{"id":5153,"date":"2014-03-01T21:02:44","date_gmt":"2014-03-02T05:02:44","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/?p=5153"},"modified":"2014-03-02T11:42:35","modified_gmt":"2014-03-02T19:42:35","slug":"david-eggers-the-circle-gengen-sf-laser-shades-painting","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/2014\/03\/01\/david-eggers-the-circle-gengen-sf-laser-shades-painting\/","title":{"rendered":"Dave Eggers, THE CIRCLE. “Gengen SF.”"},"content":{"rendered":"

I just read the new Dave Eggers book, The Circle<\/em> . It started out a little slow, but then it became a page-turner. I plowed through it in two days, thinking a lot about the characters and the ideas, and when it was done, I missed having it to read.<\/p>\n

I liked the book a lot. It got to me.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

The \u201cCircle\u201d\u009d is a company something like Google + Twitter + Facebook. They\u2019re working to take over the world, ultimately controlling all <\/em>information and all elections, and making it impossible (and illegal) for anyone to be offline. The main character is Mae Holland. She starts out as something of a free spirit, but she\u2019s also ambitious, a striver, and very much a people pleaser. And by the end, she\u2019s a self-deluding and heartless zealot. You empathize with her, pity her, and end by despising her\u2014which is just what you\u2019re supposed to do. The book is something of a moral fable.<\/p>\n

Being a science fiction writer, I\u2019m interested in the fact that The Circle <\/em>is a science fiction novel by a mainstream writer, and it\u2019s being marketed as a general audience book. Not that these general audience books use the \u201cSF\u201d\u009d genre label. They\u2019re \u201cvisionary,\u201d\u009d \u201cspeculative,\u201d\u009d \u201cdystopic,\u201d\u009d \u201cnovels of the near future,\u201d\u009d and so on. <\/p>\n

\"\"
\n[Happy moment for a writer. Sitting on a hillside with a manuscript to correct.]<\/em><\/p>\n

I\u2019d been wondering what exactly to call these books. I don’t necessarily want a bitter, negative word for them…I don\u2019t want to be like a crusty old-time Mission hipster throwing rocks at a Google bus. So I posed the what-do-you-call-these-books question on Facebook, and a person with the screen name \u201cPost Script\u201d\u009d coined what I think a the perfect word. Gengen<\/b>.<\/p>\n

Gengen is a cozy word, pleasant to say, and this is important for a new coinage. I see the gengen move as working in two directions. The name can be read either as \u201cgeneral audience genre\u201d\u009d book, or \u201cgenre book that\u2019s broken out to a general audience.\u201d\u009d It isn’t inherently disparaging to either side. You can be an SF writer moving onto the general shelves, as William Gibson has done and as Kurt Vonnegut did before him.. Or you can be a denizen of the general shelves, safe in your position, wanting to get wild and write a genre book\u2014like Margaret Atwood, Gary Shteyngart, Jonathan Lethem, Chang-Rae Lee, and nnow Dave Eggers.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

(By the way, re. \u201cgengen,\u201d\u009d someone might protest that there are other <\/em>genres besides SF. That\u2019s fine, and if someone wants to have a gengen discussion about the detective or romance or western genres, sure, why not. Gengen is a type of move, a sidling between the genre ghetto and the shopping street. But it\u2019s gengen SF that I\u2019m talking about in this post, and often as not I\u2019ll just call them gengen for short.)<\/p>\n

There\u2019s more and more gengen books these days\u2014the SF mode has acquired a trendiness, a cachet. And really that\u2019s good. I like reading SF books, and if they\u2019re gengen by a talented writer, so much the better.<\/p>\n

\"\"
\n[View from the poetry room in City Lights Books.]<\/em><\/p>\n

Of course, some pro SF writers might jeer, \u201cThe Brahmins are wading in the funky Ganges where we hardcore SF sadhus have wallowed for, lo, these many years.\u201d\u009d Or, \u201cAre we lowly science-fiction pros expected to be grateful when a mainstream writer stoops to filch a bespattered icon from our filthy wattle huts?\u201d\u009d Not, harrumph<\/em>, that I <\/em>would ever say those kinds of things. Yes, I do <\/em>write literary SF, and I don\u2019t <\/em>get much recognition in the general market, but I don\u2019t want to be all bitter and resentful about this, at least not all the time. Today I want to talk about gengen and about Eggers\u2019s excellent The Circle<\/em>.<\/p>\n

