#Bruce Sterling

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Cyberpunk trifecta

[simon-roy]

The idea of logging on a colonized alien planet brings my mind back to the planet Lalonde from Peter F. Hamilton's Night's Dawn books - a world that had very hard wood as its only meaningful export, and was also stuck developing its economy from agriculturalism (due to investment shortages, though).

All this is to say - Hey! What are some foundational inspirations for your sci fi verse? You gotta have some like recommendations of classic or older sci-fi for us, right? What are some of your suggestions of books and authors to read?

OK SO - My sci-fi tastes have sort of ended up in some very specific niches. Growing up, I was a Larry Niven +Jerry Pournelle man, in part because my dad amassed a huge collection of their books - then gave 90% of them away before i was old enough to read them. So one of my teenage missions was rebuilding that library, trash and all!

Stuff like Footfall, Ringworld, Gil "The Arm" Hamilton, Protector (yes i attempted to name a comic series similarly, and paid for it) "The Mote in God's Eye"... you name it, I read fuckloads of these books. And while they tend to land on a sort of human chauvinist "mankind will win based on his inherent adaptive human-ness, and the aliens will fail because of their rigid alien-ness", this shit was very foundational to me.

Their more collaborative series, The Man-Kzin Wars and War World, also loom large in my teenage mind. The Man-Kzin wars are super fun - humans meet a race of tiger-men, and go from being NWO peaceniks to roughneck cat-skinners in a generation! PEACE AND LOVE WONT DEFEAT TIGER MEN!

Similarly, war world (like lots of that 70s/80s military sci fi) was a sort of catch-all for western military nerds to play with their favorite factions - it was a planet where all the un-ruleable ethnic groups and nationalities had been deported by the authoritarian earth government, and left to rot... until a race of genetically engineered fascist super men land on the world, and start trying to rule the place. Pretty fun shit.

As I got older, I turned hard into William Gibson, and read the absolute shit out of both the Neuromancer trilogy and the Bridge trilogy, as well as his short stories. Bruce Sterling was part of that wave for me, too, and I religiously sought his old paperbacks out too. In terms of novels, "Distraction" is my favorite coherent Sterling Novel - though the short stories in the "Schismatrix" novel/collection of his remain my absolute favorite space opera pieces.

At this age, too, I found my top-top fave Sterling Stories - "Taklaman" and "Bicycle Repairman", both gritty pseudo-cyberpunk stories of the highest degree, in this collection:

This thousand-plus page collection of short stories and novellas was basically my bible for a few years - i put sticky notes on each story i loved and meant to return to, until the book was so festooned with sticky note bookmarks i abandoned the practice altogether. If you have the chance, just buy this book and chew on it for a few years.

As i got into my 20s, Charles Stross became my lode star - his books like Accelerando and Glasshouse were total game changers for me. They come with their own peculiarities, but I loved his transhuman/posthuman musings (or at least i was obsessed with his stuff for a good few years - the venn diagram of his obvious interests and my own overlapped enough that his books were great fodder for a growing sci-fi loving brain).

But since then, my main literary squeeze has been the great man, JACK VANCE. Working on Prophet, my friend @cmkosemen made a remark about how much the early issues of the series reminded him of a book series called "Planet of Adventure" or "the Tschai Cycle", by Jack Vance. The book has a beautifully simple setup - a man from an entirely undescribed spacefaring human civilization crash-lands onto a weird planet. But on that planet, he finds four separate civilizations, each who possess a population of enslaved humans, culturally and physically molded to the needs of their masters. And each book of this series covers our generic hero's interactions with each bizarre expoitative culture. I was extremely intrigued.

Soon thereafter, I found my current absolute favorite book - "THE DRAGON MASTERS". A book about an isolated medieval world... which gets visited, once every few generations, by a black pyramid starship, flown by a reptilian race known as the Greph. The greph capture humans to (surprise surprise) breed them into hyper specific slaves... who in turn become Greph-like in their thinking and demeanours. But the last time the BLACK PYRAMID landed, a bunch of angry medieval dudes stormed the thing, blew it up, and captured a bunch of greph... who became the breeding stock for a whole new human world of slave labour. By the time we meet this planet, the two rival lords of the human-populated regions have been breeding greph slave warriors, or "dragons", for generations, for combat against one another. But soon, the black pyramid will return...

