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.

Bruce Sterling

Categorized in : Ideas Play Wise

Worrying about a large institution, especially when it has computers, is like worrying about a large gorilla, especially when it's on fire.

Bruce Sterling

gorillas fire worry

I don't think there's much distinction between surveillance and media in general. Better media means better surveillance. Cams are everywhere.

Bruce Sterling

media mean thinking

The frontiers of the future will be the ruins of the unsustainable.

Bruce Sterling

frontiers ruins

University, as institutions, pre-date the information economy by many centuries and are not for-profit cultural entities, whose reason of existence (purportedly) is to discover truth, codify it through techniques of scholarship, and then teach it. Universities are meant to pass the torch of civilization not just download data into student skulls.

Bruce Sterling

data skulls civilization

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.

Bruce Sterling

atoms shining morning

Anything that can be done to a rat can be done to a human being. And we can do most anything to rats. This is a hard thing to think about, but it's the truth. It won't go away because we cover our eyes. THAT is cyberpunk.

Bruce Sterling

going-away eye thinking

The future is a process, not a destination.

Bruce Sterling

destination process

When you can’t imagine how things are going to change, that doesn’t mean that nothing will change. It means that things will change in ways that are unimaginable.

Bruce Sterling

imagine mean way

Everybody wants to disown neocon strategy, including the neocons, because that strategy never worked. Still, it was, in point of fact, a strategy. Nobody else has one.

Bruce Sterling

strategy want facts

I know that the human condition will be radically changed through technical means. Much of this change will be painful, monstrous and horrible. Most mutations are disgusting failures, most experiments are failures. I accept this and I don't find it frightening.

Bruce Sterling

mutation painful mean

Architects thrive after massive urban disasters. The abject collapse of East Berlin gave us the only city in Europe with a mighty host of Postmodern skyscrapers.

Bruce Sterling

east-berlin cities europe

David Brin is a technological determinist. He thinks that we understand the trend and we need to hop on it. I don't have any such illusions.

Bruce Sterling

trends needs thinking

The internet brought many laudable things, but prosperity, stability, accountability and honest politics were not four of them.

Bruce Sterling

accountability honest four

Don't become a well rounded person. Well rounded people are smooth and ull. Become a thoroughly spiky person.

Bruce Sterling

smooth belief people

Your attitude determines your altitude. Your ambitions are bigger than life Of course. They must be. They encompass it.

Bruce Sterling

bigger-than-life ambition attitude

The Bollywood distribution system is so corrupt that they have trouble making money off movies. So they sell shoes that an actress stepped in. If they turned up the amps some, maybe they could sell the actresses.

Bruce Sterling

bollywood shoes movie

War as Napoleon knew it just not possible any more. However, we're very unlikely to accept or recognize "world peace" even when we get it.

Bruce Sterling

literature war peace

Privacy under what circumstance? Privacy at home under what circumstances? You have more privacy if everyone's illiterate, but you wouldn't really call that privacy. That's ignorance.

Bruce Sterling

ignorance literature home

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

dignity littles world

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.

Bruce Sterling

real fun children