{"id":4898,"date":"2013-09-06T08:25:39","date_gmt":"2013-09-06T16:25:39","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/?p=4898"},"modified":"2013-09-06T08:41:12","modified_gmt":"2013-09-06T16:41:12","slug":"gnarly-sf-reality-1-what-is-gnarl","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/2013\/09\/06\/gnarly-sf-reality-1-what-is-gnarl\/","title":{"rendered":"Gnarly SF Reality. #1: What Is Gnarl?"},"content":{"rendered":"

This post and the next one are drawn from an essay called \u201cGnarly SF\u201d\u009d which appears in my Collected Essays<\/em>. You can read the complete essay online <\/a>as part of the Collected Essays<\/em>, but I decided to extract two blog posts from it. Also note that the essay appears in my small collection Surfing the Gnarl<\/a><\/em>, 2012, brought out by the estimable PM Press of Oakland, California.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

I\u2019m going to split my excerpts into two pieces: \u201cWhat is Gnarl?\u201d\u009d in today\u2019s post, and \u201cChange the World,\u201d\u009d which will be in my next post.<\/p>\n

The illos are drawn from my backlog of photos. As is customary in my blogs, the only thing linking the images to the text is the Surrealist principle of juxtaposition.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

I use gnarl <\/em>in an idiosyncratic and somewhat technical sense; I use it to mean a level of complexity that lies in the zone between predictability and randomness.<\/p>\n

The original meaning of \u201cgnarl\u201d\u009d was simply \u201ca knot in the wood of a tree.\u201d\u009d In California surfer slang, \u201cgnarly\u201d\u009d came to describe complicated, rapidly changing surf conditions. And then, by extension, something gnarly came to be anything with surprisingly intricate detail. As a late-arriving and perhaps over-assimilated Californian, I get a kick out of the word.<\/p>\n

Do note that \u201cgnarly\u201d\u009d can also mean \u201cdisgusting.\u201d\u009d Soon after I moved to California in 1986, I was at an art festival where a caterer was roasting a huge whole pig on a spit above a gas-fired grill the size of a car. Two teen-age boys walked by and looked silently at the pig. Finally one of them observed, \u201cGnarly, dude.\u201d\u009d In the same vein, my son has been heard to say, \u201cNever ever eat anything gnarly.\u201d\u009d And having your body become old and gnarled isn\u2019t necessarily a pleasant thing. But here I only want to talk about gnarl in a good kind of way.<\/p>\n

Clouds, fire, and water are gnarly in the sense of being beautifully intricate, with purposeful-looking but not quite comprehensible patterns. And of course all living things are gnarly, in that they inevitably do things that are much more complex than one might have expected. As I mentioned, the shapes of tree branches are the standard example of gnarl. The life cycle of a jellyfish is way gnarly. The wild three-dimensional paths that a humming-bird sweeps out are kind of gnarly too, and, if the truth be told, your ears are gnarly as well.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

I\u2019m a writer first and foremost, but for much of my life I had a day-job as a professor, first in mathematics and then in computer science. Although I\u2019m back to being a freelance writer now, I spent twenty years in the dark Satanic mills of Silicon Valley. Originally I thought I was going there as a kind of literary lark\u2014\u2014like an overbold William Blake manning a loom in Manchester. But eventually I went native on the story. It changed the way I think. I drank the Kool-Aid.<\/p>\n

I derived my notion of gnarl from the work of the computer scientist Stephen Wolfram. I first met him in 1984, interviewing him for a science article I was writing. He made a big impression on me, and introduced me to the dynamic graphical computations known as cellular automata, or CAs for short. The so-called Game of Life is the best-known CA. You start with a few lit-up pixels on a computer screen. Each pixel \u201clooks\u201d\u009d at the eight nearest pixels, counts how many are \u201con\u201d\u009d and adjusts its state according to this total, using a fixed rule. All of the pixels do this at once, so the screen behaves like a parallel computation. The patterns of dots grow, reproduce, and\/or die, sometimes generating persistent moving patterns known as gliders. I became fascinated by CAs, and it\u2019s thanks in part to Wolfram that I switched from teaching math to teaching computer science.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

Wolfram summarized his ideas in his illuminating 2002 tome, A New Kind of Science<\/a><\/em>. To me, having known Wolfram for many years by then, the ideas in the book seemed obviously true. I went on to write my own tome, The Lifebox, the Seashell, and the Soul<\/a><\/em>, partly to popularize Wolfram\u2019s ideas, and partly to expatiate upon my own notions of the meaning of computation. A work of early geek philosophy. Most scientists found the new ideas to be\u2014as Wolfram sarcastically put it\u2014either trivial or wrong. When a set of ideas provokes such resistance, it\u2019s a sign of an impending paradigm shift.<\/p>\n

So what does Wolfram say?<\/p>\n

He starts by arguing that we can think of any natural process as a computation, that is, you can see anything as a deterministic procedure that works out the consequences of some initial conditions. Instead of viewing the world as made of atoms or of curved space or of natural laws, we can try viewing it as made of computations. Keep in mind that a \u201ccomputer\u201d\u009d doesn\u2019t have to be made of wires and silicon chips in a box. It can be any real-world phenomenon you like. Does this make the world dull? Far from it.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

Having studied a very large number of visually interesting computations called cellular automata, Wolfram concluded that there are basically three kinds of computations and three corresponding kinds of natural processes.<\/p>\n

Predictable<\/em>. Processes that are ultimately without surprise. This may be because they eventually die out and become constant, or because they\u2019re repetitive. Think of a checkerboard, or a clock, or a fire that burns down to dead ashes.<\/p>\n