I love this book I even spent a good few months during covid talking with the Vance Estate and several publishers about developing it into a graphic novel, but nobody could quite agree on how it could get made with old Simon getting a paycheque... so sadly it fell apart. There are concept drawings floating around my patreon and other corners of the internet. But one day I'll use 'em...

My other favorite books of his, to name a couple of the MANY books of his I love:

THE BLUE WORLD: A caste system of humans, descended from a crashed prison ship, live on floating settlements on an ocean planet, paying protection to a giant long-lived intelligent crustacean. But one man is tired of giving up all his crops to this tyrannical megafauna...

THE MIRACLE WORKERS: Rival lords on a planet descended to medieval tech (surprise surprise) fight using armies... and rival SORCERORS who employ the powers of suggestion to voodoo each others' warriors... but when facing non-human intelligences, these sorceror's skills fall short.

But there are heaps more, and I love most (thought not all) of the ones i've read. They're generally short, concise, and full of all sorts of bizarre bullshit.

THere are more books i've read and enjoyed in my life, of course, but these are the core ones that I think of when I think of my career as a sci-fi reader... let me know what your top recs are!

[stephenist]

Rudy Rucker has posted free epub, mobi and webpage formats of the seminal sci-fi cyberpunk anthology ➡️ Mirrorshades. ⬅️

[squeamishnerd]

The Brights

Chapter 34: Beach Episode, Part 3

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Ned: Why did your phone become so very interesting all of a sudden?

Beren: No reason.

Ned: Are you trying to ignore the person over there?

Beren: What? No… Um…

Ned: You are!

Ned: You should go talk with him.

Beren: But what if-

Ned: Could you maybe try to stop overthinking things for once?

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[davidhudson]

Happy 70th, Bruce Sterling.

James George and Jae Minard’s Clouds (2014).

[cyberianlife]

This is a free online edition of Mirrorshades, as edited by Bruce Sterling.

Posted by Rudy Rucker, September 28, 2022. And with a prayer for Tom Maddox.

Browse the book!

[orchidblack]

Wild this is real. Bruce Sterling's Newsweek cover story on the Lovecraftian metaphors, thought experiments, and realities of generative AI.

Gold rushes always finish ugly, and this AI rush is another one of those. It will resemble that glamorous Atomic Age transition from "energy too cheap to meter" to "garbage too expensive to bury."

[theoszczepanski]

New Nightmares - Them

[cybercultnzicd]

- Bruce Sterling

[manicmachine]

The hacker and the rocker are this decade's pop-culture idols, and cyberpunk is very much a pop phenomenon: spontaneous, energetic, close to its roots. Cyberpunk comes from the realm where the computer hacker and the rocker overlap, a cultural Petri dish where writhing gene lines splice. Some find the results bizarre, even monstrous; for others this integration is a powerful source of hope.

Mirrorshades: Preface, Bruce Sterling

[drunkoncyberpunk]

Scam AIs....we truly are living in a dystopian cyberpunk world.

It occurs to me now that things not being what they seem, particularly technology masquerading as real life, is a running theme in cyberpunk. From Molly and Case uncovering the truth of their "boss," Wintermute; to the Replicants of "Blade Runner;" Major Kussanagi's robotic "shell;" Neal Stephenson's Metaverse, and of course the Matrix.

The spam bots and scambots we now take for granted as part of daily life were predicted decades ago by the likes of William Gibson, Bruce Sterling, Phillip K. Dick and Neal Stephenson.

Hopefully we can start to make our world a little less dystopian, by helping reliable charities.

Falling for scams does hurt people, actually

TW: Human trafficking, SA, torture, discussion of scam farms

I see a whole bunch of people arguing that they would rather risk giving to a scammer than ignore someone's gofundme. I also see people saying things like "I can't believe some sick people are profiteering off genocide" and like, me neither, but I feel like you guys really don't understand who actually runs these kinds of scams and what they are.

Scams of noticeable scale-- like scam asks being sent from hundreds of accounts to every user on Tumblr!-- are typically related to organised crime in poor countries, not Susan from Milwaukee who wants a new coat and has no scruples. People get trafficked by gangs to scam farms in Asia and Africa where they're worked to the bone and tortured trying to get idiots in wealthy countries to part with their money. Genocide profiteering is pretty much the least evil thing these people do.

Here's a UN article on it. Obvious warnings for content related to human trafficking and SA.

