{"id":4290,"date":"2012-09-20T08:06:20","date_gmt":"2012-09-20T16:06:20","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/?p=4290"},"modified":"2012-09-20T08:07:38","modified_gmt":"2012-09-20T16:07:38","slug":"what-is-beatnik-sf","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/2012\/09\/20\/what-is-beatnik-sf\/","title":{"rendered":"What Is Beatnik SF?"},"content":{"rendered":"

Today’s post relates to my new book, Turing & Burroughs: A Beatnik SF Novel.<\/a><\/em> I presented an expanded version of this material as a talk <\/a>at the Gloucester Writers Center, on August 28, 2012. My “What Is Beatnik SF” rap breaks into four parts:
\n1: Transreal SF.
\n2: William Burroughs as an SF Writer.
\n3: Transreal SF and Beat Writing.
\n4: Turing & Burroughs: A Beatnik SF Novel.<\/em><\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

1: Transreal SF<\/b> <\/p>\n

From 1960 onward I wanted to emulate the closely observed and confessional writing of the Beats, particularly the work of Jack Kerouac and William Burroughs. But I also wanted to be a science-fiction writer, playing with such classic power chords as aliens, robots, higher dimensions, shape-shifting, and intelligent plants. <\/p>\n

In 1967-1968, during my senior year at Swarthmore College, the Gloucester writer Gregory Gibson <\/a>and I were roommates. We both wanted to be writers, we both admired William Burroughs, and we both liked science fiction. We were, you might say, two piglets in the same litter, nuzzling at the same sow. <\/p>\n

After college, Greg and I wrote each other frequent letters about our diverging lives\u2014typed letter on pieces of paper. The letter-writing formed my real apprenticeship as a writer. I learned to write with natural cadences and a casual vocabulary. <\/p>\n

In 1968, Greg and I tried writing a novel together, mailing sections back and forth. I saw the projected book as a science-fiction novel called The Snake People<\/em>\u2014about telepathic, wriggling beings that dart through your mind when you\u2019re high. Greg saw the book as a wry slice-of-life description of a young guy\u2019s experiences in the Navy. The main characters were fictional versions of Greg and me. Parts of the draft made me laugh a lot. But we didn\u2019t push The Snake People <\/em>to a conclusion. We thought we had more important things to do. <\/p>\n

I learned something from our experiment. I found that using myself and my friends as characters in a science-fiction novel appealed to me very much. As Greg remarked a little later on, \u201cThe cool thing to do would be to write a science-fiction novel, but write it about your actual life.\u201d\u009d <\/p>\n

And so the model of the Beats\u2014and later the example of Philip K. Dick\u2014led me to a style of writing that I came to call transrealism in my \u201cTransrealist Manifesto<\/a>.\u201d\u009d In my transreal books I use the surreal oddities of SF to illuminate the human psyche.<\/p>\n

I like for the characters of my novels to be based on actual people, or on combinations of actual people. The characters should do more than woodenly move the plot along. They should be sarcastic, miss the point, change the subject, break the set, and do surprising things. <\/p>\n

It\u2019s liberating to have quirky, unpredictable characters\u2014instead of the impossibly good and bad paper dolls of mass-culture. Lifelike characters are the \u201creal\u201d\u009d part of transreal. <\/p>\n

As for the \u201ctrans\u201d\u009d part\u2014I use the special effects and power chords of SF as a way to thicken and intensify the material. The tools of science fiction can be a way, if you will, to directly manipulate the subtext, that is, a way to add a more artistic shape to the suppressed fears and desires that you inevitably incorporate into your fiction. <\/p>\n

Time travel, levitation, alternate worlds, aliens, telepathy\u2014they\u2019re all symbols of archetypal modes of experience. Time travel is memory, levitation is enlightenment, alternate worlds are travel, aliens are other people, and telepathy is the fleeting hope of finally being fully understood. <\/p>\n

I saw transrealism as a way to describe not only immediate reality, but also the higher reality in which life is embedded. And I saw transrealism as way to smash the oppressive lie of the news-media\u2019s consensus reality. <\/p>\n

