The Star-Spangled Future

by Norman Spinrad

Genres: Science Fiction; Hard Science Fiction; Space Opera

Synopsis

American Dream or American Nightmare? Norman Spinrad describes The Star-Spangled Future: "America is something new under the sun. not so much a nation at all as a precog flash of the future of the species . . . I wrote believing that I was simply writing disconnected science fiction stories from whatever came into my head . . . And they all turned out to be about America, the leading edge of all possible futures unfolding around us . . . After all, that was what was coming into my head, that's the mother lode of science fiction realities - the American fusion plasma of which we are creatures - and all we have to do is keep ourselves open to it . . . that's my definition of science fiction. We have seen the future and it is us."

Release date: September 29, 2011

Publisher: Gateway

Print pages: 407

Sample

I’ve always been resistant to the notion of writing a series of short stories around a theme or a “future history” and doing them up in a book as if they were some kind of “episodic novel.” To me, that would be like sitting down to write 26 episodes of the same television series, one right after the other. Durance vile!

Good Lord, I’ve never been able to write short stories to order one at a time for other people’s theme anthologies! I never know when I’m going to come up with an idea that moves me to write a story. It comes to me, or it doesn’t, and I have no control over the process. The panoply of hack devices for generating a “story idea” in an empty brain strikes me as pure-blind lunacy. You know, open a book at random, type the first paragraph you come to and “springboard” from there… or put down a random word, then a second, and a third, and keep typing this jabberwocky until it starts to make sense or they take you to the funny farm… or as a last resort start typing the telephone book to flagellate yourself into creativity.

Seems to me, you simply can’t make yourself experience the magic moment that gives a story life by intellectual process or ex-lax generated logorrhea. It’s like trying to will yourself in or out of love. Stories written without genuine inspiration will be golems, literary television, Velveeta for the mind. And usually unsalable.

When I in my total naivete began writing science fiction, I was determined to write at least three stories a month to maximize my mathematical chances for breaking into print. Some of the stories I wrote under this regime came to me with that burst of creative insight that emotionally involved the writer, and hence the reader, with the story. Without exception, these eventually sold and were anthologized many times. The stuff I churned out in between based upon the mandatory “sf notion” of the week never sold and is now mercifully lost to posterity. This taught me a lesson in the monetary practicality of esthetic morality which I try to remember.

Once, however, I was tempted. I had just finished “The Lost Continent,” and, upon evening contemplation of the title and all that it meant to me, I thought about writing a series of stories taking the reader on a grand tour of the future ruins of America, and calling the book The Lost Continent I had the title novella already, “A Thing of Beauty” fitted perfectly, and the basic image that was to become “Sierra Maestra” was already rattling around in my brain, lessee, that’s 28,000 words maybe, two more novellas would make—

Fortunately, that’s as far as it got, and with the dawn I came to my senses. You don’t write stories that way, kiddo. You couldn’t even if you wanted to.

So I never churned out those two other novellas and this book isn’t called The Lost Continent.

And yet…

And yet it didn’t start out as The Star Spangled Future either. James Baen, the esteemed editor of Ace science fiction, simply wanted to do a collection of my best science fiction stories. We had no title or theme in mind or even the idea of looking for one.

And yet what we came up with was a book called The Star Spangled Future, a definitive collection of all my short science fiction about America. Fourteen stories, northward of 90,000 words of fiction, a rather weighty tome.

For when I sat down to ponder all my short stories, written over a period of fifteen years, in New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco and London, there this book was.

With few exceptions, all the stories that Jim and I considered were my best were set in America—somewhere, somewhen, some transmutation. Truth be told, maybe two-thirds of all the short stories I had written had to do with some kind of transmogrified American reality. A collection of my best short stories had organized themselves into a book of science fiction about America called The Star Spangled Future as if possessed of independent will.

Maybe this is true on some level. All these stories were written by the same process I’ve not described. Which is to say a creative inspiration came to me from somewhere and I then applied intellectual processes to its development. These stories were written at diverse times in diverse environments and equally diverse headspaces. The one time I had the conscious notion of doing anything like writing a book of short stories about America, I shitcanned the idea.

And yet here it is.

You will notice that all of the terms in this literary equation are defined except one: creative inspiration. But of course that’s the key to the whole process and very little about it seems to operate on a conscious intellectual level at all.

