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Bruce Sterling

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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 defined the cyberpunk genre. He writes Catscan, for the SF Eye. 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.

Bruce Sterling at the Ars Electronica Festival

He is married to Serbian author and film-maker Jasmina Tesanovic.[1]

Writings

Sterling is, along with William Gibson, Tom Maddox, 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 is also one of the first organizers of Turkey City Writer's Workshop. He won Hugo Awards for the novelette "Bicycle Repairman" and and the novella "Talamakan".

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 a science-fictional pastiche of Moby-Dick by Herman Melville.

In 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.

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

In his hometown of Austin, Texas, the author is known for an annual Christmas yard party that features digital art.

In the 1980s, Sterling edited a series of science fiction newsletters called Cheap Truth, under the alias of Vincent Omniaveritas.

He has been the inspiration for two 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 games 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 movement without his perceived self-righteousness of the current Green movement. He called his proposed design movement the Viridian movement, to signify its desire for high-tech, stylish, and ecologically sound design. The Viridian Design home page, including Sterling's Viridian Manifesto, is at http://www.viridiandesign.org, and helped to spawn the popular "bright green" environmental weblog WorldChanging, where many of original members of the Viridian Movement blog, including sometimes Sterling himself.

Novels

Short Story collections (and stories they contain)

  • Mirrorshades: A Cyberpunk Anthology (1986) - defining cyberpunk short story collection, edited by Bruce Sterling
  • Crystal Express (1989) - a collection of short stories, including several set in the Shaper/Mechanist universe
  • 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)
    • Maneki Neko
    • Big Jelly (with Rudy Rucker)
    • The Littlest Jackal
    • Sacred Cow
    • Deep Eddy
    • Bicycle Repairman
    • Taklamakan

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. Spectra Books, ISBN 055356370X. 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.
  • 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 0262693267.


 
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