The Star-Spangled Future by Norman Spinrad

Author:Norman Spinrad [Spinrad, Norman]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Science Fiction, Short Story Collection
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

Introduction to

The Entropic Gang Bang Caper

Written in England under the influence of the “condensed novels” of J. G. Ballard and the “programmed” humorous fiction of John T. Sladek and first published in New Worlds, “The Entropic Gang Bang Caper” is probably the most thoroughly and forthrightly experimental and “New Wave” piece I’ve ever written. Funny how my whole image in certain quarters apparently seems based upon this obscure 1500 word story.

Okay, all you Second Foundationeers, this is as hard-core a “New Wave” story as you’re going to get to gnash your teeth over in this book. The real stuff, the kind pseudo-intellectuals like!

Near as I can make out, what the hard core English “New Wave” school was trying to do was replace the notion of linear plot entirely and create fiction which the reader experienced not as a “story” but as a succession of interpenetrating images. Think of it as fiction formally organized like film. Montage replaces plot as the organizing principle. Since what the reader is experiencing is montage and not story, you don’t necessarily need continuing characters, or indeed characters at all. Meaning is conveyed by or arises from the juxtaposition of images, of slices of realities. The prose glides lightly and allusively over the phenomenological surface while what depth there is comes from the interaction of the readers’ own various minds with the ambiguity of what’s on paper.

Condense it as far as possible. Ballard’s “condensed novels” really are full formal novels in miniature when they work, multifaceted fictional realities.

John Sladek was doing his separate weirdness. He was “writing” some amusing short stories by taking words and phrases and running them through a syntax program that organized them into sentences, paragraphs, and, by proper choice of input data, into “stories.”

In “The Entropic Gang Bang Caper,” I tried to combine both processes and carry them a bit further. I concocted a program for assembling story elements, an equation in which each term would be chosen from the appropriate class of “raw footage.” But first I went out and “shot” the raw footage in the typewriter, keeping the assembly scenario in mind. In other words, I went out and shot sequential takes of the classes of prose elements I was going to use, and then edited them with a simple program.

But I took it even a little further than that. I programmed in a random factor. Every time the program called for a certain class of prose footage, 1 would choose which “take” went in that slot by coin flip. The result is a “condensed novel” written in collaboration with both a program and random chance.

Yes Virginia, there was a New Wave…

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