Spanner R4 Update: Where Did I Get Some Of These Characters?

While editing Chapter 8 for the Final Revision, I got to thinking about the origin of some of my characters. Some of them are riffs on characters of other stories. Some of these riffs date all the way back to 1992, when I created the original group around Shira.

Diana Shockley: I created her as early as 1991 because I hated Appleseed's Deunan Knute when she killed Chiffon in the first graphic novel. The concept: what if Deunan were a villain?

Henry Becket: Her father was the second villain I created. He's basically the original Battlestar Galactica's villain Baltar without the smirk and with a fedora and thick glasses and the invincible delusion that he's the last actual hero in existence. When borrowing public-domain superheroes, I made him the Bronze Age version of the American Crusader from the Nedor comics.

Richard Becket: His younger-looking older brother is basically the Corporate version of Eblis, the Satan figure from the same show. He also thinks he's the good guy; since he's the story's supreme elitist, that means the masses are by definition the villain. His superhero identity is the Bronze Age Scarab — and for him I borrowed the idea of superhero lineages from The Phantom. The original Scarab was a Frenchman in Napoleonic Egypt, and the lineage has occult origins. Dick Becket is the seventh Scarab (the Golden and Silver Age originals being the fifth and sixth), and he has to fight his own successors, the eighth and ninth Scarabs. The Scarab lineage is central to the mystery of Spanner.

Drusilla Becket is the answer to the question, what if Erica Kane from the soap opera All My Children were a guru like, say, J.Z. Knight (of Ramtha fame) or Elizabeth Clare Prophet? For one thing, like them and other gurus, she made an enemy of Shira's grandmother Eleanor Richter, the children's author and witch.

Will Becket: If Diana is Deunan Knute as a villain, her younger brother is Mobile Suit Gundam's Char Aznable as an extremely ambiguous antihero. There will be hints of another antihero inspired by Char, Lelouch Lamperouge of Code Geass, especially come Book 5.

Colonel Tom Becket: I didn't get a good grip on the Dictel Corporation chairman until I saw James Cameron's Avatar. Then I realized he's basically the villain, Colonel Quaritch, as the chairman of Blackwater.

I just noticed that these are all Beckets. One of the characteristics of the Cromwell Becket clan is their stubborn resistance to change. They are more archetype than character. They claim divine origin, descent from the Norse, Celtic, and Egyptian gods. More than the other dominant clans in the Conservative Revolutionary Party, they remind people of Unseely Fae with their inhuman morality and their lack of respect for human lives.

This in contrast to my more protean heroes, and especially heroines. Shira is a chameleon. Jennifer has a whole arsenal of personae she can summon at will. Surviving Leila or Melody, even when they're not at full power, may depend entirely on what mood they swing into. The only heroic character who is genuinely archetypal is Ariel, with the striking white stripe in her black hair and her Holy Grail obsession. She's the one who puts the heroines' doings into some mythical context and puts them on heroes' journeys. She traces her own ancestry (and therefore her niece Leila's) through the female line ("bar sinister" in heraldry) to Mélusine, Morgan le Fay, and ultimately to Mary Magdalene. And of course she's a mentor character like, say, Willa Richter-Thomas, Zac Finney, or (looking to Chapter 16 R4) Dr. Hiram Whistler. Shira herself has multiple origins.

I'm not actually cloning any characters. I'm too good a writer to let myself be that lazy. But some of my own characters were inspired by characters in other works. Of course, creating them is only the first step. After that, their job is to grow away from their origins so they can help the other characters take the story away from their author and run amok.

Is Cyberpunk Dead -- Or Is It Now?

On this Google+ thread about this io9 article about novelists who used to write cyberpunk science fiction but have now turned to dark fantasy, a few FriendFeed friends of mine and I argued over whether cyberpunk is dead. One of them said it's dead. I said it's only dead as science fiction. But then, after all, my position is that we're already living in the cyberpunk universe.

