In Edgar Allan Poe’s story The Pit and the Pendulum, the narrator faints after being sentenced to death for a nameless crime. Upon waking, he finds himself in a completely dark room. “The blackness of eternal night encompassed me,” he reports. “I struggled for breath. The intensity of the darkness seemed to oppress and stifle me. The atmosphere was intolerably close.”
After some time spent claustrophobically groping through the dark, he begins to strategize how he might navigate the darkness and learn the exact dimensions of his prison. In a move that echoes Hansel and Gretel, he tears a long piece from his robe and uses it to mark the wall so that he can know how many paces he has gone from his starting point. With this, he’s able to begin working through the details of his (unexpectedly large) cell.
The sentence is a similar kind of technology. A reader, picking up a story, has some loose sense of the general shape of the room they’re entering (such as a familiarity with its genre, its author, or publisher). A prison cell has walls and dimensions, usually bars and a door of some kind. A science fiction story will have some sort of impossible (for now) premise (a strange rule!), maybe some odd consonant-heavy names, etc. Whatever their intuitions and expectations, the reader still starts in the dark. There’s no illuminated or crystalized image the reader receives like they do with a movie, or even a stage play.
Reading is grasping through a pitch-black space. Each word is a thread that lets you step ever forward into the dark, until, slowly, the walls of the cell are (re)created in your mind. This is the singularly most important thing I have to remember when I’m writing.
Each sentence acts like the prisoner’s cloth marker. Each word accretes information.
On one side of every fiction there is a writer, who (often) has a full and robust ‘vision’ of the world of their story. On the other is a reader in darkness. The only vector through which they can gather information about the world is the sequence of words, grammatically organized into sentences, paragraphs, scenes, and stories.
Sci-fi author and theorist Samuel Delany describes the reading process as essentially a corrective one. “A sixty-thousand-word novel is one picture corrected fifty-nine thousand, nine hundred and ninety-nine times.” He uses the example of a sentence about a dog. Let’s make a sentence of our own with that starting image: “The dog,” immediately conjures a particular image, likely different in each reader’s head (if they grew up with a Labrador, perhaps they see one of those; or if they have young children, perhaps they see a cartoon like Bluey in their mind). “The dog, sitting“ – with this addition, any reader who has imagined a dog in any other position ‘corrects’ their image. “The dog sitting on the tractor“ – now, we limit our imagination to dogs one would expect to see around or on a farm ( no longer chihuahuas or yorki-poos). You get the idea.
As each reader adapts their image of the fiction, correcting it in response to the writer’s cues, the effect of a piece of literature is created. Back to Poe’s prisoner, as he begins to use his cloth markers to explore the cell:
I tore a part of the hem from the robe and placed the fragment at full length, and at right angles to the wall. In groping my way around the prison, I could not fail to encounter this rag upon completing the circuit. So, at least I thought: but I had not counted upon the extent of the dungeon, or upon my own weakness. The ground was moist and slippery. I staggered onward for some time, when I stumbled and fell. My excessive fatigue induced me to remain prostrate; and sleep soon overtook me as I lay.
There’s not a lot of plot momentum occurring here. He tears his robe. He walks the walls. He falls and sleeps. Yet, there is still a real sense of being moved through something as a reader. The corrective process is an emerging model of constraint. We, with the narrator, are learning the shape, size, and feeling of the cell. We, like the narrator, are sometimes getting it wrong. He underestimates the size and extent of the cell and his own exhaustion. Sentences update a reader’s picture of a space, but also (especially in speculative fiction) update a reader’s model of the governing logics that produce it.
The central insight of this corrective model is a deceptively simple one: reading happens one word at a time.
The question of how to use the word sequencing to shape protocol fiction, has become very important in our work in the Protocol Fiction Special Interest Group. We’ve spent a lot of time defining protocol fiction through its strange rules. Now, we want to move toward an understanding of how the genre can move readers.
Protocols are particularly good at producing what Timber Stinson-Schroff identifies as “dynamic non-events,” or things that are prevented from happening because engineered coordination keeps a system functioning. There’s a gag in the second Kingsman movie, where a secret agent reveals his “trophy room.” It’s covered in banal newspaper front pages, each marking a day when his organization prevented an apocalyptic event. The absence of news is the achievement. This is a strange narrative property that emerges when writing about protocols. When they work, things don’t happen. But, traditionally, fiction loves events.
