Bruce Sterling

April Is Full of New Sci-Fi and Fantasy Books to Add to Your Spring Reading List

This month we’ve got teenage telekinetics, magical twins, shapeshifters, supernatural detectives, space adventures, palace intrigue, fantasy epics, monsters, and more—plus the first-ever YA fantasy novel by io9 co-founder Charlie Jane Anders. Read on! Local Star by Aimee Ogden This “polyamorous space opera” encompasses adventure and romance, as main character Triz fights off an invasion while…

Help the EFF Save the Future, by Reading Some Brand New Science Fiction!

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! The EFF just published a new book Pwning Tomorrow, featuring short fiction by Bruce Sterling, Rudy Rucker, Cory Doctorow, Annalee…

The Essential Cyberpunk Reading List

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. The Stars My Destination, by Alfred Bester This 1956 novel,…

MIT Just Put Out One of The Year’s Best Collections of Science Fiction

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. This upcoming issue features a pretty incredible group of authors: Paola Antonelli,…

Author Bruce Sterling Testified to Congress in 1993 as a Time Traveler From 2015

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. Sterling was testifying about funding for the National Research and Education Network (NREN) which was a program to complement the backbone network overseen by the National…

Vice Magazine Just Started Publishing Science Fiction Online

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 viral. Terraform will post…

We Need A New Literary Movement With A Slightly Ludicrous Name

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 zany…

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. 96.7 percent of Crimeans can’t be wrong: What a (likely…

Sterling and Lebkowsky on why the world is in a state of WTF

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. Scifi…

Bruce Sterling Thinks Artificial Intelligence Has Jumped the Shark

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 intelligence — or lack thereof — are…

Bruce Sterling’s Advice for New Science Fiction Authors: “Trying to ace your way through collapsing industries is a drag”

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 in 2013,…

Paolo Bacigalupi: Science fiction “thrives at uncertainty points, when questions about our future are unanswered”

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…

Science fiction futures ruled by the popular kids

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 dystopia? We…

Great Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers Who Never Wrote Sequels or Trilogies

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. Here are some of the greatest writers in the genre who never wrote sequels to their work.…

The Death of Philip K. Dick and the Birth of Cyberpunk

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 autobiography, Nested Scrolls,…

How to Print Keys to Any Lock

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? Using a specialized CAD program and the manufacturers’ various pin depth specifications, he was able to generate functioning keys…

Bruce Sterling on Wikileaks and the future of dissidents

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. Over on the Webstock site, Sterling writes: US diplomats used to know what to do with dissidents in other…

Rudy Rucker and Bruce Sterling’s twisted future Hollywood story will provide you with endless catch-phrases

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.” This isn’t the first collaboration between Rucker and Sterling — they also wrote “Colliding Branes,”…

Get caught up on the Sidewise nominees for best alternate history stories

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. The Sidewise Awards have two categories: long form, for works longer than sixty-thousand words, and short…

Great Moments in Alternate History: Charles Babbage

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. Welcome to Great Moments in Alternate History, a column that covers all the great moments in history…