Pattern Languages

It's a matter of whether you're content to focus on everyday events or whether you want to try to encompass the entire universe. If you go back to the literature written in ancient Greece or Rome, or during the Middle Ages and much of the Renaissance, you'll see writers trying to write not just about everything that exists but about everything that could exist. As soon as you open yourself to that possibility, you're going to find yourself talking about things like intelligent robots and monsters with Gorgon heads, because it's becoming increasingly obvious that such things could indeed exist. But what fascinates me is that the ancient Greeks realized these possibilities some five hundred years before Christ, when they didn't have the insights into the biological and physical sciences we have today, when there was no such thing as, say, cybernetics. Read the story of Jason and the Argonauts - you discover that Crete was guarded by a robot. Somehow the Greeks were alert to these possibilities despite the very primitive technology they had, and they put these ideas into their stories. Today, it's the SF writers who are exploring these things.
- Gene Wolfe

... For although in a certain sense and for light-minded persons non-existent things can be more easily and irresponsibily represented in words than existing things, for the serious and conscientious historian it is just the reverse. Nothing is harder, yet nothing is more necessary, than to speak of certain things whose existence is neither demonstrable nor probable. The very fact that serious and conscientious men treat them as existing things bring them a step closer to existence and to the possibility of being born.

Albertus Secundus
tract. de cristall. spirit.
ed. Clagor et. Collof. lib. I, cap. 28
(in Joseph Knecht's holograph translation

I recently reread Hesse's Glass Bead Game back to back with William Gibson's Pattern Recognition; they seem to me to be part of ... an overall pattern. Let's start with the fact that both can be classified as science fiction, but somewhat uncomfortably.  What makes the classification uncertain is the absence of the generically-familiar focus of technology.

Hesse's novel is set in the 25th Century. And, in a sense, the Glass Bead Game constitutes a massive scientific step forward which really ought to clinch the SF deal:

These rules, the sign language and grammar of the Game, constitute a kind of highly developed secret language drawing upon several sciences and arts, but especially mathematics and music (and/or musicology), and capable of expressing and establishing interrelationships between the total contents and values of our culture; it plays with them as, say, in the great age of the arts a painter might have played with the colors on his palette. All the insights, noble thoughts, and works of art that the human race has produced in its creative eras, all that subsequent periods of scholarly study have reduced to concepts and converted into intellectual property - on all this immense body of intellectual values the Glass Bead Game player plays like the organist on an organ. And this organ has attained an almost unimaginable perfection; its manuals and pedals range over the entire intellectual cosmos; its stops are almost beyond number. Theoretically this instrument is capable of reproducing in the Game the entire intellectual content of the universe.

All the same, it is not a technological advance. There are no Glass Bead Gizmos or Gadgets. The technology of the 25th Century is apparently more primitive than that of the world in which Hesse lived and wrote, in 1942. The reference to a 'holograph translation', in the fictional epigraph, above, is the only reference to advanced technology in the entire novel. Everyone walks everywhere, writes with pen and ink. There are a few cars. There are mathematicians and astronomers in Castilia and occasional references to laboratories, which are never seen. If there is a war, the mathematicians will be called upon to assist the war effort (as the Game players will not.) But the novel completely lacks the stock science fictional sense that industrialization and/or technology are ethically fraught fruits of knowledge. Nor is there even any reference to a past age in which all the machines were wisely broken. (This might sound just idiotic, but Hesse is being very clever. I'm just not sure how.)

But science does not equal technology, of course. There is no self-evident reason why science fiction should be technology fiction. On the other hand, maybe what we usually call science fiction would be better termed 'technology fiction'. Consider a definition by Brian Aldiss: "Science fiction is the search for a definition of man and his status in the universe which will stand in our advanced but confused state of knowledge (science), and is characteristically cast in the Gothic or post-Gothic mould.)" Leaving aside the gothic stuff (all the dragons and suits of armor retrofitted as aliens and space suits), mightn't it be even better to say that what is confusing to us about the state of our knowledge is the fact that it produces technology? That what separates Robert Heinlein from Dante is not so much a focus on man in a state of confused knowledge as a sense that man has to come to grips with technology? (The narrator of The Divine Comedy is plenty confused from pushing the limits of 'science', i.e. what natural philosophy can tell him about the universe. He rides a rocket of love to all the planets. But technology is not the issue.)

