Part One: The Chairman of the Rad - Bruce Sterling

I'll tell you a dark secret about Bruce Sterling: if he had been of an earlier generation, he'd have been a Futurian. He would have been a card carrying member of that combination science fiction fan club and writers' incubator that was so important to the future of the field. He would have been a Futurian founding father like Damon Knight and Isaac Asimov and A. E. Van Vogt -- at least for awhile. Unlike nowadays -- when he appears, eerily articulate, as a glassy-smooth sharp-dressed commentator on CNN and The Learning Channel -- back then he'd have been more or less like the other seminal Futurians, at first: gesticulating wildly, spraying spittle while stammering out titanic ideas. But Bruce is an evolver. He would have soon turned the powerful suction of his perceptions outward, beyond the technophilic, space-fetishistic horizon, and taken in the rest of the world: he would have absorbed the Angry Young Man-thing, the proto-beats like Gertrude Stein, the Italian Futurists, the surrealists, the radical political theorists of the time, and he'd have said: "Science fiction could be so much more!" The guys with tape holding their horn-rims together, wiping spit off their chins, would look at him owlishly and back away. And he'd then scowl and shrug and start on Sci-Cubism or something. "Sci-Cubism is science fiction cubed," the imaginary early-middle 20th century Sterling would write, "mutliplied by all the factors to which it has so far been blinded by its own glare; by its stunting myopia." Fanzine writers would've excoriated him -- and he'd have responded with -- say in some progressive zine maybe called "Truth In Hell", some sort of mimeographed broadsheet -- which would generate both outrage and a fervent following...

The truth is, Sterling is at heart a Futurian. He is a born cognitive-intuitive prophet (as opposed to a mystical prophet), and he has an insatiable hunger for the sense of wonder. He refines that drug, the sense of wonder, out of the raw stuff of the indeterminate future.

His lust for the future is kind of disgusting at times, really. You can almost see him snorting with desire for it. The guy's got a hard-on for the future. It's almost sick. The dude is illin'.

No, a sci-fi nerd he may be on one level, but because he's cursed with both genius and vision, the Futurians wouldn't have been enough for him. He is, you see, a guy of grand scope and capability, something which has always excited in me a teeth-grinding envy.

Remember real correspondence? Remember letters?

Before we got caught up making money and spending quality time with kids and playing computer games and surfing Internets and becoming addicted to the compressive convenience of email?

I was looking at some old letters (typed directly onto actual paper!) from Sterling, circa early-mid '80s. In one he describes trying to talk a reluctant William Gibson into buying one of these new "word processor" things, like he has. Bruce got one, of course, probably before he'd paid the rent.

His tone in the letters is like he is in person: challenging, brisk, tautly discursive, and often quite ruthless. Yet he was kind to me, encouraging me, though I think I was the older writer. I would write him tremulously insecure letters, childishly expecting wealth and fame overnight for my supposed literary gifts to the world, and Bruce would tell me that my time would come, and who cares what the science fiction world thinks...

But he also told me to stop whining. He'd tell me sharply and he'd tell me clearly. I was pretty young (Bruce was always way more mature than the rest of us, in certain ways) and I needed the wake-up calls (still do) and he knew it.

"...writers," he said, "are destined to be ruthlessly winnowed out by pitiless, long-term selective pressure."

You can see this view of life in general -- along with his insanely ambitious scope -- in all his books, from INVOLUTION OCEAN, and THE ARTIFICIAL KID (wherein evolution is seen both as a cruel taskmaster and as a sort of existential redeemer), up through HOLY FIRE: life is a winnowing, and the universe is ruthless. Some of this view may derive from having lost his mother and sister in a plane crash, when he was young. Some of it may have come from the boyhood time he spent in India, where his father had employment: India's grinding poverty sometimes speaks eloquently of survival of the fittest. But in the same works there is always a vision of transcendance, a sense that the universe, though harsh and inscrutable, is not meaningless, and that the destiny of man has magnificence about it. In that sense Bruce has always had a glimmer of the 19th century Romantic about his work.