In discussing gengen, critics often namecheck Orwell\u2019s 1984 and Huxley\u2019s Brave New World. And there\u2019s much of Brave New World <\/em>in The Circle<\/em>.
\nMae and her Circle bosses formulate three sayings that could have been lifted directly from 1984: \u201cA Secret is a Lie.\u201d\u009d \u201cSharing Is Caring.\u201d\u009d \u201cPrivacy Is Theft.\u201d\u009d<\/b><\/p>\n

The Circle<\/em> does lack certain things\u2014I\u2019m thinking of cyberpunk flash, wild SFnal speculations, and rollicking laugh-out-loud humor. But that\u2019s not what Eggers was trying to do, so there\u2019s no point bugging him about it. The Circle<\/em> totally nails the points that he wanted to hit. Like the pious holier-than-thou and insanely-naive attitude of techies who want to run everyone\u2019s lives and have everyone be so much better and cleaner than humans are meant to be. They even use that old line, \u201cWhy would you want privacy unless you have something you want to hide?\u201d\u009d And there\u2019s a cutting riff on the self-aggrandizement of a cubicle-dweller who feels brave because she \u201cliked\u201d\u009d someone\u2019s strongly political post. And Eggers really gets the brutal, brutal work schedule of computer types.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

My mind was blown by a couple of scenes where Mae goes into zombie-mode feeding-frenzy bloodlust-clicking-frenzy and spends hours or even a whole night working the social sites, building up her rankings, raising her various virtual scores, all of these scores being precise numbers you understand\u2014Eggers goes ape on this, and has a one-or-two-page paragraph where every clause contains a number that Mae is pumping for better job security and higher self esteem.<\/p>\n

And reading those scenes, I was repelled, but also, I had to think, \u201cMy god, this is me. I do this<\/em>.\u201d\u009d Obsessively spinning from Twitter to Facebook to email to my iPhone messages to the work on my new blog post to the latest tweaks of the HTML on my umpteen webpages, then back to Twitter to Facebook to… I\u2019ve spent whole days like this, lost in the clicks, returning to each site over and over, hungry for comments, for Likes, for reviews, for response…<\/p>\n

I think of a pigpen that my friends and I used to enjoy visiting at the Rutgers Agricultural School campus, back when I was in grad school at Rutgers in 1970, a tidy pen, with a feeding-trough at the near end, and a hinged metal flap over the trough, and every so often a pig would come to the trough and nose up the flap, the younger ones did this more often, and usually there wouldn\u2019t be anything in the trough, and the lid would click on the way up and then clank back down. No mail. No comments. No likes. Click clank<\/em>. Or maybe there\u2019s one left-over nugget of chow. Great streamers of saliva. Possibly an exultant squeal.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

Another thing in The Circle that <\/em>got to me was that Mae starts out with a pantheistic or nature-worshipping side to her. She likes to kayak out into the San Francisco Bay, enjoying the company of the watchful seals, loving the light on the water, even exploring a deserted little island by night, wholly in the now, fully analog, not even thinking <\/em> of checking her phone.<\/p>\n

That\u2019s when I loved Mae the most, when she was doing these kinds of things that I myself place great value on, getting outside and into nature, and leaving all the computer crap behind. I\u2019m sure Eggers himself has this side to him, or he wouldn\u2019t have been able to evoke it so movingly. And then\u2014what a bummer\u2014the Circle <\/em> bureaucrats kind of crush Mae for going offline like this. And from here on in her personality is pretty much destroyed. She loses her contact with the natural world\u2014and she loses her soul. Echoing Winston Smith in 1984.<\/p>\n

So yeah, The Circle <\/em>is a great book. Viva gengen.<\/p>\n

See the Facebook comments on this post.<\/a><\/code><\/p>\n

See the Facebook comments on the \"gengen\" word <\/a>.<\/code><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I just read the new Dave Eggers book, The Circle . It started out a little slow, but then it became a page-turner. I plowed through it in two days, thinking a lot about the characters and the ideas, and when it was done, I missed having it to read. I liked the book a […]<\/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-5153","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\/5153","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=5153"}],"version-history":[{"count":8,"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5153\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5163,"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5153\/revisions\/5163"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5153"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5153"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5153"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}