Pattern Recognition is likewise not future technology focused. It is set a few years in the future, so the phones are a little fancier. But the interest of the novel orbits around two points: the peculiar coolhunting talents of the protagonist, Case Pollard, and - eventually - the peculiar artistic talents of the maker of the mysterious film footage. Pollard and the maker are both consummate Glass Bead Players, if you will.

Much of the charm of both works - Hesse's and Gibson's - is that, frankly, the Glass Bead Games these characters are playing are too rarefied and culturally accomplished and perfect to be culturally conceivable. Case Pollard's hypersensitive oracular attunement to logos is beyond anything a real human could attain. Adapting the distinction between hard and soft SF, we might distinguish hard and soft CF, cultural fiction. Soft cultural fiction is fiction which envisions cultural forms - spiritual forms, since the German might be more appropriate: Geisteswissenschaften - that not only don't but, realistically, can't exist. They are the cultural equivalent of zap guns. But it is significant as well that the cases in these novels are right on the line. Hesse got lots of indignant/enthusiastic fan mail from people who thought they had already invented the Glass Bead Game. Likewise, if I read in the NY Times tomorrow about someone who gets physically ill every time she sees a Tommy Hilfiger logo, I would be deeply skeptical but I guess I'm not prepared to say that I know it couldn't happen that someone could be so aesthetically sensitive that it constituted a sort of allergy. It's not 'Attack of the 50-foot woman'-grade implausible. But I don't believe in it either.

Now once you make the SF/CF distinction, it is obvious my suggestion that the scope of SF should be narrowed to 'technology fiction' is not really sound. Take my Heinlein/Dante example. Is Stranger in a Strange Land about technology, whereas Dante is not? No. Stranger is a fantasy of (quite inconceivable) spiritual break-through. The Martian element is little more than a pleasantly beguiling MacGuffin to kickstart Valentine Smith's higher state of consciousness. [Of course this raises the question of whether Dante's God is a MacGuffin as well.] 'Grok' is not a scientific notion but an invocation of a superior capacity for intuitive ... pattern recognition. The Game players of Castilia grok. Case Pollard groks. How much science fiction has been soft CF fantasies of culture grok, from Olaf Stapledon's Last and First Men to Brunner's Grokwave Rider - excuse me, Shockwave Rider. At the end of The Divine Comedy, Dante and his dead girlfriend grok God. Reread the Gene Wolfe passage with which I began. It is obvious that  'wanting to encompass the entire universe' plus 'being interested in technology' is a contingent linkage.

Obviously CF is also too narrow. What we really want is something like spiritual fiction. Spi-fi. (Brits can pronounce it spiffy.)

Comments

[bob mcmanus]

Well, yeah the grandfathers are Verne, Burroughs, and Wells. Wells is your CF guy, Verne or Burroughs didn't often "change the world." There are some little intellectual puzzle pieces of the kind Arthur Clarke was good at, but for the most part good SF transfigures ....everything...usually to provide a new perpective for the reader on his reality.

SF not being about character or story is about place. There is very little small scale or localized SF, like Murdoch or Faulkner or Didion. I have heard it said that good Sf is not spiritual, the word I heard was eschatological. That is the level of ambition.

[Vance Maverick]

"Holograph" means handwritten here, not hologram, I think.

[Vance Maverick]

And it occurs to me that you knew that.

Signed, Humorless in Italy

[jholbo]

I wasn't actually sure what it meant, Vance. (I guessed that it was not hologram, but I was a bit puzzled.) Thank you for telling me.

[William S]

Yikes.