Protocol fiction has successfully found at least one obvious solution: writing about the moment the protocol fails. But what does protocol fiction look like without an explosion or a failure?
The Ductus
In The Pit and the Pendulum, after moving through the dark using his robe threads to calculate distance, the narrator trips over his torn robe and knocks himself unconscious. Later, he wakes in the center of his prison, which he learns descends into a pit. Leather straps have been wrapped around his wrists and he’s tied to the bottom center of this pit.
Looking upward, I surveyed the ceiling of my prison. It was some thirty or forty feet overhead, and constructed much as the side walls. In one of its panels a very singular figure riveted my whole attention. It was the painted figure of Time as he is commonly represented, save that, in lieu of a scythe, he held what, at a casual glance, I supposed to be the pictured image of a huge pendulum such as we see on antique clocks. There was something, however, in the appearance of this machine which caused me to regard it more attentively. While I gazed directly upward at it (for its position was immediately over my own) I fancied that I saw it in motion. In an instant afterward the fancy was confirmed. Its sweep was brief, and of course slow. […] It might have been half an hour, perhaps even an hour, (for I could take but imperfect note of time) before I again cast my eyes upward. What I then saw confounded and amazed me. The sweep of the pendulum had increased in extent by nearly a yard. As a natural consequence, its velocity was also much greater. But what mainly disturbed me was the idea that had perceptibly descended. I now observed – with what horror it is needless to say – that its nether extremity was formed of a crescent of glittering steel, about a foot in length from horn to horn; the horns upward, and the under edge evidently as keen as that of a razor. Like a razor also, it seemed massy and heavy, tapering from the edge into a solid and broad structure above. It was appended to a weighty rod of brass, and the whole hissed as it swung through the air.
At the center of the torturous prison, Father Time slowly lowers a swinging blade. Note Poe’s intentional invocation of time. Both in the painted figure, and in the pendulum, “such as we see in clocks.” This is the writer/reader task made literal. Writing can progress with a certainty – again, that deceptively simple truth – because it will be read one word at a time. Father Time swings his pendulum lower with each word. Unlike Poe’s story, though, the blade never quite reaches a reader’s chest. The writer’s fictive world model can never fully irrupt into the reader. It’s a constant negotiation, and ideally a bringing-together of the two models into a secret third thing: the story.
The reason this pendulum matters is that watching a scythe descend toward your chest produces a feeling. The corrective process of reading move a vision closer to you. In this sense, like Poe’s narrator, a work of fiction is a kind of architectural space. While a cloth marker can hint at where you are, the movement through time, the way in which an author’s fictive world approaches a reader and eventually moves through them, cocreates the phenomenological texture that gives fiction its feeling.
Mary Carruthers (a scholar introduced to the Protocol Institute’s Memory Research Group by Kei Kreutler) calls this ductus. “Ductus is the way by which a work leads someone through itself: that quality in a work’s formal patterns which engages an audience and then sets a viewer or auditor or performer in motion within its structures, an experience more like traveling through stages along a route than like perceiving a whole object.” The ductus of written works are the word-by-word, sentence-by-sentence corrections that accrue. Delany’s model of correction helps us understand what is happening in the reader’s imagination as they advance through a text. Carruthers’ ductus helps us understand how its sequence conducts a reader through those corrections.
A comedy story’s ductus will need to surprise in such a way to evoke (for example) whimsy or schadenfreude. A visceral horror story’s corrections will often involve an unsettling, transgressive, or shocking development of a previously “normal” image, while sometimes more psychological horror will begin with unsettling, transgressive, or upsetting images and then carry that associative weight forward into more “normal” descriptions. The Gothic pulls psychology outwards into the environment. Creative effects are achieved by carefully ordering sentences and words. By creating both the space (objects) of the story but, far more importantly, by creating a coherent and compelling journey through those images.
Take a look at what happens when you read – then massacre! – one of the finest opening paragraphs in English literature, from Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House:
No live organism can continue for long to exist sanely under conditions of absolute reality; even larks and katydids are supposed, by some, to dream. Hill House, not sane, stood by itself against its hills, holding darkness within; it had stood so for eighty years and might stand for eighty more. Within, walls continued upright, bricks met neatly, floors were firm, and doors were sensibly shut; silence lay steadily against the wood and stone of Hill House, and whatever walked there, walked alone.
