When I read in SF last week someone mentioned a “Mundane SF” movement. They had a website, but it’s down, although you can see their not-entirely-serious manifesto in the Google cache. I think they were motivated by a desire to write SF that’s in some way more immediately about our world — their bete noir could perhaps be Star Trek or by extension any kind of FTL alien-laden Space Opera. I can relate to this, although, as I’ve said before, what bugs me more than FTL or aliens is stories where the main characters are military personnel / hereditary nobles. Whatever. It’s always good for a writer to have some kind of group to belong to. It’s too lonely otherwise.

Thinking about Mundane SF set me to reminiscing about the “Freestyle SF” barely-a-movement that I talked about with Marc Laidlaw and Richard Kadrey back in 1987, right after I moved to California. Michael Blumlein and Pat Murphy were co-conspirators in 1987, and by now I’d certainly include John Shirley, Terry Bisson, Paul Di Filippo and Bruce Sterling as Freestylists as well (what these last authors have in common is that I have co-authored stories with them, ergo they must be Freestylists!)

I got a surfboard in December, 1986 — which I never really learned to use — and Marc and I were brimming over with surfin’ analogies to writing. We were heavily studying surf magazines.

Here’s one quote we dug: “Life on the edge measures seekers, performers, and adventurists.” Marc started writing me letters in the surf-magazine style. “There it is, Rude Dude. The Freestyle antifesto. No need to break down the metaphors — an adventurist knows what the Ocean really is. No need to feature matte-black mirrorshades or other emblems of our freestyle culture — hey, dude, we know who we are. No need to either glorify or castrate technology. Nature is the Ultimate. We’re skimming the cell-sea, cresting the waves that leap out over the black abyss …” Marc was reacting against cyberpunk a bit there. The eternal dialectic.

Marc started publishing a neat zine called Freestyle, but it only went through three issues, and then, I dunno, he moved and it fell apart.

(This last picture I found in the same part of the photo albums I was scanning today, it’s Dennis Poague, a.k.a Sta Hi Mooney, hero of the Wares.) I kind of feel like refurbishing the Freestyle concept. As its meaning was always pretty vague, maybe I can just make up a meaning as I see fit. How about this for a start: the primary mission of SF need not be futurology. Certainly it’s interesting and valuable to write “thought experiment” style stories to tease out the possible aspects of imagined worlds. But even here, the writer isn’t constrained to make the SF assumptions be at all technologically likely as seen from the possibly blinkered viewpoint of the early 21st Century. You can do a thought experiment starting with any assumptions you like. Back to the main thread, I think a lot of SF is the sensual pleasure that lies in what I call Power Chords, about playing good patterns — and about Transrealism, that is, using the SF tropes as ways to delve deeper into the psychic nature of the day-to-day world. My main desideratum is, as ever, that it be Gnarly.