The Electronic Frontier Foundation is out there fighting for civil liberties and privacy on the Internet and the digital world generally. And now, you can help support them—by reading a brand new science fiction book!
It’s now been over three decades since cyberpunk first exploded, and in that time we’ve seen gorgeous movies, read fascinating books, and seen dozens of offshoots like steampunk (and my new favorite, deco punk) develop. Here are the 21 cyberpunk books you absolutely must read.
MIT’s Technology Review has a bit of a secret: just about every year, they put together a science fiction edition titled Twelve Tomorrows. It’s one of the best collections of short science fiction out there, and you can now preorder the upcoming issue.
In 1993, sci-fi author Bruce Sterling testified in front of a House subcommittee about the future of the internet — specifically, what “the Net” would look like in 2015.
Another new science fiction magazine has just joined the internet. Vice Magazine, which was already writing about science fiction via its excellent Motherboard site, has launched a SF mag called Terraform, with stories by Cory Doctorow and Bruce Sterling. But the interesting part is, they want to see more fiction go…
When I first obsessed about the idea of being a science-fiction writer, I was captivated by the Slipstream movement, which aimed to bust genre boundaries and shatter expectations. And reading about 1975's science fiction boom makes you realize how great the New Wave was. So maybe it's time for a new movement with a…
A peek at Crimea's controversial election day, Philly widens freeways by mistake, and does Austin, Texas, have a drinking problem? Plus, the incredible story behind Rio's most famous monument, and the truth about earthquakes in L.A. Come along with us on this week's Urban Reads.
As is tradition, Bruce Sterling and Jon Lebkowsky have kickstarted the new year by discussing the current state of the world. This year's edition is as insightful and acerbic as ever, touching upon such topics as the NSA, the emergence of "android demigod" Google, and why it's so hard to write scifi these days.
Bruce Sterling wrote influential works like Schismatrix and Islands in the Net, plus he practically invented cyberpunk (with all due respect, of course, to William Gibson and Rudy Rucker). We are serious fans of his work. And if his recent comments about the potential risks of greater-than-human artificial…
There's a must-read interview with legendary Cyberpunk author Bruce Sterling over at FortyKey, where Cory Doctorow, Paul Di Filippo and a bunch of other people ask him questions about writing and the future. In particular, Di Filippo asks him what his strategy would be for breaking in as a new science fiction writer…
Wind-Up Girl author Paolo Bacigalupi's essay over at Wired is both a must read and a quick read. The essay is mostly about how Cyberpunk saved science fiction by shaking up the complacent view of the future that had dominated for decades — but then he broadens out into a more general theory of science fiction as a…
Some people's futures are determined by popular vote: American Idol contestants, class presidents, and people who want to get gay married in California. But what if every aspect of our lives was determined by our reputation and popularity? Would our futures be better, or would the tyranny of the popular spin us into…
Sometimes it seems like science fiction, and especially fantasy, are genres that lend themselves exclusively to trilogies and long-running series. But some of the greatest writers in speculative fiction have only written standalone novels, not series or trilogies.
Rudy Rucker was the first author to win the Philip K. Dick Award, right after Dick's death in 1982. Around that time, Rucker was becoming aware of the new "Cyberpunk" movement and meeting the rebellious authors who were reimagining the union of humans and computers. In this exclusive excerpt from Rucker's new…
Apple software engineer Nirav Patel wanted to create something useful with his 3D printer, so he designed a system that generates any key from any lock from any manufacturer using just the lock code. Lol, what?
Bruce Sterling is known as a prescient futurist, a brilliant science fiction author, and the author of a seminal history of hacking called The Hacker Crackdown. Now he's published a manifesto about why Wikileaks was inevitable.
You might think there's a limit to how weird Rudy Rucker or Bruce Sterling can get, but when they team up, their combined weirdness limit rises exponentially. Witness their strange, unsettling — and highly quotable — story "Good Night, Moon."
The finalists for the 2009 Sidewise Awards, honoring the best in alternate history, have been announced. And just in case the version of you in this universe hasn't already read the novel and five short stories, here's your primer.
In real life, Charles Babbage was a relatively unknown inventor who pioneered early computers. In modern alternate reality fiction, Babbage is a mad genius and steampunk icon. Here are some authors who resurrected Babbage's career a century later.
We can't wait until our brains are hardwired into cybernests, so we can fully appreciate the hilariousness of SpaceCollective's guide to skepticism about the Singularity. My fave part: This illustration, explaining how "extreme shit going down" leads to The Future.
