Literary Birthday – 14 April – Bruce Sterling

Happy Birthday, Bruce Sterling, born on 14 April 1954.

Bruce Sterling Quotes

1. We’re so intelligent now that we’re too smart to survive. We’re so well informed that we lost all sense of meaning. We know the price of everything, but we’ve lost all sense of value. We have everyone under surveillance, but we’ve lost all sense of shame.
2. Forget trying to pass for normal. Follow your geekdom. Embrace nerditude.
3. The future is unwritten. there are best case scenarios. There are worst-case scenarios. both of them are great fun to write about if you’re a science fiction novelist, but neither of them ever happens in the real world. What happens in the real world is always a sideways-case scenario. World-changing marvels to us, are only wallpaper to our children.
4. If poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world, science fiction writers are its court jesters. We are Wise Fools who can leap, caper, utter prophecies, and scratch ourselves in public. We can play with Big Ideas because the garish motley of our pulp origins make us seem harmless.
5. 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?

Bruce Sterling is an award-winning American author of Speculative Fiction. His first novel, Involution Ocean, is a science-fictional pastiche of Moby-Dick by Herman Melville. He is best known for his novels and his work on the Mirrorshades anthology. This work helped to define the cyberpunk genre. Sterling is one of the founders of the cyberpunk movement in science fiction, along with William Gibson, Rudy Rucker, John Shirley, Lewis Shiner, and Pat Cadigan. Sterling has coined certain neologisms. He wrote the classic steampunk The Difference Engine: A Novel with William Gibson. He has won a John W. Campbell Award, two Hugo Awards, and an Arthur C. Clarke Award.

Source for Image: Pablo Balbontin Arenas, GFDL, via Wikimedia Commons
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Brucesterling.jpg

by Amanda Patterson

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