Actually, I've even gone farther: on a NaNoWriMo forum thread, I declared science fiction itself to be dead. More specifically, what we know as science fiction is really a subgenre of fantasy called "technofantasy", which can be further subdivided into "space fantasy", "future fantasy", and so on. Some fantasy subgenres that originated in science fiction have actually left SF altogether and become fantasy genres of their own, most notably steampunk. Properly, Star Wars isn't really science fiction, but a chivalric space fantasy set "long, long ago in a galaxy far, far away".

What the io9 article is saying is that many authors normally associated with cyberpunk have abandoned it for dark fantasy. Some were never really SF to begin with. Rudy Rucker (Ware Tetralogy), for one, has always really done what can rightly be called "science fantasy". John Shirley (Eclipse Trilogy/A Song Called Youth) is mainly a horror author, and his seminal novel that inspired the cyberpunks, City Come a-Walkin', is an urban fantasy, a genre that Walter Jon Williams (HardWired) has also worked in (Metropolitan and its sequels).

William Gibson (Neuromancer) has gone in the opposite direction. His Blue Ant trilogy (Pattern Recognition, Spook Country, Zero History) is set entirely in the present day, using present-day technologies, and yet feels like the future he wrote about in his seminal 1980s cyberpunk cycle. And yet it's not science fiction at all, except to the bookstore marketing executives who have programmed their corporate databases to associate "William Gibson" with "cyberpunk". Gibson has done what Philip K. Dick failed to do: fuse science fiction with realistic fiction. But he was able to do that because the world caught up with science fiction.

Another example I mentioned in the Google+ thread is the Daemon series by Daniel Suarez. Daemon and Freedom™ are entirely cyberpunk, yet contain no actual science fiction at all, if by "science fiction" we mean technological speculation. Like the Blue Ant trilogy, it's set in the present day.

You can say cyberpunk is dead. But only as science fiction. Those cyberpunk writers who want to stay in the fantasy family of genres turn to dark fantasy and/or urban fantasy, or always considered themselves to be writing in those subgenres in the first place. Those who stick with cyberpunk, like I am, abandon fantasy altogether, even technofantasy, and write realistic fiction: technothrillers, political thrillers, even litfic.

Virtual reality, augmented reality, implanted computers, wearable computers, computer monitors that look exactly like ordinary eyeglasses, exotic drugs, cyberterror both state and outlaw, virtual guerrilla war, corporate headhunting using mercenaries: these were all speculations in cyberpunk SF, but are a reality today, in many cases more so than the cyberpunks could ever have dreamed. Other technologies, like social media, surprised even the cyberpunks, who never saw them coming. Hell, those old SF clichés, jetpacks and aircars, are now in production and coming down in price; hoverboards are now in development. They've left the realm of speculative technofantasy to become our reality today. I myself really have only one speculative technology in Chaos Angel Spanner: video body paint.

So I agree that cyberpunk is indeed dead — as science fiction. Unless you see SF as I do: as the literature of today. Cyberpunk is our reality.

You're probably asking me, "So where's the escapism in Spanner then?" My answer: pop culture. Can the Fashion-Industrial Complex get any more absurd and, well, fantastic? You'd be surprised...

Spanner and the Problem with Superheroes

I'm an aspiring cartoonist, and superheroes are all the rage again in popular culture. I'm putting public domain superheroes, and some heroes of my own invention, into the plot of Spanner, complete with Golden, Silver, and Bronze Age versions. However, I do not allow any of my superheroes to become the protagonist. Why? you ask. Because superheroes are not cut out to be protagonists. The protagonist is the main character, the one whose crucial decision is the event that begins the story, either as a result of the Inciting Incident or as the Inciting Incident itself. If the superhero is the protagonist, he faces the danger that he will become a revolutionary tyrant, a one-man vanguard who is the very embodiment of substitutionism, the belief that a revolutionary vanguard can substitute for mass action and the heroism of ordinary people. In Watchmen, this hero turned villain is Ozymandias, the all-powerful utopian. So in Spanner, it's the slutty teenage prankster on a hoverboard who gets the leading role, and not one of the superpowered characters.