What is creative inspiration anyway? This Faustian question has long obsessed me. After all, if one knew how creativity worked, one might be able to make oneself creative on demand, reason oneself into the fulltime possession of the illusive magic, and banish the very concept of writers’ block. One might be able to teach creativity. All people of a sufficient intellectual level might be able to be creative whenever they wanted to, and then we’d really be mind-mutants with transcendant powers.

Unfortunately, the only answer I’ve found to this question is too Zen to be taught by the Famous Writers School or even a Clarion Workshop. Which is that creativity, like science fiction, like human consciousness itself, is a product of the interface between the human psyche as created by genes and memory, and the ever-changing external environment, which is far beyond our will to control.

Each of us is the product of genetic endowment and the story of our lives. We have no control over our heredity at this writing, and since the story of our lives is also the story of other people’s lives, even the most egomaniacal and charismatic among us can never really write his own scenario.

So this flood of data from a mutating external environment pours in on us and interacts with what we’ve become at any given moment to form our consciousness. When the interaction is synergetic, an inspiration, a leap of consciousness takes place, a magical something is called into being that is not implicit in the data, and this is what we mean by creativity.

This is why creativity is a will o’ the wisp, why it can neither be taught nor analyzed. For it is the dynamic between what we are and the flood of data impinging on our consciousness as we move and mutate through time.

But is this data random? Maybe it only seems so at the time. Take the stories in The Star Spangled Future. Most of them didn’t seem to be connected to anything else or to each other when I wrote them. And yet through hindsight, a pattern emerges, and not one that I consciously created.

For me, the impulse to write science fiction is somehow deeply involved with some long-standing gestalt of perceptions and feelings about American realities.

But what is the central gestalt that caused this book to be written. What is America?

It’s like asking what creativity is or trying to define science fiction.

Definition of America: a certain nation-state, a political entity with clear, legally-defined geographical borders.

Or is it? Europe is becoming infested with Holiday Inns and McDonald’s golden arches. The Japanese play baseball. Every rock musician in Europe wants to be a star in the United States. And during the nadir of the Viet Nam War yet, a New Guinea cargo-cult tribe inquired as to whether they had enough cowrie shells to purchase Lyndon Johnson from the United States to come and be their god.

I was in Europe during a piece of the Viet Nam War, in London when America put the first men on the Moon. The war had created a lot of European anti-Americanism, which of course was to be expected. But the tenor of it was peculiar. The real gut-feeling had little to do with the plight of the Vietnamese. It was a feeling of sorrow, of loss, of betrayal. Europeans felt diminished by what America was doing, abandoned by the “leader of the Free World,” let down by something they had believed in.

Well there might have been a certain ho-hum attitude in the States when America landed the first men on the Moon, but let me tell you they went bugfuck over it in England. They were proud of America. They were relieved that America had once more given them something to be proud of. America for the moment had once more taken up the mantle of its own myth.

A myth of America that exists in countries all over the world. America, the demon of dehumanized technology. America, the hope of the underdog. America, the gobbler of the planet. America, where you go to become a star. The land of opportunity and the belly of the beast.

Mythic America extends far beyond the borders of the United States. America is not just another nation. America first impinged on world consciousness as a fabulous new world where the streets were paved with gold, a self-created new Atlantis. The myth has mutated many times, but its power still holds. Out there, America is an object of love, hate, admiration, loathing, envy, and longing wish-fulfillment. What is in short supply is indifference.

So no outside viewpoint is going to give you a definitive definition of America. It’s an image implanted too deep in the collective unconscious of the species for anyone to be cool and objective about it.

And can Americans define themselves any better? It doesn’t look that way. How many Americans even define themselves as Americans? We’ve got Irish-Americans and Polish-Americans and Jewish-Americans and Italian-Americans and Greek-Americans. We’re blacks and Nisei and Amerinds and Latinos. The only Americans that don’t self-hyphenate themselves are white Anglo-Saxon Protestants, and the rest of us call them WASPS. And even WASPS subdivide them-selves in Easterners and Westerners, Yankees and Southerners, hillbillies, Hoosiers, rednecks, and Southern Californians.

Frenchmen, Englishmen, Italians, Germans, Swedes, Indians-most of the other great nations of the world speak a national language, eat a characteristic cuisine, have national music, one or two characteristic religions, and an indigenous literature and culture.

