"CYBER-GURU" BRUCE STERLING

                                                                                                                       by Jose Carlos Neves

A native from Austin,Texas, famous for his "The Hacker Crackdown", the seminal "The Difference Engine" (co-authored with William Gibson), actually Bruce Sterling´s first "deep impact" on me comes from "Dori Bangs", his sensible short-story published by - now-defunct - Brazilian´s Isaac  Asimov Magazine # 2, in 1990, translated by Braulio Tavares. What a sensible story!
I have read it at one sitting and remember till today the compleat astonishment that envolved me than...I couldn´t even believe that so brief but intense words could conveys that magic, that leaded me to tears...What a true epiphany moment!
After it I have read another of his short-stories also in local IAM - " Espada de Damocles" - "DamoclessSword"; his romance "Islands in the Net", published here as "Piratas de Dados", and 
"Mirrorshades" the acclaimed short-stories anthology he had organized - in a Portuguese version as "Reflexos do Futuro" - to which it had been attributed as the genesis of Cyberpunk. Bruce Sterling is a fantastic, very gifted writer, who has been in Brazil at least once (as writer-guest-of-honor to the Interiorcon, the acclaimed Sci-Fi Convention organized by Roberto Causo) and proving that success doesn't spoiled him, he kindly agreeded to reply the following questions in order to our readers know him and his work best.

-First of all,Bruce, please let´s begin with some background. Your age...

*49

marital status...

*Married

sons?...

*Two daughters, 16 and 7 years old

Academic graduation and profession...

*Journalism, University of Texas 1976

-How did you get started?

*With a manual typewriter

How you first become interested in Science Fiction?

*I read it as a child

What are your earliest memories as far as that go?

*Accompanying my mother to her volunteer job at a library

-When you were young, what kind of science fiction you liked to read?

*Edgar Rice Burroughs, Robert E. Howard

Tell us your growing-up story in SF field. Do you consider yourself (also) a Science Fiction writer?

*I liked to write fiction since the age of 12 or 13, but I didn't consider myself a science fiction writer until I met people working in the science fiction field.

-What attracted you to writing? What about your earliest influences?

*I've always been glib. As a schoolchild, when I wrote, teachers and classmates paid attention. That was gratifying.Basically, I never stopped.

--Unlike with rock'n'roll interviews, the preparation for writers' interviews is immense (weak excuse, mediocre explanation).Unfortunately I have not managed to read all your books before this interview. Which one (talking about your fiction) would you single out as your masterpiece?

*I tend to like the short story collections, but the two novels of mine that readers seem most passionate about are SCHISMATRIX and HOLY FIRE.

-Thinking about cinema, music and comics: what kind of stories influenced you most?

*I don't like stories. I like concepts. I'm not a cinema person.I do know quite a lot about various forms of pop music.My home town of Austin is known for its musical enthusiasms.

-What do you think is your most important activity?

*Research. At least, I do more of that than anything else.

-What is your wildest dream?

*That's a good question. Unfortunately, it can't be answered.

-What do you consider the three most important events in your life?

*Hard to say, but the period I spent living in India was profoundly transformative.

-What is seminal for you now?

*I like websurfing.

-To be a little philosofical again, what is your conception of Time? The fourth dimension of space, like Enstein´s idea or something else?

*I'm not much interested in philosophical or physical concepts of time,but the remorseless process of history gets a lot of my attention.I'm also very hostile to the idea that history ever ends or that "the future" is some kind of static location.

-What do you imagine a being (or an object, like the Tesseract) from the Fourth Dimension if he/she/it could be accessible to our tridimensional reality?

*I don't quite know, but I would recommend that he read some novels on the subject by my friend and colleague Rudy Rucker. Maybe Geometry, Relativity, and the Fourth Dimension by Rudolf V.B. Rucker, or Spaceland: A Novel of the Fourth Dimension by Rudy Rucker.

--Do you view our inability to see the higher reality as a problem related only to human perceptions or does it involve our spiritual aspect?

