Description of an Avant-Pulp Machine

Last March 5^th 2013 Jeff Noon tweeted a Manifesto. It will be included in his coming book “Pixel Dust”. In the meantime, here it is, exactly as Jeff tweeted it at @jeffnoon:

OK. So I'm going to bite the bullet and tweet a manifesto, of sorts.

Not sure what this is, to be honest. Just some thoughts on Science Fiction (SF), genre, mainstream culture, what it all means, how it interconnects....

Projections, dreams, ideas, results from the skull lab, and so forth. A fair few items in the flow, so stick around if you can. Or not. ;-)

I present: Description of an Avant-Pulp Machine...

1) The SF Genre Machine infects and transforms. It questions, supports and replicates and fires off clichés and wonders at equal rates.

2) SF Machine moves at the pace of life, accelerated or slow-motion. It walks the boundary lines of mainstream culture, enamoured of edges.

3) SF Machine is an emergent system. It exists both in the reality of the present day and the equally valid reality of tomorrow’s dreams.

4) SF conducts experiments upon Form and Content, always inventing new techniques, new processes, new kinds of narrative expression.

5) SF evolves through small variations and wild mutations. It is designed to examine, distrust, perfect and dismantle itself, periodically.

6) Genre SF Machine enflames, enrivers, begulfs, undertugs, sidetwists and interslips. It befogs, englows, transplodes and intraflows.

7) SF Machine is modified by its users over time. It spews parts and revels in having loose screws and wires. It can so easily catch fire.

8) SF Machine is unashamed to fly on wings of sentiment over lands populated by werebeasts, elves, vampires, androids, aliens and unicorns.

9) SF Machine is trying to understand itself. It never will. It’s not that kind of machine. It’s diseased. The disease is its power source.

10) SF is the undercurrent, a visceral urge towards life. It worships both strangeness and tradition, and will fuse the two to make anew.

11) SF is a blade of words that can puncture by accident or slice with precision. The blade is forged in a fantasy realm: the human mind.

12) SF machine creates character out of the signals that travel from person to person. Our signal to noise ratio betrays our true selves.

13) Well-mannered literature is scared of pulp, of popular art. And by this act it severs a deep vein of the life blood. SF Machine revels.

14) SF Machine revels in elements from both pulp and the avant-garde and frequently mixes the two to create avant-pulp dreams and realities.

15) Genre SF Machine is a four-dimensional object (at the very least); it has more edges and borderlines than all other genres put together.

16) How fruitful the world, when pulp fuses with the avant-garde. What strange, conjoined creatures are born. How the twin suns shine.

17) SF will create new ways of reaching the public. Words will flow from root to stem to flower to seed to air to ether to earth to root.

18) SF knows that taste is personal and of personal use in deciding which items to follow in the flow, nothing more; it is not universal.

19) SF is a journey of words through time. It says down with worthiness and perfection! Welcome to corrupted signals, glitches, fused wires.

20) To read, write or add new parts to the Genre SF Machine is to partake in a grand, bizarre, dangerous, clumsy, vital, unique experiment.

21) SF Genre embraces clichés. It can read through the clichés, explore the clichés, dismantle the cli chés. It knows that wonders lie ahead.

22) SF Machine moves along pathways well travelled and yet, at the dusty end of the road, it desires to go further, out into the wastelands.

23) SF seeks out realms where no signposts or maps point the way. It loves to cross borders illegally under cover of night, or in disguise.

24) SF wants to live among hybrid creatures: with monsters of the Id, engines of flesh, women who turn into fish, and floating men of fire.

25) At the liquid edge, Genre SF Machine leaves the normative, middlebrow culture far behind. It travels beyond, into fog, into darkness.

26) Let us go now. Open all channels, connect to everything. Here we are gathered, in the flow of words. There is a strange light ahead...

Thanks for reading these stray thoughts. I hope a few of them strike sparks. Message complete.

One more, that was fully formed in my head when I woke up this morning...

27) Genre SF Machine does not have an operator’s manual. The operators are the manual.