Bruce Sterling

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Bruce Sterling
File:Bruce Sterling sn-ed.jpg Bruce Sterling, February 2008
Born	April 14, 1954 (1954-04-14)
Pen name	Vincent Omniaveritas (in fanzine Cheap Truth)
Occupation	Writer, speaker, futurist, design instructor
Nationality	American
Writing period	1970s-present
Genres	Science fiction
Subjects	Cyberpunk
Literary movement	Cyberpunk/postcyberpunk
Influences J. G. Ballard, Alfred Bester, Samuel Delany, Chad Oliver
Influenced Charles Stross, Alastair Reynolds
Official website

Michael Bruce Sterling (born April 14, 1954) is an American science fiction author, best known for his novels and his seminal work on the Mirrorshades anthology, which helped define the cyberpunk genre.

Writings

Sterling is, along with William Gibson, Rudy Rucker, John Shirley, Lewis Shiner, and Pat Cadigan, one of the founders of the cyberpunk movement in science fiction, as well as its chief ideological promulgator, and one whose polemics on the topic earned him the nickname "Chairman Bruce". He was also one of the first organizers of the Turkey City Writer's Workshop, and is a frequent attendee at the Sycamore Hill Writer's Workshop. He won Hugo Awards for the novelette "Bicycle Repairman" and the novella "Taklamakan".

His first novel, Involution Ocean, published in 1977, features the world Nullaqua where all the atmosphere is contained in a single, miles-deep crater; the story concerns a ship sailing on the ocean of dust at the bottom, which hunts creatures called dustwhales that live beneath the surface. It is partially a science-fictional pastiche of Moby-Dick by Herman Melville.

From the late 1970s onwards, Sterling wrote a series of stories set in the Shaper/Mechanist universe: the solar system is colonised, with two major warring factions. The Mechanists use a great deal of computer-based mechanical technologies; the Shapers do genetic engineering on a massive scale. The situation is complicated by the eventual contact with alien civilizations; humanity eventually splits into many subspecies, with the implication that many of these effectively vanish from the galaxy, reminiscent of The Singularity in the works of Vernor Vinge. The Shaper/Mechanist stories can be found in the collection Crystal Express and the collection Schismatrix Plus, which contains the original novel Schismatrix and all of the stories set in the Shaper/Mechanist universe. Alastair Reynolds identified Schismatrix and the other Shaper/Mechanist stories as one of the greatest influences on his own work.

File:Bruce Sterling (Open Cultures) cropped.jpg

Bruce Sterling at the Open Cultures conference (5 June 2003)

In the 1980s, Sterling edited the science fiction critical fanzine Cheap Truth, under the alias of Vincent Omniaveritas. He wrote a column called Catscan, for the now-defunct science fiction critical magazine, SF Eye.

He recently contributed a chapter to Sound Unbound: Sampling Digital Music and Culture (The MIT Press, 2008) edited by Paul D. Miller a.k.a. DJ Spooky.

Projects

He has been the instigator of three projects which can be found on the Web -

• The Dead Media Project - A collection of "research notes" on dead media technologies, from Incan quipus, through Victorian phenakistoscopes, to the departed video game and home computers of the 1980s. The Project's homepage, including Sterling's original Dead Media Manifesto can be found at http://www.deadmedia.org
• The Viridian Design Movement - his attempt to create a "green" design movement focused on high-tech, stylish, and ecologically sound design. The Viridian Design home page, including Sterling's Viridian Manifesto and all of his Viridian Notes, is managed by Jon Lebkowsky at http://www.viridiandesign.org. The Viridian Movement helped to spawn the popular "bright green" environmental weblog Worldchanging. WorldChanging contributors include many of the original members of the Viridian "curia".
• Embrace the Decay - a web-only art piece commissioned by the LA Museum of Contemporary Art in 2003. Incorporating contributions solicited through The Viridian Design 'movement', Embrace the Decay was the most visited piece/page at LA MOCA's Digital Gallery, and included contributions from Jared Tarbell of levitated.net and co-author of several books on advanced Flash programming, and Monty Zukowski, creator of the winning 'decay algorithm' sponsored by Bruce.

Neologisms

Sterling has a habit of coining neologisms to describe things which he believes will be common in the future, especially items which already exist in limited numbers.

