Bruce Sterling Interview
First, tell me a little in brief about Kiosk your Nebula nominated work - the why and what. Why did you write it and what do you hope readers will take from it?
I wrote that story in Belgrade after I’d become aware of how Belgrade people behave. When I write stories set in other cultures, as I often do, I try to set myself a challenge—not to write the kind of story that Bruce Sterling would write about that locale, but to write the kind of story some local science fiction writer might write.
I’m trying to break up my own parochiality, and work myself into a different imaginative space. I rather hope readers will be carried along into the same position.
The Commercial vs the Artistic in writing - is there a genuine difference between these two philosophies or are they artifical attributes? Are they in opposition, and if so, can they meet?
Well, I hang out a lot in countries where the creatives write in minority languages, and really, that’s just not an issue for them. They know what American commercial writing looks like, but they themselves don’t HAVE any “commerce.” There aren’t enough potential readers to establish a market.
What they DO commonly have is “political writing,” the kind of stuff that gets your fingertips broken by the secret police. So: take a guy like recent Nobel-Prize winner Orhan Pamuk -- super-popular worldwide, a real old-school deep-thinking artsy literatus, and the crazy-fascist wing of the Turkish secret police are trying hard to kill him. Now that guy is a writer’s writer. He’s got all those supposed oppositions stuffed into one refugee valise. You know, fretting about a commercial sell-out is the least of Orhan’s problems.
Furthermore, it’s dead obvious that the writing problems that matter in America now are political rather than “commercial” or “artistic”. America’s suffering a Civil Cold War. Or at least, they were until the Right’s culture-warriors started losing it.
Which themes and ideas dominate the writing of Bruce Sterling? What do you think readers take from your work they get nowhere else?
I’d say my major theme is the passage of time. I’m keenly interested in the future, and the past, and futurism, and historicity, and foresight and prediction, and hindsight and retro diction, and change-drivers, and interpretations of events, and forgotten byways of history, and radically differing future scenarios seen from minor demographic points-of-view, and ironic and sardonic unexpected developments, and planning and design versus accidents and the arbitrary . . . I dunno, my readers sure take a lot of punishment.
Will you still be read in a 100 years? Does it matter? Should writers write for the present or the future?
Well, I’ve done so much occasional journalism in so many different niches and fields that my writing will likely pop up by accident every once in a while. It probably depends on how writers “get read” in a hundred years. If it’s all about search engines for specialized weird topics like computer crime and Balkan warlords, hey, I’m in like Flint.
If it’s about literary values, well, most literature read a hundred years from now will be the classics people were reading a hundred years ago. Some of that stuff was quite topical—like Dickens, because he was just superbly talented—but the classics, writing worth reading for decades on end, they’re cram-full of passionate virtuosity.
Compared to those, the planet’s established classic writers, I’m like some kind of off-the-wall stand-up comedian. I tend to have a good time at the microphone with my firecrackers and my rubber chicken, but I’m not there to carry the weight of the civilized world on my shoulders.
Then again, some of us go out of our way to dig up work like that, after a hundred years or two hundred. My favorite writers, they’re all freaks. I read stuff no sane man would touch with a barge-pole.
How (if at all) has science fiction evolved/ changed in the time that you’ve been working in the field? Does it still have value in the present milieu? Relevance to the future?
I could go on about that interesting subject for several pages, but it would all be about publishing technology, distribution methods, and changes in the media landscape.
Writers think highly of “value” and “relevance,” but the factors that really make science fiction evolve are phenomena like the death of the pulps and Hollywood’s special FX technology; also the dominance of big-box stores, the death of distribution chains, globalization, media conglomerates and publisher buy-outs.
They’re much the same driving forces that have changed politics, the military, commerce, theater, cinema, graphic design, pretty much everything else.
What is the story you’ve written you’re proudest of, and why?
Oh well, the stories of my own that I like best are good in different ways. There’s stuff I wrote that was meant to split the reader’s head wide open with the Stanislaw Lem “spearhead of cognition,” and then there’s also a lot of weird frothy gibberish that’s probably best suited for an audience of one: me.
I rather imagine that my unpublished notebooks and letters have my best writing. Where I’m not trying to please the reader or do any literary push-ups—there, I’m just trying to get something into words.
I feel most proud of my abilities when I’m able to make something verbally clear that is truly obscure, far-fetched and peculiar. I’m not a writer who dabbles in science fiction, but a science-fictional personality who happens to write.
The short story vs the novella vs the novel - what makes you decide to write an idea in one form over the other?
There are a lot of situations and conceits that make fine short stories, yet just don’t have the heft and gravity to occupy a reader for the length of a novel. Short stories tend to pack a single emotional punch. Novellas wobble up and down two or three times, see-saw style. Novels need to go for that immersive, multiplex, rich-tapestry-of-life effect.
