“In the once-upon-a-time days of the First Age of Magic, the
prudent sorcerer regarded his own true name as his most prized possession but
also the greatest threat to his continued good health, for—so the stories
go—once an enemy, even a weak unskilled enemy, learned the sorcerer’s true
name, then routine and widely known spells could destroy or enslave even the
most powerful. As times passed, and we graduated to the Age of Reason and
thence to the first and second industrial revolutions, such notions were
discredited. Now it seems that the Wheel has turned full circle (even if there
never really was a First Age) and we are back to worrying about true names
again.”
So begins True Names, Vernor Vinge’s 1981 cyberpunk tale in
which protagonist Roger Pollack, aka the hacker ‘Mr Slippery’ finds himself
under threat when his real identity is revealed to the ‘Great Enemy’, aka the
American Government.
If this opening strikes you as surprisingly fantasy-flavoured
considering its otherwise grounded premise of basically getting doxed, you’re not
imagining it. In the world of True Names, the powers of technology have become
almost akin to magic within ‘The Other Plane’ (their fictional version of the internet).
Written in 1981, a year before the term ‘cyberspace’ as we
now understand it first appeared in William Gibson’s short story Burning
Chrome, and two years before the word ‘cyberpunk’ was even coined by author
Bruce Bethke, Vinge’s novella is uniquely placed in the world of literature.
As well as being arguably the genre’s first great work, True Names was also published at a time when public awareness of the potential of computers to shape the future was only just becoming recognised. Written by a professor of computer science in a time when all but the most basic computer terminology was all but unknown outside of techie circles, the novel had to find its own language to describe its digital world. And that language, of course, was fantasy.
Accessing The Other Plane
By having his fictional hackers adopt the more familiar
language of fantasy fiction, Vinge circumvents a problem which has blighted
writers of science fiction since the dawn of the genre- Jargon Creep.
Jargon Creep (a phrase which I made up for the sake of
making this article easy to write, so don’t look it up) is a common occurrence
in any story which requires substantial world-building. It’s an easy problem to stumble
into.
To build the world, it’s often necessary to create words for
things that don’t exist. But slowly and surely the world-specific terminology
grows and grows until the reader struggles and the story grinds to a halt. And
so, the author has two choices: continue to drown his readers in the jargon in
the hopes of finding a particularly hardcore readership of proper nerds- or find
ways to limit the Creep where possible.
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| Vinge (now retired) lectured in computer science and maths at San Diego State University © Raul654 |
Vinge, being a teacher of the esoteric twin subjects of maths and computer science himself, understood the importance of not making your audiences’ brains explode. In an era in which the Apple II was only a few years old, and the IBM PC was still a little way off. The internet was a pipe dream, with its crude predecessor ARPANET essentially only operating between a sparse collection of universities and military bases.
As a result, at best computers were at best viewed by the public
through the lens of isolated, low-powered microcomputers such as the Sinclair ZX80, or the dated science fiction tropes of mainframes and master computers- think Alpha
60 from Alphaville (1965) or Hal 9000 from 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968). At worst, they were arcane
and mysterious couched in obscure tech words that few at the time actually understood.
Vinge does not flinch away from using technological words. However, he chooses to use them sparingly, to add flavour rather than to
form the structure of the world. Instead, he veils his story in a gloss of a
more familiar mythology, the world of high fantasy, making his world more
accessible to his readers.
Not just a language, but a world
However, the fantasy of his sci-fi tale isn’t simply
confined to the narration. On the contrary, it is a fully diegetic part of the
world; a “mythos” which the novel’s characters themselves adopt within their
digital world.
Being a story of rebels against the establishment, it makes
sense for Mr Slippery and his “Coven” of hackers to see themselves as sorcerers,
the harbingers of a new age of magic. After all, in the 60s and 70s, fantasy
had been the genre of choice among the counterculture, with its themes of freedom,
love and pastoral golden ages striking a chord with the hippies of the time. Works
iconic of the genre such as Lord of the Rings were elevated to pop culture
status as slogans such as ‘Frodo Lives’ and ‘Gandalf for President’ appeared on
badges, t-shirts and the walls of toilet cubicles.
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| A popular hippie slogan of the 70s © Quinn Dombrowski |
It made sense for Vinge’s near future ‘warlocks’, as the
descendants of his era’s anti-establishment rebels, to adopt the same magical
imagery as their forebears. It is more than just pure whimsy, but an overt expression
of their modern, libertarian politics.
By contrast, those who are less au fait with the world of punkish
rebellion, such as the US Government, drag twenty years behind in a banal world
of square, conservative drabness. Their vision of the virtual world takes the
form of “old-fashioned office complexes” where “the ‘feel’ of 1990s-style data
sets was unmistakable” (for reference, True Names is set sometime in the 2010s).
This was arguably very prescient of the coming decades, as
old hippies such as Steve Jobs became pioneers of the computer industry, and
rebellious hackers became an archetypal character in fiction, culminating in arch-psychedelia
evangelist Timothy Leary’s eventual claim that “PC is the LSD of the 90s”.
In the modern world, it can be easy to forget the influence
which True Names has had over our collective consciousness. Many of his ideas
have since been repeatedly reused by other authors, and his reputation has been
partially obscured by his more popular peers. Yet his pioneering novel remains
an icon of science fiction, not only for being a rip-roaring adventure, but for
being a remarkable prophecy of the computer age that followed, written in a language
which we normies could understand.
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