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Chekhov's Gun
01/06/2005 . Source: Charles Stross 
Chekhov's gun is a literary weapon, says science fiction author Charles Stross; "If in the first act you have hung a pistol on the wall, then in the following one it should be fired. Otherwise don't put it there." I'm a jobbing storyteller, who's just mailed in the manuscript of his eighth novel. I do this stuff because (a) I enjoy the process, and (b) it's better than working for a living. I'm more of an artisan than a theoretician; in this respect I'm not atypical among my peers, for while it's normal for authors to examine their own working processes, if you spend too much time in navel-gazing you'll never actually write anything.
There's a foggy borderland between working entirely by rule of thumb, and developing a theory to guide the process; I'm wandering around somewhere in the middle of this wasteland, squinting into the mists and trying to work out if there's a better way to do what I'm trying to do. And at present I'm thinking hard about Chekhov's gun -- because this literary conceit is sitting on the wall mocking me, stopping me from coming up with a sequel to a couple of reasonably popular novels.
Except the weapon on my particular wall isn't a pistol. It's a neutron bomb.
Back in 1995, I suffered a cynical rush of blood to the head and decided that I was going to write a space opera. To cut a long story short, the book that eventually emerged was published under the title "Singularity Sky" in 2003 (2004 in the UK). A sequel, "Iron Sunrise", was finished in 2001 and published in 2004 (2005 over here). I should like to note, parenthetically, that the title "Singularity Sky" bears no relationship to the content of the first book -- it was pinned on it after the event in order to avoid a namespace collision in Ace's list, and I've regretted the premature deployment of the "S" word ever since. These novels aren't brilliant and they suffer from a number of flaws, but most readers seem to like them well enough and it would be a comfort to my bank manager (not to mention my editor, and the fans who want me to write more of the same) were I to write a third one in the series.
The problem I've got with the setting is twofold. Firstly, in confronting the genre conventions of space opera I was forced to deal with a question that Vernor Vinge first articulated in the late 80's and early 90's; how do we avoid having a technological singularity come front-and-centre and disrupt the narrative? Fiction is an art form confronted by certain conventions, and among the most fundamental (but rarely articulated) is the axiom that fiction works best when it informs our identity, if not our reality: to put it another way, it's bloody hard to write fiction (let alone interesting fiction) about vastly transcendant post-human intelligences which are to us as we are to nematode worms. To dodge the problem of artificial intelligences bootstrapping themselves to near-godlike levels of competence and sidelining the plot, Vernor invoked an apparently physical mechanism (for "A Fire Upon the Deep"). For my part, I ran across an interesting essay on time travel and computing by Hans Moravec, banged it together with the physical principle that faster than light travel entails causality violation, got a spark (hey! I was writing a space opera -- faster than light travel is one of the hoary old cliches of the sub-genre), and nearly set fire to my own world-building trousers.
I'm not going to give away the shop in this blog entry, but to sum it up: the entity known as the Eschaton that crops up in both novels is not only a Deus in Machina, it's a Chekhov's Gun. The logic of the books points towards a conclusion in which the gun is fired (and the announcement over the PA system in the background is news to the effect that God has left the universe).
However. I don't really do heroic archetypes - another of the hoary cliches to which authors of the Old space opera always genuflected, and which these days tends to be observed in the negative. As I got into spinning yarns set in this fabulous far-future universe I'd invented, I discovered that the stories focussed on a much more human scale: questions of philosophy arising were more likely to be examinations of social relationships or local politics than grandiose stabbings at the cosmic canvas. I'm no Olaf Stapeldon, or even Greg Egan.
So. I've placed this lovingly-polished weapon -- one capable of deconstructing an entire fictional universe -- on the wall, and I've got this feeling that it's staring at me, whispering: "pull the trigger, Charlie, you know you'll have to do it some day!" Even worse, I've implicitly promised the readers something that I'm loath to deliver. If I pull the trigger and expose the underpinnings of the plot, delivering the final explanation for what the Eschaton is about, then that's it: it's fat-lady-sings time for these books. I can live with that -- I've got other stories to tell -- but the characters in the books will be more than a little bit disgruntled and, more to the point, there's no coming back from that point. This isn't the Reichenbach Falls, and the Eschaton is no Holmesian villain. Nor is there a Holmes in this cosy human-sized universe, some chilly more-than-human intellect that can suck on its pipe and pronounce a chain of evidence linking the smoking gun on the wall to the dead god in the middle of the carpet.
If I want to pull the trigger, I need to find a gunslinger who's up to the task. And like I said, I don't buy into the myth of the super-hero.
How do you go about creating a believable human protagonist who is capable of destroying the universe? (And please don't say, "emulate General Jack D. Ripper" -- this isn't Dr Strangelove and black farce isn't how I want to go.)
Charles Stross
(c) Charles Stross 2005
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