In his letters, way back when, Sterling would toss off remarks like this: "I did read the Roderick Jensen article in AMERICAN SCIENTIST on Classical Chaos. In fact I'm building up a substantial file on this topic and the related topics of complex dynamic systems, computer graphics, and cellular automata. I don't understand it yet but I do sense its importance. I don't think it has much to do with evolutionary theory, though its implications seem so fuzzy, so all encompassing, that I suspect chaos theory could be applied to almost anything. It strikes me as being a metaphor for the information age in much the same way that clocks and steam engines were universal metaphors for the times of Newton and Darwin. I don't think, as Rucker pretends to in his latest non-fic book MIND TOOLS, that the universe is a cellular automaton -- anymore than the universe was a clock or a steam engine. But the imagery is already in the zeitgeist and the quality of the buzzwords is maximum primo..."

The strange thing is, that's often the way he talks in person...

And yes, we talked about cyberpunk. "The sort of recognition we have now, is nothing compared to what it might be if we were really in control of our topics and material. People hunger for this stuff, they sense its importance, its value..."

If there was, in those days, a bit of Lord Byron about Bruce there was also a fair amount of Mao Tse Tung. Not that he was even faintly a Communist -- but he was and is a gleefully radical visionary, and he talked both jokingly and quite seriously, at once, about our "ideological axis" and the Movement (in science fiction), and was delighted when we began teasingly calling him "Chairman Bruce."

Bruce is opinionated, you say? Even noisily so? A bit overbearing at times? Is it so?

Does the Pope launder mafia money? You bet. Let's face it, Bruce has a messiahnic streak, he can talk the ontological pants off you; he's a one-man soundbite factory and he's a charismatic son of a bitch and, yes, the guy could have been a successful politician (God help us) or cult leader if he'd wanted to. Luckily for the world, he chose the field of futurism.

Make no mistake: his status is not simply "famous science fiction writer". Despite brilliant landmark books like SCHISMATRIX and ISLANDS IN THE NET and HEAVY WEATHER and GLOBALHEAD and CRYSTAL EXPRESS and HOLY FIRE -- books that will be, in Gibson's words (in a letter to me after he read SCHISMATRIX), "ripped off by other science fiction writers for their ideas, for decades to come" -- despite all that, the world perceives him increasingly as another, hipper Alvin Toffler. He's practically a guru over at Wired Magazine, and he delivered killer soundbites on a recent TV special about infowar. He's invited to speak about computer crime and internet freedom all over the civilized world and in some places only marginally civilized.

Indeed, Bruce is often jetting around around the globe. His lifestyle could become pretty heady, and maybe has, once or twice, but because he married Nancy, who's just as smart as he is (so he knows he can't get away with anything), and twice as steady, he always makes it safely back to the home he's built in his beloved Austin.

His popularity in Russia and other distant overseas venues may obtain from his own personification of the GLOBALHEAD concept. While there's a lot of the Texan in Bruce, the motherfucker has always thought globally. He has a gift for getting into the mindsets of other cultures, and subcultures. Way before World Beat was around, Bruce knew that the world would be united by the media, what we now call the internet, and he knew that it would be a marvelous paradox: both a unity and a bubbling pot of ever-emerging diversity. And he's championed that diversity, that plurality, that unity, all along.

Of course many SF writers saw a certain big dichotomy coming (still fully to manifest itself), but it was Bruce Sterling who articulated the dilemma so eloquently in the Shaper-Mech stories. And he predicted the use of viruses deliberately applied as medical tools long before other science fiction writers. Many of his predictions about bioengineering are, to put it simply, coming true.

The Stapledonian scope of a Bruce Sterling novel comes at you like that holy-grail of a storm his Storm Troupers pursued in HEAVY WEATHER -- too big to deal with sometimes, world-scaled, yet having direct impact on individuals: you'd better hold onto that particular lamp post, pal, or the wind will sweep you away. He evokes the big picture and then shows us just how it breaks up into the interacting pixels of everyday life.

Bruce Sterling's current work in progress is DISTRACTION, his biggest novel yet, encompassing those strange bedfellows, science and politics. The book is bound to be conceptually groundbreaking: Bruce has always created lush fields of paradigms that other writers will be content to merely graze upon.

It's Bruce's world...but because he loves diversity, he lets us live there too.