• In the December 2005 issue of Wired magazine, Sterling coined the term buckyjunk. Buckyjunk refers to future, difficult-to-recycle consumer waste made of carbon nanotubes (aka buckytubes, based on buckyballs or buckminsterfullerene).
• In July 1989, in SF Eye #5, he was the first to use the word "slipstream" to refer to a type of speculative fiction between traditional science fiction and fantasy and mainstream literature.
• In December 1999 he coined the term "Wexelblat disaster", for a disaster caused when a natural disaster triggers a secondary, and more damaging, failure of human technology.
• In August 2004 he suggested a type of technological device (he called it "spime") that, through pervasive RFID and GPS tracking, can track its history of use and interact with the world.
• In the speech where he offered "spime", he noted that the term "blobject", with which he is sometimes credited, was passed on to him by industrial designer Karim Rashid. The term may originally have been coined by Steven Skov Holt.

Personal

File:Bruce Sterling at Robofest.jpg

Sterling at Robofest '94 (with mullet).

In childhood, Sterling spent several years in India, and today has a notable fondness for Bollywood films. In 2003 he was appointed Professor at the European Graduate School where he is teaching Summer Intensive Courses on media and design. In 2005, he became "visionary in residence" at Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, California. He lived in Belgrade with his second wife, Serbian author and film-maker Jasmina Tesanovic for several years. In September 2007 he moved to Turin, Italy. He also travels the world extensively giving speeches and attending conferences.

In his hometown of Austin, Texas, the author was known for throwing large South By Southwest parties up through 2005, and for participating in his block's annual Christmas lights display, to which Sterling added digital art.

Bibliography

Novels

• Involution Ocean (1977) - A science fiction version of Moby Dick, set in a deep crater filled with dust instead of water, featuring an impossible romance between the protagonist and an alien woman. The book was published as part of a series of books by new authors discovered by Harlan Ellison and was marketed as such.
• The Artificial Kid (1980) - A novel about a young street fighter who continuously films himself using remote controlled cameras.
• Schismatrix (1985) - The twenty third century solar system is divided among two human factions: the "Shapers" who are employing genetics and psychology, and the "Mechanists" who use computers and body prosthetics. The novel is narrated from the viewpoint of Abelard Lindsay, a brilliant diplomat who makes history many times throughout the story.
• Islands in the Net (1988) - a view of an early twenty first century world apparently peaceful with delocalised, networking corporations. The protagonist, swept up in events beyond her control, finds herself in the places off the net, from a datahaven in Grenada, to a Singapore under terrorist attack, and the poorest and most disaster-struck part of Africa.
• The Difference Engine (1990) (with William Gibson) - A steampunk alternate history novel set in a Victorian Great Britain in the throes of a steam-driven computer revolution.
• Heavy Weather (1994) - Follows high-tech storm chasers in the American midwest where greenhouse warming has made tornadoes far more energetic than the present day.
• Holy Fire (1996) - Set in a world of steadily increasing longevity (gerontocracy), a newly rejuvenated American woman drifts through the marginalised subculture of European young artists while dealing with the implications of posthumanism.
• Distraction (1998) - A master political strategist and a genius genetic researcher find love as they fight an insane Louisiana governor for control of a high-tech scientific facility in a post-collapse United States. Winner of the 2000 Arthur C. Clarke Award. US editions: ISBN 0-553-10484-5 (hardcover), ISBN 0-553-57639-9 (paperback).
• Zeitgeist (2000) - A girl group à la the Spice Girls tours the Middle East under the direction of trickster Leggy Starlitz. Explores a world in which postmodernism and deconstructionism were actually true in their postulation of reality as a malleable major consensus narrative.
• The Zenith Angle (2004) - A techno-thriller about a cyber-security expert who goes to work for the U.S. government fighting terrorism after 9/11.
• Kiosk (2007)
• The Caryatids (Forthcoming, February 2009)