See how utterly differently this rearrangement (which changes almost no words) reads:
Hill House stood against the hills; it had stood by itself for eighty years and might stand for eighty more. Within, walls continued upright, bricks met neatly, floors were firm, and doors were sensibly shut. Silence lay steadily against the wood and stone of Hill House, not sane. Whatever walked there, walked alone, holding darkness within. Even larks and katydids are supposed, by some, to dream. No live organism can continue for long to exist sanely under conditions of absolute reality.
In this remixed paragraph, the insectoid and avian (the inhuman) don’t emerge until after the house has been fully described. When Jackson writes “larks,” “katydids,” “dream,” and “reality” first, she loads everything that comes next with the associative weight of those words. When these words and phrases are listed after the description of the house, a reader has to “go back” and re-layer this imagery themselves. Without them, and with the “by itself” relocated ever so slightly, the first two sentences read almost triumphantly, a very different affective mood. The ductus has changed substantially.
Equally important are the interruptive effects of “not sane.” In Jackson’s original, this works in part because it’s a change in the rhythm with which the information is delivered. Sequencing within and between sentences matters. The mention of sanity (notably, she never uses the word insane) in the first sentence extends, temporally, and in doing so, creates an unsettled effect in the reader. The opening “No” waits for its “sane” for ten full words, 18 syllables. Even the subsequent – punchy – interruption of “not sane” in the second sentence stretches to two words: “not // sane.” This, combined with the sudden change from the first sentence’s long, flowing language, into the staccato interruption of “Hill House, not sane, stood …” produces a suite of effects that texture the rendering of the image in real time. All this shapes the content of the scene and its mood dramatically.
We have to read sequentially. And so the order of things matters. Good writers know this, and will often ensure that their sequential order produces clear, logically simple images and events. Great writers will use this to imbue stories with that effervescent quality of all literature: densely layered meaning. They’ll use seeding and nuanced revelation to produce meaning with novel and exciting effects. Tone, voice, and even – to a point – genre emerge from how language is arranged.
We now have a model of how a work interacts with a reader – how it forms, and then successively corrects an image, and how those corrections shape an experience of a work through their sequencing. What relationship does this have to protocols, and by extension protocol fiction?
The Shapes of Protocol Fiction Journeys
In protocol studies, Protocol Institute (PI) research director Venkatesh Rao defines a protocol as an “engineered argument.” Both those words are dense. A longer definition from PI is that “a protocol is a codified set of behaviors that, when adopted by enough agents, enables coordination without continuous negotiation.” It’s both the “I cut, you choose” rule our parents taught us when we were splitting the last slice of cake with our sibling, and the Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) that enables browsers and servers to exchange information – i.e., have websites be accessible by your simply typing a URL. There’s a tension here: if fiction is a constant negotiation between two world-models, its protocols would seem not to be working. But, in fiction, the protocol layer preemptively fuels the corrective negotiations that make up the text.
A story doesn’t have to teach you the rules of grammar, the definition of every word, or the mechanics of how to read word-by-word. It often doesn’t have to teach readers the conventions of its genre, either. All that is prepackaged (unless you’re writing children’s literature!): grammar, lexicon, reading order, genre expectations. A work must teach a reader how to read its particular text, but not – like Carl Sagan would say – create the universe just so you can bake an apple pie from scratch.
Which is useful, because the ductus of a work primarily exists only within that work. Some exhaust gets collected and ossified in genre-level protocols, which is why we talk about nascent genres “maturing” and eventually “being transcended.” The more aspects of a work that are codified into a persistent genre or grammatical layer, the more a specific work can create complicated “single-use” ductus. Persistent protocols enable work-specific engineering.
Grammar and genre comprise the protocol layer atop which the sentence and paragraph can operate. Fiction functions like an application capable of this constant (corrective) negotiating because it runs atop a stack that frees up capacity for a conductive (in the ductus sense of conducting) negotiation. Text becomes the conduit through which two world-models argue, and a story emerges. Taken as a whole, a story is an engineered argument in Rao’s sense. The ductus is the engineering. It is the place in which designed rhythms, orders, and corrections structure the reader’s movement toward a shared world-model that can run extravagantly (see the deferred meanings in Jackson). The sentence is where fiction’s protocol stack gets executed.