You’re credited with having coined the term slipstream - expound on that: how did it come to be and what is it?
Oh, I’m quite the coiner of neologisms. That one came up in a conversation with a book-collector pal of mine named Richard Dorsett. Richard was and is a devotee of non-realist works that were wonky. Not “science fiction,” not “fantasy,” not even “mainstream.” I agreed with Richard that there seemed to be a hell of a lot of books of this kind, and since I was a literary critic and he wasn’t, I made it my business to hunt down a bunch of these and to try to publicly describe what they were like.
There are rather a lot of “slipstream” books around now, but the meltdown of genres and categories is common across all the arts. It’s in painting, cinema, music—I could probably name thirty different current subgenres of “science fiction and fantasy,” New Weird, Interstitial, New British Space Opera, urban fantasy, dark fantasy, New Wave Fabulism… and that coterie sounds entirely sober and sensible compared to the radical fractionation in pop music, where within techno alone you’ve got darkstep, gabba, jungle, breakcore, drum and bass, dancehall, garage, house, garage house, intelligent dance music, speed garage, doomcore… And those aren’t minor differences.
To the cognoscenti they’re quite obvious.
If you look at the way a contemporary slipstream writer like Jonathan Lethem or Kelly Link handles genre conventions, they have much the attitude of DJs using loops, breakbeats and samplers. They’re simply not composing for an earlier orchestral medium where the brass was separated from the woodwinds. There’s very little good reason for that to matter to them nowadays.
Inevitably, people link you to cyberpunk. And cyberpunk is often seen as being all about the cool gizmos and neat bodily gadgets, but there’s also a large socio-political aspect involved there, isn’t it? It’s not just about the amount technology impacts on and changes the individual human, but the amount of change it causes/ can cause in human to human behavior. What’s curious is how human social behavior adapts to new advancements in technology, and even how much tension develops between the desire for personal change/ modification with the inherent human social instinct. Would you say this is true? Does it play on your mind at all when you write? Is there a price we pay with technological advancements, something lost for something gained?
Well, people link me to cyberpunk with perfect justice because I was the loudest cyberpunk ideologue.
I’ve read a lot of earnest paragraphs like this one you just handed me, and although you’re not exactly missing the point or anything, it’s gotten hard for me to keep a straight face. It’s as if you were asking Allen Ginsberg about beatniks in 1975. “Allen, wasn’t beat about bongos, and not getting a job, and having facial hair—and forgive me for asking this, but didn’t marijuana, heroin and gay sex have a lot to do with it?” You know what was really cool about cyberpunks? We didn’t blow anybody’s head off and no teenagers were knifed in Tangiers.
You want to talk seriously about technological impact? Climate change. You can put all the rest of that baloney in your back pocket, that was all the 20th century’s idea of a techno-threat. You wanna ask if climate change plays on my mind when I write? ‘Write,’ hell! Texas is swarming with West Nile mosquitos and the price of food is skyrocketing. That plays on my mind when I walk, breathe and eat!
Is cyberpunk dead?
It might well be, depending on how you define “cyberpunk” and “dead,” but that’s not gonna make any practical difference. Me, Gibson, Rucker, Shiner, Shirley, Cadigan, Di Filippo, I doubt any of us give that issue a minute’s thought now. Bear, Laidlaw, they’ve also got other things on their minds. Kelly still seems kind of interested. He edited a pretty good book on the subject lately.
Electronic vs Print publishing - any thoughts on the matter?
You should talk to my colleagues in newspapers. If you can find any newspapers left.
I have to ask, the Turkey City Lexicon: how did it come about, does it still get revised and added to and do you think it accomplished its purpose?
I should do something with that. People do find it useful. There aren’t enough hours in the day.
What does the future hold for Bruce Sterling, the writer?
Got a new novel coming out this summer. It’s a departure, it’ll be interesting to see if people think it’s any good.
The future looks seriously turbulent to me. These are worrisome times, and yet, not worrisome enough. I don’t feel that I need or ought to waste a lot of time fine-tuning my literary career under circumstances like today’s—and tomorrow’s.
Instead, I plan to multiply my options and see if I can find some coherent group of people, anybody, anywhere, who looks like they might be up to meeting the major challenges ahead.
If I can understand what they’re doing, or better yet befriend them, I rather imagine the writing will take care of itself.
* Read Sterling’s essay on Slipstream here.
BRUCE STERLING is the author of The Hacker Crackdown
DAVID DE BEER‘s short fiction has been published in or is forthcoming from venues such as Chizine, Alienskin and Courting Morpheus. He currently resides in Johannesburg, South Africa.