When you donate to a scammer, you fund these organisations and give them a reason to exist. It's possible some of the fundraisers are legit. I honestly find it unlikely given I'm not seeing any from any other countries where urgent fundraisers would seem to have great reason to exist but which haven't captured the same level of attention on Tumblr-- the number of Sudanese, Congolese, Ukrainian, Burmese or Uyghur fundraisers in my DMs is a fat 0. In any case, there are safer ways to help.

If you want to help (which is great!) you don't have to take the risk of paying for human trafficking. Donate to legitimate charities which have the resources to safely and effectively ensure the money and help is getting to the right people. Funding human trafficking rings in Myanmar is not a good risk to be taking while trying to help.

[squeamishnerd]

The Brights

Chapter 36: She Jinxed It, Part 1

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Kristy: Kit, did you have to pick College Cram as the movie to watch the day before the next term starts?

Kit: But I like this movie, and-

Bruce: The term starts tomorrow!?

Janie: What's the problem with that? I thought you liked studying.

Bruce: Do I look like I'm someone who likes studying?

Janie: Well… You kinda do.

Bruce: Wearing glasses has nothing to do with how studious someone is.

Bruce: Maybe if I start wearing sunglasses with prescription instead, then I can both see properly and look less like a nerd.

Janie: Oooh, smart.

Daisy: But seriously, Kit, why did you pick this movie?

Kristy: Maybe it's because of all the topless, muscular people.

Janie: Remember how he talked about positive jinxing, or something like that? Maybe he's trying to help us with our studies.

Kristy: Oh my Watcher, cuz, don't tell me you're superstitious too! Why has everyone started to talk ab-

Kit: Please stop ruining the movie…

Kristy: You knew that this movie has woohoo in it, didn't you? You just want to rub it in that I want a partner.

Kristy: Just like someone else has been doing all the time lately.

Daisy: Oi! Leave me and Cameron out of this, you selfish llama!

Kit: *Tries watching the movie*

Daisy: This movie is boring, plus I'm hungry and I want to call Cameron over.

Bruce: I'm ditching too.

Kit: I promise it'll get better, we haven't gotten to the interesting part yet.

Kristy: Sorry, but I think everyone stopped listening.

Janie: Can't y'all be nice to Kit?

Daisy: Do you want to stay over or just go for a quickie?

Cameron: I mean… I kinda wanna stay over, but I don't think that's the best idea with the term starting tomorrow.

Daisy: Quickie it is then. All my roomies are home though, so we have to be discreet.

The next morning

Janie: Morning, cuz, any plans for today, except for lectures?

Kristy: Bot Savants build meeting.

Janie: Are you wearing that to Bot Savants?

Kristy: What's wrong with this?

Janie: Aren't you gonna use machines and stuff? Long sleeves seems rather dangerous, what if you get stuck in something?

Kristy: That won't happen.

Janie: Watch it happen only because you said it won't.

Kristy: Why is everyone so superstitious? Give me a break.

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[lebfilm]

BRUCE STERLING MUST SWIM

CHROME IS GONE THE POOL23 RISEN THE MUTATION IS A STEP TOWARDS P3RF3CT10N https://dreams-of-an-electric-mind.webflow.io/eternal Ponderous Orb-session – The Cosmic Liminality FREE JACOBO GRINBERG https://psi-encyclopedia.spr.ac.uk/articles/jacobo-grinberg-zylberbaum#Syntergic_Theory ENTER THE FORUM: https://fnord.forumeiros.com/t449-kstxi-ksc PROBABLY JACOBO GRINBERG ENDED UP HERE…

[quotation--marks]

The King stood, yanked the documents down, cast them onto his padded floor. ‘You see, sir, it don’t really matter a hang what nonsense is blithered and babbled on these bills! The secret truth is, that bills is endless by their very nature, regular as the tides in the Thames, or the smoke of London. London’s true sons call London ‘The Smoke’, you know. She’s an eternal city, like your Jerusalem, or Rome, or, some would say, Satan’s Pandaenonium! You don’t see the King of the Bill-Stickers worrying for smoky London, do you? Not a bit of it!’

William Gibson and Bruce Sterling, The Difference Engine

[thejaymo]

When Is The Audience? | 2427

Atemporal thinking is crucial in today’s fractured media landscape.

Instead of optimising for immediate visibility, you always have the opportunity and option to create for a future audience. One that’s somewhere in the long tail. If you’re willing to embrace that, you don’t need to worry about algorithms or trends.