Rat Star

Written in March of 2004

So this guy designs a miniature communications stratellite. A stratellite is a satellite that hangs in the stratosphere instead of beyond the atmosphere. Imagine a thing the size of a pack of smokes, hung under a cuboid balloon the size of a paperback. And the balloon's made of solar-electric panel fabric.

He's got a hundred friends around the world on a private website with whom he shares the specs. All of them are building these things in their back rooms. The things are designed to make use of stuff you can obtain on the "prosumer", professional-use consumer goods level. Between them, they're going to release twenty thousand of them into the air on a set date.

The stratellites hack wireless phone signals. Maybe they project a 100-mile wi-fi footprint down on earth, and convert all wireless phone signals into Voice Over Internet Presence. They're carrying real-time translator chips for every major language-something IBM, among others, are working on right now. Photonic chips, maybe-computing with light, very fast, currently in active development. The stratellites go up and they hack into and randomise every phone system on earth. Every activated mobile phone on the planet suddenly rings. And you answer yours, and someone on the other side of the planet is on the line, having answered theirs. And they're speaking to you in English, in a reasonable facsimile of their own voice, regardless of whether what's coming out of their mouth is Mandarin or Inuit. And the phones will keep on ringing until you actually start talking to the person you've been randomly connected to. Because you can't sweep twenty thousand stratellites out of the air quickly, and they're going to just keep on going. And, all of a sudden, the world gets even smaller.

Half an idea, from a graphic novel I'm writing. There's a future there. Two or three steps away from where we are right this second, reach exceeding actual grasp a little, not exactly the steely extrapolation so prized by some observers of sf and futurism. But it's a future.

For as long as I can remember, the primary goal of my work has been to force outbreaks of the future.

When I was a kid, my favourite part of going to the cinema was the preview section. Trailers from films not yet released, perhaps not yet finished. A collection of 120-second leaks from the future.

In Alan Bleasdale's immense novel-for-television GBH, the suicide girl who so impacts Michael Murray's life leaves behind a note which reads, in part, "I want to know what happens NEXT."

Not long before his death, that terrible old fake Tim Leary publicly anointed Terence McKenna as his successor in bringing word of the Future to the people. (Of course, he also said, "All energy comes from our beloved synergetic partners, the vegetable queendom. Yeah, a round of applause, ha ha heh, to the vegetabllllles!" So fuck him.) Terence McKenna, a genuinely brave and open mind who entertained any crazy idea for the single dewdrop of the future that might have been breathed upon it, spent the time before his death simply considering what would happen next. In the DMT hallucinogenic experience, he-and some 60% of everyone who takes it-was transported to a kaleidoscope landscape populated by jewelled spheres containing within themselves the language at the end of time, the sum total of every language that ever was and ever will be. One of McKenna's theories-and he tried many on the experience-was that DMT propelled living consciousness into the afterlife. This low-lit drugspace was the afterlife, the Sumerland, the Bardo, Heaven. He once said that he couldn't understand why this wasn't front page news: that living beings had made real-time contact with the afterlife. That the ayahuasceros and other DMT-using shamen were necronauts, working in the realm of the dead. His conclusion was that society works very hard to prevent outbreaks of the future. Which sound a little paranoid, but then, he did smoke epic volumes of weed.

"Culture is not your friend," said McKenna. But he meant society, or at best the monoculture or "the" culture. It sends people to kill strangers in places they can't find on maps for reasons that defeat understanding. Wars freeze time, in McKenna's view. The reality is more complex. Violence hothouses technology. You don't get radar without the Second World War. In McKenna's own theory, it was psychedelic mushrooms that activated human potential-early humans found them growing in the droppings of prey animals, and upon eating them discovered that they improved visual acuity, making them better hunters. Mushroom-eating humans outhunted and therefore outlived straight humans. Put bluntly, mushroom-eating Og had a better chance of braining straight-edge Ug with a leg bone from thirty feet. Mushrooms, in McKenna's conception, were a neurotechnology that improved the human brain's uptake of information. 

The future is information. The future is about information. It's also about making the word "culture" mean what you want it to.

We seem to be currently in the grip of what me and novelist Alex Besher call "future fatigue". It's what Bruce Sterling is talking about when he playfully advocates switching the word "futuristic" with the word "futurismic." The future as we have imagined it seems tired, boring, ordinary. The Space Shuttle is a classic car now, as aesthetically historic as a finned Fifties car. It comes from a time before Bara and Tristan Risk were born. It's what Matt Jones is getting to grips with as he designs user interfaces for Nokia phones. It's what William Gibson nods to when he notes that his hugely influential Neuromancer, which conjures a cyberspace the world still hasn't lived up to, missed out on one hugely disruptive, worldchanging technology-mobile phones. He mentions this in illustrating science fiction's great power-not in hard prediction of a probable future, but in informed and energetic speculation of a possible future. One is tech journalism, the other is social fiction. Sf only gets a bad futurist rap from people who confuse one with the other. That my Nokia 3650 outperforms Captain Kirk's communicator ten-to-one isn't the point.