The reader’s image (i.e., fictive world-model, aka imagination) forms, and is accreted upon, expanded, corrected, argued against, nuanced, made smaller, made bigger, made specific, and made dramatic by word order and choice. Sentence-by-sentence.
So what does the genre of protocol fiction build within each work? Where does its ductus take us, and how?
One solution so far has been to find protocols that aren’t working for people. Nadia Asparouhova calls these “Kafka protocols.” These are protocols that “hold too much power,” and where a “[p]articipant is trapped in a maze that they can’t understand and also can’t escape.” Here one finds a cliche of science fiction writing – it is easier to write about dystopias than utopias. My own story Noise Ordinance is a straightforward play at dystopia. More recent protocol fiction works, like Cameron Russell Armstrong’s prize-winning American Skyway, traffic in a similar, but updated satire/thriller-inflected tone. This again, culminates in a very dynamic event – the antithesis of the non-event which typically characterizes protocol studies.
In Armstrong’s story, we can see some micro-techniques of protocol fiction emerging. Let’s take the opening paragraph (specifically, its second sentence):
Clusters of bureaucrats dutifully feigned attention while quietly locked in desperate combat with the looming spectre of accidental slumber during this third hour of the 17th session on the ninth day of the quarterly two-day Reratification Accords for the treaty governing the Joint Defense of the Lebanon Space Elevator and Remembrance Zone, which memorialized the grand experiment formerly known as the United States of America.
Armstrong uses a very different valence to Jackson. His story begins with “clusters of bureaucrats,” the word cluster immediately suggests computation, statistics – protocolish realms. There’s also a nice scansion to the phrase (a wildly important feature of prose that needs careful attenuation) “clusters of bureaucrats dutifully feigned.” The oxymoron of dutifully feigning something immediately conjures the satirical tone that defines the piece. This hint of satirism is formalized in the next clause, where the epic tone of “locked in desperate combat with the looming spectre” is immediately undercut by “accidental slumber.” High language for what amounts to the simple struggle not to fall asleep in a boring meeting.
From there, we dive into a long, nested list defined by a succession of numbers: “The third hours of the 17th session on the ninth day of the quarterly two-day.” This cascade produces another effect; numbers abound, but mean little in this story. Ninth day of the two-day is fun, and the second oxymoronic detail in just the first sentence. What emerges here at the level of language is that the containers of numeric meaning contain irresolvable tensions that are too easy to ignore and too hard to fix. That this is nestled within a numeric cascade further drenches the text.
Then, there’s the finale of the opening line: “formerly known as the United States of America.” Like Jackson, I don’t think this paragraph would work at all as well if that detail was foregrounded, instead of having it hit at the very end of the sentence. Again, we have a collision of tones: “grand experiment” versus “formerly known.” If you begin the paragraph with “America is dead,” the tedium of the meeting and the nested numbers read as entirely tragic throughout, rather than letting the mundanity accrete and then detonate. This is, in short, if you haven’t read it, essentially the entire plot of American Skyway in miniature, in a single sentence.
In American Skyway, the U.S. has fractured into four successor states that all share a space elevator anchored in Kansas. This space elevator keeps all four economies functioning, and the ratification meeting described in the opening is held quarterly to keep the treaty up-to-date. Our intrepid, isolated hero is the only one paying close enough attention through the haze of routine to notice important details in the seemingly small amendments made by the California delegation, all of which grant the head of the rotational defense force “unilateral decision-making on force deployment and munitions storage.” He also notices the delegation bringing in a number of explosives-laden trucks. His objections to the proposed amendment’s buried implications are overruled. The accords pass. Everyone drives home. As Mark drives away, he looks back at the elevator behind him, just in time to see it erupt as a “small, sickly blue blossom slowly spread[s] across the upper atmosphere.”
The story is found (in miniature) entirely in the form, tone, and content of the second sentence. The surprise of the dead United States that appends the sentence mirrors the explosive ending of the story, but the tensions through which that explosion emerges also saturate the text. The oxymorons and irony nested in numbers that propel the sentence’s language act as a formal version of the Californian subterfuge. Meaning is buried in a cascade of routine, minutiae, and bureaucracy. The “desperate combat” and “looming spectre” which at first appear to be satirically overwrought are actually wholly accurate descriptions of what’s happening.