[Rich Puchalsky]

I think that Gibson book is really more spiritual fiction than CF, unless all CF is spiritual. Gibson's books are organized around archetypal characters. The coolhunting character in Pattern Recognition is just another version of Gibson's Finder of Art: someone with a mystical ability to track down artistic works -- representing the source of all value in a world where everything else is a
commodity. The Pattern Recognition character finds movies; previous books have had Finders who found watches, sculpture, etc. I'd say that this is a cognate for an ordinary mystic's supposed ability to find God. Also, I think that Stapledon's Last and First Men is better described as a mystic work rather than a cultural one.

Science fiction that's really spiritual fiction seems fairly widespread. It should probably include every major Philip K. Dick book to start with.

As a sort of footnote, there is a list of mentions of some of the smaller real-world religions in SF books at:

http://www.adherents.com/lit/index.html

[jholbo]

Just: yikes?

Is that good, or are you just embarrassed for me that I didn't know holograph? (Hey, I'm already moving beyond that and putting the shattered bits of my linguistic life together.)

[Patrick Nielsen Hayden]

Sure. One of the most venerable stunts in the SF bag of tricks is the deployment of stuff that feels "rational" in the service of a big Touching The Face Of God payoff. It's venerable because we never get tired of it.

[jholbo]

If I may suggest a direction for this thread - but feel free to follow it where you will: what do people think of "Glass Bead Game" in relation to the SF tradition?

[jholbo]

Oh, and greetings Patrick. Always glad to hear from you. You are right, of course, that my point is sort of elementary. I really wanted to invite discussion of Hesse, who isn't exactly in the SF canon - although I know I'm not the first to identify his novel as SF.

[Jonathan]

I'm teaching the Hesse later this semester. I hope to have more to say about this post when I don't have to go teach, but I'll certainly also have my students take a look. There will be a class blog as soon as I set it up this week.

[jholbo]

You're teaching Hesse as SF? Please inform me of any interesting secondary literature you find.

[Jonathan]

I'm teaching Glass Bead Game--not sure about the "SF" there.

[Rich Puchalsky]

John Holbo: "what do people think of 'Glass Bead Game' in relation to the SF tradition?"

I think that it belongs with the utopias, dystopias, social satires, and books of ideas, and should no more be considered to be SF than Gulliver's Travels should be considered to be "travel fiction". Or perhaps I'd say that if the Borges short stories having to do with language are SF, then the Glass Bead Game is SF.

The Glass Bead Game itself could well feature in a Borges short story. It's basically a totalitarian concept: that all culture and all science can be encompassed within a universal symbolic language, the rules of which can no longer be changed or added to. Playing the Game is a combinatorial process of linking existing ideas -- one might imagine a musical analogy as being a sort of hip-hop composed entirely of cleverly arranged samples. Hesse makes it clear in the introduction to the book that his imagined society no longer really produces much art or much science, and has no real use for the individual outside of their hierarchical role. So wondering why they have little technology is rather beside the point. I mean, one could go to a standard SF amateur sociology extrapolation and say "A society with little active science might well lose its advanced technology", but that isn't what Hesse seems to be interested in.

Disclaimer: last read the book long, long ago.

[Evan Williams]

For me, CF and spiritual fiction fall into the general category of magical realism. Phillip K. Dick is interesting, here. He travels all the way from SF to CF to Spi-Fi, often in the same paragraph. He certainly has written traditional SF stories, but even those are not about space ships, except as vehicles to get to something more profound.

And this, for me, is the essence of magical realism. I guess I feel that, say, the Galactic Pot Healer has more in common with 100 years of solitude than Rendezvous with Rama.

The line between magical realism, SF, and Fantasy depends largely on the intent of the author. Elves, Ray Guns, or wierd, magic plagues are capable of being the focus of a story, or a device to get to something deeper or truer (or, for that matter, falser). What section Barnes and Noble shelves the book in is largely irrelevant (for my purposes).

[bob mcmanus]

Maybe I am not getting it.