After Litfic Dies: Science Fiction vs. Fantasy

Face it: literary fiction is dying. The question is, what will replace it as the new mainstream? I've been championing science fiction in recent posts; I'm convinced that its method will be the core of the literature of the future, and indeed of the present. However, from what I've seen lately, it isn't the most popular potential successor to the old litfic. What is? Fantasy.

In the bookstores, science fiction and fantasy are always put together in the same section as if they were the same. The assumption seems to be that they form a single genre. But the official publisher and bookseller category is misleading. You see, science fiction and fantasy have opposite worldviews. Science fiction usually relies on some sort of scientific logic and a whole lot of awesome future technology, but fantasy always requires at least one supernatural thing.

Two Kinds of Science Fiction

I just found out that there's actually two kinds of science fiction: fiction in the genre, and fiction outside it. The latter is called, somewhat disparagingly by fans, "mundane"; the most popular writer of "mundane" SF is, of course, Michael Crichton. Some mainstream or even literary fiction is all but indistinguishable from science fiction; one famous example is Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse-Five, which is set partly on an alien world in some sort of trans-time. William Gibson's current "Blue Ant" cycle belongs to this category. Meanwhile, there is some genre SF that could fit just fine in the mainstream. For example, I've noticed that Philip K. Dick's proletarian-realist novels (the literary fiction he longed to be known for, such as In Milton Lumky Territory) are sold in the SF/fantasy section of the bookstore simply because he is an SF God. Some novels are (or were) on the borderline: Thomas Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow and Don DeLillo's Ratner's Star were both nominated for the Nebula Award; Neal Stephenson's Cryptonomicon tends to be put in the SF/fantasy section with Snow Crash and the Baroque Quartet, but rests right on the boundary between "genre" and "mundane" and is intended to be there.

As Literary Fiction Dies, Science Fiction Must Take Over

Face it: the traditional literary fiction that defined the mainstream in the 20th century is on its way out, much like the newspaper it drew from starting in the late 19th century. During its period of dictatorship, anything outside its narrow boundaries was ruthlessly relegated to the lowbrow genres of pulp fiction by the cultural establishment's literary police. But now literary fiction is almost extinct. Why? Because its ideology, called Naturalism, no longer reflects the daily lives of ordinary people.

What does? Science fiction. You see, far more than in Isaac Asimov's day, we are living in the world predicted by science fiction. Rockets and space stations? Check. Supercomputers, internets, virtual reality? Check. Robots do more of our manufacturing work. Cyborgs are increasingly banal. Androids and jetpacks are in development. Can interstellar spaceships, wormholes, antigravity, and time travel be far behind? And there's some amazing stuff now commonplace or in development that were inconceivable to the likes of Asimov, Robert Heinlein, and their contemporaries: nanotechnology, personal area networks, quantum computing, augmented reality — the list goes on...

The conclusion should be obvious. The central place in the mainstream of modern literature that was once held by the now dying Naturalist literary fiction properly belongs to science fiction. Why, then, is it still relegated to genre and fandom? Because the old literary establishment still controls the publishing industry.

Science Fiction Is The True Modern Literature

Remember my post in which I vowed to destroy science fiction? Now I'm going to assert with J. G. Ballard (in his introduction to his novel Crash) that science fiction is the only true modern literature, and the only kind of literature that fits the science fiction universe we live in.

On the surface, the two are exact contradictions. But they're not. In fact, they're the same thing.

Sex, Dreams, and Storytelling: My Artistic Philosophy

Before I get to the world building, I first want to state my philosophy of storytelling. The short form:

1. A story is a collective dream. Likewise, a dream is a personal story.
2. Storytelling is like sex, including something called a "climax". The lover makes love to (usually) one person, but the storyteller makes love to huge audiences.
3. Story is conflict. Without conflict, there can be no story.

These three principles are the keys to my understanding of storytelling and my way of writing fiction. (Note: The first version of this entry was incomplete. I have now finished it.)