This is a clear ductus for protocol fiction: allow a protocol’s buried contradictions to accumulate until they become an event.
Protocol fiction has been quite good at exploring the failure space of protocols, and this is a well-trodden ductus for a reason. Armstrong’s story is one of the best examples of it we have. This is a valuable vector for the genre, but one of several. What is still being built, in my opinion, is a method for using these nascent techniques to invert or complicate a straightforward plotting that culminates in a dramatization of failure. What does protocol fiction without an explosion look like?
Or to put the question in this essay’s language: moving forward, what kind of associative, corrective, and accretive details can the genre use? One promising vector can be found in the Institute’s New Nature paradigm, a view of the world where “regimes of reality [are] governed by technologically mediated laws that are nearly as inviolable, immutable, and persistent as those of nature.” I believe this will mean a play between nature and technological imagery (the way Armstrong plays with mock-epic and bureaucratic language) – the katydids of Jackson and the cyberswarms of Gibson finding novel ways to bounce off each other.
It will require thinking through which details protocol fiction reveals and obscures, and in what order.
A lot of science fiction has involved using the knowable mechanisms of empiricism and science to reveal/explicate impossibly strange results: time travel, space colonization, alien intelligences. Think of so-called Golden Age science fiction. Asimov’s Three Laws of Robotics are the clearest example of this mechanism: the stories literally start with a comprehensible schema of rules that govern robotics behavior, then walk readers through estranged results of these rules – robotic religions and seemingly impossible murders. Godwin opens his The Cold Equations with regulations, mass ratios, and engineering constraints, which propel the speculative strangeness of the work’s brutal results. Clarke’s The Fountains of Paradise presents readers with a space elevator rooted in tensile strengths, permits, and data. Known conditions (behavioral rules, engineering constraints, material/administrative constraints) move toward spectacular and strange worlds. The estrangement is downstream of the familiar.
New Wave science fiction is considered to be a break from this mechanism, but I think it is actually a relocation, rather than a reversal. Ballard’s “inner space“ expands the “knowable mechanisms” to include things like psychology, myth, media, and (sub)urban designs, from which strangeness emerges. Even a novel like Delany’s Dhalgren, which completely eschews mechanism, locates the strangeness in outcomes – an ever-changing city layout, two moons, a fully dislocated self.
It’s true that many of Stanislaw Lem’s novels, and the Strugatsky brothers’ Roadside Picnic, do explore truly ontologically unsettled mechanisms (the Zone, Lem’s ocean), and then render the understandable outcomes that emerge – economics, theorizing, technologies. However, Lem and the Strugatsky brothers both use the literal – extraterrestrial – alien to achieve this. The unknowability is external. This creates a distance from the ontological instability these objects create. When a system is fundamentally alien, a reader’s corrections are experienced as “well, this emerged from elsewhere, of course it is not sensible.” Obviously, these can still be deeply effective and vitally important for the genre, but they stop short of what I think science fiction can become. What happens when we locate instability as emerging from human, authored, and once-understood systems?
It’s my contention that a more contemporary science fiction will invert the strange outcomes × legible mechanisms engine. Strange human mechanisms (and the work here is dramatizing these mechanisms’ strangeness) will be explicated through a suite of understandable outcomes: distributed rules that are impossible for any single person to hold the history of, machine-generated decisions that operate via complex “black box” algorithms we can’t understand. Protocols that work even when no one knows why.
Classical tendency:
KNOWN RULE → STRANGE WORLD
Protocol fiction opportunity:
KNOWN WORLD → STRANGE RULE
We have a possible model for this, and, surprise surprise, I think it’s the very story we’ve been using: Poe’s The Pit and the Pendulum.
When Poe’s narrator wakes up strapped to the torture rack, Father Time above him, consider the sequence of events that actually occurs. He looks. He looks up. He takes in some greasy food. He lifts his head and looks again. He touches his bandage. There’s hardly any action here. Certainly no explosions, or even dramatic state changes of any kind. And yet, this is a propulsive bit of fiction. What is carrying, conducting the reader in such a dramatic way?
