Bruce Sterling is an author, journalist, critic and a contributing editor of Wired magazine. Best known for his ten science fiction novels, he also writes short stories, book reviews, design criticism, opinion columns and introductions to books by authors ranging from Ernst Jünger to Jules Verne. His non-fiction works include The Hacker Crackdown: Law and Disorder on the Electronic Frontier (1992), Tomorrow Now: Envisioning the Next Fifty Years (2003) and Shaping Things (2005).
If poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world, science fiction writers are its court jesters. We are Wise Fools who can leap, caper, utter prophecies, and scratch ourselves in public. We can play with Big Ideas because the garish motley of our pulp origins make us seem harmless.
One of the great beauties of politics as an art form was its lack of restriction to merely standard forms of realism.
If you don’t have a sense of wonder it’s like you’re dead inside. But your sense of wonder can be used to trick you. You can have a sense of wonder over a thing that’s basically a conjurer’s trick, or a con job, or a rip-off.
«“Everybody is in trouble with my dad. My dad only sort of gets the Internet. My dad started looking up all his old enemies on Facebook. My dad picks big flamewar fights. It’s like my dad just discovered that people can talk about politics without his permission. Facebook is like his new drug, he’s getting all sweaty and manic. . . Farfalla, is Facebook the work of the Devil? Google is ‘not evil,’ but nobody ever said that Facebook was ‘not evil. ’”»,«Brixie wasn’t talking to him, or listening to him. Nothing like that at all. Brixie was off in her own world, flaming away like a blowtorch. She was such an Internet fiend that she had never learned any other way to behave. »,«I love both her and them. I have come to understand that she is what they are. A woman accepts a man, expecting that he will change. A man takes a woman, expecting that she will never change. They are both disappointed. Yet within this very disappointment is the primal source of all new men and all new women»,Death defeats us in the end. But our children are our revenge against it.
My idea of an amusement park story is getting adventurers to go tour environmental disaster areas. After all, if the entire Great Barrier Reef gets killed, which seems like an extremely lively possibility, what are you going to do with all that rotting limestone?,I do have two data identities. I have my name, Bruce Sterling, which is my public name under which I write novels. I also have my other name, which is my legal name under which I own property and vote. .