Gnarly<\/em>. Processes that are structured in interesting ways but are nonetheless unpredictable. Here we think of a vine, or a waterfall, or the startling yet computable digits of pi, or the flow of your thoughts.<\/p>\n

Random<\/em>. Processes that are completely messy and unstructured. Think of the molecules eternally bouncing off each other in air, or the cosmic rays from outer space.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

The gnarly middle zone is where it\u2019s at. Essentially all of the interesting patterns in physics and biology are gnarly. Gnarly processes hold out the lure of being partially understandable, but they resist falling into dull predictability.<\/p>\n

Anything involving fluids can be a rich source of gnarl\u2014even a cup of tea. The most orderly state of a liquid is, of course, for it to be standing still. If one lets water run rather slowly down a channel, the water moves smoothly, with a predictable pattern of ripples.<\/p>\n

As more water is put into a channel, the ripples begin to crisscross and waver. Eddies and whirlpools appear\u2014and with turbulent flow we have the birth of gnarl.<\/p>\n

Once a massive amount of water is poured down the channel, we get a less interesting random-seeming state in which the water is seething.<\/p>\n

Now, the pay-off for this whole ine of thought is that it becomes possible, via some computer-science legerdemain, to argue that all <\/em>of the interesting processes of nature are inherently unpredictable<\/em>.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

What, by the way, do I mean by \u201cpredicting a process\u201d\u009d? This means to have some procedure for determining the processes result very much faster than the time it takes to simply let the process run. Saying that a gnarly process is unpredictable, means there are no quick short-cut methods for finding out what the process will do. The only way to really find out what the weather is going to be like tomorrow is to wait twenty-four hours and see. The only way for me to find out what I\u2019m going to put into the final paragraph of a book is to finish writing the book.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s worth repeating this point. We will never find any magical tiny theory that allows us to make quick pencil-and-paper calculations about the future. Sometimes scientists\u2014or science-fiction writers\u2014have speculated that there\u2019s some compact master-formula capable of predicting the future with a few strokes of a pencil. And many still have an internal faith in some slightly more sophisticated restatement of this.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

But we have no hope of control. On the plus side, the gnarly is a bit better behaved than the fully random. We can\u2019t predict the waves, but we can hope to ride them.<\/p>\n

As a reader, I\u2019ve always sought the gnarl, that is, I like to find odd, interesting, unpredictable kinds of books, possibly with outr\u00c3\u00a9 or transgressive themes. My favorites would include Jack Kerouac and William Burroughs, Robert Sheckley and Phil Dick, Jorge-Luis Borges and Thomas Pynchon.<\/p>\n

Once again, a gnarly process is complex and unpredictable without being random. If a story hews to some very familiar pattern, it feels stale. But if absolutely anything can happen, a story becomes as unengaging as someone else\u2019s dream. The gnarly zone lies at the interface between logic and fantasy.<\/p>\n

William Burroughs was an ascended master of the gnarl. He believed in having his work take on an autonomous life to the point of becoming a world that the author inhabits. \u201cThe writer has been there or he can\u2019t write about it\u2026 [Writers] are trying to create a universe in which they have lived or where they would like to live. To write it, they must go there and submit to conditions that they might not have bargained for.\u201d\u009d (From \u201cRemembering Jack Kerouac\u201d\u009d in The Adding Machine: Selected Essays<\/em>, Seaver Books 1986.)\u2026<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

In order to present some ideas about how gnarl applies to literature in general, and to science-fiction in particular, I\u2019m going to make up four tables to summarize ho gnarliness makes its way into science-fiction in four areas: subject matter, plot, scientific speculation, and social commentary.<\/p>\n

In drawing up my tables, I found it useful to distinguish between low gnarl <\/em>and high gnarl<\/em>. Low gnarl is close to being periodic and predictable, while high gnarl is closer to being fully random.<\/p>\n

Keep in mind that I\u2019m not saying any particular row of the table is absolutely better than the others. My purpose here is taxonomic rather than prescriptive. Rather than using the words \u201cpredictable\u201d\u009d and \u201crandom\u201d\u009d to refer to the lowest and highest levels of complexity, one might use the less judgmental words \u201cclassic\u201d\u009d and \u201csurreal.\u201d\u009d<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

Just so you have a general idea of what I\u2019m talking about, here\u2019s how I see some of my favorite authors as located on the complexity spectrum:<\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n
Complexity Level<\/em><\/td>\n\u00a0Sample Authors<\/em><\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
\u00a0Classic<\/td>\n Golden Age F&SF.\u00a0 J.R.R. Tolkein, Isaac Asimov, Kage Baker.<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
\u00a0Lower Gnarl<\/td>\n\u00a0Robert Heinlein, William Gibson, Bruce Sterling, Cory Doctorow, Karen Joy Fowler.<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
\u00a0Higher Gnarl<\/td>\n\u00a0Charles Stross, Robert Sheckley, Phillip K. Dick, Eileen Gunn, me.<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
Surreal<\/td>\n\u00a0Douglas Adams, John Shirley, Terry Bisson, Anna Tambour.<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<\/tbody>\n<\/table>\n

Let me stress again that I admire the work of all the authors in this table. The point here is simply to point out that one can use various modes and approaches to writing SF. Note that some authors may write novels in various modes\u2014Terry Bisson\u2019s Pirates of the Universe <\/em>for instance, is high gnarl and transreal, rather than random and surreal.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

This post and the next one are drawn from an essay called \u201cGnarly SF\u201d\u009d which appears in my Collected Essays. You can read the complete essay online as part of the Collected Essays, but I decided to extract two blog posts from it. Also note that the essay appears in my small collection Surfing the […]<\/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-4898","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\/4898","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=4898"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4898\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4904,"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4898\/revisions\/4904"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4898"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4898"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4898"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}