One of the simplest ways to write a transreal novel is to model the main character on yourself, and I\u2019ve done this numerous times, as in my novels Spacetime Donuts, White Light, The Sex Sphere, The Secret of Life, Saucer Wisdom, <\/em>and Mathematicians in Love.<\/em> <\/p>\n

But I often write transreal novels without using myself as a character. Not having a specific Rudy-inspired character can give the other characters more space to develop and to open up. And if they\u2019re not me, they can do more shocking things than I have. <\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

2: William Burroughs as an SF Writer<\/b> <\/p>\n

For whatever reason, most people don\u2019t think of William Burroughs\u2019s novel Naked Lunch as science-fiction, but it is. I feel that it\u2019s transreal SF\u2014that is, an autobiographical SF novel in which the author\u2019s experiences are made more vivid by transmuting them into SFictional tropes. <\/p>\n

Burroughs often wrote admiringly about SF in his letters, and he sometimes said that\u2019s what he was indeed writing. But people tend to ignore this. Perhaps it\u2019s that so few SF works aspire to such a high literary level, or that Naked Lunch <\/em>doesn\u2019t have a straight-through plot-line. But if you look at the tropes in the book, it really is <\/em>SF\u2014aliens, imaginary drugs, telepathy, talking objects\u2026 the gang\u2019s all there. <\/p>\n

It\u2019s worth mentioning in passing that Jack Kerouac occasionally talked about wanting to write SF as well\u2014although Jack was perhaps too deeply rooted in the pastoral and Romantic mode to write SF. But he liked the idea <\/em>of SF as a characteristically American literary form, just as jazz is an indigenous American music. <\/p>\n

Burroughs\u2019s Yage Letters Redux, <\/em>edited by Oliver Harris is a kind of epistolary transreal SF novel, featuring exchanges between Burroughs and Allen Ginsberg. Some great lines from Burroughs\u2019s yage letters: <\/p>\n

\u201cYage is space time travel.\u201d\u009d \u201cA place where the unknown past and the emergent future meet in a vibrating soundless hum.\u201d\u009d \u201cThe trees are tremendous, some of them 200 feet tall. Walking under these trees I felt a special silence, a vibrating soundless hum.\u201d\u009d <\/p>\n

I like the \u201cvibrating soundless hum.\u201d\u009d It\u2019s a wonderful image for how telepathy might feel. <\/p>\n

The Yage Letters Redux <\/em>includes Allen Ginsberg\u2019s incredibly heavy letter and journal notes about his own yage trip in Peru seven years after Bill\u2019s. At the start of his trip, Allen is filled with this intense fear of death, a sense that he\u2019s dying right now: \u201c\u2026as if in rehearsal of Last Minute Death my head rolling back and forth on the blanket and finally settling in last position of stillness and hopeless resignation to God knows what Fate\u2026\u201d\u009d <\/p>\n

Allen writes of beginning \u201cto sense a strange Presence in the hut \u2014 or a Being I am blind to habitually \u2014 like a science fiction Radiotelepathy Beast from another Universe \u2014 but from the series of universes in which I do temporarily exist\u2026\u201d\u009d <\/p>\n

Ginsberg reaches a core mystical revelation: God\/the universe\/everything\/everyone is a One\/Many mind accessible to all, and there is nothing arcane or unusual about this fact, it\u2019s staring us in the face all the time, and there\u2019s no secret, nothing to know, this is all there is, divinity is here and now. <\/p>\n

We\u2019re talking metaphysical <\/em>beatnik SF. <\/p>\n

As I recall, Bill\u2019s answer to Allen\u2019s somewhat frantic letter was to mail back some demented sfictional gibberish, and to advice Allen to cut the Burroughs letter into pieces, to paste the pieces onto a sheet of paper and to reread in order to hear Burroughs\u2019s true voice. <\/p>\n

Gregory Gibson and I found Burroughs\u2019s response wonderfully amusing, a fine instance of hardcore stoner humor. \u201cGetting a little steep<\/em>, dude? Enjoy the ride.\u201d\u009d <\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