The same parameters define a sense of “national identity” for most of the nations on Earth. We all know what they are. Nationalism is the style, the very look of a people. Who would mistake a Swede for your average Turk? A street scene in Moscow looks nothing like a street scene in Marakesh. France, Germany, Spain, Italy—most of the western nations are the recognizable brand-names of a people.

But… the United States? What other country in the world has a name that’s pure political definition, devoid of ethnic image? Only the “Union of Soviet Socialist Republics,” with whose national karma we seem inextricably entwined, and there you have an ideological nationalism in words of one syllable.

In a certain sense, there is no real America. Not the way there’s a France or Sweden or Poland.

When the mutant hordes of Europe overran the native American Indian culture, this continent’s continuity with a millennial past was broken, and what emerged after the dust had settled was a huge empty new world populated by religious refugees and zealots, political Utopians, losers in Europe’s many wars, land-hungry ex-serfs, exiled troublemakers, wheelers and dealers, impoverished minor noblemen, and just plain pirates. Weirdos and malcontents from all over Europe in a magic new land of endless bounty, theirs for the taking.

For which they showed great enthusiasm. Taking Manhattan for 24 bucks, buying the vast Louisiana Territory for a song from a Napoleon who didn’t exactly own it, and finally forthrightly ripping off great big chunks of Mexico. And dragooning slave labor from Africa all the while. Finally, mass waves of immigrants swept in to populate the empty golden continent.

And here we are today, a quarter of a billion of us, the descendants of the footloose, freebooting, Utopian hippies of the eighteenth century and refugees from most of the nations of the Earth, and nobody is in the majority. With the exception of a few pitiful American Indian enclaves, everything that makes America America was brought here from somewhere else. Or mutated under the skies of the New World in the past three hundred years. We have no common past stretching back into the dim millennial mists. We are bits and fragments of the rest of the world thrown together here in dynamic instability to interact in quicksilver new combinations.

We’re not just a new nation, we’re a new kind of nation. By the traditional parameters of nationhood, America does not exist. The genes of the species intermingle freely here, and so do national styles. We are the test tube baby of the human species, the mutant child of the nations of the world, the homeland not of the time-honored past but of the transnational future.

In America, men first learned to fly. Here was the awesome power of the atom first placed in men’s hands for good or ill. Here the first transnational mass culture was created by American rock music. Here the secular democracy was invented. Here western science and eastern mysticism are engaging in their first meaningful dialectic. And from America the human species launched its first expedition to another planet.

All a chain of coincidences or some deep mythic truth buried in the pre-cog collective unconscious of the human race?

Trying to define America is like trying to define creativity… or science fiction.

They all tend to merge into the same illusive indefinable. America is a nation which fits no conventional definition of nationality. Science fiction is the only branch (mode? genre? form?) of literature which cannot be definied by parameters of form, style, or content. Both “science fiction” and “America” are multiple states of mind; indeed the only way to define either of them is by their very multiplicity.

Inevitable then that both science fiction and America embody humanity’s dreams of its future, and its nightmares as well.

The essence of science fiction is the speculative element. Something new under the human sun must be generated by the interaction between the psyche of the writer and his environment. Which brings us back to creativity. Because creative mental mutation is science fiction.

GIGO, garbage in, garbage out—a maxim of computer programmers. The quality of the input data determines the quality of the output no matter how good the data processor. But when it comes to the magic human data processing program called creativity, you can look at it more positively, since humans are able to synergize mutations not implicit in the data.

Nevertheless the data does determine the quality and frequency of creative mutation, statistically speaking. The more of it there is, the denser it is, the more varied and complex, the higher the incidence of creative synergy. Of mutation. Of invention. Of science fiction. Of a sense of self-creating our futures.

And if we look at America as the input data, as a dynamic data bank, the external information system of internal creation, we begin to see why America is such a science fiction reality, indeed why science fiction may now be emerging as a characteristic American literature while it emerges as a transnational literature at the same time.

America was set up as a laboratory and a model for a future which the world has not yet attained. A transnational future. A future in which the peoples of the world mingle and interbreed genetically and psychically.

Not a melting pot, but a fusion plasma where all the cultures, wisdoms, and evils of all the peoples in the world are jammed together in a high energy state all the time. In everyone’s head. The peoples of the Earth flooded into the emptiness of America, filling it with their genes and their cultures and their ways of looking at the world. Almost immediately, this forced transnationalism began to mutate because of its very complex and compacted mix. Only in America are the elements of scores of national realities so thoroughly mingled, geographically and culturally.

