Bruce Sterling

Bruce Sterling

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.

Quotes

• Obsolescence and death, the reign of the archaic, the abandoned, and the corny: Really, if you saw Windows 3.0 on the sidewalk outside the building, would you bend over and pick it up?!?
  • in the Long Now talk "The Singularity: Your Future as a Black Hole" (2004).

• As a philosophical problem, it comes down to a better way to engage with the passage of time; and I think we're getting close to one, because the imaginative loss of the future is becoming acute.
  The most effective political actors on the planet now are people who want to blow themselves up.
  These are people who really don't want to get out of the bed in the morning and face another unpredictable day.
  • in the Long Now talk "The Singularity: Your Future as a Black Hole" (2004).

• Tomorrow composts today.
  • in Shaping Things (2005).

• "Mashups [...] nobody's going to listen to mashups in another ten years. Mashups are novelty music. They're like "The Monster Mash." They have no musical staying power. You're pursuing a phantom there. It's bad music, I mean, it's not bad— it's a pastiche, it's like magazine collage— which can be good for what it is. But to pretend that that's like tremendous creative work— No! It's a tremendous creative power— and it can have a tremendous audience, but it's not tremendously good. And we need a little bit of aesthetic honesty in confronting things like this. Just because it's new, and people with laptops can do it, and get away with it, and find an audience for it, does not make it a real cultural advance. It's an epiphenomenon."
  • in SXSW 2007 Bruce Sterling Rant (2007).

• "There's no victory-condition for being human."
  • Slashdot Interview.

Short fiction

The Peak of Eternal Light (2012)

Quotes from the e-book edition of Edge of Infinity, edited by Jonathan Strahan, and published by Solaris ISBN 978-1-84997-460-8

• Clearly, Mother de Gupta dearly loved motherhood – mostly, for the chance that it offered her to boss around small, helpless people.

• Maybe we were forced to conform to that tradition, for the sake of futurity. But the truth is, fatherhood was good to me. Today, there’s a boy, eight years old, who depends on me for guidance in this world. So now I realise: life can’t be all about me. Me, and my own favourite things: interaction design, aesthetics, robotics, metaphysics... When you and I built a child, that forced me to realise how much this life matters!

• “But Dad... what if I just beat people up with my baton? Wouldn’t they have to do whatever I say?”
  Pitar laughed. “That’s been tried. It never works out well.”

• As tempers rose, a compromise was urged by certain moderates, whom everyone ignored.

Pictures from the Resurrection (2015)

Quote from the e-book edition of Meeting Infinity, edited by Jonathan Strahan, and published by Solaris ISBN 978-1-84997-922-1

• The Dark Age world had all kinds of potential issues that might bother Anita Atkinson: climate crisis, state collapse, financial ruin, mass extinction, catastrophic population dieback. None of those things bothered Anita, though, because she didn’t understand long words.

Islands in the Net (1988)

All page numbers from the mass market paperback edition published by Ace Books, ISBN 0-441-37423-9, 9th printing

Won the 1989 John W. Campbell Memorial Award and was nominated for the 1989 Hugo Award.

• The autumn sun shone brightly. It was still the same sun and the same clouds. The sun didn’t care about the landscape inside people’s heads.
  • Chapter 1 (p. 16)

• The Net was a lot like television, another former wonder of the age. The Net was a vast glass mirror. It reflected what it was shown. Mostly human banality.
  • Chapter 1 (p. 17)

• Centralized bureaucracies always protect the status quo. They don’t innovate. And it’s innovation that’s the real threat.
  • Chapter 2 (p. 47)

• Real life was where the baby was.
  • Chapter 4 (p. 97)

• Laura listened to their crude P. R. with sour amusement. They wouldn’t crank out this level of rhetoric unless they were trying to hide a real weakness, she thought.
  • Chapter 4 (p. 107)

• When the People march in one direction, it only hurts to ask awkward questions.
  • Chapter 4 (p. 109)

• Revolutions. New Orders. For Laura the words had the cobwebby taste of twentieth-century thinking. Visionary mass movements were all over the 1900s, and whenever they broke through, blood followed in buckets.
  • Chapter 4 (p. 109)

• You know what that is? That’s peasant technology, brother. It’s slash-and-burn agriculture. You know what that might do to what’s left of the planet’s tropical forests? It’ll make every straw-hat Brazilian into Paul Bunyan, that’s what. The most dangerous bio-tech in the world is a guy with a goat and an axe.
  • Chapter 4 (p. 121)

• Where there’s war, there’s whores.
  • Chapter 5 (p. 168)

• She’d read somewhere once that 90 percent of the world’s havoc was committed by men between fifteen and twenty-five.
  • Chapter 8 (p. 228)

• The world doesn’t give a shit how noble your motives are—it’ll roll right over you. That’s how it works.
  • Chapter 10 (p. 356)

• I’ll grant you good intentions, but intentions don’t count for much. Corruption—that’s what counts.
  • Chapter 10 (p. 365)

• You know when it really got bad here? When they tried to help. With medicine. And irrigation. They sank deep wells, with sweet, flowing water, and of course the nomads settled there. So instead of moving their herds on, leaving the pastures a chance to recover, they ate everything down to bare rock, for miles around every well. And the eight, nine children that African women have born from time immemorial—they all lived. It wasn’t that the world didn’t care. They struggled heroically, for generations, selflessly and nobly. To achieve an atrocity.
  • Chapter 10 (p. 365)

• Agriculture is the oldest and most vicious of humanity’s bio-technologies.
  • Chapter 11 (p. 389)

External links

• "Beyond the Beyond" Bruce Sterling's current weblog