unremarkable sales. Then, in 1983—writing as “Vincent Omniaveritas”—he launched the inflammatory and now legendary fanzine Cheap Truth. A representative rant from issue one: “As American SF lies in a reptilian torpor, its small, squishy cousin, Fantasy, creeps gecko-like across the bookstands. . . . SF’s collapse has formed a vacuum that forces Fantasy into a painful and explosive bloat.” Sterling now says, “[I was] not only trumpeting my friends, but I was attacking my enemies and making enemies and just generally raising hell. And I think that’s an excellent thing to do when nobody knows who you are and you don’t quite know either.” Despite its short life span (eighteen slim issues) and its tiny mailing list of three hundred or so, Cheap Truth’s audacity had a galvanizing effect. And it certainly helped promote the loose-knit band of sci-fi brigands dubbed “cyberpunks,” featuring Sterling as both Colonel Parker and Elvis.
The cyberpunks were heating up. They hot-wired and retrofitted a genre to suit their noir-ish ideas. Defying the notion of space as the final frontier, archetypal cyberpunk fiction explored the complex relationship between people, computers, and the global community. Often set against a post-catastrophic background, the stories speculated about the ever-changing line where flesh and blood meet and merge with hardware and software. Of necessity, the writers developed their own lexicon. Sterling says, “People use the term ‘cyberspace’ all the time—they don’t know that William Gibson made up that word. They just sort of assume it was always there, you know?”
Like the British New Wave in the sixties, Sterling and others—including Lewis Shiner and Howard Waldrop—were turning science fiction on its ear. Some rejected the “cyberpunk” handle, and even Sterling, once a ringleader, now assigns it to a time and a place that has passed. “It’s very much like asking Allen Ginsberg about ‘beatnik’ in 1972,” he says.
In 1985 Schismatrix, a profoundly weird futurist saga, was a commercial breakthrough for Sterling, and the critical response to The Difference Engine (1991), written with William Gibson, sealed his reputation. In a detailed alternate history, Sterling and Gibson rewrote the Industrial Revolution in England by introducing an imaginary technology in the form of steam-driven cybernetic engines. Sterling earned his success by honing his writing skills. Readers who know him only from the frantic “crammed prose” of his early novels would not recognize him as the lyrical hand behind 1996’s remarkable Holy Fire, a near-future chronicle of an elderly woman’s uneasiness when biotechnology has put immortality within human reach. This November Bantam Spectra will publish Distraction, set in East Texas and Louisiana in the 2040’s. It’s the unlikely tale of a star-crossed affair between a political campaign adviser and a neuroscientist. “Cajuns become top biotechnicians. It’s all about gumbo and oil refining. Anybody who can do gumbo and oil refining can do biotechnology, in my opinion.”
In conversation Sterling exhibits an exquisite intelligence and a crackling wit. He is proud to own up to being a science-fiction writer, a great success in a genre that he hesitantly describes as “a lot like a tide pool. Every once in a while a little fresh water will wash in, but generally it’s a small simmering pond with odd creatures you wouldn’t find in the larger social areas.”
But that pond can accommodate the literary and mythic fantasies of Michael Moorcock’s multiverse as well as Sterling’s unapologetic, cybernetic musings. They are disparate but kindred writers who sparked literary revolutions in the past and continue to inspire visions of the future.
Mike Shea has written for the Austin Chronicle.
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