I'm learning some things that I'm trying to assimilate and correlate into a cohesive narrative one day. For example (and this will come across pretty random) Samuel R. Delany's writing I've realized in the first few pages of his latest opus concerns itself with motion. I like the way he describes light as sliding across the matte bar, and it occurred to me, that's it. Motion is inherently and possibly the most succinct description of phenomenological reality. So it behooves us creative writers to pay attention to how it's expressed in all the aspects of our daily lives.
In my quest to achieve a narrative which at least tries to approach the matter of story in a fresh way, I find myself returning to the following algorithmic formulae. Bear with me while I try to spell it out as best I can. An experiment I have as a writer is to develop a story in which the amount of time it takes to read it equals the amount of time spent in its scenes. Each chapter would be broken up as a series of events. Every event, each of varying durations, would take the reader exactly the same amount of time to read (on average) as the events being written about themselves take to play out.
I'm relatively certain this approach echoes an aesthetic long ago attempted more than once, perhaps a good example is James Joyce with his chronicle of a day's events in Ulysses. (The question remains: did the author intend for his novel to take about twenty-four hours of reading time, all told, to get through it? I don't know the answer to this question.) Of course Joyce has influenced many writers, such as Samuel R. Delany as reflected in the carefully constructed prose of his 1975 novel Dhalgren. I'm certain that another, quite analogous aesthetic was perfected in literary form by Gustave Flaubert in his evocative 1869 classic novel Sentimental Education. Here the author was concerned more with two integral ideas. First, at least it seems so to me, was the achievement of a descriptive sort of writing whose focus on painting the scenery for the reader to visualize in their mind's eyes was parallel to what the great impressionist painters accomplished with their gorgeous artwork. Second, Flaubert was obsessed with preserving the proper ratio of passing time in his narrative; that is to say, he wished to at least capture the right sense of proportion in time for the reader in sketching out the existence of a young man's life in mid-19th century revolutionary France. It took him five years of painstaking work to achieve his masterful effect, and from what I understand, it pushed him toward a nervous breakdown.
One of the differences that I've been able to discern between Chip's latest epic novel Through the Valley of the Nest of Spiders and its predecessor Dhalgren is that the older classic novel concerns itself in a way more primarily with place, that is to say the city of Bellona which occupies a space in time as the key element upon which its characters are staged, while 2012's TTVOTNOS I believe to be more concerned with the setting of time, that is the duration of the two protagonist's relationship set in Diamond Harbor. (This observation comes despite my having not read the entire book; it became evident largely from what I've read about it.) Both novels of course allow for the full dimensionality of spacetime to be described, yet the subtle difference between them seems to be a shift in focus so that time seems more dominant in the latter book (with space playing backdrop), and vice-versa for Dhalgren. It's almost as if Dhalgren micro-analyzes one briefer period of time with focus on the place setting; while TTVOTNOS performs the trick in reverse. (Full confession: merely reading the first twenty pages of Chip's very long book spurred me on toward writing this essay off the cuff. What struck me forcefully was the sense of motion he's captured in his descriptive prose, which caused me to put the book down and excitedly begin writing this.)
Expanding the parameters of human consciousness has always seemed like a good idea to me. I think I agree that Samuel Delany's 1995 novel Hogg, for instance, remains an important literary work as Norman Mailer and other authors of literary repute have stated, because it dares to extend the playing field to the farthest limits of what our society would deem acceptable. Yet back when it came out, I myself found it difficult to continue reading it after several pages, due to its graphic subject matter. I put the book down and have yet to pick it back up. That said, however, by the author having gone to such extremes and confronting every taboo, a book like Hogg holds the doorway to free speech wide open and helps protect it by setting an extreme example; not for others to follow, necessarily, but to create the insulation required for future writers to feel secure their domain of personal expression remains sustainable. Our imagination must never be under fetters. That's what the protection of free speech is all about. The book is like a literary speculum. I realize this just remains an idea, and that certain books, even much less shocking than Hogg have been and will continue to be burned by subsects in various areas of our mainstream American society. Which leads to another concern. The potential for electronic books to be tinkered with or otherwise censored and withdrawn or restricted and deleted remains ever potent. It seems to me that young minds are already being shaped away from reading books anyhow by virtue of social utility networking, video games, streaming movies, and other online modes of choosing to pass one's time comfortably; a significant majority of these past-times being accounted for by the prevalence of smart phones. We all know how powerful and elusive both ideas and memory can be. It's true that our brains may play tricks with memory, sometimes going so far as to fill in the blanks with fictions to help us stitch our experience evolving through time together. Now, where was I?