Short story collections

• Mirrorshades: A Cyberpunk Anthology (1986) - defining cyberpunk short story collection, edited by Bruce Sterling; ISBN 0-441-53382-5
  • "The Gernsback Continuum" by William Gibson
  • "Snake-Eyes" by Tom Maddox
  • "Rock On" by Pat Cadigan
  • "Tales of Houdini" by Rudy Rucker
  • "400 Boys" by Marc Laidlaw
  • "Solstice" by James Patrick Kelly
  • "Petra" by Greg Bear
  • "Till Human Voices Wake Us" by Lewis Shiner
  • "Freezone" by John Shirley
  • "Stone Lives" by Paul Di Filippo
  • "Red Star, Winter Orbit" by Bruce Sterling, William Gibson
  • "Mozart in Mirrorshades" by Bruce Sterling, Lewis Shiner
• Crystal Express (1989) - a collection of short stories, including several set in the Shaper/Mechanist universe; ISBN 0-87054-158-7
  • "Swarm"
  • "Spider Rose"
  • "Cicada Queen"
  • "Sunken Gardens"
  • "Twenty Evocations"
  • "Green Days in Brunei"
  • "Spook"
  • "The Beautiful and the Sublime"
  • "Telliamed"
  • "The Little Magic Shop"
  • "Flowers of Edo"
  • "Dinner in Audoghast"
• Globalhead (1992, paperback 1994); ISBN 0-553-56281-9
  • "Our Neural Chernobyl"
  • "Storming the Cosmos"
  • "The Compassionate, the Digital"
  • "Jim and Irene"
  • "The Sword of Damocles"
  • "The Gulf Wars"
  • "The Shores of Bohemia"
  • "The Moral Bullet"
  • "The Unthinkable"
  • "We See Things Differently"
  • "Hollywood Kremlin"
  • "Are You for 86?"
  • "Dori Bangs"
• A Good Old-fashioned Future (1999); ISBN 1-85798-710-1
  • "Maneki Neko"
  • "Big Jelly" (with Rudy Rucker)
  • "The Littlest Jackal"
  • "Sacred Cow"
  • "Deep Eddy"
  • Bicycle Repairman"
  • "Taklamakan"
• Visionary in Residence (2006); ISBN 1-56025-841-1
  • "In Paradise"
  • "Luciferase"
  • "Homo Sapiens Declared Extinct"
  • "Ivory Tower"
  • "Message Found in a Bottle"
  • "The Growthing"
  • "User-Centric"
  • "Code"
  • "The Scab's Progress"
  • "Junk DNA"
  • "The Necropolis of Thebes"
  • "The Blemmye's Stratagem"
  • "The Denial"

Non-fiction

• The Hacker Crackdown: Law and Disorder on the Electronic Frontier (1992) - about the panic of law enforcers in the late 1980s about 'hackers' and the raid on Steve Jackson Games as part of Operation Sun Devil. Spectra Books, ISBN 0-553-56370-X. Reasoning that the book had a naturally time-limited commercial life, he has made the text of the book freely available via Project Gutenberg (HTML version).
• Tomorrow Now: Envisioning the next fifty years (2002) - a popular science approach on futurology, reflecting technology, politics and culture of the next 50 years. Readers of Sterling will recognize many issues from books like Zeitgeist, Distraction or Holy Fire. ISBN 0679463224
• Shaping Things (2005) is a "book about created objects", i.e. a lengthy essay about design, things and how we will move from the age of products and gizmos to the age of spimes (a Sterling neologism). The 150-pages book covers issues like "intelligent things" (spiked with RFID-tags), sustainability and "fabbing". MIT Press, ISBN 0-262-69326-7.

Awards

• Hayakawa Award "Taklamakan" Best Foreign Short Story (1999)

External links

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• Bruce Sterling at the Open Directory Project
• Closing talk by Bruce Sterling South by South West, March 13 2007, Austin Texas.
• Opening keynote speech at Ubicomp 2006 conference, Orange County, California. Bruce's speech begins at 0:10:20.
• Video Interview with Bruce Sterling, English language with German intro and subtitles
• Wired Blog : Beyond the beyond
• Video Lecture by Bruce Sterling, European Graduate School, Saas-fee, Switzerland 2006 about technologies such as RFID's.
• Reason Magazine Interview with Bruce Sterling
• Interview pour le site Actusf.com (in French)
• Archive of Catscan columns at EFF
• Talk at the Innovationsforum Interactiondesign, Germany 2007
• "Computer Entertainment Thirty-Five Years From Today", Flurb 6 (Fall-Winter 2008). Speech at the Austin Game Developers Conference.
• Opening Keynote at Lift08: "A look at 2008, the boring year ahead"
• Talk on "Spimes and the future of artifacts"
• Lift Asis 08 talk: "Mobiles and the urban poor"
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