Bruce Sterling - Biography

Bruce Sterling is an Austin-based science fiction writer and Net critic, internationally recognized as a cyberspace theorist. His writings have been very influential in the cyberpunk movement in literature, specifically the novels Heavy Weather (1994), Islands in the Net (1988), Schismatrix (1985), The Artificial Kid (1980), and Involution Ocean (1977).

Along with William Gibson, another one of the major figures of cyberpunk, Bruce Sterling co-authored the novel The Difference Engine (1990), a novel which is part of the steampunk sub-genre. The novel forms an alternate or speculative history set in 1855 London, which is anachronistically advanced. Bruce Sterling is the editor of Mirrorshades, co-editor of The Cyberpunk Anthology, and co-founder of the Electronic Frontier Foundation.

As well as being a leading science fiction writer, Bruce Sterling has been involved with numerous projects and written several books of futurist theory. He was the founder of the Dead Media Project, an on-line reliquary, or archive, to forgotten, or dead, media technologies. In this way, he looked to the past through the future, anticipating, almost, in the shininess of new media, its utter destruction. Bruce Sterling also founded the Viridian Design Movement, an environmental aesthetic movement founded on the ideas of global citizenship, environmental design and techno-progressiveness.

Bruce Sterling's numerous book-length essays both question and promote how the future is shaping our concepts of self, time and space. In Shaping Things (2005), he offers a history of shaped objects, moving from the most rudimentary hand-made artifacts through to the complex machinery which defines our current existence. In Tomorrow Now: Envisioning the Next Fifty Years (2002), Bruce Sterling examines how today’s technologies will affect our future lives.

Written in a wry, intelligent style, Bruce Sterling’s book makes bold claims on the future, examining scientists' use of medicine to extend our lives while examining at the same time our seemingly bottomless thirst for oil. Bruce Sterling’s most acclaimed book, The Hacker Crackdown: Law and Order on the Electronic Frontier (1993) is a deep history of the birth of cyberspace, following the periphery of the development of technology from the first telephone hackers to the government’s attack on several prominent hackers in 1990.

Bruce Sterling’s novels include Intuition Ocean (1977), The Artifical Kid (1980), Heavy Weather (1994), Holy Fire (1996), Distraction (1998), Zeitgeist (2000), The Zenith Angle (2004), Kiosk (2007), and most recently The Caryatids (2009). His essay collection and non-fiction books include The Hacker Crackdown: Law and Order on the Electronic Frontier (1993), Tomorrow Now: Envisioning the Next Fifty Years (2002), and Shaping Things (2005). He currently blogs at Beyond the Beyond for Wired Magazine.