This American fusion plasma is so complex and dense that it keeps generating new complexity and increased density, so that it never stabilizes into a fixed cultural matrix, an American national style. Bits and pieces of the cultures of the world forever fuse into new American elements and with the flood of American mutations.

America is something new under this sun. Not so much a nation at all as a precog flash of the future of the species, the leading edge of the evolution of world man. Which, of course, is also what science fiction is all about.

And that’s how The Star Spangled Future ended up writing itself.

One of the things that had historically limited science fiction to its peculiar ghettoized state was the tendency of science fiction writers to live in the pocket reality of the world of science fiction, a cozy familiar Ruritania where you have a secure patent of nobility, and where the input of the real world comes third hand and creates mutations not of realities but of previous science fiction. Indeed, it is common for citizens of the Grand Duchy of SF to speak disdainfully of the “mundane” world outside the borders of the magic kingdom.

But I grew up outside this realm. I didn’t even know it existed until I had published a first novel. What ever gestalt of input made me a science fiction writer, it came from general American reality, not the subculture of science fiction. At a stage when other new science fiction writers were doing their extracurricular bullshitting in fanzines, I was doing mine in the underground press. Sure, I read a lot of science fiction, but American realities seemed far more science fictional to me than spaceships and alien planets.

Mundane? Oh really?

You be the judge. In The Star Spangled Future, you will find fourteen stories written over the span of a decade in many places and many headspaces, and all of them about “mundane” America, not spaceships and other worlds. I wrote them believing that I was simply writing disconnected science fiction stories from whatever came into my head. Most of them were first published in the usual science fiction markets. And they all turn out to be about America, the leading edge of the possible futures unfolding around us right here where we live.

After all, that was what was coming into my head, that’s the mother lode of science fiction realities—the American fusion plasma of which we are creatures—and all we have to do is keep ourselves open to it. That’s where I get my crazy ideas, Charley, and that’s my definition of science fiction.

We have seen the future and it is us.

By any rational criteria, it’s Science Fiction Time in America right now; hence the title of this section of The Star Spangled Future. We have seen the future and it is us, I said just a moment ago, but of course we all know that there’s no such thing as the future at all. There are many multiple futures struggling to be born at any given moment, nowhere more so than in America. Some of them are worthy of our aspiration while others are trying to crawl out from under wet rocks, and in the multiplex American reality none of them exactly precludes any of the others.

So for all any of us know, any of the stories in this section could be happening right now. The present and the future have a very fuzzy boundary in these times. Consider that in America, right now, we know that:

Mass media has impressed comic book heroes like Superman into the Jungian unconscious. Death, sex, and power dance to the beat of an electric guitar. Cancer has become such a dreaded metaphor for bad karma that there are those who seriously believe it is the result of bad karma itself. Religion, psychotherapy, and marketing have created scores of specimens of new kinds of cults vying with mutated Eastern imports for landlordship of the New Jerusalem. Sports events have replaced tribal warfare as the mythic area for local chauvinism. History is molded on national television. Men are seriously launching a political movement to build cities in space.

Science Fiction Times indeed! Who knows how close fiction is to unfolding realities? I saw the “Holy War on 34th Street” nearly break out on more than one occasion. There is now a doctor in Texas using a kind of cancer therapy based on the transmogrification of disease into inner myth, a treatment based literally on fantasy itself which has shown some positive results. And there are people learning to consciously craft their dreams.

Where does science fiction end and the “real world” begin? Figure it out for yourself if you can. Lotsa luck! But don’t expect to come up with a simple answer while you read these stories.

At the age of nine, Harrison Wintergreen first discovered that the world was his oyster when he looked at it sidewise. That was the year when baseball cards were in. The kid with the biggest collection of baseball cards was it. Harry Wintergreen decided to become it.

Harry saved up a dollar and bought one hundred random baseball cards. He was in luck—one of them was the very rare Yogi Berra. In three separate transactions, he traded his other ninety-nine cards for the only other three Yogi Berras in the neighborhood. Harry had reduced his holdings to four cards, but he had cornered the market in Yogi Berra. He forced the price of Yogi Berra up to an exorbitant eighty cards. With the slush fund thus accumulated, he successively cornered the market in Mickey Mantle, Willie Mays and Pee Wee Reese and became the J. P. Morgan of baseball cards.