Oh yes, please forgive me if I come across as if digressing. I was reading the first few pages of a Samuel Delany novel, and his writing style got me so excited I began this rambling essay. I don't think it's really possible to digress anywhere from our point right here in the universe, is it? Everything I'm writing about here will eventually coalesce together in the mind of the reader if it isn't doing so already. Just give it time. Since Delany's unique and lucid style has been an inspiration to me ever since discovering his books, I've been interested in pushing the creative writing process farther past the established parameters of your typical mainstream science fiction and even the science-fantasy of the Weird into an area beyond that to explore the really strange and surrealistic, yet always with the noble intent of describing our reality as accurately as possible for the setting of my fiction; only making it strange by virtue of shifting our focus deeper into the fabric of our nature with the goal of merely altering the perspective of how the story is told.
An example, for instance, would be to focus farther into our worldscape, describing (let us say) a wart on a character's knuckle, and paying enough devotion to the description of that wart so that the reader is brought deeper into the interior of its setting as if by a zoom lens. In this passage the description of the wart would be so close-up that the reader might at first mistakenly infer they are reading a passage about a hill, or some odd sort of polyp, or maybe a natural object common to a tidal pool, which when magnified a little reveals certain geometric intricacies that may lend themselves more to what we would normally think of as being artificial (almost hexagonal patterns denoted in the skin, for example). Both natural formations as well as some man-made technology, with its requisite geometrical structuring and rectilinear architecture, manage to both mimic nature and defy it on certain levels.
It's my goal to attempt to write a sort of hyperrealism whose reading experience would be tantamount to a colorful and outlandish fantasy yet all along describes as accurately as possible merely a more focused depiction of a natural setting in our own reality. To create a sort of fantasy landscape that is nothing of the sort would be an achievement in hyper-realism as far as I can tell. To further supplement the inherent realism of the narrative would be to include the aforementioned strategies famously utilized by a few authors in depicting the key elements of space, time, and motion. The final added polish to the glazed surface of this narrative would be to filter those three key elements through the five portals of human perception in terms of sketching out their characterization.
That is about as closely as I can describe what I myself feel most excited about insofar as the continuation or expansion of the New Wave of science fiction established by such diverse luminaries as Anthony Burgess, J.G. Ballard, Michael Moorcock, Samuel Delany, A. A. Attanasio and the collective influence of the branching off schematics leading to the cyberpunk movement which owes itself to their Godfather Philip Kindred Dick, himself a wellspring of influence who spawned the likes of K. W. Jeter, John Shirley, William Gibson, Bruce Sterling, Pat Cadigan, Lewis Shiner, Joanna Russ, Rudy Rucker, Alice Sheldon (the elusive "James Tiptree, Jr."), until we branch off into the tangled depths leading forward and back to other practitioners of stylistic storytelling such as Ray Bradbury, Alan Moore, Misha Nogha, Lucius Shepard, Caitlín R. Kiernan, et al.
The opportunity has arrived for the Old Weird to begin its fade into black. There's a New Strange already incepted and gestating. Something beyond the slipstream that is awaiting a small chrome ball bearing to be rolled away from its flaking CPU-tomb in order to come alive, re-charged and uploaded into the new clouded light of day. An emergent tendril growing from the receding bulk of science fiction's rich legacy, one that if cut through its rubber insulation and fiber-optic marrow bleeds plasma sparking a dim halo of light to guide us dead ahead into the unfolding mystery of our strangely unknown future (considering we've been able to deduce it's already happened). What will become of our obsessions with the organic and visceral the more we disengage ourselves from natural physical interfaces in favor of virtual reality operating systems archived by supercomputers? I'm interested in discovering our own connection to nature as similar sorts of operating systems, that is to say as organic computers ourselves processing information encoded by starlight and which we're still all dealing with together here on the same time wave.