The corrections – the ductus – operate via the narrator’s updating model of the mechanism. What’s more, Poe very skillfully moves this on a schedule. First, we get an inventory of the room – all of which will be vital to the narrator’s eventual escape, but none of which register as such immediately:
I now lay upon my back, and at full length, on a species of low framework of wood. To this I was securely bound by a long strap resembling a surcingle. It passed in many convolutions about my limbs and body, leaving at liberty only my head, and my left arm to such extent that I could, by dint of much exertion, supply myself with food from an earthen dish which lay by my side on the floor. I saw, to my horror, that the pitcher had been removed. I say to my horror; for I was consumed with intolerable thirst. This thirst it appeared to be the design of my persecutors to stimulate: for the food in the dish was meat pungently seasoned.
The inventory: a strap, an arm, food, and a rule.
If protocol fiction is a genre of strange rules, then focusing on the rule is helpful for building out some techniques. The rule here is that the narrator can eat (a salty dinner) but cannot drink – there’s no pitcher. Immediately, the narrator begins to infer the intent behind this. He speculates that there is a designed cruelty here: a salty meal but no water. This isn’t a fact but an interpretation, perhaps a hypothesis about the logic of his situation. This prompts a reader to make a correction. They’ve moved from an image of a thirsty man to an image of a man inside a logic designed to make him thirsty.
From there, the narrator observes the ceiling. Recall that Father Time appears to the narrator as a painting at first. Then, both narrator and reader are corrected: “I fancied that I saw it in motion.” It’s a machine. From here, corrections accumulate. When he looks up later, he realizes it’s not just a machine, because the sweep of the scythe changes – it grows wider and gets closer. It is descending toward him.
… what mainly disturbed me was the idea that had perceptibly descended. I now observed – with what horror it is needless to say – that its nether extremity was formed of a crescent of glittering steel, about a foot in length from horn to horn; the horns upward, and the under edge evidently as keen as that of a razor.
Each of the descriptive details emerges from an updated understanding of the machine. It’s not just an ambient movement, it’s a machine that is aimed at him, specifically. It’s not so much that the reality of the room has shifted, it’s that the purpose and logic governing the room has crystallized.
Poe pushes this even further moments later:
The vibration of the pendulum was at right angles to my length. I saw that the crescent was designed to cross the region of the heart.
It’s not simply aimed at him in some nebulous way. No, with horror, he realizes the extent and specificity of the machine’s purpose. It will fall and swipe its way through his entire body, starting directly atop his heart. The emergence of this knowledge doesn’t come from interfacing with the designer of the system, not from finding some secret blueprint or assessing the character of the men who put him here. The corrections here amplify the horror of the story, more so because they happen in the absence of the designers of the system and emerge from a character (and, by extension, us readers) correcting their understanding of the world. The horror is the slow reveal of the obscured logic and purpose of the situation.
This narrative tension can only hold for so long, though. There’s a limit. Once we, along with the narrator, know what will happen; once the model is “complete,” something has to change for the narrative to escalate and continue. The story must find new areas within which to deploy its corrective engine. Poe’s solution here is particularly instructive.
The narrator watches the blade descend, confronts his situation, and waits for his fate. In a kind of boredom, he mindlessly turns to the side and sees a number of rats have emerged, drawn to the scent of the meal he was fed. His attention soon returns to the blade that’s slowly lowering and to the ingenuity of his captors who designed this situation.
All of this is Poe planting and seeding the eventual payoff of this section of the story. Jackson used imagery to affix narrative and thematic weight to description – putting the birds and insects first. Armstrong seeded for detonation and “reveal” by holding “formerly known” until the end. Poe uses a third kind of reveal here: the details that he seeded earlier in the passage as something seemingly inert that become deeply relevant paragraphs later. This is, I think, quite valuable for writing propulsively about rules. In addition to the mood that Poe’s imagery and sequencing evoke, there is the effect of leaving an apparatus in “plain view” to both the narrator and reader, leaving it seemingly alone as window dressing, and then revealing that this apparatus is actually pivotal for completing the system or model.
Out of the boredom and exhaustion, Poe’s narrator “for the first time during many hours – or perhaps days” thinks. He begins to try to find a way out of the blade’s path. Finally, he remembers the rats, his free elbow, and the food.
None of this information is new to the narrator or the reader. The rats, the food, the free elbow, it’s all on the page already. The “correction” isn’t novelty, it’s instrumental and combinatory. He simply thinks to use all four of these realities simultaneously: he rubs the food on his restraints and rolls free as the rats chew through them.