"Stranger" and "Shockwave" are just variations on "Odd John" or "Slan"

Clarke's "City & the Stars", "Logan's Run". Robert Silverberg's "Time of Changes" about a society without the 1st person pronoun. These are utopias/dystopias that are ultimately sterile and spiritually destructive, and about individual breakthroughs coming about through renunciation of the technology and "return to nature"

I always considered the Glass Bead Game to be a technology (specifically Whitehead/Russell with barbaric Goedel the protagonist...been 30 years for me too). A universal symbology encompassing all science,art, other human intellectual endeavors. Strikes me as a technology philosophers could love. Are not religion, language, philosophy "technologies" as much as any other measuring instruments?

Hesse may have has parallels to the sterility of the scholastics, probably to the Hindu thinkers of Buddha's time, and certainly to the direction high literature(Joyce & especially Mann) and philosophy were taking at the time he wrote the book.

[Keith]

Having not read the Glass Bead Game (though I do have it sitting on my shelf, in the line up of things to get to one day) I can't really comment on it in any meaningful way.

However, I've always had a vague inkling that Sidhartha could be viewed as an SF inner-quest, if you view the spirituality in a purely metaphorical sense. Buddha becomes a Phildikean displacement of Sidhartha, analogous to how VALIS is a displacement of Horselover Fat (which in turn is a displacement of Philip Dick). This has the odd result of putting both Hesse and Dick as two points on the same continuum; both men looking for God, but going about it in the most different ways possible.

[ben wolfson]

Not having read any of the books mentioned in this post, but having a sort of general geek-derived sense of the meaning of "grok", I ask: it's not too far removed from intuitive knowledge, right? Ie, "all is leaf!" is an instance of grokking?

[back40]

Iain Banks' Player of Games is a useful SF companion for GBG. Cue Hipbone.

[bob mcmanus]

Okat. Moved the Gibson & Hesse over to my hardrive. This reminds of the thread a while back, i searched in vain, about the difficulty in imagining moral absurdities(IIRC). So is the question about imagining impossible(or very very alien) cultures or cultural artifacts?

Are we talking about stuff like Silverberg's egoless society and Kate Wilhelm's community of clones? Or musical instruments made of klein bottles played by the artist's emotions?

SF has been very conservative, Burkean, in viewing the unchangableness of human nature in the face of changing technology. Part of the point. But maybe it is just difficult to imagine different "human natures". And always considered a great challenge to come up with a plausible alien intelligence.

[William S]

So sorry. Actually meant 'yikes' more for myself and the potential of the post. I wanted to comment but have not yet sorted out all thoughts...

[Vance Maverick]

Ben, there's a reasonable entry on "grok" in Wikipedia.

[Gary Farber]

"They are the cultural equivalent of zap guns."

This may not be at all as clear as you intend. Off-hand, a "zap gun" is more or less one of two things: either it's a fancier taser -- hardly an impossibility -- or it's a fancier laser -- equally real. But perhaps it's just me who isn't at all clear what you have in mind in using "zap gun" as a synecdoche for impossible technology.

(Ever hear the story of how Pyramid published Phil Dick's The Zap Gun and Jack Vance's Space Opera? Don Benson, the primary sf editor there in the late Sixties thought it would be funny to commission books with those titles....

As Scott Meredith, one-time active sf fan, then Dick's agent, wrote him: "Dear Phil:
I'm happy to report that we have a novel assignment for you from Pyramid Books. We had a meeting with Don Benson, the editor over there, and he has an idea for a science fiction novel entitled THE ZAP GUN.
Of course, you'll recognize the zap gun as the old Buck Rogers standby. Don wants to do a book that would be somewhat tongue-in-cheek, but about the serious possibility of a real "blaster". The blaster seems much more a possibility today because of the experiments with the laser beam.
Don has agreed to contract on the basis of a detailed outline from you and will pay an advance of $1500: $500 on signature of contract, $500 on completion, and $500 on publication.
I hope this idea interests you, and I'll look forward to an outline from you shortly.
In the meantime, all the best. Scott."