*There is no "higher reality" in the sense that you mean here. If one sees a spiritual higher reality, that in itself is a major problem.

-Are the cognitive limitations of present-day man technological, philosophical or epistemological?

*They're biological limits.

-Have you read any good story, book, essay or text about the Fourth - and higher - dimensions that would you recommended? And image concerning (films,pictures, painting, comics)?

*Well, Edwin Abbott and Ouspensky would make a good start, also Duchamp's "Nude Descending a Staircase." Douglas Hofstadter has written some interesting things along this line.

--Your prose is rich of SF similes.It seems also that there is a strong relationship between your nonfiction and novels. What are your writing methods?

*I like to write some nonfiction so that I know the subject that I'm talking about. Then I can fictionalize it more effectively.

-If ou do read (or even have read) comics, what was the first comic by Alan Moore did you read?

*I like underground comics. I read some of the Swamp Thing issues he did. I quite like Halo Jones.

-Did it had a special impact on you? Why?

*I wouldn't call myself an Alan Moore fan, but I do appreciate his attention to historical detail and his interest in Lovecraft.

-What do you think is his best work to date? Why?

*I wouldn't know, but I would bet it's something that he never showed to anyone. Maybe a diary entry, something in a notebook. Lovecraft's notebook is fantastic, the best thing he ever wrote.

-Do you agree with Chaos theory that our world (and the Universe as a whole by extension) is ruled by fractals, strange attractors and so on, where a little alteration on initial conditions could cause big and unexpected alterations on the final ones?

*I think that mathematical description is useful for a lot of events, but it doesn't explain everything one sees. People used to be very interested in "catastrophe theory" in the 1960s, but mathematics can go out of intellectual style.

--I think people feel more relieved in some disorderliness than being in perfect order. What lead people feel so? It seems that Chaos Theory and Fractals do have a place in explaining the genesis of life, right?

*I don't think people need to worry much about "perfect order."Perfect order has never existed and it never will.

-Labels are just a convenience, I know. So,do you think that "cyberpunk" was just a marketing term, coopted by a huge commercial mainstream?

*No, I don't think that. Cyberpunk was a term in literary criticism, and the commercial mainstream for fiction writing of any kind really isn't all that huge.

-Do you think it´s "original mentors"- yourself, Gibson, Cadigan, Rucker and the like - have had an intentional, active participation in this "marketing" aspect of it? Or was you all actually "victims" of this vicious process that undermines every real creative trend, if you know what I mean?

*I know what you mean, but you worry too much about it.Alan Moore, to mention just one creative person, obviously does a hell of a lot of writing outside any market pressure.He's done dozens of interviews and reviews, and he didn't get paid for them.

*When we "original mentors" were inventing cyberpunk writing, I can promise you that we weren't paying each other anything. If it were really "marketing," we would have been forming a corporation and patenting our intellectual property.

-How do you imagine real-life computers and digital technologies in ten years?

*I'm getting kind of interested in this strange promise of Gilberto Gil, your new Minister of Culture, to "tropicalize digitization." I'd like to see him give that a try. (emphasizing is mine - JC)

-Bill Joy, one of the inventors of Java, claims that the robotics, genetics and nano-technology that are fueling the global economy also contain the seeds of our self-destruction. Do you think Joy's thesis is plausible and what are the ethics of your writings?

*Silicon Valley is broke and the global economy is in crisis, so we've probably bought ourselves some nice free time there.

--What is your view about that 9/11 terrorist attacks? Some anarchists are even considering these tragic events as a "hoax". Perhaps a great culture representative like you has a personal theory/view about it.

*I don't think that setting fire to skyscrapers with suicidal hijackers was a hoax, but dramatic terrorist activities always fade as time passes. This summer more people died of the heat in France than died in 9/11, and the Greenhouse Effect isn't a "hoax" either.

--In your opinion, are culture and war the instruments of American supremacy over the world and how do you judge the neoconservatism of Bush administration.