3: Transreal SF and Beat Writing<\/b> <\/p>\n

Let\u2019s look at how some characteristics of beat writing are reflected or contrasted in transreal SF. I\u2019ll set up a series of paragraphs, each with a paired Beat <\/em>and Transreal SF <\/em>part.<\/p>\n

Beat<\/em>: A confessional, deeply autobiographical, revelatory style in which no acts or thoughts are kept from view. Transreal SF<\/em>: A deep autobiographical mode, with the added fillip that by distancing the narrative from conventional reality, the self-exposure is less stark. <\/p>\n

Beat<\/em>: A focus on ecstatic and mystical modes of consciousness, and a turning away from practical political discourse. A focus on personal freedom, and a turning away from any normal kind of working life. Transreal SF<\/em>: The move to some transcendent higher level is standard for SF, as is a concern with fantastic dilemmas that have little relation to the quotidien daily news. The average SF character has little concern with any conventional career. This is, after all, escape <\/em>literature. <\/p>\n

Beat<\/em>: Sex and drugs. Transreal SF<\/em>: The somewhat reactionary mass SF market places limits on the kinds of sex that can be depicted. But if one branches out into indie or underground SF, the sexual possibilities are vast and intense. Regarding intoxication, there are SF novels in which futuristic drugs play a part. But SF also offers possibilities of more outr\u00c3\u00a9 ways of getting high\u2014for instance via quantum fields, or via telepathic contact with a friend, with an alien, with a physical object, or with the currents in the air. <\/p>\n

Beat<\/em>: Odd language and new, cobbled-together words. Transreal SF<\/em>: Coining words is standard procedure for SF writers. The trick is to use a poet\u2019s touch in creating the new words. Juicy Ghosts <\/em>for telepathy, uvvy <\/em>for universal communication device, bopper <\/em>for a self-reproducing robot, merge <\/em>for a powerful body-melting psychedelic, skug <\/em>for a slug-like mutant, and so on. You want to think about the other words suggested by your made-up word, and choose it so there\u2019s a good match between the said and the unsaid. <\/p>\n

Beat<\/em>: A loose, free style. Most of the books lack any coherent book-length plot or story arc. Transreal SF<\/em>: SF is at heart a commercial genre. The readers expect a page-turning experience. Although a Beat novel might be something more like a book of poems that one dips into repeatedly over an extended period of time, an SF novel is more typically read at white heat over a period of days. <\/p>\n

<\/a><\/p>\n

4: Turing & Burroughs: A Beatnik SF Novel<\/em><\/b> <\/p>\n

My novel, Turing & Burroughs<\/a><\/em>, is a beatnik SF novel featuring a 1950s-movie-style \u201calien invasion,\u201d\u009d a love affair between William Burroughs and Alan Turing, and a roadtrip terminating in a thermonuclear blast. My goal was to merge a beat cultural attitude with a page-turning videogame-like plot. Like Kerouac I put my characters onto a road trip and included swatches of travel writing from my journals. Like Burroughs, I used slimy, freaky mutant creatures as a stand-in for the strangeness of the humans who surround us. I wanted to bring Alan Turing into this weird wonderland and to show him a good time.<\/p>\n

That’s enough tell, here’s the show: Try browsing the free sample version <\/a>of my novel that’s currently online as a webpage. Or, perhaps more to the point, look at my early version of the novel’s third chapter, written in the form of letters from Burroughs — this appeared as the story \u201cTangier Routines\u201d\u009d<\/a> in my webzine Flurb<\/em>.<\/p>\n

Let the beatnik SF word-virus tickle your brain.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Today’s post relates to my new book, Turing & Burroughs: A Beatnik SF Novel. I presented an expanded version of this material as a talk at the Gloucester Writers Center, on August 28, 2012. My “What Is Beatnik SF” rap breaks into four parts: 1: Transreal SF. 2: William Burroughs as an SF Writer. 3: […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4290","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4290","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4290"}],"version-history":[{"count":21,"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4290\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4311,"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4290\/revisions\/4311"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4290"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4290"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4290"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}