Don later wrote to Dick Geis's Psychotic (later titled the anodyne Science Fiction Review, but still one of the most prominent fanzines of the day): "Thanks for the very interesting review of THE ZAP GUN in PSYCHOTIC. I'm glad you liked it, to the extent that you did anyway. The origin of the book was interesting: my publishers have a strong preference for "real science fiction" titles for S-F books -- hence the retitling of Raymond Jones' RENAISSANCE, which we put out as MAN OF TWO WORLDS; many other books, especially originals, had this happen. Naturally, I got bugged, losing arguments on this point all the time, and decided to start with "real science fiction titles" nobody could fault. {I m}ade up two, SPACE OPERA and THE ZAP GUN, and I found writers for them, Jack Vance and Phil Dick. Curiously enough, I had at the last minute, trouble with these titles, one representative of Management saying: "SPACE OPERA -- that doesn't sound like science fiction..."

However, having more or less grown up in the field, I rather tired of discussions about the borders and definitions of genres sometime in my late teens. Campbell started calling for "social science fiction" shortly after he took over Astounding circa 1938, and believed he found it with Heinlein, stories such as Asimov's Nightfall, and others. Call it soft sf, call it cultural fiction, call it a bananna. Literary taxonomy makes me yawn, but it seems entirely ineradicable, so enjoy.

Chip Delany has said many wonderful things on the pointlessness of genre debates, though. Wish I could recall the one I have in the back of my head at the moment --- ah, yes, I quoted it on rec.arts.sf.fandom on Usenet in 2000, back when I still wrote on Usenet. And now I've posted it here, as it's rather long to post as a comment, and besides, this way I can find it again more easily, and besides, I've posted a lot in the last couple of days, and no one's reading it, according to Site Meter. So go read Chip on "descriptions," rather than "definitions" of genre....

[jholbo]

That's fascinating, Gary. I love this stuff. I meant 'zap gun' to evoke, specifically, the equivocal status of the tech products in Dick's novel. Are they real or aren't they? A zap gun is an obviously fake gun - just a pleasant toy. Then again, it might shoot. (Then again it's been a while since I read Dick's novel. Maybe I'm just getting confused.)

[Gary Farber]

I'm afraid the last time I read Dick's book was about thirty years ago, so my memory of the actual details is quite vague at this point.

But -- and forgive me for being slow here; I simply want to be sure I'm understanding you correctly -- are you saying that your usage of "zap gun" is more or less derived from the Dick novel?

Because "zap gun" as a term was around fandom and the sf field since, specifically, the 1948 Worldcon in Toronto, Torcon I, and the infamous ""ZAP! ZAP! ATOMIC RAY IS PASSE WITH FIENDS" newspaper headline, and Martin Alger's subsequent remark the next day. As Dick Eney's Fancyclopedia II put it circa 1959, well, see the entry at the bottom of the page for here, and Richard Graeme's more thorough here under the newspaper headline.

The "ZAP, ZAP, RAY GUN FIENDS PASSE" headline was still legendary when I first became active in fandom circa 1971, and was still being used as an interlineation in fanzines later in the Seventies. (Of course, in the modern era, you can pull the reference to "Buck Rogers" out and replace it with "Star Trek" or some far worse sci-fi media dreck, like the original "Battlestar Galactica," or even yet worse.)

It's not that I expect modern sf readers to be steeped, or have ever heard of, what is now obscure fanhistory, of course. I'm just noting that the title of Dick's book was precisely because of the existing lineage of the term in the field as meaning something along the lines of "dopey prop in bad movie serial, and not something found in real science fiction." (And to a lesser, and more obscure, degree, the joking term for the water-guns that were briefly in vogue at sf conventions in the early Fifties.)

Since that's the kind of background sense of usage I come to the table with, that's why I'm stumbling a bit trying to make sure I'm understanding what your usage is. (Please be clear I'm not in any way saying my understanding is in any way more "valid" than yours is, or anything like that.)