*I judge the Bush administration harshly. I think it is disastrous. This is certainly the worst American administration I've ever seen as an adult, although the second Nixon administration and the second Reagan administration were also wonderfully bad.

--SF can be very often the mirror of our reality. After that disaster in New York, and the new raid over Iraq, how do you think the entire SF community and the SF writers themselves will react to what's going on in the world?

*If they had any sense, they'd be writing about something radically new and inventive, and leaving the war coverage to the fiction writers working inside government.

--Do you have a political agenda? What is it?

*I'm a techno-green.

-Coming back to more "sane" themes, what do you see as the missing link necessary to bring AI research up to speed with your visions of intelligent machines?

*I don't have a vision of intelligent machines. I don't believe in them.

-How do you perceive science and technology nowadays, and do you think that we may lose control over them one day in the future?

*We never had control over them in the first place. Nowadays I perceive them as being under severe threat from religious fanatics.

-The potential of nanotechnology seems far more vast. How do you think it's development will affect human consciousness in the future?

*The potential of nanotechnology seems vaster than it is because nobody is defining what they are talking about.

-Synchronicity is a major theme that runs through Pop culture nowadays. What model do you use at present for interpreting this mysterious phenomenon?

*Jung died quite some time ago.

-What do you think happens to consciousness after physical death?

*There isn't any.

-How do you see consciousness evolving into this twenty-first century?

*Consciousness will change all right, but the change will probably start with medical interventions with the senile and the mentally ill.

-The methods of science and art are beginning to achieve some wonderful things together. What do you think created such a chasm between the two disciplines in the first place, and why do you think they are now merging?

*Artists are interesting people with dull ideas, while scientists are dull people with interesting ideas. Personally they get along better than one would think, but they have different methods of distributing money, reputation and resources.

-Can the "noise" be discussed from the standpoint of the information ideology? What is the position of "noise" in the information ideology?

*I would once again ask Rudy Rucker to tell you that. He knows quite a lot about it.

-Can you tell us which SF author, from the new generation, we should keep an eye on, as far as your opinion is concerned?

*Cory Doctorow.

-Any titles to underline, in particular?

*http://www.boingboing.net

-What directions do you see science fiction taking in the next ten years?

*Fantasy will replace it. Science fiction will continue to shrink in readership until it begins offering people a reason to think seriously about the future consequences of our actions.

-What do you think of the notion that that consciousness might require quantum effects?

*I think it's interesting but probably silly.

-How about distributing your books on the net for free? What if the bad guys scan them and distribute them on the web ? How can you stop them?

*I don't much care. I have distributed one book of mine on the web for free, a book called HACKER CRACKDOWN. I get a lot of email about it from hackers. It's never been my business
to police the spread of information.

-What about drugs? Do you think hat acid ( and other kind of drugs, like the mushrooms of Terence McKenna, the DMT) could help us in opening the gates to altered states of counsciousness? For you, this "states" are another reality, a parallel universe, another dimension, an alien landscape, an inner world - like he "immateria" concept by Alan Moore - , the summ of all this or anything else?

*I'm very interested in drugs and their effects, but I never make the category error of thinking that drugs are mystical substances just because they make people feel mystical when people eat them.

-Are there any questions about your work that no one has ever asked you but that you would like to have been asked because you can provide an interesting/informative answer?

*Yes.

--How do you think the underground has changed since the 60s?

*A lot of the most enthusiastic mystics died from violent collisions with reality.

--Whom do you read and respect nowadays? (mainstream concerning, mainly)

*I thought William Gibson's new mainstream novel was pretty good.

--Is there anything on which you are working that you´d like to tell us about?

*Yeah. I like my mailing list about the environment and postindustrial design.
http://www.viridiandesign.org

--What do you think is the main disadvantage of the contemporary computers, besides being slow?

*They're full of products from Microsoft.

-Finally, which places in the Net do you visit more often?

*I like Google ( www.google.com)

Thank you so much, Bruce, to share all your deep knowing on every subject with us.