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Bruce Sterling
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 Bruce Sterling burst upon the sf scene in the mid-1970s with a first novel,
Involution Ocean (1977), billed as "A Harlan Ellison Discovery," a work heavily influenced by the 1960s New Wave writers,
particularly J. G Ballard. No one expected much in the way of hard SF from him thereafter, even though his second
novel, The Artificial Kid (1980), showed serious interest in technological speculation. It escaped general notice in
the early 1980s that Sterling was publishing a series of stories rich in scientific speculation and technological
detail set in a future solar system swarming with humanity and aliens. Then came cyberpunk.
Sterling and his friend, Lewis Shiner, living in Austin Texas, were visited for a summer of intense
work and play by John Shirley and William Gibson, and the four of them, through correspondence, through
their writing and through Bruce Sterling's one-sheet fanzine Cheap Truth, proclaimed a revolution, a radical
reform of hard sf, a movement that is now known as cyberpunk. The Movement stood for political awareness
and commitment, the stylistic tradition of the New Wave, a fascination with the technological nuances and
surfaces of life in the future (contact lenses, running shoes, personal computers), and, most centrally, the
interface between human mind and flesh and machines, especially computers. It was the next step beyond cybernetics
in sf, and it was the hip, fashionable mode of the late 1980s. The paradigm books are Gibson's
Neuromancer (1984), Sterling's Islands in the
Net (1988), and Mirrorshades: The Cyberpunk
Anthology (1986), edited by Sterling.
Sterling also wrote Schismatrix (1985), the culmination of his "swarm" stories of the early 80s, one of
the best hard sf novels of the decade.
Schismatrix is in the tradition of Van Vogtian sf adventure, artfully written
to a literary standard far above the general run of hard sf, jammed with plot twists and overflowing with
dense speculative ideas based on real science. His stories, from pure fantasy to hard sf, are collected in
Crystal Express (1989). "His main interest," says
The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction, "continues to be the
behavior of societies rather than individuals and the perfection of sf as a vehicle for scientific education and
political debate."
"The Beautiful and the Sublime" is rooted in the sf genre, from Kipling's fascination with air
travel, through Ballard's fliers at Vermillion Sands, but most significantly is in dialogue with the tradition, a
challenge to hard sf. Extend your reach, it says to other writers, use the tropes of sf and the rigors of hard sf to
attain sublimely new fictions.
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The Ascent of Wonder copyright © 1994 by David G. Hartwell and Kathryn Cramer. | ||
Cramer: On Science & Science Fiction || Hartwell: Hard Science Fiction
David G. Hartwell || Kathryn Cramer || About Tor Books || Ordering Info
Interactive Intoduction to THE ASCENT OF WONDER copyright © 1995-1997 by Kathryn Cramer.