I've been talking with a lot of people, lately, about What Happens Next. We're living in a science-fictional world now. Someone reminded me that J. G. Ballard once said "the future will be boring," and damn if old miseryguts wasn't right all along. The future is sold to us as a commercial experience-and that was how it was going to be, all along. It almost doesn't seem enough that I come from the last generation of sf writers to produce material on typewriters.

We've used up our available consensus futures. We've outlived them. They didn't work. 2001 is as much a historical object as is Apollo. We thought we were going to space, but we're really not. On current projections, we're some sixteen years away from putting human crews anywhere that we have not already been. VR turned out to be a bust, which put away fully ten years of cyperpunky novels featuring 3-D immersive user interfaces. (Perhaps interestingly, most of the new sf novels I see are space-opera high fantasies that seek to retain their own credibility by enforcing hard relativistic physics. Which is a bit like anchoring some trip with elves by detailing how their teeth would drop out from lack of brushing with fluorides.)

The body modification crowd interest me, in this context, because they're attempting to make a new physical future out of what they've got. Their only available canvas on which to paint the future is their own bodies and whatever tools are laying around right now. Trace it back, if you like, to Gibson's one big flash of clarity in the Eighties (and most people don't even get one-Gibson's had three or four): "the street finds its own use for things."

The internet has come to work for people in much the same way. I saw Stewart Brand lecture, a few years ago. Standing there like he'd just wandered in from a foresty log cabin, Swiss Army knife and compass mounted on his belt, he talked about how we'd become a workaround society. We have become entrained to step outside the stated rules of a device's operation in order to get it to do what we want. Put another way: we're all hackers now. That's exactly what bodymod people are doing-hacking the properties of the device they're born into.

We stand here now in a time so advanced that innovation is boring.

Is unnoticed. McKenna never predicted a time, on his Timewave Zero graph, where novelty lost all value and no-one gave a shit anymore. 

We're in the post-future. Brand co-created The Long Now Foundation, to make people aware of the true scale of time and human impact- but there's no mention in his book on the subject of the Long Now being spent in the living room being pounded into a coma by reality television. This is the Long Now-a present without a future.

All this speaks to the central problem of sf. Sf is a social fiction; it stands in a speculative zone from which to consider aspects of the present condition. But if the future is old and tired, then it's historical fiction. It needs a future. It needs to show us where we could go, not where we've been. It needs what Samuel Delany terms a novum: a piece of the future, of novelty, of something as yet unseen.

Nova are why some people find sf difficult to read. Sf is a destabilising prose. It's slightly deranging. It has too much in common with surrealism (which is a contraction of "super-realism"). Faced with a line like "the door dilated," the brain has to do a little extra work to make it make contextual sense. It's one reason why sf has an affinity with the medium of comics, where the brain has to do an extra comprehension trick to make the transition from panel to panel make sense-"closure", in Scott McCloud's term. In picking up a piece of sf, you accept the experience of processing strangeness and applying it to the world you know.

You telling me the world couldn't use a little more strangeness?

In fact, are you telling me we couldn't use more ways to process the inherent strangeness of the advanced post-future we're living in? This place with mice growing human ears on their backs and human brain tissue being worked on to computer chips? That we somehow just dismiss as business as usual?

Hack the devices you've got. Make them say something new. It's the simplest and most potent trick in sf. Take a hard look at where you are now and then wonder what it could look like the day after tomorrow-with no reference to any other dream of the future. 1984 = 1948. "Brave New World" was the terminal iteration of the left-wing "enlightened eugenics" of the early 20th Century Huxley was writing from.

When Ken Kesey, novelist, prankster and experienced hallucinogen man, took the synthetic superpsychedelic STP, the doors of perception ripped open so wide and so loud-immense and yet anticlimatic-that it finished him. It took him a while to put into words the aftermath that left him drifting in the present. Something in him was missing after taking STP, becalmed on a Long Now. Eventually, he found the word "tiller". STP burned out his tiller. He was unsteered, and the world left him in still cold waters.

Immense and anti-climatic defines these post-millennial years, after that great burning peak of anticipation. Tillerless and timeloose, we're just kind of hanging here, waiting for something to happen. Rats in a maze with no exit, basically reduced to playing with our tails and shitting in the corners.

If there's no exit, then you make one. Break open the top of the maze and let starlight in.