Bruce Sterling
48 quotes
Biography
Michael Bruce Sterling is an American science fiction author known for his novels and short fiction and editorship of the Mirrorshades anthology. In particular, he is linked to the cyberpunk subgenre.
"You know what's truly weird about any financial crisis? We made it up. Currency, money, finance, they're all social inventions. When the sun comes up in the morning it's shining on the same physical landscape, all the atoms are in place."
"In a world so redolent with wonder, how can we allow ourselves to conduct our daily lives with so little insight, such absence of dignity?"
"This was the nature of secular power. Industrial power. It was the West that invented it, that invented Hitler, the gutter orator turned trampler of nations, that invented Stalin, the man they called “Genghis Khan with a telephone.” The media pop star, the politician. Was there any difference anymore? Not in America; it was all a question of seizing eyes, of seizing attention. Attention is wealth, in an age of mass media. Center stage is more important than armies."
"Obsolescence and death, the reign of the archaic, the abandoned, and the corny: Really, if you saw Windows 3.0 on the sidewalk outside the building, would you bend over and pick it up?!?"
"Tomorrow composts today."
"Interstitialism is very postmodern, in that it calls old definitions into question without bothering to invent plausible new ones."
"Mashups [...] nobody's going to listen to mashups in another ten years. Mashups are novelty music. They're like "The Monster Mash." They have no musical staying power. You're pursuing a phantom there. It's bad music, I mean, it's not bad— it's a pastiche, it's like magazine collage— which can be good for what it is. But to pretend that that's like tremendous creative work— No! It's a tremendous creative power— and it can have a tremendous audience, but it's not tremendously good. And we need a little bit of aesthetic honesty in confronting things like this. Just because it's new, and people with laptops can do it, and get away with it, and find an audience for it, does not make it a real cultural advance. It's an epiphenomenon."
"There are a lot of times and places where "humanity" is headed in no place in particular. Those scenes interest me. Like, little European cultures with weird minority languages, who are just hanging around in obscure mountain valleys, making clay pots and singing, and knifing each other on Tuesdays... It's not like we all line up and dash like mad for some end-goal called "The Future." There's no victory-condition for being human. The future is just a kind of history that hasn't happened yet."
"These people are setting entire new standards for nightmarish postindustrial anti-chic. Only heavy-duty cosmopolitan San Francisco Bay area performance artists, who double as the Dilberts from Hell, could dress with such miraculous anti-fashion sense. ... Mark Pauline is a creative force first, a human being second, and a nice guy at a very distant tenth."
"The autumn sun shone brightly. It was still the same sun and the same clouds. The sun didn’t care about the landscape inside people’s heads."
"The Net was a lot like television, another former wonder of the age. The Net was a vast glass mirror. It reflected what it was shown. Mostly human banality."
"Centralized bureaucracies always protect the status quo. They don’t innovate. And it’s innovation that’s the real threat."
"Real life was where the baby was."
"Laura listened to their crude P. R. with sour amusement. They wouldn’t crank out this level of rhetoric unless they were trying to hide a real weakness, she thought."
"When the People march in one direction, it only hurts to ask awkward questions."
"Revolutions. New Orders. For Laura the words had the cobwebby taste of twentieth-century thinking. Visionary mass movements were all over the 1900s, and whenever they broke through, blood followed in buckets."
"You know what that is? That’s peasant technology, brother. It’s slash-and-burn agriculture. You know what that might do to what’s left of the planet’s tropical forests? It’ll make every straw-hat Brazilian into Paul Bunyan, that’s what. The most dangerous bio-tech in the world is a guy with a goat and an axe."
"Where there’s war, there’s whores."
"She’d read somewhere once that 90 percent of the world’s havoc was committed by men between fifteen and twenty-five."
"The world doesn’t give a shit how noble your motives are—it’ll roll right over you. That’s how it works."
"I’ll grant you good intentions, but intentions don’t count for much. Corruption—that’s what counts."
"You know when it really got bad here? When they tried to help. With medicine. And irrigation. They sank deep wells, with sweet, flowing water, and of course the nomads settled there. So instead of moving their herds on, leaving the pastures a chance to recover, they ate everything down to bare rock, for miles around every well. And the eight, nine children that African women have born from time immemorial—they all lived. It wasn’t that the world didn’t care. They struggled heroically, for generations, selflessly and nobly. To achieve an atrocity."
"Agriculture is the oldest and most vicious of humanity’s bio-technologies."
"My art, science fiction writing, is pretty new as literary arts go, but it labors under the curse of three thousand years of literacy. In some weird sense I'm in direct competition with Homer and Euripides."
"The real advantage of CDs is that they allow you to forget all your vinyl records. You think you love this record collection that you've amassed over the years. But really the sheer choice, the volume, the load of memory there is secretly weighing you down. You're never going to play those Alice Cooper albums again, but you can't just throw them away, because you're a culture nut."