Harry breezed through high school by the simple expedient of mastering only one subject—the art of taking tests. By his senior year, he could outthink any testwriter with his gypsheet tied behind his back and won seven scholarships with foolish ease.

In college, Harry discovered Girls. Being reasonably goodlooking and reasonably facile, he no doubt would’ve garnered his fair share of conquests in the normal course of events. But this was not the way the mind of Harrison Wintergreen worked.

Harry carefully cultivated a stutter, which he could turn on or off at will. Few girls could resist the lure of a good-looking, well-adjusted guy with a slick line who nevertheless carried with him some secret inner hurt that made him stutter. Many were the girls that tried to delve Harry’s secret, while Harry delved them.

In his sophomore year, Harry grew bored with college and reasoned that the thing to do was to become Filthy Rich. He assiduously studied sex novels for one month, wrote three of them in the next two which he immediately sold at a thousand a throw.

With the $3,000 thus garnered, he bought a shiny new convertible. He drove the new car to the Mexican border and across into a notorious bordertown. He immediately contacted a disreputable shoeshine boy and bought a pound of marijuana. The shoeshine boy of course tipped off the border guards, and when Harry attempted to walk across the bridge to the states, they stripped him naked. They found nothing and Harry crossed the border. He had smuggled nothing out of Mexico, and in fact had thrown the marijuana away as soon as he bought it.

However, he had taken advantage of the Mexican embargo on American cars and illegally sold the convertible in Mexico for $15,000.

Harry took his $15,000 to Las Vegas and spent the next six weeks buying people drinks, lending broke gamblers money, acting in general like a fuzzy-cheeked Santa Claus, gaining the confidence of the right drunks and blowing $5,000.

At the end of six weeks he had three hot market tips which turned his remaining $10,000 into $40,000 in the next two months.

Harry bought 400 crated government surplus jeeps in four one-hundred-jeep lots at $10,000 a lot and immediately sold them to a highly disreputable Central American Government for $100,000.

He took the $100,000 and bought a tiny island in the Pacific, so worthless that no government had ever bothered to claim it. He set himself up as an independent government with no taxes and sold twenty one-acre plots to twenty millionaires seeking a tax haven at $100,000 a plot. He unloaded the last plot three weeks before the United States, with U.N. backing, claimed the island and brought it under the sway of the Internal Revenue Department.

Harry invested a small part of his $2,000,000 and rented a large computer for twelve hours. The computer constructed a betting schema by which Harry parlayed his $2,000,000 into $20,000,000 by talcing various British soccer pools to the tune of $18,000,000.

For five million dollars, he bought a monstrous chunk of useless desert from an impoverished Arabian sultanate. With another two million, he created a huge rumor campaign to the effect that this patch of desert was literally floating on oil. With another three million, he set up a dummy corporation which made like a big oil company and publicly offered to buy his desert for seventy-five million dollars. After some spirited bargaining, a large American oil company was allowed to outbid the dummy and bought a thousand square miles of sand for $100,000,000.

Harrison Wintergreen was, at the age of twenty-five, Filthy Rich by his own standards. He lost his interest in money.

He now decided that he wanted to Do Good. He Did Good. He toppled seven unpleasant Latin American governments and replaced them with six Social Democracies and a Benevolent Dictatorship. He converted a tribe of Borneo headhunters to Rosicrucianism. He set up twelve rest homes for over-age whores and organized a birth control program which sterilized twelve million fecund Indian women. He contrived to make another $100,000,000 on the above enterprises.

At the age of thirty, Harrison Wintergreen had had it with Do-Gooding. He decided to Leave His Footprints in the Sands of Time. He Left His Footprints in the Sands of Time. He wrote an internationally acclaimed novel about King Farouk. He invented the Wintergreen Filter, a membrane through which fresh water passed freely, but which barred salts. Once set up, a Wintergreen Desalinization Plant could desalinate an unlimited supply of water at a per-gallon cost approaching absolute zero. He painted one painting and was instantly offered $200,000 for it. He donated it to the Museum of Modern Art, gratis. He developed a mutated virus which destroyed syphilis bacteria. Like syphilis, it spread by sexual contact. . .