Nor had I erred in my calculations – I at length felt that I was free. The surcingle hung in ribands from my body [...] I slid from the embrace of the bandage and beyond the reach of the scimitar. For the moment, at least, I was free.
He emerges, safe, rescued by the very components of the system that he had viewed as a designed prison moments earlier.
This sequence reveals one path for the ductus of a non-event. A stretch of time in which the primary movement of the story is the reader’s model of the rules (alongside the narrator’s) updating, correcting, hypothesizing, and then updating again. The mechanism itself becomes the vehicle for the climax. The initial reading of the salted meat as cruelty transforms into an instrument of escape. This occurs without the properties of the meat changing at all. The corrective force of a moment like this is distinct from a “sharpening image,” in the traditionally pictorial sense. Instead, this is a functional correction. The model of the world is updated, but not via its material, but instead through its capacity and logic.
Take three elements from Poe’s ending:
Food: starts as torment, becomes bait.
Rat: starts as ambient and verminous, becomes instrument.
Free arm: starts as simple allowance, becomes interface for freedom.
Objects don’t change, their function inside the model does.
The techniques available to protocol fiction in large part already exist – this story is from 1842, far before any formalized science fiction genre emerged. The ductus-construction techniques exist already, what’s needed is applying them to novel technologies and logics – to protocols and science fiction. Poe’s narrator is trapped by a personed institution (even if those people are present through their absence in the story).
What’s novel is that we live within mechanisms that are distributed, disauthored systems – ones that were at one point authored that have become so evolved or diffused that they no longer function as such. We encounter these primarily through outputs, rather than design. We don’t need aliens to interface with these systems, but we do need ductus that can lead us through compelling stories about them. The crucial break between Poe and the future of protocol fiction lies in the designed versus emergent distinction, and whether the techniques used by Poe can be successfully wielded within narratives about diffused systems. With Poe’s instrumental turn, we have a promising possible system for protocol fiction. In fact, I’d argue that Poe’s method might work even better in fully ontologically destabilized systems, where the property of the meat remains unchanged, but the capacity for characters to use it is opened even further. Recombination in truly opaque systems is the only mode afforded to characters. What happens when we play with that even more?
So, to answer the question of how to dramatize non-events: The dynamism of the non-event can emerge from rendering the strangeness of the rules (the protocols) that shape the fictional world. This means moving some of the corrective momentum of the prose – the pace and places with which a reader’s image is corrected over the course of a story – away from the results and onto the rules themselves. The ductus moves a reader from outcomes that are legible into the darkened room of obscured and estranged governing logics. The reader’s model of the protocol which produced those outcomes gets corrected over time. The dynamism of non-events lives there. What accretes, word-by-word, is a model of the protocol itself.
We just have to remember, when it comes to fiction, worlds are built one word at a time.
Jamverse Contest Winners!
The winner of the first Jamverse contest is Second Coat by Spencer Norwick. Second Coat is a steganographic communication protocol in the city of Mayaford. The artifact combines elements of Zoothesia and Stockton Chronicles.
Four other artifacts that we loved and awarded are:
This was the first fiction contest in which we sought artifacts set within existing story universes rather than fully developed stories. While reading through the entries, we learned that the best artifacts were fractal microcosms of a larger story that also revealed traffic jams in the universe. They used storytelling techniques to place the artifact in the world and we could see the artifact fitting into a fully developed story.
Looking at Spencer’s Second Coat through an Orson Scott Card MICE lens, it’s clear that it is set in the milieu of Mayaford – the artifact introduces a new idea (communication through residues left behind by city workers). The traffic jam emerging in the world is the graffiti subculture, armed with kappala halos, meeting the bureaucratic protocols of the city workers of Mayaford.
Thank you to everyone who participated in the first Jamverse contest. It’s great to see the variety of artifacts that have been created. It also gave us more insight into what makes a good artifact. We’re very interested in the use and repetition of these within stories since we experience protocols through day-to-day, artifact-shaped objects like notes, tools, maps, and apps.
We’d love more such artifacts to exist in the Jamverse, and if you decide to contribute one, these five have set the bar.
Dive into the stories and artifacts, and see where inspiration takes you!
